This album of dancy electronic pop hasn't left my MP3 player since I bought it. It's like finding a lost and prescient New Order album circa 1985, filled with compelling and instantly memorable melodies. The lyrics are quite wordy, but they are also quite good, like on the melancholic opener, a guy going to visit his ex in a new city:

"Smeared black ink...Your palms are sweaty and I'm barely listening to last demands...I'm staring at the asphalt wondering what's buried underneath: There I am. Wear my badge--a vinyl sticker with big black letters adhering to my chest. Tells your new friends I am a visitor here, I am not permanent..And the only thing keeping me dry is: You seem so out of context in this gaudy apartment complex/I'm a stranger with a doorkey explaining that I'm just visiting/I am finally seeing why I was the one worth leaving."

"Give Up" is an excellent, warm and human example of a genre in which one's connection can sometimes get lost amongst the bleeps and blips of synths and Casios. One of last year's best!

"Mason & Dixon" is Thomas Pynchon's best work: less impenetrable than "Gravity's Rainbow", warmer than "V." & the lamentable "Vineland". It takes a little effort, but one easily becomes accustomed to the 18th-century mannerisms of type and syntax with which Pynchon chose to clothe this story. And what a story it is...The birth of America from an uneasy brew of Enlightenment principles and nagging superstitions, fueled with coffee & tobacco & other smokables, urban sophistication butting up against rural individualism. After observing the Transit of Venus across the sun in Dutch Sumatra, the grieving widower Mason and caffeine-addled Quaker Dixon take another assignment laying lines for the Penns in the New World, vaguely suspecting their glasses and measuring devices are going to divide more than just the landscape before them. And so begins the big adventure into America. "Mason & Dixon" is a travelogue, an encyclopedia of the science and politics of the Revolutionary era, always with a focus on Pynchon's perennial preterite everyday man who has been passed over by fortune.

As with his other fiction, the esoteric historical minutiae is seamlessly woven into conversation and the narrative (Pynchon must have camped out at the Royal Observatory in England and poured over its documents and M & D's letters and diaries to spice this one so richly). A classic for which we'll probably have to do some popular catching up, like "Moby-Dick" and "Ulysses" and any encyclopedic masterpiece which went partially unrecognized at its inaugural appearance.

Writer/director Mike Judge's understated satire of flourescent cubicle-angst keeps the tone subdued and lets the absurdity simply show itself. This well-made film was an instant-classic cult film and found many adherents on its first video run for good reason. We root for our protagonist Peter to stay in his occupational hypnotherapist-induced state of carelessness and not "get back with the program" as he and his two downsized friends seek to "Superman 3" their ex-company of a fortune (as payback for being summarily laid off). From the ironic gangsta-rap soundtrack to the narcotizing voice of the boss Lumbergh and Stephen Root's mumbling & near psychotic Milton, "Office Space" offers no big critique, but a good time.

"City of God" is one of the best films I've ever seen. Nowadays a lot of films bluster about with kitchen-sink editing and visual effect techniques, a kind of visual swagger borne of music video, but this one really hit the marks with the script and acting and actually earns its style. Be warned--it's very casual in its brutality, is shocking even in this jaded age, and the movie does not pause to moralize on any of its characters. Both the good and the bad meet violent ends. But it also has ample moments of poignancy and heart as well. What's most intriguing is how we never really connect with any of the characters, except for the narrator Rocket who longs to use a camera instead of a gun. Rocket is experiencing as memories all the things we witness, and this is what gives it all a stylized and casual-seeming distance and swiftness. When I learned that actual street kids from the Rio slum acted the parts...Well, it's just unbelievable how good they are. This is perhaps the most perfectly edited film I've ever seen. It was like watching Scorsese's continually amazing "Goodfellas" for the first time all over again.

Here's a good documentary about Lynch. Of course, you never get a clue of insight from him or his friends about what informs the strange metaphysics and obsessions that we the audience experience in his films. But sensing what a likable and completely normal person he is in these interviews makes the disjunction all the more fascinating. He's just a painter and sculptor (albeit one whose medium sometimes involves dead rats, flies, and his beloved ants) who happened to get a commission from AFI in 1970 and has chosen to make films at his whim ever since, with complete artistic control of his projects. We experience his close working collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti in Prague and elsewhere, and it drives home how important music and sound is to him, and get glimpses of his earliest films. "Pretty as a Picture" is a must-own for his fans.

