If you missed it in 1986 (I was 8), The Manhattan Project is kind of a cross between “Dr. Strangelove,” and “E.T.” It ends in a sweaty finish that is arguably the best bomb-defusing scene in movie history. The finale is short. It is peppered with pithy jokes, and it features beautiful back-and-forth between John Lithgow, John Mahoney, Richard Jenkins and the teenage star Christopher Collet.

But amid real nuclear catastrophe, Wikileaks cables, and a series of young, Internet-savvy uprisings across the world, The Manhattan Project poses a surprisingly relevant allegory about how governments and people use technology. It’s also a time capsule of not how tech has changed in the last 25 years, but how it’s stayed the same, and how we’re really trying to do the same things we’ve always been trying, only better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it.

Written and directed by Woody Allen writing partner Marshall Brickman, the pacing from playful family/teen movie to a thriller climax with a deft political statement is impressive. In fact, I rewatched it in a couple sittings on Netflix, and found the first half kind of dated and goofy, like Goonies or Monster Squad. But the final 45 minutes are brilliant and mature. Bordering on preachy, but with some nice winks from Lithgow and Mahoney. The underlying message is a common one in 80s nuke fiction: mutually assured destruction is fucked. Particularly when all of the people perpetuating it are, at heart, good and caring. The metaphor of all parties each cutting wires simultaneously is a little heavy, but sweet.

But what really got me thinking about The Manhattan Project is its use of technology. I watched a documentary recently that posed that all technological advances are basically reinventions of inventions from the 1980s. The iPod is a walkman. The iPhone is a car phone (or perhaps a bag phone). VCR to the DVR, DVD, home streaming. And so on. The Manhattan Project has a couple of instances that serve as almost eerie demonstrations of that.

First, the teenage main characters are on a bus, on the run with a preposterously small and nimble homemade nuclear weapon. Paul looks over a sleeping commuter’s shoulder and he’s watching a portable television set on his lap, about the size of a small microwave, with a 4×4 in. screen and one earbud. Paul and Jenny (denim-clad, liberated teen played by Cynthia Nixon) trade off with the earbud and watch the news, where they are being reported as domestic terrorists on the run. Keep in mind, this is 25 years before smartphones or tablets, but serving exactly the same purpose they eventually would.

Later, as Paul’s nearing his showdown with the army guys and nuclear scientists, Jenny decides the only way she can try to save them from being killed in a cover up is if she rallies as many people as she can to the site of the nuclear weapons plant. She picks up her landline in the family kitchen, calls a friend (played by Robert Sean Leonard!) and says:

“All of our lives are stake. When you hang up, call two people. It doesn’t matter who. Tell them each of them to call two people. And then those people call two more people. Tell them all to go to…”

It’s not genius, it’s a phone tree. But still, when I watched it recently, it actually took me a half a second to figure out why she would do that. And then I thought, oh like Twitter. It was a distinctively teenage tactic, as all novel communication is, for better or worse. A flurry of dialing can spread a dirty rumor just like a mass text of a naked teenager. But in this case, an offline social network rallies the kids in the town to organize against the U.S. military.

Meanwhile at the nuke factory, Paul is under threat from a team of ear-pieced and walkie-carrying army guys with long-range sniper rifles, TSA x-ray scanners and surveilance cameras. No doubt all pretty cool-looking at the release date.

What I’m getting at is not that The Manhattan Project’s technology seems silly in hindsight, but that it remains a shrewd fictional snapshot of technology doing what it’s always done: not changing how we communicate, but forcefully evolving the efficiency with which we already do so. Just as bomb-makers forcefully evolve the way we kill each other. Extending the reach of the voice, and extending the reach of the arm.

Governments use it to secure and control nations. People use it to subvert that control for better or worse, whether by phone tree, Facebook group or leaked State Department documents from an undisclosed location in Switzerland.

In the final scene, with little-to-no falling action before denuoument, Lithgow has defused the homemade nuke and redeemed himself as a man of science and not a mass murderer, saving New England from a 100 kiloton accidental nuclear explosion. He walks toward the exit, military assault rifles targeted on him, and shouts: “What are you going to do? Silence me? And him?” Here he opens a cargo door. “And all of them.” And the teenagers are crowded around outside.

“Too many secrets.” he shouts, resigned and exhausted. “Too many secrets.”

