You AUGHT To Remember

#1 - Facebook

2009-12-31T18:03:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

You were your status update.

100 days, 100 trends. And what tops our survey? What trend of the aughts surpasses all others?

Obviously, the Internet played a massive role in the aughts. Perhaps the major role. Our connection with our friends, lovers, and acquaintances was mediated by the information superhighway. And those who controlled the means of communication controlled our lives. The aughts saw a grand drama of competing social networking sites striving for our allegiance and online devotion. What began as a Friendster flurry quickly morphed into MySpace mania. With MySpace it appeared, for a brief respite, that the general populace had agreed unilaterally on a social networking site to triumph over all others. But alas, the actual site proved unwieldy, prone to profiles of women of ill repute and myriad alt-rock bands promoting their latest faux Arcade Fire-esque album. The neatness and clarity of Friendster was lost in the graphic overload. MySpace could not sustain itself. Another social network was required to bring us together.

Enter Mark Zukerberg, Harvard Sophomore and future billionaire. After beginning his nascent website in 2003 (from his dorm room) as a social network for Ivy League students only, it was only a matter of time before the burgeoning entrepreneur realized the potential of his new creation. Originally called "The Facebook," one received immediate cache upon invitation, in the early days at least. A world away from MySpace's free-for-all webpage design structure, "Facebook" (the "the" was dropped early on) was a clean, organized way to present your internet identity to the world. Once the site went fully mainstream, accessible to any and everyone, it vanquished it's rivals, dominating the social networking market to this day. Overnight Zukerberg's elitist online club became a social force to rival Google.

So why? What is it about Facebook? How did an elitist online club for Ivy-League brats turn into the most important trend of the decade? As in comedy the answer is always: timing, timing and timing. The world of social networking was being explored as far back as AOL Member Profiles (Remember those?) and the early aughts proved a viable crucible for competing design schemes and website structures. In retrospect it should have been clear to all media barons that Social Networking was bound to become a central part of social reality in the 21st Century and yet the major Internet tech companies like Google and Microsoft offered little in this format. Social Networking, thank God, was left to the amateurs and entrepreneurs. It was just a matter of which site found the secret ingredients to provide the most viable and addictive service. The alchemy of Internet success in this arena was, as yet, a mystery. The turning point was when Facebook opened up it's website to open-source 3rd-party applications, facilitating all manner of programs and services on the site. Sure, most of these applications ended up annoying users, like the ubiquitous "poking" applications, but overall the business plan was steady and open to endless improvement. In short order, Facebook went from an alternative social network for those outside the MySpace universe to the only viable convergence point of social networking on the Internet.

Facebook has become as much a place as a website. A nexus of actual identity and web persona, Facebook is both a representation of a person's external self and a subjective representation of their own sense of identity. Online chats, wall commentary, photo tagging, private messaging - all have become as substantial as most corporeal interchanges between persons, the virtual realm asserting itself as not merely a supplement to "real" interaction but a full-on replacement of it.

A person's Facebook page is a delicate destination. A locus of personal thoughts and feelings as articulated by a user's myriad preferences in books, movies and television shows, Facebook is also a repository for evidence about an individual's social side, with endless tagged photographs of a subject bleary-eyed at drunken parties or other such embarrassing candid moments. As the site has grown to dominate its market Facebook's users (meaning about everyone) have only grown to rely on the site more and more. Reading one's friends one-line status updates with the ferocity of a Talmudic scholar, one's social connections are as virtual now as they are real. Were are not replacing the real, merely expanding it's boundaries. This expansion, the dissolution of borders between actual and virtual identity, is the aughts' greatest legacy. A legacy that will only continue to grow and expand as our technology further blurs our knee-jerk notions about reality and the way in which we interact with it and each other.

Facebook was the victor in the aughts' battles of social networking. The site is a crossroads for all travelers to swap stories and exchange ideas, to post photos and update one's "stutus," which, when considered existentially, is quite an update to make on a daily basis. Facebook is now embedded in the very texture of contemporary society; to not be a part of it is to withdraw in some extent from modernity itself, so sweeping is the influence of Zukerberg's creation.

And for these myriad reasons we find Facebook the aughts' most influential and important trend. Now excuse me while I update my profile with the news.

You AUGHT to remember.

#2 - Hipsters

2009-12-30T22:41:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Apathy was the new black.

Like the hippie of the sixties and the yuppie of the eighties, the aughts too featured their own archetypal personality, a persona born of the ideological vacuum left by a post-cold war world and cauterized in the anxious miasma of a post 9/11 America. The hipster, raised in the affluent and vacuous 90's, is a child of privilege who, without rejecting his bourgeois roots like the hippies before him, merely attempts to neutralize the fact by ironically appropriating the aesthetic of the working class. Not to be confused with solidarity, this arch performance is a variety of liberal guilt that's been internalized and then regurgitated as self-conscious meta-commentary. A hipster is not dressed so much as costumed, each item and accessory meticulously chosen to juxtapose a hipster's privilege with their assumed blue-collar aesthetic. At the root of every Hipster-ism is the tension between authenticity and artifice, the hipster embracing the latter as if it was a variety of the former. Hipsters are truly fake in the most literal sense of the term.

There has always been bohemians dwelling in certain enclaves of urban centers, loci of struggling young artists, writers, thinkers, revolutionaries and philosophers who, despite what might be a middle-class or aristocratic background divert themselves from the mainstream path to success; one might think that hipsters offer little new in the way of social phenomenon. This is missing the crucial point. Whereas all other Bohemian movements, from the Belle Epoque world of Puccini's La Boheme, to the beatniks in the 50's to the hippies in the 60's, have sought out alternate enclaves of living in order to better seek out the grand philosophical ideas of truth, beauty and authenticity. The hipster is the negation of these ideals, deliberately rejecting such quests as vain exercises by sentimental people naive enough to believe in these antiquated ideas. The hipster instead exists as a living quotation mark, every facet of the personality a tacit rejection of any all proactive assertions. The Hipster is the death of hope, for hope implies an ability to rectify contradictions and achieve progress. A hipster's existence is a censure of all efforts to viscerally engage with the word in anything but an ironic context. In this way the Hipster is, of course, the extension of post-modern thought as applied to an actual individual; post-modernism taken, as it were, "to the end," penetrating the very essence of subjectivity. If post-modernism's central tenet is it's rejection of modernism's obsession with "the new" and "the true," (replacing such ideals with the negation of meaning) then the Hipster is the movement's living breathing foot soldiers.

Being a Bobo, a cousin of the Hipster but absent the pretense, my interaction with the aughts more prominent social group has been mostly tangential. A social phenomenon replete with analytical interest, my feelings toward the group have always been apathetic at best. Seeing how apathy is the dominant stance of a hipster toward, well, everything, the reaction is not without some appropriateness.

If the earnestness and "free-love" flower-power dreams of the 60's seem silly to jaded modern eyes at least we can say that the Hippies really believed in their dreams of social progress, free-love and liberated consciousness. True Hipsters, believing only in irony, exist in an ocean of ill-matching yet meticulously chosen signifiers, undoing all meaning rather than bolstering it. Neither left nor right, political ideologies are something to be undermined and not endorsed - a lazy cynicism about progress is a staple of the hipster diet. But, maybe this is the end of history; Francis Fukuyama's dream of capitalist democracy's triumph is, in fact, true, but the price we pay is that we all morph into self-referential, uber-sarcastic, consumption pod people who, in capitalism's sneakiest trick, think that this very consumption is the purest expression of our individualism. Self-obsession and the free-market go hand-in-hand, and by being too "meta" to believe in meta-narratives anyway, the hipster is nothing if not the most intense of naval gazers, all the while, like a moth to a flame, subscribing subconsciously to the most insidious kind of groupthink, conforming to the most rigid and insidious social standards.

The most insidious aspect of Hipsterism is its illusion of authenticity. In order for this grand post-modern gambit to work, the Hipster himself must be convinced that his tastes and aesthetics are entirely determined by a solipsistic self-awareness which allows him to pursue his tastes and cultivate his style based on his little more than own subjective appetites. It's a variation on a old joke: I wouldn't want to belong to any club that I had to be member of. Going by self-disclosure, there is no such thing as a Hipster; all candidates would easily deny their inclusion in this non-group. The Hipster just "digs what he digs," it's all just personal preference. To admit any solidarity with any "movement" or "scene" is to confess a kind of positive engagement with social reality, a reality that Hipsters claim to be above. To be a Hipster is to be deeply conformist yet wholly unaware of this fact. That is the ultimate irony. It's an irony which must never be spoken of lest such a breach rupture the whole architecture of disaffection that is the Hipsters raison d'etre.

In case you haven't noticed, I don't like Hipsters. I suspect the only way to eradicate this hipster problem is satiric ridicule.

You AUGHT to remember.

An Interim: What are the top two?

2009-12-29T18:14:00.000-08:00

Hi readers. Here we are, on the cusp on the Teens, saying goodbye (and good riddance) to our beloved aughts. Any idea what the top two selections might be? What are the two most prominent features of the decade not yet mentioned? I'd be curious to hear what you think. Of course, I know what they are but then again....I'm writing the thing! The correct guess gets....my undying respect!

#3 - 9/11

2009-12-29T14:57:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Reality showed Roland Emmerich what for.

Decades do not begin on January 1st. They begin when an transitional event occurs, re-calibrating the social coordinates of society; a moment of Hegelian flummox in which the past recedes backwards, turing yesterday into ancient history. Though almost two years had elapsed, the aughts did not really begin until the beautiful morning of September 11, 2001. There is little need here for me to recount the horrible events of that day, or to analyze the myriad ways in which 9/11 fundamentally altered our very identity as Americans. We know all this already. Best perhaps simply to remember, and most importantly...never forget.

You AUGHT to remember.

#4 - YouTube

2009-12-29T10:28:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

We got a whole new kind of boob tube to waste our time on.

Once upon a time there was no YouTube. That time: 2004. Not so long ago. YouTube released its Beta version in February of 2005. It officially launched in November of that year. By 2006 it was impossible to imagine life without the site. I think the wheel took longer to be embraced upon invention. By the end of 2006, TIME magazine was calling "You" the person of the year and everything from entertainment to politics had been transformed by the still nascent website. Though there had long been video on the Internet, the perception of the World Wide Web pre aught-five was still that of a primarily text based interface. YouTube was a major catalyst in turning the internet into the multimedia platform it is today. The site was the most democratic form of media distribution ever invented, handing to the laymen the opportunity to turn their private home videos and amateur mini-movies into cultural phenomenon at no cost whatsoever. Sure competition was stiff but, when a video did break through the cacophonous din and "went viral," shared from one user to the next like an internet social disease, the impact was felt from coast to coast, water-cooler conversations all but dominated by suggestions of clips to view.

Given the multiplicity of content on YouTube, its interesting that the website still has the reputation of being, essentially, the worlds biggest interactive collection of America's Funniest Home Videos. Though there is no Bob Sagat lurking about making cornball jokes, it is true that many of YouTube's biggest smashes were of this low-fi, pratfall variety: Cats playing piano, skateboarders flying off of ramps, Helen Keller falling of the stage in an amateur production of The Miracle Worker (my personal favorite). The more asinine the better, America's appetite for the silly knew no limits. And, given YouTube's five-minute video time limit, such easily digestible folderol made sense.

While these videos are without question a popular dimension of YouTube's appeal, the power of the website resides elsewhere. In the political arena gaffes by candidates are inevitable. Only in the aughts however could a gaffe be recorded once and then easily accessed by millions of users over and over and over again. (And linked to on Facebook pages and blogged about and twittered and....) Those campaigns not hip to this sea change often found themselves embarrassed and recoiling, like incumbent Virginia Senatorial candidate George Allen who, caught on tape in 2006 using the racial slur "macaca" at a rally, was later forced to apologize for the slip. Yeah, he lost. Many other such political moments got the YouTube treatment, changing the democratic process in America forever.

Creative entrepreneurs have also taken advantage of the site, in some cases transforming their YouTube videos into full-blown careers. Performer Liam Sullivan went from unknown to comedic sensation when he posted his now classic "Shoes" music video on YouTube in 2006. When Philadelphia videographer James Rolfe began comically reviewing the bottom-of-the-barrel video games of his youth, the persona of "The Angry Video Game Nerd" was born. Rolfe even had a cool theme song. Before long he was hired by gametrailers.com to be an exclusive feature of the site. Jeffery Self and Cole Escola were two unemployed 20-something friends just bored enough one day to start posting irreverent YouTube clips under the moniker the VGL Gay Boys. After a video about gay marriage in California went viral their popularity skyrocketed. Hollywood came a-knocking and before long the duo had their own TV show on Logo television, a gay Rowan and Martin for the internet age. The VGL Gays Boys, like Liam Sullivan and the Angry Video Game Nerd, are but a few examples of the awesome opportunities granted anyone with a computer and imagination in the 21st Century. The world of YouTube is littered with such success stories.

YouTube created its own universe of memes. Reaction videos to 2 Girls, 1 Cup being a paradigmatic example, much of YouTube became a matter of call and response in the aughts; a single video inspiring a slew of responses, remixes and parodies. Yes it was funny when we heard the audio tape of Christian Bale excoriating a crew member on the Terminator set, a verbal parade of purple profanity and mean-spirited sarcasm to make David Mamet envious. It was even funnier, however, when the clip was overlaid onto the viral sensation "David at the Dentist," the whole becoming so much more than the sum of its parts. Even narcotic use was effected by the site; the (legal) psychtropic Salvia came to be known as the "YouTube drug," the substances five-minute high perfect for recording and uploading for all the world to see. Video trends took on a life of their own. Beyonce's Single Ladies dance is almost better known because of its myriad parodies than for the original video itself. Yes, the aughts were a decade when pop culture could be endlessly rejiggered to one's own taste. After Chris Cocker gained national attention for screaming "Leave Britney Alone!" into his computer screen it was hours, not days, before parodies started to proliferate YouTube. Even celebrities like Seth Green got into the act with his own spoof of Cocker's teary-eyed missive, acutely aware that going viral is the way to stay relevant in 21st Century media.

The amount of content on YouTube now is staggering. Getting ever closer to the fantasy of watching whatever you want to, whenever you want to, and for free, YouTube has changed media consumption forever. Not one to let a major internet hub fall into other hands, Internet giant Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for over a billion dollars, eventually discontinuing their own YouTube-esque service "Google Video." With camera phones now offering instant YouTube uploading there will be no limits to peoples ability to document and share their lives with the world. Hell, we're there now. YouTube was the aughts' most perspicuous example of the paradigm shift toward user-driven content in mass media. The question is whether at the end of the next decade there will be any big-media left whatsoever, or will YouTube be all; the whole of media completely decentralized and fragmented yet located and uploaded onto one website? It's possible.

You AUGHT to remember.

#5 - American Idol

2009-12-28T19:34:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

An Idol was no longer a golden calf.

American Idol - A series of memories

I remember Kelly Clarkson, voice sand-papery as Tom Waits after a bender and as teary as a newly crowned beauty queen, squawking her way through the First Season's climatic ballad A Moment Like This for what felt like the 20th time. Indeed, American Idol became a new kind of Miss (or Mr.) America for the 21st century. Only bigger. Kelly Clarkson couldn't have known it when she became Idol's first reigning champ but, the show was about to change (and dominate) the music industry in the aughts, the winner all but guaranteed a one-way ticket to super-stardom. And the runner-up, in the case of the Justin Guarini (he of Sideshow Bob coiffure), a one-way ticket to total irrelevance.

I remember Clay Aiken, eliminated during prelims, getting the chance to redeem himself as a wild card selection by singing Elton John's Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me, nailing every note and giving Idol one of its greatest, and cheesiest, performances ever. Somewhere Barry Manilow was smiling. Clay would go on to win America's heart but lose the competition. Ruben Studdard, a performer whose repertoire of gestures while performing consisted of a numerous ONE. (Smile earestly, Place hand to heart, then reach out. Keep smiling) took the top spot. Clay, you were robbed. But it's OK because now you're a big happy gay daddy.

I remember Fantasia (easily the best name for a pop star since Madonna), acting like she had already won the competition, sitting down stage center, delivering George Gershwin's Summertime with more soul than any American Idol contestant had ever before or would ever again. When the single mother took the prize later on in the season, it all just felt like a bygone conclusion. Fantasia remains, despite her lack of mega-selling records, at once the rawest and most polished talent Idol has discovered.

I remember Dunkleman. Sorta. Do you?

I remember William Hung, a man who did the impossible. From an ocean of horrible auditions - a veritable smorgasbord of delusional losers, attention hungry pranksters, ostentatiously costumed narcissists, and mentally unstable psychos - one man sunk so low he reached new heights. William Hung, performing the now definitive rendition of Ricky Martin's She Bangs at his American Idol audition, was so atrociously awful, so deliciously inappropriate, so the opposite of talented, that the "singer" became nothing short of a celebrity in his own right. Public appearances followed, as did a record deal. Some of Idol's top 10 contestants can't boast that. Was Hung a performance artist whose act demonstrated a deconstructionist critique on the concept of "talent" and "fame?" Or maybe he was just the kid in the class who didn't know that he was being made fun of. Probably the latter. Hung, alas, dropped out of UCBerkeley to pursue his music career. The Grammys have not been forthcoming. Hung's fame brings to the fore one of Idol's most troubling elements: its cruel, (admittedly) hilarious, and ethically dubious audition process. Sure, many of the show's more over-the-top wanna-bes are cognizant enough to realize the nature of the dog and pony show that they are about to put themselves through. Many court the shame. But a great swath of the contestants appear truly convinced of their own aptitude for Pop stardom, only to be laughed out of the room by the judge's panel (and, through extension, by America). These individuals, often decidedly void of social skills and marginally disturbed, are paraded in front of a snide and salivating public who, eager to gawk at the freaks, live vicariously through the judge's caustic and dismissive remarks. William Hung was a success story of a sort I suppose. To call it a triumph of mediocrity would give Hung too much credit. Perhaps his narrative is more a revenge of the un-gifted. And, like most revenge, it's ultimately unsatisfying. And so we are left with question: Who was this joke on anyway? Hung? Or us?

I remember "nice judge" Paula Abdul promoting Idol on Seattle local news, sounding like she had spent the morning doing body shots to help the Quaaludes go down easier. She was rarely more coherent on the show.

I remember Melinda Doolittle singing like a superstar week after week and then, maddeningly, acting as demure as some virginal giesha during her interactions with the judges. Having misplaced her neck week after week, Doolittle nonetheless consistently displayed utter showmanship with her full-throttle, highly focused and vocally controlled performances. To make My Funny Valentine tolerable to hear yet again is an achievement. To make it one of the best performances in Idol history? That's a miracle. Her Achilles's heel: the girl couldn't take a compliment. It's hard for America to put you on a pedestal if you act like a doormat. She was voted off before the finals.

I remember Simon and Ryan, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. Just kidding. I mean, that's silly. I mean, it's not like they are making homophobic gay innuendos at each other all the time or anything. I mean, not on a show that only featured an (kinda) openly gay contestant in its most recent season. I mean, nah, they would never kiss, in a tree or elsewhere. I mean, that would just be gay.

I remember Sanjaya's hair. We must all worship Sanjaya's hair. A pompadour of endless mutability, the skinny Indian boy's one-of-a-kind coiffure gave a far better performance on Idol than the singer did, Sanjaya himself being Idol's worst top-10 contestant in the show's history. But the hair, that was a thing of beauty. A piece of modern art to be displayed in a museum and pondered over. Or perhaps vacuum sealed and dissected in a lab. Or maybe pickled and left in the catacombs of a church the way they do the rotting appendages of Saints. The locks of Mr. Malakar are a national treasure and must be preserved!

I remember some blond boy bursting out into strange popping noises in the middle of his song. Trying to bring a unique spin to his performances Blake Lewis utilized his mad skillz as a beat boxer on America Idol in the biggest effort yet to turn the art form into a mainstream trend. And the boy was good. Since Blake's second-place finish, the results have not been promising; Beat Boxing remains a fringe music style. Were all of Blake's efforts for naught? Not really. There are some consolations to be had. For example, everyone knows who you're talking about when you reference "that beat-box guy."

And finally, I remember Adam Glambert, who, employing the magic of eye liner, black hair dye and vocal cords of indestructible carbon microfiber (well, one assumes) gave artistically limping American Idol (Lambert would have eaten the previous season's runner up, Bop! magazine ready David Archuleta, for breakfast) a shot of pure Ziggy Stardust-quality. Deeply anachronistic, Lambert's theatrical, glam-rock persona was a throwback to a musical era of high artifice, ambiguous sexuality, and musical experimentation. Perhaps this is the reason that, despite the consistently brilliant performances delivered by the leather lunged rock n' roller, the more palatable, "good 'ol Southern boy," Kris Allen ended up snatching the prize away from Glambert's black fingernailed hands. America's tastes remain guarded. David Cook, that's edgy. Adam Lambert, that's full on Studio 54 territory. But Kris Allen's victory was Pyrrhic; since the finale the media coverage has been focused not on the apple-cheeked winner but on his flamboyant runner-up.

You AUGHT to remember.

#6 - The Great Recession

2009-12-27T10:26:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

The free market cost us a whole lot.

Greed was very good in the aughts. Goaded on by the radical free-market zealots populating the Bush administration, the American economy resembled not so much a self-regulating system in the invisible hand paradigm of Adam Smith as it did a full-blown Reno casino with the taxpayers tied to the roulette wheel. And like a frothy-mouthed gambling addict on a lucky streak, there is no stopping the madness until it was too late. During the better part of the aughts, for the sharks within the financial system, times were good indeed: the Cristal champagne flowed at crowded velvet-roped clubs, credit was loose, and the word "bonus" came to mean a nothing short of a small fortune. The Masters of The Universe were back, "the hostile takeover" being replaced by "the credit default swap" as the archetypal dubious financial transaction of the decade. Complex mathematical financial models, totally inaccessible to laymen, became the backbone of our financial system, an apparatus so complex that even its practitioners didn't fully understand how the economy was working. All that mattered was profit, and, for some, there was plenty of that.

Sub-Prime loan. The quality of the investment is advertised in its name. You think that people making, oh, 20k a year (if that) would know better than to buy a $500,000 home but, hoodwinked by mountebanks peddling low-interest rates and manageable monthly payments, these sad-sacks couldn't help but reach for the American Dream when the carrot of home-ownership was dangled above their heads. "What's an Adjustable Rate Mortgage you ask? Don't you worry your pretty little head about that, that's just technical gobbledygook." And as these real estate robber barons bundled and sold the mortgages to ever-higher strata of financial institutions, the real estate bubble swelled to the point that the whole American economy rested upon the ricketiest of foundations. The pillars of American finance were weighed down with mounds of bad debt that could never be repaid. What happened when all these checks suddenly came due? What happen when that adjustable rate mortgage, well, adjusted? Let me put it thusly: did you ever play Jenga?

