Dave’s Top 10 of 2006.
As in the I still can’t believe that it’s no longer 2005. God I miss 2004. Finish my construction. Whatnot.
Some of my favorite things, most of which have some tangential relation to 2006
http://www.rogue.com/brews.html#hazelnut
This is probably my favorite beer. The only reason the probably is there is because I can only find it in one place in LA and it’s a ridiculous 5.69 a 22 ounce bottle. I’d pay double that in a bar. It’s just that good. Creamy, tasteful, sweet and smooth, it’s a got the smoothness of Guinness with the complexities of a winter ale.
Dane Cook backlash.
As per blog style, I write: for all of the things I can’t stand about (insert object), I actually liked: The commercial for Employee of the month, in the clip when Dax from Punked yells “This is an 82 Honda. HOW DARE YOU!”
Some things are irritating but you can’t understand why you have a personal dislike of them. In the scheme of life rules, the more you dislike something, the more popular it gets. IE Steaze and I hating Dane Cook (seriously, women LOVE him) came before his HBO show, but as he got bigger, we would go out of our way to rip on him. We could be watching the Daily Show, be talking about work, and insert a 3 minute digression to work in an aside about how much he sucks.
Things like this wrack with the mindset of society, and it renders us either dumb or needlessly intelligent in trying to dispel why they can’t stand it. You will either hear the diatribe of a college kid on how vastly flawed the approach of global leaders is on their soapbox issue, (like my sister explaining her protest of Victoria’s Secret because it destroys virgin forest. But to be fair, as soon as I heard virgin and Vickie’s in the same sentence, I stopped paying attention) t’other side is like that of a 7th grader trying to explain why they don’t like Brokeback Mountain (it’s gay)
Thankfully, most of the writers for TV parodies don’t like Dane Cook. The problem is that the top three TV satirists:
South Park, SNL, and Daily Show, all stayed away from him. South Park probably didn’t want to waste time, same with Daily Show. SNL currently sucks at the Dane Cook teet, and so they are right out.
Which meant that, oy, it was Mad TV and Family Guy were the first to come up with a Dane Cook Comedy Vaccine. They simply made him out to be a loud, spiky haired doofus who says the same words over and over again. Subtle it’s not, welcome it is.
Comedy Vaccine’s are the solution to problems like these. They initiate a vocabulary for the masses and for the intellectuals by creating a parody Golem, we can laugh at the recreation because it exemplifies everything we don’t like about the object into a laughingstock.
Will Ferrell never will be more socially prominent than when he’s doing his W, and he’s as good of an example of a parody Golem as a Comedy Vaccine than anything else. While many look better playing a W, others sound better, and others are written better, Ferrell succeeds because he does all three the best on average. It’s easy to call Bush an idiot in public, it’s more successful to just say “Strategery” to reinforce a point or standing.
And by the way the shocker is two in the pink, one in the stink, no thumb is involved. I don’t care if you call it the S’Fuer, but go to hell. Dane Cook, you have become the rent a homosexual diversion for comedy. And you’re not gay. That’s not good.
++++
The Dems winning the house
Sure it’s two years late, but it’s a good sign that above anything, we’re not afraid anymore. Fear has ruled the choices we have made, and permeated our better senses since 9/11. It’s nice to know that we have learned a lesson, and on the mass level, wanted not to continue.
These dems could be terrible just as likely as they could be awful. But this one was about the general populous not about the ultimate idea. This was more a referendum on Bush than the impeachment was for Clinton.
++++
“The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living”
It’s certainly not the best album I heard all year. But there is something to be said about making an album that is just like the ones the artist made before, i.e. tales about living your 20’s. I like this album because I like Mike Skinner and because I feel like the problems I deal with are the ones he is talking about. Sometimes it’s easier to mellow out chemically than to reason with one’s problems.
It has 3 of the top 100 cuts I heard all year, but the remainder are spotty at worst. Songs about masturbation, doing too many drugs, and the 20 something realization of “momento mori” are ones I’ll listen to.
