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Owning 2007
The hot stove nearly burned the house down in mid-December with the release of the long-awaited Mitchell Report. In the most nebulous name-naming since the McCarthy era, it singled out over 80 major and minor leaguers accused by — well, by somebody, anyway — of juicing themselves up with steroids of human growth hormone. What, exactly, what the point of the report might have been is unclear; after all, it came with a prepackaged caveat that everyone should just ignore its contents, end the madness and get on with their lives. Sports blogs and pundits, with which our culture is afflicted like boils, chose to focus on the entirely unsurprising news that every MLB team had its own resident juicer, and ignored the much more salient point that many of those outed by Mitchell’s prison snitch were such unheavy hitters and powerless pitchers like F.P. Santangelo and Jim Parque. It’s almost enough to make you wonder why the currently-under-indictment Barry Bonds has had to eat so much shit this year. Not even fellow big-name juice box Roger Clemens had as stellar a career before he started his steroid regimen, and that, combined with a surly personality and an unwillingness to kowtow before sportswriters, probably accounts for the vast hatred of Bonds found in all quarters. (The claim that Bonds is particularly blameworthy because he allegedly lied under oath is unsettlingly reminiscent of the saga of one Wm. J. Clinton.) While Sammy Sosa continues to play (racking enough RBIs last year to be singled out for praise by sportswriters) and Jason Giambi (who’s a snitch and a weasel as well as a cheat) collects a paycheck for America’s Team, while Mark McGwire hides in the silence that having saved baseball can buy you, Bonds may actually go to prison for something that a third of the league is guilty of doing. Enjoy your success, boys, and remember, if steroids are as bad for your health as they say, that Barry Bonds died for your sins. #9. UNEQUAL EXCHANGE OF THE YEAR: COMIC BOOKS AND MOVIES My very first article for the High Hat, way back in spring of 2003 (!), concerned the relationship between comic books and movies. Back then, when it was still a relative novelty for movies featuring men in tights to be anything other than abysmal, I worried that the relationship was somewhat one-sided, that comics were giving more than they got. The theory was that the movie business would get source material for the next blockbuster, while comics would gain credibility, respectability and a fresh new audience, but at the time, it felt like only half of the transaction was being made. Now, four years later on, it’s become abundantly clear that even comics creators are under no illusions about what they’re getting out of the deal. No one waits by the door of their local comic shop like a wounded bride, wondering where all the new readers are going to get here from the multiplex. Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, and Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen are two of the most anticipated films of 2008, while Moore’s new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book experiences rave reviews but mediocre sales, and mainstream audiences remember the rotten film of League than they do the outstanding comic. Snyder has slavishly adopted Frank Miller’s visual style, but there’s more buzz around Miller’s role in the upcoming Spirit film than any of his current comic work. (Which, come to think of it, is a fair cop, since his current comic work consists of the ridiculous All-Star Batman series — though see Jon Morris’ top ten list for a different take.) Comics writers like Brian K. Vaughn have realized that film and television work pay the bills, while bringing in Richard Donner as a co-writer has done more to boost Superman’s profile than any number of better stories by writers who didn’t come from Hollywood. Funnybook sales continue to slide, as millions are spent on getting Nic Cage into a flaming skull mask. Does this mean that I’m going to stop slavishly obsessing over the Watchmen movie until it finally opens to inevitable disappointment? Of course not. But my point is . . . well, I forget what my point is, but did you see the new Dark Knight trailer? Awesome! #8. RETRO TREND OF THE YEAR: TOTALITARIAN RULE IN RUSSIA Right-wingers went predictably nuts in December when Time magazine named Russia’s head lizard in charge Vladimir Putin their Man of the Year. But what the man our president calls “Pooty-poot” accomplished is nothing short of a miracle: he restored the brutal authoritarian rule of Soviet-era Russia without abandoning his commitment to 1990s-style cut-throat gangland capitalism. Buoyed by his country’s massive oil and telecom wealth, and backed by what are essentially organized mobs of youth who have built a delightfully post-modern Stalinesque