Twenty-five years later, it seems not much has changed. But the secrets are bigger, the nuclear disasters are real, and the phone trees are a hell of a lot better.

Within minutes of the email and website announcement of the NYT paywall details, Twitter was all aflutter.

Cory Doctorow made his rote attack against all things not free and open to the public. His basic argument is, this paywall is flawed as a way to keep freeloaders out of their content. It will piss people off, and people will stop linking to the Times because they won’t want to, by extension, piss of their readers.

The other general negative sentiment is that the site will hemorrhage traffic, lose ad revenue, etc. This may all be correct, but I’d wager, and the Times is wagering big time, that none of that matters.

I suspect those at the helm figured, we have a few important things going for us: First, a massive part of what people read and share on the Internet comes from us, at our great expense. Second, well-to-do people have and will pay handsomely for our content. Third, those same people increasingly don’t want the greasy grey paper that is attached to that content.

This paywall is less a paywall and more of a way to corral those people who live and die by the Times, and want access anyway they need it, at their fingertips daily. As it is, those people are either paying for the print edition and still using online heavily, or they are lost in the ocean with casual users.

Marco Arment, a smarter man than I on such matters, wondered why they wouldn’t just do a flat 5 bucks a month for all content. But in a way, it’s closer to the NPR pledge system than it is to what most consider a paywall. That’s where Doctorow is wrong. The Times isn’t trying to shut people out or stop freeloading.

It’s offering a firm nudge to the readers who are willing to pay (because those who aren’t can get around it if they are willing to dance a little), readers who use heavily (because you can access plenty without the wall dropping), and finding a way to skim a hefty revenue stream off of that top tier of consumers.

History shows only a few percent of free users will convert to paid users. What the Times is trying to do is somehow locate and charge only those users.

People who value good content will pay for it. They’ll buy the vinyl. The Times is trying to find the vinyl buyers and rake in a huge chunk of cash that will, hopefully, pay to keep the content coming.

They have to find that sweet spot of skimming money from the top, and not shutting down casual traffic, and along with it their massive influence on general chatter in the world.

But it’s in everyone’s best interests that the Times, one of the few shops out there that can still afford to experiment, figures out how to get Internet use to pay for news generation. Ads aren’t going to cut it, and the HuffPo model of not paying for reporting is, well, shit you’ve read HuffPo.

If the New York Times can’t figure it out, American journalism will go the way of the record companies.

I have a Kindle 3, the wifi-only version. I am very fond of my Kindle, and here’s one reason why. Reading a Sunday newspaper magazine, discovering a writer I’d never heard of who sounded very interesting, quick scan of the Kindle store on my phone discovers his autobiography, the large free sample downloads in seconds. I’m still at the table reading the magazine and flicking through the sample. I haven’t finished my beer and I’ve bought the book, which is loaded onto the Kindle, which is in the other room waiting for me to come and sit down as soon as I’ve finished my beer at the table. That’s the future I wanted.

The coincidence is not lost on me that the week I purchased a Kindle is the week Borders Books & Music — the big box version of a bookstore that I grew up on — filed bankruptcy and announced it would be closing 30% of its stores.

Nor do I take it lightly.

When I was an all-joints adolescent growing up in suburban Phoenix, Borders served as an entry point and an escape for me. In the same way media conglomerate Blockbuster introduced me to all the movies I’d never seen before (and my first job), so did the towering brick and mortar bookstore facilitate my introduction to the joys of reading, but also just spending time around books.

Borders was far better than the Waldenbooks of the mall (which they soon absorbed with the help of Kmart). You could just go to Borders and wander around and it was fun. Fun in the way I was just learning the library could be fun. You could sit down and read a book before buying. You could browse magazines. You could drink coffee. You could even listen to music you were curious about before shelling out the $13 they overcharged you and still do. (My second job was working in the CD section of the Best Buy next door, but that’s another blog post.)

I showered them with my minimum wage paychecks. And my life was rich with Camus, Salinger, Star Wars novels and issues of Rolling Stone, if not half-dressed high school girls.

After I went to college, the same Borders served as a sanctuary for my family when my mother went through her second divorce. We’d meet there and spend as much time as we needed. Catch up, plot our next move, share a paper.

