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Up in the Air

A couple of movies came to mind after I watched writer/director Jason Reitman’s wonderful Up in the Air. The first was Jerry Maguire, another funny drama about a man very comfortable in his career who faces an existential crisis. That film, like this one, features a display of movie star acting that will never get the acclaim heaped on showier method roles but is every bit as deserving.

The second film was Broadcast News, James L. Brooks’ classic about three TV journalists and their professional and romantic entanglements. It’s not so much plot or technique that invited the comparison but an overall tone of realism and respect, a sense that these are movies made by adults for adults, a Hollywood rarity.

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Monsters of Folk – Monsters of Folk

I find it a lot harder to write CD reviews than movie reviews, partly because I need to listen to an album carefully several times before I feel comfortable writing about it and things pile up. So I have a handful of 2009 albums sitting unreviewed that I hope to get to over the next couple of weeks so I can have a proper summary of my year in music.

I don’t buy a ton of albums, not compared to true music hounds. I average maybe 15-20 per year, generally the new releases of artists I like and a few attempts to broaden my horizons by picking up something new that’s receiving a lot of acclaim.

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Song of the Day #502: ‘Scarborough Fair/Canticle’ – Simon & Garfunkel

I once came up with a scientific formula to numerially rank every CD in my collection. The idea was to assign a point value (on a scale of 1-10) to each song on each album and then divide by the number of songs on the album. This would give you a mean song-score for the whole album… basic stuff.

The added wrinkle came when I tried to account for longevity. I figured it would be easy to overpraise more recent songs while a song that stood the test of time would get no boost for having done so. So I weighted the scores by adding a tenth of a point for every year since each album’s original release.

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Song of the Day #501: ‘April Come She Will’ – Simon & Garfunkel

I’ve spent a bunch of Beatles Weekends now exploring the Brit pop explosion of the 60s but there was an equally significant movement happening at the same time on the other side of the pond.

I’m referring to folk rock, a genre influenced by The Beatles themselves to some degree but mostly typified in the music of Bob Dylan, The Byrds and the focus of this week’s theme, Simon & Garfunkel.

Early on, Simon & Garfunkel leaned more toward the “folk” side of folk rock, but over the course of their five albums they introduced a host of new sounds to their repertoire and created a legacy that resonates to this day.

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Song of the Day #500: ‘Twist and Shout’ – The Beatles

Here I am at my 500th Song of the Day. Haven’t missed a single day for nearly a year and a half. I admit there are times when I wonder if I can keep this going for very much longer but then I stop and think about dozens of songs and artists I haven’t been able to cover yet and I realize that the SOTD series will certainly never die for lack of material. If it dies, it will be because I give up. And I don’t give up easy.

I considered finding some meaningful song to position in this spot to mark the occasion, but I couldn’t come up with anything. And because I was featuring Beatles cover songs this weekend, I figured their most famous one is certainly worthy of the spot.

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