cult of personality around him, Putin has managed to combine the state terrorism of the 1950s (Assassinated journalists! Crazy poisons!) with the freewheeling, heartless market dictatorship of forty years later (Criminal businessmen! International arms deals!). He’s also managed to transform the intelligence services from a ruthless instrument of government oppression into his own breeding ground for flunkies; his selection of Gazprom chair/professional non-entity Dmitri Medvedev as his successor not only shows the amount of trust he has in his fellow spooks (Medvedev has no intelligence ties), but is a clear indicator that he doesn’t so much intend to step down when his current term is over as simply switch chairs, neatly sidestepping the constitution. So hostile to democracy that he actually managed to earn a mild rebuke recently from President Bush, Putin has ruthlessly accumulated political power for his United Russia party, making elections in what is ostensibly one of the freest of the Eastern Bloc nations even less robust than they were under Brezhnev. But he’s also played the other side of the fence, amassing what is reported to be one of the most vast private fortunes in the world due to his preferential treatment of favored business partners. In what has to be one of the crowning ironies of the 21st century, Russian citizens who seek more freedom and less police-state tactics from their leadership are increasingly turning to . . . the Communist Party. Making the old-line Red Guard look like a beacon of progressive politics is nothing short of remarkable, and if that’s not enough to qualify Putin for Man of the Year, I don’t know what is. #7. INITIALS OF THE YEAR: D.R.M. Digital rights management — or, as its opponents label it, digital restrictions management — has, for a number of years, been building up as a unique factor in the relationship between consumers and producers. Far removed from the typical buyer vs. seller expectations of the market, digital technology has shaped the relationship into something much more like that between labor and management. Along the way, it’s redefined the definition of what it means to own something you buy, led to the most directly confrontational attitude in history between makers and users, and led to some of the most inadvertently hilarious movie PSAs of all time. 2007 has been a particularly fertile year for ugly digital rights management conflict: after NBC’s The Office became a big hit largely on the strength of its availability on iTunes, the network management had a panic attack at the thought of their now-valuable property floating around the internet unsupervised and revoked Apple’s rights to carry it, instead carrying to their own site in a low-quality, commercial-packed, bug-filled format. But hey, it’s free! Amazon launched its own mp3 download service, which attracted customers less because of its lower per-song price point than its lack of DRM restrictions. The same couldn’t be said for its big holiday product, the electronic book reader known as the Kindle, which featured a limited amount of content and was so crammed with content management restrictions that people stayed away in Christmas-ruining numbers. And the bigwigs of the music industry continued to plead poverty, citing ever-decreasing CD sales (which they blamed on internet thieves), while neglecting to even include in their year-end reports an accounting of legally downloaded music sales, which set a record high. It was, in fact, astonishing, the degree to which the entertainment industry defended digital rights and intellectual property — especially considering their claim that no one can predict with any degree of accuracy whether or not there was even any money to be made on the internet. Which brings us to . . . #6. GLORIOUS STRUGGLE OF THE PROLETARIAT OF THE YEAR: THE WRITER’S GUILD OF AMERICA STRIKE
#5. GENRE OF THE YEAR: METAL The occasion of critics’ end-of-year lists used to be a happy one. It was a time bursting with joy and excitement, a time of life, when music writers would tell us about whatever new music we were missing out on, what new movements and trends were a-birthing so we could all jump in on it. Nowadays, though, it’s a time of death. The music press is falling over itself to hip us to the latest type of music to lie moldering in its grave. Jazz has obviously been dead since the late ’70s; rock music died for the first time in 1984 and at least fourteen times since then. It took more to kill it than Rasputin, but no sane person who wants his column widely linked to would dare deny that it’s now as dead as Jacob Marley. And declaring hip-hop to be dead is virtually the national pastime of your average music critic, who has been filling its corpse with more holes than 50 Cent since at least 1996. One musical genre, though, has escaped the long knives, even if it’s just because most of the