As I was struggling to rank my top albums of 2008, I read Roger Ebert's top twenty films of 2008, where, finally giving up winnowing his choices down to just ten, he wrote:

If you must have a Top 10 List, find a coin in your pocket. Heads, the odd-numbered movies are your 10. Tails, the even-numbered.

This served as a moment of inspiration. Rather than ordering twenty albums, I thought, I would put them into two tiers and then write a bit of code to randomize their ordering within the tiers with each page refresh.

Perhaps luckily for my readers, in the end I decided against this. As I started to write my little blurbs, momentary preferences started to sink in. But I admit they are just that: momentary preferences. I still like my number one album from last year, but man that Spoon album, which I ranked #16, sure has been getting a lot of play this year.

So here it is: a snapshot of what I currently think are my top twenty albums of 2008. Last year, some of the recommendations in the comments became new favorites, so please tell me where I went astray.

20. Kanye West -- 808s & Heartbreak

When I heard the first singles coming from this percussively stripped-down and AutoTune-obsessed breakup album, I was expecting throwaway tracks, some filler before his next proper album. But it turns out that this is a proper album, with only the live freestyle on the final track meriting the skip button. It isn't quite Kanye at his finest, but it just goes to show that we all benefit by his persistent sincerity.

Favorite tracks: Paranoid; RoboCop

19. El Guincho -- Alegranza

Yes, it sounds like it was produced in exactly the same way as an Animal Collective album, but on Alegranza the loop components come almost strictly from the tropical realm (think steel drums and maracas). But it's never exhausting in the way Animal Collective can be, and it's surprisingly danceable throughout.

Favorite tracks: Antillas; Fata Morgana

18. Coldplay -- Viva la Vida

While I've always had a guilty pleasure like of Coldplay's singles, their past albums have been filled with aimless, tiresome songs. On Viva la Vida, they still wear their influences on their sleeves (along with colored ribbons), but the songs are rarely boring and benefit from Brian Eno's light touch.

Favorite tracks: 42; Death and All His Friends

17. Gang Gang Dance -- Saint Dymphna

How to describe this eclectic album? I could say Pure Moods meets Battles, but that really only describes a few tracks on here, and doesn't manage to explain the electronic touches or dancefloor moments. I guess I'll give up and say this is the best compilation album of 2008 by one band.

Favorite tracks: First Communion; House Jam

16. Hercules and Love Affair -- Hercules and Love Affair

Yes, 2008 was the breakout year of new-wave/disco (see also Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours). And it's not even "retro-influenced" anymore -- much of this album sounds straight out of the 70's, with the exception of Antony's voice, which has finally found a comfortable home. It started with the Junior Boys a few years ago, but I've been a sucker for this stuff ever since.

Favorite tracks: Hercules Theme; Blind

Posting has been light here during the dog days of summer, and it's about to get lighter: I'm on vacation until September 7th, when I'll be in various places (and attending two weddings) in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, upstate New York, and Maine. I have a twitter feed now, so if you're interested in the occasional update, you can follow that as well. Have a good Labor Day weekend.

I've been slowly working on this for nearly a year now, but I've finally gone through and tagged all of the posts on crazymonk.org. This is a casual blog, so I haven't been particularly consistent in my tagging methodology, but perhaps this will make it easier for you to browse the crazymonk.org archives by topic.

At the time of this posting, there are 1550 individual topics assigned to 1256 posts. If you click on "more tags" in the "Recent Topics" block on the right, you will find a giant tag cloud of every single tag on the site, which is a fun way to explore the site. And there's something almost poetic about reading a string of text such as "The Lost Highway tom brady the prestige dayvan cowboy conventions the diamond age lebanon Religulous nonfiction shopping senior citizens spike jonze Jann Wenner death juno."

The top tags on the site so far are pretty generic (e.g., film, politics, tv), but for fun I've pulled out some of the more specific topics on the site that have been applied to more than 20 posts:

* las vegas
* 2008 election
* trailers
* hbo
* SCOTUS
* roger ebert
* david foster wallace

Have fun.