++++
Movie wise, I have yet to see Little Children, a film by Todd Field who I think made the best “adult” film of this decade with “In the Bedroom.” If you have never seen that film, rent it immediately. It’s the cinema that deals with few realities any person wants to deal with, and does so with a sympathetic, pathetic, and vengeful eye. If not for Band of Brothers or the 2001 World Series, this is the best work of art of that year.
And it’s hard for me to call “The Departed” the best film of the year, since I haven’t seen more than 10 in theaters, and while that’s my favorite even if I enjoyed Apocalypto just as much, it’s almost a backup choice. I would love to join the impassioned bandwagon of a great film, I just didn’t see one.
This is the first time in 5 years when I can honestly say the best of the year was not only the best, but the best by a considerable margin.
Just Off the list.
Borat – funny, but it’s caught in the nether region of faux reality. What is staged, what is real, and what is coherent as a character if half the time he’s acting a role and the other half he’s eliciting response? While I laughed a lot, it was hard to enjoy after because of a flimsy underline.
Jackass 2 – I liked it more that Borat. Mainly because these people were willing to whore themselves out for the gag.
10. Heroes – Sure it’s ripped from X men and other comic books. Sure it’s hokey (Save the Cheerleader, save the world. Come on, that’s the best you could do!?!) Sure it’s goofy and Ali Larter’s character is a quagmire of plot and reality issues, but I cannot turn away. While Battlestar Galactica was a far better show, half of the episodes in the run are from 05 and/or will be in 07, Heroes triumphs the serial fantasy shows because it’s in its first run. Sci-fi and fantasy always can come out of the gate swinging, while comedy can take up to three years. Heroes may be crap in three months, but the appeal and joy of this first run were special. Everyone at my work talked about this show (and they also talked about Lost) and while everyone had complaints, everyone, including me, enjoyed this on a basic, child like level. While Transformers, GI Joe, and MASK may be gone (until Hollywood remakes them as features), this was the first TV show in primetime that equaled the joy of Saturday Morning Cartoons.
9. South Park, Season 10. I don’t know if there was a bad episode in the bunch. The only weak one was the finale, which retread all the sports clichés. Maybe this was an early knock at Rocky Balboa, but this was done better in “The losing edge” episode.
However, this episode, like “the Losing Edge” were made watchable because of the third act, both which used the sport clichés to fantastic results.
It’s a funny episode, yet it treads on familiar ground, something this season of South Park did not.
This season attacked Family Guy with perfection, it had a great 2 part episode about time travel, and it had Mr. Mackey asking “Oh, so you think it’s funny? How would you like it, if someone came into your house, opened up their butt cheeks, maybe spread them apart a little, and let out a big fudge dragon.”
Minge and Gary. A great Halloween episode. And the phrase “Nice.”
8. A World of Hurt – The Drive by Truckers. (The closing track off of “A Blessing and a Curse”) When the opening lines are about suicide and whores in the light of encroaching death it’s a hard shot to swallow. To make a song that is about living for the next day’s futility shaded in the poorest life that ultimately makes you care about everything good in life, well… it’s great to be alive.
7. Ten Silver Drops – The Secret Machines – it’s not the best of the collection, but at the same time, this perpetuates the love I want to live in. Something about endless musing about the loves that go pear shaped. Some guy, sitting alone in his room is listening to the album and reminiscing about the worst parts of his relationship with a girl.
Albums about heartbreak are not rare. Rob Gordon said it at the beginning of High Fidelity: What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
If anything, music is a gateway to a gateway away from life. It’s the simple answer to the crushing reality of life. And it’s a sick addiction, and the best notion of this idea is that in the movie, Rob plays “you’re gonna miss me” by the 13th Street Elevators, one of the all time great tell off songs of the genre.
Many songs are about being heartbroken. Many blame the other “You’re Cheatin’ Heart” others blame themselves “See Frank Sinatra.” And those two forms dominate the landscape, more so now since Beyonce and crew made a career about moving on and being with the best man.
Songs that deal with the loneliness and misery without mentioning the cause are the most deadly of all, if only because they allow a person to wallow in the misery.
Ten Silver Drops isn’t that great of an album musically. But simply for the idea of being “alone, jealous, and stoned” and extrapolating on it, well, it’s like listening to Graceland again, in a different mood.
