Best Of The Decade
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Best Album: Bob Dylan, Love and Theft
Released on 9-11, Love and Theft is largely forgotten. It's a completely sui generis, enigmatic album. Cribbed from an obscure Japanese book called Confessions of a Yakuza, the lyrics overflow with southern place names and one-liners. It's easily Dylan's best album since Blood on the Tracks.
#2: Modest Mouse, Good News For People Who Love Bad News
It's too bad that hipsters deserted Modest Mouse after Float On became a hit and they showed up on The O.C since this album carries the banner of irony and emotional distance. Well, suck it hipsters! Good News is as thematically cohesive as any novel, and has a greater emotional range than any other Modest Mouse album, or any other indie rock album in recent memory.
#3 The Deadly Snakes, Porcella
The Deadly Snakes were a rough around the edges garage rock band on LA's very own In the Red Records. Then came Porcella, a blend of blues, folk, garage, and pop. Sadly, the band never found commercial success, and broke up in 2006.
Best Film: There Will Be Blood
One of the great stories of the oughts is how Paul Thomas Anderson stopped making pretentious, bombastic ensemble movies and started making great films. Maybe it was the name change. There Will Be Blood is the counter-argument to the Horatio Alger myth that told of young men going west, working hard, and becoming successful. Daniel Plainview's success owns only to his hatred, his spite.
#2 The Man Who Wasn't There
The Coen Brothers are the only 1980s indie directors that are still making amazing films, as exemplified by this years' A Serious Man and 2001's The Man Who Wasn't There. Largely forgotten now, the film manages to be more emotionally resonant than most Coen Brother films, while still retaining that ironic playfulness we've come to love.
#3: Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
Charlie Kauffman is a genius screenwriter who needs a genius director. Michel Gondry is a genius director who needs a genius screenwriter. Eternal Sunshine combines Kauffman's wacky plot devices with Gondry's beautiful visuals, and an honest to god good performance by Jim Carrey.
TV Show: The Sopranos
Not only was The Sopranos the best TV show of the decade, I'm willing to call it the best work of fiction of the decade, the best TV show of all time, and the best depiction of the Mafia of all time. It was as close to perfect as a TV show can get. Tony Soprano will go down as one of the most indelible fictional characters ever created. The artful direction forever disproved the notion that TV is a second-class medium. And the ending was sublime.
#2: The Wire
Despite a mediocre second season and resoundingly bad last season, The Wire was an incredible series. I never understood why people were always comparing it to Dickens - Dickens told stories about people victimized by cruel systems. The Wire tells the story of people trying to change systems (both civic systems and the systems that criminals have set up) and failing, not because of evil men, but because the system is so unwieldy.
#3: The West Wing
The West Wing was to Clintonism as Rambo II was to Vietnam. Liberals got to do it all over again, but they got to win this time. We got to intervene in Rwanda, assassinate a terrorist, bring peace to the Middle East, and watch a Bush-esque character get destroyed in the general election for being too dumb. Was it an idealistic fantasy? Of course. But in episode after episode, real issues were debated in an intellectually honest and engaging way. And it was funny too!
Best Book: Charlie Wilson's War
Those who saw the depressingly mediocre movie, adapted from George Crile's book, know that this is the unbelievable story of how a drunken Texas congressman and an outcast CIA agent engineered the funding of a guerilla war that brought the USSR to their knees. What they don't know is that the book reads like a cross between Catch-22 and John Le Carre, depicting government bureaucracy and international affairs at its most bizarre.
#2: Columbine
Columbine, by former Newsweek writer Dave Cullen, may be a revisionist history of the event, but it's also a beautifully told portrait of the people involved, as well as an exploration of how these tragedies happen, and how we deal with them as a society. The lessons of Columbine have as much to do with how tragedies should be reported than with how we can avoid them.
#3: Under the Banner of Heaven
Jon Krakauer's scathing book cuts back and forth between early Mormon history and modern-day fundamentalist Mormon stories. Along the way, it can't help but make you wonder, is this so different than other religions? After all, Mormonism is not the only faith that encourages its disciples to communicate directly with god. Krakaur shows how this door, once open, can lead to catastrophe.
Best Blog: Kottke.org
Kottke.org is essentially just an aggregate. No political commentary, no rants, no revelatory diary entries. Just a pointer to other things on the web. It shouldn't be this good, and yet it is. Jason Kottke, a web designer who's been blogging since 1998, has a knack for finding the best needles in the haystack that is the internet.
Best non-blog content site: Bloggingheads.tv
There's really no category for Bloggingheads.tv, because there's nothing like it on the internet. An answer to cable TV's talking heads, Bloggingheads takes two bloggers, gives them webcams, and has them talk for about an hour. Editing is strictly verboten. Often times so is good sound quality. Nevertheless, Bloggingheads is a venue for engaging debate, rife with nuance and exploration. Two must-see episodes are Will Wilkinson v. Tyler Cowen and Robert Wright v. Christopher Hitchens.
Best Gadget: iPhone
If Apple had only invented the iPod, which changed forever the way we listen to music, that would have been enough. But Apple went one step further and created the world's most aesthetically pleasing and user friendly PDA. Reading articles, getting directions, looking up facts have never been easier. Oh and apparently it makes phone calls too.
Where are the women in this list? Was nothing notable created by a female in the last decade?
That's interesting about Columbine, I hadn't heard that before.
West Wing and Sopranos both premiered in 1999, but they matured a few years later.
My #4 and #5 TV shows are Mad Men and 30 Rock. #6 would probably be Survivor. I liked Deadwood bought thought it was seriously flawed.
I decided to make a 10 movies list, and you can read it here:
http://blogs.uscannenberg.org/neontommy_arts/2009/12/my-top-20-movies-of-the-decade.html
Wish you did a Top 10 list for each. So much missing. For film, Memento, The Departed, Almost Famous, The Royal Tenenbaums. For TV, Lost, Arrested Development, The Office (UK and US).
Describing "Columbine" by Dave Cullen as 'revisionist history' is probably a good way to put it. But is it accurate 'revisionist history'? No, not really. The book isn't without controversy because while Cullen gets some things right and clears up some errors in the story he also creates some of his own which is unfortunate. "Columbine" is by no means THE definitive book on what happened that day in April 1999. That book has yet to be written.
One person who is distressed about this book is Randy Brown. Brown's son Brooks was a fellow classmate and friend of the Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Brown has spent as much and probably even more time than Cullen studying the Columbine attack and why it happened, and he all but calls "Columbine" a 'work of fiction'. People should read his negative 1-star review of the book "Columbine" at Amazon. To do so you can follow this link: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3AJEK6T7746K6/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
This is an outstanding list. Totally agree on Sopranos and West Wing (though didnt the latter start in 99? Maybe not). Your one egregious omission, however, is the highly underviewed and unappreciated Deadwood.
I think the Sopranos finale was genius. And the last season of the Wire was not as great as the rest of the show.
But the Wire still wins.
I understand that the ending is a bit contentious. I loved it. It's exhibit A in the case for the Sopranos as not just the best tv show, but great art.
The last season of The Wire was "resoundingly bad" but The Sopranos, with arguably the worst series finale of all-time, is the decade's best? I'm not buying it.