My cultural New Year's resolutions

2011 is here, lying before us like a great unopened book. And here are the resolutions I hope will see me through it.

1. Listen to "classic" LPs I have so far ignored in my lifetime. While no-one could claim to know everything, my perverse, wilful obsession with electronica over the years has meant I've spent most of my days ignoring established mainstream records that are cornerstones of the canon. I'm no ignoramus, but to take two stark examples, I don't own The White Album or Are You Experienced? *makes embarrassed face*

2. At the same time, I must dig deeper into the realms of the obscure. Websites like A Strangely Isolated Place or Killed in Cars make me realise I have only scratched the surface in my appreciation of the modern undeground. When Michael Pisaro / Taku Sugimoto's 2 seconds LP is riding high on many people's end-of-year lists, it tells me I am not looking hard enough.

3. Listen to more classical music. With Radio 3's Mozart marathon this month comes the thought that I've largely ignored classical music in recent years. I'm sure I'm not alone, but when I make the effort, it brings great pleasure. Effort - that's the problem here. But for a start I could give Boulez' Piano Sonatas 1-3 a listen, after pretty much letting them rot in my room for about six years. On a less severe scale, I could give Don Giovanni a proper listen, seeing as I've had it for about 15 years now. Also should tackle the early Beethoven symphonies, my double CD of Ligeti, Adam's Nixon In China, and those Schoenberg CDs I have casually listened to now and again without ever really plugging away at them.

4. Avoid everything about Mad Men until the 4th series box set comes out in March. Having finally finished series 3, I have had a couple of narrow escapes when flicking through the TV reviews. Does he die? Does he marry someone else? Does he get capped? It's the best thing on TV since the Sopranos, anyway, so I don't want to ruin it for myself and the missus.

5. Read more. 2010 was a pretty good year for books for me. Among the highlights, I managed to get through Peter Ackroyd's enormous London: The Biography, read Simon Schama's beautiful epic on the French Revolution, Citizens, and Franzen's intermittently brilliant The Corrections. Best of the lot had to be the utterly gripping All The President's Men, which I picked up after a seminar on investigative journalism with David Banks. It really is a parable of the journalistic quest in its purest form - like The Old Man and The Sea with notepads. For 200 pages, I could barely put it down. The journalist's equivalent of the Bible, really, and compulsory reading for anyone thinking of leaving the industry. Still hard to believe I'd ignored it for so many years.


6. Finish all those box sets. I was given a John Cassavetes box set for Christmas in 2009, and have watched just one film from it so far. I still have a string of Ealing comedies to watch from a box set I got about five years ago. I have a box set of Claude Chabrol films I have not even OPENED yet. The same applies to the Northern Exposure and Brideshead Revisited DVD collections. Maybe a month off work would help.

7. Finish The Wire. This resolution is like number 6, but I HAVE actually started The Wire, and really liked it. Problem here is that the wife is not a fan, so it's hard to free-up TV time to watch it. Have been stuck on episode 2 of season 4 for about six months. God only knows what Stringer Bell would do to me, if he wasn't already dead.



8. Go through the back catalogues of my favourite Krautrock bands. Tangerine Dream, a band I first came across at 16, are case in point. I have some of their records, but nothing from their great late 60s/early 70s period, apart from bits on compilations. Must also do the same with Can, Neu, Faust, Popol Vuh. Especially Popol Vuh.

9. Expand my horizons. Awesome Tapes from Africa and Woebot's peerless (now defunct) blog are two ways of showing myself I know nothing about 90 per cent of the world's music. Which must change.

10. Finally, discover the funk classics from the seventies - whose merits I have only recently begun to understand. From Funkadelic's Maggot Brain to the neglected mid-career albums of James Brown, there is so much good stuff out there that I need to get my teeth into. Sly and the Family Stone too, and - not sure if it counts as funk - but the dozens of records released by the remarkable Stevie Wonder. Have been listening to Innervisions quite a bit recently, but had spent years seeing Wonder as a bit of a novelty. Could not have been more wrong.