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Back when I used to blog on the regular - back when blogging was something people did on the regular and when "on the regular" was a term people used (was it?) - my most popular post was the countdown of my Top 200 favorite tracks of all time. I did an update several years later (in 2011) and that list was updated in my iTunes in the post-blog years as new songs were released and some former favorites fell out of favor. Tastes change, but the changes were minimal, and every several months I would cue up the playlist on my iPhone and play the greatest songs ever recorded by human beings. But recently, I upgraded iPhones and my MacBook and somehow -- it's still not clear how but I know it has something to do with the "Cloud" - I lost about half the contents of all my playlists and as a result I no longer had a record of my Top 200 songs of all time.
My old blog is no longer active (www.vaguespace.net is a dead link) but I can still get to it through Typepad's pages (even though I stopped paying them - thanks TypePad!) - so I got to the old Top 200 list from 2011, went through the laborious process of putting them all in a playlist and then the even more laborious process of adding all the newer songs I missed and the ones that maybe should have been in there all along. I figured I'd share that list on this blog, in a hopefully non-laborious process. I'm starting with #201 to 300 in order. I hope you enjoy. And let me know in the comments if anything's missing!  The Syracuse Orange basketball team has a long and storied history that I've been a part of (as a fan) since the late '80s, from the championship-caliber teams of Derrick Coleman and Sherman Douglas through the lean years of an NCAA suspension and Lawrence Moten's greatness to the shocking Final Four run by the John Wallace-led team of scrappy underdogs (1996) to the disappointing Jason Hart / Etan Thomas / Ryan Blackwell class of the late '90s/early 2000s until the capstone championship (at long last) with the Carmelo Anthony-led run to the title in 2003. Since then, we had half a decade of solid and disappointing seasons (the 2006 magical Big East tournament run led by Gerry McNamara the highlight, missing the tourney in 2007 and 2008 the lowlights) and then we peaked as a team with a group of stellar recruiting classes that led to #1 rankings and #1 seeds in the NCAA tournament through the great Kris Joseph - Wes Johnson - CJ Fair - Dion Waiters - Fab Melo - Michael-Carter Williams teams that culminated in another Final Four in 2013. Then through the first 25 games in a new league (the ACC), Syracuse went 25-0 and spent 3 weeks as #1 in the country, only to collapse down the stretch despite Tyler Ennis and CJ Fair and lose to 11 seed Dayton in the 2nd round of the tournament. A year later, they were handed crippling recruiting limits after a seeming decade of NCAA investigations that resulted from Fab Melo cheating on a single exam and a few kids smoking pot and the result has been a turbulent five years of fandom - from the 18-14 team of 2014-15 to a shocking 5th Final Four run in 2016 under Jim Boeheim behind miraculous back-to-back defeats of Gonzaga and #1 Virginia featuring seniors Michael Gbinije and Trevor Cooney alongside freshman legends Malachi Richardson and Tyler Lydon which stamped their place as bracket-wreckers in the modern era (2 final fours in 4 years despite all the turbulence of NCAA investigations).
Then they missed the tournament in 2017 (after losing Richardson, Gbinije, and Cooney to early entry and graduation) and then spent last year struggling the whole season after losing 5 of their top 6 players (Lydon to the NBA, Tyler Roberson & DaJuan Coleman to graduation along with grad transfers Andrew White and John Gillon). Then they were down to 6 scholarship players by January after injuries and transfers took away Taureen Thompson, Howard Washington, Matthew Moyer, and grad transfer Geno Thorpe). But that team - potential NBA players sophomore Tyus Battle, freshman Oshae Brissett, and a group of scrappers - PG Frank Howard, skinny freshman Slovakian Marik Dolezaj, and hands-of-brick junior transfer Pascal Chukwe along with the only scholarship reserve, injured freshman Bourame Sidibe, somehow squeaked into the tournament as the very last team in, then won 3 games in the NCAAs as an 11 seed before running into the buzzsaw that was Duke after a shocking Sweet 16 run. 10. Black Panther / Avengers: Infinity War I'm doing a bit of a cheat to squeeze in extra movies on my list and I don't have enough to separate the two Marvel entries in my reckoning. I think after seeing pretty much all of the Marvel movies in the past several years - despite never being a comic book movie fan before them - I was pleased / surprised / overwhelmed by the "Snap" and all that came before it in the near finale of the multi-year, multi-film experiment that has broken box office records and turned me into a massive fan of comic book movies. On the other hand, Black Panther was refreshing, exciting, awe-inspiring and simply inspiring to see POC centered in a movie this big and this awesome (and with the box office to prove it). Whether it's a "better" film than Infinity War - probably, I mean it will be up for Best Picture (and might even win) but I probably enjoyed Infinity War more coming out of the theatre. Both great movies and everyone has seen them. The rest of this list is way, way, way more obscure :)  
I recently watched two documentaries that are on the Academy Awards Best Documentary shortlist for 2018, and they are at the moment two of my three favorite movies of the year (alongside Alfonso Cuaron's stunning Roma). Free Solo I saw on the big screen - which I would highly recommend for its breathtaking visages, while Minding the Gap is on Hulu (who picked up distribution). Both movies did well at the box office, in a year of documentary surprise hits that reached the $10M+ mark (led by Won't You Be My Neighbor, RBG, and Three Identical Strangers). And both were amazing.  |