The ten best albums of the last decade

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Yes, I know we haven’t really begun a new decade yet. And yes, I know we’re already a month into the “new” decade. But everybody else did it, so me too me too me too.

Here are, in my opinion, the best albums released between 2000 and 2009:

    1. The Arcade Fire . Funeral
    2. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead . Source Tags And Codes
    3. Radiohead . Kid A
    4. Sigur Ros . Agaetis Byrjun
    5. Spoon . Kill The Moonlight
    6. Sleater-Kinney . The Woods
    7. The New Pornographers . Mass Rmantic
    8. The Hidden Cameras . Mississauga Goddam
    9. Mates Of State . Bring It Back
    10. Regina Spektor . Begin To Hope

      The weird thing about this list is that there’s nothing later than 2006. In fact only two albums from 2009 made my initial cut-down list, and none from either 2007 or 2008. Were those three years devoid of great music? Or have my music consumption habits changed so much that I no longer absorb and appreciate great albums? Both possibilities worry me.

      Sorry, cats

      Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

      I know, I know, this blog is a ghost town lately. Too much time at work, both for me and my brain. Not a lot of other time or processing happening. In fact, today was the first chance I’ve had to just relax. We went to the market, picked up some wine and snacks and watched two movies: Adventureland (imdb | rotten tomatoes) and Trouble The Water (imdb | rotten tomatoes).

      We even sold our old futon, finally. We were glad to see it go to some kids who’ve just moved here. Hopefully it lasts as long for them as it did for us. That futon was pretty much the first piece of furniture we bought when we got our first place in Toronto, and it’s served us well over the years. Twelve years later and it’s still completely solid. We need the space and there’s just no earthly reason for us to still have a futon anymore, but we still felt a little sad to see it go.

      Now relaxo-day is coming to a close, and tomorrow it’s back to work. Anybody out there have a time-delaying machine? Anybody? Anybody?

      "All is lost, you can't go home"

      Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

      Two tragedies caught my attention last week. One was massive and horrible in scale, the other rather more private.

      I tend to associate songs with feelings or memories, often for no particular reason. This past week, while absorbing scenes of destruction in Haiti following the massive earthquake, a friend emailed me news of the passing of musician Jay Reatard. Of course the two events don’t compare in scale — Reatard (whose real name was Jimmie Lee Lindsey Jr.) was one man, a fairly obscure musician — but on reading the news of his death his songs swam into my head the same way those photos of Haitian ruins imprinted on my brain (especially this one) and Reatard’s “There Is No Sun” became, in my mind, the sad soundtrack of the Haitian disaster.

      That night, on my commute home, my mp3 player randomly started playing Reatard’s “It Ain’t Gonna Save Me” and it shook me a little. Eerie enough to hear Reatard singing “All is lost, there is no hope for me” over and over again on the day of his death, but positively chilling to think of all those for whom those lines were so true, lying trapped beneath rubble or searching for family amidst the ruins.

      There’s no logical tie between Jay Reatard and the disaster in Haiti, but they’re now inextricably linked in my mind. Reading the stories, watching the news, donating to the Red Cross, even hating Pat Robertson…for me, Watch Me Fall is now the score to it all.

      You take the red pils, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

      Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

      Back in August my favourite beer blog gave me some good news: a new brew pub would be opening at the end of my street. Not just any brew pub either: it would be run by Mike Duggan, who has quite a pedigree in Ontario craft brewing. Actually, the building itself (at the corner of Victoria and Lombard) had a pedigree too: it used to be home to Denison’s and Amsterdam.

      Four months later, Duggan’s Brewery finally opened. Last night Nellie and I got around to trying it, and we were both pretty happy. We sat in the bar section rather than the restaurant (as much by necessity as choice; even though they haven’t had the grand opening yet the place is packed most nights) and ordered some small portions. Well…we assumed it would be small. My corned beef sandwich, fries and cole slaw stuffed me, and Nellie’s chicken wings were huge. Both were very good, and there were at least half a dozen other things on the menu I want to try. There was one poor frantic soul waiting on all the tables, but he managed to keep our glasses full.

