Personal Year/Decade in Review notes

What a weird, sad, maddening and wonderful decade. Trying to keep up with various cultural incidents — we've become too fractured to call them events, really — is just about impossible. The splintering of media channels, despite the various mergers and conglomerations, has left us with the possibility that developing an ADHD-like approach to artistic and cultural experiencing might just be evolutionarily advantageous.

How does a person make sense of what's happening in the world nowadays? When RSS first came out, it was touted as the best way to filter out the "useless" online content and get to what we're really interested in. The "good" stuff, so to speak. Now it seems to add to a burgeoning sense of self reinforcement, that is, what you find and read only reaffirms what you already believe as opposed to challenging those beliefs, testing them under the twin beacons of logic and emotion.

Fashion became a big deal under the Obama administration.

Journalism in America is undergoing an apocalypse.

I reclaim the meaning of "apocalypse" to be profound change or transformation, rather than the end of the world.

Yea to old-school, violent, and manipulative vampires, no to melodramatic, sparkly (!), brooding vampires.

Yea to zombies, whether they come in the form of movies (28 Days Later), comics (The Walking Dead), or classic literature (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).

Yea to comic books being part of the pop culture discussion, no to fanboy baiting and event exhaustion.

Lists about any section of culture, whether it's music, movies, TV or whatever, cannot help but reflect personal tastes. But if you gather enough of them and compile them into one master list, will that give you an "objective" view of what was good?

Simon Reynolds' Notes on the noughties: The musically fragmented decade.

Tags: music, culture, lists, comics, movies, TV, culture, fashion, media, 2000s

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