Top 5 World Series Teams

Top Lady

1) 1982 St. Louis Cardinals
Ozzie, Willie, Vince, Whitey, Forsch, Sutter, Tommy Herr, Keith Hernandez, and those powder-blue uniforms made for one of the best series teams of all time. Every other house in St. Louis has a VHS tape of this series sitting around.

2) 2006 St. Louis Cardinals
It was actually the NLCS against the Mets that made this team memorable for me, before they took down the Tigers in a five-game series. Yadier Molina’s game-winning home run in the 9th inning of Game 7 was the moment of a lifetime for thousands of Cardinal fans.

3) 1974 Oakland A’s
This was the A’s third consecutive WS win, qualifying the team for “dynasty” status, despite lots of intra-player theatrics. Rollie Fingers matched the bar set high by this era of excellent pitching, and certainly got help from Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson. However, the 1974 Oakland A’s will most likely be forever remembered for the true awesomeness of their mustaches.

4) 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates
Definitely a little team that could, the ’79 Buccos were led by the spirit of Roberto Clemente and the leadership of MVP Pops Stargell. Their earnest love for each other and their city was rivaled only by the sheer ridiculousness of their uniform design.

5) 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers
Featuring all-stars Roy Campanella, Sandy Koufax, Pee Wee Reese, and Jackie Robinson, Dem Bums miraculously won this series against the Yankees—their first WS win since 1900, and their last before the team moved to L.A.


Top Guy

1) 1975 Cincinnati Reds
The 1975 World Series is generally considered the greatest ever played. There was history—the Reds were the first professional baseball team, the Red Sox one of the sport’s most storied franchises. There were stars—Johnny Bench and Pete Rose for the Reds, Carlton Fisk and Carl Yastrzemski for the Red Sox. And there was drama—Fisk waving a home run ball fair during the 12th inning of game six. In the end, the mighty Big Red Machine won the series, then backed up their title with a sweep of the New York Yankees in 1976.

2) 1986 New York Mets
This was the year I got into baseball, and the Mets were my team. They easily won their division, beat the brutally tough Houston Astros in the National League Championship Series, then compounded the misery of the Red Sox by winning games six and seven following Bill Buckner’s agony-of-defeat-worthy error. Led by young stars Dwight Gooden and Daryl Strawberry, this Mets team was supposed to become a dynasty. Instead, it will go down as a one-hit wonder.

3) 1998 New York Yankees
Like almost everyone who doesn’t call the Bronx home, I hate the Yankees. But the 1998 team was close to perfect. It won a then-record 114 regular season games, then backed it up with an 11-2 playoff record and a World Series sweep against an overmatched San Diego Padres. This also was the year that David Wells pitched his perfect game.

4) 1948 Cleveland Indians
Cleveland’s last championship is most noteworthy because it was the first time black athletes won a World Series title. Cleveland won it with black stars Larry Doby and Satchel Paige.

5) 1924 Washington Senators
Rooting for the Senators before 1924 must have been like rooting for the Kansas City Royals now. They were so putrid that one journalist quipped “Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” That losing tradition changed when 36-year-old Walter Johnson led the team to a fluky World Series win against the New York Giants. This team showed there is hope for everyone—maybe even the Royals.

Top 5 Food Shows

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1) Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives
Do I love Triple-D because host Guy Fieri reminds me of one of my old co-workers? Yes. But that’s not the only reason. Fieri searches out the best American diners and shows viewers how they make the food—spotlighting a segment of the culinary industry that is seldom scene on the Food Network.

2) Iron Chef America
Two competing chefs have 60 minutes to cook a five-course meal featuring a secret ingredient. Those meals are then judged by a panel of culinary minds, and a winner is crowned. The real treat is getting an inside look at how some of the world’s top chefs—always including Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, Masaharu Morimoto, Cat Cora or Michael Symon—operate in the kitchen.

3) Mexico One Plate at a Time
If I could have lunch with anyone in the world, Rick Bayless might get the nod. The catch is that he’d have to cook. The Chicago-via-Oklahoma chef knows more about Mexican cuisine than anyone else on Earth, and One Plate is the perfect showcase for his knowledge and skills.