Corny and sophomoric, "Titanic" has its moments, but it's best seen on the big screen. James Cameron was aiming for a single tale on which we could focus to humanize the monumental disaster of the Titanic, but with so many badly written scenes like a roster of cliches, the main story is just incidental. As far as the acting, what can one say? Di Caprio & Winslet give it their best--just what their roles deserve, I guess. Billy Zane is suitably reprehensible as the vain rich-boy villain, and the supporting cast are good, especially Victor Garber and Bernard Hill as the Titanic's engineer and captain, respectively. So just go along for the doomed ride, because it's still worth seeing just for the technical wizardry and amazing attention to detail.

Apart from being a brilliant flip-off to the illusion-machine of Hollywood, "Mulholland Drive" is David Lynch's most thematically rich and successful film. Like his "Lost Highway," it involves parallel identities and a character's inability to confront a painful reality. Here these explorations are seamlessly interwoven into two thriller-like noir plots, one involving an actress fresh off the plane named Betty who tries to help an amnesiac woman she discovers in her shower, and the other involving a filmmaker who is being bullied into an artistic compromise by a shadowy Hollywood mafia. On the barest surface, that is...These two stories meet at a place which is never explicit, but for the presence of a mysterious figure called the Cowboy who appears thrice: first, giving some menacing advice to the filmmaker to do as he'd been instructed; second, telling Betty to wake up when she's sleeping (and thus we learn that she's actually a psychotically depressed failed actress named Diane); and third, he saunters by in the background at a party which all the characters have gathered. All of the cast is excellent, but particularly Naomi Watts, who effortlessly conveys the sad desperation of Diane's reality (which is a shock after the sunny alter-ego we have witnessed in her performance in the first part of the film). The cinematography is so thickly vibrant it is literally sur-real--that is, slightly exaggerated in its mahagonies and crimsons and alizarines tones.

This DVD is okay. Be warned: Lynch forewent putting chapters in the movie, so it runs continuous (This could be annoying to those who like to skip around establishing connections between scenes). However, the DVD I purchased has strange glitches in the soundtrack--the sound fades a few notches at odd times. I'm not sure if this is a production flaw, or just my copy.

As to the plot and what MD is about, another reviewer here, Willie Krischke from Oregon City, has nailed this one, I think. But "Mulholland Drive" seems an homage to all the people who've been wrecked either by the culture Hollywood or by the ancillary seediness of the place (one of Lynch's good friends, the actor Jack Nance, was murdered by thugs). The fact that he could probably get anyone in Hollywood to star in his films, but likes to employ actors who don't have steady work shows that he cares about the people behind Tinseltown Maya.

But Lynch's motives, of course, are never that simple. He's one of the only filmmakers who understands the perversity or absurdity of a group of strangers who face a glowing screen in a darkened room, under the temporary control of someone not physically present--and exploits not only that darkness, but the penumbral state as we go to sleep and the comfortable world of identity and names disappear. "Mulholland Drive" is his best film.

This may be the best classical performance of the 20th century. I play this CD very often, and it was my intro to Bach's Goldberg Variations. I've listened to other versions, but always come back to it. Gould's abbreviated and sometimes hyper-accelerated renditions of these keyboard masterpieces are like perfect jewels. His phrasing of the opening Aria is pensive and joyous, a little essay unto itself. And then you plunge into the first variation. As they go by (most under a minute), you wonder, as Gould did in the liner notes, how these pieces are in any way related to the Aria which spawned them. You hear rumors of the chord progression, traces of the harmonies, echoes of the bass line. Each note is crystalline pure (sometimes one set of his fingers are playing staccato while the other, somehow, sounds pedalled--how'd he do that?) This double-CD set is amazing, and a must for anyone seeking a new world of music in the realm of baroque and classical music.

Lahiri is a tremedously talented storyteller. These stories are told with such economy and precision of both image and character expression that it's just baffling and exhilarating. Not all the stories are equally great (my favorites are the title story, "Sexy" and the final piece) but her pithy style remains a distinctive signature in our McSweeney's age of logorrheism and irony. Based upon this slim but excellent collection I'll definitely read her novel "The Namesake".

"Apollo" contains fantastic synthesizer work. Dan Lanois & the Eno brothers created one of the best soundtracks in the history of film (pieces from this album are still turning up in movies twenty years later: "An Ending" was used as the end title sequence of Soderbergh's "Traffic" and was more recently used to great effect in Boyle's "28 Days Later"). I remember when I owned this document on vinyl, and thought: side one is dissonant & spooky like the cold vastness of space, and side two filled with peace and awe and wonder. On CD as a continuous experience it's like doing an orbit from the shadowside back to the sun's cold light. Very organic and warm, it is one of Eno's very best.