After the housing bubble burst, the shock-wave rippled through our economy, all but leveling its totemic institutions to the ground. The wealth of America had become little more than a slight-of-hand trick orchestrated by a few ingenious and unscrupulous bankers who put momentary profits ahead of sound long-term financial planning.

The narrative of the collapse of 2008 is now legendary. A domino metaphor is almost too easy to describe what took place in the fall of last year; perhaps a Nagasaki analogy is actually more fitting: it all just blew up in our faces. A mushroom cloud of cash whose fallout will prove radioactive for years to come. Lehman Bros was the first to fall. The headline was almost unthinkable but, there it was on the front page: Lehman Bros. files for bankruptcy. It was clear that this was a whole new depth of fissure in the capitalist system. Washington Mutual followed suit, the biggest bank failure in American history. It was looking like 1929 again. Insurance giant AIG was next on the chopping block when the United States Government performed a deus ex machina, saving the institution (and maybe the nation) from total financial ruin.

The economic collapse did provide America a living receptacle of loathing, disgust and resentment. His name was Bernie Madoff and, if history is just, the "Ponzi scheme" is no more; "Madoff scheme" will do very well, thank you! Stealing billions (billions!) of dollars from his investors, Madoff kept up his deceitful charlatanism for years, the robust economy allowing him to delay paying the piper as long as business was good. When the bull turned into a bear, and a really mean bear at that, there was no where else to hide. Madoff was through, his investors were broke, and America finally got a sense of just how corrupt and insane the world of finance had become. Yet Madoff is something of a whipping boy. Though he was without question corrupt, Madoff was, in a sense, a product of a system that encouraged behavior which, if not downright illegal, teetered ever so close to impropriety. Viewing Madoff as a singular and isolated example of corruption is to to ignore the myriad Bernie Madoffs that operated within the confines of a deregulated and corrupt system. These 21st Century Gordon Gekkos may have not broken the law but they nonetheless plundered America, turning our entire economy into a big game of "hot potato." Guess who was left holding the vegetable when the music stopped? That's right. All of us.

If there is a silver lining to the bleak clouds that now hover over America it is to be found in the resurgence of liberal Keynesian economics. If the crisis of '08 doesn't put the final nail in the coffin of Monetarism then we are all doomed. The economic meltdown has thoroughly discredited lassez-faire mandarins like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, the latter of whom finally admitted that he "found a flaw" in the system. "I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact." Well, about time you stopped jerking off to Atlas Shrugged and took a gander at the real world Mr. Greenspan.

"Experts" like Greenspan set the stage for this grand drama to unfold, blindly confident in the all-powerful wisdom of the "market." What we're left with is a disaster on a par with nothing in America since the crash of '29. But there is also hope. Hope of a future where greed may be kept in check by powerful regulatory forces and the "market" is utilized not as a grand schematic for all social organization but a tool, amenable to control, to help further the prosperity of society and welfare of the general populace. But, until these dreams are realized, we remain isolated in our private hoovervilles, singing the new anthem of The Great Recession: Brother can you spare a 401K?

You AUGHT to remember...

#7 - Fake News

2009-12-26T16:24:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

The real news seemed fake and the fake news seemed real.

Let's face it, a lot of shit went down this decade. Compared to the temperate seas of the 90's, a decade so devoid of dramatic news that years were spent obsessing over a presidential hummer, the aughts were a roiling tempest of global turbulence, financial meltdowns, ecological disasters, foreign wars and game-changing historical events which, when seen in totality, mark this as the most significant decade for news since the 1960's and maybe earlier.

The news itself was news this decade. With the method of information dissemination being reinvented daily by the Internet, traditional news sources found themselves scrambling to keep up and stay profitable. On television, all three of the long-standing grandfatherly network news anchors either retired or expired, and with their passing so too the primacy of "the Nightly News" as the central authoritative televised presentation of the days events. Even Walter Cronkite finally gave up the ghost. No television program would ever be able to fill the role that the "Nightly News" used to play, not in the fragmented and blog-filled world that we suddenly found ourselves living in. That being said, there was one news program in the aughts that reported the news thoroughly and accurately while at the same ladling the comic absurdity of the modern world over every story it reported. I am of course talking about The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, without question the decades most important news program.

Ushering in a golden age of satire The Daily Show with Jon Stewart reasserted irony as the primary weapon of truth-telling in civil society. The show was the news media's sarcastic conscience in an era of unabashedly biased cable networks, barking media "pundits," political "spin-rooms", and shrinking financial resources for bread and butter field reporting. The aughts were an era where sycophantic "reporters" with dubious credentials infiltrated the White House press corps, lobbing softball questions to GW in times of great national crisis. An era when the 24 hours news cycle amplified every political skirmish into a hysterical crisis only to be discarded and forgotten by the next day. An era in which the talk show host with the most stringent views or most outrageous performance skills garnered the highest ratings, truth and thoughtfulness be damned. It was in this context that The Daily Show, though far from unbiased, acquired a carapace of authority and integrity shared by no other television program. To those who counted on a fair analysis of the news The Daily Show became a nightly ritual for many Americans, replacing both late night talk and traditional evening news. Host Jon Stewart went from being a successful stand-up comic and sporadically employed film actor to the most trusted man in America. Eminently astute and endlessly hilarious, Stewart combined old-fashioned borscht belt humor and the hyper-intellectual comedy of Ivy League publications like the Harvard Lampoon, with a dose of Tim Russert's inquisitional rigor thrown in for good measure. Unlike the self-congratulatory echo-chambers of 24-hour news networks, The Daily Show actively courted intelligent debate of a kind not seen on television since William F. Buckley gave us his parting switchblade smirk on Firing Line.

The shows most important function was its role as a media watchdog, ruthlessly exposing the lunacy and hypocrisy of the "legitimate" cable news channels, which, in the show's meta-analysis of the field, come across as inane and opportunistic loci of blathering idiots and any-for-a-rating gambits. How else to explain Glenn Beck or CNN's Star Wars hologram? By dismantling the edifice of legitimacy that the "real news" claimed a monopoly on, the void left behind was to be filled by a different kind of program, one with no obligation to seriousness but which nonetheless was executed with the utmost of integrity. The Daily Show's ridicule of mainstream news paved the way for its own meteoric rise to success. When Jon Stewart appeared on CNN's long runing debate program Crossfire the comic all but torpedoed his hosts, turning his appearance into nothing less than a full-blown confrontation, accusing his hosts of "hurting America." The show was canceled a few months later, all but coronating Stewart as America's voice of reason.

The Daily Show grew so popular it became a miniature star factor with many of the series' correspondents moving on to widespread Hollywood success. Steve Carrell joined Judd Apatow's cadre, transforming himself into a major film star. He then conquered the small screen yet again as the read role in TV's hit sitcom The Office. Ed Helm's eventually joined Carrell on The Office and later landed big screen success in 2009's biggest comedy smash, The Hangover. Rob Courdroy too has cultivated a modest film career after his tenure on The Daily Show.

But it was former correspondent Stephen Colbert who turned his faux-newsman persona into a one-man cult of personality on The Daily Show's remarkable spin-off The Colbert Report. A lampoon of blowhard talk show hosts of a sort popular on Fox News, The Colbert Report is even purer satire than its source. Never breaking from his assumed egomaniacal pomposity and party-line conservatism, Stephen Colbert (the character, not the actor of the same name) is a textbook lesson in satirical construction. From the beginning Colbert had his finger on the pulse of America. Introducing the word "truthiness" into the American lexicon during his first episode, the word could arguably be the most vital addition to the American vocabulary in years. When Colbert was plucked to bring his act to the Annual Press Correspondent's Dinner in 2006 his set left the room in a dazed silence, the routine being a sustained and penetrating critique of the Bush Administration's policies and the press' coverage thereof. After bombing in person, when the footage hit the internet Colbert's speech immediately turned into a sensation, eventually running a victory lap as the most watched video on iTunes. It still remains one of the most overtly confrontational and politically brave moments by a member of the press during the Bush administration.

With The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (as well as their cousin in print, the sublimely hilarious weekly news periodical The Onion) satire and humor acted as the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of go down. As real news veered ever closer to the precipice of absurdity, more and more did the silly and comic approximate the actual texture of reality, even when the truth was anything but funny. With an administration and congress more closely aligned with the ideological perspective of the Daily Show's creative team now in power, it remains to be seen if the show will be able to maintain its critical satiric edge. But whatever happens, without the fake news of the past ten years the real news would have simply been unbearable.

You AUGHT to remember...

# 8 - Hooking-up

2009-12-24T21:33:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

No one had "sex" anymore.

Note: College and Grad students, feel free to submit this essay as your own for a course in "Contemporary Neologisms and Hegelian Philosophy."

The Hookup: A Dialectic Analysis

In the aughts, one expression has surged in popularity, especially among the young. One expression embodied, in itself, a shift in the culture's sexual mores. This shift, I hope to prove, could not have occurred without the expression, the language facilitating the needed symbolic restructuring that social pressures demanded. Eventually, so common was the expression's use that it itself began to alter behavioral patterns, as opposed to merely accommodating them.

I am, of course, talking about "hooking-up," the aughts' catch-all term for any casual sexual interaction. By deconstructing the subtle ways in which the word functions, we can analyze both how behavior dictates language and, reciprocally, how language dictates behavior. A dialectic analysis allows us to trace the evolution of the expression and its widespread integration in society.

Employing the dialectic concepts of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis we can trace how "hooking-up" became such a dominant phrase in our collective vocabulary. In a traditional dialectic, within each thesis is a contradiction which leads to the antithesis -- which then brings about synthesis.

What was the thesis here? As the 21st century approached, a generation was coming of age that had never lived through the sexual revolution of the sixties or the gender politics of the seventies. Women were equals to men prima facie; they no longer had greater pressure to get married than men and were actively discouraged from having children at too young an age. Concurrently, sexual interactions outside of marriage were by now the norm, safe-sex education and the pill rendering the activity consequence-free for those responsible enough to take precautions. The result was a society where casual sex, of one sort or another, was becoming more and more prominent.

And here we arrive at the contradiction. Even though social pressures were creating a need for loose and easily-disposable romantic detachments, the lexicon of terms to describe this variety of sexual behavior was wanting. Options of expression were limited and inadequate. There was a severity to saying that you "had sex." The disclosure was too invasive, too clear, too forward. It was even worse to "make love" when obviously you were doing no such thing. Expressions with a more casual feel were tainted by a misogynistic cant: "Get laid," "scored," "hit a home run," "got some," "nailed her" (which is almost impossible to imagine or make sense of with the opposite pronoun, continuing a tradition of male-centric slang descriptions of sex)," are but a few examples. They all share a view of sex as conquest, a vantage point almost always masculine in perspective. Suddenly these terms began to sound as antiquated as "free love." There simply was no word to express the new sexual politics of the 21st century.

What kind of language would be required to accommodate these new social pressures? It would have to be gender neutral, for one; women as much as men were engaging in this casual sexual behavior, and it sometimes involved two women or two men. It would have to deflate the importance of sex, making the activity as mundane and routine as walking the dog or getting a latte. It would need to maintain a certain level of discretion, allowing people to discuss the topic without admitting much in the way of specifics. And finally, it should allude to easy detachment. "Hooking-up" was the perfect candidate.

Already an expression in common - though different - usage before the aughts, to "hook-up" with someone meant little more than to meet them in person. It was inevitable in retrospect that the word would get re-appropriated to imply, now almost exclusively, some sort of sexual interaction. This re-appropriation was the anti-thesis to the contradiction created by a vocabulary and social climate that were deeply mismatched. "Hooking-up" could mean anything from a stolen smooch at a party to full-blown intercourse. In either case, one was not inclined to press the point further and inquire just what a person meant when they said they had "hooked-up" with someone. "Hooking-up" was a catch-all; a phrase allowing people to both confess their intimate behavior to others and simultaneously reveal almost nothing. The verb "to hook" was the perfect symbolic image for interpersonal connection in the aughts. Hooking implies easy unhooking. Other verbs in the vicinity carry with them a deeper sense of permanence: to link, to join, to latch, to meld. Hooking, with its intimations of tenous permanence, was the ideal metaphor for sex in the aughts.

As the phrase caught on we reached the synthesis point in the dialectic. From first accommodating new social realities, the phrase began to proactively create them. "Hooking-up," as an expression more than an activity, normalized casual sex to such a degree that inhibitions against such behavior were slackened to the point of non-existence. "Hooking-up" became an expectation, a fully integrated aspect of modern life for the young. Language, not merely expressing our ideas, actively sets the coordinates of our social reality, creating culture, not just defining it. There needs to be a stabilization between external behaviors and internal representations of such behaviors, these representations being embodied by words and expressions. The relationship is a two way street. The important thing is that they not get too misaligned; such tensions, as seen in the early aughts, can lead to dramatic change, both within a individual and society as a whole.

Does "Hooking-up" have a half-life in our collective consciousness, or is the notion here to stay? I suspect the former. The synthesis of the dialectic that brought us to this point may itself be a new thesis with its own internal contradictions. The cagey ambiguity at the center of the expression - its failure to express much at all - implies a certain retrograde prudishness that we still hold with us. There is something dishonest about "hooking-up," something delusional. "Hooking-up" takes away the sex from sex, neutralizing its awesome power. We still feel anxiety about the broken down gender roles and sexual negotiations that the modern world foists upon us, unable as we are to integrate a truly coherent sexual ethos into a world where procreation can be accomplished in a lab and men and women share social equality (in theory if not practice). "Hooking-up" may not, in the final analysis, resolve this neurotic predicament. It's a temporary solution to a long-term problem: the human animal.

You AUGHT to remember...

#9 - Reality TV

2009-12-23T20:20:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Reality got really fake.

Growing like a cancer throughout the Aughts, Reality TV began as a benign fad that quickly metastasized into a full-blown fixture of television programming, threatening the health of the entire medium. Reality TV was junk food: cheaply made, bad for your health, greasy, deeply addictive and prone to cause indigestion. Never had the term boob tube seemed so apropos. As the appetite of the audience grew more and more insatiable, the competition to create new content devolved fast into a race to the bottom, the shows growing ever more outlandish and sensationalistic. With nearly as many channels as there were viewers to watch them, the need for cheap and salacious material to stand apart from the fray became all consuming.

And who were the stars of Reality TV? From the evidence on display in show after show, the only casting criterion was that you be as unreal as possible. A unappetizing lot of stripper skanks, desperate nobodies, muscular meatheads, nerds with the social skills of small rodents, and celebrities climbing their way back onto the D-list, the stars of reality television were Hollywood's shortbus of non-talent would-bes and has-beens. Though they all ostensibly have passed psychological exams, watching the programs one would be hard pressed not to suspect that a few unscrupulous doctors were slipped a bribe or two; how else to explain the Charenton Asylum level of insanity on display?

As the decade wore on the format consolidated into recognizable mini-genres, each with their own cliches and quirks. A quick run-down of the two most popular, and abysmal, types:

Celebrity Verite
Beginning with the surprise success of The Osbournes, Celebrity Verite was one of reality television's most durable genres. The idea: take a quirky, off-beat celebrity and document their daily life, it's bound to be entertaining. The Osbournes worked because, despite the obvious eccentricities of its leading man, the show captured an honest dynamic of family life. As with all reality TV trends, when series came and went the spark of originality soon disappeared, replaced instead by ridiculously contrived scenarios and spontaneity-free dialogue. Whatever gonzo verisimilitude made The Osbournes a surprising charmer is totally absent from more recent Celebrity Verite exercises. The unwatchable Keeping Up With Kardashians is proof enough of that. Other prominent examples: The Anna Nicole Show (Anna Nicole Smith), Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica (Lachey and Simpson), The Simple Life (Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie), Hey Paula! (Ms. Abdul), Hammertime (M.C. Hammer), Hogan Knows Best (Hulk Hogan), The Girls Next Door (Hugh Hefner), The Two Coreys (Haim and Feldman), Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood (Tori Spelling), My Life on the D-List (Kathy Griffin) and Being Bobby Brown (Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston).

Reality Romance
Reality dating (quite opposed to dating in reality) in the Aughts began with a sour note, the now legendary Who Wants To Marry a Millionaire, a one-night special aired on Fox in 2000 in which a terrified blonde named Darva Conger found herself betrothed to a "multi-millionaire" with a lounge singers name, Mr. Rick Rockwell. The marriage, it need be noted, did not last. It wasn't even consummated. From this blatant glorification of gold-digging and misogyny, the only place to go was up. And yet, descent was achieved. With the bland Bachelor and Bachelorette as the template, dating shows became the most formulaic of all Reality TV. The Set-up was always the same: A central "bachelor" is looking for love. A harem of contenders longingly pines for their would-be suitor. A weekly event or outing or contest helps determine that weeks elimination, chosen, ostensibly, by the bachelor him/her self. At the end of the series our lead selects his/her soul-mate; riding off into the sunset together they live happily ever after. (Or at least until they receive residuals.) From show to show, the structure is practically set in stone.

The difference between one show from the next is the novel band of contenders that the producers select and whatever manipulative twist can be thrown in at the last minute to spice up the otherwise tired formula. Same-Sex romance was explored on Boy Meets Boy (gay bachleor, with both gay and - unbeknownst to the lead - straight boys vying for his affections) and the hastily canceled Playing It Straight (the exact opposite of Boy Meets Boy, with a bachelorette seeking a male companion). Those of ample appetites got their moment in the reality sun with More To Love, the dating show for people with waistlines as big as their hearts. Various has-been celebrities got into the act, looking for love as the star of their own dating reality show. Tilla Tequila swung both ways on A Shot at Love, while Brett Michaels made it his goal to nail each of the contestants on the ludicrously skanky "Rock Of Love." Rap star and human timepiece Flava Flav scored big ratings with his show, Flavor of Love. It lasted three seasons despite its star finding true love at the end of each iteration. Curious. Failed Flavor of Love contestant "New York" proved so popular that the outlandish loudmouth got two seasons of her own dating extravaganza, I Love New York.

Fooling no one, the pretense of romance on any of these programs is about as authentic as Tila Tequila's breasts. That's not the appeal. We just like to watch the carnival. The freak-show is alive and in full force. My favorite of the genre? Joe Millionaire, the 2003 Fox dating show in which a gaggle of airheads think they are being courted by a dashing young millionaire only to be told in the finale that he is, in fact, a construction worker. The show was nasty, ridiculous and impossible to stop watching.

The structure of reality dating has been copied in other reality shows from America's Next Top Model to Scream Queens to the dating-in-all-but-name Brody Jenner vehicle Bromance. The format itself has gotten so old it almost makes one pine for the days of Love Connection.

Of course there is so much more to Reality TV! I didn't even get to talk about the surfeit of dance-focused shows like So You Think You Can Dance or Dancing With The Stars. And what about competition programs like the original reality phenom Survivor or Emmy darling The Amazing Race! Wife Swap gave us the "God warrior" as well as Richard Heene, the man who would go on to give us the hoax of the decade - the balloon boy. And RuPaul's Drag Race! I didn't even get to talk about RuPaul's Drag Race! Our cups runneth over...

And lest anyone be concerned about my viewing habits after reading this, fear not; I don't actually watch this crap. I learn everything I needed to know from The Soup!

You AUGHT to Remember...

#10 - Harry Potter and the Enchanted Bag of Money

2009-12-22T13:50:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Boarding school never looked so good.

Harry Potter was the Aughts' biggest franchise, a series of books (and later movies) that cast a spell not merely on children but the whole of civil society. To call them "childrens books" is akin to calling the Atlantic Ocean a really big lake. Grown men and women showed no qualms when reading the books in public, often on on park benches and on subway trains, all but advertising their devotion to the series. J.K. Rowling could do no wrong. It wasn't kosher amongst even the most pretentious of the intelligentsia to sneer at the books the way the same crowd did (and should have) for the two other publishing bombshells of the decade, The Da Vinci Code and Twilight. Take that same superior attitude toward the Potter books and you were likely to lose friends fast. Rowling's creation was critic proof, despite whatever Harold Bloom says.

By the time the door-stopper of a final Harry Potter book came out, the release was greeted with the kind of promotional roll-out usually reserved for Michael Bay films or Olympic ceremonies. Deep queues of people dressed as Hufflepuffs and Slytherins waited for hours outside bookstores to grab their midnight copy of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, which, after their persistence and patience, they proceeded to read until completion in the wee small hours of the morning. No book can, or maybe ever will, receive such a mardi-gras of celebration upon release. When the smoke had cleared, the series had sold over 400 Million copies and had been translated into over 67 languages. Rowling, who had once subsisted on the government's dole, heads into the next decade a billionaire.

The trick of Harry Potter was Rowling's employment of a traditional coming-of-age narrative filtered through enchanted cheesecloth, creating a "magic" world that was, in fact, analogous to our own. Hogwarts was in most important respects like any boarding school, except at Hogwarts one could converse with the portraiture or learn how to brew aphrodisiacs in chemistry class. Though the muggle (that's Potterian for non-wizard) world seemed anemic and bland next to the Hogwarts fairly-tale, look deeper and its clear that each was but a reflection of the other. All the magic in Harry Potter can be read as a parody of more mundane realities. Even Quidditch, the most popular sport no one has ever played, is little more than an elaborate game of soccer (excuse me, football) taken into the third dimension.

Rowling's myth-making was not the genesis-like creation of an entirely new imaginative eco-system, as was the case with fantasy classics by Tolkien and (dare, I say) George Lucas. Rather than inventing her menagerie of enchanted fauna from thin air, Rowling's potpourri of character types are a grand buffet of mythic creatures and traditional Christian and pagan bogeymen: Wizards and witches, dragons and trolls, giants and werewolves. Rowling was churning through the entire back-catalog of childhood fantasy to make her epic. But, underneath the spells and sorcery were adolescent realities: schoolwork, puberty, nascent sexuality, and the tenuousness of innocence and youth.

The Potter phenomenon did not begin in the Aughts (the first book was published in 1997), but it was the release of the first Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, in 2001, that kicked off Potter's march toward total cultural dominance. The following series of films based on the books have too been wildly successful in their medium. How successful? Well, all six of the films made so far are among the top 25-highest grossing movies of all time. That successful. And, for the most part, they have achieved artistic as well as commercial success. Though the first two films reek of a heavy-handed and antiseptic Hollywood aesthetic (the blame mainly falling on the director Chris Columbus' less-than-subtle approach), as the series pressed onwards Warner Bros. hired adventuresome and sophisticated directors, supplying greater depth and melancholy to the story. Alfonso Cuaron, Mike Newell, and David Yates have all sat at the director's chair, bringing their dinstictive styles to the property.

