RS Immortals' Albums

So Rolling Stone came up with 100 Immortals back in 2004, I think, and then promptly (2011) updated that list and kicked a bunch of them off. Not so "immortal" after all, I guess.

All the same, with a few exceptions I have an album (studio or live) by each (and for the ones I didn't I've put in whatever Hits or Anthology of their work I have). So if you pick the best work of each you could arrive at a top 100 list. Except it's 108, since, as I said, they changed it around. Regardless, the following wouldn't be a terrible way to start compiling a record collection:

1. The Beatles	Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band *also #1 artist on RS list both years*
2. The Beach Boys	Pet Sounds
3. Marvin Gaye	What's Going On
4. James Brown	Live at the Apollo
5. Miles Davis	Kind of Blue *artist removed 2011*
6. Van Morrison	Astral Weeks
7. Stevie Wonder	Talking Book
8. Led Zeppelin	Led Zeppelin IV
9. David Bowie	The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
10. AC/DC	Back in Black
11. Guns n Roses	Appetite for Destruction
12. The Who	Who's Next
13. Allman Brothers	At Fillmore East
14. The Rolling Stones	Exile on Main Street
15. Talking Heads	Stop Making Sense *artist added 2011, ranked #100*
16. The Clash	The Clash
17. The Kinks	The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
18. Elvis Costello	This Year's Model
19. Bruce Springsteen	Born in the USA
20. Radiohead	The Bends
21. Sex Pistols	Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
22. Queen	A Night at the Opera *artist added 2011*
23. Joni Mitchell	Blue
24. The Doors	The Doors
25. The Velvet Underground	The Velvet Underground and Nico
26. Bob Dylan	Bringing It All Back Home
27. Plastic Ono Band	John Lennon
28. Simon and Garfunkel	Bridge Over Troubled Water
29. The Band	Music from Big Pink
30. U2	The Joshua Tree
31. Neil Young	After the Goldrush
32. Roxy Music	Avalon *artist removed 2011*
33. Curtis Mayfield	Superfly
34. Pink Floyd	Dark Side of the Moon *artist added 2011*
35. Prince	Purple Rain
36. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers	Damn the Torpedoes *artist added 2011*
37. The Eagles	Hotel California
38. The Jimi Hendrix Experience	Electric Ladyland
39. Patti Smith	Horses
40. Black Sabbath	Paranoid
41. Jay Z	The Blueprint *artist added 2011*
42. Buddy Holly	20 Golden Greats *highest ranked non-album*
43. Nirvana	MTV Unplugged in New York
44. Madonna	Ray of Light
45. Phil Spector	A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector
46. Little Richard	Here's Little Richard!
47. REM	Automatic for the People *artist added 2011*
48. Fats Domino	Greatest Hits: Walking to New Orleans
49. The Yardbirds	Roger the Engineer
50. Elton John	Goodbye Yellow Brick Road *ranked at #49 on RS list. Spooky.*
51. Chuck Berry	The Great Twenty-Eight
52. Cream	Fresh Cream
53. Aretha Franklin	I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
54. Public Enemy	It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
55. James Taylor	Sweet Baby James
56. Creedence Clearwater Revival	Cosmo's Factory *artist added 2011*
57. Otis Redding	Otis Blue
58. Booker T and the MGs	The Very Best Of
59. Beastie Boys	Paul's Boutique
60. Santana	Abraxas
61. Muddy Waters	At Newport 1960
62. Jerry Lee Lewis	Live at the Star Club, Hamburg
63. Ray Charles	Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
64. The Stooges	Raw Power
65. Everly Brothers	All-Time Original Hits
66. The Byrds	Mr. Tambourine Man
67. Metallica	Master of Puppets *artist added 2011*
68. The Police	Ghost in the Machine
69. Sly and the Family Stone	There's a Riot Going On
70. The Ramones	Ramones
71. Big Brother and the Holding Company	Cheap Thrills *Janis Joplin*
72. The Grateful Dead	Live/Dead
73. Parliament	Mothership Connection
74. Michael Jackson	Off the Wall
75. The Drifters	All-Time Greatest Hits and More: 1959-1965
76. Louis Jordan	Best Of *artist removed 2011*
77. Roy Orbison	The All-Time Greatest Hits
78. Ike and Tina Turner	Proud Mary: The Best Of
79. The Temptations	Anthology
80. Jackie Wilson	Mr. Excitement!
81. Johnny Cash	At Folsom Prison
82. The Supremes	Anthology
83. Ricky Nelson	Greatest Hits *artist removed 2011*
84. The Shirelles	25 All-Time Greatest Hits
85. Martha and the Vandellas	The Ultimate Collection *artist removed 2011*
86. Frank Zappa	The Best Band You've Never Heard in Your Life
87. Lee Scratch Perry	The Arkology *artist removed 2011, had been #100*
88. Elvis Presley	Elvis Presley *lowest rank of RS' top 10 artists*
89. Bob Marley and the Wailers	Natty Dread
90. Aerosmith	Rocks
91. Al Green	Call Me
92. Nine Inch Nails	The Downward Spiral
93. Derek and the Dominoes	Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs *Eric Clapton*
94. Lynyrd Skynyrd	Second Helping
95. NWA	Straight Outta Compton *artist removed 2011*
96. Eminem	The Marshall Mathers LP
97. The Four Tops	Second Album
98. Run DMC	Raising Hell
99. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles	Going to a Go-Go
100. Hank Williams	Turn Back the Years
101. Etta James	At Last! *artist removed 2011*
102. Sam Cooke	Live at the Harlem Square Club
103. Carl Perkins	Original Sun Greatest Hits
104. The Flying Burrito Brothers	The Gilded Palace of Sin *Gram Parsons*
105. Bo Diddley	Go Bo Diddley
106. Howlin' Wolf	Moanin' in the Moonlight
107. 2Pac	All Eyez on Me
108. Dr. Dre	The Chronic