Side note: on my Itunes playlist, Alone Jealous and Stoned” is #1 for the year in terms of play.
2. “Sweet Talk” by Spank Rock. The 2nd best thing to come out of Baltimore this year.
3. Woman by Wolfmother. Call me an old school elitist when it comes to rock, but sometimes the simple joys sound a little bit better to my tastes.
4. Strausberg and The World Was a Mess but His Hair was perfect – Both by the Rakes. One perfectly short and one perfectly over the edge long.
5. Wolf like Me – TV on the Radio. Still digesting the album, and even if it sounds like Bloc Party 2, I’ll be damned if this thing doesn’t get me every time, even with the old “lets go slow for a bit” lull.
6. PTI podcasts. Yeah. Podcasts are so 2005. PTI is my favorite news show. It’s 30 minutes + of sports news jabbering. My father “hates” this show. I’ll also note, he never liked sports, and thinks that it’s almost absurd that people know who won the Super Bowl in 1999 (Denver in 99, but for the 99 season, it was St Louis over Tennessee on the goal line stand, which I have to note for anyone with a column, if the Titans had scored, they wouldn’t have won. They would have scored 6, and they still had to hit a PAT to tie. If they wanted to win, they would have had to go for 2. In the 99 era of sports, no body in the NFL went for it. It would have gone to OT, and the Titans D was not good enough to stop one of the best offenses in NFL history after 4 quarters. If the game was 23-18, this would have been a great game. It was a good game with a great 4th quarter, but that’s it. The 98 Super Bowl with Denver and Green Bay is the best, with Carolina vs. New England and New England in 2004 and vs. St Louis in 2002) This is what I talk about and my father can’t stand. This is why I love PTI and my father hates it. If I didn’t look exactly like my father, I would be sure I was switched at birth.
5. Life on Mars – I hate cop shows. Hate them, and on two separate occasions chastised my father and sister about liking and referencing CSI in real life terms in a 3 day period. Yet I have two cop shows in my top 5. First off, the #1 choice is above and beyond the best thing to come out this year. #2, Life on Mars was more than a cop show, and was as far away from a procedural as one can find on TV.
I thought about doing a post comparing Life on Mars and The Wire when I was going through the first seasons of both in September. Both are not the run of the mill TV shows. LOM is a BBC production, which has produced Cracker and Prime Suspect, two great cop mini-series/ shows. LOM is a cop show with a Lost “where the hell am I” atmosphere. It’s also a show with a central premise that takes everything 30 years back in cop tech and life, making everything about the show nostalgic and old school when it comes to the meat and potatoes parts of the show. For 8 episodes it was one of the most engrossing shows because it had
A. An overarching plot.
B. A genuine cool premise.
C. It was a testosterone fueled cop show, something that disappeared until season 2 of the Wire. (Note, I have Prime Suspect on this list, where the female is the lead. This is not about men being men, it’s about the raw idea of enforcement opposed the blind eyes of justice. When OJ, Jacko, and Richard Blake get off the hook, while Martha Stewart goes to jail, and the head of Enron dies in his mansion in Aspen, it’s easy to say media law isn’t fulfilling. That’s why the simple answers and brute force of line crossing cops is easy to feel reassured by on TV but miserable in real life. The American individual can decide right vs. wrong far better than the American People.)
D. Smoky offices and cops in leather jackets boozing on duty in small pubs.
4. The Surrogates (Comic Book) – A 5 part series I am sure will be made into a feature in the next 3 years, this is a graphic novel centered on the premise that people can live (vicariously) in robot/human synthetic bodies. It’s somewhere between The Matrix and Blade Runner in terms of Sci-fi setting, it’s almost an alternate reality for living, as it is now possible to live in and experience the world in a new shell; one can become another gender, athletic type, gender, etc. The positive result is that people lose racial and gender bias; the negative result is that people are merely living a half-virtual reality, they may get short of breath via nanodes, but they aren’t really breathing hard, and hence aren’t really living. In the middle of this, everyone looks like they want to. The protagonists in the series come from a cult of religious zealots (term used only to imply drive, not belief) who decry the idea of improving on God’s creation. A consummate look on the coming impacts of technology, plastic surgery, and the notion of body perfection, and the true notion of beauty in the world, even if it’s set 40 some years in the future.
