Oh Time. Oh Website.
The end of February fell apart and then March rushed in and we are a third of the way done before I notice we have started. Where is the time for us to slow down and reflect? I am asked questions I cannot answer, given problems I cannot solve, playing games that I cannot win. And I am reading so little.

I now resolve to you that the rest of February March will be filled with films, as I am eight films behind in my posting and you should expect one everyday until I am caught up (even later today!) Since it is spring break and that gives me a few extra moments to write pithy reviews of the moving pictures that have graced my eyes over the last three weeks. I will also venture to Buffalo from something like Wednesday to Sunday and so if you are there you should send some smoke signals my way.

I leave you with this, of which I can offer no explanations save that the internet is dementing our minds.

The short film Cashback I somehow acquired (legally through iTunes, I believe I got a pack of short films that were all Oscar Nominated … 2005? – yes, I checked) and really enjoyed, mostly because I liked that whole set and made everyone watch it. (great sentence)

Anyway. This is the full length version and while maybe it lost some of it is super cool concise-ness I still enjoyed this movie. Though I think a lot of this is the really artistic nature of the story and the plot and the direction.

And finally Sean Biggerstaff (above) is amazing. To learn more about him you should go visit his website which really seems to be his own personal endeavor which I find really refreshing and very insightful from a celebrity. I hope to see much more of him.

I am at something like twenty-six hours of being awake. I am convinced that this is the way to fix my sleep schedule which constantly gets off because my body really likes to sleep for about 12 hours and then stay up for about 16, leading to a really normal natural cycle.

Although I still feel totally awake right now, I have been a bit hyper all day (I partially attribute this to the amazing 60degree weather we had today here in early January in Pittsburgh – as the girl I was walking behind told her friend in front of the Pitt Union – I think this must like totally be global warming // friend-girl responds: I think I like it? ) and have probably said a bunch of crazy things to people.

So what if I post some charts on all the crazy short messages I have broadcast out to the internet over the last year – convenient because I seem to have tons of these year2007 posts backlogged.

The following charts show my Twitter stats from 2007. Except actually they are my all time Twitter usage – I realized this because ever since I installed Leopard at the very end of October I stopped twittering, because for some reason Twitterific didn’t load on launch, and I kept forgetting, excuses, excuses, blah, blah, blah, end of the semester – and I ended up not twittering all of Nov. & Dec., which means those big bars on the chart are from last Nov. & Dec. Which is fine.

If you have twitter (and a mac) you can also do this – the script was created by Damon Cortesi and if you don’t have a mac there is also a web version linked over there that doesn’t need Numbers which above uses.

I also have the post-lunch peak that gruber noticed, an awkward Thursday drop that I can’t explain, and I have very low @results, because I really just post updates, I don’t use it so much for conversations. Maybe that could be a resolution for 2008.

(for those of you playing along at home – the bad ideas are in bold. — jk, I like Pittsburgh)

I can rattle my head off and spit all sorts of pleasing adjectives, as much as I want about what music I liked and didn’t like in 2007, but in some ways it is better if I just show you the numbers. All of these stats are based on Last.fm and their accumulations of the songs I have listened to over the past year. This is of course not totally accurate – sometimes I listen to iPods, I still use CDs in the car, and for most of December I was on a totally unnatural Pandora kick. Ignoring all that, I present my Top Artists 2007:

Also even more inaccurate are my top albums of the year, because well we had a little problem with leaving Cobra Starship on repeat. Also a lot of times when I first get an album I burn it and listen to it in the car or on the iPhone at work, and then listen to older stuff in the apartment. But I figured, maybe you care:

Top Albums:

