doug nelson: DISENGAGE!

25 SONGS OF THE YEAR
You don’t read this blog/have me as a friend in order to a get a list of songs you already knew were great. As such, don’t expect Hate It Or Love It, Boyfriend, 1 Thing, or any of the other fantastic tracks you already should’ve heard to be on my list. Hell, you’re not even going to see The Fallen, Casimir Pulaski Day, Hope There’s Someone, or Luno on here. Revel in my snobbery!
Mystery Jets: Alas Agnes
Clor: Outlines
Gnarls Barkley: Crazy
Franz Ferdinand: The Fallen (Justice Edit)
Herman Dune: Not on Top
Faux Pas: Cup of Wonder
Spinto Band: Oh Mandy
White Rose Movement: Love Is A Number
The Darkness: One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back
The Editors: Munich
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth
Metronomy: Trick Or Treatz
Sambassadeur: Between The Lines
Cloudroom: Hey Now Now
Neon Blonde: Headlines
Bunky: Yes/No
Edan: Promised Land
Diane Cluck: All I Bring You Is Love
Of Montreal: The Party’s Crashing Us
Wolf Parade: Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts
Metric: Glass Ceiling
Girls Aloud: The Show
Röyksopp: Only This Moment
The Very Hush Hush: Every Little
The Juan Maclean: Give Me Every Little Thing

BANDS OF THE YEAR
Metric: Metric pretty much ran my playlist late this year, and I already need more. Make more, MAKE MORE!
Rhapsody: It was a rough year for mixdisc recipients: Many of you had to put up with Unholy Warcry, Rhapsody’s most intolerable/awesome song. But you may not know that there is much, much more: Most of the summer featured five or so tracks in the main mix, blaring from the iPod several times a day.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: I still feel surprised over CYHSY’s inability to crack high numbers on year-end charts. Forget critics, I thought this stuff was fantastic, and I listened and relistened to every song dozens and dozens of times.
Bloc Party: It took me a while to warm up to Bloc Party, but once I got it, I was rocking Luno and Like Eating Glass like nobody’s business.

GAMES OF THE YEAR
AV Club has begun reviewing games, and I see it as a sign: Video games are part of our modern experience, and as the PS2 and Xbox die, games have entered a new era of accessibility and art direction that appeals to nongamers as well as the diehard. As technologies and theories improve, we’ll see more and more video games on the front pages, in our homes, and as cultural cornerstones every bit as important as movies or books.
Shadow Of The Colossus. From its first rumors, SOTC seemed severely different: A game with 16 bosses and almost nothing else, Colossus invested an awful lot of money and time into what most games give maybe 10% of their gameplay. This focus resulted in the most stunning, memorable experience I’ve had with a game, surpassing Prince Of Persia and even Final Fantasy 7 at times, which is impressive given SOTC’s razor-thin plot and bare minimum of dialogue. The concept is simple: Here’s a giant, giant, giant monster intent on stepping on/drowning/frying you. Climb on top, and stick this sword in his head. Easier said than done: Each colossus is a puzzle, one that requires planning and testing and strategizing as you dodge footfalls the size of city buses. The art direction and motion are the best seen on the PS2, pushing polygons to the edge of believability and covering up the rest with gorgeous post-processing light effects, motion-blurs, and voluminous dustclouds. Even great games that rely on similar tricks (Vice City, Viewtiful Joe) haven’t been able to match the breathtaking visual thrill of watching the entire world swing below you, hundreds of feet down, as you dangle helplessly in front of one giant yellow eye.
Burnout: Revenge. The fourth Burnout adds so much to single-player play, and only takes slightly from the multiplayer aspect; making it the best in the whole damn series for lonelies like me. In case you haven’t played, here’s the idea: You’re racing a number of courses on city streets and highways, against other cars. You get ‘boost,’ or turbo, for crashing them into beams, throwing them off bridges, and mashing them into oncoming traffic paste, as well as for performing dangerous tricks like driving in the wrong lane and narrowly missing buses. Revenge adds a new twist: You can now volley traffic going your way into other cars. While this isn’t a major aspect, Revenge signifies the apex of craft for this series: Tracks (especially Rome) are breathtaking, crashes are thunderous and draw cries of “YES” and “OH YEAH” from drivers, and the cinematic slow-motion camera movements are perfectly realized. The only disappointment is the Crashbreaker, a Burnout classic mode where you throw your car, bowling-style, into a busy intersection to watch the dollar signs of damage pile up. The new breakers are much trickier and smarter than the old ones, but they don’t lend themselves to the fantastic partystyle play that Takedown offered, where up to eight players passed around a controller and smashed semi trucks into the LA freeway (because, in Revenge, four of those players wouldn’t even make it to the intersection, having difficult obstacles to overcome first).