 

I've uploaded a selection of photos taken during my various weekend travels around the Eastern Sierras and its foothills for the first half of the summer. Locations:

*Reno (NV)
*Lake Tahoe (CA)
*Virginia City (NV)
*Lassen Volcanic National Park (CA)
*Truckee River (CA)
*Donner Lake (CA)
*Mammoth Lakes (CA)
*Devil's Postpile National Monument (CA)

I was born during Disco Demolition Night, a Chicago White Sox home game in 1979 where unwanted disco records were collected and blown up in center field, causing a near-riot.

When it exploded, the bomb tore a hole in the outfield grass surface and thousands of fans immediately rushed the field. Some lit fires and started small-scale riots. The batting cage was pulled down and wrecked and the bases literally stolen, along with chunks of the field itself.

The police broke it up and the game was forfeited to the Detroit Tigers. It is considered a symbolic marker of the beginning of the decline of the musical fad -- I was born on The Night Disco Died.

Part 1: The Convention

I got up early yesterday to make sure I got to the Reno Events Center in time for the registration period of the Democratic Washoe County convention. Once I picked up my "Alternate" badge, I sat in the bleachers for more than six hours while listening to speeches by Harry Reid and other local Nevada politicians. In the meantime, the credentials committee spent the day trying to figure out how to seat the alternates, which led to some intra-party bickering. Here's how it was supposed to work:

At the end of the caucus, delegates were elected based on the results from the people in each presidential preference group. In Washoe County, this broke down to about 50% for Obama, 40% for Clinton, and 10% for Edwards. When the delegates entered the convention, they cast their votes for their presidential preference (which they could change later in the day), presumably the same one they chose at the caucus, although that wasn't mandated. As you might expect, not everyone elected to be a delegate shows up at the convention, and hence alternates are seated instead, preferably from the same precinct and presidential preference group as the missing delegates.

Because thousands of people showed up at the convention, it took awhile to count the first round of preferences, but it was clear that delegates were missing from all three major groups (Obama, Clinton, and Edwards). However, because it would have taken so long to go through precinct by precinct to select alternates, the representatives of each campaign agreed to make a motion for changing the rules as follows: if Edwards did not have enough alternates to replace their no-shows, they would be replaced by Obama and Clinton alternates, split 50/50. As soon as this proposal was announced to the floor, there was a general outcry form the Obama side of the room.

An Obama delegate went to the microphone and stated that they wanted to amend the rule change, but the chairman announced that before an amendment could be made, the floor would have to vote on the original suspension of the rules. After 10 minutes or so of mass confusion, the vote took place and the suspension passed. Immediately afterward, the Obama delegate proposed the following change (I was sitting in the bleachers thinking the same thing): that the Edwards no-shows should be split proportionately between Obama and Clinton, that is 5 to 4, rather than 50/50.

There was a debate on the floor about this issue. Someone on the Clinton side, not understanding the change, I think, proclaimed that this was disenfranchising the missing Edwards delegates. The chairman made clear that if you didn't show up, you couldn't be disenfranchised. Then another Clinton delegate made a better argument: that we were delaying the already long convention by fighting over 9 state delegates, and was it really worth it? The Obama people shouted yes. Eventually, there was a vote, and the amendment passed. Recounting this, it sounds like a mundane argument over convention rules, and that's what it was, but resolving a complex debate about fair representation in a room filled with over a thousand delegates was both chaotic and amusing.

So now that the process was amended to supposedly speed things up, they started seating alternates. They began with the Edwards alternates, and then seated the Obama and Clinton alternates. I hung back, as I had no strong desire to be a delegate unless my vote was needed. Thirty minutes later, it was clear that the Clinton people didn't have enough alternates either, and so the remaining Obama alternates (including me) got to cast their preferences. In the end, with Edwards delegates realigning and the Clinton no-shows, Obama went from having 50% of Washoe's state delegates to 58%.