      Speaking of our glasses, we had three pints each: Nellie had the fest and the tripple (yes, that’s really how they spelled it), and I had the weiss and the Pils. We each had a pint of the #9 IPA, which we already knew and liked. That leaves three we haven’t tried: the stout, the Asian and the porter. Can’t wait to get back.

      As if it weren’t dangerous enough having C’est What and Beerbistro so close, now we have this too. Oh well, we shall have to tough it out. Le sigh.

      "That borscht haunted me for weeks"

      Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

      Yesterday I finished reading A Writer At War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 (amazon) by Vasily Grossman. A month ago I blogged about needing more information about the Russian front, and I count myself lucky to have found this book. Grossman was a writer first, journalist second, so he brings out the characters he encounters even more than the war itself. He was not a party stooge, and did not simply churn out Communist Party dogma. He did describe in a rather breathless manner the generals who pushed back against the initial Nazi invasion, and especially the men and women who held the line at Stalingrad, but he also spoke very frankly about the epidemic of rape as Russian soldiers advanced across Poland and Germany. This frankness would eventually land him in hot water, especially when he arrived at Treblinka. His article ‘The Hell Called Treblinka’, published in Znamya and reproduced in the book, was a sickening and somehow eloquent description of the horrors Grossman found there.

      “Stories of the living dead of Treblinka, who had until the last minute kept not just the image of humans but the human soul as well, shake one to the bottom of one’s heart and make it impossible to sleep. The stories of women trying to save their sons and committing magnificent doomed feats, of young mothers who hid their babies in heaps of blankets. I’ve heard the stories of ten-year-old girls, who comforted their sobbing parents with a heavenly wisdom, about a boy who shouted when entering the gas chamber: ‘Russia will take revenge! Mama, don’t cry!’

      …

      Inhabitants of the village of Wulka, the one closest to Treblinka, tell that sometimes the screams of women who were being killed were so terrible that the whole village would lose their heads and rush to the forest, in order to escape from these shrill screams that carried through tree trunks, the sky and the earth. Then, the screams would suddenly stop, and there was a silence before a new series of screams, as terrible as the ones before, shrill, boring through the bones, through the skulls and the souls of those who heard them. This happened three or four times every day.”

      As a Jew Grossman must have been overcome by emotion — indeed he suffered from nervous exhaustion on his return from Treblinka — but the article was written with very little of it, save what seems like amazement, or shock, at the scale and savagery of the thing. This frankness would land Grossman in hot water, eventually, as he underestimated the antisemitism of Stalinist Russia. While Grossman reported on the obvious targets of this slaughter, Russia would only allow descriptions of atrocities to specify Russian or Polish citizens, not Jews specifically, and Grossman’s insistence (along with other writers) on highlighting the atrocities against Jews would draw the ire of the Party. Grossman further angered officials by attributing the Stalingrad victory to the soldiers rather than to the Communist Party and to Stalin himself. In both cases Grossman was likely saved from the gulag, or possibly death, by the passing of Stalin in 1953.

      Grossman’s greatest work of fiction, based on what he saw in those four years, was Life and Fate (amazon), his 1961 book titled and written as an echo to his mentor Leo Tolstoy‘s most famous work. The KGB seized all copies before it could go to print, but Grossman had given a copy of the manuscript to a friend. It took twenty years for this manuscript to be copied to microfilm and smuggled to Switzerland, by which time Vasily Grossman was long dead. He died disillusioned by Stalinist Russia’s corruption and lies, but enamored to the end with the bravery and determination of the soldiers he fought beside for those four years.

      "We are not swans. We are sharks."

      Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

      I’m always conflicted about the Reuben sandwich. It always seems like a good idea, all the rye bread and corned beef and swiss cheese, and then all of a sudden…sauerkraut. Ugh…whose #@&% idea was that?!? It doesn’t ruin the whole experience. It just dampens the rest of the tasty flavours.