For the adults in the room the real joy comes from watching the entire payroll of the Royal Shakespeare Company gnaw at the expensive, stony scenery the way only a British thespian can. Has Alan Rickman, an actor with 16 variations of a sneer, ever been put to better use than in the role of Severus Snape? Could Ralph Fiennes be any more ominous and serpent-like as the Dark Lord Voldemort? And how genius is Maggie Smith as McGonagall, pursuing her lips with the hilariously submerged indignation and hysteria that only the two time Academy Award winner can summon? Or consider Emma Thompson as a batty "divination" instructor? Or Kenneth Branagh as...well, the list goes on. The brilliant cast is the series' secret weapon: not only are they all impeccable in their roles, they're English as Fish & Chips. An cast chock full of Sirs and Dames supplies a national authenticity (the Potter stories, for all their universal appeal, are as British as Brideshead Revisited or Coleman's Mustard) to a production as Hollywood generated and financed as a Transformers film.

When the final installment (halved into two films, lest the cow be anything but totally dry upon final milking) hits multiplexes starting next year, it will be the final curtain to Potters hegemonic dominance on childrens fantasy entertainment. Rowling, the most profitable writer in history, now finds herself with an impossible act to follow. Maybe she'll just spend the rest of her life dropping scandalous morsels of gossip about the characters from her books. Sure, we now know Dumbledore's a homo, but maybe Ms. McGonagall was actually a 60's radical. Or perhaps Ron grows up to become an S&M fetishist. The possibilities are endless. Meanwhile, the books will remain staples of a child's literary diet, easily on a mantle next to the best of Lewis Carrol or C.S. Lewis. Personally, I would like Rowling to keep telling Harry's story. He grew up with us, shouldn't he grow old with us too? Who wouldn't want to read Harry Potter and the Irreversible Herpes Spell? Or Harry Potter and the Cursed Marriage of Doom? And finally, we can't forget Harry Potter and Potter and the Mage's Magic Adult Diaper.

You AUGHT to remember...

#11 - Tweens

2009-12-21T19:44:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Grown men and women were forced to use the word "tween."

Pop quiz. Before you were a teenager you were a....what? Well, for almost all of human history you were, simply, a child. But, one day the early-mid aughts, some corporate douche (actual it was probably a whole boardroom full of doucheitude) realized that he could drum up a whole consumer base by inventing a new demographic to exploit. Enter the "Tween." As in, "inbetween." As in, "inbetween childhood and high school." Clever? I thought not. Those oh-so-magical years from 8-12, notoriously the worst of all youth (especially the later few, with the inchoate stirrings of puberty in the background), are now the focus of our national attention and the drain funneling away our excess cash. A demographic defined almost entirely by what it consumes, a tween cannot be extracted from their taste in music, or clothing brand loyalty or movie going habits. With almost all other media splintering down into more and more refined niches, the Tweens represent the last remaining monolithic mass market to advertise to. No group is more susceptible to slavish groupthink than a pre-teen, the age when solidarity with and acceptance by one's peers is paramount to ones own sense of identity. Sell to one, sell to all. You are what they buy. And they bought a lot. Tweens, funded by an apparently endless stream of cash from their dazed and clueless parents, shopped with the abandon and mouth-foaming need that only a child could summon guiltlessly, when cost is nothing and obtainment is all. I don't think there were a lot of piggybanks cracked open, it was more like an ATM.

A massive, synaptic-ally interconnected, multi-platform, synergistically marketed network of TV shows, pop bands, movie-musicals, fantasy-novels, clothing brands, and video games - to those in the matrix Tweendom is all. It's celebrities are just the biggest things ever! The music's like, the most fun in the world. Duh! To those unplugged, Tween culture is a hermetically sealed media-dome, inaccessible to those outside yet totally transparent; the tweens themselves were a kind of body-snatched alien race living amongst us. The circular totality of Tween culture is its most amazing feature. Tweens were a self-contained subculture that metastasized into the decade's most game-changing (and profitable) pop-culture phenomenon.

Acting as a kind of central ventricular pump for all things Tween, the Disney Channel hatched more bankable stars this decade than anything other media incubator. A locus of pre-sexual romantic angst, blandly cheerful gonad-free pop, pixie-stick hyper situation comedies, and white-strip-print-ad-ready cherub superstars, the Disney Channel was ground zero for the pre-teen set in the Aughts. From here we can sketch our new Raphael-ian tableau. (The school of Athens? The playground of Tween!) To do so, I have to channel my inner 11-year-old-girl, so, here we go...

Oh My God! So like you have to talk about Zac first, cause he's like hottest boy evah! Seriously though, super serious now, he has really proved himself a worthy, like, mega-star since his debut in HSM. He has so pushed his mad skillz as an actor! Like, for example, he really stretched himself in Hairspray cause he went from playing a singing and dancing hunky high school student to like, a singing and dancing hunky high school student in like the 20's or 60's or, you know, ancient history. I totally bought it! But speaking of HSM..VANESSA! VANESSA HUDGENS! She is like, so beautiful and so talented and it's so not fair! And she gets to date Troy Bolton in HSM and then really date Zac in real life. Again...not fair!! Ok, yeah, she sexted. Like, so what? LOL! I totally love her. But not as much as I love JOE JONAS! He is the middle one in the Jonas Brothers and, OK, like I love them all, I do, I love all the Jonas Brothers, but Joe...is totally the one. Just something about him is so dreamy. And you know he'll be totally a gentleman cause he always wears his purity ring. And of course, I can always listen to his music. Oh, and if you're gonna talk about awesome music you can't not talk about Miley. Miley Cyrus OMG! Only the most awesome biggest most amazing actress/singer/songwriter/dancer/producer ever!! The star of Hannah Montana, the best show on TV! Miley is like, everyones hero. I can't believe that you hadn't heard of her, she's like the most famous person on the planet, duh! Ok, gotta run, my Mom got tickets to the matinee of Wicked; I've seen it, like 10 times. I'm totally Galinda! Yeah..HSM, Jonas, Hannah Montana. That's all you need to know. There is like, totally so much more but I'm gotta go. CYA!

You AUGHT to remember...

#12 - The Metrosexual

2009-12-21T16:58:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Put-together straight men threw off everyone's gaydar.

I Am the Very Model of a Modern Metrosexual

I am the very model of a modern metrosexual
I have good taste in matters both specific and quite general.
I know that when a gent is getting ready to go out at night,
It's needed for his self-esteem that shoes and belt should match just right.

I'm very well acquainted too with fashions that are high couture,
From Prada shirts to Fendi belts to Marc Jacobs' entire oeuvre.
And 'cause my wardrobe closet overflows with clothes that I enjoy,
Now other members of my sex are calling me a girly boy!

[Now other members of his sex are calling him a girly boy!
Now other members of his sex are calling him a girly boy!
Now other members of his sex are calling him a girly boy!]

I'm very good at picking out real diamonds from Zirconia.
My ear for music, delicate as songs of a Euphonia.
In short in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
I am the very model of a modern metrosexual.

[In short in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
He is the very model of a modern metrosexual.]

And in the morning I wake up and head directly to the loo.
Before I leave I have about an hour of grooming to get through.
I brush my teeth, I jeuj my hair, I wax and I exfoliate.
I look so hot that I'm aroused; I drop my pants and masturbate.

And at the club so late at night, the girls they swoon and follow me.
The work paid off! I look so good, I've nabbed a pussy colony.
But when I try to make a pass, it doesn't matter what I say.
It seems that they just can't believe yours truly isn't really gay.

[It seems the girls just can't believe his truly isn't really gay.
It seems the girls just can't believe his truly isn't really gay.
It seems the girls just can't believe his truly isn't really gay.]

The grooming of your body is important if your tres hirsute,
A manscaped torso is a must to look good in your birthday suit.
In short in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
I am the very model of a modern metrosexual.

[In short in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
He is the very model of a modern metrosexual.]

Why most men choose to act and talk as if they were neanderthals,
Is but a question which I know cannot be solved in schoolyard walls.
A man can know the rules of sport and pledges of fraternity,
But get a manicure and some would call it an absurdity!

Though I don't mind that people think that I am gay when they see me,
I know that it's a compliment. I know my sexuality.
Try "acting straight?" Well, I don't know, I guess I've never really tried.
But I'm one man, I'm proud to say, with no need to become queer-eyed.

[But he's one man, he's proud to say with no need to become queer-eyed.
But he's one man, he's proud to say with no need to become queer-eyed.
But he's one man, he's proud to say with no need to become queer-eyed.]

So in the Aughts, well, here I was, a new kind of celebrity.
I fooled them all to think that I was more than just a jerk yuppie.
But still, in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
I am the very model of a modern metrosexual.

[But still, in matters of good taste, specific and quite general,
he is the very model of a modern metrosexual.]

You AUGHT to remember.

#13 - Skinny Ties

2009-12-20T15:49:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

We all dressed like Mad Men.

Neck wear of ratpackers and reservoir dogs, the skinny tie had been hibernating for decades before resurfacing with a vengeance in the late Aughts. Men of all ages rediscovered the joys of the svelte necktie slowly, the girth of the apparel shrinking little by little over the decade, from the fat, iridescent slabs that dominated millennial neck wear (Thank you Regis Philbin!) to the sleek and chic near near uni-dimensional style prevalent today. (For proof of this evolution see Ryan's Seacrest's wardrobe over 10 years.) The effect is young, fun, streamlined and classy. Adjectives like swag and swinging are not inappropriate. For those of a stylish mien, the skinny tie has all but cornered cool. Somewhat less flattering on those of a more portly build, the skinny tie looks best on men as lean as their neck wear. Sporting a tailored suit, an anachronistic pair of brightly colored converse sneakers, and a skinny tie loosened around the open neck, the fashion-forward man of the late Aughts looks not unlike a slacker substantiation of the The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

Of course, that gray flannel suit was itself wiped clean of mothballs this decade with the hit television show Mad Men on AMC. Probably the most fastidiously accurate (and luscious) recreation of mid-century fashion and design since Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven (another of the decade's artistic highlights), Matthew Weiner's Mad Men is like attending a design showroom of early 60's modernism. Skinny ties and thick rimmed glasses abound, with perfect matching handkerchiefs poking out of every suit's breast pocket. It's style porn. Luckily the show surrounding the vintage duds and leather backed Eames Chairs is equally rich in characterization. Dramatizing a glamorous, lost New York of rigid workplace gender roles, two (or three+) martini lunches, incessant cigarette smoking and flush post-50's abundance, the characters of Mad Men nonetheless teeter on the edge of a social and sexual revolution that would come to uproot the customs and mores of their lives and the world. It's telling that no decade featured such a revolution of style from beginning to end than the 1960's did, a signal of the more real turbulence quaking beneath the shallow fault lines of the fashion world.

Some might chalk up the rise of the skinny tie and the success of Mad Men as two unrelated phenomenon, but I can't help but suspect that the two are more inextricably linked; when fashion trendsetters and the Hollywood hoi-polloi converge on the same aesthetic seemingly independently of each other it's a clue that something is afoot in the American subconscious. Perhaps we, like the employees of the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, are living in a world where the center can't hold, the new revolutions heading our way threatening to collapse the apparatus of stability and material comfort we strained to erect. In the sixties it was the sexual revolution and newly energized leftist movement that undid the world of the Mad Men. The vague but persistent march of globalization and ecological disaster threatens ours. Though I lament to say it, if I had to guess what style of necktie will be popular in ten years, I would expect a resurgence of the loud and bombastic variety that dominated the late 60's and persisted in popularity through the whole of the 70's. Made with thick and heavy synthetic fabric and featuring bright, unsubtle stripes, the tie of the teens is (well, will be) what happens when the whole edifice of civil society starts to fall apart, as it did in the 1970's.

The mens necktie as barometer of social unrest and economic stability? Yeah, I'll go there. (College students, there is an essay for you!) For now, the skinny tie and the slim suit are emblems of control and simplicity in a world that is increasingly anything but.

You AUGHT to remember.

#14 - Paris Hilton

2009-12-19T20:36:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

You were famous for being famous.

Resistance is futile! Turn off your TV. Avoid web sites ending in .com. Avert your eyes when passing billboards on the road. In the Aughts, no maneuver could help a person escape the galactic entity that was Paris Hilton, mega-mega famous socialite and celebutante to end them all. Eager to have her face plastered hedcut-style next to the word "celebrity" in Webster's (she already was located next to the words "skank" and "shallow"), Paris was the decade's most famous person that people loved to hate. Actually, she was this decade's most famous person, period. One had a better chance of avoiding coverage of the Iraq War than of bypassing Paris Hilton's event horizon, sucking, as it inevitably does, anything that nears it into a black hole of gossipy skulduggery. Paris was celebrity in the Aughts, designed to induce ridicule and, simultaneously (though clearly not paradoxically), envy. Created by and for the same audience who balks and gripes about the inexorable celebrity news coverage that they (secretly, ironically) can't stop watching, Paris Hilton was rich, pretty, and famous enough to make us want to be her just as she was shallow, artificial, and tacky enough to allow us to dismiss her. In this way, she was a kind of non-threatening comfort; we were all allowed to take her seriously because, of course, no one takes her seriously.

A joke more than a person, the most amazing thing about Paris Hilton was the ease in which she adopted the persona that the market demanded. Shameless and unaware of the fact, Paris Hilton would, seemingly, stoop to any low to keep her picture frequency in US Magazine high. Of course, this shallow bottom-feeding is exactly what drove the hotel heiress all the way up to the top. If Paris Hilton had not existed, we'd have had to invent her. Either the Paris Hilton persona was the grandest piece of performance art since Andy Kaufman declared himself a professional wrestler or Hilton was a figure of Hegelian import and inevitability, embodying her era with the same magnanimity as "history-on-horseback" himself, Napoleon Bonaparte. (Paris Hilton is to the Aughts as: a) Leonardo Da Vinci is to the Renaissance, b) Socrates is to Ancient Greece, c) Adolf Hitler is to 20th Century Fascism or d)F. Scott Fitzgerald is the the 20's. Answer: All of the above!) Who knew being a spoiled brat was such an art? (Or a business!) Paris (definitely not pronounced "Paree") invented a new kind of persona: the famous famous person. To be an icon in the 21st century one didn't have to act well, or sing fabulously, or even succeed as model...no. One simply had to be famous...for no reason at all.

Of course, the template here is Barbie. Ample of bosom, vacant-eyed, with a ludicrously singed and minuscule waist, the absurd proportions of America's most beloved doll are, strictly speaking, impossible in natural biology. It's more of a goal to strive for. With a polyurethane complexion amplifying her strained vacuity, the flesh and blood (we think) Paris came as close as any to embodying a life-size, walking, talking, breathing Barbie doll, albeit a Barbie with the fashion sense of a high-paid prostitute. Though it's easy, if sad, to see how Paris embodied an obvious male fantasy (blond, dumb, an easy lay), it still perplexes what women saw in the Diva of Ditz. And yet it seemed that every girl wanted to be Paris's BFF; they'd even compete for the honor. We couldn't decide if we worshiped her or wanted her publicly flogged in the town square. (Probably both and for the same reasons.) The stench of blatant schadenfreude permeating Hollywood when Paris was carted off to jail for drunk driving had people holding their noses from coast to coast. We built her up to bring her down. It was an ungainly sight all around.

Paris represented a grand cultural displacement, the myriad anxieties endemic to the new century were at once too horrible to dwell over and yet too distant to fully confront: terrorism threats, foreign wars, the flooding of American cities due to poor infrastructure - the problems were legion and yet, for most, not necessarily personal. Paris was the rejection of all such concerns, a nexus of artificiality to distract from the real. The shallow overwhelmed the deep, and the excessive vanquished the temperate. Underpinning it all was the worship of loose cash and excess spending; Paris's one legitimate claim to fame, if you can call it that, was her copious family fortune. Money was rolling in in the Aughts and Paris was there to show us how to spend it.

With the heiress nearing 30, the bloom is off the rose. So too with America. The collapse of the financial system has made the conspicuous consumption of celebrity culture obscene. Paris, practically a sketch comedy character to start with, is doomed to greater and greater irrelevance and embarrassment should she attempt to maintain her cultural cache. A product of her decade, with its passing so to does Hilton's grip on pop-culture. She's no longer a viable cultural force, she's a Hollywood Square in waiting. A wise woman would willingly fade away from the spotlight, sparing herself and the country the indignity of a 40-year old Paris doing specials on TV about her plastic surgery or later-in-life dating fiascoes. (You know it's coming.) But, somehow I fear that Paris is going to cling to her fame like some 21st Century Norma Desmond, ending up isolated and alone in her Hollywood mansion watching reruns of The Simple Life on a loop.

The point of pop-culture, what in fact makes it interesting, is it's shameless consumerism; pop culture is what people want to buy. And because of that, because it actually responds to the desires and whims of the general populace with greater flexibility and honesty than other more "refined" artistic pursuits, pop culture acts as a kind of Rorschach test for the mental state of a whole society. It's what we really desire even when think we don't. And in the Aughts, what we desired, at least figuratively, was Paris Hilton. The hotel heiress should be analyzed less as an object of the Aughts than a mirror of its vain, superficial, easily titillated, excessive and privacy-averse face. Paris was the endless cycle of paparazzi photographs, tabloid magazine headlines, online gossip mongering and "Entertainment" News television programs. She was the Aughts's seething, white-sunglass wearing id. And that is definitely not hot.

You AUGHT to remember...

#15 - Blogs

2009-12-18T13:30:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Everyone was an opinion columnist.

Blog
(noun)
1. A website which is frequently updated in the form of "posts." The content can be anything from political analysis, to celebrity gossip, to astrophysics, to film criticism, to food recipes, to personal diary. See also; live journal. Short for WEBLOG.

2. What you are reading right now.

3. A great way to get a movie deal.

(verb)

1. The act of blogging. [see below]

Blogger
(noun)
1. A solipsistic person who, eager to share his random musing on any asinine topic that interest him, decides to find a space on the Internet where he is able to empty his wasted intellectual energies on self-satisfying, banal observations about his daily life.

2. A frustrated journalist who, requiring the low entrance start-up of the Internet, uses a blog to begin an outside-the-normal-mechanisms-of-journalistic-approval news source.

3. One of the few category's that Perez Hilton and Richard Posner have in common.

Blogging
(Verb)

1. The act of writing pages and pages of text to be posted for universal publication on the world wide web, only to be read by you and your mother.

Bloggish
(adj)
Blog-like in content i.e. a brief opinionated, unjustified statement that is uttered with total certainty or an over-long description of a total banal experience.

Blogosphere
(noun)
1. The Interconnected network of blogs on the Internet which, together, act as an echo chamber for various up-to-minute new stories, memes, trends, and gossip.

2. The world's biggest game of Telephone.

VLOG
(noun)
1. A video blog.

2. A way for people too lazy to actually write anything to nonetheless offer their unsolicited cultural analysis, or share their self-confessional daily diary, to anyone on earth who cares to watch and listen.

(verb)
1. The act of posting a video blog.

Götterdämmerblog
(noun)
1. The total decimation of old of old media by the rise of the blogosphere.

2.The replacement of hard-working, paid field reporters and newsroom journalists by unpaid, unemployed, self-described "pundits" and "reporters" working from their living room.

You AUGHT to remember.

#16 - Cell Phones

2009-12-17T10:24:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Land-line became a punchline.

GREAT MOMENTS IN CELL PHONE HISTORY

"Snake" on Nokia Cell-Phones

Remember your first cell phone? What brand was it? When did you get it? I think I know the answer. I have taken a very informal survey to determine when most people got their first cell phone (I know I could just look at sales statistics but, this is a lot more fun.) and, shockingly, the answer is almost uniformly consistent: 2001. It seems that the second year of our decade was the watershed moment when a cell-phone went from a luxury to a necessity. Almost overnight, to not have a cell phone was to be divorced from modern life. The pager, now frozen in time as an emblem of the 90's, went from being wildly popular to antiquated as the telegraph. Cell phones were not the future by 2001, they were now. And, if you're like me, your first phone was probably a small Nokia with a monochromatic screen, like the one shown above. These phones were everywhere. Decidedly primitive by today's standards, these were ultra-portable communication devices that were cheap enough to be adopted by people from coast to coast in an amazing shopping frenzy. Nokia quickly became the market leader (and still is). And what gave Nokia the edge? It had to be...Snake!

Though these days you can play the latest photo-realistic FPS or the entire 8-bit Nintendo catalog on your mobile, I contend that the most addictive game possible for a portable device was Nokia's classic upload of Snake. A snake, symbolized by a little dark line, consumes morsels of food, each morsel making his body grow that much longer. The snake once in motion cannot be stopped and it's up to the player, manipulating the snakes direction, to make sure he doesn't ever eat his own tail. I lost hours upon hours of time snaking around. (You can download the original Nokia game here.) Snake was the first clue that cell phones are going to be about a lot more than audio communication.

It was also with these rudimentary phones that the real number one feature of cell phones came into focus: texting. See, I have always loathed talking on the phone. I like to look people in the eye when I talk to them, preferably over an alcoholic beverage for conversational lubrication. I find phone conversations awkward to end and weighed down with too much idle chatter. And yet, communication whilst separated in space from another individual is a necessity. (How else are you going to know where to meet for drinks in the first place?) A text, a short direct written communication between two cell phones, solves all these problems. It's also obsessively fun. My mobile is really a text machine which I sometimes use it for phone services. I am not alone.

The Blackberry
The most forward-thinking of cell phones, the Blackberry-5000 series, with it's E-Mail capabilities and rudimentary web browsing, became the first popular "smartphone" in America in 2002. Quickly becoming an object as synonymous with businessmen as the briefcase, the Blackberry user - in a three button suit, checking his email as he dashes down the street - is an iconic persona of the decade. So addictive the device has been nicknamed "crackberry," the Blackberry was the first popular consumer gadget that foresaw the convergence of functionality as the future of the business. Not content to merely provide phone service, the blackberry wanted to do it all. And did.

The phones greatest advertisement was none other than it's unofficial pitchman President Barack Obama who throughout the campaign was often photographed checking his Email or making a call on the device. After a hard fought battle, the President got permission to keep his Blackberry (a custom made, one-of-a-kind, security cleared Blackberry no less), all but securing sales for the company for years to come.

The RAZR

Chicest of the cells, the RAZR was the first cell phone to double as fashion accessory. Released for a whopping $600 in 2004, the RAZR began life as a kind of high end luxury item for money-oblivious fashionistas. After the price was dramatically lowered by 2006, the phones cache had already been established. It sold like gangbusters. In retrospect, the RAZR represented the pinnacle of the cell phone as cell phone. With smartphones taking over the entire market in ever more rapacious succession, its now the end of the cellphone as we once knew it. (The phone itself being but one in a panoply of features on the newer smartphones.) The RAZR was the most stylish, most publicized, most media friendly cell phone ever released. At last, design had met utility, form had met function. An iconic object of the Aughts, the RAZR was the cell phone's most commanding cultural moment. In only three years after its release a little product by a fruit company would all but demolish its cultural dominance.