At that point, the convention moved on to the phase where state delegates are elected for the state convention. Only those who were elected state delegates are eligible to go to Denver for the national Democratic convention, and hundreds of people clearly wanted to go. Washoe County is guaranteed one male and two female national delegates, and potentially two more from the congressional district, and so I realized it was highly unlikely I would be elected from the over 500 state delegates Washoe is entitled to. So rather than stick around for the state delegate elections, I left early to attend the Brianna Denison protests.

Part II: The protests

A few weeks ago, members of the Westboro Baptist church (AKA the "God Hates Fags" group) showed up in Reno to protest the funeral of a fallen soldier. Tens of counter-protesters showed up, mostly from biker gangs, and apparently there was a minor scuffle. When the church announced they would picket the funeral service of Brianna Denison, the young college student who was recently murdered by a serial rapist here in Reno, the story of which has received national coverage, the ACLU of Nevada decided to observe the protest to make sure the local police were protecting the constitutional rights of both sides. I decided to tag along.

When we got there, a blizzard had already been raging for over an hour. We walked out in front of the Reno Convention Center, where the service was being held, and soon saw three or four women from Westboro Baptist church standing on the sidewalk on S. Virginia St., one of the busiest roads in Reno. They held signs saying, "God Sent the Killer," "Pray for More Dead Kids," and "America is Doomed." We only saw a few counter-protestors, so we decided to walk down a bit more to see if we could find anything else.

By the time we walked back, there were hundreds of counter-protestors, mostly biker gangs and UNR students, surrounding the three or four church members. I started taking some photos, and got threatened by a biker for doing so. It was at that point that I realized that some of the bikers had swastikas on their jackets -- it's not often you find White Supremacists teaming up with college students during a protest, but that's what was happening. Then the angels showed up:

I'm not sure what their message was, but their costumes were creative.

At this point, it seemed like the police were doing an admirable job protecting the church members, but we crossed the street to get a better look. I had a hard time taking photos in the nighttime blizzard, but here is what it looked like:

Almost everyone in that picture is a counter-protester, but you can see two signs held by the church members below the big American flag.

After ten minutes or so of this, with the crowd occasionally cheering whenever a big bus or stretch limo drove by and blocked the church members' signs, a police SUV drove up and the church members willingly went inside. The cops later told us that they asked to be safely escorted back to their cars. The counter-protest immediately ended, and the memorial service began soon afterwards, attended by nearly 3,000 people.

The police did an excellent job keeping the peace, protecting the extremely unpopular protesters and even arresting an angel at one point who evidently became too aggressive. I thought they could've done a better job zoning the protest/counter-protest areas, but I guess that's difficult when you have 3-4 protesters vs. hundreds of counter-protesters. Still, I remember a protest in Boston once where over fifteen cops were lined up like a soccer wall in front of 4-5 neo-Nazis, and I thought that worked pretty well. Regardless, the emotionally heightened moment fizzled, and Brianna Denison got a respectful memorial service.

As promised, here are some pictures from my unexpected stopover in an Omaha airport maintenance hangar after a bomb threat diverted my flight from Vegas to Hartford. We didn't take too many, and were trying to be discreet about it since we didn't want anyone to take our camera. There are a few more in the Flickr set.

AP: Threat Forces Flight to Land in Omaha. I was on this flight, on my way home for Christmas from Reno. I was originally happy that we found a nonstop, non-redeye flight from Las Vegas to Hartford, but it turned into a redeye flight with a stop in an Omaha airport hangar.

Because the threat was made by a drunk person who didn't make the flight (according to the pilot), no one in the plane panicked, and we were mostly annoyed at the delay. They landed our plane in a remote part of the airfield, at the far end of which were waiting tens of emergency vehicles and police cars, I guess in case we exploded. They must not have been that concerned, since we waited in the plane nearly an hour for them to pull up some steps so we could deplane. It was 10 degrees in Nebraska, but they had buses ready to take us to the hangar.

We were treated kindly by Southwest staff, and given water and snacks. After asking us as a group a few vague questions ("Do you know a Janet?"), they bused us back into the plane, which refueled at a gate and continued onto Hartford. Generally, the whole experience was boring and tiring. Not quite Die Hard II.

