'Gilded Palace of Sin'

An all-time, top 10 record for me. It has everything. The musicianship. The perfect balance between the swaying heartbreak of country and the driving energy of rock and roll.

It's basically a greatest hits for the Burritoes and Gram Parsons' shining moment. Yeah, he had other tunes, other albums. But "Gilded Palace" was the great bridge between The Byrds and Parsons' solo work.

I can listen to this over and over.

'How Green Was My Valley'

If you want a good lead, look into the history of Wales.

It's always interested me because I'm a bit of a Anglophile particularly the British Isles.

Somehow among the last several hundred years, the countries of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales carved their own distinct cultures and languages in their part of the world, for better or for worse.

Wales is particularly perplexing because of their particular language. Trying to sift through the various facts and theories about the Welsh people and their origins. None of it really makes sense.

What doesn't change no matter the language barriers and cultures are the horrors of the mines. It's disheartening when Huw turns his back on education, the only way out, and enters the mines out of some blind loyalty to the long walk to the coal mine inhaling that blackness. It's sad beyond any death.

'The Best Years Of Our Lives'

One of the most sobering moments of the recent history is watching Ken Burns' "The War" and listening to veterans from World War II talking honestly and openly about the horrors of their experience in Europe and Asia and the frightening period after they got back.

It's not a story heavily publicized from the Great Generation after a justified war in which actual evil and genocide were defeated. What we learned was that war is a giant shit sandwich no matter if it's a faceless Vietcong or Al Qaeda, or jackbooted Nazis dumping remains of Jewish corpses to the incinerator. It doesn't matter. It all fucks you up.

"The Best Years of Our Lives" -- with a light, but poignant brush -- chronicles the change from combat to going back home where you just wish everything was the same (even though it isn't) and family and friends can not really handle that every thing has changed.

It's jingoistic to a fault. Although it doesn't throw darts at the idea of killing Nazis, but it takes a fair share of shots at the idea of war and how pointless it can be.

But as we'd probably like to paint a pretty picture of that time in this country, it's a stark portrait that a lot of lives were lost through a soul-breaking Depression and a country so unwilling to stick their nose into someone else's problems that it almost destroyed the world.

'M. Hulot's Holiday' & 'Mon Oncle'

I didn't think much of these two films, from French director Jacques Tati and featuring the bumbling exploits of Monseiur Hulot.

Thankfully, the "Mon Oncle" DVD featured a short introduction by Monty Pythoner Terry Jones.

In it, he actually explained how "Mon Oncle" initiallyi disappointed him, too, until he watched it more and more and it eventually became his favorite.

Jones qualified Tati's satire of the post-war, modernity and consumerism that was taking the soul and flavor out of France, M. Hulot's France. Jones also highlighted the use of soundtrack. The clickety-clack of the secertary's shoes in the factory compared to the brilliant and pretty music used while Hulot walks around the market and streets.

Jones made such a good argument that I went back and watched "Mon Oncle" again. And I like it 75 percent more than I did four hours earlier.

What would it hurt to get studios to do a short interview with someone explaining why they like the film we're about to see?

'Reveries Of A Solitary Walker'

For all intents and purposes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Reveries of a Solitary Walker" was the first ever blog. God might have an argument for the Holy Bible. But I'll stick with the French philosopher.

Rousseau had little use for the narrative or storytelling element of the novel. He had ideas and the most direct, best way to get those ideas to the public or to those who read were through these short little essays.

These essays or "walks" were written near the end of Rousseau's life (he did not finish the final "walk, No. 10, before his death). I can just imagine a very bitter (he was ... it shows) and bored Rousseau probably stuck indoors or in a chair for a lot of the time wanting to get something done and wanting to speak his mind one final time.

What makes it a blog -- of sorts -- is that it's (we assume) completely bias, highly personal and written with no filter.

Hodgepodged throughout are anecdotes about these walks he takes through Paris and the surrounding areas documenting these incidents with individuals and the revelry in nature. Some stories border on the ridiculousness of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," while all support some idea or social standard that has captured Rousseau's fancy at the moment.

Chuck Klosterman has published five books and gotten gigs at SPIN, ESPN and Esquire doing essentially the same thing. Seems Rousseau battled just to have a couple of friends.

'Shoot The Piano Player'

What you often run into on the the 1,001 film list are films that are particularly good films (in terms of the ordinary requirements of a good story, decent acting, developed characters), but they're just singularly important.

"Shoot The Piano Player" isn't a particularly a good movie outside of Francois Truffaut's filmmaking and it being a seminal chronicle in the French new wave.

"Charlie" the piano player isn't particularly interesting -- kind of a schmuck -- until three-quarters through the film when you learn that he was a vaunted classical pianist, who went off the deep end when his wife committed suicide. The audience was not feed the good stuff until late in the film and then, when the revelation came down, there was nothing in the previous 45 minutes to make us think differently about Charlie.

Knowing what you know at 50 minutes doesn't make you think or change your thoughts about Charlie the previous 49. Even his kid -- not like single parenthood is altogether rare -- wasn't his kid, but his kid brother, brought into the city to escape the rabble-rousing prospects of his other brothers in the country.

Again, it's a film where you can't just watch it for the story, but for the production. A classic example from a very deep and inspirational era of films.

'Little Caesar'

What is the public's fascination with gangsters?

Whether it's "Little Caesar," "Scarface," "The Wire," "The Sopranos," "Godfather," "Goodfellas" or any of the other six dozen gangster-oriented films or TV shows that are generally popular.

There's a dozen possiblities for this phenomena. The simple answer is that, secretly, all of us straight people want nothing more than to live above the law. To wake up every morning doing something so dangerous that you might not live out the day. We probably also like the idea of doing the bare minimum of work to receive, in turn, the maximum amount of payment. Without paying taxes.

However, I think humans have a "Robin Hood" complex. Robin Hood is an OG. The first gangster in popular culture and we've since written books about his fake life and about four dozen movies and TV shows about his fake life. Robin Hood is the idea of the poor man getting his day.

We enjoy the fact that the uneducated, poor -- however, self-motivated -- immigrant or minority doing something for themselves other than going on welfare. As hard-working Americans, we abhor the Mexican immigrant coming into the United States just to get government handouts. But should that same Mexican immigrant run a heroin line, no matter how much we dislike the drugs, at least he wasn't looking for something easy. Like not breaking the law.

What aids this fascination with the gangster "underdog" is that the film or TV show has made these people inherently likable. Watch "The Wire" or "The Sopranos" and tell me you don't identify with or root for Omar, Avon Barksdale, Tony, Sylvio or Paulie Walnuts.

We forget that these are sociopaths -- they murder, intimidate, deal drugs, guns, kidnap and generally make the United States kinda worse for the wear.

We're closer to Edward G. Robinson than Jimmy Stewart a lot of the time.