Easy Come Easy Gaughin

Helen Hunt

She’s been in the public consciousness since she was a child star in the mid 70’s. She bounced back and forth between TV and film, and although she has a number of very strong film roles, she is still tagged as a TV person because of her success there, particularly in Mad About You, for which she earned 4 Best Comedy Actress Emmys.

At the height of her film career, following high profile roles in What Women Want and As Good As It Gets (for which she won an Oscar for best actress), she bowed out for an extended period to raise a family. Perhaps I should consider awarding bonus points for the maternal instinct in the next reformulation of the magic formula.

I won’t do that, actually, but it is a strong argument for listing actors and actresses in separate lists. We shall see.

Ten best roles

10) What Women Want 9) The Frog Prince 8) Pay It Forward 7) Dr T and the Women 6) Twister 5) A Good Woman 4) Project X 3) The Waterdance 2) Cast Away 1) As Good As It Gets

Percentile rating

84.15

Hey, I read a book!

Actually, I tend to read about a book a week, and don’t know why it never occurred to me to keep track with them here.

Mr Rodman’s a TV writer, with histories at both Letterman and The Daily Show. At age 28 (he’s now 32, I think), he took some time between writing gigs, and moved into a retirement community in Florida, where he was younger than the average resident by about 45 years. He stayed there 6 months. This book records the lessons and events of that half-year. It’s really a very funny book, and I recommend it to any adult.

It’s probably worth noting that this book came at the recommendation of a really solid radio interviewer named Jesse Thorn, who manages a podcast empire, with The Sound of Young America being the most prominent of the bunch. He’s a very funny interviewer, gets great guests (most frequently fringe comics.) He’s responsible for turning me onto to works of George Saunders, and if for nothing else in this lifetime, I owe him big for that.

Bonnie Hunt

Her vast talent outstrips the roles she’s been awarded, but since she’s the sexiest middle-aged woman in the history of film (with Mary Steenburgen a very close second,) it just doesn’t seem to matter so much that casting directors never got it. If this weren’t science, I would rank her higher, by dammit.

Ten best roles

10) Beethoven 9) Stolen Summer 8) Cheaper By the Dozen 7) Beethoven’s 2nd 6) Cheaper By the Dozen 2 5) The Green Mile 4) Only You 3) Jumanji 2) I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With 1) Loggerheads

Percentile rating

73.05

Tom Hulce

Tom Hulce is one of those mysterious actors that I assumed would make a huge splash, but tended not to show up much beyond the breakthrough role in Amadeus (I will always love the way Elizabeth Berridge called him “Vuhlfie”; she’s another one I wish we could have seen much more of.) His best roles indicate an ability to play both drama and comedy (and of course, with the lead role in Amadeus, both.) He’s apparently done a lot of stage work, and that’s fine for people who live near stages, but it would have been nice to see more of him down here in Bodunk, too.

Ten best roles

10) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 9) Those Lips Those Eyes 8) Black Rainbow 7) Wings of Courage 6) The Inner Circle 5) Fearless 4) National Lampoon’s Animal House 3) Echo Park 2) Dominick and Eugene 1) Amadeus

Percentile rating

87.07

Kate Hudson

There’s no doubting that the daughter of Goldie Hawn and at least one of the Hudson Brothers is a cutie, but that’s not enough to be highly regarded as a serious actress. Despite a couple of roles outside of her comfort zone, she seems mostly content to live in the circle of ditziness, a sort of alternate to Drew Barrymore, playing the same comic foil over and over to a string of limp leading men mostly not capable of pulling off the comedy thing. Sadly, since she’s built her entire reputation on a sort of feisty cutesiness, her prime’s about to be behind her, unless she can transition into roles where it’s not enough to simply be the sex kitten.

Ten best roles

10) Gossip 9) About Adam 8) Desert Blue 7) Alex and Emma 6) Raising Helen 5) You Me and Dupree 4) How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days 3) Le Divorce 2) Skeleton Key 1) Almost Famous

Percentile rating

74.80

School’s out, and already I am about to crawl out of my skin, because I don’t know what to do with myself.

So I set up a multi-loss (ten, actually) tournament within my CD collection, and then used the results, after running them through a recursive pairwise ranking scheme, to rank my “favorite” CDs. This list is completely off the cuff, and springs out of thousands of snap decisions on my part (along the lines of “Which would I rather hear, Ozric Tentacle’s Strangeitude, or Elton John’s Peachtree Road?” Which is an odd example, because frankly, I don’t care to hear either of those ever again, but maybe you get the idea.)

