lists

Maybe I'm being too way too picky, but there is something deeply underachieving about Nerve's "Girl Power Top Ten," a list of the ten most—oh yeah, here it comes—empowering movies of all time.

Now, I would never come right out and suggest that perhaps having three dudes be the ones to make both of these judgment calls is going to, you know, limit the scope of things, but...okay, that's basically what I'm saying. Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, and Leonard Pierce, who coauthored "Chick Hits," get shirty in their introduction about the cluelessness of the media execs and pop-culture minders who've been so pleasantly surprised at the success of Sex and the City's big-screen bow, going on to write proudly that "We here at The Screengrab aren't afraid to get in touch with our feminine sides as we raise our Cosmos to these...films that put their empowered female characters front and center (without resorting to stripper poles OR big gauzy Prince Charming/Bridezilla wedding porn)."

Sometimes I find it difficult to keep up with my reading pile, especially now that I've inherited a coffee table so enormous it almost begs for piles and piles of magazines, books, and zines to be stacked atop it.

But I set aside some time this weekend to catch up. A few things I enjoyed. Maybe you would, too:

Every year, I'm one of the many critics invited to select their top 10 albums and singles for the Village Voice's venerable (if interesting largely only to other music critics) Pazz & Jop poll. I stopped writing about music for a (fractional) living seven years ago, and most music criticism gives me hives now, but I still love music itself, and the nice thing about Pazz & Jop is that you don't actually have to wax adjectival about your picks, you're just like: White Stripes. I liked it. Boom.