It's Friday, I'm in love (with my stereo).

A soundtrack for driving to work and trying not to cry at the first sub-zero morning of the near-winter.

1. Paul Simon: Obvious Child. You'll dance, you'll cry, you'll drum on your steering wheel till you accidentally honk your horn.



1a. Guys, I'm starting to get pretty frigging pumped about the Graceland 20th Anniversary Tour next year. PRETTY FRIGGING PUMPED.



2. M. Ward: Epistemology. I like songs that reference screwing up the words to the hymns.



3. Titus Andronicus: No Future Part III. Because it's comforting to remember that you really will always be a loser.



4. Billy Joel: Don't Ask Me Why. Three minutes of SMOOTH GOLD.



5. Elton John: Rocket Man. I don't know, I honestly can't think of a moment for which this song is NOT the best choice.



5a. Here's something I love: When a song takes six minutes to get to its incredible climax, and those last thirty seconds are so, so worth it. Example: Someone Saved My Life Tonight.



6. Beach House: Walk in the Park. This is more of a night driving song, in my humble opinion, all blissed out nostalgia and soothing keyboards. Mmmmm.



7. Belle And Sebastian: Lazy Line Painter Jane. Included as a tribute to all the music I would never have known about if it weren't for my various ex-boyfriends (or possibly just one in particular). Monica Queen's voice gets me every time. Basically an essential track for any mix tape produced in Oshawa between 1999 and 2002.



And, scene.

Putting the graphic back in graphic novels.

Here is a list of the best comics I read this year. They didn't all come out this year, but I am okay with that. I hope you are too.

1. Sword of my mouth by Jim Munroe and Shannon Gerard. It's a freaky, post-rapture, pro-urban agriculture fable, and the illustrations are so gorgeous and detailed and vaguely 1970s. It also features a mutant baby!

2. Moving Pictures by Kathryn and Stuart Immonen. This one has the feel of a film noir masterpiece and is about the Nazis trying to steal paintings, and the plucky museum staff who try to stop them. An angel dropped it into my lap one very long day and it kept me busy sitting in the emergency room.

3. Undeleted Scenes by Jeffrey Brown. I just love him. He captures the mundane details of his own life in this sweet cartoony way. He draws like a very mature ten year old. And kitties feature prominently in many of his comics. Look! Christmas Kitties!

4. Mercury by Hope Larson. This one jumps back and forth between the present, where a teenage girl is struggling to live her life while her mother is far away, and the past, where one of her ancestors is visited by a mysterious stranger during the Gold Rush. The two stories eventually intersect and the results are strange and unexpected and creepy and lovely.

5. Wilson by Daniel Clowes. It's about a real asshole, basically. Clowes' greatest gift is, in my opinion, his ability to create these truly horrible people and then inhabit them so completely that your sympathy for them runs parallel to your disgust. And his drawings are just so perfect--the different versions of Wilson from chapter to chapter, the silent pages, the pauses between words. It's gorgeous.

Now tell me yours.

It's been a long long time.

A few years ago, I had this very sobering moment while listening to Weezer's Blue Album. It must have been around 2004, and the awful truth dawned on me that I'd been enjoying and dissecting that record for ten years. Holy shit, I thought, I am getting old.

Several years on, this same thing is happening more and more. And every time it does, I feel another little crow's foot bore its way into my face. I guess maybe it's a testament to my amazing taste in music that I listen to things that are relevant and poignant and touching even years after their release (notable exceptions: the Vengaboys, Aqua, and several others too embarrassing to list here, although I would posit that Aqua's Turn Back Time is in fact a very moving song). Yes. Let's go with that. But it's also probably a testament to how much I love going back to particular sonic memories. I've written about this before, but I'll say it again: aural nostalgia is the best kind.

So here is a list of the top five songs I've been emoting to for far too long and the embarrassingly ancient eras they evoke.

Happiness--Elliot Smith. The endless GO-Train rides of the summer of 2000.



Deathly--Aimee Mann. A bad breakup, a worse makeover, and a long trudge home in the snow from the movie theatre in 1999. Also, several months spent lying on the living room floor in Vancouver.



My Name is Jonas--Weezer. Approximately seven thousand house parties between 1994 and today.



Sloan--She Says What She Means. East Hamilton in the mid 90s was a pretty great place to be, until your parents found your secret stash of Absolut.

(I could probably include most of Sloan's catalog on this list. For a long time I felt like I was the hippest person in the universe because I owned a copy of Smeared on cassette.)

Autumn Sweater--Yo La Tengo. Makin' out, breakin' up, beach-walkin', sleep-walkin', you know, all the good stuff that seems pretty weird and shitty at the time. Ah, the halcyon days.




It should be noted that the main criterion for this list is that I first heard the music on or around the time it was released. I could write a whole other list for the oldies, and of course, Kodachrome would be number one, followed closely by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. (Party Mix 4-eva!)