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A List Of Lists

by Maitri on December 28, 2009

in books, computing & internet, culture-society-history, digital rights, federal flood, football, gizmos & hacks, government, hurricane katrina, media, music, new orleans, public domain, science & technology, sports, tv/film

Lizzy Caston and I were to write a mode d’emploi for air travel in this day and age of the ever-orange threat advisory. A sample: Lady, please do your best not to wear four-inch-heeled slouch boots and every metal ring and bracelet in your collection before entering airport security. The grimace on your face as you hobble about like a startled flamingo while trying to yank that thing of your foot amuses no one and only makes us standing in line behind you at 6AM want to push you down and carry on. Ok, it wasn’t going to be snide and actually more polite and helpful, honest. Given recent explosive and “explosive” events and evolving TSA guidelines, however, Lizzy and I are going to have to sit on a few more flights, visiting a few more airports in the process, before we can pen anything useful.

Lists it is, then. Best of decade (never mind that the new decade technically does not start until January 1, 2011) and best of year lists. Ranking things is not my cup of tea; all of my top five movies rate about the same. But what motivates others’ sort algorithms and makes their #1? Let’s see. As always, please add to the discussion and feel free to list your favorite lists in the Comments section.

TECHNOLOGY – Since my Precious iPhone has not been more than arm’s length away at any given moment this year, to the point that my husband thinks I need to “tweetox,” it seems only fitting to start with Wired“s 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009. Productivity is king, followed by games, travel and hobbies. Am I supposed to be embarrassed that I’ve downloaded only 2 of the 20 – Runkeeper and RedLaser – or proud to have gone this long without spending money on some of these not-free apps? $5 for Instapaper when I can simply Safari over to reader.google.com?! I think not. What are some of your favorite apps and why?

MORE TECHNOLOGY – The Real-Time Web is all that excites me in this list of 2009’s disruptive technology. Augmented Reality has potential but, in my opinion, isn’t ubiquitous enough to have made a difference yet. Google Voice and Wave haven’t shown me their value this year, either. What do you think? PC World’s list of the 10 disruptors of the last quarter century rings truer even today – I highly recommend this read.

MOVIES and technology – Roger Ebert is a rockstar. Here’s a man who can find a great movie in a stinking haystack, commit to his picks and explain patiently to you why. Ebert’s on Twitter, where he points us to all four of his Best Films of 2009 lists.

Aside from watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Matrix trilogy, Harry Potter saga and a handful of pop and arthouse films in the theatre this decade, I have to admit that D and I are not the best cinema-goers, preferring to watch DVDs in the comfort of our home (Netflix – now there’s a decadal gamechanger mentioned little), and even that has fallen by the wayside. But along comes streaming video, the Creative Commons (also one of the best concepts given form in the 2000s) and the notion of simply putting your art out there, the studios be damned, and you get beautiful genius like Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues, which has been around a lot longer than you think. Whether a movie has live actors or animated ones, the most important thing about it is the story. To paraphrase my dear, departed 3D Arts professor, George Cramer, all the visual effects dreamt of in Hollywood cannot polish a turd of a story. This is why I am not likely to watch Avatar and recommend Monsters, Inc. instead. Excellent story + well-animated fur = WIN.

MUSIC and technology – NPR’s The Decade’s 50 Most Important Recordings Between YouTube and downloadable MP3s, my music collection grew and grew up in leaps and bounds this decade. Ignoring the current obsession with emo-hipster bands, pop divas and American Idol ingenues, there was some real good stuff: Radiohead’s Kid A and self-released In Rainbows, Kanye West’s College Dropout, Madeleine Peyroux’s Careless Love, The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The New Orleans Bingo! Show’s For A Life Ever Bright, Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, Sasha’s Airdrawndagger, DJ Krush’s Jaku and OutKast’s Stankonia. Coolest music videos of the decade: Ok Go’s On Treadmills, Clint Maedgen’s It’s A Complicated Life and Empire Of The Sun’s We Are The People. Alright, folks, tell me what I missed and why.

BOOKS and technology – Forget the Kindle and nook. And forget those who tell you this carefully-planned obsolescence is going to change the nature of reading. Find a light laptop and/or smartphone you’re comfortable with, do actual work with it and download books to it. A book is not an exotic bird to be placed in the gilded cage of DRM, but something to be owned, shared and, most importantly, read many times on any platform. I’m against the iTunes model of book consumption – fit the media to the unique delivery mechanism – and publishing companies’ constant war on the public domain. Hooray for copyfight and folks like Cory Doctorow who have the balls to self-publish quality literature. True defenders of freedom will enjoy and be inspired by his Little Brother.

The Times Online’s 100 Best Books of the Decade. If you’re going to read only one of them, make it Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao. What a book. A Dungeons&Dragons-playing Dominican-American college student, the gut-punching dialogue and relationships, the history, the profanity oh the succulent profanity, the future. What a book. Your best read?

SPORTS – An NFL junkie, my most important moment in sports was the New Orleans Saints’ 2006 return to the Superdome after the Flood and Tom Benson’s near treachery. Granted, it contained no triumph of athleticism, but you’d think it rates (sorry, brimmy, but the Patriots-Brady-NFL-ESPN lovefest is getting old). Again, is there another such moment in the 00s that I should be aware of? Please comment away. Lastly, for the record, I am very pleased with my quarterback and Athenae‘s imaginary boyfriend, Aaron Rodgers. His stats this season show that the team made the right decision and everyone else should shut it.

TELEVISION – When Babylon 5 ended in 1998, I despaired. This is why God invented Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, Rescue Me and Futurama. After Lando Calrissian and Kosh, the outstretched arms and biting sarcasm of Bender and Tommy Gavin beckoned. After Katrina and the Flood, the confused innards of Al Swearengen’s Deadwood, Adama and Starbuck made all too much sense. The Onion AV Club’s Best TV Series Of The 00’s nails it.

LIST TO IGNORE – Ten Stories that Changed Our Lives This Decade: #10 Katrina. #9 Brett Favre. Delete. Any list that places Favre, whose family was very much affected by the hurricane, over the suffering of people goes right out the window.

THE WEIRD AND CHEESEHEADY, ‘cuz that’s how we roll – 2009 in Review: Top Weird Stories From Wisconsin: “A 37-year-old Fond du Lac man went to a motel room for what he thought was going to be a romantic tryst but instead was assaulted by four women who used Krazy Glue to attach his privates to his stomach. Police say it was all part of a bizarre plot to punish him for a lover’s quadrangle gone bad.” Hey, we gave you Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer. Enough said.

ROUNDUP – I’m a sucker for New York Times graphics. Philip Niemeyer pictures the past 10 years in a neat little 12×10 matrix. The word “truthiness” gained popularity around the same time as Katrina/Federal Flood (they used a flood graphic and not a counterclockwise spinny one, phew). 2008’s maverick was Ron Paul and not John McCain – can’t keep pulling out the same old shtick every four years. I often wonder what happened to 2008’s ardent house flippers. Hmmm, Brownie was a Bushie term of endearment in 2004 but “tsunami” wasn’t big until 2006? I really like the evolution of key nouns and verbs across the decade. Would you have done this graphic differently?

Thus, 2009 comes to an end. The ox gives way to the tiger. Here’s wishing all of you a safe rest of the year and a great 2010 filled with pleasant surprises and many new buzzwords to learn. Peace.

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12 Days Of Christmas – Sorta

by Maitri on December 25, 2009

in desi / india, funny

Welcome to the first of the twelve days of Christmas. The twelfth day of Christmas marks Epiphany, much more relevant to merrymakers worldwide as the start of Carnival season. See, this is how you keep that tree up until Lent. Just change out all the ornaments. Or pull off only the red baubles and replace them with purple ones. Never say I taught you nothing.

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102 Minutes That Changed America

by Maitri on December 21, 2009

in global, government, tv/film

After groaning through the Saints loss to the Cowboys (come on, the Cowboys?!), I took the depression-fest one step further and watched 102 Minutes That Changed America. Without a word or a blink, I consumed raw chunks of video footage of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. Eight years later, the same raw feelings, the same nausea, the same urge to dive into the television and save everyone, especially the jumpers. We’ll catch you. No, we won’t.

But, what do those of us who weren’t there know? What right do we have to what the dead and survivors went through? Sure, I remember turning on the television at 8:03AM to watch the second airplane crash into the south tower, sinking to the floor and thinking, recognizing, knowing, “This evil. It has followed me here.” I recall a hundred different permutations of misery, fear, anger, helplessness, yet this was not for any of us who weren’t there. How could we possibly know?

