UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Often I sit down at the computer in the evenings after the kids have gone to bed, with the best intentions of doing something productive, and yet somehow before long I find myself watching YouTube videos of people playing “Watcher of the Skies” on their home Mellotrons. (Who even has a Mellotron at home? Someone, I guess.)

Anyway… in the midst of that extremely productive use of my time, I found this rare gem: it’s the original lineup of Yes performing “Beyond and Before” live in France in 1969. Worth seeing if for no other reason than to laugh at Bill Bruford’s t-shirt.

No surprises, really, after I had already highlighted the 5 strongest contenders, but here they are in order, with cover art and brief reviews. And of course, links to buy. Ka-ching!

#5: Flight of the Knife
Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears
Buy Now from Amazon MP3

This is probably the most obscure of the five albums in this year’s list, which comes as no surprise to me. Nonetheless, I think it’s worth a listen. I discovered the album when iTunes was featuring it for $5 and I figured, why not?

Musically, it’s an odd mix of bits and pieces of Queen, David Bowie, Yes, Ben Folds and more, both old and new, and yet it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard. This concept album is as over-the-top as can be, and then some. But every moment of it is enjoyable, amusing, rocking, and a bit self-mocking. Apparently the band’s live show is equally overblown, in a good way, with elaborate costumes and theatrics.

#4: Lightbulbs
Fujiya & Miyagi
Buy Now from Amazon MP3

Probably more entitled to the name “The Mooney Suzuki” than the band that actually goes by that name, this band’s Can influence is apparent and strong, yet they forge their own unique sound in a minimalist electronica/rock style.

The lead-off track, “Knickerbocker,” sounds the most like Can, and more problematically, nearly identical to “Ankle Injuries,” the lead-off track from their previous album, 2006’s Transparent Things. but after the opener things go in a different, but equally interesting, direction.

If you’re not already into them, I recommend this album for (if nothing else) the best finger-snapping performance ever committed to record (“Pickpocket”).

#3: Evil Urges
My Morning Jacket
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This one’s getting a lot of “best album of the year” hype. Well, from everyone except Pitchfork, but they’re pretentious douches anyway. (Oh snap! I went there! And I even listen to stuff like this.) Exhibit A: Their top 50 of the year features not one but two bands that have “Fuck” in their name. Oh, tee-hee, aren’t we rebellious and unconventional? We’ll bestow pointless accolades on bands that, by their very names, have declared total disinterest in such publicity. But I digress, even if it was worth it to rip on Pitchfork. Now where was I?

Oh yeah, My Morning Jacket has delivered a great album that I have enjoyed listening to in its entirety numerous times over the past few months, after I finally overcame my apprehension, based (regrettably) on Pitchfork’s review, and listened to the album my own damn self.

#2: Saturdays = Youth
M83
Buy Now from Amazon MP3

With a title like this, the John Hughes-esque high school archetypes on the cover, and the vintage early ’80s sound throughout, you’d think M83 had grown up in the age of Atari, but the number in the “band” name refers (as I understand it) to this solo artist’s year of birth.

“Kim and Jessie” is the breakout (get it?) hit here, and you might be inclined to expect the rest of the album to sound the same, but you’d be wrong. That was a bit disappointing to me at first, but I quickly grew to love the synth-heavy, neo-New Wave sounds throughout.

#1: Narrow Stairs
Death Cab for Cutie
Buy Now from Amazon MP3

The dense, brooding 4-minute jam that opens the extended version of the hit single from this album, “I Will Possess Your Heart,” is my favorite musical moment of the year. (Even better than the hoedown jam in the opening track of Evil Urges.) But this album doesn’t get first place just for featuring a cool 8-minute jam track about a stalker (told from the stalker’s perspective). Everything about this album is great. The music’s great, the lyrics are great (especially “Your New Twin Sized Bed”), the flow from track to track is brilliant, it’s just a 100% enjoyable album from beginning to end, and like a satisfying meal at a good restaurant, you feel good about enjoying it. (As opposed to the bag of Doritos and White Castle sliders you metaphorically consume with every listening to certain albums.) I have no reservations whatsoever in hailing Narrow Stairs as my album of the year.

Honorable Mention

Best Album I Haven’t Actually Heard

TV on the Radio: Dear Science As the heading reveals, I haven’t actually heard this album, but I’ve meant to. And everyone else seems to think it’s the best album in, like, forever. Totally.