      The past few days have been like a Reuben. On Wednesday we saw Up In The Air (imdb | rotten tomatoes) which was excellent, and deserves all the hype. George Clooney, Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga (my girlfriend du jour) were all great in their roles. Highly recommended, if you haven’t seen it yet.

      On New Year’s Eve we returned to Nota Bene for dinner, as we were so impressed by our first visit (about a year ag0). Two things went wrong before we even got there: I finally succumbed to this cold I’ve been fighting off for weeks, and we had FAR too big a lunch at Terroni. Still, I was excited to go. Last time we both enjoyed all three of our courses and the service was outstanding. This time…well, I can’t be sure if things have gone downhill, or if it was just down to being New Year’s Eve. My lobster bisque was just okay and my main (pulled suckling pig) should have been better than it was, even after I realized I was eating blood sausage with it. Nellie’s starter was good (it was the same pasta she had last time) but her chicken was…well, a giant slab of chicken. The molten chocolate cake & Grand Marnier ice cream we had for dessert was solid, if unremarkable. Really, though, the thing that shocked me the most was the difference in service. From the start we felt we were being rushed…asked for our orders when we’d barely sat down, drinks showing up when the last ones were less than half drunk, and so on. We asked for a recommendation from the sommelier; whoever we got wasn’t the sommelier, but someone who seemed to know less about wine than we did. Merlot? Yeah, no, we don’t want merlot, thanks. What pissed us off the most was this: since we had a fair amount of wine to go with the chocolate dessert we ordered glasses of dessert wine for after that final course. Instead, they bought the dessert wine while we still had half our dessert and nearly a full glass of pinot each. I get it, it was New Year’s Eve and they were trying to turn over the table, but it’s not the kind of treatment I’d expect from Nota Bene.

      On New Year’s Day (happy 2010, by the way!) I dragged my sick ass out of the condo because there was no way I’d miss the chance to see Avatar (imdb | rotten tomatoes) in IMAX/3D.  Wow…it was worth the hour standing in line. It took me a while to adjust to the 3D glasses, but my god. Just incredible. Seeing little plants floating in front of me, feeling vertigo as the camera looked down off a cliff, getting nearly airsick as we flew through a canyon. The movie itself wasn’t anything special or new, but if that movie doesn’t win every single visual effect Oscar, then something is drastically wrong.

      We spent the rest of yesterday (and today, so far) sitting on the couch and watching movies (Lions For Lambs and The Watchmen) and playing Mario Kart Wii.

      Pretty good couple of days. Too bad about the stupid sauerkraut.

      2009 annual report: steady

      Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

      Let’s see, what happened in 2009?

      Well, we took a big trip to France, a relaxing trip to Nova Scotia and a weekend trip to Ottawa for my brother’s birthday. Closer to home we enjoyed Toronto things like Hot Docs, TIFF and a Leafs/Canadiens game, as well as concerts by Mogwai, Frightened Rabbit and The Rural Alberta Advantage. We also made it through some rather dodgy Toronto moments like being stuck in a high-rise elevator and a tornado-spawning storm.

      We celebrated friends’ events like the weddings of our friends Jenn & Trent and Tatiana & Sean, and for my friend Adam the signing of a record deal with a major label. We also said goodbye to some friends, like Nick and Stryder.

      We tried, for the first time, fantastic restaurants like Amaya Bread Bar, Jacobs & Co, C5, North 44, Fid, The Wellington Gastropub, Scaramouche, and book-ended the year at Nota Bene in January and December. We also returned to old favourite Canoe, and I got to try Splendido one last time before it changed ownership.

      I watched 80 movies (for the first time, that is; I re-watch movies all the time), bought 30 albums and got 15 DVDs. I also read 14 books (quite a change from previous years when the MBA all but killed my pleasure-reading): The Coming Of The Third Reich by Richard Evans, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad by Dan Kennedy, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Almost Home by Damien Echols, Columbine by Dave Cullen, The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, The Long Walk To Freedom by Nelson Mandela, Deliver Me From Nowhere by Tennessee Jones, Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk, The Dark Valley: A Panorama Of The 1930s by Piers Brendon, A Short History Of WWII by James Stokesbury and A Writer At War by Vasily Grossman.