Countdown

I like completing lists.

When I get near the end of one I tend to make a mad dash to the finish line, and I'm engaged in a few such dashes at the moment.

A few years ago my dad got me '101 Sci-Fi Films to See Before You Die' and I slowly made my way through most of it. In the past couple of months, though, I've been steadily plugging away and now I'm down to the final baker's dozen. Unfortunately a couple are not easy to find, so it may be a while until I can finally knock this one out. The movies still left to see are:

The 10th Victim (1965)
Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966)
Time After Time (1979)
Le Dernier Combat (1983)
The Brother from Another Planet (1984)
Dune (1984)
The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988)
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
Open Your Eyes (1997)
Code 46 (2003)
Primer (2004)
The Host (2004)
Attack the Block (2011)

(Admittedly I could watch Dune, but I'm going to read the copy on my shelf first.)

Another list, which will take a bit longer, is the Nobel prize winners. I've finally hit 75% completion, however, since reading epic novels takes lots of time, I won't be able to claim victory over this list for a while yet.

Sticking to the realm of literature I'm also one book shy of completing the Penguin Great Ideas series, but that last book is Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'. I'm around 675 pages in - or half way. Some months to go, then, I suspect.

Finally there's a list of  1,001 Recordings to Hear Before You Die by Tom Moon. A graduation gift from my sister this excellent collection has sustained me since 2009, but I am finally getting into the last stretch - only 60 recordings to go. Not surprisingly they are not easy to find, as I have been unable so far to track them down in collections ranging from the UC Berkeley music library to YouTube or iTunes or a score of libraries and music stores around the country.

Nevertheless, the whole point of lists is to help organize one's life. I wager it'll only take a few years, at most, for all of these lists to reach completion (and that's mainly due to the Nobel's remaining length). Then I can focus on one of my older on-going lists, such as the best 20th century English language novels (only 45% complete as yet)...

Paint?

So, quite a few years ago I was considering doing a mural in college. Or rather, a painting on a very large piece of canvas someone had mounted but chosen not to use. I got to the stage of drawing the preliminary forms on the canvas when it was ignominiously discarded in the dumpster by the maintenance folks. Lots of hours, wasted.

But now that I have a classroom of my own, I'm considering the idea anew. Time and again I've made lists of various people I consider inspirational, but here I wanted to narrow the focus to Americans, and, perhaps selfishly, make them the ones I agree with. So, although Ronald Reagan is in inspiration to many, he wouldn't show up in my painting.