3. Mark Nason and Antik Denim – While I don’t claim to be a fashionista, I have started to care about how I look these days. Maybe it’s LA getting to me, but part of it comes from the fact that my wardrobe hasn’t changed since 2001 or so. Mark Nason makes ridiculously gaudy boots for men; they have crosses, dragons, and flaunting design flair that scream videogame fantasy. Antik Denim is a jeans line that features styles named “Elvis,” “Bronson,” and “McQueen.” The jeans are somewhat mass produced, but each one is scuffed and designed by hand, giving each pair an individual look. While the latter is a recent trend in fashion, the idea of both is something I can cotton to: while women have been given fashions for other women and men to look at, these are two brands that are built for men to wear for themselves. It’s one thing to look good in a suit, it’s another to build the wardrobe with pieces of clothing that look and feel like accessories to a look than a fashion statement; it’s the stylistic end of RPG videogames, where buying a piece makes an wardrobe seem like a battle outfit. I may be nerdy in thinking this, but I don’t know if I have dressed as well in my life. Part of me says this is a means to getting girls to approach me, but I care more about looking like a action star/ vampire hunter to myself than pussy. (Why do I put this at 3? Because I am hoping this is the beginning of male oriented fashion, if anything, we deserve to go out looking like samurais, cowboys, or 70’s style cops (Serpico or Bullit). So what if straight men may now care about clothes on a level 50% that of a normal woman, I say, it’s about time we started looking like the badasses we want to be instead of the Ralph Lauren prep or skater kid extremes; we have the suit and tux for the work and formal, it’s kind of cool and nice to feel boyish and masculine at the same time in party gear. I will not be surprised if the utility belt some how makes its way into everyday fashion within 2 years.
2. Pearls Before Swine (Comic Strip) – The first strip since the best days of Dilbert worth going to the funny pages in the newspaper, and the first one since Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes retired in 95 and 96 that actually qualifies as genius. It’s morbid, cynical, stupid, and loving; often in a mere 4 panels. Featuring 4 characters, Pig (stupid but happy), Rat (smart, but miserable) Goat (smarter than Rat, but a hermit from the world) and Zebra (loving but doomed to be eaten by the killer crocs) it’s not a comic strip as much as it is a forum for Steven Patsis, who through his 4 main and a few other recurring regulars, is able to offer a slighted look at life that is mostly miserable, occasionally heartfelt, and always hilarious. The greatest part about the strip is its’ self awareness, as the author is a participant and acknowledges it’s medium and counterparts. It mocks Cathy, the characters show up in Family Circus and Marmaduke, and the characters live in the world of the comics page, both blessed and cursed by the trappings.
1. The Wire. The only “top 10 TV shows of the year” list that I read this year that didn’t have The Wire as #1 was IGN.com. They had Battlestar as number one, which, in all fairness, is about right for a nerd show and site. Scratch that, TV guide had 24 as #1, though both had the Wire as #2.
In 2001, I watched Band of Bothers. To this date, it’s still the best thing I have seen this decade in terms of performed media. However it was #2 to the World Series of that year for the best things I saw in 2001. Both I rated high because of the effects of 9/11. BoB gave hope that the American Ideal, although misguided and faulty at times, still has the right basic belief system for triumph against evil; simply the good instilled by the founding fathers in the Constitution and Bill of Rights allows American Citizens to sacrifice their life for the good of the country. The 2001 World Series was the living example of the “never say die” attitude of this country. I don’t know if anything will mean more to me than that series, even if the 2004 ALCS felt better.
So what about The Wire?
I have written about it too many times, but season 4 of The Wire was more than special, it was a once in a decade masterpiece. I don’t know care to explain why it’s so great, or even why I evoked comparisons to events 5 years ago, other than the notion that when greatness finds you, it’s hard to get out of one’s system. Everything from this point on in the decade will be compared against The Wire, Band of Brothers, and the 2001 World Series.
