I like reading other peoples' blogs, especially when they note or try to kind of spread the word about music or movies or books or whatever that they like.  so in that spirit here is a list of a few things that I either discovered or re-aquainted myself with over the last year that made me want to run and jump.

Agitpop  Back at the Plain of Jars and Stick It!      This was an unsung but brilliant early 80s band from NY who I heard have recently reformed.  They combined a sort of tough jangle with an arty, angular sensibility and were great.  I was aware of them peripherally in the 80s but have only recently spent time with their records.  Of course there were so many underground bands active in this time period whose work has only grown in everyones' estimation since then.  For me '07 was a year of discovery or re-discovery of much of this kind of thing.  From the more famous bands like Wire, The Only Ones and Pere Ubu to the more obscure ones, like these guys. 

Anton Chekhov The Seagull       For some reason, last year I got super into plays, which I think had something to do with a feeling that live music has seemed to become a distressingly codified expression and experience for me in recent years - almost as if the dividing wall between performer and audience that was supposedly shattered by punk-rock and later stomped upon further by the internet has been slowly rebuilt and fortified, and the whole experience re-defined in a way that has less to do with the commited pursuit of adventure and enlightenment through art and more to do with premature marketing strategies and an ambivalent adherence to a set of redundant, bullshit cultural and musical archetypes.  Which isn't as fun.   But I digress, and anyway there's always gonna be somebody brewing up something great and real in some practice space somewhere.  Anyhow, a few months ago I  went to see the Breakin' String Theatre's production of The Seagull  in the Off Center space on the east side and there it was, in its uncomfortable and inspiring glory, this thing I had been sort of missing.  Written a long time ago, far away from here, and seemed totally current and raw, emotionally devastating and tough as shit.  Confused people in a house.  Real flesh and voices in front of me, putting away the bullshit and going for the heart and the throat, with good, solid writing behind it.  The people who put on that play were great.  Just like the best live music I've seen.  So then I re-watched Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd St., the filmed version of the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya with Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, and was similarly blown away by the freshness and intensity of this stuff.  Which brings me to... 

My Dinner With Andre  I've seen this movie a whole bunch of times and I watched it again I think twice last year.  Two guys performing a script based on their past conversations  Just talking for two hours in a fancy-pants restaurant in the early 80s.  I think it's amazing and unlike any other movie I've seen before or since.  It has been ridiculed as pretentious arty-fartiness, and I know there are people who find it so boring that they cannot stay awake through it, so it's maybe not for everyone.  But I love it, and it makes me feel alive in the same way that my favorite records do.

Daniel Clowes Ice Haven     I always forget about graphic novels and then I see one in the library like this one and borrow it and it blows my mind.  It deals with a few sets of characters, from little kids to elderly people, who kind of weave in and out of each other's lives in this disturbing small town, and the story runs parallel to the Leopold and Loeb murder case.  So it's kind of a combination of true-crime and surrealist childhood psycho-drama that is colorful and full of dark humor, and I thought it was really cool.