The iPhone

There is a before and then there is an after. There is before JFK was assassinated and there is after. There is before Alexander Graham Bell called Watson into his office and there is after. There is before the Emancipation Proclimation and there is after. Equally so, there is before the iPhone and there is after.

Upon release the iPhone was given the sobriquet of "Jesusphone" and not undeservedly. Here was, at long last, a gadget of our dreams. The title iPhone was actually something of a misnomer. Yes the iPhone was the best, most effortlessly usable, most feature rich cell-phone ever made but, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Nothing short of a mini-Mac, the iPhone was a fully realized web-browser, calendar, Email service, camera, iPod, GPS (in it's second model) and, eventually, 3rd-Party platform for a ever-growing sea of applications. The touch interface was both intuitive and revolutionary (and perfect); the click-wheel of the iPod might as well be tossed into the dustbin of tech history, next to punch cards and the abacus. It's original price point of $500 was the only aspect of the phone that slowed it from total world domination, the amount being just too cost-prohibitive for many, despite the myriad features. When the price was eventually lowered to $200 the excuses anyone once made in avoidance were dried up. The iPhone was the Jesusphone indeed, the second coming of mobile devices and the death knell for the first era of cell phone culture. Picking up an incoming call, while surfing the net (in full HTML glory), after reading your daily E-Mail and updating your calendar appointments, it's sobering to remember that just 6 years ago you were playing Snake on a small, peaked looking screen. That, my friend, is what the Aughts were all about.

You AUGHT to remember...

#17 - Comic Book Movies

2009-12-16T10:33:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

Real heroes wore spandex.

In either an example of deep cultural regression or the artistic blossoming of a formerly adolescent genre (yeah, the former), the "based on the comic" superhero film came to dominate the box office in the Aughts. In three of the past ten years a superhero film was the highest grossing movie and many, many other films minted small fortunes churning out culturally familiar properties of various and often dubious quality. There may be nothing new under the sun, but the exhaustingly repetitive narrative devices employed by these movies ought to make one or two servings enough for any person to consume in a decade, but, as the plethora of sequels and spin-offs attest, the appetite for these modern pop-myths is all but insatiable.

Unpacking the forces in our collective consciousness that have created such a vast market for the superhero is an almost impossible task. The superhero movie is, in a way, a perfect product of late capitalism: they're escapist, they have a synergistic connection with past consumption, they create a market for various consumer tie-ins and finally, they encourage (then nullify upon exiting) infantile will-to-power fantasy scenarios for an audience who, high of the buzz that comes from imagining yourself as super-humanly strong or able to control the weather, return for the next iteration to get their "super-fix." It's easy to dismiss the success of these movies as merely the teenage crowd spending their parents cash on the weekend, but, when a comic book film explodes into multiplexes to become the second highest grossing film of all time...something bigger is afoot.

How many superhero films were there this decade? I've lost count.

Well, there is X-Men 1-3, maybe the best comic-to-movie films of the Aughts. With their obvious but not wholly ineffective analogies to racial and sexual discrimination, these were movies that, if not deep, couldn't immediately be called shallow. That's something of a victory in the genre. The X-Men films, particularly the witty and thrilling second installment, had both guts and a brain. The same can't be said for Hugh Jackman's solo endeavor, The X-Men spin-off Wolverine, a brain dead, mirthless exercise in pyrotechnic excess; coasting on the brand name's laurels Wolverine didn't even bother to make its title characters CGI claws look realistic. At this point they could have simply shot the film with Jackman in a child's Halloween costume and the zombie-fied fans would still line up.

Spider-Man 1-3 printed money, Peter Parker's transformation from uber-geek to uber-mensch supplying the fantasy template for four-eyed nerds everywhere. Even when the quality fell off the deep-end, as it did in Spidey's 3rd strained outing, the masses flocked, at that point beaten into a kind of willful submission. Sam Raimi, once a director of inventively silly horror films (The Evil Dead) or tightly wound, dramatically fulfilling suspense stories (A Simple Plan) found his talents subsumed by the panoply of special effects and pop-culture excesses that made the Spider-Man movies the successes they were. He also made a fortune.

Fantastic 4 and it's sequel Rise of the Silver Surfer, shocked box office soothsayers with their surprising performance. The B-Level Marvel property got C-Level productions values supplemented by the kind of cornball dialogue best suited to Saturday morning cartoons. The movies looked more like direct-to-VHS duds than mainstream theatrical releases. And yet, they were hits, all but cementing in movie executives minds the knowledge that crappy films based on existing properties are a far better investment than trying to do anything original.

The onslaught was relentless. Daredevil and its spin-off Elektra, are remarkable only in that Daredevil, starring a blind Ben Affleck, actually mustered up enough business at the Box Office to garner a spin-off. Who knew? Ghost Rider starred Nicholas Cage (as a flaming skull on a motorcycle) and Sam Elliot (as a flaming skull on a horse). The two rode their Mephistophelean vehicles into the President's Day weekend record books. Catwoman purred into film history as one of the most abysmal films of all time. But oh that outfit! Iron Man, blissfully shy on action-packed hysteria, mainly existed as a vehicle for Robert Downey Jr. to chew his very expensive scenery. At least the film knew what it was doing. Ang Lee's ponderous The Incredible Hulk was so ill-conceived (the director visually displayed the graphical boxes of a comic strip throughout the movie, as if the audience would rather see the storyboard for an action sequence than the sequence itself) that an honest-to-God do over called HULK was put into production in short order. It too underwhelmed. Also leaving audiences begging for less was Bryan Singer's sporadically charming though blandly cast Superman Returns. Perhaps the square jawed ethos of the title character - he of truth, justice and (especially) the American Way - had come to seem a vapid ideological outlook in an era where "the American way" meant invading sovereign nations to plunder oil reserves.

Devotees of Alan Moore's work talk about his seminal graphic novel Watchmen as if it were War and Peace, The Sorrow and the Pity, and Great Expectations rolled into one. No hyperbole is too grand. When the movie came out no one ever seemed to notice that Watchmen, both the movie and the graphic novel, was an anti-hero scribe costumed (in spandex and with a bright blue cock) as one of (all of?) the stories it was trying to undermine. Disenchanting at every turn, Watchmen is a kind of miserablist superhero anti-fantasy. A novel can be read at a pace dictated by ones own temperament; in the cinema, with it's incessant and unstoppable motion forward in time, the result of such consistent misanthropy can be frustration instead of engagement. The film, in a series of half measures, couldn't quite figure out just what the Hell it was trying to sell; slavish devotion to the source does not an honest adaption make. Maybe throwing more caution to the wind would have proved liberating but no doubt the army of nattering Watchmen-heads would have come at the film with daggers. It was a no-win situation for director and audience.

Batman Begins hit the reset button on the Warner Brothers tentpole franchise, hoping that a total restart could make audiences forget the so-campy-even-drag-queens-stayed-away aesthetic that Joel Schumacher had brought to the series. Legions of fanboys, anxious to justify their childish obsessions, ate up Chirs Nolan's solemn and "realistic" take on the series. The patina of seriousness seemed to confer artistic legitimacy on the caped crusader. When Begins's sequel hit the multiplexes the bleakness and humorlessness all but swallowed the whole film, making for a comic book movie that practically invited you not to have fun. The response: total worldwide box office domination of a sort not seen since an ill-fated Leonardo DiCaprio shouted to the Atlantic Ocean that he was "King of the World." The Dark Knight is a wholly silly film taken by audiences (and many critics) as a piece of serious art. If you're 19 and just read Thus Spake Zarathustra for the first time perhaps you'll be hood-winked by the Joker's declarations of ideological purity but anyone who asks that adult art address serious moral and psychological questions in a original and profound way will find The Dark Knight to be little more than a Trojan horse, the facade of seriousness hiding a series of ever more incoherently staged, and choppily edited action sequences. The emperor has no batsuit.

Then there were films that attempted to comment on this cinematic phenomenon, like the comedy My Super Ex-Girlfriend or the Will Smith vehicle Hancock. The former was simply dismissed while the latter, despite some success, underperformed. (Though given its stars amazing track record, only record-breaking ticket sales could live up to expectations.) An all out Zucker-level spoof called, duh, Superhero Movie is memorable only for its impressive Tom Cruise impersonation.

Perhaps the best of all superhero movies in the Aughts was Pixar's hilarious and moving The Incredibles. With a lark of a premise about over-the-hill retired superheroes, the picture proved a piquant analysis of contemporary family dynamics, the vagaries of middle-aged compromise and the necessity of self-fulfillment, all of it basted with a light moral certitude of a distinctly Randian variety. While the film was no Objectivst propaganda piece, it' endorsement of the talented few rising above the masses received a more nuanced and effective treatment here than anything in The Fountainhead. The Incredibles, while a cartoon, has more humanity in it than all the X-Men you could swing a stick at (though I really wouldn't try it). Now that's super.

You AUGHT to remember...

#18 - iPod

2009-12-15T15:58:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

We all became pod people.

Imagine if you will dressing a mannequin up in the full regalia of the decade. Your task is to make the mannequin the emblematic representation of the era using only the language of clothing and accessories. Obviously, as this blog has demonstrated, there are lots of directions you could take this task. Is the mannequin a boy in skinny jeans or a girl in boho-chic skirt? Should it be early or late Aughts? Hipster or socialite? Uggs or Crocs? One accessory, however, is to be included without question. One item that, if excluded, would leave the mise-en-scene curiously lacking. Emerging from the pant pocket and rising up to the mannequin's ears are two unmissable strands of white plastic which expand out to form two bulbous tips at their end. They are ear buds, the universal symbol announcing that this mannequin is an owner of the consumer product of the Aughts, the iPod.

Here is a object that drives otherwise critically minded people into a hyperbolic frenzy; speaking in tongues and sonnets of devotion are not uncommon. Both Gadgetheads and technophobes ended up embracing the device, the former for the Pod's technical prowess and revolutionary design structure, the latter for its ridiculously easy-to-use interface and catchy television commercials featuring dancing silhouettes. When Marx wrote of commodity fetishism he must have had a vision of iPod, though Marx was perhaps too short-sighted: As Apple's now iconic MP3 player was marching onward and upward, conquering the world like some Napoleonic gadget, its devotees moved beyond fetishism, approaching, ever closer, devotion and then, finally, worship. iPod is the new opiate for the masses. It has no competitor. Pity the poor fool who shows his face in public with a Zune. Even Hester Prynee would snicker. The iPod rules. Swept up in the fervor, Newsweek journalist Stephen Levy wrote a 2006 book on the iPod's cultural impact. The title: The Perfect Thing. Don't be coy with us now Levy, tell us what you really think.

Before the product reached total cultural ubiquity, sporting the iPod's signature and near luminescent white ear buds - perhaps the best aesthetic idea in a product line replete with design brilliance - whilst strolling a busy avenue immediately gave you a cache of "with-it"-ness that garnered no small number of envious glances from those sad sacks still forced to go about their day in the bland humdrum of music-less existence. Now that everyone in America save the Pennsylvania Dutch own an iPod of their own the exclusivity of the object has waned; the iPod is less a demarcation of status and has become a modern necessity, which is what a "must-have" object turns into when, in fact, you actually must have it. Steve Jobs gave all our lives a soundtrack. Walkman who?

I don't need to tell you that the iPod changed the entire of financial model of the music business, or rather, decimated it; the iTunes Store leveling both Tower Records and Vigin Megastore outlets, leviathans of the industry both. I don't need to tell you that what began as cigarette pack-sized white box that held 1000-songs has evolved into an entire product line of astoundingly smaller and more colorful iterations that have developed the ability to play not only music, but movies and television programs as well. And I definitely don't need to tell you that only Apple, with the advent of the iPhone, could make a product that could eclipse the iPod in pure lustful consumer desire. (Of course the iPhone is an iPod too. Natch!)

Even I, attempting to snarkify the cultural impact of the iPod for your reading pleasure, can't help but get swept up by brilliance of the machine. Even its name is perfect, both unforgettably simple (four letters, two syllables with that fantastic plosive "P" and satisfyingly confident "D" framing the resonating vowel "awe," - it's just fun to say), and vaguely bio-futuristic, pod being a word most likely found, before the Aughts, in a dime science fiction novel or biology textbook. Chosen by the prototype's resemblance to The HAL 9000 ("Open the pod bay doors Hal") the iPod debut year of 2001 was not without some literary resonance. The future indeed, was here.

The iPod; it's both a noun and complete sentence. iPod, do you? (You do.)

You AUGHT to remember...

#19 - Celebrity Babies

2009-12-14T22:12:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Celebrity progeny were as famous as their parents.

Apple Martin -

Ah Apple. Adorable Apple. Ye of fruitsh name. Last name Martin no less! Your oh-so-sophisticated parents (almost) named you after an overpriced sickly-sweet cocktail; I don't know about you but if my last name is Collins I'm not naming my kid Tom. All but setting up years of school yard taunts, the Martins, in their first action as parents, showed themselves to be either totally oblivious naifs, mild sadists, or strained ironists. In any case, Apple is the one who will pay the price. (Maybe the Mr and Mrs. Martin thought...when your Dad is a rock star and your mom an Oscar winner, bullies tend to go easy on you. Probably true.) Here is Ms. Paltrow's defense of the unusual name:

It sounded so sweet and it conjured such a lovely picture for me – you know, apples are so sweet and they're wholesome and it's biblical – and I just thought it sounded so lovely and … clean! And I just thought, "Perfect!"

Gwenny! Love you doll, but Apple is not a biblical name. Ishamel is a biblical name. Bernadette is a biblical name. Fuck, Madonna is a biblical name! Apple...that's a food. The bible has an apple in it but, what's your point? Are you going to name your next kid frankincense?

Shiloh Jolie Pitt -

Though the Jolie-Pitt operation has practically become an orphanage at this point, you Shiloh are special. You are the first (though as of 2008 not the only) biological child of the world's hottest, most famous couple: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, aka Brangelina. This being the case, your DNA alone should keep men drooling. You can expect to grow up and become the most beautiful girl since Helen of Troy. Congrats. All your adopted brothers and sisters must resent you so. You even got a wax figure of yourself in Madame Tussaud's. Maddox was bestowed no such honor.

This being said...why are you kinda fugly? (Ok, I said it, but you, dear reader, were thinking it!). Seriously, is it just me or do you look a little downsy? Maybe expectations just ran too high but you Shiloh are definitely a sufferer of UBS: ugly baby syndrome. (See Seinfeld episode: here.) I realize that evaluating the beauty of a baby is tacky, and gross and stupid (and even vaguely creepy). I even understand that a baby's attractiveness bears little relation to their future beauty, but...your parents are BRAD PITT and ANGELINA JOLIE! You were expected to make the Gerber baby look like Quasimodo.

Don't worry Shiloh, everyone has an awkward phase, maybe you should be grateful that yours was when you couldn't even go to the bathroom for yourself. I am sure in 20 years, when you are on the cover of Vogue (or Vogue's holographic teleputer multimedia download), you'll laugh at what a funny-looking baby you were. Because if you turn out anything but stunning, the study of genetics will be proved to be nothing but hogwash.

Suri Cruise -

I feel bad for the Cruise-Kidman kids. No one cares. No one takes their picture. Does Tom even see them? Who knows? They don't matter. Kidman and Cruise worked hard to keep them away from the spotlight. How stupid is that? Everyone knows that babies and young children love nothing more than to be accosted by hoards of paparazzi from they day they are born. The flashing lights are oh-so-pretty. Kidman and Cruise's kids are adopted anyway. That's no fun. Everyone knows you love adopted babies less than your real ones. I mean, duh!

We must understand Suri Cruise, the child created by the entity known as Tomkat, in two modalities. There is Suri the person: an adorable, smiling young child who has been thrust into one of the most unique and scandal prone family situations this side of Buckingham Palace. This is the Suri we should care about, and the Suri who deserves both a modicum of privacy and maybe even a little pity. Then there is Suri, the press release: a baby who proved that Tom 1) Actually slept with his new paramour (why were those Kidman babies adopted anyway??) and 2) Was serious enough about the relationship to have a baby in the first place. Tom's career needed a child, a biological child, and Suri fit the bill. And to think, she didn't even have to go to central casting. (I don't think.)

Where is this all leading? Either these celebrity babes will use their vast fame and copious opportunities to do great things in the world (and maybe even become great stars themselves) or we are setting ourselves up for the worlds most pathetic reality TV show ever: I was a celebrity baby, get me out of here!

You AUGHT to Remember...

#20 - Shepard Fairey's "HOPE" Poster

2009-12-13T19:08:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

A poster made a President.

Marketing professionals have long known that image is everything; political campaigns focus-group every piece of official electoral paraphernalia and photograph in an effort to target their audience and "control the message." They might as well be selling you detergent, so over-analyzed and blandly mass-marketed are most pieces of presidential advertising. Despite the strenuous labors by a presidential campaign's highly-paid and professional PR department, rarely does a marketing strategy break through the din of punditry and negativity that is par for the course in any modern presidential election. As electioneering gets more and more corporatized, the trend only seems to be worsening. Who would have thought then that in 2008 America would be introduced to perhaps the most effective and iconic piece of propaganda in the history of presidential campaigns: Shepard's Fairey's HOPE poster.

Fairey's creation is so classically appealing, so brilliantly anti-programmatic, so in-sync with the zeitgeist of not only a campaign but a nation, that it is now hard to imagine the 2008 Election without this blue- and red-inked portraiture. Fairey's poster, while utterly of the aughts, is - ironically - something of a throwback; redolent of Soviet propaganda, this image of the (then) future President can almost be considered an example of illustrative pastiche. A post-Warhol portrait, with it's "silk-screen" effect and large swaths of pure color, Fairey's is a decidedly "pop" representation of the candidate. Blissfully absent the platitudinous sloganeering that passes for a candidate's "message" in modern politics - "change you can believe in," "America first," "in your heart you know he's right" - Fairey reduces down an entire campaign's raison d'etre to one word : HOPE. Placed in large, plain font underneath Obama's placid but distantly-hopeful and deeply-dignified expression, the word is less a command for the reader than a definition of its subject. The man is the message. Candidate as abstract concept. When some critics (cough, Hillary, cough) were criticizing Obama as being short on wonkish detail and long on vague, inspirational speechifying, Fairey dived head first into the fray, turning the broad and imprecise substance of Obama's buzzword heavy campaign into a virtue; America, it turned out, needed the diaphanous and simplified power that comes with an ideological point-of-view based on simple and fundamental concepts like HOPE, CHANGE and PROGRESS. America's feverish and swollen head needed a detailed and systematic analysis to be sure, but, even more, its bruised and wounded heart needed the palliative that only comes from finding a powerful yet simple idea it could believe in. Eight years of the abysmal Bush Administration had demoralized us and tarnished our perception of ourselves. There was a crisis of national spirit. Obama's eyes reaching toward the heavens, it's no coincidence that Fairey's poster looks more like a stained-glass window than a traditional campaign poster. Obama inspired something akin to secular devotion in his followers, and Fairey knew it.

Not since Che Guevarra's iconic visage became a staple of college-dorm rooms has the image of a political figure so penetrated the general consciousness as Fairey's Obama. Seemingly unsullied by manipulation from computer software, the HOPE poster spoke true in an era when an analog aesthetic had become synonymous with a forgotten authenticity. Though Fairey's poster was developed independently of the Obama PR team, it quickly became the unofficial image of Obama's campaign and an endlessly imitable pop culture landmark. Parodies were common almost as soon as the poster was released. When a website called obomiconme allowed any user to Fairey-ize their face, a bold-lettered word of their choice below their colorized mug, the results were posted to endless Facebook pages, all but solidifying the HOPE poster as a watershed piece of political ephemera for an entire logged-on generation. The original poster now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, a piece of American history encased and displayed for posterity. Fairey's use of the AP photograph that served as his "inspiration" has gotten the artist into a messy and as-yet unresolved legal imbroglio, a case which still may set new precedent in the legal intricacies of "fair use" doctrine in a world with Google Images and porous boundaries of ownership.

Am I suggesting that the HOPE poster won Obama the election? Hardly. Such an assertion would be at once widely hyperbolic and sillily shortsighted. It's bigger than that. The poster was the election: the victory of hope over cynicism and change over stasis. It is a testimony to Obama's skill as politician and his dignity as a person that he could carry the weight of such lofty ideas on his shoulders and not seem diminished in some way by the heavy load. And it is ironic yet inevitable that Shepard Fairey, an artist outside the political machine who emerged from the guerilla hinterlands of the skateboard scene, was the American who most knew how to connect a candidate with a country. Obama spoke to a nation full of people needing the reassurance and quiet resolve that comes from embracing the one item left at the bottom of Pandora's Box. If there ever was a decade when the rest of its contents had spilled out over America, this was, sad to say, most definitely it.

You AUGHT to remember...

#21 - Twitter

2009-12-12T14:04:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Any thought worth sharing was 140 characters or less.

You AUGHT to remember...

#22 - Red Bull

2009-12-11T14:50:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

we wanted our beverages to be as methamphetamine-like as possible.

Pop Quiz:

1) Red Bull tastes like...

a) sweet and acidic seltzer water.
b) if Mountain Dew could spoil...
c) something an astronaut would drink.
d) alkaline battery acid.

2) Consuming Red Bull with spirits...

a) gets you intoxicated faster.
b) makes you forget your name.
c) will end with you naked and pregnant.
d) habiba fopmsf sdfksaf....

3) Taurine, Red Bull's most potent ingredient,...

a) is a chemical found in human bile.
b) can be extracted from bull testicles.
c) has never been scientifically proven to increase energy.
d) will eat through steel like Alien blood.

4) Red Bull's secret ingredient is...

a) civet coffee extract.
b) bergamot oil.
c) cocaine.
d) kryptonite.

5) The Red Bull logo is...

a) a lighting bolt.
b) a costumed superhero.
c) two large bulls charing head to head.
d) a picture of Henry Spencer from Eraserhead.

6) Red Bull, is, in the end...

a) a passing fad.
b) the best new drink since Tang!
c) legalized crank.
d) ZOOM!!!!!!!

Answer Key:
1-d; 2-a,b,c,d; 3-a,b,c; 4- c (Oh yes!); 5- c; 6- c,d

You AUGHT to remember...

#23 - Wikipedia

2009-12-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

cheating at Trivial Pursuit was easy as a mouse click.

I shall not bore you with facts and statistics. I will not ladle you with internet history. I will avoid analyzing the various controversies that have arisen over the years. (If you are interested you can find that information here, here, and here.) I simply want to take the moment here to say, unequivocally and clearly, that Wikipedia is one of the greatest things to ever happen in the history of humanity. There I said it. That's all. I'm done.