I will follow up on this thought in an upcoming post on art and writing based on others’ tragedies and getting it right. Back to the documentary. It reminded me that my crystal ball of 2001 predicted a very different 2009 than the one we’re in. America would have reassessed its alliances with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and Osama Bin Laden would have been nuked from space on September 12th, 2001. Today, we are still in Iraq (WTF) and just sent 30,000 more men and women to die in Afghanistan, every brown person is considered a threat to national security and Bin Laden’s beard grows longer. Did those 102 minutes really change America?

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Good Writing on Good Music

by Maitri on December 18, 2009

in books, music

David Kirby was on the Bob Edwards radio show this week to talk about his new book on Little Richard and how Tutti Frutti changed musical expression forever. The St. Petersburg Times has a nice review of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Little Richard is one of my favorite musical characters. Little known tidbit: At the 2001 Madison Blues Festival, I was asked to dance up on stage with him. Midway through another supersonic number, he picked up a little girl who was dancing her heart out and booty off, placed her on top of his piano, and went right back to performing. It was a sight to behold – her beaded braids flying while Little Richard’s flamboyant energy, encapsulated in thick, shimmering velvet, yoyoed everywhere from his central spot in front of the piano. I didn’t get too close to the center of the action owing to a crazy certainty that had he banged on that baby grand any harder, the whole thing would have gone crashing into Lake Monona. Velveteen Richard, the piano, the kid on it, and all. Everyone who has come into contact with Little Richard has a story and David Kirby sounds like he has many. I can’t wait to read this book.

***

I’ve heard enough of Thelonious Monk’s music to consider him one of those musicians who get dictation from another plane. Pianist Vijay Iyer says it isn’t so in his loving Ode To A Sphere (thanks, Mimosa). There was a lot of logic, practice, and purpose – actual human craft – to the transcendental. Again, I stand ignorant about a lot of jazz, but appreciate Iyer’s passion for Monk’s passion and that his nerdspeak makes this topic accessible to someone like me.

The idea that music that feels good might require craft, discipline and hard work runs contrary to prevailing wisdom about Monk. Many people still harbor a false and uncharitable image of an untutored, unpolished, intuitive savant. But close attention to Monk’s music reveals the result of decades of purposeful experimentation, discovery and refinement.

… Cecil Taylor once spoke in reverential tones of Monk’s different combinations of notes in different registers, as if that quality were somehow the key to it all. And indeed, this is how sound works: Overtones of a low fundamental start out sparsely in the lower octaves, and become gradually denser as you climb up to the high register. Monk displayed intimate knowledge of this physical law, and he put it to the test.

If you haven’t yet listened to Historicity by The Vijay Iyer trio, give it a whirl. Their version of MIA’s Galang is a quiet riot.

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Does Greed Qualify as a Pre-Existing Condition?

by Maitri on December 17, 2009

in government, wtf

The only question I have about the healthcare bill any more is: What is being passed after all this noise? For in my book, if it looks like crap and smells like crap, remember not to step on it.

Cousin Bina has the most coherent answer so far: “They are watering down the principles they started out with (universal health care, public option markets for individual insurance to increase competition). They are now voting on a bunch of amendments — most recently about subsidies for Medicare — and it still has to be conferenced after the final vote.”

Some liberal friends contend that it is important to get anything passed, however warped and contrary to the original intentions of the bill, just to prove to constituents that the Democrats can pass something. They’re passing something, alright, but let it not be termed healthcare legislation. How does this bill help the growing number of uninsured Americans get access to affordable healthcare? How does it decrease the chokehold enjoyed by the insurance cartel? It doesn’t change a damned thing! Between the Republicans, who don’t know the meaning of the word “bipartisanship,” and insurance-company-bought and centrist Democrats, we don’t need foreign enemies, y’all.

I’d go on but Cliff does such a nice job of laying out the entrails:

… Now you don’t want to seem bipartisan so you are willing to do anything he wants to get to the official 60 votes on the health care bill. That means the public option, Medicaid buy in and any single payer system is dead. That’s funny because the insurance mandate is in there which means that not only will insurance companies keep getting paid, we will all have to buy it from them or face the consequences. That’s enough to make me want to join a tea party. I say this while for the third time in the last two years my employer searches for a cheaper insurance plan that won’t cripple the agency. That’s okay though. We still have our freedom to hire all new employees part time so we don’t have to give them any benefits. I would like to thank Senator Lieberman and the rest of my government for preserving that privilege.

It’s all fun and tea parties and special interests until you lose your job and your kids get sick. Won’t you be glad then about what your activism accomplished.

Reading:
Ezra Klein | What Lieberman Has Wrought

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