My top 2 of the decade became a top 3 list of the unassailable. It’s going to take something extremely special to get into this list.
Some of my favorite things, most of which have some tangential relation to 2006
http://www.rogue.com/brews.html#hazelnut
This is probably my favorite beer. The only reason the probably is there is because I can only find it in one place in LA and it’s a ridiculous 5.69 a 22 ounce bottle. I’d pay double that in a bar. It’s just that good. Creamy, tasteful, sweet and smooth, it’s a got the smoothness of Guinness with the complexities of a winter ale.
Dane Cook backlash.
As per blog style, I write: for all of the things I can’t stand about (insert object), I actually liked: The commercial for Employee of the month, in the clip when Dax from Punked yells “This is an 82 Honda. HOW DARE YOU!”
Some things are irritating but you can’t understand why you have a personal dislike of them. In the scheme of life rules, the more you dislike something, the more popular it gets. IE Steaze and I hating Dane Cook (seriously, women LOVE him) came before his HBO show, but as he got bigger, we would go out of our way to rip on him. We could be watching the Daily Show, be talking about work, and insert a 3 minute digression to work in an aside about how much he sucks.
Things like this wrack with the mindset of society, and it renders us either dumb or needlessly intelligent in trying to dispel why they can’t stand it. You will either hear the diatribe of a college kid on how vastly flawed the approach of global leaders is on their soapbox issue, (like my sister explaining her protest of Victoria’s Secret because it destroys virgin forest. But to be fair, as soon as I heard virgin and Vickie’s in the same sentence, I stopped paying attention) t’other side is like that of a 7th grader trying to explain why they don’t like Brokeback Mountain (it’s gay)
Thankfully, most of the writers for TV parodies don’t like Dane Cook. The problem is that the top three TV satirists:
South Park, SNL, and Daily Show, all stayed away from him. South Park probably didn’t want to waste time, same with Daily Show. SNL currently sucks at the Dane Cook teet, and so they are right out.
Which meant that, oy, it was Mad TV and Family Guy were the first to come up with a Dane Cook Comedy Vaccine. They simply made him out to be a loud, spiky haired doofus who says the same words over and over again. Subtle it’s not, welcome it is.
Comedy Vaccine’s are the solution to problems like these. They initiate a vocabulary for the masses and for the intellectuals by creating a parody Golem, we can laugh at the recreation because it exemplifies everything we don’t like about the object into a laughingstock.
Will Ferrell never will be more socially prominent than when he’s doing his W, and he’s as good of an example of a parody Golem as a Comedy Vaccine than anything else. While many look better playing a W, others sound better, and others are written better, Ferrell succeeds because he does all three the best on average. It’s easy to call Bush an idiot in public, it’s more successful to just say “Strategery” to reinforce a point or standing.
And by the way the shocker is two in the pink, one in the stink, no thumb is involved. I don’t care if you call it the S’Fuer, but go to hell. Dane Cook, you have become the rent a homosexual diversion for comedy. And you’re not gay. That’s not good.
++++
The Dems winning the house
Sure it’s two years late, but it’s a good sign that above anything, we’re not afraid anymore. Fear has ruled the choices we have made, and permeated our better senses since 9/11. It’s nice to know that we have learned a lesson, and on the mass level, wanted not to continue.
These dems could be terrible just as likely as they could be awful. But this one was about the general populous not about the ultimate idea. This was more a referendum on Bush than the impeachment was for Clinton.
++++
“The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living”
It’s certainly not the best album I heard all year. But there is something to be said about making an album that is just like the ones the artist made before, i.e. tales about living your 20’s. I like this album because I like Mike Skinner and because I feel like the problems I deal with are the ones he is talking about. Sometimes it’s easier to mellow out chemically than to reason with one’s problems.
It has 3 of the top 100 cuts I heard all year, but the remainder are spotty at worst. Songs about masturbation, doing too many drugs, and the 20 something realization of “momento mori” are ones I’ll listen to.
++++
Movie wise, I have yet to see Little Children, a film by Todd Field who I think made the best “adult” film of this decade with “In the Bedroom.” If you have never seen that film, rent it immediately. It’s the cinema that deals with few realities any person wants to deal with, and does so with a sympathetic, pathetic, and vengeful eye. If not for Band of Brothers or the 2001 World Series, this is the best work of art of that year.