Ok, so, you want some explanation. Why does Wikipedia deserve such over-the-top praise? What attributes make it such an indispensable part of modern life? For the answer I simply like to imagine showing the site to a scholar from another era; perhaps a banyan wearing student of philology or natural philosophy, reading a book in Latin by candlelight next to his brass cassegrain reflector telescope at the Cambridge library in the 18th century. In the dimly lit scene, cut from Barry Lyndon, I emerge from my time-machine phone booth, laptop in hand. Somehow finding a wifi connection o'er the vast distances of time, I put the computer before the powdered and primped young student and ask him to type in a subject, any subject, into the Wikipedia search box. Perhaps "Sir Isaac Newton" is his selection, or, "Thomas Aquinas," both of whom would be on the lads 18th Cetrury reading list. Maybe his search is more abstract and he seeks knowledge on topics like "math" or "God." Or perhaps bored of scholastic endeavors his query is less academic and he searches for "figgy pudding" and "copulation." It's probably what's really on his mind. Whatever the choice, he instantaneously receives an organized and clear informative essay about his subject. Should he be dissatisfied with the contents on the page, hyperlinks are available to him at the bottom, allowing the student to reference at a more in-depth level the subject he was curious about. He types and types, the computer can't be stumped. The jaw goes slack. I would venture to guess that in no time at all this man of learning would come to be calling me a deity. (Either that or a witch to be burned at the stake. I'd prefer the former.)

I like to think about this because, given how quickly we incorporate new technology into our daily lives we just as quickly take it for granted. It bears repeating that the world of our impressed Cambridge student, learning his Euclid by the flicker of candlelight, was not so long ago. How far we have come is a testimony to the inquisitive academic spirit that has motivated thinkers throughout out history since time immemorial. And the terminal point of all these efforts may just be Wikipedia. The site represents one of the grandest dreams of all mankind: the totality of all human knowledge converging on a single, accessible point, a nexus of human intelligence. And, unlike the library of Alexandria, it can't burn down. It's practically indestructible.

Unreliable you say? An encyclopedia with no academic standard to separate the wheat from the chaff? Of what use is that? A encyclopedia in which anyone, any uneducated bozo, can act as an editor for any entry? That sounds like a recipe for disaster. To those naysayers I ask, "Have you ever actually used Wikipedia? Have you ever been shocked or appalled by a glaring error?" Neither have I. Sure, there have been some embarrassing moments but, on the whole, study after study has shown the online resource to be as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. And even so, few who use the site are unaware of its unreliable narrator; a healthy skepticism about the contents is adopted by most readers. Even if an article were total balderdash, the aggregation of other web sources linked on a Wikipedia page are reason alone to single the site out as an important destination in web 2.0.

Wikipedia can make for a fun party game (albeit of a decidedly nerdy sort). I call it "Six-Degrees-Of-Anything" (sorry Mr. Bacon). The rules: select two wildly disparate topics and see how many internal wikipedia links it takes you to get from one to the other. For instance, Hula-Hoop to the Defenestrations of Prague goes thusly: Hula Hoop-Belarus-History of the Soviet Union 1985-1981-Czechoslovakia-Prague-Defenestrations of Prague. If you can get there in less links, I owe you a tenner. (Seriously, anyone who sends me an Email doing this will win a $10 from the kitty here at YATR. Game on bitches!) This hyper-connectivity between seemingly isolated topics even inspired an off-Broadway show called The Wikipedia Plays (natch), a collection of short pieces based on one long link train within Wikipedia.

Unlike "legitimate" encyclopedias, the democratic nature of Wikipedia means that the entry about Spider-Man may be as thorough as the page devoted to Friedrich Nietzsche. Sophisticates and would-be arbiters of social import might balk but, I say, no harm, no foul. Yes, we should all be familiar with the theory of eternal recurrence but, it hardly hurts anyone to know that Peter Parker began his Spider career as a professional wrestler. Britannica's editors have to make those kind of editorial decisions lest their encyclopedia become, well, 3.1 million articles long (as the English "edition" of Wikipedia is). No such editing is needed on the information superhighway; bandwidth weighs a lot less than leather bound tomes. Online there is more than enough room for Kant and comics, Napoleonic Wars and Napoleonic Desserts, Captain Ahab and Captain Kirk. Wikipedia's catholicity of content is what makes the site so universally appealing. Not a day goes by when I don't use it, trying to cram another abstruse fact or two into my already over-stuffed cranium. Luckily, with Wikipedia there, I know if I forget I am mere keystokes away from remembering.

You AUGHT to remember.

#24 - Low Rise/Skinny/Designer Jeans

2009-12-09T17:13:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

You bought your denim at a "bar."

Rugged, tough, casual, the jean is the pant of the Marlboro Man, the Rebel Without A Cause, the Wild One. The jean is a classic pant of blue-collar Americana, an affordable, durable, comfortable piece of apparel that was anything but pretentious. Until the Aughts. Make no mistake, this was the decade of the $400 jean -- the tighter through the leg and lower on the hip, the better. Comfort and affordability be damned.

This casual pant became high fashion in the Aughts, each specialty brand contriving more and more outlandish ways to put a unique stamp on a classic formula. Elaborate back pocket embroidery was not uncommon; the rococo designs acted as a kind of crest for the brand, the way a specific tartan pattern used to separate one Scottish clan from the next, except the kilts worn in the Highlands didn't cost a month's salary. In an era where casual was all, capitalism had little choice but to make the informal formal; there had to be a new fashion pecking order, and casual wear had to become as status conscious as "designer" couture used to be. Small design variation from label to label made little overall aesthetic difference yet these minute trappings created the cache that separated one overpriced brand from the next.

I hear your chortles of protestation. "This is hardly new!" you claim. "I was wearing overpriced jeans in '84." Certainly, designer jeans have been on the market since the 70's, but the complex hierarchy of denim fashions reached an apotheosis in the Aughts; jean brands became a caste system. The once humble pants were coronated as the ultimate arbiters of chic. One didn't shop in a store for pants, one went to a brilliantly titled "denim bar," a label conjuring up not a retail shopping experience but a libidinous nightlife hotspot. A place where one didn't so much as purchase clothes as consume them, they way one would an over-priced gin and tonic. Jeans were clothes for the club, not work, and if I'm gonna spend $15 on a martini, you best believe I'm wearing expensive clothes. Young people couldn't get enough. There was, according to slate.com in 2005, such over-hype about the pants that a blue-jeans bubble was upon us. (Why was this the only bubble we saw coming?!?) Designer jean manufacturers like True Religion saw their stock go from from less than a single dollar to seventeen clams a share in under a year. Business was booming. And why? What does wearing a designer jean label say about you? Something to do with having too much money probably. But, in the Aughts's haze of excess and loose cash, anything one could do to wear their bank account on their sleeve (or ass) was fair game.

And what did these buy-a-new-flat-screen-TV-or-equally-priced-pair-of-pants pants look like? They were skinny, first and foremost. The Aughts were not kind to those large of hip and thick of loin. The trend in jeans to this day is a pair that fit like nylons; if putting the jeans on does not require elaborate yoga positioning, you're probably do in for a skinnier pair. While many find the tight fit unflattering there is nonetheless a sleek, streamlined appeal to the skinny jean, a style which is in almost every way superior to the clown-like baggy and apertured jeans of the 90's, the sort made oh-so-popular by Seattle grunge bands. Skinny jeans are, on the right individual, sexy and fun, a throwback to an older vintage style, when most clothes were fitted and slim. (A trip to a thrift shop can testify to the elephantizing of size standards over the years.) More inexcusable was the proliferation of low rise jeans, pants that all but guaranteed a million dollar shot of ass cleavage every time one sat or squat. Only plumbers used to be so tactless.

High couture denim is one trend that I suspect will persist into the Teens. However, with a society less flush with cash to burn, perhaps the pleasures of a moderately-priced pair of 501's will once again reveal itself to a newly humbled public. Then again, maybe even a distraught economy can't stop the inexorable rise of the jean to the pinnacle of the fashion firmament; those parties needing their $1000 pair will continue to fork over the big bucks in the name of fashion and status. The rest of us, well, we'll be happy with our old Levi's.

You AUGHT to remember.

#25 - Celebrity Sex Tapes

2009-12-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

You weren't a real celeb unless their was footage of you taking it off and getting it on.

Celebrities have sex. Shocking I know. The logical and unavoidable extension of our fascination with the private lives of the rich and famous, the sex tape is a celebs most guarded of private moments decimated to a salivating public. (Maybe birth tapes with celebrities popping babies out of their swollen vaginas will be the next paradigm.) Not pornography in the strict sense of the word - I doubt the tapes are watched for sexual stimulation very often - sex tapes are instead near perfect voyeuristic red meat. (Near perfect because they would be even more voyeuristic if the celebrities didn't know they were being taped, which usually they do.) Sex tapes are unabashedly intimate experiences starring people whose stock in trade is acting and artifice. To watch a sex tape is to rob a celebrity of their mystique, to see them as just another mammal, sweating and panting and emitting fluids. Deflating the bubble of superiority that surrounds the famous is a gratifying experience for most laymen; we build 'em up to tear 'em down. "You wanna be rich and famous? There is a price to pay bitches! We get to watch your sex tape with no guilt!" Or so the thought goes. And, let's face it, catching anyone, celebrity or no, in the act of sexual congress unawares is always a good excuse for snickering. Any urbanite who has peeked through open blinds at apartment dwellers in flagrante delictio will surely attest to this. Why the sight of two adults engaged in a common adult activity summons up the 7th grader in all us is a mystery. It's probably just another one of civilization and it's discontents. But, giggle and gawk we do, unable to turn away. And, if this is how we react to strangers, then a sex tape with celebrities is bound to be as transfixing as a hypnotist's spinning wheel of mystery.

The sex tape business is booming thanks to advances in both production and distribution. Before the advent of video in the 1980's, sex tapes were difficult to make without embarrassment. With images stored only on film, getting private X-rated footage developed was no mean feat. With video, the home user could at last easily make their own private sex tapes. Mass producing a low-grade videotape, however, from the already low-fi original proved a challenge that never was quite conquered. Nonetheless, video was the first golden era for the genre; it's why we call them sex "tapes" and not sex "movies." There were legendary examples by the likes of Rob Lowe (with two girls, one of whom was 16 mind you) or the extremely graphic Honeymoon video of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, in which the couple acted as if they were, in fact, porn stars and not a married couple. Still, sex tapes sputtered out infrequently in the 80's and 90's. It wasn't until the digital revolution that society had at last found the recipe to make sex tapes easily. Spreading them to a cubicle near you was even easier.

How easy? A sex tape (how long are we even going to be using the antiquated word "tape" ) can now be shot on a cellphone and, with the click of a button, sent over the Internet to be accessed by any curious party almost instantaneously. It's really ridiculous when you think about it. Not just celebrities but even the general populace now is more willing to dally in amateur porn. (A quick google search will prove this.) It's gotten so simple, maybe too simple. Luckily, for home grown porn stars, there is little interest by the general public to see you heaving and panting away. With celebrities though, a whole lot of other people want a peek. You think a famous person would be aware enough of this fact to refrain from ever filming themselves in the act but, alas, some lessons are hard learned.

So who scandalized us all in the Aughts with their sex tapes?

Fred Durst proved his Bizkit wasn't so Limp when a sex video was leaked to the Internet. He ended up suing Gawker.com for posting the footage.
A menage a trois with Grey's Anatomy's Eric Dane, wife Rebecca Gayheart, and former Miss Teen USA contestant Kari Ann Peniche was also leaked by Gawker.com; the drunk, high, and naked threesome provide twelve minutes of Grade-A NSFW cavorting accompanied by the the kind of asinine chit-chat one would expect from a naked prom queen and stoned television stars. It's very underwhelming.
Though the tape itself has yet to be leaked, Dustin Lance Bareblack, I mean, Dustin Lance Black had images of a very graphic sex tape leaked to PerezHilton.com; in them the studly Oscar winner (for his screenplay to Milk) is seen having unsafe sex with an anonymous male partner. Given the writers outspoken advocacy for safe sex, the pictures were no small embarrassment.
Dustin Diamond, known to children of the nineties everyone as uber-nerd Screech on Saved By The Bell, also had a sex tape leaked in this decade though, given the actors willingness to do anything to stay famous, from obnoxious and contrived dramatics on Celebrity Fit Club to bottom-of-the-fame-barrel Celebrity Boxing tournaments, it's mostly likely he leaked the tape himself as yet another stab to keep his name afloat in Hollywood. Sorry Screech, but when you do that it's not a leaked sex tape, you've just descended into pornography. I'll just watch Tobey Maguire imitate you on SNL instead. Much more entertaining.

Like the one ring, there was one sex tape to rule them all. One sex tape that catapulted its already infamous star into the stratosphere of fame like few other people in history. I am of course talking about One Night In Paris, the Paris Hilton sex tape. Penetrating deep into the general consciousness, One Night In Paris was watched even by those who proclaimed a disdain for such vulgarity. It was irresistible. Even Christopher Hitchens couldn't avert his gaze. The only celebrity sex tape whose title sounds like a mid-level James Bond punchline, One Night In Paris was the moment when Hilton crossed the Rubicon and became perhaps THE celebrity of her generation. (It was also her best acting work so far...sad but true.) Though the hotel heiress gave a half-hearted cri de couer when the movie was leaked, it's hard to shake the impression that the socialite was secretly grateful for all the attention, media coverage being the staple of her diet.

But with One Night In Paris the scandal of the sex tape and the feeling of titillating violation one felt while watching it, began to wane. With the proliferation of DIY porno sites like Xtube, the entire libidinal edifice of the sex tape has begun to crumble. Non-professional sex videos are slowly becoming just another series of clips sandwiched between Saddam Hussien's execution and videos of cats playing the piano. Surely we can expect a lot more celebrity sex in our future but really, who cares anymore?

You AUGHT to remember...

#26 - Judd Apatow: The Geek King of Comedy

2009-12-07T19:03:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

There was nothing superbad about Apatow Inc.

At the beginning of the Aughts the name Judd Apatow drew mostly shrugs. A few devotees of the prematurely canceled Freaks and Geeks might have recognized Apatow as the driving force behind the cult-series, but for most the struggling comedian was a total unknown. Cut to 2009 and Apatow has become a household name. A director/writer/producer synonymous with a particular brand of hyper-verbal, geek-centeric, pop-savvy, homosocial comedy movies that resonated with a generation of (mostly) young men who, weaned on a diet of mass media and raised with an excess of social and financial comfort, had little idea how to grow up and become men. The rare instance of a true comedy auteur (by which I mean a director/writer who not only controls his work with total precision but also maintains a consistent ideology and aesthetic from project to project), Apatow's films dramatize the modern crisis of masculinity.

Without the large scale wars that once put young men through an innocence killing emotional crucible and lacking the rigid sexual categories or social practices of courtship that were decimated by the sexual revolution, a generation of young men are stuck in permanent adolescence, a condition signaled by but not limited to: a preoccupation with pop-culture minutiae coupled with little interest in larger social or political reality, a selection of inter-personal relationships dominated by a tight consortium of same-sex friendships, and, an idealized but fear-tinged obsession with women and sex that is much-discussed but rarely-consummated.

Judd Apatow's meteoric rise to become Hollywood's "king of comedy" was in fact a long, slow climb from hard-working comedic writer to omnipresent comedic byline. Years toiling as a failed stand-up and sitcom writer were the training ground for Apatow to perfect his comic chops. With Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared (his second failed sitcom) Apatow had created two of the most critically acclaimed sitcoms to ever be cancelled after their first season. It wasn't until Apatow directed his first feature, the hilarious 40 Year Old Virgin, that the comedian had his first unqualified success. Starring Steve Carrell as the unsullied middle-ager, The 40 Year Old Virgin was contrived to be sure, but came packaged with a surprising wallop of heart and wit. And with the film, Apatow's merry band of players were beginning to consolidate: The sarcastic and schleppy Seth Rogen, handsome and smug Paul Rudd (an actor who in any other director's hand would be cast as leading man), roly-poly Jonah Hill and the director's real-life Mrs., Leslie Mann. Apatow's casts became the familiar landmarks that would connect all his disparate comedic endeavors.

The follow up to Virgin became the prototypical Apatow film, 2007's Knocked Up. Starring Seth Rogen as the perpetually stoned, potty-mouthed, unemployed schlemiel who, in a drunken evening of post-clubbing coitus, impregnates the career-centric, beautiful and WASPy Katherine Heigl. The following awkward attempts at romance between the two form the backbone of the film, with the two happily coupled by the end, baby in tow. Knocked Up was Apatow's most distilled artistic vision and thematically iconic movie. It's also his best. Much time is spent at Rogen's Los Angeles house, a hive of nerds and stoned 20-something men who live in a kind of slacker idyll; days are spent playing ping-pong while discussing their much postponed Internet venture, a site dedicated to cataloging female nudity in movies. Pop-culture references abound as does comically graphic banter about all means of sexual perversion. Actual sex is something Apatow's men engage in far, far less than their conversation would indicate. That would mean actually getting to know women.

Despite the liberality of the dialogue's content, with Knocked Up Apatow began to gain a reputation as something of a reactionary. Just as The 40 Year Old Virgin can be read as an endorsement of abstinence and marriage, Knocked Up was seen by some as an anti-abortion screed and a rejection of single motherhood. Of course, the judgmental approbation that would typify a truly right-wing movie is not present; the films act less as a rejection of liberal social attitudes than an unexpected endorsement of conservative ones.

Apatow's most recent film, Funny People, fared less well at the Box Office and represented a somewhat darker turn for the usually uplifting writer/director. Its themes of regret and mortality perhaps pushed Apatow's lackadaisical insouciance to its breaking point. The easy flowing banter reaches a terminus when the subject under discussion can't be amplified comically by a penis joke.

Shockingly, Apatow has directed only three films, a surprising fact to audiences who associate his name with a veritable smorgasbord of comic hits this decade. The man has become a one man comic industry, spreading his tentacular grip over the Hollywood machine with increasing rapidity. Other than his three directorial efforts, Apatow either wrote or produced 14 other features this decade starting with the Frat-pack hit Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. The films Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall couldn't confused for anything other than Apatow productions and Pineapple Express starred not only Seth Rogen but also Freaks and Geeks star James Franco, both of whom spent the whole movie stoned, another Apatow prerequisite. Other films like I Love You, Man and Role Models (both starring Paul Rudd) were not associated with Apatow in any way but nonetheless owed their entire aesthetic to the decades leading comedic impresario.

With the tepid response to Funny People, it's possible that Apatow's empire may soon be shrinking, his bromantic brand of male-centered comedies exhaustingly similar with each new iteration. Nonetheless, more than any cinematic trend this decade, I predict that the Apatow movies will come to epitomize the social reality of early 21st Century life. Whether this will give you nostalgia or nausea I suppose depends on your fondness for dick jokes.

You AUGHT to Remember...

#27 - Tattoos

2009-12-06T10:54:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Tattoos got the Tramp Stamp of Approval!

Remember when tattoos were edgy? When having a tattoo marked you as a rebel, an outsider, a fringe member of society with a distaste for authority? You probably drove a motorcycle (or your boyfriend did) and had a penchant for Led Zeppelin and clothing made entirely of leather . If you want to really travel backwards in time, you may have been a sailor, the classic anchor tattoo a permanent record of your years in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Or if you really, really want to go into the annals of tattoo history, maybe you starred in a Mel Gibson film wearing little more than a loincloth and nose ring. (OK, that's 2006, but you know what I'm saying!) What's important about the tattoo is that it branded you as non-conformist and slightly threatening. Having the tattoo mattered far more than what the tattoo actually was. And no one thought a tattoo was art.

As part of the general trend of mainstream culture appropriating fringe aesthetics and commodifying them accordingly, the tattoo underwent a major perceptual shift this decade. The badge of the bad boy became the trendiest of fashion statements. (Of course, the lingering scent of social transgression that for so long defined the tattoo in the collective psyche is the very thing that allowed the tattoo to become and stay so popular, a reality which will persist until tattoos have become so commonplace and neutered by popularity that any association with their original aura of danger will have become totally neutralized. How will we know when this had occurred? It'll be some obvious nuke the fridge moment; perhaps Miley Cyrus will get a tattoo. Oh wait...uh-oh.) The Aughts, without question, have been the golden age of the Tattoo and we have the TV shows to prove it.

Our decade saw no less than three television series about tattoo culture. Inked was A&E's reality series about the curiously legal-firm sounding Hart & Huntington Tattoo Company. Located in the Palms casino in Las Vegas, Inked was too corporate by a half. (H&H opened a outlet of the store at the touristy Orlando Universal City Walk in 2007. A Hells Angel or salty-toothed sailor wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near.) Less about the art of the tattoo and more a standard reality-show soap opera, Inked was a letdown. The show lasted two seasons. More interesting and authentically urban was Miami Ink and it's later spinoff LA Ink. Both series put the art of the tattoo front and center making the intramural drama and bickering more contextually justified. Celebrity clients would swing by to get their new permanent body art. Regular people would share their stories about why they wanted the tattoo they did. Miami Ink's breakout star was Kat Von D, who after being "fired" from the Miami store opened her own parlor in Hollywood and spearheaded the spinoff, LA Ink.

The body was a canvas in the Aughts, and the men and women who practiced the art were modern Michelangelos of the flesh. The work being accomplished now is nothing short of astounding. Sadly, for every beautiful back tattoo done to look ancient Japanese screen painting there are 10 tacky "tramp stamps" that look like a pirate flag or Batman logo. As with any fashion, there is no accounting for taste. And while the idea that in 50 years masses of seniors will be playing shuffleboard with faded and distorted tattoos covering their flabby and sagging flesh is somewhat bizarre (not to mention unappetizing), for now, especially for the young, a tattoo is a must-have fashion accessory, a deep and permanent means of self-expression. Whilst I have yet to feel the itch to defile my own body with a tattoo (I don't, as a matter of course, care for things that I can't get rid of: tattoos, herpes, children, college loans ) it may only be a matter of time before unadorned folk like me are the exception and not the rule.

You AUGHT to remember...

#28 - Hyperlinks

2009-12-05T14:54:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

If you liked it then you shoulda put a link in it.

In the Aughts, sentences weren't just sentences, cold flat words arranged into coherent ideas, no! That's dull. Now, embedded into the very fabric of language was a new kind of textual device, for use only on the Internet. Behold the Hyperlink.

Once a binary world of black on white, with the hyperlink words popped off the screen in tantalizing colors. Passively reading became an impossibility; hyperlinks beckoned your participation, drawing you ever closer to the moment of contact, like Sleeping Beauty towards the enchanted Spindle. Suddenly, any phrase could become pregnant with possibility. Like a linguistic Christmas cracker or syntactic piñata, the hyperlink fills a word or phrase with a hidden surprise, a jack in the box waiting to be sprung.

Beneath what we read on the Internet there is a labyrinthine network of information loci; the hyperlink cracks through the floor boards letting us begin to traverse the ever expanding maze of content that is the information superhighway. The hyperlink is a kind of gift from writer to reader, a guide map pointing the latter toward his next destination, helping him avoid the pitfalls that can come from cold searching through the entirety of the internet.