So I’m tempted to shed a tear for Borders as I read about its demise, on digital
ink. But not so fast.

As big a role as Blockbuster, Tower Records and Borders all played in my young exposure to art, let’s be honest, they really shouldn’t have. They were there because they had annihilated smaller competition with economies of scale and mergers long ago.

These days, I download. I read on a computer screen. I try things before I buy them. I read them on Kindle. But the same weekend the Kindle arrived, I went to the library. The prior weekend I picked up Chris Ware’s new Acme Novelty Library, and a cherished Doug Coupland book from my local friend-owned bookstore. Just to own. Another friend at Floating World, not Amazon, will ship my next bundle of stapled-together comics.

Borders is dead, but print not quite.

I remember not long after I moved to Portland, where I found a mecca of independent book and music stores, I got to thinking.

All my life growing up, I never knew what it was like to happily pay an individual for a product he or she sells. To feel good about buying something, not just to gain an item, but to support something you believe in. To see the face of the person your money goes to, and to know that your money helps them continue providing a place that you don’t just frequent – you love.

That’s what the Borders and the Blockbusters and the Towers rob the consumer of, robbed me of. The teenager starves for something real, and he deserves someone real offering it to him.

So I read on a matte grey screen with my $20 a month digital NYT subscription about the toppling of brick and mortar media giants. And I know that my next paper books will be purchased soon, and from someone I know, someone small and nearby.

I might shed a small tear for Borders Books & Music. But if we have to put an epitaph on its gravestone, maybe it should read: Live by the free market, die by the free market.

No, it turns out, they do not die. Nor do they all hibernate. Jamie did some basic research for me, and found that squirrels (or “squee-rells” as her aunt calls them) get fat, hide little stashes of food near their home trees, and just hang out in their nests until it warms up. This little guy was apparently making a trip to the ground to grab some food.

They build pretty good little nests, or dreys, out of whatever kind of leaves and twigs they can find. And then they just hunker down. They’ll stay in bed for days without leaving. But here’s the interesting thing: Squirrels are solitary little animals. They have their own little dreys and food stashes. But, when it gets really cold, that changes temporarily.

The lone squirrel will allow other squirrels to climb into the nest with him. In fact, if it’s cold enough, several squirrels will climb into one nest and huddle up next to each other to share body heat and stay warm. Then it warms up, and they leave. Or as the painfully adorable squirrels.org states, “once the temperature rises, the guests will be on their way.”

Cold has a way of messing with things. We didn’t have cold where I grew up, at least not real cold. Not snow days or frozen pipes. It snowed a few flakes every now and then and we would go outside and stare at it. When I go out and the city is covered in snow, it’s like I live in an entirely different place. Things I walk by every day and ignore suddenly become visible. There’s too much to see most days to get a good look. When you cover most of it with the cold blank of snow, things appear.

Streets lose their lanes and cars disappear. Dogs lose their sense of smell. More pets get lost in the winter than any other time of year because their senses are dulled by the static air. They don’t know where home is if they go too far.

Stay indoors and enjoy Wintry Mix on 8tracks, with songs from Salem, Glasser, Mount Kimbie and more. Invite some strangers into join you on the couch. When it gets warm again, make them leave.

Deerhunter – He Would Have Laughed:

Or to put a literal, less-Pitchfork point to it, it’s listening to music consistently for weeks, then suddenly and unexpectedly realizing that it contains one of the best songs you’ve ever heard. With either song, I distinctly remember hitting a point in the track where I jumped out of my seat to look at the song and then couldn’t stop listening.

Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened:

It’s the kind of music that doesn’t put its cards on the table right away. You might find an entirely new song four minutes into a song you’ve heard a hundred times. Which isn’t to say that it’s inaccessible; Microcastle and Halcyon Digest (the two records I’m familiar with) are loaded with hooks. But some of the best moments in Deerhunter songs pop up after morphing from something else. And then you never want the song to stop playing, except for the fact that there might be another astonishing moment in another track you’ve already heard a hundred times.

Helicopter and He Would Have Laughed Live

Denver’s packed in with snow and 7 degrees. It’s been a horrible few days. Nice to get under a blanket, curl up with a loved one or maybe a pet, and take in a beautiful storm and a happy ending.