critics aren’t paying attention. It was easy enough to call 2006 the Year of Metal; with all the jaw-dropping stuff that’s come out this year, and with a jeweler’s eye towards what came before and a keen expectation if what’s likely to drop next year, it wouldn’t be hard to stretch that out to a half-decade or more. While its position in the public imagination is still that of a music made by and for 15-year-old white American suburban males, metal has, in fact, almost imperceptibly turned into the single most diverse genre in modern popular music. Women play a bigger part in it than ever before; there’s hardly a country that doesn’t have a thriving extreme metal scene, and some of the most exciting heavy rock being made today comes out of places like South America, the Middle East, and Japan; and it’s spawned more microgenres than even hip-hop did last decade, all of them both immediately recognizable as parts of a whole and instantly distinguishable as different from one another. 2007 has seen stunning releases from an incredible range of bands in the metal tent: impossibly complex death-jazz from Behold . . . the Arctopus, doom-tinged heavy rock from Earthless, black-speed fusion from the Black Dahlia Murder, punishingly sophisticated and emotionally devastating post-hardcore spazz-rock from the Dillinger Escape Plan, and riff-heavy, groove-inflected ultra-thrash from Machine Head all managed to sound like the products of a similar aesthetic, while sounding nothing like each other at all. Prog, electronica, folk, ethnic music, even instrumental post-rock have all been adapted by and altered for the world of heavy music, with often surprising but rarely boring results. Those who ignore how far what was once the most restrictive genre in pop music has come have forfeited their right to complain that there’s no more progress in the rock world. #4. DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK OF THE YEAR: THE WU-TANG CLAN No, seriously, don’t call it a comeback — 8 Diagrams, the best Wu-Tang album since 36 Chambers changed the rules of hip-hop forever back in 1994, is more of a death knell than a return to form. It sounds nothing like their triumphant first album, and given the difficulty of its birthing process and the negativity with which it’s been greeted by everyone from critics to members of the band, it’s very likely the last album that will appear under the iron flag of the Wu. It’s a record few expected them to even to complete; with Ol’ Dirty Bastard dead and several members pursuing successful (and, more importantly, incredibly divergent) solo careers, and with production mastermind the RZA’s scratching fingers in half a dozen pies, it wouldn’t have been a shock if 8 Diagrams had never been realized. And even when news came that it would finally drop in December, few thought it would be anything like a success; certainly, if you’d told me that it would contain a Beatles cover (with guest appearance by George Harrison’s kid, no less!), I wouldn’t exactly have predicted a masterpiece. But that’s exactly what it is: a woozy, bleary, rambling masterpiece, a drugged-up, detached, disorienting work of sheer brilliance, easily the strangest thing the RZA has ever done, and damn close to the best. Still, it’s short-sighted to call this, as some critics have, a RZA solo album: it wouldn’t succeed without major contributions from every surviving member of the Clan, even Ghostface Killah, who’s been outspoken against it and who may have even tried to sink it with the scheduling of his own The Big Doe Rehab album. Method Man, in particular, hasn’t sounded this furious or focused in years, and even Ghostface and Raekwon, the Clansmen who have been the album’s biggest detractors, drop classic verses when called upon to do so. It’s too bad 8 Diagrams is likely a last hurrah rather than a sign of things to come, but if you gotta go out, there are worse ways to do it. #3. OKAY, THIS YOU CAN CALL A COMEBACK OF THE YEAR: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN For almost two decades, the Coen Brothers were untouchable. While not every film they made was a thing of unvarnished greatness, they didn’t make a bad movie from Blood Simple to The Man Who Wasn’t There — and a streak of nine, among contemporary filmmakers, is something like a miracle. Then came the decidedly non-miraculous Intolerable Cruelty, the first Coen Brothers comedy to contain no laughs, and The Ladykillers, which wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be, but likewise wasn’t as good as it should have been. A consensus began to form: since the Coens’ first two attempts at filming material they didn’t write coincided with their first two duds, they had to get back to doing their own original screenplays, and fast. When word came down that their next project would be No Country for Old Men, reaction was somewhat muted; the news could have been