Why use the hyperlink? The reasons are legion. The hyperlink's versatility is its greatest feature. In its most boring form a hyperlink can be an unambiguous and straightforward way to direct a reader to another webpage on the internet. For example, see here. (Which is itself an example of such use. Meta.) But hyperlinks really gain purchase when their use is more subtle and the interaction with the reader is more nuanced. Factual statements asserted in a primary text can be justified and referenced with an appropriate hyperlink, a kind of footnote on steroids. Or, a piece of text can make little sense at all without reference to its link, the linked site's content re-contextualizing the original pages meaning. Thanks Timothy Berners-Lee.

Of course, hyperlinks are destroying the art of reading. They're everywhere and they are irresistible. You can't even read short passages online without a hyperlink invasion. Try to make it through an op-ed article in the New York Times Online Edition without being teased away numerous times before getting to the end. (Frank Rich's most recent column had 18 links.) Incessant linking is recalibrating how our minds process written information. What once was a vertical activity has turned lateral; one doesn't read down so much across. Tabbed browsing allows one to link away from one page and onto the next, leaving a digital trail of breadcrumbs strewn on your computer desktop. Extended argument and cohesive thought are no match for the new information overload supplied by the internet, a glut facilitated in no small part by the advent of the hyperlink. We may be reading more words than ever before, but we're finishing what we start less and less, the hyperlink always beckoning us to abandon our current paragraph and seek out more exciting pages elsewhere. If you made it this far without so much as a trip away on one the hyperlink passports I've supplied, I'd be impressed.

You AUGHT to remember...

#29 - Dr. Phil

2009-12-04T10:32:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Folksy, homespun, judgmental advice and tired catchphrases replaced psychology.

The Ballad of Dr. Phil.

(Sung to the tune of the Ballad of Davy Crockett)

Born in Oklahoma at the half century.

To Jerry and Joe, (Oh! Jerry is a she.)

Bald as an egg since he was only three,

A bald Phil McGraw is a fait accompli.

Dr., Dr. Phil

Boy of the wild frontier.

Annulled his first marriage in '73,

A real purdy gal but not enough for he.

Cheated on her with a girl menagerie.

Now she runs a liquor store in Kansas City.

Dr., Dr. Phil

At least he 'aint no queer!

Now, Phil was real strong and big and tall

So he got himself a scholarship to play football

Tackling Phil was like hitting a wall.

But in the big game he scored almost nothing at all!

Dr., Dr. Phil

He needs a new career.

Phil had it in his mind to be a headshrinker

Just like his daddy before, of that he was sure.

"Dr. Phil" was born, a man you cannot deter,

A so-so shrink, a great entrepreneur.

Dr., Dr. Phil

Psychological buccaneer.

Now a piece of advice from those in the know:

To get rich and famous go on Oprah's show.

Be tough and folksy and next thing you know,

You've got best-sellers and your own TV Show!

Dr., Dr. Phil,

A celebrity who knows no peer.

Now out on his own, McGraw was up to bat,

Taking a swing, he knew where it was at.

How to reach America and not fall flat?

Just talk about diets cause they're all really fat!

Dr., Dr. Phil

Obesity profiteer.

No longer a shrink, McGraw's just a guy,

Who says what he thinks while his guests sit and cry.

But Phil kept his title, though it's kind of a lie.

But if Phil's not a "Dr.", well then, no one would buy.

Dr., Dr. Phil

He's not quite sincere.

Over ten million is his yearly paycheck,

for telling his guests how their lives are wreck.

And his advice is a notch above dreck.

Follow up with guests? Why? No one will check!

Dr., Dr. Phil.

His judgment is severe.

His Nielsen ratings are beginning to slip.

Once neck and neck with Oprah, he's losing his grip.

His southern drawl is anything but hip.

Let's all give the "Dr." a bird we can flip.

Dr., Dr. Phil.

The end must soon be near!

You AUGHT to remember...

# 30 -Soccer Mom/Hockey Mom

2009-12-03T14:58:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

Motherhood was defined by your child's sport of choice.

Dear oracle that is Google Images, what is a "Soccer Mom?":

Ah, I see Oracle. Please, I implore thee in the name of Apollo, answer my second querie, grant to me on this day visions of a "Hockey Mom!":

You AUGHT to remember....

#31 - Single Ladies

2009-12-02T15:34:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it.

I resisted this entry for a long time. As big as Beyonce's hit song was, I couldn't help but think that I was being blindsided by the excitement of the moment; that Sasha just wasn't fierce enough to warrant being called an Aughts landmark. I knew that more recent memories were weighted unfairly against more distant ones and so treated more current trends with reticence. Maybe 2008 felt like the year of the Single Lady, but surely the brouhaha could have just been a passing craze. And then I realized, as Beyonce slowly took over the world...I was really really wrong! Single Ladies penetrated pop culture like no other song this decade. Performed at every possible music awards ceremony, lampooned on late night television and spawning a whole cottage industry of recreations and spoofs on YouTube, Beyonce's Single Ladies became the biggest dance craze since the Macarena.

The song itself is in the tradition of classic anthems to feminine resilience and emplowerment like I Will Survive, or I Am Woman and indeed, has joined these songs in jukboxes and dance mixes at gay bars from coast to coast. Laughable lyrics aside, the song makes its point clear enough. But, catchy as the tune is, with it's hand-clapping backbeat and memorable, oft reapeated titular musical motif, what has made Single Ladies a major success is its music video. Featuring the most imitable and engaging dancing in a music video since Michael Jackson's Thriller, those with a keen (or maybe just gay) eye immediately noticed that the choreography bore a striking resemblance to an old Bob Fosse routine called Mexican Breakfast; Beyonce's rendition just nixed the cheesy lounge music, added a pulsating dance beat, and made the whole thing, well Shasha FIERCE! Shot in gorgeous black and white on a sparse bare set, the video has to be one of the simplest in memory. And it was al the better for its reserve. There is no camera trick or special effect as impressive as raw talent.

When was the last time that any music video mattered? At all? MTV and VH1 long ago abandoned caring about the art form. Leave it to Beyonce to, with a small budget and only herself and two back up dancers, create the biggest music video sensation of the decade.

Inspiring a small army imitators on YouTube, America couldn't stop recording itself dancing to the tune. Would a 300lb man have donned a black unitard, bootlyliciously bumping and grinding around his living room to the track if he weren't recording the video to upload to the world? Maybe. But it would be a lot more creepy. (His, ahem, unique interpretation has, as of this blog entry 9,337,549 hits, but I have a feeling that if you haven't seen it, it's about to be 9,337,550.) He is but one in a sea of amateur Single Ladies, a veritable follies of left feet.

Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it) cemented Beyonce's status as the reigning queen of Pop. (Sorry, Madonna.) Given how ubiquitous it is in the culture, how much longer the song will stay novel (or even tolerable) to listen to is anyone guess. Even President Obama got into the groove. When a chorus of highschool football players began dancing to the tune on the hit show Glee, I both wanted to jump for joy and run and hide. By the time Liza has her way with the song in the upcoming Sex and the City sequel all the single ladies may be married with children. But, until then, like a Pavlovian puppy, when I hear those four little words I can't help but start dancing. I bet you can't either. Now put your Hands up!

You AUGHT to remember.

#32 - Crocs

2009-12-01T19:38:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Mario Batali started a footwear frenzy!

Crocs are not a shoe. Crocs are not a fashion trend. Crocs are not for adults. Crocs are a toy. A candy colored plaything fit only for party clowns at childrens birthday parties. Orthopedic Tupperware, the only thing more shocking than how ugly crocs are is how many grown men and women actually ware (wore) the plastic beasts.

Of course, they are not plastic. Don't you dare call them plastic. Crocs are made out of Croslite, which sounds like the name of either a company that will freeze-dry your cadavourous head for future regeneration or an overpriced crockery brand. Styled like a dutch clog without the handcrafted charm, crocs began life as boat shoes, utilitarian and slip resistant, and on deck is where they should have stayed.

I blame Mario Batali. How a heavyset, television celebrity-chef with no fashion sense came to be the footwear's biggest PR ambassador is something of a mystery. (And why anyone at Crocs thought this was a good marketing move is beyond me, but, bizarrely, it was.) Matching the Jack O' Lantern hue of his hair, Batali's orange crocs came to be the chef's calling card. Molto Mario was often seen bandying about New York in his Tropicana colored plastic shoes, giving the brand an ostentatious display in the fashion capital of the country. It wasn't long before the company signed the Chef up to sponsor his own Croc product line.

Crocs Inc. earned as many haters as devotees. Most legitimate press coverage veered toward the perplexed if not downright critical. The company, drunk off its quick and massive success, expanded fast, opening independent retail stores, advertising itself as a "lifestyle brand." How does one make Crocs a lifestyle? What was their dream? Rubber hats? Rubber belts? Rubber Undies?

Luckily, Crocs are fast becoming an over-exposed fashion faux pas; a flash in the pan that quickly devolved into a nostalgic punchline, like the Dolorean or love beads. Though they might be marshmallow soft to the heel, and though devoted Croc wearers may still swear by them, their legacy is as inevitably silly as their visual aesthetic. Croc-A-Doodle-Doo! The brand's fifteen minutes if fame is up.

You AUGHT to Remember.

#33 - 2 GIRLS, 1 CUP

2009-11-30T12:50:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Scat was not a jazz style.

I have not seen 2 Girls, 1 Cup. I have no intention of ever seeing 2 Girls, 1 Cup. I would recommend to anyone, if they haven't seen 2 Girls, 1 Cup, that they avoid doing so at all costs. 2 Girls, 1 Cup is, of course, the Marquis De Sade's favorite Internet video. A movie of such misogynistic degradation that even Leopold Sacher-Masoch would get nauseous watching it. A two minute dive into Caligula-worthy debauchery. I wont describe it's contents (a description is available here and here) as elaborating further would cause me to lose my lunch all over my laptop.

Extreme porn was, before the Internet, a hard-to-find commodity, an object of borderline legality that had to be sought out by a dedicated pervert; they don't put coprophilia magazines on deli newsstands everyday. But, thanks to the democratization of information dissemination (finding bestiality sex videos is as simple as searching for stock quotes or weather reports), imagery that in the past would have been seen by only a select adventurous and/or disturbed few have now been watched by cringing millions. Hungry Bitches (the official title of 2 Girls, 1 Cup) is without question one of the most watched pieces of pornography since Deep Throat. A uniquely 21st Century phenomenon, this inexcusable movie became a pop culture sensation in 2007. It may also spell the end of Western Civilization.

The appeal (if that's what you want to call it) is not just the video's disgusting contents. Making a gross-out video is remarkably easy. No, what makes 2 Girls, 1 Cup such a widespread "hit" is its pretense as pornography; the filmmaker's attempt to arouse is what shocks and titillates. The irony here is textbook. 2 Girls, 1 Cup's actual effect is (we hope) the opposite of its intent. The set-up is almost comic: the maudlin piano score, the beauty of the "Girls," the mysterious title with its intimation of ravenousness ("What ever could these 'bitches' be hungry for?) - the ambiance is decidedly romantic. And then...

Whether or not anyone has ever watched 2 Girls, 1 Cup for sexual gratification is a question I don't really want to know the answer to, like, do I have the Alzheimer's Gene, or, how many calories does a Grande Frappauccino have? I take some comfort in the fact that the vast, vast majority of Cup viewers have watched the video as either as test of wills or on a dare. A sad few didn't know what they were watching when they started. (An occupational hazard for voracious Internet surfers.) All these decent people, confronted with images as foul and debased as any as they will ever see thought it wise to record their own personal Ludovico treatments for posterity. The great legacy of 2 Girls, 1 Cup is the anthology of reaction videos, a voluminous record of disgust uploaded to YouTube and preserved for all time. A parade of faces in various grimaces of laughter, horror and nausea, watching these videos in rapid succession has a hilarious, hypnotic fascination. The consistency of the reactions, the uniform tempo of the squirming, the omnipresent piano serenade in the background- the reaction videos are more and more of a delight to watch with every new "Oh My GOD!" They became so popular that 2 Girls, 1 Cup's viral popularity can only be explained in reference to the desire people had to share their horror at watching it with the world. Why else would you sit through that? The 21st Century is the era where nothing is worth doing unless it's taped and uploaded. Privacy is so overrated.

By all means, should my reservations not dissuade you, watch the movie and post your own reaction video, but let it go at that. I don't recommend writing college essays about 2 Girls, 1 Cup, the professor is prone to miss your satirical brilliance.

Another piece of advice: don't think too long about 2 Girls, 1 Cup. You might find yourself asking unpleasant questions like: "Who are these 'actresses?'" " Why was the video really made?" "Why did the girls do it?" "It it fake? It's gotta be fake! It's fake. Please God, let it be fake." "What viral video could possibly top this?" That last question is the scariest of all. While I'd like to pretend that 2 Girls, 1 Cup will be a unique moment in the history of the Internet, I suspect that we will have more unfit-for-human-consumption videos uploaded our way in the near future. But for now we have, for your viewing pleasure, our de facto psychological record: Variance of disgust reactions in human subjects.

You AUGHT to remember.

Tosh.0

The Biggest Reaction Video

www.comedycentral.com

Web Redemption

2 Girls, 1 Cup Reaction

Demi Moore Picture

#34 - Sex & The City/Desperate Housewives

2009-11-29T16:37:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

Feminism officially died.

What's is so fucking great about Manolo Blahniks? Will someone explain this to me? I may be gay, but the shoe fetish gene was left off this particular homo's chromosome. For all six season of HBO's massive hit comedy Sex and the City its fashion obsessed heroines discussed, fantasized and worshiped the exclusive footwear label in terms so rapturous that short of inducing an orgasm upon slipping on a pair (The "thwunk" sound you hear is Michael Patrick King smacking his hand to his head saying, "Why didn't I think of that?") it was hard to fathom what the fuss was all about. Of course, one could ask the same question about Sex and the City? What was the fuss all about? A weekly chatterfest about four ~~gay men~~ single women, all in their thirties, gallivanting around the Big Apple on the hunt for cock, cosmos and couture, sustained by what could have only be Madoff size bank accounts, (How else are they to afford their Imelda Marcos sized closets to store their incessant parade of big-label apparel?) Sex and the City was, one can safely assume, difficult to relate to for most women. So why? Why did this often shallow and periodically vulgar cosmo-quiz of a show become a major cultural landmark in the Aughts? Why did women and the men who did thier hair keep watching and dissecting Sex with such fervent enthusiasm?

Sex and The City was first-class escapism of the most ingenious sort. Its women were liberated and modern, sexually open (Had a women ever discussed the taste of "spunk" before on television?) and libidinally ripe. Piggybacking off of the hard won battles for women's lib in decades past, the Sex and the City girls were a new archetype for the gender; neither wives nor whores, these were power-girls: self-sufficient, financially independent, sexually satisfied (or admittedly insatiable) and really, really HOT goddamn it! The kind of women other members of the sex might pretend or wish to be. But underneath the Donna Karan skirts and horseshoe necklaces were women so old fashioned as to make Mary Tyler Moore look like Gloria Steinem. Obsessed with men - dating them, screwing them, analyzing them and, above all, marrying them - these women, particularly the series' perpetually lovelorn narrator Carrie Bradshaw, were as concerned with finding a mate as any in a William Inge play. Hardly career obsessed, for the Sex and the City gang work exists only as a backdrop to explain (unconvincingly) the deep pockets in them Prada pants. Carrie, already clearly raking it in as a lifestyle columnist and freelance writer (first a suspension and then a total expulsion of disbelief), nonetheless selects for her on again off again paramour an even wealthier master of the universe called Mr. Big, reinforcing the dream of Cinderellas everywhere that a rich man will, in the end, be your prince charming, generic name included.

And so it was, by the time the series finale had the girls sipping what we had hoped would be their last $20 cosmopolitans, all four of our protagonists were either married or coupled; even the sexually voracious and commitment phobic Samantha has settled down with the (or at least a) man of her dreams. Even The Golden Girls had the good sense to keep Blanche single! Really girls? You all need a man to have a happy ending? Can't we have an finale a little less retrograde?

Speaking of retrograde, another program this decade focused on the trials and tribulations of four ~~gay men~~ attractive thirty (ok, forty) something women. Deeply silly and relentlessly un-PC Desperate Housewives was a trashy, sassy, all too silly Sex and the City meets Dynasty hybrid, a prime-time soap opera with a catty cast of just-this-side-of-young knockouts. Unlike City's single-but-looking characters, the women of desperate housewives are, as the title suggests, already defined by their men. Taking place in one of those nebulous could-be-anywhere-but-always-wealthy suburbs that overpopulate TV shows and movies (as if every Suburbanite lived in a gorgeous restored Georgian four bedroom), Wisteria Lane had little to do with real America or reality in general. Where Sex and the City maintained a gloss of verisimilitude, both in style and content, it's writers clearly attempting to care about the shows characters, in all their excess and predictability, Housewives shows no such compunction; when not veering toward the ludicrous the show's plots leaned toward the totally absurd. Housewives courts camp in every moment. Can something really be a guilty pleasure if it's openly sold as such?

Desperate Houswives was a massive hit when it first premiered in 2005, but its importance to pop culture has waned. Though the series won no points in its presentation of women as, well, desperate housewives, I can't help but think that the obvious silliness and debauchery made the audience less willing to take the characters as seriously as the ones on Sex and the City. For this reason it's Desperate Housewives that's the less culturally damaging entertainment. At least we know we aren't supposed to idolize these women. It's also really fun, but then again I'm biased. How gay is Desperate Housewives? Most episodes are named after Sondheim songs. 'Nuff said.

You AUGHT to remember...

#35 - Vintage T - Shirts

2009-11-28T16:34:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Plain white tees were so done.

To be a slave to fashion one must keep their expectations wide open. What may be required to stay on the forefront of shifting trends is not necessarily a big wallet and a trip to fifth avenue. No, in the Aughts, for a casual look that was a la moment, you had to forsake the professional sartorial institutions altogether and rummage through piles of faded and old T-Shirts piled high at your local thrift store.

This is not a retro revival, this is irony chic. When searching for a Vintage Tee it's best to look for the most unexpected design possible. For instance, an old T-Shirt for a youth summer camp is good....
but a Jewish youth summer camp is better.

Pop culture iconography is always a winner, especially if a shirt features characters from cancelled Saturday morning cartoons.

Superheroes work too,
but not if it's a tasteless mass-produced image from the past 25 years.

If you are of an edgier ilk, tops stamped with shabbily silk screened images of old rock bands can give you a grungy vibe.

Ironic text is a must, particuarly if the shirt features any religious messages.
Product and company logos are f-u-n, especially if the logo style has been discontinued or if the company no longer exists.

If the product is associated with childhood memories, like Cereal brands
or long-forgotten toys and games,
you've hit the graphic-Tee jackpot. 8-bit Video game imagery is a category unto itself.

It wasn't long before mainstream apparel companies appropriated the aesthetic and mass produced their own faux-vintage graphic tees. Urban Outfitters has made a whole business off of the style.

What is the appeal of the vintage tee? What does the childlike content of the imagery say about its wearer? Obviously, the primary function here is irony. Dressing like a walking billboard for a defunct company, or sporting an obviously dated design style is an extremely self-conscious way to dress. Not merely about "looking good" a vintage Tee gives an outfit editorial content. The shirt becomes a kind-of punchline. But, not simply an arch exercise in self-aware post-modern expression, there is a real Freudian undercurrent sustaining the popularity of the vintage tee.

By reengaging with the symbols, imagery and graphical style prevalent in childhood memories- the wearers of Vintage Tees are almost always born in the 70's or 80's - the anxiety of nostalgia is abated. The lingering affection Vintage Tee wearers have for the products, companies and images featured on these shirts would, if exposed, threaten to neutralize the aura of cool and disaffection that young people in the Aughts cultivate as their default attitude. There are few things less apathetic than a child's excitement when playing with his new toy; few things more uncool than the smile on the face of a kid when he gets dropped off to summer camp for the first time. These feelings are confronted and then submerged, (or secretly indulged) when the object of sentiment is de-contexualized, slapped onto a shirt and literally worn on the outside of the body like armor made of irony. The vintage tee may be the height of cool, but underneath, its very warm and fuzzy.

You AUGHT to remember.

#36 - Craigslist

2009-11-27T07:59:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

One guy's list got so popular he made Santa jealous.

Website design has come a long way in the Aughts. From bland text based interfaces as aesthetically pleasing as the Wall Street Journal Stock Index to multimedia, flash enabled, graphically rich immersive "experiences," a well designed webpage is less a site one reads than a destination one visits. And yet, for all of Web 2.0's (as this era of the Internet is being coined) surplus of impressively designed webpages, there was one site that saw little need to adapt to the changing climate. One site that, despite being as visually bland as a box of generic cheerios, has established itself as one of the Internet's most popular destinations and a feature of social reality, that, like so much of the web, we could no longer imagine living without. It's a webpage that, if not single than helping handedly, destroyed the newspaper industry, gutting a financial model that could no longer sustain itself in a world where information exchange became both instantaneous and free. It's Craigslist! Your one stop find a job, buy a car, sell your toaster, audition a drummer, get laid, find a date, rent a prostitute shop for all your lifestyle needs. (Often in that order.) Craigslist is unpleasant, confusing, maddening, dull, mysterious, spam-filled and totally, absolutely necessary.

Craigslist didn't just find it's niche, it found everyones niche - on the site you could shop for just about anything that can be bought or sold (or given away for free) - from collapsible bicycles, to human labor, from a back alley blowjob, to a dinner companion for the opera - Craiglist was anything but limited. And unlike classified ads in print the call and response of posting and answering on Craigslist was near instantaneous. Craigslist was bland to be sure and almost wholly charmless but Goddamn if the site wasn't efficient at delivering the goods (both figuratively and literally).

Craigslist works because everyone agrees that it must. More local than eBay, less corporate than monster.com, and far blunter than EHarmony, Craigslist is the de facto location where everyone goes to engage in the marketplace. It's a cyber-bazaar; a wild, unruly yard sale-cum-newspaper classifieds section where any and everyone hawks their wares, prices always negotiable. Competition serves no one in this commercial model, the site only succeeds if there is one and only one place for everyone to meet and trade. Gradual migration to another similar site is a near impossibility. To the victor goes the spoils. Craigslist, being the first site of it's kind, capitalized on its initial dominance in online classifieds to become a nearly unstoppable force; by the time competitors tried to get a foothold Craigslist had staked its territory, dug out a moat, and erected battlements. King Craig rules.