And it’s hard for me to call “The Departed” the best film of the year, since I haven’t seen more than 10 in theaters, and while that’s my favorite even if I enjoyed Apocalypto just as much, it’s almost a backup choice. I would love to join the impassioned bandwagon of a great film, I just didn’t see one.
This is the first time in 5 years when I can honestly say the best of the year was not only the best, but the best by a considerable margin.
Just Off the list.
Borat – funny, but it’s caught in the nether region of faux reality. What is staged, what is real, and what is coherent as a character if half the time he’s acting a role and the other half he’s eliciting response? While I laughed a lot, it was hard to enjoy after because of a flimsy underline.
Jackass 2 – I liked it more that Borat. Mainly because these people were willing to whore themselves out for the gag.
10. Heroes – Sure it’s ripped from X men and other comic books. Sure it’s hokey (Save the Cheerleader, save the world. Come on, that’s the best you could do!?!) Sure it’s goofy and Ali Larter’s character is a quagmire of plot and reality issues, but I cannot turn away. While Battlestar Galactica was a far better show, half of the episodes in the run are from 05 and/or will be in 07, Heroes triumphs the serial fantasy shows because it’s in its first run. Sci-fi and fantasy always can come out of the gate swinging, while comedy can take up to three years. Heroes may be crap in three months, but the appeal and joy of this first run were special. Everyone at my work talked about this show (and they also talked about Lost) and while everyone had complaints, everyone, including me, enjoyed this on a basic, child like level. While Transformers, GI Joe, and MASK may be gone (until Hollywood remakes them as features), this was the first TV show in primetime that equaled the joy of Saturday Morning Cartoons.
9. South Park, Season 10. I don’t know if there was a bad episode in the bunch. The only weak one was the finale, which retread all the sports clichés. Maybe this was an early knock at Rocky Balboa, but this was done better in “The losing edge” episode.
However, this episode, like “the Losing Edge” were made watchable because of the third act, both which used the sport clichés to fantastic results.
It’s a funny episode, yet it treads on familiar ground, something this season of South Park did not.
This season attacked Family Guy with perfection, it had a great 2 part episode about time travel, and it had Mr. Mackey asking “Oh, so you think it’s funny? How would you like it, if someone came into your house, opened up their butt cheeks, maybe spread them apart a little, and let out a big fudge dragon.”
Minge and Gary. A great Halloween episode. And the phrase “Nice.”
8. A World of Hurt – The Drive by Truckers. (The closing track off of “A Blessing and a Curse”) When the opening lines are about suicide and whores in the light of encroaching death it’s a hard shot to swallow. To make a song that is about living for the next day’s futility shaded in the poorest life that ultimately makes you care about everything good in life, well… it’s great to be alive.
7. Ten Silver Drops – The Secret Machines – it’s not the best of the collection, but at the same time, this perpetuates the love I want to live in. Something about endless musing about the loves that go pear shaped. Some guy, sitting alone in his room is listening to the album and reminiscing about the worst parts of his relationship with a girl.
Albums about heartbreak are not rare. Rob Gordon said it at the beginning of High Fidelity: What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
If anything, music is a gateway to a gateway away from life. It’s the simple answer to the crushing reality of life. And it’s a sick addiction, and the best notion of this idea is that in the movie, Rob plays “you’re gonna miss me” by the 13th Street Elevators, one of the all time great tell off songs of the genre.
Many songs are about being heartbroken. Many blame the other “You’re Cheatin’ Heart” others blame themselves “See Frank Sinatra.” And those two forms dominate the landscape, more so now since Beyonce and crew made a career about moving on and being with the best man.
Songs that deal with the loneliness and misery without mentioning the cause are the most deadly of all, if only because they allow a person to wallow in the misery.
Ten Silver Drops isn’t that great of an album musically. But simply for the idea of being “alone, jealous, and stoned” and extrapolating on it, well, it’s like listening to Graceland again, in a different mood.
Side note: on my Itunes playlist, Alone Jealous and Stoned” is #1 for the year in terms of play.