worse (the Coens would adapt the screenplay themselves, and the source material was a major American novelist), but it could have been better (it still wasn’t an original work, and it wasn’t even close to being Cormac McCarthy’s finest novel). When the movie first screened for festival audiences, however, all fears that the Coens might have three stiffs in a row in them were immediately laid to rest. Almost every critic who screened it hailed it as a new classic and one of the best movies of a particularly strong year in American cinema; and as of this writing, it’s also become the Coen’s most financially successful film to date, selling even more tickets than Fargo, their previous top grosser. Like many great filmmakers, the Coens start as many arguments as they settle, and in particular, the film’s deliberately anti-climactic ending has raised more than a few eyebrows. No Country is also liable to trigger many a fight as people wonder what the Coens’ attitude towards Tommy Lee Jones and his worldview might be, just as they did with Marge Gunderson in Fargo. While nearly everyone seems to agree the Coen Brothers are great filmmakers, there’s a vast difference in what any two given critics will rank as their best films; no doubt the coming years will see endless disagreements about where No Country for Old Men deserves to be ranked in their oeuvre, but it’s a safe bet it won’t be anywhere near the bottom. #2. BREAD AND CIRCUSES OF THE YEAR: THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN About a year ago, I took a look at what I then thought likely to be the shape of the upcoming presidential race. With a lame-duck president whose approval ratings were subterranean, an unpopular war still raging and the incumbent party running on a security platform, and the opposition party threatening to feature as its two leading candidates a woman and an African-American for the first time in history, I predicted that it would be an ugly, ugly campaign. And while there’s still plenty of time, especially after the primaries, for that prediction to come true, the horse race up until now hasn’t so much been nasty as it has been . . . well, stupid. “Silly season” is the term applied to slow news periods where not much of real import is going on; it often gets used to describe the early goings of a presidential campaign, around the holidays when there isn’t much in the way of actual news. But this time around, there’s a lot going on in the world: environmental havoc, terrorism, the rise and fall of nations, a shaky economy, a major war — and the campaign isn’t just silly, it’s downright ridiculous. Not only are we faced with the possibility of a win by Hillary Clinton, which would bring us an entire generation raised in a period where leaders of the free world had one of only two names (take that, John Quincy Adams!), but we’re also looking at the prospect of her main opponent being a man whose main qualification is that he happened to be standing nearby when terrorists crashed a plane into a building near his office. Every campaign features something new for the punters, but the amount of unprecedented events in Election ’08 are starting to pile up like manure in the Aegean stables: this is the first time it’s been seriously suggested that marriage could be used as a back door through the 22nd Amendment. This is the first time that a candidate’s middle name has been used to suggest that he might secretly be an Islamist mole. This is the first time that candidates for the highest office in the land have publicly made the argument that the U.S. has a moral imperative to torture people. This is the first time that someone has referred to himself as “the official candidate of the internet”, let alone meant it as a compliment. This is the first time that a debate featured questions for the candidate broadcast on-line by a man in a chicken costume. This is the first time someone has run based on an acting résumé even less robust than that of Ronald Reagan. And this is the first time — although I have a sinking feeling that it won’t be the last — that one candidate has accused another candidate of spreading false rumors about his belief that one imaginary being is the brother of another imaginary being. I usually wish for the elections to be over because I’m tired of all the rancor and mudslinging; but now, it just feels like I’m waiting for the credits to roll on a really sub-par sitcom. #1. NON-EVENT OF THE YEAR: 2007, THE YEAR WAR BROKE The war in Iraq achieved a certain level of unreality in 2007 — and here, I don’t mean the surreal, nightmarish, hallucinatory quality that the Vietnam War assumed sometime around the Tet Offensive. What I mean is that for much of America, it became sort of like a stoned dorm-room conversation about what it would be like if we used flowers for money: it seemed to exist, for many people, on a purely theoretical plane, and