My sister reported watching and hating Reds, maybe my all-time favorite movie. It got me thinking about the best movies I have seen, and the movies I have seen that were highly touted, yet I didn’t like. Here are some the Academy Awards for Best Picture, ones that I have seen, and ones I thought should have been the Best Picture for that year instead.

There are years in which I saw very few movies, so they aren’t all listed here.

1953: From Here to Eternity. Amazing film.

1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai. The plot of this film is riveting. Runner-up: 12 Angry Men.

1959: Ben-Hur. I know this is supposed to be a classic, especially the chariot race, but this is the most closeted home-erotic film of all time. Should have won: North by Northwest.

1962: Lawrence of Arabia. This is a top ten film for me.

1966: A Man for All Seasons. I love this film for a lot of reasons, especially the intelligent, elegant dialog, and the idea of a man standing up for his beliefs no matter what befalls him. A dent is this script is its revisionist absence of Thomas More’s cruel persecution of heretics.

1970: Patton. Love the story, the cinematography, the acting. Great film.

1976: Rocky. Should have won: All the President’s Men. Marry this with The Post, and you have an evening of truly engaging stories about journalism. But then there’s Taxi Driver. It was a good year for films.

1977: Annie Hall. My wife hated Woody Allen for his personal life, but I never turn down the chance to spend the evening with Annie. Also of note: this was the lowest-grossing Best Picture of all time.

1978: The Deer Hunter. Coming Home was a close second. But I don’t feel engaged by either of these films. Their biggest flaws was my inability to relate to any of the characters. Should have won: Interiors, possibly my number two favorite movie. It’s not an easy movie to love, but I relate to every character.

1979: Kramer vs Kramer. Should have won: Apocalypse Now.

1980: Ordinary People. Maybe in my top five list.

1981: Chariots of Fire. This one might go in my bottom ten list. Should have won: Reds.

1982: Gandhi. Also in my top five list.

1983: Terms of Endearment. Almost unwatchable. Should have won: The Big Chill or The Right Stuff.

1984: Amadeus. Watched and was engaged, but wasn’t the best that year, especially the way it let Tom Hulce be just a little bit 1980s. Should have won: The Killing Fields.

1985: Out of Africa was a long, boring masterpiece. Should have won: The Color Purple, which is also kind of a long, boring masterpiece.

1986: Platoon. I considered Platoon as one of my favorite war movies for years, but it hasn’t age well, especially tainted by the presence of Charlie Sheen and his wooden narration and 80s haircut. Should have won: Hannah and Her Sisters.

1987: The Last Emperor. Meh. Should have won: Broadcast News.

1988: Rain Man. This movie made a huge splash, but I might have watched it one more time. Should have won: it wasn’t a great year in film, so maybe Colors or Wings of Desire. Die Hard was fun, but isn’t really “great.”

1989: Driving Miss Daisy. I am one of the few who are really bored by this film. Should have won: Dead Poets Society.

1990: Dances with Wolves. I reluctantly accept this win, with the caveat that I despise Kevin Costner’s bland, monotonal narration.

1991: The Silence of the Lambs. It has its moments, but given a choice, Slacker is the 1991 film for me.

1992: Unforgiven. Abby and I both loved it.

1993: Schindler’s List. This isn’t, as a film critic friend of mine recently pointed out, a fun film to watch, but it merits its Best Picture standing. Unfortunately, it competes with The Age of Innocence, another movie in my top ten.

1994: Forrest Gump. I never liked this movie. Should have won: Pulp Fiction. Duh.

1995: Braveheart. I am really bugged by this movie’s revisionist history, and it’s too long. Should have won but surprisingly is not even nominated: Heat.

1996: The English Patient. Long and boring. Should have won: Fargo.

1997: Titanic. This movie might be at the top of the “Worst Best Pictures Ever” list. My girlfriend in 2000 wouldn’t shut up about it. Should have won: maybe Good Will Hunting, but it wasn’t a very good year in film.

1998: Shakespeare in Love. Should have won: The Thin Red Line.

1999: American Beauty. This movie takes us down a dark path, but it’s masterful.

2000: Gladiator. I love this movie, but often turn it down in favor of something easier to watch.

2001: A Beautiful Mind. This might be Russell Crowe’s best work.

2002: Chicago. Should have won: The Pianist.