I have a few pictures, which I'll post when I get a chance.

It takes me awhile to catch up with a year's output of movies, and I'll never be able to grasp a year's worth of books. Music is really the only art form that I can make sense of by the end of the year; that's why I'm posting my top 20 albums of the year, and no other lists.

Flea mocked my posting this list by calling it self-aggrandizing -- perhaps it is, but then so is maintaining a public blog. Compiling my top albums each year is a way for me to get a sense of how my musical taste changes with time, and of how the splintering music world is evolving. And maybe I'll encourage one of you to listen to something they wouldn't have otherwise, and vice versa. My list in 2005 led me to listen to albums recommended in the comments section that I wouldn't have found otherwise.

One more thing: I didn't post a list in 2006 because I was woefully behind in music discovery due to my employment at Nevada's Question 7 campaign. If you're curious, my top 5 from 2006 is here. Now, onto 2007:

20. The Arcade Fire -- Neon Bible

The disappointment of the year (next to maybe the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah followup), yet it still barely qualifies for my top 20 by virtue of several killer tracks. There's no room for me in this Bruce Springsteen revival, but excise the Boss and you have a pretty good album.

Favorite tracks: The Well and the Lighthouse, No Cars Go

19. Iron & Wine -- The Shepherd's Dog

It was initially offputting for me to hear Sam Beam add tropical and African rhythms to his compositions while maintaining his soft and measured vocals, but I eventually came around. Perhaps it was the realization that this album resembles 1980's Paul Simon only superficially.

Favorite tracks: House by the Sea, Resurrection Fern

18. The Field -- From Here We Go Sublime

Another grower. I don't usually give uhn-tse-uhn-tse electronic albums repeat listens, but the glitchy repetition and floating vocals kept me interested. It's Fennesz with a backbeat.

Favorite tracks: The Little Heart Beats So Fast, Silent

17. Caribou -- Andorra

How does one assign Caribou to a genre? He started off with jazzy electronica, moved to shoegaze and psychedelia, and played around with motorik. allmusic.com uses the term "Dream Pop" -- sure. I'll just say that it's melodic, percussive, and infectious. And "Irene" is one of two songs from 2007 that make me feel drunk just listening to it.

Favorite tracks: After Hours, Irene

16. Spoon -- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Even Stranger than Fiction -- the mediocre Will Farrell film -- couldn't ruin Spoon. They can still make an album where every single darn song is catchy.

Favorite tracks: Rhthm & Soul, The Underdog

I don't usually post about my work here, but Advomatic recently launched the TheMiddleClass.org, a project by the Drum Major Institute, a non-profit think tank founded during the Civil Rights era. The site grades legislators in Congress on how they voted on selected pieces of legislation, based on how supportive the bill is of the middle class (defined by DMI).

I won't say much more here, but Joshua Levy from techPresident shared some positive things about the site and its excellent design by multipod.

When I changed my address at the DMV today, I registered to vote as a member of a political party for the first time in my life.¹ I took this step in order to vote in the Nevada Democratic primary this January, which is scheduled to take place after the Iowa caucus but before the New Hampshire primary.

My plan is to switch back to nonpartisan status after the primary, because even though I am more politically aligned with the Democrats than the Republicans: 1) the mainstream Democratic platform diverges from my personal beliefs on several key issues; and 2) I have general frustrations with the American two party system.

In any case, I'm looking forward to participating in the caucus process.

------------

¹ This isn't entirely true, since I was automatically registered as a Democrat when I voted in the 2004 Massachusetts primary, but I switched back to independent status within days.(return)

A little late in coming, but here's the Flickr set of photos taken during my vacation in Sicily -- where my brother had his wedding -- and mainland Italy. Most of these pictures were taken by Flea.