1. Cobra Starship – While The City Sleeps, We Rule The Streets
2. Dolour – Suburbiac
3. Patrick Wolf – The Magic Position
4. The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
5. !!! – Myth Takes
6. Regina Spektor – Soviet Kitsch
7. Patrick Wolf – Lycanthropy
8. The Academy Is… – Almost Here
9. Laura Veirs – Year of Meteors
10. Linkin Park – Minutes To Midnight
11. Broken Social Scene – Broken Social Scene
12. Bloc Party – A Weekend In the City
13. Björk – Post Live
14. Panic! At the Disco – A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out
15. ActionReaction – 3 Is The Magic Number
16. Björk – Vespertine
17. Mirah – C’mon Miracle
18. Björk – Medulla
19. Low – The Great Destroyer
20. Patrick Wolf – Wind in the Wires

My Top Ten Albums of the Year:

10. Armchair Apocrypha – Andrew Bird
9. Infinity on High – Fall Out Boy
8. The Reminder – Feist
7. Neon Bible – Arcade Fire
6. The Magic Position – Patrick Wolf
5. † – Justice
4. Mirrored – Battles
3. Volta – Bjork
2. In Rainbows – Radiohead
1. Boxer – The National

And that is the top ten. Questions, Comments, Complaints?

Things that maybe should have made the list but forgot to: Low, Drums & Guns; Interpol, Our Love To Admire; LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver; Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Is Is (not even an album! just an ep); The Tough Alliance, A New Chance; Bloc Party, A Weekend In The City; St. Vincent, Marry Me; The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America; Kings of Leon, Because of the Times; The Field, From Here We Go Sublime; and St. Vincent, Marry Me; Linkin Park, Minutes to Midnight.

Albums that I was just sort of disappointed in: The Shins’, Wincing the Night Away; Rufus Wainwright, Release The Stars; Wilco, Sky Blue Sky; and Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala.

Albums that I guess I was supposed to love but can’t stand: Amy Winehouse, Back to Black; Band of Horses, Cease to Begin (actually I can stand this, I just think it is really boring and I guess I am supposed to love it); and M.I.A. Kala – which I mostly can’t tolerate at all.

Summary of Noise

I decided that Regina Spektor is really good, especially the album Soviet Kitsch, that I do like The Academy Is… and I don’t know why I didn’t listen to them before, that The National is one of my favorite bands ever, that good electronic music is too hard to find – but maybe getting easier, that music festivals like Austin City Limits are a really good idea (and value for people who like lots of music), and that Patrick Wolf is going to keep getting better.

Portfolio

Unfortunately, it is currently a mostly empty portfolio. But it is coming along. And I am going out for coffee.

I am at home now. So some of the posts are going to be like this. Short.

Alright, so I am a little behind and you are gonna have to wait for me to catch up with my life. Expect more soon, Broken Social Scene was great. Really great. And my computer is only sort of broken but more functioning again. I have to go write a board editorial kthxbye.

Err. yeah.

Four years running now I have attempted or pretended to attempt the creation of a (terrible) novel in the month of November. You might ask what my problem is, why keep doing this (or pretending to) if you know it isn’t going to happen? And I would answer, it could happen, but I would (completely) hate the results.

Most of my fiction (and we aren’t talking about all that much work here) vegetates for months as an idea, occasionally with sporadic notes, more likely just reoccurring thoughts that I can’t get rid. This is how my fiction writes itself, randomly and over long periods of time.

So November 1st rolls around and I realize that I have to start writing and if lucky I have a few fragments of characters, concepts, cataclysms, but more likely nothing. And so I will start writing stream of consciousness, mostly about how much I hate writing stream of consciousness; sometimes about how I shouldn’t be writing novels in November.

A few weeks ago Mary asked me if I was doing NaNoWriMo and I said resolutely, ‘no,’ that always goes too poorly for me. Then I got an email from D saying that they were all getting together for a write-in… and of course I attended. Because what else do I have to do on a Saturday evening than pretend I am writing a novel. And so while they are now counting thousands of words I have fifteen pages of a notebook filled with some random thoughts, fragments of stories, and me writing about how much of a pain writing a novel without planning is.

Am I pretending to write a novel this month, of course I am! The good thing is I am for now writing more, but certainly not fifty thousand words more. If I were to finish it, I would hate myself more than if I did not–what I am really hoping for is a few usable paragraphs that will later grow short stories to cradle them into prose.