BBC America will be running all six episodes of the excellent mini-series State of Play back to back starting Sunday morning at 10:00 EST.  These episodes are otherwise unavailable in the U.S.  If you haven’t seen it, but enjoy suspenseful political thrillers and top-notch acting talent (Bill Nighy and James McAvoy have to be the best-played father/son duo I’ve watched in recent years), it’s guaranteed to please.  Plus, they’ve all got great accents!

Mark Kozelek has to be the most brutally honest, intensely personal singer/songwriter I’ve ever heard.

He’s probably most widely known for being the singer for the Red House Painters, a band allmusic.com lists under both the genre of sadcore and dream pop. He’s also done a side project called Sun Kil Moon and a couple solo albums. One of his solo albums is a collection of AC/DC covers. His next album, Tiny Cities, due out next week, is a collection of Modest Mouse covers.

But it’s his sad and brutally candid songs that I love the most.

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As many of you probably know by now, I’m rarely more than a good nudge away from talking way more about music than anyone probably wants to hear. Dallin’s last post being that nudge, here we go. "Best Of" lists are like crack for me — a good, cheap, wildly addictive fix.

In that light, I thought it would be a good time to discuss what we’ve been listening to this year. I’ve gotten a ton, but I’m dying to hear what everyone else likes so I can get it while there’s still time to include it in my 2005 listening. There will be a good bit of overlap with Dallin’s similar post from July, but I didn’t get a chance to comment there, so this will serve that purpose too. Here’s what I’ve liked, with a quick and dirty temporary ranking (other than the broad categories, I haven’t ranked any albums specifically) with a sentence or two description:

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We are getting closer to the end of the year and, no doubt, debate over the best music release this year will soon be upon us.  I will happily join in that debate, but will state my unequivocal opinion that this year’s best and most important music release is the recently discovered live performance of the Thelonious Monk Quartet and John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall.

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Neil Young’s "Cinnamon Girl" destroyed John Lennon and Paul Simon, garnering 19 of 30 votes.  wow.  Thanks to all who voted! 

Let’s bring things into more recent decades, shall we?

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Look, NBC, I know you’re sore about the destruction of Must See TV.  And I can only imagine the pain you feel at having lost Thursday nights.  E.R., your erstwhile drama flagship, is on its last legs.  Will & Grace is past its prime.

But please don’t sacrifice My Name Is Earl in order to try and reclaim lands you’ve lost.  Those days are over.  Don’t kill a good show in a futile attempt to regain past glory.

Your pal,

Steve

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money, who got it from Shakespeare’s Sister:

"What movie scenes always make you cry?"

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This week has been a long one for me. I’m gonna celebrate Friday with some music.

If there’s one thing Thunderdome has taught us, it’s that the KB’ers all have different taste in music. So I’m going with a hodge podge of songs from genre we don’t hear much from around here…So step out of your musical comfort zone for a bit and check them out.

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Prince’s "When Doves Cry" crushed the competition of Morrissey and Bjork, despite Bjork’s song being the best of them.  Ah, well, such is Thunderdome.

This week features the biggest hitters yet!

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I freely admit that I have never read or seen any of Harold Pinter’s works. But still. Are the members of the Swedish Academy really sure that they picked him for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature? Didn’t they really mean, I don’t know, say, Phillip Roth or Orhan Pamuk?

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I’d rather have to weed out our comments than not to have any comments to begin with.  Bear with us, folks, as we continue to wage war on spam.  Eventually we may have to move away from Typepad.

We’ve been getting a lot of comment spam — usually a half dozen spam comments a day, but last night we got several dozen.  As a way of getting rid of it, we’ve turned on mandatory registration through Typekey for comments.  It’s a slight burden, but hopefully nothing too onerous.  Sorry.

There have been lots of police dramas in the history of television — some of the first scripted TV shows were crime-related. Recent decades have shown some of the best. So, let’s decide which are the best of the best.
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With the introduction this week of Alfred Hitchcock, The Masterpiece Collection (A 15-DVD set from Universal), I thought I’d introduce my boy picture/girl picture theory of Hitchcock, as he alternated his subject matter for movies. He did this in his British period, too, but I’m focusing mostly on the American features he made, following his first one done in Hollywood, Rebecca, which he made for David O. Selznick.

(Note: there are SPOILERS about the movies in the following list)
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wow - 20 weeks already??  Last week, Boston’s "More Than a Feeling" beat out Kansas’ "Carry On, My Wayward Son," 13 votes to 9.

Back to more recent times!

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…in my house, anyway. Break out the Wensleydale and the Heath Robinson (or Rube Goldberg, for us Yanks) contraptions, because Wallace and Gromit’s first full-length feature opens this weekend. It’s guaranteed to be crackin’. After countless viewings of Nick Park’s three W&G short form masterpieces — A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out, and (my personal favorite) The Wrong Trousers — our family is giddy in anticipation of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It’s time to put down the Cheese Holiday magazine and support quality filmmaking from across the pond.

I turned the television on last night so I could watch the season finale of the first season of The X-Files, and caught the top of the second inning of the Yankees-Angels game. Playoff baseball is here again. I don’t have cable, so I can’t watch all of the games, but I can pick up WCBS from New York at night here in North Carolina, so I imagine I’ll be listening to John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman the next few weeks (hopefully).
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I know we’re late (again), but I think we’ll get a full week’s worth of tunes in.

Has anyone else noticed that accordions seem to be everywhere in music these days? After realizing accordions were in a couple songs I really like, I thought about it for a while and easily came up with five good songs from the last few years that feature them prominently.

Accordions: the new black?

Songs With Accordions

• Calexico, "Sunken Waltz"
• Ry Cooder, "Corrido De Boxeo"
• The Arcade Fire, "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)"
• Great Lakes Myth Society, "Big Jim Hawkins"
• Gogol Bordello, "Mishto!"
• Bonus: The Decemberists, "A Cautionary Song"

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Friday night I went to see one of my favorite live bands, the Frames. They’re from Ireland and they’ve been around forever, but they’re only now starting to get any kind of attention here in the States.  That attention consists of college radio playing a song or two from their latest album.

Still, it was enough for them to play a slightly bigger venue in LA than they did last time. And the crowd *loved* them, but you sort of have to. They’re just so good live.

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