2. “Sweet Talk” by Spank Rock. The 2nd best thing to come out of Baltimore this year.
3. Woman by Wolfmother. Call me an old school elitist when it comes to rock, but sometimes the simple joys sound a little bit better to my tastes.
4. Strausberg and The World Was a Mess but His Hair was perfect – Both by the Rakes. One perfectly short and one perfectly over the edge long.
5. Wolf like Me – TV on the Radio. Still digesting the album, and even if it sounds like Bloc Party 2, I’ll be damned if this thing doesn’t get me every time, even with the old “lets go slow for a bit” lull.
6. PTI podcasts. Yeah. Podcasts are so 2005. PTI is my favorite news show. It’s 30 minutes + of sports news jabbering. My father “hates” this show. I’ll also note, he never liked sports, and thinks that it’s almost absurd that people know who won the Super Bowl in 1999 (Denver in 99, but for the 99 season, it was St Louis over Tennessee on the goal line stand, which I have to note for anyone with a column, if the Titans had scored, they wouldn’t have won. They would have scored 6, and they still had to hit a PAT to tie. If they wanted to win, they would have had to go for 2. In the 99 era of sports, no body in the NFL went for it. It would have gone to OT, and the Titans D was not good enough to stop one of the best offenses in NFL history after 4 quarters. If the game was 23-18, this would have been a great game. It was a good game with a great 4th quarter, but that’s it. The 98 Super Bowl with Denver and Green Bay is the best, with Carolina vs. New England and New England in 2004 and vs. St Louis in 2002) This is what I talk about and my father can’t stand. This is why I love PTI and my father hates it. If I didn’t look exactly like my father, I would be sure I was switched at birth.
5. Life on Mars – I hate cop shows. Hate them, and on two separate occasions chastised my father and sister about liking and referencing CSI in real life terms in a 3 day period. Yet I have two cop shows in my top 5. First off, the #1 choice is above and beyond the best thing to come out this year. #2, Life on Mars was more than a cop show, and was as far away from a procedural as one can find on TV.
I thought about doing a post comparing Life on Mars and The Wire when I was going through the first seasons of both in September. Both are not the run of the mill TV shows. LOM is a BBC production, which has produced Cracker and Prime Suspect, two great cop mini-series/ shows. LOM is a cop show with a Lost “where the hell am I” atmosphere. It’s also a show with a central premise that takes everything 30 years back in cop tech and life, making everything about the show nostalgic and old school when it comes to the meat and potatoes parts of the show. For 8 episodes it was one of the most engrossing shows because it had
A. An overarching plot.
B. A genuine cool premise.
C. It was a testosterone fueled cop show, something that disappeared until season 2 of the Wire. (Note, I have Prime Suspect on this list, where the female is the lead. This is not about men being men, it’s about the raw idea of enforcement opposed the blind eyes of justice. When OJ, Jacko, and Richard Blake get off the hook, while Martha Stewart goes to jail, and the head of Enron dies in his mansion in Aspen, it’s easy to say media law isn’t fulfilling. That’s why the simple answers and brute force of line crossing cops is easy to feel reassured by on TV but miserable in real life. The American individual can decide right vs. wrong far better than the American People.)
D. Smoky offices and cops in leather jackets boozing on duty in small pubs.
4. The Surrogates (Comic Book) – A 5 part series I am sure will be made into a feature in the next 3 years, this is a graphic novel centered on the premise that people can live (vicariously) in robot/human synthetic bodies. It’s somewhere between The Matrix and Blade Runner in terms of Sci-fi setting, it’s almost an alternate reality for living, as it is now possible to live in and experience the world in a new shell; one can become another gender, athletic type, gender, etc. The positive result is that people lose racial and gender bias; the negative result is that people are merely living a half-virtual reality, they may get short of breath via nanodes, but they aren’t really breathing hard, and hence aren’t really living. In the middle of this, everyone looks like they want to. The protagonists in the series come from a cult of religious zealots (term used only to imply drive, not belief) who decry the idea of improving on God’s creation. A consummate look on the coming impacts of technology, plastic surgery, and the notion of body perfection, and the true notion of beauty in the world, even if it’s set 40 some years in the future.