2003: The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King. Abby and I gave the Lord trilogy its day in court, and found it guilty of boring us. Should have won: hmm. It wasn’t a good year.

2004: Million Dollar Baby. This movie was great, but so difficult to watch at the end. Should have won: The Aviator.

2005: Crash. Should have won: Brokeback Mountain, maybe another near the top of my list. An interesting aside is that people who don’t understand relationships or society very well called this “a gay cowboy movie,” but is really about how the difficult pursuit of happiness is, and the consequences of adultery.

2006: The Departed is a pretty solid choice, but I also liked Letters from Iwo Jima, the companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, also a great film. It’s a toss-up.

2007: No Country for Old Men. Abby never turned down this movie, so we saw it a dozen or more times; it’s a great piece of cinema.

2009: The Hurt Locker impressed me on the first pass, but re-viewing revealed it’s flaws. Should have won: Inglourious Basterds.

2017: The Shape of Water. This might have been more of a political win. Should have won: Dunkirk.

2021: CODA. Should have won: Don’t Look Up!, just because it is SO funny.

In constructing this list, I looked at a lot of lists of movies, and I felt very discouraged at the state of entertainment. There are too many sequels made just to sell tickets, and too many showy special-effects movies that don’t have good plot or characters. Many nights, it’s smarter to read a good book.

I first saw Purple Rain in about 1987, during a period when girlfriend Kathy and I were renting movies about four times a week. She loved the movie at the time, but I think she would agree that it has aged poorly.

Purple Rain is an attempted fusion of a concert movie with a biopic. The concert part works great, but the plot? I wonder if the plot was needed at all. Maybe it was a studio formula that said, “you have to have a plot. It can’t just be a concert.”

The biggest flaw in the plot is when the manager and his ilk are talking about The Kid not having the sound any more and needs to be replaced. Truth: if you saw a show half as good as The Revolution’s show in this movie, you would simultaneously cum and shit your pants, then need hospitalization to have your smile removed.

Other thoughts…

The “girl show” Morris puts together with Apollonia 6 isn’t sexy it all. It’s clumsy and unmusical.

If it was Prince’s intention to spell out to us what a bastard and egomaniac he was in real life, well done.

The music, though not performed live for the film, was mic’d and mixed to have a concert sound to it.

On my second watch-through this week, it dawned on me that much of the bad acting is due to the rotten script. “It’s all I dream about. What about you? What do you dream about?” It feels like it came out of my tenth grade journal.

In conclusion, I find this movie poorly-written and filmed, but the concert footage is as good as the album. When I watch again, I will fast-forward through all the dialog to get to the performances.

I am a fan of several movies about the Vietnam War: Apocalypse Now and its companion piece  Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, We Were Soldiers, and even The Post.

There are also some not-so-great movies about the Vietnam War: Born on the Fourth of July, Hamburger Hill, The Boys in Company C, The Green Berets, Casualties of War, and Good Morning Vietnam, to name a few.

But standing head and shoulders above all this fiction, good and bad, is The Vietnam War, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

This ten-part series originally produced for PBS is a definitive work about the Vietnam War.

I first got a taste of this in 2017 on Netflix, where it was a limited run, but recently bought the DVD box set and rewatched it, and it is amazing. It is unflinchingly candid about the war from start to finish, and brutally honest about how horrible it was. Yet at the same time, it seems fair and unbiased, an even and difficult account of what might have been one of America’s darkest chapter.

Never mind that the main musical score is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Never mind that there is a full-screen view of my newspaper in Episode 4. Never mind that it took 10 years and $30 million to complete.

It hits so hard that despite wanting to, I couldn’t unhear some of the most difficult things human beings can utter, like, “My hatred for them was pure. Pure.  I hated them so much. And I was so scared of them. Boy, I was terrified of them. And the scareder of them I got, the more I hated them.”

I’ll leave that last quote un-cited because it is so brilliant, true, and universal.

Part of the difficulty in watching a series like this is that it becomes tedious and difficult to watch through to the finish, especially since it is so densely packed. This is ironic, because everything about the war itself was tedious and difficult to watch. Are we so weak and shielded from human nature that we can’t watch depictions of what our fellow human beings actually did?

After a full watching the second time through, though, I have to say that The Vietnam War goes near the top of my recommendations list.

