Other than the occasional Nat Hentoff pro-life column, The Village Voice is pretty well worth ignoring except for two issues every year: The year-end film issue, which comes in December, and the year-end music issue, which comes in...February. Both contain the most exhaustive polls of (respectively) film writers and music writers anywhere, so it's always interesting to discover what the whole of American criticism things of my favorite films/albums.
You can, of course, look at the results yourself, but a few interesting bits:
16: Björk, Medulla (down from #3 in 2001 for Vespertine, which is her best ever in this poll [despite it being her weakest album])
50: Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans (up from #114 in 2003 for Greetings From Michigan...; #50 is his best)
58: Buddy Miller, Universal United House of Prayer (up from #214 in 2002 for Midnight and Lonesome; best is #49 in 1999 for Cruel Moon)
84: Sam Phillips, A Boot and a Shoe (rightfully down from #62 in 2001 for Fan Dance; best is #19 in 1994 for Martinis & Bikinis)
139: William Shatner, Has Been (um)
1519: Brother Danielson, Father: Son (down from #450 in 2001 for the Famile's Fetch the Compass, Kids; best is #273 in 1997 for the Family's Tell Another Joke at the Ol' Choppin' Block)
Singles is less interesting, but one cool thing:
299: Buddy Miller, "Worry Too Much" (i.e. a Mark Heard cover)
Also, from the comments section, obviously from an atheist or agnostic: "Sufjan Stevens has become my new favorite token Christian. He mildly terrifies me because he so confidently welcomes apocalypse, making him a little too much like those scary Americans for whom the horrors of war, genocide, and natural disaster could never detract one scintilla from the glorious possibility that all those corpses might hasten rapture in our lifetime. Yet his serenity gets me right in the place that still harbors some religious feeling -— the joyful kind that wants to erase all alienation between man and God, and between man and man in God -— and is my new favorite example of what Twain called 'the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.'"
i sincerely do not know what you are doing here. are you lost? were you
looking for your delicate calico cat, and did you follow her up two flights of stairs
to this room? she is not here. she was here, yes. we gave her a warm bowl of milk, we talked with her about campaign finance reform for a time, and then she bid us good day. i believe she was
going to the post office two blocks down, but i don't quite recall.
for surely you did
not find your way from prinsiana, the least traveled site on
the internet. if you did, though, perhaps you are looking for humor. perhaps you are looking for profundity. perhaps you are looking for answers.
i'm sorry, but you shall go naught-for-three.