      So while last December I felt pretty blah about the year gone by, I was happy with this year. Most of the significant change came at work, which I don’t talk about here, but trust me when I say it got a lot more interesting and significantly busier for both of us. Outside of that, though, there was a lot of good, very little bad and a whole lot of steady. Given that 2009 was anything but for a lot of people, I’ll take it.

      On the first four days of Christmas…

      Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

      Here’s what we’ve been up to in the four days since we left you:

      On boxing day we enjoyed the main part of Nellie’s gift to me: gold seats at the Air Canada Centre for the Montreal Canadiens / Toronto Maple Leafs game. We were eleven rows from the ice, right at one of the blue lines, and had a great view of the ice. I was actually surprised by the number of Montreal fans in attendance…I’d say maybe 20% of the fans were cheering for the Habs. It was amazing for me to be that close to the ice — in my previous visits to Canadiens games (both in Montreal) I’d been in the nosebleeds — and to see and hear everything. It was also nice to see my team win for a change (the Habs won 3-2 in overtime) as the first two games I saw were losses. Nellie had fun too, eating a hot dog and drinking beer and making eyes at Carey Price. It was a blast, and an experience I was worried I’d never get to have in Toronto. Top-notch Christmas gift, baby!

      .:.

      December 27th was actually our anniversary. Typically we’d go out to dinner to celebrate, but it being Sunday everything was closed. We hung out with CBGB for a little bit and generally just took it easy.

      .:.

      Yesterday we thought we’d get out of the house and see what all this Avatar fuss is about, so we walked in the freezing-ass cold to the Scotiabank to buy tickets. Little did we know that tickets to the IMAX screenings had been sold out for days. Bah, forget it. We cut back across King Street and decided to stop in at the beerbistro so that the afternoon wasn’t a complete loss. I had a Tilburg’s Dutch Brown Ale and a Maudite, while Nellie had a Durham Hop Addict and an Urthel Hop-It, which I think is her new best friend. We went to movie plan B at home, watching Defiance (imdb | rotten tomatoes) on the PVR (it was okay…given the subject matter it probably should have been a little more engaging than it was). Then we got ready for dinner.

      Much like North 44, Scaramouche is such a quintessentially Toronto restaurant we couldn’t hardly believe we hadn’t yet tried it. An anniversary seemed like an ideal time for such an adventure, and it was settled. First, the room: pleasant, if a little dull & dated, and while we were seated at the window to appreciate the famous view, the evening’s snow squalls made it difficult to see much. Second, the service: a little off, to be honest. Our server was efficient enough but not exactly friendly, and somewhere between dessert and the bill he just disappeared. We never saw him again, and after several minutes of waiting we finally got someone else’s attention and they tag-teamed our bill, etc. So that was weird. Third: the food, and this — most importantly — was the best part. I had warm duck salad, venison wrapped & roasted in smoked bacon and coconut cream pie for dessert. Nellie had butter poached lobster, a grilled kerr farms filet mignon and her dessert was three kinds of cheese. We had various glasses of wine before dinner and with our apps, but the real star of the evening was the 2006 Petite Sirah/Zinfandel/Mourvèdre ‘Phantom’ Bogle. Excellent without the food and downright superb with it, neither of us wanted to finish the bottle, but we couldn’t help ourselves. Nellie’s port and my Calvados with dessert were good, but I know we were both thinking about that wine. Oh, and the restaurant did make a nice final flourish with our dessert plates:

      scaramouche dessert

      .:.

      Today was a bit more pedestrian: grand plans of shopping withered on the vine when we realized it was -20 with the wind chill, so we opted instead for leftovers, chocolate, napping and more movie-watching. Today the PVR served up the Warner Herzog documentary Encounters At The End Of The World (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Really, I could watch anything by that man and be happy, but from a strictly mechanical sense it did precisely what documentaries are supposed to do: answer some questions and raise still others.