Some highlights from the trip:

• Visiting the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, which I wrote about earlier this year. [Photography not allowed.]
• Eating homemade Sicilian food with my extended family.
• Sixty American wedding guests taking a charter bus to the small Sicilian town where my parents grew up, and my dad giving a tour of the town. (Here he is describing the olive oil making process in a building where my grandfather occasionally worked.)
• My brother's wedding, and relaxing at a Sicilian villa the morning after.
• Watching Strombolian eruptions on Mt. Etna from the villa, several days before a somewhat major eruption, which we missed. [No photos.]
• Viewing colorful frescoes in Pompeiian houses.
• Dinner with Jon May & Lorelei at a vegetarian restaurant in Rome's San Lorenzo neighborhood.
• Dinner with old Italian friends in the Valpolicella wine-growing area near Verona.
• Early Christmas shopping in Venice.

It was a fantastic trip, and we ate extremely well, with good people.

I will be vacationing over the next two weeks, and hence this blog will very quiet for the duration. I will be attending Andrew Sullivan's wedding, with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart as my guests. (Bill Maher can't come -- he has to work.)

OK, the truth: tomorrow we're flying to Palermo, Sicily for the eventual purpose of going to my brother's August 31st wedding in Taormina. I have a vast network of family in northeast Sicily who will all be attending, along with 90 or so American friends and family. We'll be flying out of Venice, so we'll be seeing various parts of Italy as well.

Congrats to crazymonk.org commenters NYAnthony and Elissa!

This past weekend, I did the up-and-back-down version of the famous Narrows hike in Zion National Park. It was physically exhausting, since the hike involves nearly constant wading up a swift river with depths varying from shin- to thigh-high, but also immensely rewarding -- especially where the river was wall-to-wall and 30 feet wide, with vertical walls towering 1500 feet above. The temperature reached over 105 degrees that day, but in the canyon it was cool and comfortable.

The conditions in The Narrows makes casual photography difficult, so I have no photoset to show off, but I posted the above image to give you a sense of the scale. I'm the orange humanoid speck at the bottom of the opening.

After being warned by my server host that the crazymonk.org Wordpress installation was in dire need of an upgrade, I finally got to transferring all of my data from Wordpress to a Drupal installation. I was too lazy to upgrade Wordpress, and since I use Drupal everyday at my job, I'm much more likely to add new features and keep this website secure if it's built in Drupal.

Nothing significant has changed yet, besides some of the visual layout and a couple of new blocks in the sidebar. I'm using a spam module for comments that I haven't used before, so I'm taking it slightly on faith that the comment threads here won't get out of control.

I hope to add more features in the coming months, but in the meantime your crazymonk.org experience shouldn't be much different.

I've mentioned here before that I've been working for Advomatic, a company devoted to building tools and web sites for organizations with missions we support.

Today would be an excellent day to check out our portfolio. We've had a lot of interesting clients recently.

I'd like to write a little more about my experience viewing the Stardust implosion. Before I get to that, check out some videos of the implosion (thx, alina) -- as I mentioned before, my video did not come out because they turned off the lights right before the building went down. Evidently, I'm not the only one annoyed about that.

On Monday night, I had almost forgot about the implosion, but at 8pm or so I got a comment encouraging me to go (thx, slater). I remembered my regret after missing the Boardwalk implosion last year, so I resolved to not miss the Stardust's. But I was concerned about finding a good spot to view the event -- the Stardust is right on the Strip, and I didn't want to deal with parking my car, navigating crowds and construction fences, and potentially not finding a good spot.

My first thought was that I should find a nearby parking garage with an open roof. I looked at a Google map for reference:

The Circus Circus casino would clearly be the best bet, but I was concerned that it was so close that they would shut down the open parking area. (I was wrong -- the photographer in the link above was there.) Still, I thought my best bet was to find a spot behind the casino, off the Strip, where tourists would be less of a problem. Checking out Google, there was an obvious area behind the train tracks running nearly parallel to the Strip. I wasn't sure if I would find a good spot to hang out, but the view would be unblocked.