BOOKS OF THE YEAR
I don’t read enough. I read QUICKLY, tearing through Cormier’s Fade and Salinger’s Catcher in single afternoons, but I still don’t collect nearly enough books for how interested in literature I am. I partially blame you: PLEASE, please, recommend me your favorite books.
The Catcher In The Rye, by J. D. Salinger. Has anyone else read this? It’s about this kid, like, that has all these problems and stuff, and right before Christmas! Yeah. Um, I guess I’m saying I finally read this, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Cursed homeschooling: Depriving me of all literature but the novelization of Star Trek episodes!
McSweeney’s 13 (the comics issue). McSweeney’s tackles comics with the expected reverence, and the results are dazzling. The combination of comics and thoroughness seemed to beg for the hand of Jimmy Corrigan author Chris Ware, and as guest editor, he creates a book that’s a joy to hold and behold, gorgeously printing modern comic masterpieces and their rarely-seen ancestors along with fantastic essays (and wrapping it in what may be the best book cover of all time).

MOVIES OF THE YEAR
I thought it was a bad year for movies. Or, I didn’t see enough good ones…whatever. The year after Eternal Sunshine was bound to feel disappointing, right?
The Devil’s Rejects. The sequel to the nearly-intolerable House Of 1000 Corpses, Devil’s Rejects seems to be everything we were promised of Corpses: Retro-drenched scares, with homages and complexities at Tarantino’s level. While Rejects certainly appears less sassy than Kill Bill, it’s SUPPOSED to: Make no mistake, it’s a very scary movie, and the stylistic touches work hard to pull the carpet out from under you, not give you more room to dance. I won’t flat-out recommend you see Devil’s Rejects, as it’s very difficult to sit through (the middle third is especially raw), but I’m just calling it my favorite movie of 2005.
Miranda July’s tidy little masterpiece, Me And You And Everyone We Know, is an absolute must-see. I’m not sure if I learned anything from it, but I loved it.
Wallace And Gromit: Curse Of The Were-Rabbit was ridiculously funny. I still don’t understand why people thought otherwise. The mere fact that a dog locking a car door could elicit as many laughs as it did is testament to the geniuses of timing behind Aardman.
Shopgirl was beautiful and engrossing, but, I felt, poorly-scored. Disagree with me! I dare you!

RENTALS OF THE YEAR
This year was the year of Netflixing everything I ever wanted to see, and it was BLISS! Not on this list: The Battle Of Algiers. It was awesome. See it.
Akira. The most elaborately-animated film ever made, Akira is worth seeing just for the crazy spectacle of it all: Stunning visuals, horrific violence, alien score. While the plot feels extremely condensed, the film itself is a wonder to behold, and no anime since has surpassed it visually.
Goodfellas was a great movie, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you should: It’s much better than The Godfather.
Neon Genesis Evangelion. The anime classic about teenagers piloting giant robots is a hidden gem for non-anime-fanatics: In the final chapter, NGE goes absolutely batshit, throwing violent, sexual, and religious references left and right in one of the darkest and most enigmatic television finales of all time. It’s all fun and fights until one episode opens with a young Shinji masturbating over a coma patient’s body.
Three Kings. Stylistically and emotionally one of the best movies I saw this year, Three Kings just makes me wonder why I wasn’t exposed to this film earlier.
Waking Life stunned me, not just with its experimental visuals, but with its dense philisophical dialogue and pacing. Utterly engrossing, it makes you lose sense of time as you sink further and further in. A must for aspiring philosphers and film fanatics.
Microcosmos. None of the descriptions prepared me for exactly how intimate and gorgeous Microcosmos is. Rent it rent it rent it.
Buffalo ‘66. A friend text-messaged me, this spring, asking who directed Buffalo ‘66. I looked it up, read a little, and added it to Netflix, finally watching the film 6 months later in my entirely-empty new apartment. If you haven’t seen Vincent Gallo’s wonderful performance: Do. Really.
The Apartment. Jenn ordered me to watch, and I did: Now, I order you to do the same. The Apartment offers a compelling plot that seems far above its contemporaries, as well as a fascinating window into a bygone culture. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine took home an armful of rightly-deserved awards for this one.