if it was something they could talk about, or even vehemently argue about, for hours and hours, it certainly wasn’t anything that carried the weight of consequence in the cold light of the morning. Living in San Antonio, a city with an unusually high concentration of military personnel, I am daily exposed to both military corruption (a number of the ridiculously large number of appropriations scandals in the Iraq War have broken here) and the ruined faces and bodies of vets, so it’s difficult to keep any of it at arm’s length. But for the rest of the country, the entire conflict seems to be operating on almost a level of abstraction: the same right-wingers who were infuriated at Vladimir Putin’s Man of the Year win suggested that the award should actually go to Gen. David Petraeus, whose “surge” is often said to be “working” by people who seem less well-equipped to say what it is or what it’s supposed to accomplish. Fatalities amongst Iraqis and Americans alike reached a wartime high in 2007, but Democrats were reviled as “defeatists” for suggesting that even a mild withdrawal might be called for, with victory so close at hand (though, again, what that victory might consist of was left murky). The grotesque record of fraud, profiteering and waste by American corporations and government agencies in Iraq — called by no less than the federal General Accounting Office the greatest financial scandal in American history — is, with the exception of fewer congressmen and journalists than one can count on one’s fingers, roundly ignored by conservatives and thought of by liberals as a “maybe someday” issue on a level with reparations for slavery. Our country’s unprecedented loss of status in the international community garners a political reaction that scarcely varies from party to party: the Republicans seem to think that a country as great as America doesn’t have to care that it has no friends in the world, while the Democrats seem to think that if only they win the next election, everyone will love us again. And as the veteran’s benefit budget shrinks for the third year in a row while the budget for conducting the war grows for the sixth, it all begins to resemble nothing so much as a parlor game in a more genteel reality where war is something that happens to other people. |
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#10. HORMONE-FED SCAPEGOAT OF THE YEAR: BARRY BONDS
“The writer is king here at Capitol Pictures,” says Jack Lipnick in the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink. It was understood as a joke then, and it should be understood as a joke now — but Hollywood’s first writer’s strike in decades has proven remarkably resonant. Putting the lie to the claim of some critics who say the scripted show is dead, it took only a few weeks of clip shows and derivative reality programming for viewers to really feel the sting of the departed writers; no breakout hit has emerged to make people forget what they’re missing, and even the critics are doing an about-face with their winter junkets being canceled. The situation is especially muddled during the current strike because of an unusually high number of writers who are also actors, and although it seems likely that scabs will rear their heads in increasing numbers after the new year, actors and hosts have shown a great deal of solidarity with their content providers. The usual gags about a writer’s strike being impossible to notice have rung hollow during what most agree to be an unusually rich year for both movies and television, and despite the lofty financial position of some of the upper-echelon writers, the public has shown a rather deep level of sympathy, aided and abetted by appeals directly from the strikers through the very medium that forms the heart of the biggest demand: the internet. Film and television writers are demanding what print journalists, actors, and directors already have: the right to be paid for work that appears solely on line. Producers (who have already had some of their dirty laundry — especially the shaky financial position of the studios thanks to poorly planned front-loaded deals that pay millions to big-name directors and stars — hung out in public thanks to the strike) claim there’s no guaranteed revenue, and thus no means by which to pay the writers, from online content, which begs the question of why they’re so eager to produce it. While we’re solidly on the side of the writers in this battle, though, we can’t help note the irony that a strike by TV and movie writers, a number of whom are multimillionaires, is the labor conflict that has drawn the most attention and sympathy from the public in years. It’s a testament to how thoroughly consumer capitalism has managed to marginalize the labor movement that the WGA strike has had more effect on the public than any other strike since Reagan broke the air traffic controller’s union. 