3. Mark Nason and Antik Denim – While I don’t claim to be a fashionista, I have started to care about how I look these days. Maybe it’s LA getting to me, but part of it comes from the fact that my wardrobe hasn’t changed since 2001 or so. Mark Nason makes ridiculously gaudy boots for men; they have crosses, dragons, and flaunting design flair that scream videogame fantasy. Antik Denim is a jeans line that features styles named “Elvis,” “Bronson,” and “McQueen.” The jeans are somewhat mass produced, but each one is scuffed and designed by hand, giving each pair an individual look. While the latter is a recent trend in fashion, the idea of both is something I can cotton to: while women have been given fashions for other women and men to look at, these are two brands that are built for men to wear for themselves. It’s one thing to look good in a suit, it’s another to build the wardrobe with pieces of clothing that look and feel like accessories to a look than a fashion statement; it’s the stylistic end of RPG videogames, where buying a piece makes an wardrobe seem like a battle outfit. I may be nerdy in thinking this, but I don’t know if I have dressed as well in my life. Part of me says this is a means to getting girls to approach me, but I care more about looking like a action star/ vampire hunter to myself than pussy. (Why do I put this at 3? Because I am hoping this is the beginning of male oriented fashion, if anything, we deserve to go out looking like samurais, cowboys, or 70’s style cops (Serpico or Bullit). So what if straight men may now care about clothes on a level 50% that of a normal woman, I say, it’s about time we started looking like the badasses we want to be instead of the Ralph Lauren prep or skater kid extremes; we have the suit and tux for the work and formal, it’s kind of cool and nice to feel boyish and masculine at the same time in party gear. I will not be surprised if the utility belt some how makes its way into everyday fashion within 2 years.
2. Pearls Before Swine (Comic Strip) – The first strip since the best days of Dilbert worth going to the funny pages in the newspaper, and the first one since Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes retired in 95 and 96 that actually qualifies as genius. It’s morbid, cynical, stupid, and loving; often in a mere 4 panels. Featuring 4 characters, Pig (stupid but happy), Rat (smart, but miserable) Goat (smarter than Rat, but a hermit from the world) and Zebra (loving but doomed to be eaten by the killer crocs) it’s not a comic strip as much as it is a forum for Steven Patsis, who through his 4 main and a few other recurring regulars, is able to offer a slighted look at life that is mostly miserable, occasionally heartfelt, and always hilarious. The greatest part about the strip is its’ self awareness, as the author is a participant and acknowledges it’s medium and counterparts. It mocks Cathy, the characters show up in Family Circus and Marmaduke, and the characters live in the world of the comics page, both blessed and cursed by the trappings.
1. The Wire. The only “top 10 TV shows of the year” list that I read this year that didn’t have The Wire as #1 was IGN.com. They had Battlestar as number one, which, in all fairness, is about right for a nerd show and site. Scratch that, TV guide had 24 as #1, though both had the Wire as #2.
In 2001, I watched Band of Bothers. To this date, it’s still the best thing I have seen this decade in terms of performed media. However it was #2 to the World Series of that year for the best things I saw in 2001. Both I rated high because of the effects of 9/11. BoB gave hope that the American Ideal, although misguided and faulty at times, still has the right basic belief system for triumph against evil; simply the good instilled by the founding fathers in the Constitution and Bill of Rights allows American Citizens to sacrifice their life for the good of the country. The 2001 World Series was the living example of the “never say die” attitude of this country. I don’t know if anything will mean more to me than that series, even if the 2004 ALCS felt better.
So what about The Wire?
I have written about it too many times, but season 4 of The Wire was more than special, it was a once in a decade masterpiece. I don’t know care to explain why it’s so great, or even why I evoked comparisons to events 5 years ago, other than the notion that when greatness finds you, it’s hard to get out of one’s system. Everything from this point on in the decade will be compared against The Wire, Band of Brothers, and the 2001 World Series.
My top 2 of the decade became a top 3 list of the unassailable. It’s going to take something extremely special to get into this list.
posted by Indiana at
6:07 PM
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