I grouped the people into rough categories, and came up with the following:

Great Americans – Personal list

Civil Rights Leaders, Humanitarians, and Labor Leaders

1.      WEB Du Bois

2.      Frederick Douglass

3.      Dolores Huerta

4.      Saul Alinsky

5.      Harry Bridges

6.      Fred Korematsu

7.      Martin Luther King Jr.

8.      Henry David Thoreau

9.      Alice Paul

10.  Harriet Tubman

11.  Helen Keller

12.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

13.  Susan B. Anthony

14.  Ida B. Wells

15.  Margaret Sanger

16.  Harvey Milk

17.  Cesar Chavez

18.  Jane Addams

19.  John Brown

20.  Gene Sharp

Politicians and Legal Figures

21.  Robert Ingersoll

22.  Bernie Sanders

23.  Eugene Debs

24.  Norton I

25.  Woodrow Wilson

26.  Lyndon B. Johnson

27.  John F., Robert, and Ted Kennedy

28.  Theodore Roosevelt

29.  Eleanor Roosevelt

30.  Franklin D. Roosevelt

31.  Dwight Eisenhower

32.  Abraham Lincoln

33.  George Marshall

34.  Elizabeth Warren

35.  Barack Obama

36.  Earl Warren

37.  Robert Reich

38.  Jerry Brown

39.  Rut Bader Ginsburg

40.  Al Gore

41.  Hillary Clinton

42.  Clarence Darrow

Authors and Journalists

43.  Mark Twain

44.  Edward R. Murrow

45.  Flannery O’Connor

46.  Willa Cather

47.  Herman Melville

48.  Walt Whitman

49.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

50.  Nellie Bly

51.  James Baldwin

52.  Allen Ginsberg

53.  Joan Didion

54.  Ernest Hemingway

55.  Howard Zinn

56.  Langston Hughes

57.  Jane Mayer

58.  Hunter S. Thompson

59.  Toni Morrison

Artists

60.  Mary Blair

61.  Louis Comfort Tiffany

62.  Julia Morgan

63.  Maxfield Parrish

64.  Frank Lloyd Wright

65.  Ansel Adams

66.  Dorothea Lange

67.  Bill Watterson

68.  Gary Larson

69.  Aaron McGruder

70.  Winsor McKay

71.  Dr. Seuss

72.  Roy Lichtenstein

73.  Buckminster Fuller

74.  Philip Johnson

75.  Thomas Nast

76.  Will Eisner

77.  Art Spiegelman

78.  Edward Gorey

79.  Keith Haring

Performers and Entertainers

80.  Duke Ellington

81.  Miles Davis

82.  Martha Graham

83.  Jim Henson

84.  Aaron Copland

85.  Louis Armstrong

86.  George Carlin

87.  Lin-Manuel Miranda

88.  Bob Dylan

89.  Pete Seeger

90.  Phil Ochs

91.  Joan Baez

92.  Michael Moore

93.  Stanley Kubrick

94.  Aaron Sorkin

95.  Rod Serling

96.  Jon Stewart

97.  Harry Houdini

98.  Penn and Teller

99.  Orson Welles

100.                      Francis Ford Coppola

101.                      Robert Johnson

102.                      George Gershwin

103.                      Don Hertzfeldt

104.                      Bob Newhart

105.                      Taylor Mac

106.                      Matt Groening

Educators and Academics

107.                      Booker T. Washington

108.                      Horace Mann

109.                      John Dewey

110.                      Carl Sagan

111.                      Jared Diamond

112.                      Amory Lovins

113.                      Paul Krugman

114.                      Clark Kerr

115.                      Ken Burns

116.                      Daniel Quinn

Founders

117.                      George Washington

118.                      Thomas Jefferson

119.                      John Adams

120.                      Benjamin Franklin

121.                      Thomas Paine

122.                      James Madison

Scientists and Naturalists

123.                      John Muir

124.                      Rachel Carson

125.                      Frederick Law Olmsted

126.                      Stephen Mather

127.                      Wright Brothers

128.                      Nikola Tesla

129.                      Thomas Edison

130.                      Willard Libby

131.                      Claire Patterson

132.                      EO Wilson

133.                      Carl Akeley

134.                      Thomas Hunt Morgan

135.                      Jonas Salk

136.                      Grace Hopper

137.                      Diane Fossey

138.                      Richard Feynman

139.                      Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason

Native Peoples

140.                      Geronimo

141.                      Tecumseh

142.                      Ishi

143.                      Zitkala-Sa

144.                      Sitting Bull

145.                      John Ross

Maybe I will make the painting - maybe not. The choice, after all, is not entirely mine. But just to be on the safe side, I took the first step and started cartooning it out, to get an idea of layout and particular juxtapositions / contrasts I would want: