The Best of 2008

Let's start with the event of the year: Sen. Barack Obama being elected as president! I knew that I'd see this happen during my lifetime, but I was never sure when. It's good to know that it occurred before I became 30. Now I'm 1 for 3 with presidential elections.

I enjoy making and reading these end-of-the-year lists since they often serve multiple purposes. The first is that they are a record of the American cultural zeitgeist. What did the critics enjoy and what did the general public enjoy? Where do I fall in this spectrum? Most hip-hop has been lacking this year. I don't follow the blues, jazz, country, metal, or R&B too closely or at all.

I think back to David Foster Wallace's introduction for the 2007 edition of the Best American Essays. He talked about Total Noise and Deciders (his caps) and what it meant to be a responsibly informed adult in the U.S. nowadays. He argued that it's impossible to read every published essay in the U.S. as a precursor to deciding on what's the "best." All any of us can hope to do is to be intelligent enough to know what we don't know and to approach such personal ignorance with a sense of humility so that we may begin to improve ourselves. Wallace's revelation echoes of Socrates, Mengzi, and the Buddha. I can only hope that I have been able to explore and map my own ignorance with these lists.

Movies
I haven't watched that many movies since August thanks to my job at the Daily Wildcat, but many of the movies I have watched have been great overall. However, there was a clear, definite winner.

Best movie: WALL-E
How brave is it of Pixar to take a chance on starting a movie with a 30-minute opening sequence with no dialogue? And with a big budget, "mainstream," animated film, no less. Beautiful animation, a story full of satire and playfulness, WALL-E boasts some great moments of humanity from characters made of pixels. I would even go so far and say that this movie is near flawless.

Next best movie: The Dark Knight
Another great movie that provides the new standard for superhero movies to come, and a good example of how make a better sequel. Christopher Nolan's version of Batman hits all the right notes: Bruce Wayne's conflict between his civilian life and his life as Batman; supervillains; gadgetry; and so on. Yet the movie transcends previous superhero movies in that the situations are grounded in situations that not only test Batman's sense of morality but also those in Batman's life such as Jim Gordon, Alfred Pennysworth, and Harvey Dent.

Best movie reissued this year: Chungking Express (Criterion Edition)
OK, so the special features aren't all that special, which is surprising since Criterion usually does a great job in this area. But the movie still holds up really well after all these years.

Other notable movies: Iron Man, Hellboy & the Golden Army,

Music
I've been trying to catch up on all the music released since the summer. Thankfully, many of the year's best albums have been spread throughout the seasons rather being unloaded during the fall and winter, which was the norm in recent years.

Albums (in no particular order)
- Hercules & Love Affair - Hercules & Love Affair
- Jamie Lidell - Jim
- Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
- Lykke Li - Youth Novels
- M83 - Saturdays = Youth
- Quiet Village - Silent Movie
- Q-Tip - The Renaissance
- Santogold - Santogold
- She & Him - Volume One
- Sigur Ros - Incredibly Long Title
- Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

Songs (in no particular order)
- Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma
- Shelby Lynne - I Only Want To Be With You
- Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes
- The Roots - Rising Down
- Portishead - The Rip
- Estelle - American Boy (feat. Kanye West)
- Hercules & Love Affair - Blind
- Sigur Ros - Gobbledigook
- The Juan Maclean - Happy House

Happy House - The Juan Maclean

Books
This is somewhat new for me. I've always been lifelong voracious reader and the greater availability of a faster Internet connection has translated to many hours spent reading multiple online publications. Yet reading an article on a computer screen cannot compare to the tactile experience of reading something in my hands. The weight, texture, and even the smell of paper held in my hands is an experience that cannot be replicated with metal and electricity. (Sorry Kindle.) In spite of a shrinking publishing industry, a global economic depression in which we have yet to see the bottom and numerous cultural items that demand our attention, I don't think book reading will see a great decline in my lifetime. What may decline are the venues through which new writing may disappear, a different issue altogether. With that said, here are my book discoveries and delights of the year:

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman
A great look into how doctors think, how they make mistakes in their thinking, and the consequences of these cognitive errors and assumptions.
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
A companion book to The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan distills nutrition advice into 3 simple tenets while providing the layout of the battle (and collusion) between business and nutrition.
Usagi Yojimbo Volumes 1-8 by Stan Sakai
Following the adventures of a ronin rabbit, Stan Sakai's comic book series is tasty melange of heroism, history, culture, and mythology.
Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland
Bolland's recoloring of his collaboration with Moore adds to the tense, occasional banal atmosphere of the story. Great ending.
Doom Patrol Volumes 1-3 by Grant Morrison and various artists
People have talked about the deconstruction of the superhero, but few have carried it out to the same extent as Grant Morrison. "Fighting" a living painting was the most normal "villain" that the Doom Patrol faced in these volumes.
De/Compositions by W.D. Snodgrass
Speaking of deconstructions, a chance discovery at the university library yielded this collection of poems compiled and reinterpreted by Snodgrass. His versions of poems from renown poets demonstrate that the parts can indeed be greater than the whole. It also reveals the importance of editing.
Modern English Grammar by Bryan A. Gardner
Which brings me to this selection. Less repressive than Fowler but better than Follet, Gardner's approach to usage and grammar makes for a entertaining read, even if you don't care all that much about grammar. The mini-essays sprinkled throughout the text are interesting discussions into what makes English English. This book, and the following, proved invaluable during my time as the Daily Wildcat's copy chief.
On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition) by William Zinsser
A man who claims William Strunk and E.B. White as direct influences, Zinsser brings verve to his pages in his ongoing quest to perfect his writing. Reading his prose alone is a lesson well served on how to write simply and carefully.

Tags: music, movies, politics, 2008, books

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And a Belated Word on the 2008 Presidential Election

Incredible!

Tags: politics

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Paranoia or just knowing too much?

Was the Bush administration setting a scorched earth policy in place for its second term? That is, was it intentionally laying the groundwork for the next administration's abject failure in all the public arenas (economy, health, war, culture, jobs, education, international affairs)? To show that whoever comes in will utterly fail and thus drive the public to the neoconservatives? But this is too paranoid sounding...isn't it?

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A Word About Porn

(I can see the hits increasing already.)

I am prudish when it comes to the inner workings of relationships. But I am open-minded about ideas, which include ideas about sexuality, sex, gender, and porn. This doesn't mean I condone everything or even most of what's out there. And there is some weird stuff out there, which I get somewhat filtered via Warren Ellis's website. While he finds the often horrific extremities of porn and body modification as part of his research, Susannah Breslin finds these extremities in the business of porn and in the people who work in it. Her blog, The Reverse Cowgirl, is one of the best sites I've come across that looks at the porn and the sex industry shrewdly and from a perspective that doesn't stem from hysteria or a religious agenda. I've been following her writing for half a decade now and it is incisive and unrelenting. I mention her blog now because her recent book proposal fell through, which is a damn shame. I was looking forward to what she had to say about her time in Porn Valley. Thankfully, Breslin is working on her next projects, which can be found here and here, and she also continues The Reverse Cowgirl. If you want to track America's culture of porn and sex, Susannah Breslin is the person to read.

The Eat Here review

Brian Halwell's Eat Here is an economically elegant argument on why we need to eat more locally produced foods. Unlike other polemical works on this type of topic, Halwell provides us with not only a summation of the issues and problems surrounding food and the food industry, but also a summation of simple solutions.

There is a definite slant to it all. The book is published by the Worldwatch Institute, an organization and magazine that focuses on the environment and social justice, and the author is a senior researcher for the institute. Halwell also avowed his membership to a Slow Food chapter within the book. Despite this bias, or perhaps because of it, Halwell presents a surprisingly reasonable case on behalf of eating local foods.

Halwell highlights the numerous, widespread problems surrounding corporate-raised, nonlocal food. There is the enormous amount of fuel consumption involved in transporting produce across states. This has come about due to cheap oil prices and government trade incentives and subsidies further lowering the cost of gasoline. The result of this, alongside highly efficient industrial food production, is that the price of food commodities (yes, commodities) on the global market is artificially low. How can the Oklahoman garlic farmer compete with the Chinese farmer who grows the same type of garlic under a weaker currency, thus allowing for "cheaper" heads of garlic?

Safety standards by the USDA have little power of enforcement beyond censure and reluctant recalls in light of food outbreaks with little fear of penalty. The Food Safety and Inspection Service, an arm of the USDA, works with food processing plants to detect sources of contamination and formulates a plan of prevention. These are voluntarily followed and the plants are infrequently inspected due to shortage of inspectors and funding for inspection and testing. These concerns are further compounded by the centralization and internal expansion of food processing plants whereby one weak spot along the line can result in a few tons of ground meat being contaminated with E. coli or bushels of spinach being cleaned with sewage water.

The current business model for industrial farmers is akin to that of indentured servants where farmers often have little choice but to buy seed, fertilizer, pesticide, and equipment from different sources that are often owned by one major conglomerate. There are also the high suicide rates among farming families, children abandoning the family farm in favor of better employment elsewhere, decreasing financial returns for each successively larger harvest.

Thankfully, as often as Halwell puts a central problem under the spotlight, he also presents individuals and organizations who are working on solutions. One privately owned fast-food chain based in Oregon and Washington called Burgerville uses local ingredients for all its franchises. Halwell notes the need for farmers to group together their selling power and diversify their partnerships in order to compete with corporations.

For us, Halwell points to several steps we can take to become more involved with local food. We can visit farms near us to learn more about what is grown there. Granted, this may not be entirely possible for anyone who lives in the middle of an urban area. But that doesn't mean we can't find a farmer's market or produce grown from converted lots and rooftops. With a little knowledge and help from experienced growers and farmers, we can even harvest our own vegetables and herbs in our backyard or in pots. For the more ambitious of us, we can join food policy councils (or start one) and lobby for greater use of local food in our schools and businesses. Our concept of and relationship to "local food" does not have to remain confined to farms and ranches.

Next on the "To Read" List:

• The United States of Arugula by David Kamp (review in process)
• The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Today's Supplements:

• Slow Food International and Slow Food USA for their philosophy toward food and their growing influence.
• Worldwatch Institute for its focus on economic, social, and environmental issues.
• Vitamin D because it's winter.
  

American Politics and the Presidency of 2008

My prediction: we all lose.