“I’ve been downhearted, baby, ever since the day we met.”

The song Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand is an excellent example of one of the dirtiest tricks the record industry played on us music-hungry fans: find an artist with a quirky, catchy song, have him or her record it (with a record producer’s finesse), then fill the rest of the CD/Album with his real talent, no talent at all.

I loved this song when it came out, and that’s no small compliment in the midst of one of the most creative, liberating, and musical periods – the mid-1990s – in entertainment. I heard it on the radio, which, of course, is much less likely today in the age of streaming.

I remember riding somewhere with a fellow newspaper staff member. When this song came on, I told him I liked it, and he added, “This guy is that one-man band.”

This song is moody, has thought-provoking lyrics, and has some edgy elements added to it, especially the church bell (or whatever bell) in the background offbeat. The beat and the doot-doos invite you to bob your head slightly when it’s playing, and even play it again once its done.

So I own a CD for this song, filled elsewhere with filler, songs that bring to a sharp point why we have one-hit wonders: talent is chance, success is chance, commerce is chance.

Updated in December 2021 to include a review of Creep by Radiohead

Around the dinner table with my Norman, Oklahoma friends (a group known at the time by several names, such as The Thirty Something Group [despite the fact that they weren’t 30-something any more], The Breadmaker Group, and The Bohemian Continuum) in 2009, I revealed a not very secret secret that those closest to me, like my wife, already know: I look at women’s hands, kind of obsessively. I related a story about having these feelings in third grade, explaining to them that when Mrs. Dzialo was at the front of the room, I stared at her hands. They looked really sexy to me.

When I was done with this story, Thea said, “So, you’ve always been a creep?”

After the laughter died down, I said, “Yes. Yes I have.”

Thus, even those closest, and presumably most understanding, to me were inclined to label and judge me. And thus, when Dan Marsh challenged me to review the song Creep by Radiohead, a song I already loved, it seemed obvious.

When I was younger, I usually felt like an outcast, and this feeling was never more apparent and powerful than when I was a young teenager, without a clue how to act around girls my age, who, in my view, shunned and mocked me. This perception imprinted deep into me, creating the idea that I really was more awkward and less attractive than the girls were.

It was manipulation that, as an adult, I realize was far from accurate. I think about the girls that age who I meet and photograph all the time as a news photographer, and I realize that they are the ones who are awkward and mannered, not me. How do I know this? I am completely comfortable socially is all settings, unless I am talking to a teenager. There is friction, and it comes from them. I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their incomplete replies.

So the song Creep tends to strike a chord.

“I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul…”

Then the perfect, and most revealing lyric, is sung: “What the hell am I doing here?”

What, indeed, Creep? How dare you be an oddball, an outcast, a nerd?

Creep is layered densely. You can’t listen to this song without going deep.

And in the end, of course, the voice is NOT the creep, and doesn’t “belong here” because of the special someone who has us all psyched to imagine she’s perfect. She’s not perfect, and his desire is as honest as anything she has to offer.

I love this song, but I love High and Dry and Fake Plastic Trees just as much. Radiohead rules!

“They’re the ones who’ll hate you
When you think you’ve got the world all sussed out
They’re the ones who’ll spit at you
You will be the one screaming out…” ~High and Dry

All that said, the only reason I know anything at all about Radiohead is due to Napster, and the Apple friendly app Macster. Yes, that’s right, I stole all the Radiohead I own.

Soundgarden has a bit more polish than it’s contemporaries. It is more densely layered than Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

In Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, I am reminded of Alice in Chains: driving, deep, super-masculine vocals, harmonic, dynamic instruments, and a song structure that narrates and navigates us through the story.

The lyrics are brilliant. If Nirvana wrote lyrics to fill the space between the music, Soundgarden writes and sings lyrics with a purpose unto themselves.

I was guardian of a teenager once who wanted nothing else than to play Black Hole Sun on the electric guitar we got him.

I would say if you are not familiar with Soundgarden, give it a try.

Never ever confuse Soundgarden with Savage Garden. I dated a young woman in 2000 whole loved Savage Garden with all her heart, and wow, it was so lame. Boy band lame. Should be labeled Toxic, Do Not Play, Impotent and Lame in All Respects!

At that time in music history, I was flying a lot, and I listened to a huge amount of Brahms and Grieg, usually preferring the more flowing composition that resembled my feelings about flying.