At 12:30am, we headed up in that direction. After navigating to my chosen street, I saw a car pull into a big parking lot. There was a bar there, but behind that, right next to the tracks, there was a large and empty lot. As soon as we pulled in, it was obvious that this was the perfect place. Not only did we have a clear view of the Stardust, but we could just sit in our parked car and wait for the moment. The picture below shows where we were, indicated by the red rectangle:

This is what we saw:

We waited there for about 90 minutes. During that time, a total of around 30 vehicles, mostly Nevada plates and including some off-duty cab drivers, showed up for the implosion. All we could see were some lights swirling around the building creating some odd psychedelic impressions, unaware of the party taking place on the other side.

At about 2:15am, two large fireworks were set off near the building. They seemed official, and our guess was that it was a 10 minute warning, which would correspond to the 2:30am time I had been hearing through the rumor mill. About ten minutes later, I saw large streams of water shooting into the air towards the Stardust. Flea told me that it was some sort of dust containment system.

A few minutes later, they began the fireworks show. I wasn't expecting such a flashy show, but it was actually an entertaining set of fireworks that lasted several minutes. At the time, I was unaware of the small private party taking place on the other side of the building. After the last firework was set off, the various floors of the building started flashing. I thought this was a visual effect of the explosives, but I later learned we were merely seeing the rear lighting of the numeral countdown that was being displayed on the building's front end. (See the videos I linked to above.) It just served to confuse us.

Then the building went entirely dark. A few short seconds, and then an extremely loud boom overtook us. The 32-story Stardust imploded, all of it collapsing straight down, except for one edge, which tipped over on top of the rest of the building. A huge cloud of dust spread to the north, missing us entirely. The whole time my jaw was agape -- it was an awesome sight: a historical landmark obliterated in one fell swoop. (Not including the months of preparation time that preceded the implosion, and the weeks of cleanup to follow.)

Yesterday was a groggy day, but I can now say that my time in Las Vegas included an implosion. And it was worth it:

Ever since my disappointing trip to a ghost town in Death Valley last year, where all there was to be found was some rusted cans and tens of abandoned mines, I've been hoping to go visit Rhyolite, two hours northwest of Las Vegas. This past weekend, that guy from fantent/snakesonablog and I finally made the trip.

Rhyolite, one of the better preserved ghost towns in southern Nevada, had a population nearing 10,000 at its height in the late 19th century, but was empty a few decades later. Several large buildings still remain, including the jail, a residence/brothel, the bank, and the train depot. There are also abandoned mines peppered around the area, and a small cemetery.

In addition to the historical landmarks, Rhyolite has also become the unlikely home for a modern sculpture garden. You can find these sculptures near the road approaching the town. The oldest sculpture, an odd portrayal of The Last Supper with white-robed ghosts, has been around since the early 1980's.

I took a small number of photos of the town and the sculptures.

It's been awhile.

Brown, Ford, and Hussein died. (They need one more for a bridge game.)

Many top ten lists have been released, reminding me that movies take a long time to come out when you live in a third tier city. (Still waiting for Volver, Pan's Labyrinth, and Children of Men.) And that the music world is way too big and fractured to make any casual sense of. And that I rarely read recently published books.

Indiana Jones 4 is finally going into production this year for a May 2008 release.

Nevada has a new governor who, in a fit of ego and self-aggrandization, was secretly sworn in at midnight on January 1st: "We didn't want any word out in advance because of the security concerns... This is a new world since 9-11 and the first major change in Nevada government since then."

I now have a Mii on my brother's Wii.

And I'm a little more than halfway through Against the Day. Turns out it's hard to find any reading time when you're home visiting family.

I'm back from my vacation, which means that you should see some action here again. I spent some time in L.A., San Francisco, and the coast in between, catching only two movies (The Fountain and Casino Royale) and reading a mere 10% of Pynchon's latest.

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed with Sacha Baron Cohen's performance, only posting twice. I'll try to find a better guest blogger next time.

So tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, which I'll be spending in L.A., and then I will be taking a bit of a vacation -- my first since 2005. I don't expect to be around many computers during next week, but it's possible that a post or two might pop up. Luckily, I have found a guest blogger to take over crazymonk.org for the next week or so. His name is Sacha Baron Cohen, and you should be hearing from him soon.