If I had to project a narrative onto my favorite music this year, it would have to be the album prevailing. There are six or seven on this list that are better as a whole than parts. The other side is that many of my favorite songs aren’t on here because I didn’t like the whole album as much. So, what you will. Anyway, enough jabber. Onto the jabber.

10. Titus Andronicus, The Monitor
Song: A More Perfect Union
Self-indulgent, punk bar band rock epic with 7-14 minute songs, and a loose theme of the Civil War. That’s right, as in The Monitor and The Merrimac. This band far exceeded its last album, with an invigorating set of songs that almost lives up to its aspirations, which alone make for a pretty great release.

9. Morgan Packard, Moment Against Elsewhere
Song: Unveil
There may be better ambient releases from 2010, but this one came at me from nowhere and I think it’s really beautiful on headphones, at work or at home. The minimalist piano reminds me of some Erik Satie or even jazz. Just enough melody to keep it interesting.

8. Robyn, Body Talk
Song: Dancing On My Own
Robyn put out more good dance pop in 2010 than Katy Perry, Kesha, and Christina Aguilera combined. The subject matter isn’t pandering, and the music is complex enough to satisfy rock snobs. And there’s Dancehall Queen.

7. Pantha Du Prince, Black Noise
Song: Satellite Sniper
The number of sounds in this album or on each track would be staggering if they weren’t all so gentle and organic. Wood and metal, clicks and jingles, very pretty. That said, there’s a lot going on and plenty of moody tracks, so it’s no easy listening. A hefty minimal electronic record.

6. Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Song: All of the Lights
There are many superlatives being thrown around about this release, but that song has the best drum beat in the history of hip hop music. It’s not nice music. A lot of these songs make me very uncomfortable, as all good music should.

5. Sharon Van Etten, Epic
Song: Don’t Do It
Sharon Van Etten’s first record was beautiful, and crushingly dark. Epic is no ray of sunshine, but the range of emotions suggests someone who can see at least a bit of light in the distance. Van Etten has soft, gorgeous voice, and her second record has even better songwriting. (It’s the second record we’ve all been hoping would come from Bon Iver.)

4. The National, High Violet
Song: England
This isn’t the breakthrough that Boxer was, but more music like that 2007 tearjerking chamber rock was a pleasure to listen to this year. They continue to be among my favorite bands.

3. Grinderman 2
Song: Heathen Child
The video for Heathen Child is nightmarish, psychedelic, sexy, terrifying and funny. All can be said about Nick Cave’s second Grinderman album. It even has some tender moments, setting it apart from the first. I love everything about it.

2. LCD Soundsystem, This is Happening
Song: Dance Yrself Clean
I, along with many other aging men trying to analyze their lives while remaining somewhat cool, feel a kinship with James Murphy. Of course, none of us are like Murphy, who at 40 is now an official rock star. He remains bold, funny and insightful. And he’s cranking out dance beats that draw those losing their edge and young clubgoers alike. I hope it’s not truly the last LCD record, but if it is, “Home” is a great note to end on.

1. Arcade Fire, The Suburbs
Song: We Used To Wait
“The last defender of the sprawl Said, ‘Where do you kids live?’ Well sir, if you only knew What the answer was worth Been searching every corner Of the earth”

The Suburbs explores the lives of people who don’t recognize their homes and live worlds away from friends. When I watch Arcade Fire perform, they look alien, but I know them. It’s that conflict with origin and change that makes their music so powerful. Such a concept album could have been horribly trite, but each song is sad and triumphant. It’s full of eerie, sincere, celebratory rock anthems. This made the top of my list by leaps and bounds, and Arcade Fire continues to be the most unique, intelligent and emotional band around.

So that’s it. And a bunch more, and a bunch that I’ll remember and regret not including. And several others that I’ll grow to like more and more in 2011, 2012 and 2013. Maybe even some of these I end up disliking down the road. Never know.

But for now, painful sadness at not including The XX, Suckers, Yeasayer, Mount Kimbie, Besnard Lakes, Brian Eno, Daft Punk, DEERHUNTER!, Girl Talk, Gorillaz, High On Fire, The Hold Steady, Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Neil Young, Red River, Rogue Wave, Rufus Wainright, Shout Out Louds, on and on…curse this list and you Roderick.

Building my affection is this video for “Drunk Girls,” featuring some kind of Panda…well, just watch it.

This Is Happening