As I have noted in a couple of previous movie reviews, futurism – the fictional depiction of how the future might look for humanity – is notoriously inaccurate. But what about fiction that is set in the present, but accidentally depicts – with alarming accuracy – actual events that come to pass?

Contagion is just such a movie.

When the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 exploded into the world, many of us took the news sideways, reacting in half-steps with half-information. At first, we cowered in our cars, closed schools and restaurants, and bought up all the hand sanitizer. When it got much worse, we went back to school, we went back to sporting events, we stopped masking and social distancing. You get the idea.

Contagion has pretty much everything the real pandemic offered: a dangerous virus, panicky people, concerned scientists, a quack blogger, even the kidnapping of a WHO epidemiologist. It even shows the zoonosis from bats to domestic pigs to humans, similar to the 2019 zoonosis.

“Cover your mouth please,” results in, “fuck off!”

“We are only able to give 50 doses today,” results in a rush and riot at a pharmacy.

Some things this movie missed, at least to some degree…

1. The weird coprophelial toilet paper hordage in early 2020
2. The crushingly disappointing political scene in 2020
3. The silly, childish anti-vax, anti-mask scene masquerading as personal rights advocacy or patriotism
4. In most places, vaccine distribution is sensible (first to need, first to get), not by lottery as depicted in the movie
5. Society stayed mostly ordered, with the glaring exception of January 6

This movie was based on the 2002-2004 SARS epidemic, and the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, after which Steven Soderbergh hopped into a time machine to today, made some notes, then went back to 2011 to start filming.

This film was gripping when it came out, but is over-the-top relevant today. I highly recommend it.

Dan most recently challenged me to review Rearviewmirror by Pearl Jam. Dan’s really getting into 1990s grunge/garage recently, and I approve of this message.

It took me a while to get down to listening, but I am now, and I like it. It’s got that “I don’t care what the record producers says, let’s jam” sound to it.

It also got me thinking about what music we like, and why, and how that changes from one decade, year, month, day, and hour to the next.

What music did I think was the absolute ultimate when I was in college, for example? If you had asked me in 1982, I probably would have said Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd. I played the album into vinyl extinction, then played the CD over and over, usually in my headphones at fighter-jet loudness levels. These days, I have little desire to hear it.

If you’d asked me when I was a young journalist in the late 1980s, I might have said With Tomorrow by This Mortal Coil. By December of 1992, I know I would have said Wild Horses by The Sundays (a cover of the Rolling Stones song.)

How much if this is what we construct between our ears, and how much of it is how we are born and raised? My wife Abby, for example, can’t get enough Garth Brooks, but his sound just bounces off me.

My musical taste is fluid, however, and I wonder how much of that is because the global cadre of music is ever-enlarging. If you turned on the radio in 1940, for example, how many contemporary songs even existed at that point?

Then today I turned on the radio, the actual FM radio in the truck, and heard something – um, wow, millennials, this is music? I can’t even describe how artificial and monotonous it sounded. Kids these days.

Oh, and FM radio? You’re doing about as good a job reinventing yourself as newspapers are. “92.2, The Pump! Cranking out your favorites from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, and today!”

In Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Diane Keaton plays a neurotic New Yorker named Mary Wilke. On the night Mary and Woody’s character meet, she and her date discuss the “Academy of the Overrated,” an imaginary collection of musicians, intellectuals and entertainers whose work isn’t nearly as great as they are generally regarded.

Musician Sting, the former frontman for The Police, might be in the top ten of such a list I would author. Too polished, too packaged, too careful, too 80’s, then too 90’s.

A music-critic I once dated called him “Stinj,” because she thought the very name was lame (although she happily got on board with U2’s “The Edge.”)

My friend Dan Marsh asked me if I would review a Sting song, and I mistakenly said yes. I had forgotten that Sting’s superstardom didn’t agree with me, and that I don’t like his music.

For this review, I listened to the song, Moon Over Bourbon Street, and the two CDs we own of his music, If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, and The Summoner’s Tale. Ick.

It is especially hard to review this song after heavy doses of Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots in the last few days.

Sorry Dan.