4) The Restaurant
Reality TV generally turns my stomach, but this now-defunct show was a can’t miss for me. Rocco DiSpirito was one of New York’s great young chefs until this series; now he’s a cautionary tale. From a chef who’s almost never in the kitchen to whiny employees who don’t care about the eatery’s success to a power struggle between the two principle owners, Restaurant was basically a primer of how not to run a restaurant.

5) 30-Minute Meals
I know it’s trendy to hate Rachel Ray, and I agree that she can be more than a little annoying at times. But who can argue against a show where the central premise is to teach parents that it’s possible to cook healthy, tasty meals at home in less time than it takes to load up the car and drive the kids to McDonald’s?

Top Lady

1) Good Eats
The most satisfying thing about Good Eats is its orientation of episodes around a single ingredient. It’s great to spend 22 minutes showing how to make eggplant parmesan—but even better to show five different things to do with an eggplant, as well as getting a little history and nutritional information besides. The fact that Alton Brown never seems to get tired of showing the best way to do simple things such as chop an onion is particularly endearing to those of us who were never taught how to chop an onion. Last year, I cooked Thanksgiving dinner for my family, due in no small part to this show. (It was awesome, by the way.)

2) No Reservations
I realize that some people have a problem with Anthony Bourdain. Aside from his New York ‘tude, he often remarks on how his adventures take him to places no mere American tourist would dare go or taste—as if having a producer that hooks him up with local guides, a camera crew, and a significantly larger travel budget than most backpackers makes him a mere tourist. However, he’s definitely willing to laugh at himself, and he seems deep down to want to encourage people to get out in the world and taste new things.

3) America’s Test Kitchen
Another science-y cooking show but on a PBS budget. What I like best about ATK is that they approach cooking with techniques out of a high-school lab workbook. What’s the best “room temperature” for baking with butter? Let’s make a hypothesis, set a control group, and find out!

4) The French Chef
The original is still the champ. I don’t know that Julia Child necessarily made things look easy, but listening to her breezy talk while she butchers up a rooster for coq au vin was the original comfort food of cooking shows.

5) Yan Can Cook
OK—this is not the greatest cooking show on Earth. But my mom will attest that I loved this show as a kid. Wearing aprons that said things such as “I Wok My Dog Every Day” (I know, sick, right? I don’t think he got it), chef Martin Yan made simple stir-frys and other Chinese dishes probably toned way down for the American PBS crowd. But he had a goofy sense of humor that appealed to kids when no other cooking shows did.

Top 5 Photographers

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1) Lee Miller
Model, Photographer, Reporter, Muse: Lee Miller had an extraordinary life on both sides of the camera. As a young model, she graced the cover of Vogue in the 1920s, then learned photography (and a few other things) from her relationship with Man Ray, making abstract photographs. In the 1930s, she became a photojournalist for Vogue and Life magazines, covering World War II in France and North Africa. And she was the only photographer with the American troops when they entered the Buchenwald concentration camp, sending her images of dead and dying bodies back to her editors with only the words “Believe It.”

2) Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky creates wall-size photographs that often act as if they were paintings, often capturing large-scale scenes such as infinite layers of hotel balconies or the eye-popping colors of a huge 99-cent store. His free and open use of digital alterations also brings in the question the nature of the medium, which Gursky clearly believes is as malleable as paint.

3) Taryn Simon
A working contemporary photographer, Taryn Simon’s trademark is getting access to remote or off-limits areas to take “forbidden” images. A recent show at the Whitney Museum held pictures of green-glowing nuclear waste, the Death Star prop from Star Wars (packed in storage in a Hollywood lot), and a portrait of Kenny, a white tiger with mental retardation and other problems due to massive inbreeding.

4) Gordon Parks
Aside from being the photographer of the Civil Rights Movement, Gordon Parks also produced hundreds of images of simple beauty. And, yes, he directed Shaft.

5) Ryan McGinley
Ryan McGinley is definitely the toast of the town at the moment, and he should be. A young, working photographer in New York, his images capture the spirit of the 2000s in a way no one else does. Young, beautiful hipsters frolic in a park, find ecstasy at a Morrissey concert, and graffiti-bomb buildings at twilight. They seem to think they will always be young and beautiful, and in these pictures, they will be.

