And the yards around your feet fall away while you're asleep

I love lists. Making lists, checking things off of lists, and, especially in this season, collecting and reading end-of-the-year “of 2007” lists. Here is a list[!] of some good ones I have seen:

Pitchfork’s Top 50 Music Videos of 2007
Not as good as their all time 100 Awesome Music Videos, and not as significant to pretentious music literati as their forthcoming top albums of the year list, but still nice because it's fun to watch clever videos and these are selections most people probably don’t see. The Arcade Fire “My Body is a Cage” fan video [edited montage from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West] is a favorite.

The Oxford University Press’ Word[s] of the Year: 2007
The word of the year is LOVACORE [someone who eats locally grown food], which is MUCH BETTER than Webster’s choice, which is very “hello, 2002!” OUP also considered word/phrases such as “colony collapse disorder” (a still-unexplained phenomenon resulting in the widespread disappearance of honeybees from beehives, first observed in late 2006), and “mumblecore,” which has very recently become one of my new favorite words.

Kurt Loder’s Best Movies of 2007
[this link shows up hella messy on my computer, so apologies if that is also the case for you.] Call me crazy, but there is still something I like about MTV – Kurt Loder’s film reviews. What I appreciate about this list is that it has nothing to do with MTV or anything MTV cares about these days, and it contains a solid collection of films that are relatively accessible to the common man [read: movies that may not be playing at the local cineplex but that do not require plane tickets to New York or Paris or Robert Redford.] All of Loder’s Bests are either some of my favorites [No Country, Zodiac, Gone Baby Gone] or films I know I will like when I see them [Sweeney Todd and Jesse James..]. P

Kurt Loder’s Worst Movies of 2007
I don’t necessarily agree with all of his selections [I really liked “Death Proof”], but the descriptions are fab. For Hannibal Rising: “Staunchly faithful to the book, which was also terrible.” And for The Hitcher, possibly the worst remake decision ever [because who can step to Rutger Hauer?]: “Yet another entry on God's long list of questions for producer Michael Bay.”

Aquarium Drunkard’s Year in Review – Top Six Albums of 2007 [plus 12 extra]
Music bloggers love lists almost as much as I do, and after careful and/or flippant consideration, this is my favorite of the lot. Sometimes I listen to channel 26 on Sirius, and sometimes the voice behind Aquarium Drunkard is the lunchtime guest DJ, and most of the time it’s a consistently rocking lunch. Not surprisingly then, out of the many prominent music bloggers revealing their carefully crafted best of lists, AD put together the list that most corresponds to my own amorphous and un-composed favorite albums selections. A primary factor is that he didn’t put Panda Bear at No.1, unlike most such lists. I like Panda Bear fine, but to be honest Person Pitch is just a little too distractingly discordant for me. Also, a good amount of my other total faves also made the top 18 [Besnard Lakes, Iron and Wine, Radiohead, the National, Andrew Bird, Band of Horses], AND we have the same favorite National album.

iTunes Most-Downloaded Songs and Albums of 2007
What the beans, America. Maroon 5… really? I can only hope that the artists with actual integrity are being adequately supported [illegally and non-monetarily] in other ways, or else the Planet is certainly in Peril.