I grew up watching b-grade war movies. My dad was a war movie fan, but never wanted to spend the money to take us to the cinema. He would sit up many nights watching “Five Star Treater” (on channel 5), and the station didn’t have the budget for top-tier films. Some of the titles we saw over and over were Battle of the Bulge, Anzio, To Hell and Back, Hell is for Heroes, The Big Red One, Merrill’s Marauders, The Guns of Navarone, and Sergeant York.

As a young adult, I was lukewarm about war films until I saw Platoon, Oliver Stone’s 1986 flawed but gritty, engaging movie about the Vietnam War.

By 1998, technology and budgets had improved and increased enough to bring us movies like The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan, both amazing and sobering fictionalized tellings of World War II events.

2001’s Band of Brothers makes a couple of awkward missteps, but is, overall, a better show to watch than 2010’s The Pacific.

It’s easy to say that The Pacific, the follow-on of Band of Brothers, paints a grimmer, more horrible picture of war and its inherent cruelty. The Japanese are shown as mindless, wild animals with absolutely no regard for humanity, military or civilian. They surrender, only to pull grenades to kill MPs and medics. They shoot or booby trap civilians. They poison all the drinking water they leave behind.

At one point we see an American Marine torturing a Japanese soldier with his bayonet, only to have another Marine throw him to the ground and execute the prisoner with a .45 shot to the head, “to put him out of our misery.”

In other scenes, a lot of them, actually, we see Joseph Mazzello’s character Eugene Sledge look back toward us with breathless disgust at the horrors he has either seen, prevented, or, in the end, perpetrated.

So in a way, while we mostly like and cheer for the Band of Brothers as they march across Europe, fighting “the good war,” we eventually hate everyone in The Pacific.

But then we see episode 9 of Band of Brothers, Why We Fight, in which the 101st Airborne liberates a concentration camp near Landsberg. The depiction of the horrors there is soul-blackening. When my wife watched it (only once), she cried out loud through whole scenes.

If you like war movies for their realistic depiction of combat, both are at the top of the list. But The Pacific shows us that it is non-stop, chaotic, filthy, and, much of the time, without purpose, whereas the battles in Band of Brothers mostly seem to at least in some way try to win battles and the war.

A big plus for Band of Brothers was that it was made at the end of the 20th century, when some of the actual soldiers were still alive, and each episode includes interviews with these men. The accounts are honest and moving: imagine the toughest human that training and character could create, reduced to tears by a 60-year-old memory.

Imagine it’s 1971. The Apollo Program is wrapping up its missions that the public has come to regard as commonplace and expensive. Star Trek‘s three short seasons are done, and it is in reruns. Television has moved into the era of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and All in the Family.

Futurism is a tough nut to crack. Would we have flying cars by 1982? Would we be in space by 1999 like in the show Space 1999?

As I rewatch the 1971 drama The Andromeda Strain, I think of these things.

1. Everything is clean. Even in actual NASA clean rooms, there is tape and clutter and more clutter. The real future remains untidy.
2. Everything is austere. Despite the nature of people and the necessity of work, futurism seems to think we have room for huge rooms containing almost nothing at all.
3. Everything is made of stainless steel.
4. Clothing is all the same, usually a one-piece outfit in a bland color, or made of foil.
5. Doors slide open and closed automatically.
6. There are many unlabeled, seemingly similar lights and switches.
7. Food is in pill form.
8. There is a huge amount of chatter about technical things. (Unfortunately for The Andromeda Strain, literally all the chatter is nonsense.)
9. All important information is shared by lazy, barefoot, overweight teenagers using small video monitors, and all that information is true to the viewer.   (Oh, wait, that’s the actual future. Never mind.)

I actually like the original 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, and I have read, and like, the book.

For decades I have been hoping that a big Hollywood studio would remake a couple of my favorite, but achingly terrible, war movies, The Battle of the Bulge (1965) and Midway (1976).

In 2019, one big studio made one of my wishes come true: they remade Midway.

My first criticism is a big one: why does this film start long before the events it is depicting? Was it really necessary to bloat this picture with hash and rehash? Start at the beginning of … The Battle of Midway! The actual battle went on for three days, so why would you need to pad your runtime with other events?

The special effects work well in this piece, since all the effects in the 1976 version were practical effects, and not very effective, in many instances made using a technique known as back-projection, in which the performers and props are placed in a studio space with a film of the exterior projected onto a screen behind them. It was far cheaper than Star Wars’ inlaid matte paintings, and well before the time of motion capture and digital chroma key.