Craigslist has inspired everything from off-Broadway shows, to Weird Al Yankovic parody songs, to psycho killers. Its stamp on American society is profound and unlikely to diminish any time soon. Pressure is always on for the site to sell-out, add ads, redesign its antiquated graphical interface. Something. But Craigslist plods on, conquering the the world a city at a time. All with only a staff of thirty and a founder who interacts with his sites users through the format of Haiku. Though he could sell his site for billions Craig is content with just millions; holding fast to his ideology of "direct democracy." As for myself? I just keep waiting to see if someone asks about me on Missed Connections.

#37 - Netflix/Hulu

2009-11-26T12:48:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

Late return rental fees were a thing of the past.

Five Haikus about Netflix and Hulu

Anxiety comes
When I search through film listings.
You are what you queue.

Entertainment Starved?
TV is now a Buffet.
Stuff me with HULU!

Trips to Blockbuster
Are but a distant Mem'ry.
Why ever leave home?

And for the first time,
Satisfied with your service,
You sent it all back.

Screamin' 'bout streamin'.
Hulu may screw o'er artistes...
But it's fucking free!

You AUGHT to remember...

#38 - Perez Hilton

2009-11-24T20:05:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

Hollywood's biggest power broker worked out of a coffee shop.

The original title of Perez Hilton's now infamous namesake blog was "PageSixSixSix." It was the last instance of wit that Perez would ever display. In just five years this foul-mouthed, flame-y haired, even flame-yer acting, gutter minded chimichanga has gone from an unemployed freelance writer with $60,000 dollars of debt to the worlds most famous gossip blogger, a six figure salary and multi-media fame. In retrospect the Miami-born, NYU educated, Mario Armando Lavandeira's rise to Hollywood fame was as unlikely as his blog (or one just like it) was inevitable. As such, and as horrifying as it is to contemplate, Perez Hilton is one of the Aughts most emblematic personalities. Oy.

Stylistically, somewhere between a Michael Musto missive and elementary school bathroom stall scrawl, Perez Hilton, the site and the man, have come to define what gossip is in the new cyber-media. Walter Winchell he ain't, Perez was the first to realize that in the era of the mouse click and hyperlink, volume always trumps quality. Best to have forty hastily organized posts a day than five brilliantly pithy, well written ones. Grammar is for losers, sentences are passe. In the Internet area, a picture (of Clay Aiken with drawn on ejaculate running down his mouth) says 1000 words, none of which would be pleasant to read. Hilton's editorial standard requires only that the posts be in English, and even then sometimes you wonder...

Perez may get millions of hits a day but, for most readers, the actual time spent on the site probably lasts about as long as an extended piss or short shit; the experience is always excremental. Perez knows (intuitively, from experience no doubt) that surfing the Internet has bulldozed our attention spans to somewhere between badger and opossum on the phylogenetic tree. We now want our celebrity news digestible in one long gulp, like a frat boy finishing a six pack. You'd throw up if you were to sip it. A brief visit down Hilton lane on your five minute office coffee break can function as an emergency infotainment debriefing. It's gossip redux. A digital Page Six, distilled to bullet points and dirty pictures. Drained of all editorializing, the site is a who-is-doing-who and who-is-pregnant-now memorandum of the most crude kind. The frequent updates keeps its readers hitting refresh like lab mice clicking their feed bar. Communication hasn't been rendered this sparse since the heyday of the pay-by-the-letter telegram.

Perez did much right in his quest to become the self-proclaimed "Queen of All Media." Unlike other low-brow gossip sites like DListed.com or Pinkisthenewblog.com (or even more legitimate Internet gossip sources like gawker.com and it's subsidiaries) Perez's site was as much about the blogger's own cult of celebrity as it was the actual A-D Listers and celebutantes he reported on. You would go to his site to learn about Brangelina drama or the latest Britney Spears disaster scene, but you couldn't escape the man himself. Anything but camera shy, this zaftig trash-talker worked overtime to make his personal persona (not just his blog) synonymous with celebrity in the 21st century. The efforts paid off. Soon, the New York Times was writing articles and old media could no longer ignore this new Hollywood game changer. His inferno-topped visage became a fixture of the LA nightlife scene; soon he was the one in Paparazzi photographs. TV Specials and red carpet gabfests were only going to be a matter of time.

With the new medium of blogging being defined and re-calibrated in real time, the journalistic standards that held sway for decades in print media were, if not useless, totally ignored. Was a gossip blog more like a gaggle of friends pick-a-littling at drinks on a Friday night or was it a newfangled periodical column in the vein of Liz Smith, Cindy Adams and the legendary Page Six? (Or was a blog more akin to a logorrheic nutjob shrieking on a soapbox in Hyde Park?) Perez Hilton assumed the casual, loose lipped informality of private conversation but got an audience as massive as any of the genre's old warhorses. Controversy inevitably followed.

While Michael Musto may snarkily (Michael Musto eats his corn flakes snarkily) and obliquely allude to a well-known closet case's infamous same-sex orgies, Perez will provide pictures and commentary. For Hilton, himself an out and proud gay man, the Hollywood closet was only a doorway to success; he has little interest in protecting any public figure's privacy should they choose to hide their sexual orientation. And Hollywood is afraid, very afraid.

Both Lance Bass and Neil Patrick Harris had little choice but to announce their homosexuality after being backed into a closet corner by the scruple-free blogger. Though "Who's gay in LA LA Land?" has long been a favorite party game of homos from here to the land of Oz (lots of gays there), when such casual speculation finds its way online, the finality of putting the trashy gab in writing (even of the non-print variety) brings to bear a new whole roster of ethical and journalistic issues. But, of course, Perez is not a journalist. He is not a reporter. He is not the employee of a media company. He is a guy with a laptop. In essence, that's all he is or needed to be. This is the 21st Century. Recently, after the feeding frenzy over Miss California's anti-gay response to Perez Hilton's Same-sex marriage question (He later called her a "dumb bitch.") while appearing on the Miss USA panel, Perez has positioned himself as a GLBT activist, even showing up on legitimate talk shows to debate same sex marriage. Not all gays are having it.

Who's really not having it are the paparazzi who risk life and limb daily to get that million (or 500, more usually) dollar shot of Nicole Ritchie eating a corn dog. They struggle and toil only to have their "work" exploited by Hilton, who, as easy as a right-click, appropriates the fruits of their labor, defiles it with his magic markers, and then posts the image for all to see, making boffo bucks all the while. Enter the lawsuits. While it's hard to get worked up about injustices against the pawn-scum that are celebrity paparazzi, what was at stake in the case against Hilton was nothing less than the copyright status of images in the brave new world that is the Internet. In this instance the matter was settled out of court, leaving the precedent still nebulous; further lawsuits, whether against Hilton or other Internet picture poachers is all but inevitable.

As a fabulized, slenderized Hilton stands atop his mini-Empire of over-inflated importance, he must wonder, "How long can this last?" As self-made as any classic entrepreneur in the mythopoeia of the American Dream, Perez Hilton was neither the most original nor talented neophyte bloggerhead to reach for success, he was simply the one who got there first and knew what to do with it when he arrived. He is at once unique and emblematic. Is Perez Hilton really the Queen of all Media? In the age of the internet, you are what you say you are. So, Long Live the Queen.

You AUGHT to remember...

#39 - Tom Cruise, Mental patient.

2009-11-23T18:10:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

For a Top Gun, acting sane was a Mission Impossible.

Leaked Bellevue Case Study

The patient, a Caucasian male in his mid forties, was admitted to the ward after displaying erratic and self-destructive behavior on and off for the past ten years. Immediately it was apparent that he was in need of treatment and intensive analysis. Initial attempts at psychological evaluation were met with passive aggressive hostility, the patient repeating the phrase "Help Me Help You" over and over again - a clear attempt to undermine the dynamic between doctor and patient. This was the first manifestation of what we later determined to be a chronic and unique case of manic narcissistic personality disorder, complimented by low-level schizophrenia and conscious seizures. We initially misdiagnosed him as bi-polar assuming that the manic episodes would have to subside into depressive periods. To our surprise, the manic phases persisted indefinitely. We have rooted out the cause of this pathological condition as a combination of repressed and confused sexual proclivities, social isolation, continual and persistent positive reinforcement for bad behavior and indoctrination into a religious cult.

An inflated sense of power and self-worth were the first clues to the patient's narcissistic temperament. The condition would manifest itself most prominently through the outrageous claims that the patient would make. In one instance he claimed that at the site of an auto accident, amongst the entire crowd only he could help the situation and assist those in peril. The exalted status he held himself in made his psyche easily susceptible to indoctrination by a religious cult, the cult's ideology acting as a reinforcing mechanism. His existing belief that he has privileged insight which others lacked became a part of his religious faith. The cult then feeds on the patients psychological dysfunction, increasing the schizophrenic episodes to the extent that, by the time he came to us, the patient believed that human beings descended from an alien race implanted on earth in volcanoes which were then destroyed by nuclear weapons. The patient, now fully convinced of his cults dogma, makes it a mission to convince others of his beliefs, overstepping the boundaries that should restrain him from offering up opinions on topics he is not qualified in any professional way to address. If under interrogation, the patient immediately attempts to put his inquisitor on the defensive, reversing the power roles so that his own authority cannot be questioned. He may even dismiss criticisms outright, accusing the questioner of being "glib."

For such an individual external coordinates of success must be maintained at all costs. The cognitive threat of failure could pop such an inflated ego. Sexual health and a satisfying romantic relationship are important criteria in any healthy persons analysis of their own well-being but with a pathological narcissist however, it is merely the impression that counts in his evaluation. This being the case, the patient will overcompensate when discussing his love life, in this instance, jumping fast into marriage and wildly exclaiming his affections to anyone in earshot. This super-abundance of excitement brought about what can only be described as conscious seizure in the patient, forcing him to jump and flail wildly. It is important to note the imbalance between the hysteria manifested by the patient and the quiet anxiety emanated by the partner who is, of course, passive, and seemingly powerless. The display of affection by the patient is directed less at his partner than at the world in general, a signal that what concerns him is not the relationship but his perception of himself in the eyes of, in Lacanian terminology, the Big Other. Romantic gestures are big and broad and ludicrously predictable (the patient proposed to his new wife at the Eiffel Tower, for instance); it's a performance of life not a living of one.

Within the mania there are still massive mood swings. In an indoctrination video that the patient made for his cult the subject displayed an alarming ability to shift from fiercely intense testimonial to wild, uninhibited and unprovoked laughter and then back to steely jawed instruction. This persistent manic energy throughout the panoply of emotions is the most disturbing feature of this patients pathology. It's hysteria on Cruise control.

Our advice is for the patient to take his protein pill and put his helmet on.

You AUGHT to remember...

#40 -Going Green

2009-11-22T20:18:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

Green was the new black.

The bad news: We're all fucked. The planet is now a phlegmatic, feverish, invalid. Mother nature is looking more and more like Grandma Moses each day. Hard to believe for some but, if science is to be trusted, it seems that pumping carbon emissions and pollution into our environment unabated for a hundred years eventually takes it toll. Who woulda thunk it?

What's going to happen according to those nerds in the know?: Temperatures will continue to rise. Even one or two degrees upwards will wreak total havoc. Eventually, ice caps will melt, polar bears will go the way of the woolly mammoth, and the Kevin Costner film Waterworld will come to seem less a Hollywood debacle and more like the most prescient of documentaries. (Yes, in the future the oceans will be ruled by a leather clad Dennis Hopper in an eye patch.) I, for one, have already bought some beachfront property...in Nevada.

The good news: It was cool to be a harbinger of doom. There was no easier way to be "with it" than to decry the fate of our planet and mock those rubes who would deny the existence of climate change even as they suntan in January. And rubes they are indeed. There are few emotions as self-satisfying as justified pessimism in the face of delusional optimism. Convinced that climate change is nothing but a socialist plot to regulate commerce, the far right, though convinced of impending Armageddon by any and all other means, nonetheless refuses to believe that we could ever do anything to our environment that would threaten our well-being. The good lord said nature was there for our use after all. So, it was empirical fact vs. faith based denial. Um, score one for science. The problem is, of course, just how bleak the scenario really was. No one wants to hear about their inevitable destruction. Pandora's Box cannot be left wide open, hope must be maintained.

Enter the patron saint of the new environmentalism, the maharishi of green, the philosopher-king of Eco-alarmism, Al Gore. A dejected and bloated Gore left the 2000 election embittered and in shambles; a should-be president with no country to lead, what was the former VP going to do with himself? The answer, become earth's biggest hero since Captain Planet. There was something charming and professorial about his slide show of eco-terror, not the hippest of ways to spread his gospel of green. And yet, put that slideshow (OK, powerpoint presentation!)on film, release in theatres across America and you have yourself a major documentary hit. Two Academy Awards (Yep, even the song won!) and a Nobel Peace Prize later and the green movement had reached its apotheosis.

Now everything is green. Celebrities are green. Companies are green. CARS are green. CARS! Kermit was so wrong. Being green is a marketing ploy now, a signifier of a person or product being "with-it." Shedding the granola eating, hemp attired persona that typified environmentalists in the past, the environmental movement could count on movie stars to be their poster boys. Leo DiCaprio drives a hybrid and flies commercial, private jets use too much fuel. Less glamorous, Ed Begley Jr. has gone all the way, living in a "green" house and driving a converted electric VW rabbit. It's all about eliminating your "carbon footprint," one of the Aughts most pronounced coinages.

Is it all for nAUGHT? Though Gore would have you believe that changing your light bulb will change the world, I can't help but fear we are deluding ourselves about our own ability to divert the rolling boulder of climate change. China and India are on track to surpass the USA in almost every criteria of industrialization, including carbon emissions. America has passed no real laws or regulations that addressing the issue in any serious, systematic way. We couldn't even stand in solidarity with the rest of the civilized world and join the Kyoto protocol. What we have instead of policy is fashion. Instead of solutions we have "crisis awareness." Instead of leaders we have trendsetters. Own a hybrid car? Awesome. Seriously. But China is still poised to pump more pollution into the environment than any nation has in the history of the world. And they all ride bikes! Everyone doing their part may not be enough, and until we realize as a nation and as a world that a political solution in the only solution (if there is a solution), I'm afraid all the good intentions and Hollywood endorsements wont be worth the price of a gallon of dirt when we find ourselves canoeing over the Sahara.

You AUGHT to remember...

#41 - Movie Musicals

2009-11-21T21:42:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

Hollywood started singing again.

It was the unlikeliest of comebacks. Unlike the Western, a film genre that, though dead, (or at least sputtering and wheezing like Doc Holliday after some saloon fisticuffs) inspires a perpetual reverence in critics nostalgic for the All-American mythos, expansive cinemascope vistas and moral clarity that are part and parcel of the genre, the movie musical had no such luck maintaining its highbrow cultural cache. The genre had cascaded down from the heights of popularity to near total irrelevance, musicals coming to seem a relic of a bygone era in American society, the social upheavals of the Sixties negating the overt sentimentality and escapism that had come to be associated with the genre. Whether this reputation was deserved or not matters little, the proof was in the pudding: the genre's biggest hits were either syrupy paeans to music, love and family (The Sound of Music) or acerbic, witty insider showbiz stories (Singing In The Rain, 42nd Street), neither of which could succeed in connecting with an increasingly disillusioned and sentiment-averse populace.

Other pressures pushed musicals even more away from the limelight. Advancements in camera technology allowed for more location shooting; with the shift to natural light and real locales the artifice of the sound stage was rendered sillier and sillier and if there is one thing a musical needs to sustain credulity it's artifice. The real death knell for the movie musical was the usurpation of show tunes by Rock 'N Roll as the hegemonic standard for popular music in America. Those who held onto affection for show music got more and more cult-like and ostracized from the mainstream. Musical theatre and musical cinema, once the most mainstream popular art forms in America, came to be associated almost entirely with older urbanites and, above all, homosexuals. When Oliver! won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1968 the victory was Pyrrhic; you can have a coronation for the king after the revolution if you like, it doesn't change the fact that the castle is trashed and the queen already beheaded.

Efforts were made at rehabilitation (HAIR, Cabaret) and, later, resurrection, (A Chorus Line, EVITA) but all was in vain. Musical movies were decidedly uncool, so entrenched in an antiquated style of filmmaking (and equally calcified ideological perspective) that no cultural defibrillator could bring the genre back to life. Until the Aughts.

Love him or hate him, there is no question that Baz Luhrmann and his hyperkenetic, maximalist aesthetic breathed new life into the corpse that was the movie musical with his 2001 hit Moulin Rouge. A love story as hackneyed as anything in a Jeanette McDonald/Nelson Eddie classic, Moulin Rouge aspired to turn the genre's vices into virtues. A epic romance supplemented by overwrought love songs with purple lyrics? Check. A glamorous showbiz setting? Check. An artificial mise en scene employing clearly unrealistic settings that smack of the theatrical? Check. Just edit the thing like you're Vincent Minnelli on a Meth jag and you've made a modern musical classic for a post-MTV Generation. Employing a melange of musical genres ranging from Whitney Houston power ballads to Jule Styne charm songs and beyond, Luhrman displays less a catholicity of taste than a post-modern desire to incorporate the entirety of 20th Century popular music into his own meticulously crafted, hermetically sealed universe, a world baring little relation to the bohemian Paris it ostensibly represents. The gambit paid off and Moulin Rouge proved a box office smash, clearing the air for other movie musicals to climb mount improbable and achieve mainstream success. If only Mr. Luhrman's vision, for all it's contemporary stylings, included content and characters that weren't as creaky as a Parisian flat's floorboards.

With Rouge convincing Hollywood executives that a little razzle dazzle was on the menu for the American public, it became only a matter of time before the eternally postponed film version of Kander and Ebb's classic musical Chicago would finally get its cinematic bow. Helmed by Broadway director Rob Marshall making his big screen debut, Chicago was an unprecedented success. Hewing close to its source material, Chicago was a big, splashy, sexy, bootlegged cocktail of a movie with a chaser of satire. The biggest moneymaker in Miramax history, Chicago dominated awards season, taking the top prize at the 2003 Academy Awards, the first time a musical had done so in over three decades. Though the dance sequences (or should I say sequin-ses) were over-edited and the performances less revelatory than many critics claimed (Did Queen Latifah really deserve that Oscar nom?) Chicago was still something of a revelation, a Broadway show transferred to a different medium with near total success. receiving acclaim from both critics, laymen and, toughest to please of all, theatre queens.

Suddenly, cineplexes were flush with singing and dancing, but, the new welcoming attitude toward movie musicals inevitably led to overstretching; lapses in judgment were inevitable. Sadly, two high profile projects threatened to derail the genre's revival altogether, making Chicago look more a one-off than game changer. A juggernaut when it landed on Broadway, The Producers was inevitably destined for a cinematic treatment after Chicago proved that movie musicals could still rake it in (and help boost slagging ticket sales on the Rialto as well). Already a cinema classic with starring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, this new Producers was playing with fire before a frame was filmed. Having first-time director Susan Stroman behind the camera didn't help; all her inventiveness and wit went flat when asked to think in two dimensions. The Producers was little more than a record of the stage show, pickled and canned for posterity.

RENT, though faring better at the Box Office, was even more creatively bankrupt. Directed by the middling, eager-to-please Chris Columbus, RENT was filmed with an almost naive literalness that served to highlight, not minimize, the shows flaws, mainly, its weepy melodramatics and occasionally self-pitying attitude. (It is based on an Opera after all.) Michael Grief's original theatrical staging was deliberately icy, sparse and unsentimental; it's what gave the musical its gloss of "coolness" and made the lachrymose storytelling palatable. Without inventing an analogue in cinematic terms, the musical fell flat, disappointing a small army of RENT-heads for whom the show was the I CHING, King James Bible and Hammurabi's code rolled into one.

And there was more. The Phantom of the Opera, the movie. Yeah, that happened. The High School Musical series proved that young people couldn't get enough singing and dancing in their entertainment, the more toothless the better. Puppet wrangler and Lion King wunderkind Julie Taymor made a psychedelic Beatles musical called Across The Universe but few cared. Though Dreamgirls won Jennifer Hudson an Oscar and made 100 Million domestically, the expectations for the movie were so sky high that modest success felt like a disappointment. Hairspray got John Travolta back where he belongs: in a fat suit, high kicking. The public couldn't stop the beat, minting the John Waters adaptation a cool 118 Million domestically. And, when an actress named Streep agreed to sing some songs by a band called Abba for the film version of the tourist-friendly claptrap known as Mamma Mia the box office was bound to be good. 600 Million Dollars later, mouths are still agape. The winner takes it all indeed.

The best of the lot was Tim Burton's blood soaked adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Nary a sequins in sight, Sweeney was unlike any musical movie ever made. A horror film as much as anything, perhaps only Burton, with his unique brand of carnival macabre, could supply the delicate combination of menace and mirth that Sweeney trades in. Brechtian tropes be damned, Burton's Sweeney was an old fashioned thriller, a Hammer horror creepshow with better art direction (it's only Oscar win). Oh, and in this horror movie, the monsters sing. The film was critically lauded and performed modestly well at the box office, though a massive smash was probably never in the cards for Sweeney; some projects are simply too brilliant and original to fit into any proscribed marketing model.

With Rob Marshall's adaptation of Nine set for release this December starring a starry a cast of Oscar favorites, there is no doubt that the movie musical is hitting a stride. A Miss Saigon film is already in the works and one can imagine that it's only a matter of time before Wicked gets a celluloid makeover. When Hugh Jackman, the actor most destined to star in a movie musical (can Carousel happen, like, NOW?), hosted the Oscars this year and announced while opening a big production number "The Musical Is Back!" what could one do but agree and rejoice. The Musical IS back. It's really great and all that jazz...

You AUGHT to remember...

#42 - Jon & Kate+8 & the Octomom

2009-11-20T08:33:00.001-08:00

It was the decade when...

Mothers didn't have children, they had litters.

Darwin was wrong. It's true that nature selects certain individuals to be barren, but not out of genetic deficiency. No, natural selection is not always the culprit. Sometimes nature, in her infinite wisdom, is just trying to spare everyone else the shitstorm that ensues when certain individuals have babies. But we humans, prone to thwart nature's guidance at every possible turn, have made it possible for these progeny-less souls to not only birth a single child but a whole gaggle of them, making Homo Sapien gestation resemble more a rabbit than a bipedal mammal.

Jon and Kate Gosselin were a sweet couple. Unable to conceive children without the assistance of fertility doctors, the pair gave birth to a pair of beautiful twin girls. Tempting fate, the Gosselins felt another child was in their destiny and so back to the experts they went, hoping to add one more bundle of joy to their family. This time medical science proved too efficient. Six embryos decided to park in Kate's uterus and 9 months later the Gosselins were parents to a group of babies larger than some softball teams. TLC saw a marketing opportunity and before the befuddled parents knew what they were doing they had a hit basic cable television program on their hands. The barely submerged tension between the high strung Kate and the lackadaisical, mildly recalcitrant Jon gave the show it's hook, and, in a way, it's heart. In a household of two adults and eight children the environment is bound to be somewhat more tense than an episode of The Waltons; their imperfections were a signal of their humanity. When the friction turned to fire the resulting inferno was beyond anyone's wildest imagination. In the episode where the couple announced their decision to separate, Jon&Kate garnered its highest ratings ever with some 10.6 million viewers tuning in to watch a family get destroyed in almost real time.