      Tonight the plan (well…my plan) is to watch Canada’s junior team play the Slovaks, and then tomorrow it’s back to work for a bit. In other words: wow, it’s been a relaxing vacation.

      Hopefully it will be less successful than Operation Eat Chocolate Until Even My Puke Smells Sweet

      Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

      My my, what a Christmas morning. The crazy wind outside woke us up at 4AM, and we never really got back to sleep. We chatted with my brother and his missus on Skype for a bit at the end of their Christmas day (they’re in Brisbane), then extracted the goodies from our stockings, then had a breakfast of delicious Cumbrae’s bacon, biscuits straight from the oven and prosecco mimosas. Then, to the business at hand — the unwrapping of gifts. Here’s my haul:

      • Five books: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind, The Disappeared by Kim Echlin, Empire Of Illusion by Chris Hedges, The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels, and a book about Cumberland County, NS (where I grew up)
      • Three Blu-ray discs: Die Hard (which we watched last night, actually), Inglourious Basterds and Children Of Men
      • This t-shirt
      • Chocolate. Oh, sweet merciful frangipane, the chocolate.
      • A jar of beets. Which, on any day other than Christmas — when I actually really want beets — would be a weird gift.
      • A proper, game-style Montreal Canadiens jersey, which I shall wear tomorrow night at…
      • The Montreal/Toronto game at the Air Canada Centre! Nellie somehow got us gold seats. I don’t know whose soul she had to sell to do it. I don’t even care. If y’all tune in to CBC Saturday night, I’ll be the guy getting his ass kicked by angry Leafs fans.
      • There was also an Amazon.ca coupon which I promptly used against a massive order to clear off my wishlist: Star Trek, Heat, Fight Club, Band of Brothers, Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee and The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton.
      • Of course we got lots of little things in our stockings, my favourite being the latest issue of GQ (which Nellie got for me after reading this tweet, because she is simply awesome)
      • We got some shared gifts like some cool art from my brother and his wife, some blown glass coasters (with a backstory) from my mom & dad, and four bottles of delicious Alchemy from Nellie’s mom
      • Best of all, though, were the donations my family made in lieu of gifts, which through some good timing, generosity and a little voodoo were matched 300% and given to the United Way of Greater Toronto.

      Right now the turkey’s in the oven, the mess has been carted away, Nellie’s watching the Blu-ray copy of Serenity I gave her, the cats are coming down from their catnip high and we’re sliding into sweet relaxation mode. Tonight there’ll be revelry with friends. Tomorrow we’ll do battle with the deluded sports fans of Toronto. Following that I plan on launching Operation Watch Movies Until Mine Eyes Do Bleed.

      Merry Christmas, kids!

      "Jesus Christ, Powell, he could be a f*cking bartender for all we know!"

      Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

      Chrtistmas feels different this year. Maybe it’s because there’s not been any snow in Toronto (until today, but apparently it’ll be gone by tomorrow afternoon), or maybe it’s because all I’ve been able to think about lately is work, or maybe it’s because I’ve not been on a flight to NS and then relaxing on the family farm.

      But today after I got home from work, it started to feel a little more like Christmas. Different Christmas. We have our own little traditions, like watching Die Hard (for me) and Love Actually (for her), eating loads of delicious food from Cumbrae’s and About Cheese and Moroco and drinking the bottle of wine I got Nellie last year. It doesn’t replace all the other things that feel like Christmas…it just adds to them.

      In that, I suppose I’m lucky. There are a lot of people who have bad memories of Christmas, or no memories of it at all. That surplus of good fortune, not to mention the fact that we’re both happy, healthy and gainfully employed, prompted and allowed me to try to do a little bit to help some of the people who aren’t so lucky. And I figure that should be a Christmas tradition too.

      Whatever you might be celebrating, wherever you’re celebrating it, I hope it’s a happy one. And I hope the peanut butter balls there are as good as the one I’m eating right now. Cheers, everybody.