Midway’s showy special effects are fun and eye-pleasing, and even engage fans of war films, but remain an example of buying content rather than mastering it. $100,000,000 buys a lot of eye candy, but like all candy, it’s not very nourishing.

So how does Midway (2019) compare with Midway (1976) in terms of theatrical nourishment? I definitely prefer the new version, and though it isn’t brilliantly written, it tell its story.

The Heston version gets bogged down in a pointless sidebar story about Captain Garth’s son, a navy pilot, falling in love with a Japanese-American Hawaiian island resident, both so we can have some reason to care about him when he gets badly burned carrying out one of the attacks, but also to show us that Americans had outgrown anti-Japanese racism and resentment by the 1970s. “Don’t give me any of that racial bigot crap!” Heston growls.

Both films feature star-studded ensemble casts. Both films are too long.

The final insult from the 1976 version is the crass, obvious reuse of stunt crash scenes from 1970s far superior Tora! Tora! Tora!

So, finally, I am happy that big Hollywood remade Midway, and I have watched it several times. It’s not great literature, but it’s fun and engaging. I recommend it.

I was watching MTV in my rooming house in college in 1984. A U2 video, probably Sunday Bloody Sunday, came on. One of other roommates who happened to be in the room said, “They’re so concerned.”

U2 has done a pretty good job of reinventing themselves as the years have gone by. That’s pretty rare. Even rarer is when bandmates can stay together. Everyone from Pink Floyd to The Beatles parted ways with a fair amount of hostility. U2 seems to stay together with no hint of infighting or “creative differences,” and I wonder why?

But back to the review of Mofo. Or forward to the review. This is an odd song. I know it’s trying hard to be driving and edgy, but for one reason or another, every time I tried to listen to it all the way through, I found a distraction, usually another song in my library. I’m trying to like this song, I really am.

I hate to be one of those guys who thinks they know everything about music and what’s good and what’s bad, because hey, I’ve never sold a million copies of anything. But I give Mofo a thumbs down.

I miss The Unforgettable Fire.

Shades by Iggy Pop (whose actual name is James Newell Osterberg Jr.) shares a lot with the 1980s sound: primitive gated reverb drum tracks, that ringing rhythm guitar, the obvious and predictable bass line (blum, bluh-blum), and the exactly-in-1986 lyrics. And do I hear a keytar in there somewhere?

I guess there were certainly worse songs produced and performed in the mid-1980s, but this song hits almost every 80s point, right down to being produced by David Bowie. Once you learn that Bowie produced it, you can’t unhear his hand in it.

I really like the lead-in and lead-out guitar and the “whoo-hoo”s.

I know there is a place in the music salon for tunes like this, but checking another “no thanks” box for me is how instantly and vividly it brings back that time for me. In 1986, I was 23, and dating a tomboy named Kathy. Kathy and I spent late nights watching videos on TBS and MTV. She was a huge U2 fan. It was a very intense relationship, one I can almost still smell on me, and it didn’t end at all well.

If I can set aside those criticisms, though, I found myself enjoying this song. It’s a catchy tune, dressed up with just enough synth and glitz to keep it complex and interesting to the ear.

Also, 80s? What’s with the chain link fence fetish?

I challenged my writer/blogger friend Dan Marsh to review a song, and he counter offered by suggesting an additional song for us both to review.

The song I suggested, Carnage Visors, is a 27 minute instrumental musical orgasm of darkness that was offered as a cassette-only b-side recording by The Cure in 1981.

The music is hypnotic and repetitive, but never boring, built not on lyrics, but on a grimly constructed bass line that keeps teasing us and tempting us to let go into an abyss.

It is entirely plausible to put this piece of music on an endless loop and play it in hell; not the seventh circle of hell, but the nicest parts of hell (Nine Inch Nails reference).

Carnage Visors is the opposite of the high school cheerleader, the opposite of the public relations spokesmodel, the opposite of the nuclear family. Carnage Visors elicits honest tears of loss, of fear, of humiliation, of regret.

If Carnage Visors is an orgy of blackened souls, Dan’s suggestion, Scentless Apprentice by Nirvana, instantly sounds like the chaos Jewish children created when asked to draw pictures of their homes after World War II.