Since then, the duo has become tabloid celebrities of the highest (lowest?) order, each week a new fathom southward in their ongoing public squabbles. Jon has regressed to total douchebaggery, pimping out his fashion style, partying in Vegas, and dating younger women of poor character while Kate has become a tear-prone talk show regular, onetime co-host on The View, and, with her "reverse-mullet" coiffure, the most influential trendsetter for women's hair fashions since Jennifer Aniston sported the "The Rachel." When Posh Spice is imitating you, you know you have penetrated pop culture in a way never before reserved for reality TV stars. Lost in the maelstrom are the real victims of Jon&Kate, the individuals now destined to their own paparazzi filled futures and reality show contracts, the eight children thrust into a media spotlight so bright it would make Stevie Wonder squint.

While Nadya Suleman, better known to the American populace by the supervillain sounding title of "Octomom," has no reality show of her own (yet) she has nonetheless ratcheted up an impressive amount of television coverage, mostly on the Dr. Phil program, which, despite weekly protestations by the host to stop discussing the story, continued to give this womb with legs blow-by-blow analysis. As always, media-whore Gloria Allred was there wearing a brightly colored suit of righteous indignation, shouting loudly about "the children." Suleman, already a single mother of six (all from in-vitro fertilization), decided in 2008 that what her life needed was more mouths to feed. After implanting six frozen embryos the 33 year old found herself pregnant with 8 babies (two had split into twins) and in January of '09 she gave birth to the lot of them, transforming herself from pathetic anonymous welfare mother into the now infamous Octomom. With a small of army of children around her, the Octomom became the postermom for the reckless use of fertility technology. Something of dish, it's no coincidence that this Angelina Jolie lookalike was offered One Million dollars to star in a pornographic film, an offer which she later turned down. Not necessarily a wise decision; the movie could have paid for at least three if not four college educations. Only ten more to worry about.

A freak show and domestic disaster parading as a news story, the only thing really interesting about the Octomom is trying to figure out who is going to be more fucked up, her kids or the Gosselin clan. I, for one, can already imagine the worlds most exciting episode of Family Feud.

You AUGHT to remember...

#43 - Kiddie-Porn Style Advertising

2009-11-19T20:27:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Looking at clothing advertisements made you want to shower.

Marketing strategy for apparel advertising pre-Aughts: Find the fittest and sexiest model you can. A beautiful celebrity will do nicely if you can afford it. Hire an expensive photographer like Herb Ritts or David LaChappelle to shoot the ad. Photograph your Adonis or Venus-like model sporting your clothes in a perfectly constructed fantasy mise-en-scene, awash on a sandy beach or frolicking through a pinewood forest perhaps. The expression on the model should be one of primal hunger and penetrating intensity. Take pains to flatter the model and clothes as much as possible, shooting all photos from the most forgiving angles. In post-production, whatever imperfections remain should be eliminated with powerful Photoshop computer software, software allowing endless manipulations of photographic images. The final ad should be a perfect idealistic representation of a human being, made all the more God-like by the addition of your apparel item featured in the ad.

Marketing strategy for apparel advertising in the Aughts: Go and find you favorite anonymous office intern, the one who gives you a hard-on when she takes your coffee order in the morning. Offer her a little extra money to pose for a few pictures that you yourself will take even though you have no training in photography. Sneak into her parents basement one night bringing along your now antiquated and commercially discontinued Polaroid camera. Have the intern try on various brands of your company's underwear and proceed to take candid shots, the more unpleasant the angle the better. The model's expression should be one of either giddy embarrassment or slack-faced boredom. Don't worry about lighting, the fluorescents will be satisfactory illumination; candlelight would be far too forgiving. Take your candid shots back to the office (But don't forget to bang your "don't-worry-she's-not-jailbait" employee before you go, the sexual harassment suit wont stick.) blow them up 500 times and, viola, you have your new billboard.

So what's the appeal of this new gonzo style of advertising? What ideological strands coursing through the culture could upend so much of the prevailing wisdom?

The realism offered up in kiddie-porn style advertising satiates the desire for an authenticity that is more and more foreign in a world exceedingly virtual. We live in a culture where amateurs can photoshop their own digital photographs as easily as the professionals; a society where our exposure to perfectly sculpted and tanned bodies so overwhelms our experience that perfection no longer draws our attention. It is the appeal of the imperfect, the cheap, the shabby that captures our imagination now. For so long our fantasies were idealized, the perfect had become passe. Bored with our dreams, we now find libidinal escape in the dingy lurid low-fi world summoned up by, above all, the advertising of American Apparel, America's largest clothing manufacturer and one of the biggest commercial success stories of the Aughts.

American Apparel appeals to a plugged-in culture; it's no coincidence that the advertising resembles a variety of photo sharing prevalent on social networking sites or cell phone "sexts." There is a patina of intimacy to Kiddie-Porn Style Ads just as there is an illusion of privacy with ones Picture Mail exchanges or tagged photos on Facebook. But, in reality, confusion abounds. With the membrane separating public from private growing more porous each day, it's no surprise that advertising would want to capitalize on this anxiety. Digitally perfected models built like Bernini sculptures have lost the ability to titillate as they once did, our threshold for shock having shifted drastically far away from the once temperate sensibility that made, once upon a time, Marky Mark in Tighty-Whities a scandal. Kiddie-Porn Style advertising is designed to look invasive and homemade and intimate (and illegal); its appeal is your low-level discomfort with the image, a queasiness that its makers hope can be channeled into a salacious eroticism. Forbidden Fruit tastes the sweetest.

You AUGHT to remember...

#44 - Star Wars and Indiana Jones Nuked the Fridge.

2009-11-18T14:51:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

George Lucas crapped all over his old franchises.

Cease and Desist Notice to Mr. George Lucas.

Dear Mr. Lucas:

It has come to our attention that your actions over the past decade in the production of the films Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode 3: Return of the Sith (hereafter referred to as "Star Bores") as well as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter referred to as "Grandpa Jones") infringes upon the rights of millions of moviegoers to preserve their childhood memories unscathed. This is a clear violation of your contract with the public to create films worthy of the legacy that you, yourself, began in 1977. Your recent actions have been grossly negligent, displaying a complete lack of regard for taste and artistic merit. Star Bores and Grandpa Jones represent a failure to satisfy the duty of care mandated for a filmmaker of your status.

A partial list of the infringing acts are enumerated herein:

In Star Bores, you created a mise-en-scene so digitized and robbed of human emotion that R2-D2 was the most psychologically-realized character in the films.
In Star Bores, the romantic dialogue between your two protagonists, played by Natalie Portman (hereafter referred to as "Weepy") and Hayden Christensen (hereafter referred to as "Darth Fey-der") was so purple and hackneyed that it would not pass muster either in a) a nineteenth century operetta or b) a Lifetime Channel television movie.
In Star Bores, you cast Darth Fey-der, an actor so annoyingly petulant that it was nearly impossible to believe he would ever transform into James Earl Jones.
In Star Bores, you expected the viewer to actually care about bickering between the Galactic Senate, the Jedi Council, the Corporate Alliance, and the Trade Federation -- a dense political bureaucracy as entertaining to watch as roll call at a Congressional committee on tax code amendments.
In Star Bores, you promoted Jar Jar Binks to Senator. This act alone is an offense to anyone who ever purchased so much as a Star Wars lunch box.
In Grandpa Jones, you cast Shia LeBoeuf -- nerdy, mousy Shia LeBoeuf -- as a leather-clad 1950s "Wild One" greaser, a role so incongruous to the performer's skill set that the decision can only be regarded as an ironic joke. To add insult to injury, in an act of sheer recklessness, you then named the role "Mutt" (hereafter referred to as "Dog").
In Grandpa Jones, you could not resist having your Skywalker Ranch computer nerds bring their Crayola crayons to pixelate all over the screen, all but destroying the visceral verisimilitude for which the Jones series is known.
In Grandpa Jones, you wisely bring back Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood but then give the actress almost nothing to do, besides looking frustrated and delivering necessary exposition.
In Grandpa Jones, you filmed a scene where Dog repeatedly get his balls busted by CGI jungle flora whilst he stands astride two moving Jeeps like a castrated Colossus.
In Grandpa Jones, our hero, one of the most beloved screen characters in history, escapes a nuclear explosion by hiding in a "King Cool" refrigerator which is then propelled by the nuclear blast away from the atomic destruction, at which time our hero rolls out unscathed, admiring the mushroom cloud visible in the now-far distance.

For the foregoing reasons, we hereby demand that you cease production of any new films, retiring from the entertainment industry. If you refuse to comply, we will be forced to file a complaint in the appropriate court and commence a legal action. Mr. Steven Spielberg, your co-conspirator in the Grandpa Jones project, has received a copy of this correspondence.

If you choose to ignore this notice and greenlight further projects based on these franchises, you can expect millions of dollars in profit but everyone will hate you -- and you will ultimately lose in the court... of public opinion.

We expect a response from you or your representative within two weeks of receipt of this notice. And no, your Jedi mind tricks will not work on us.

Sincerely,

You AUGHT to remember...

#45 - MySpace

2009-11-17T21:50:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

A place for friends became a cathouse for skanks.

The scene: A Saloon in Beverly Hills, California.

We see Tom, an attractive man around 34, walk into the saloon. He is wearing a tight white shirt. He looks disheveled. He walks over to the bar and sits down. The bar tender (played by Sam Elliot) goes over to him.

Bartender: Well, hello there son. From the looks of you, I reckon you could use a drink. Something a little stronger that a sarsaparilla perhaps?

Tom: Give me a double of whatever your strongest whiskey is.

Bartender: One of those days, is it? The clouds ain't got no silver lining? I've been there son. Here ya are. (He hands him the drink) Now, I ain't no head shrinker, but, care to share your troubles?

Tom: It's all over. You know the expression the higher the climb the harder the fall?

Bartender: I 'spose I've heard that once or twice.

Tom: Well, I am living proof of it right here. The sword of Damocles has fallen. You, sir are looking at the man who invented the #1 social networking site on the Internet.

Bartender: Whoa...you're the founder of Fa..

Tom: No! You do not say that word in my presence. When I hear that word I seizure. So, no, Not THAT social networking site...the (cough) former #1 social networking site on the Internet.

Bartender: Ah, Twitter! I love to tweet.

Tom: NO! I'm talking about the MySpace! The site that was once poised to rule the Internet and by extension, the whole world. And I was everyone's first friend Tom. That was me.

Bartender: Ah, MySpace. I remember that. I used to have a profile on there. Jeez, I haven't been on MySpace in years.

Tom: Yeah, you and everyone else. I tell ya man, we were once the most popular website in the America. I couldn't get enough press! We were changing the way the world works. People were getting famous from our website alone.

Bartender: Like that Tequila lady. She's mighty purdy.

Tom: And Dane Cook went from nobody to the top comic in America thanks to our site, and he's not even funny! The music industry had been upended; new bands could advertise themselves and get famous with the click of a button. And getting laid became as easy as logging on and getting off.

Bartender: It's true. I met a fine hussy or two off of MySpace.

Tom: It was beautiful. This was supposed to be my decade. I went on Friendster in 2002, saw that I could rip it off and BAM!, we went from four million subscribers in December of 2004 to 100 Million by the end of 2006. Friendster was left in the dust. I was a king.

Bartender: As my Grandpappy used to say, "Heavy is the head that is inflated with it's own bullshit."

Tom: I don't think that's the right express...nevermind. You know when I thought we had won? Really triumphed? July 2005. Rupert Murdoch bought us for $580 Million. Half a Billion Dollars! MURDOCH! The kingpin of old media. The Aussie Oligarch. I thought, within a few years, we'd own Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Steve Jobs would be licking my boot. I would rename "the Internet" "MySpace-Land." My goal: every human on planet earth would be my friend. And it was all coming true!

Bartender: Son, sounds like you had some delusions of grandeur. As my Momma used to tell me, "Pride goeth before you totally make of an ass of yourself." What went wrong do you think?

Tom: Everything! I mean, everything. I wanted to let people customize their own pages. Make them look however they wanted. Good idea, right? What ends up happening? You can't read half of the member profiles, the pages are so cluttered and ugly. MySpace began to have the the visual temperament of the Speed Racer movie or PaperRad art collective. And then...the trash. So much trash came out of the woodwork. I didn't know the world had so many trashy people in it...and I live in LA! It got so you were more likely to receive a friend request from a Ukrainian prostitute than anyone you actually knew. Bad things started to happen too. A English girl advertises a party at her parents house on MySpace...next thing you know the home is destroyed, there is ten of thousands of pounds of damage and we are the fall guys in the British Press. Our music site started to get bad reviews, but with competitors like ITUNES and Pandora it was hard to keep up. Our PR went from bad to worse. Disturbed teens started to blog on MySpace about their love of guns or death obsessions right before they went out and shot someone. That didn't win any points for us. The whole site started to feel like this saloon: dark, dirty, cluttered, redolent of whisky, with a tranny-hooker in the corner. And there was this other website called Face...well, a competitor who through some stroke of luck just took off.

Bartender: Son, that's some hard knocks. Another Whiskey?

Tom: A double. (Bartender gives him the drink. Tom downs it.) Now experts are saying that Murdoch was a fool to buy us, can you believe that! At the time we thought we were worth 4 to 5 Billion- we were underselling! Reports have Newscorp losing 100 Million due to loss of traffic. We are about to lay off 420 employees, 30% of our workforce. No one talks about us anymore. I don't...know...what I'm...going to do!! (Break downs in sobs.)

Bartender: Now, now son! Don't let all that bring you down. As my Pa always said to me, "When life gives ya lemons, throw em at the nearest asshole who crosses ya."

Tom: What? What does that mean? Nevermind. I gotta go home. I'm too depressed. I'll just go for a swim in my pool of Evian water and then make love to the three Penthouse triplets currently bathing in my whirlpool spa.

Bartender: All right then son, it's been a pleasure a talking to ya. I'd like to keep in touch.

Tom: That'd be nice. It's been nice to talk to someone.

Bartender: Great. I'll Facebook you tonight.

(Tom falls to the ground in convulsions. End of Scene.)

You AUGHT to remember...

#46 - Cougars

2009-11-16T14:48:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Women with hot-flashes were hot.

Meow. Prowling through the late Aughts was a whole new kind of kitty-cat, a feline with a little too much mascara and way too much lipstick. Une chat who specializes in French kissing - she's had years of practice! A pussy who doesn't so much smile as smirk lasciviously, worried that a full grin might expose her crow's feet. Meet Matronus Sexualis, aka, The Cougar.

The Cougar is that unmarried woman of a certain age (that age being middle), who, approaching the period when women no longer have them, the time when many who long ago traded sexual inhibition for estrogen replacement therapy, refuses to go gently into that good night and seeks out sexual conquests with all the desperation of Christopher Hitchens at last call. Big hair and cleavage are welcome. A duplicitous ex-husband who left the Mrs. for a much younger Miss is not unheard of. An external carapace of confidence hiding a wounded and lonely soul who, at middle age, finds herself unloved and alone is a must.

The appeal of The Cougar persona is a total contradiction. On one hand, The Cougar is a celebration of female sexuality: In a society where women are routinely de-sexualized in the movies and media the minute they turn 40 (as Goldie Hawn says in The First Wives Club, women in Hollywood have three ages, "Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy"), Cougars flip the bird and demand that we accept the reality that not only do women over 40 have a libido but that they can express it with whomever they want, including younger men. The Cougar is, in her way, a feminist trailblazer, a woman refusing to conform to the sexual role society prescribes to her. But the other paw tells a different story. It's the novelty of the cougar, the silliness of the idea, that made this new Archetype catch on. The Cougar fascinates because she is so improper. A middle aged business-man trolling for pussy is hardly news but a middle age woman hunting for cock is funny and unexpected and vaguely grotesque, a step away from midget sex. With Cougars, women are reduced to their sexual appeal and appetites, other facets of their identity regulated to the litter-box.

The Cougar phenomenon has been lampooned on Saturday Night Live, chronicled and dissected in the pages of magazines, and most recently inspired its own sitcom starring Courtney Cox. It's all Cougar, all the time. If the media were an accurate guide to reality, it would appear that the USA is overflowing with Mrs. Robinsons, out to ensnare the young men of America in their leathery claws. The truth is that The Cougar is a fictional creation, a marketing device to appeal to middle aged women and easily titillated men. But, in the great feedback loop that is modern mass media, the illusion has become a reality, the existence of the Cougar archetype inspiring older women to express their sexuality more openly and shamelessly then they have in the past. So despite the yin and yang sides of The Cougar as a social phenomena, it remains true that the empowerment granted a woman when she owns her Cougardom is a positive change for both the individual involved and America in general. Cougars not only travel in a pride, they have reason to feel some as well.

You AUGHT to remember...

#47 - Uggs

2009-11-15T08:53:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

We wore sheepskin snow boots EVERYWHERE!

And now, Caveman Ugg on.....UGGS!

Ugg like uggs. Uggs better than no uggs, No uggs hurt feet when run through forest after bear. Uggs make walking fun! And uggs look so stylish. Ugg in uggs look like all those girls in Starbucks.

Ugg is confused though. Is it just Ugg or are uggs ug? I mean, Ugg named Ugg because Ugg's Mommy thought Ugg was ug when birth Ugg. Maybe uggs are named by same Mommy since they too are ug.

Ugg's ug uggs were expensive to boot! Ugg have no more rocks to trade. Ugg lost all his rocks in a credit default swap so now Ugg can no more buy uggs.

Ugg want to pick himself up by his bootstraps, but uggs have no bootstraps. Ugg is doomed! Ugh.

You AUGHT to remember...

#48 - Reefer Madness

2009-11-14T07:42:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Pot became a wonder drug.

Have Crohn's Disease? Migraines? Fibromyalgia? Multiple Sclerosis? Arthritis? Hypertension? Insomnia? Urinary Incontinence? Crick in the neck? In fact, do you have any ailment whatsoever? Step right up and try nature's remedy. It goes by many names: Pot, Ganja, Reefer, Weed, Tea, Marijuana, Cannabis. According to many it is nothing less than a panacea for whatever ails you. And it's now legal for medical use in 13 states; in California it's practically aspirin.

Though marijuana decriminalization has been a liberal cause since the high-holy days of the 1960's, until recently it remained a fringe issue, associated with ex-hippies or free-market fanatics who would legalize Uranium if there was a market for it. For mainstream America however, pot remained tainted by its association with a counterculture seeped in anti-establishment ethos. Intimations of being a "gateway drug" have persisted for decades despite all research to the contrary. But the times, they are a-changin'. With a generation coming of age for whom the sixties were nothing but a historical epoch, the prejudices that besmirched cannabis's reputation simply hold no (bong) water. California in particular has become so lax in their marijuana laws that dispensaries are popping up everywhere, like doobie-stocked automats. Getting a legal prescription requires about as much subterfuge as jaywalking. What was the tipping point that pushed pot into legitimacy? My pet theory (probably concocted while high): really good stoner movies.

"Dude, Where's My Car?" (2000) was stoner film as written by Ionesco, an absurdist comic lark starring two clowns (Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott) as old-fashioned in their shtick as Laurel and Hardy, though a good deal more attractive with their shirts off. More chipper (and tanner) than Vladimir and Estragon, the Duo's confusion was nonetheless as existential as it was comic. (Or so I surmised while watching the film on Showtime at 3AM a few brownies in.) Another contact high was supplied by "Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle" (2004) which had as its comic highlights a Lothario version of Neil Patrick Harris doing his best to demolish his squeaky-clean child star image and a wild tiger ride though the backwoods of New Jersey. Awesome. In the backdrop of both was a general haze of pot smoke, though the subject was little discussed onscreen. (But seriously, why else would you drive around Jersey all night long for White Castle?) Proof positive that there doesn't have to be a joint in sight to qualify as a stoner film.

Joints were very much in sight (as were bongs, pipes and all other manner of marijuana paraphernalia) in the films of Judd Apatow. If pot-heads were to elect a poster boy for this past decade, the double-chinned visage of Apatow's favorite leading man, Seth Rogen, would have to be the winning candidate. "I want YOU...to grab me the potato chips." Jew Fro-ed, heavy lidded, prone to giggle at his own sarcastic barbs and suffering from a chronic case of the muchies, pot hasn't had such a cinematic champion since Cheech & Chong drove a "fiberweed" van into smokers hearts. If the gas mask bong employed in Knocked Up didn't make viewers want to toke up, Rogen followed the flick with Pineapple Express; this ganjapalooza was a genre mashing hybrid about a low-level drug dealer (James Franco), his best client (Rogen) and a gangland murder that these anything-but-action-heroes inadvertently wander into. The title refers a varietal of pot so choice it "smells like God's Vagina." Without question the longest advertisement for reefer put to celluloid in recent memory, the film is already a classic of the genre (for whatever that's worth).

So, as marijuana laws continue to be gutted, and with a new generation apathetic to baby boomer culture wars, it seems all but certain that Starbucks will be selling Maui-Wowie scones along side lattes in short order. Okay, maybe that's not going to happen anytime soon, but cannabis is, by any measure, integrated into polite society with a prominence never before seen in American history. When George Will, aka the political pundit least likely to ever say the word "blunt" in it's noun form, shrugs and admits the inevitable, the debate might as well be over. Marijuana is here to stay. Thank god that battle is over, I'm cached.

You AUGHT to remember...

#49 - RIP MJ

2009-11-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

It was the decade when...

Michael Jackson snapped the last tether connecting him to planet earth, then died.

Given the orgy of obits and retrospectives that were published after Michael Jackson's untimely demise this year, I have absolutely nothing to add to the chrous of voices. It's all been said. Instead here is a photo-essay about the last decade of Michael's life, commentary by yours truly.

"Hey Brit, did you hear madness is contagious now?"

When Liza is the most realistic looking person in the picture, you know you're not in Kansas anymore. Seriously, I don't even know where to begin with this caption...all I do know is that if they recreated this tableau at Madame Tussaud's, I'd be there in a heartbeat.

At first glance, I thought that was Dixie Carter. With all his money, why did Michael have to construct his protest placard with crafts purchased from Michael's? Did he think that the store was named after him?

"Behold Simba, King of the Jungle!" It's so cute how he dresses his son up as a Klansman for Halloween.

"Martin, if I say it's raining, it's raining."

Blinking is so overrated.

Michael Jackson : 2LGT 2LGT 2QUIT. I guess he was a morning person.

"This is the part of the story when Sleeping Beauty is supposed to wake up!"

"Formerly black now white, freakish, acquitted child-molesting pop superstars of the world, UNITE!"

The Rest Is Silence.

You AUGHT to remember.