TELEVISION OF THE YEAR
SJ bought me a flat-panel TV in the spring, and when I moved to the new apartment, I got a nice new flatscreen monstrosity. This+Netflix means an increased awareness of TV culture, and while this may sound like a BAD thing, it’s actually led to a few fantastic discoveries.
Arrested Development. At this point, hands-down my favorite television show of all time, AD chugs into a third season with a relentless pace of sight gags, running jokes (often culled from simple repeated phrases), and remarkably quick pop-culture humor (the first season speared Segways, and the second covered both The Lynndie and Star Wars Kid). Despite near-sure cancellation, Arrested Development remains as funny as always, with the closing seconds of Episode 306 easily among the series’ best moments. Honestly: I can’t express, in words, how fantastic this show is. Rent it, watch it closely, enjoy it enormously. Props to Leina’ala, without whom I would never have given this show a second look. Leina’ala, Goddess Of Funny, We Praise Thee.
Adult Swim’s least-heralded gem, The Venture Brothers, will return shortly (HUZZAH!) with all-new episodes. A study in post-greatness, VB focuses on Dr. Venture, the obvious adult version of boy-prodigy Jonny Quest. The satire never stoops to mere copycattery, though: Dr. Venture lives in a world where his genius has only led him to community college teaching jobs, and his idiot sons provide him with nearly no chance of continuing the historical significance of the Venture name. His old peers (including versions of the Fantastic Four and 6 Million Dollar Man) are faced with irrelevance and debt, and his new ally (The fantastic, mysterious Dr. Orpheus) lives life foremost as the father of a surly goth teenager (”Pumpkin, you’re up early, and you’ve changed out of your jam-jams into… the clothes… you wore last night. How frugal of you.”). Among the classic Hanna-Barbera troubles of ghost pirates and old nemeses, the Venture family has to deal with garage sales, home security issues, and the attention-hungry attacks of self-appointed arch-villian The Monarch. Dr. Venture weathers it all with a pained expression, and his brilliantly-realized bodyguard (Patrick Warburton) can only upstage Race Bannon with a near-psychopathic lust for violence. The jokes are quick and entirely unique, ranging from subtle classic film references to two henchman arguing over who would win in a “crazy fantasy fist-fight between Anne Frank and Lizzie Borden,” and the animation is far and above even Adult Swim’s new crown jewel The Boondocks; richly-colored, expressive, and a flawless reference to the shows it lovingly takes from. VB is Adult Swim’s full circle: After years of hit-and-miss cannibalism of the Hanna-Barbera canon, they give us our childhood aged and ironed, treated with the sort of irreverence that only comes from love.
Lost’s second season has been faster and meaner than the first, providing pages of theory-fodder for us curious viewers. While still dragging through some slower moments, the producers seem to have more sharply tied the survivors’ pasts into the insanity now unleashed, and the result is a much tighter, more entertaining show.
The climax of Naruto’s first 120 episodes is worth waiting 119 episodes for. While the show needs some serious fast-forwarding (I once mistook an entire episode I’d seen before for a flashback), the fights are clever and fun, and the major plot points are often horrifically mature and complex. Naruto simply embodies the best in modern Japanese television: Running subplots, difficult relationships, and increasingly bombastic payoffs.

BUYS OF THE YEAR
Washington DC’s Rebound Designs make purses out of books. That is all.
Lordy, do I want Yummy belts.
Freitag’s bags are crazy expensive, but +++awesome.
You can’t buy the Blowfly yet, but, SOON, brothers and sisters.

WEBSITES OF THE YEAR
Media Matters has become a daily visit for me: Their combination of heavy fact-checking and active retraction-demanding is both informing and fun-to-watch. News organizations should be judged on the factual aspects of their reporting as well as their response to outside correction, and Media Matters has done a fantastic job of arming its readers with the information necessary to vote with our browsers/wallets on the media empires of our choice.
With the motto of “geek to live,” Lifehacker has been the one-stop shop for all things DIY and organizational for months now. After a weak start, LH picked up a huge readerbase willing to contribute and augment entries to near-perfection. Now, Lifehacker is a site with real solutions, real ideas, and the potential to make a real difference in your day-to-day routine.
Perry Bible Fellowship has been linked to umpteen billion times this year, but if you missed it, go have a look.
The Lonely Island, now boosted to (even more) fame after their involvement with the funniest SNL bit in years, has a (probably never-to-be-updated-again) website that’s worth a half-hour of browsing. I especially recommend ‘The Heist.’
And, of course, if you don’t have Firefox by the beginning of 2006, shame on you. So rarely does a program emerge that both simplifies and improves an experience; but Firefox’s built-in genius and extensible goodness achieve the ideal: A web browser we love to use, and love to call our own.

POLITICAL QUOTES OF THE YEAR
In 2005, conservatives did a much better job representing/slamming their platform than progressives could’ve hoped to. Enjoy.
Former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett: “[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”
Pat Robertson: “If [Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez] thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.”
Bill O’Reilly to San Francisco: “[I]f Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. … You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”
Rush Limbaugh: “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.”
Ann Coulter: “I’m getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties.”
American Family Association president Tim Wildmon: Liberals “don’t have the kind of family responsibilities most people have.”

BEVERAGES OF THE YEAR
Genmaicha, a green tea that goes spectacularly well with sushi (and still quite well with everything thing else). I only recently discovered this, and it has taken my top spot for teas.
Guinness. Don’t know why, but I suddenly began liking it this past spring.

GUILTY PLEASURES OF THE YEAR
I can’t stop listen to the original Broadway cast’s recording of Popular, from Wicked. I am ashamed of myself.
Also, I can’t stop watching Foster’s Home For Imaginary friends, or, well, thinking about it. Or blasting the theme on my way to work. It’s just that good. But really, it’s for kids, people.