Musically, Scentless Apprentice hits hard.

For as acidic and oddly tuneless as it is, and with all the screamed lyrics, you might think this song is trying to get you to stop listening, but as I fired it up to play for the second time, the third time, the tenth time, I couldn’t stop listening. I couldn’t even turn the volume down. It was injecting some kind of musical drug into my ears. I found myself bobbing my head and shoulders to the driving rhythm, and almost getting chills during the dirtiest of the screams.

Yes, Kurt Cobain’s dirty screams hit my ears with a desperation that can’t be faked. Were these the sounds of a dying drug addict? No, not at all. The dying and drug addiction followed the downward spiral (Nine Inch Nails reference) Cobain had been building since he could talk, and this song is following it as well.

Much of this song is aimed at expressing chaos; chaos in a tortured soul, chaos in an unfair world, chaos of intimacy gone wrong.

In an odd way, Scentless Apprentice invites me to reinvent my past, only as a dirt poor roadie fan crashing as many Nirvana concerts and appearances as I could. It invites me to be a photographer at the gates, held back by security men, trying to get the truth of this mess, but at the same time, filled with the desire to be a part of the band.

Unlike the often sophisticated lyrics of Nine Inch Nails, Cobain keeps his words relatively simple… “Hey, go away, go away, go away, go away, go away, go away, go away…”

The downside to songs like this is that they invite you to go to a similar dark place, a place we all have inside us, filled with rage and fear, a perfect place where it all seems simple. I learned this lesson decades ago when I listened to too much Nine Inch Nails, and let it take me down with it.

On the other hand, it definitely washes the Sarah McLaughlin from your mouth.

My first LP was Led Zeppelin IV. My first CD was Peter Gabriel’s So. I don’t know what my first download was because my first downloading experience was during the Napster era, and it was a little like looting a liquor store after an earthquake: we grabbed anything our bandwidth could carry.

In 1979, Michael, my girlfriend Tina, and I discovered Pink Floyd’s The Wall. We listened to it and got emotionally involved in it. It carried us places no music had before. That was at the core of my becoming a Pink Floyd fan. There are a lot of amazing songs on The Wall, but many of us liked to think that Pink Floyd wrote The Wall just for us, and the song for me (and a lot of kids like me) was Comfortably Numb. We stayed up late in our dorm rooms or crashing at some buddy’s place, or driving with the guy who had the best stereo, listening to Comfortably Numb and becoming comfortably numb, whatever it meant to each of us personally.

I spent late, late lonely nights, playing Comfortably Numb on my headset at rock concert volume levels, being moved to tears by the images it conjured inside me.

For years after that, if someone asked me, “What music do you like?” the first band on my list was Pink Floyd. I saw the movie The Wall and became a fan of it, although by then I had built so many stories in my head to go with the music of The Wall that the movie didn’t deliver my fantasies to me.

Last week Pink Floyd released The Endless River, a collection of mostly-instrumental music culled from the cutting-room floor of the last 20 years or so. It has been met with decidedly mixed reviews, and I can’t disagree with the critics.

Pitchfork wrote that The Endless River “is quintessentially and self-consciously Pink Floyd, for better or for worse … it proves to be one of the few Pink Floyd releases that sounds like a step backwards, with nothing new to say and no new frontiers to explore.” Mikael Wood of the LA Times gave the album 1 out of 4 stars and called it “so excruciatingly dull (even by Pink Floyd’s often-dull standards) that the band’s name on the cover feels like a straight-up bait-and-switch.”

But I also see a real value for me in nostalgia for Pink Floyd, and The Endless River works for me in this capacity.

In the years after Pink Floyd front men Roger Waters and David Gilmour parted ways, with Gilmour claiming Waters wasn’t part of the band and Waters claiming the band wasn’t Pink Floyd without him, it got harder to care about the band. The music lost its narrative, its genius, it brilliant messiness. I think this is because they were both wrong, and Pink Floyd wasn’t a group of members, it was a moment in music.

I always sensed that post-Waters Pink Floyd were always saying, “We’ve got to be the smartest, the most amazing, the most enigmatic, the deepest.” and that fact sometimes kept them from being themselves.