Best Mainstream Pop Album

Coldplay: Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends I don’t know why I’m always compelled to write out the full title, since no one else seems to do so (or even necessarily know it). Perhaps the full title and its usual truncation is part of the reason I can’t give this album more than honorable mention.

Best Musician’s Musician Album

Joe Satriani: Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock What was that I was saying about album titles? Oh yeah. Well aside from the fact that his greatest fame has probably come from the Coldplay lawsuit, I do think this is one of Satch’s best albums ever, which is to say that the soaring-melodies-and-shredding-guitar-to-cringe-inducing-cheez ratio is much higher than usual. And he doesn’t sing at all (well, not really). But his appeal is too narrow, his music more craft than art, for me to put him in a top 5 list.

Christmas is officially over, and this year my video game collection increased in size by one game: Prince of Persia (Limited Edition) for the XBOX 360. My initial assessment: great game, cool visual style, engaging gameplay, nice re-imagining of the series. I look forward to playing it more.

One thing I do not look forward to more of is touching the box. The Limited Edition version of the game comes packaged in a special outer box, which is designed to look like an antique leather-bound book. Artistically it is very well-done, but what is profoundly disturbing about it is the feel of it. There is some sort of coating on the cardboard that makes it feel eerily like real, well-worn leather. But not exactly. It mostly just feels like there’s some kind of weird fuzzy/sticky/highly unnatural (and probably toxic) film smeared all over the box. Yuck.

Luckily, inside the box is a regular plastic game case (featuring the standard cover art), which is what I’ll be keeping on the shelf. And I’ll store the cardboard box away in a secure location where it cannot contaminate my life further.

I am currently in the midst of developing a website for a client (great client, by the way), featuring a WYSIWYG text editor (TinyMCE) within its CMS. At some point along the way, I looked at the source code of some of the HTML that the client had inserted into the database via TinyMCE. With dismay, I noticed the likes of the following amongst the “actual” content:

<p><!–[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning /> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas /> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables /> <w:SnapToGridInCell /> <w:WrapTextWithPunct /> <w:UseAsianBreakRules /> <w:DontGrowAutofit /> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState=”false” LatentStyleCount=”156″> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]–> <!–[if gte mso 10]> <mce:style><! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} –> <!–[endif]–></p>

Ugh. For those keeping score at home, that would be more than a kilobyte of… well… absolutely nothing on a web page. Oh, except some browsers will turn it into a couple of extra, unwanted blank lines thanks to the paragraph tags wrapping it all.

The sad thing about all of this is that I am no longer even at a point where I look at that and say “What the hell is this?” I know exactly what the hell it is. It’s code generated by Microsoft Office for some inscrutable, presumably nefarious purpose. It seems to have no effect whatsoever on the presentation of the content on the page in any known browser or application that I’ve bothered to investigate. But whenever you copy-and-paste content out of a Microsoft Office application like Word and into a web-based text editor, or if you use Word’s “Save as Web Page” feature, the resulting HTML consists of significantly more of this bloat than of the content itself.

Aghast — or, at least, I would be aghast if I weren’t so numb to all of this now, after more than a decade of confronting it — I began crafting an email to the client, in my ongoing quest to reduce dependence upon Microsoft applications, one user at a time. But then I decided the client didn’t need my admonitions (although I don’t rule out the possibility that he’s reading this); the whole world does.

I was all set to copy and paste that draft email into this post. Unfortunately, although I had copied it to the clipboard, I didn’t paste it before going off and copy-pasting of the Microsoft garbage code above, and I also didn’t save it as a draft in Mail. Once again Microsoft seems to have the upper hand. Balllllmerrrrrrr!!!!!

The upshot of all of it, though, was simply that Microsoft Word generates copious quantities of garbage HTML and includes it in what gets put into the clipboard when you copy-paste content from a Word document into other applications (such as a WYSIWYG text editor box in a CMS). Most of the time there’s no visible effect from this garbage code (other than the fact that it increases page load times slightly by virtue of being more data to download), but there’s no way to know for sure that it’s not going to break a page in some browser, either now or at some point in the future when browsers adhere more strictly to XHTML DOCTYPE specifications. Plus, it’s just pointless garbage Microsoft is making me look at when I view source. I object to it on principle.

Then again, who am I to challenge the Goliath of software?

In that other universe, they never kicked David Palmer out of the band…

On a related note, three words: purple velvet pants.