There are a number of rules; my idea was to generate a list of actual studio albums, so there was a hierarchy of comparisons that were essentially pre-determined; a studio album always beat a live album (unless the live album featured almost exclusively previously unreleased songs, like Neil Young’s Not Fade Away,) which almost always beat an anthology/greatest hits disk by a single artist, which almost always beat a collection by various artists, which almost always beat a Christmas album (inexplicably, we have dozens.)

So, I am thinking about this first shot at ranking as a trial, and might go back later and be more precise in my record-keeping, but I do feel the list is pretty representative of the types of music I most love, which is mainly geeky proggy-rock and the type of music that I sometimes tag as being in the “Beatles tradition.”

As the summer passes, I may try to undertake choosing my favorite 100 recordings of all time (which would be very different, as I don’t have CD copies of many of my favorites.)

Here’s the list

1 The Beatles, Rubber Soul
2 The Beatles, Revolver
3 Bob Dylan, Blood On the Tracks
4 The Beatles, Sgt Peppers
5 The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour
6 The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
7 Kate Bush, The Dreaming
8 Fleetwood Mac, Tusk
9 Jules Shear, The Great Puzzle
10 King Crimson. Red
11 Cheap Trick, Heaven Tonight
12 Radiohead, OK Computer
13 World Party, Goodbye Jumbo
14 Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cosmo’s Factory
15 Neil Young, Zuma
16 Ben Folds, Rockin the Suburbs
17 Todd Rundgren, Something/Anything Disc
18 Aimee Mann, (Mostly) Music From the Motion Picture Magnolia
19 Matthew Sweet, Girlfriend
20 Kate Bush, Aerial
21 Jellyfish, Bellybutton
22 Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
23 Neil Young, Freedom
24 XTC, Skylarking
25 Richard Thompson, Rumor and Sigh
26 The Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed
27 Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
28 The Rolling Stones, Beggers Banquet
29 David Baerwald, Bedtime Stories
30 Everything But the Girl, Walking Wounded
31 Kate Bush, Hounds Of Love
32 XTC, Oranges & Lemons
33 Jethro Tull, Thick as a Brick
34 Lindsay Buckingham, Out of the Cradle
35 Yes, Relayer
36 Elvis Costello, King of America
37 David Bowie, Station to Station
38 The Beatles, Abbey Road
39 Electric Light Orchestra, New World Record
40 Jellyfish, Spilt Milk
41 The Beatles, White Album
42 Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells
43 Yes, Tales From Topographic Oceans
44 Frank Zappa, Apostrophe
45 Todd Rundgren, A Wizard A True Star
46 John Hiatt, Stolen Moments
47 Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers
48 Yes, Big Generator
49 Ben Folds, Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner
50 Rheostatics, Introducing Happiness
51 Dixie Dregs, What If
52 John McLaughlin, Johnny McLaughlin Electric Guitarist
53 Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
54 My Morning Jacket, It Still Moves
55 John Hiatt, Bring the Family
56 John Eddie, Who the Hell Is John Eddie
57 King Crimson, VROOM
58 Bob Dylan, Modern Times
59 Ben Folds, Whatever and Ever Amen
60 Laura Veirs, Year of Meteors
61 Frank Zappa, One Size Fits All
62 Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
63 Genesis, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
64 Elton John, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
65 Alice Cooper, Killer
66 Neil Young, Sleeps with Angels
67 Crowded House, Woodface
68 John Hiatt, Slow Turning
69 The Beatles, Let It Be
70 Peter Gabriel, Us
71 U2, Achtung Baby
72 Sting, The Soul Cages
73 Bob Dylan, Time Out Of Mind
74 Porcupine Tree, In Absentia
75 Weather Report, Heavy Weather
76 Eric Johnson, Venus Isle
77 Beach Boys, Pet Sounds
78 Frank Zappa, Hot Rats
79 King Crimson, Happy with What You Have to be Happy With
80 King Crimson, THRAK
81 King Crimson, Three of a Perfect Pair
82 King’s X, Gretchen Goes to Nebraska
83 Kate Bush, The Sensual World
84 Rush, Roll the Bones
85 U2, The Joshua Tree
86 The Travelin Wilbury’s, Volume 1
87 Built To Spill, You In Reverse
88 New Radicals, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too
89 Tom Petty, Into the Great Wide Open
90 The Anniversary, Your Majesty
91 Sarah McLachlan, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
92 Wondermints, Bali
93 Jason Falkner, Can You Still Feel
94 Chris Thile, Not All Who Wander Are Lost
95 Tim Finn, Tim Finn
96 King’s X, Faith Hope Love
97 Wilco, Being There
98 Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsys
99 Tim Finn, Before & After
100 Jen Trynin, Cockamamie

Apologies for any formatting problems.