Top Guy

1) Richard Avedon
I often had been struck by beauty in photographs, but I had never really been moved by a still image until seeing Richard Avedon’s In the American West series. American West featured striking photographs of common people living hardscrabble lives as oil workers, cowboys and drifters. Walker Evans and Robert Frank also have captured the essence of the American soul, but Avedon’s work made a deeper impression on me because I saw it first.

2) Henri Cartier-Bresson
Cartier-Bresson is known as the father of modern photojournalism. He’s an innovator who took some of the most famous photographs ever. He co-founded Magnum Photos, possibly the greatest collection of photojournalists ever assembled. But Cartier-Bresson makes the list for one simple reason: When I elicited responses from my photographer friends, one wrote back “Cartier-Bresson (duh…).”

3) Nick Ut
Sometimes you become famous for being in the right place at the right time. Ut’s defining moment is a photo of a group of crying Vietnamese children running down the road after their village was napalmed. The photograph won Ut a Pulitzer Prize and helped end that disastrous war. In addition to being a great photographer, Ut proved himself to be a great man—he didn’t return to his bureau to publish the photograph until he had rushed a little girl to the hospital, saving her life.

4) Charles Peterson
Annie Leibovitz is probably the best known rock ’n’ roll photographer, but the Seattle scene wouldn’t have been Seattle without Charles Peterson. His gorgeous action shots of bands such as Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden are often slightly overexposed or out of focus, but they provided the perfect illustration for a grunge sound that was equally muddy and unfocused yet brilliant.

5) Gordon Parks
Few photographers could move back and forth between the worlds of journalism and fashion as deftly as Parks. His photographs for Life depicted life at both the top and bottom of black culture, and his fashion photos for Vogue were groundbreaking for the simple fact that they were shot by a black man. After a lengthy career, Parks tried his hand as a film director, scoring a hit with Shaft in 1971.

Top 5 Matador Records Releases

Top Guy

1) Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair
When this record came out, I couldn’t decide if I wanted Liz Phair to be my cool sister or my even cooler girlfriend. Sadly, Phair never again matched the excellence of Exile, which is supposedly a track-by-track answer to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. The highlights are “Stratford-On-Guy,” “Divorce Song” and “Help Me Mary,” but every song is a gem.

2) Bee Thousand, Guided by Voices
GBV didn’t reach its commercial height until Isolation Drills, but the Dayton, Ohio, band reached its artistic peak here. Bee Thousand is the album that brought lo-fi into the mainstream, and songwriters Robert Pollard and Tobin Sprout turned a collection of two minute pop songs into a work of art.

3) Superchunk, Superchunk
No Pocky for Kitty is consistently better, but Superchunk’s eponymous debut scores here because of “Slack Motherf**er,” possibly the best song the group ever wrote, and a song that should have served as the anthem of the Reality Bites generation.

4) Mass Romantic, New Pornographers
I used to work as a music critic, a job that makes you listen to so much bad work that you actually start hating music from time to time. It was at one of those low points that I first heard Mass Romantic, and it restored my faith in the art form.

5) Slanted and Enchanted, Pavement
If someone ever asked me what indie rock sounded like in the early ‘90s, I would hand them this record.

Top Lady

1) What’s Up Matador, Various Artists
Everyone, and I mean everyone I knew in college had this compilation when it came out in 1997. And, with stellar tracks by Matador all-stars, as well as sweet little one-tracks by bands whose whole albums you really don’t want to buy (Pizzicato Five, anyone?) it’s a great dip into an era and sound when electric guitars were still the tool of choice over bloops and bleeps.

2) If You're Feeling Sinister, Belle and Sebastian
Twee core was around well before B&S (see also: Beat Happening), but these moody Scots certainly ushered in the trend of inviting all 16 of your friends to be in your band and play random instruments. Stuart Murdoch’s pleasant, Nick Drake-y voice, ambiguously sensual lyrics, and no identifiable photos in the CD cover intrigued millions of fans and critics alike.

3) Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement
If someone ever asked me what indie rock sounded like in the early ‘90s, I would hand them this record.

4) And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, Yo La Tengo
YLT has been around forever, played with everyone, and covered everyone. That said, when they get together and do their own thing, they can crank out the lo-fi like no one else. “Our Way to Fall” is a truly beautiful forgotten love song, and “You Can Have It All” lets you know that mellow groovin’ is still possible in the 2000’s.

5) Mass Romantic, The New Pornographers
I first heard of the NP’s when someone in Chicago told me she saw them last night and people were dancing. For those of you who didn’t go to rock shows in 1999, this was the equivalent of saying that the Supreme Court had just delivered its most recent opinion to the tune of “Hello Dolly!” People did not dance at shows. People looked at their shoelaces with their arms crossed. For me, these power poppers from Canada, along with the Strokes, truly ended the grunge/slacker movement once and for all, and ushered in the 2000’s with a really joyful approach to music that allowed bands to look like they were having fun again.

Top 5 Films Featuring Steve Buscemi

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1) Ghost World (2001)
Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson turn in outstanding performances, but there’s not another actor that could have pulled off the sad-sack audiophile who gets duped into a fake date as well as Buscemi does in this movie. As a side note, the Blues Hammer/old bluesman scene is one the funniest, saddest and most spot-on set pieces in the history of film.

2) The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
This list could have been populated entirely by Coen Brothers films because Buscemi also acted in Barton Fink, Miller’s Crossing and the Big Lebowski, as well as Fargo, which is next on the list. He only has a small role in The Hudsucker Proxy as a Beatnik bartender in a watering hole frequented by Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Lee), but this gets my nod because it’s my favorite Coen Brothers movie.

3) Fargo (1996)
Two years after The Hudsucker Proxy, the Coen Brothers gave Buscemi a much meatier role as a kidnapper-turned-murderer and later murder victim. The role was written specifically for Buscemi, who turns in a star-making performance despite being upstaged by Frances McDormand. One piece of trivia: The film isn’t actually based on a true story.

4) Billy Madison (1995)
Buscemi is perfect in small roles, and this might be his smallest. He’s onscreen only long enough to put down a shotgun, smear some lipstick on his face and cross Adam Sandler’s name off of a hit list. Despite his short time on screen, he gets the film’s biggest laugh.

5) Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Mr. Pink is an unfortunate name, but he has the good fortune to be the only major character to survive—he’s most likely arrested at the end. Mr. Pink’s best lines are at the film’s beginning, when he debates the meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and gives an anti-tipping monologue.

Top Lady

1) Fargo
Probably the performance that most people remember—especially since Steve ends up in a wood chipper. I bet he still gets people referring to him as a “funny lookin’ little guy.”

2) Ghost World
If he’s impossible to forget in Fargo, most people have to be reminded that Steve is also in Ghost World (and, in fact, has the third-largest role after the two girls). His roles often get described as “eccentric” but his personification of Seymour makes him into an eccentric who is actually trying to adjust and be a little more normal. His femme fatale is Thora Birch’s Enid, who obsesses, seduces, uses, discards, wins back, and then loses him.

3) Pulp Fiction
OK, so he only has a bit part as a waiter in this one, but it’s a memorable scene (at the diner, where Uma Thurman and John Travolta win the dance-off) in a movie that is basically a composite of memorable scenes.

4) Art School Confidential
This film begins as a satire on the level of “P.C.U.” but, midway through, turns truly dark and pessimistic. Co-written by Dan Clowes, this film is a nice counterpart to Ghost World, and is genuinely funny, especially when John Malkovich, as an art teacher, sighs with frustration while looking at his “greatest works”—paintings of solid triangles. Steve plays a coffee shop owner in this one.

5) Barton Fink
A Top 5 Steve Buscemi list could easily double as a Top 5 Coen Brothers list, so I tried to be selective. No, Barton Fink isn’t as good as The Big Lebowski or even Blood Simple, but (with the exception of Adaptation), it’s portrayal of how the process of writing can drive someone insane is unparalleled. Steve plays a bellhop named “CHET!”