The Endless River is supposedly the last album from Pink Floyd, since keyboardist Rick Wright died in 2008. I am listening as I write this, and the music has some real strengths. But I’m no different than the rest of the fans who compare it to the music we grew up hearing; Meddle, Animals, Atom Heart Mother, Wish You Were Here.

Of course, I’ve already bought it on iTunes. I am, after all, a fan.

Years ago, circa 1987 as I recall, Robert shared an apartment with about five other guys in Tulsa. I went up there for a weekend to hang out, and while waiting for Robert to return from work one morning, I met one of his roommates. I don’t know his name, but I will never forget him, because the only thing between his ears was the rock band Rush.

I came into Robert’s kitchen for a bite of breakfast to find this guy sitting at the kitchen table with a boom box. It was covered with Rush stickers, and he was wearing a Rush concert tour dates “wife beater” t-shirt.

I sat down with some cereal and he launched into a 40-minute diatribe about Rush; how great they were, how no drummer could touch Neil Peart, how Geddy Lee’s voice was a vocal orgasm, how he’d gotten ahold of the super-rare Japanese import of a certain album, about how I had to hear this song (which he played), then that song, then another, and so on.

It was an oddly sobering experience about how the other half – the half whose existences are one-dimentional – lives.

I think about this guy sometimes when I see young people who have tattoos. What could I have possibly been into when I was 20 that I would want on my body now that I’m 50? Camaros? Foreigner? That girl I had a crush on? The Doobie Brothers? Mannheim Steamroller? My journal? Sheesh. Message to young people: if you have to mark yourself, get a piercing. At least you can change out the message.

Thoughts about this came about because I am currently working on a fun little playlist challenge.

This challenge came about because in addition to a USB port for an iPod car, there is a CD slot, which will play an audio CD or an MP3 CD.

The challenge, then, is to assemble an MP3 CD, which typically holds about 145 songs, with no more than one song per artist.

This is harder than you might imagine, particularly if you have a huge iTunes library and have, as I have, been collecting music for a lot of years. At the same time, I am having fun doing it.

The advantage to something like this is that it forces me to listen to some music (or at least access briefly before skipping) like (I cite as example because it is playing as I write this) Me and Bobby McGhee by Janis Joplin. I love this song, but seldom listen to it.

• • •

Now that it’s finished, I will say that it was a fun playlist to create, but it wasn’t easy. It ended up being 144 songs. I challenge you to try something similar.

When I was ten, my family and I saw Lost Horizon at the Vaska theater in Lawton, Oklahoma. For former Lawtonians, the Vaska is a legendary landmark, and mention of it for them will surely stir some memories.

The film, which I found and started watching on YouTube over the past few days, is often regarded as one of the top 50 worst films of all time. It tells of travelers who find a hidden utopia, and shows their struggles with their desires, particularly their desires to sing terrible Burt Bacharach songs. The utopia depicted in the film is a little like an airport executive lounge or a suburban California country club, with everyone relaxing around card tables or potted plants. Internet reviews note that there are no blacks in Shagri-la, and most of the Asian people are silent and seem to do all the work, so really it’s a utopia for rich whites.

When we came out of the theater on that night in 1973, my sister and I were singing the songs, and thought that we had just seen a masterpiece, while mom and dad were probably rolling their eyes and talking about how they’d never get those two hours back.

While re-watching it over the last couple of days, I have to say that the music is mostly an embarrassment to my past, although I can kind of see how one or two of the pieces might have been catchy to a ten-year-old.

I vaguely remember as a child having something of a crush on Liv Ullmann, but now as I watch it, I find Sally Kellerman’s portrayal as a neurotic waif much more fetching. Of course as she gets happier and better-adjusted as the movie progresses, she gets less attractive. (How I managed to marry a non-neurotic woman remains a complete mystery.)

Also of note is this: why did anyone ever cast George Kennedy in any movies? He is one notch below Richard Anderson as Oscar Goldman in terms of talent, and rivals Ernest Borgnine in looks. His character builds an irrigation system to “improve” paradise, which in the long run would have the unintended consequence of making the inhabitants fat and lazy, but in 1973, that would be difficult to foresee.

Also also of note: John Gielgud as “Chang”? I suppose that in 1973 the world was desperately short of real Asian actors, so an English actor had to step up.

The saving grace of this experiment is that on YouTube, I can skim forward to skip all the songs. At the end of the day, it was a fun little blast from my past.