The Year That Was 2010

“The word is about, there's something evolving,
whatever may come, the world keeps revolving
They say the next big thing is here,
that the revolution's near,
but to me it seems quite clear
that it's all just a little bit of history repeating

The newspapers shout a new style is growing,
but it don't know if it's coming or going,
there is fashion, there is fad
some is good, some is bad
and the joke is rather sad,
that its all just a little bit of history repeating…”

-Shirley Bassey

With all due respect to Shirley Bassey, and to a lesser extent our good friends with Propellerhead, I begin to differ. History does not repeat. We have seen years like 2010, but nothing exactly the same. Let’s review...

The Paris Review
The health care debate, the first of its kind since the Clinton initiative in 1993, was slugged with lies, damned lies and statistics regarding abortion funding and death panels, but the health care bill passed this year thanks to a blue dog Dem named Bart Stupack. The conservative congressmen from Michigan, who had made his bones on the pro-life movement, stood tall and organized other blue dogs to support the bill after Obama promised no monies in the bill would lead to abortions. As the bill was voted on the G.O.P losers shouted “Baby Killer” at Stupack, an act akin to calling a Red Sox fan a Yankee, or a Shark a Jet (but worse), we could all see the look on Stupack’s face. He knew his political life was over. Like Paris leaving the walls of Troy to certain death, Stupack sacrificed himself so millions of Americans could have basic health coverage. As the years go by I doubt people will recall what this man did for America, but he did it with honor and integrity in the midst of lies. I thank him for that. Last November Dems like Stupack lost the re-election battles because of this, but I they may have won the war. Just look at this essay on Slate.

Person of the Year: Dan Savage
With full disclosure Dan has been kind and complimentary to my writing in the past, but this award has nothing to do with those matters. With a rash of homosexual suicides across the country, the editor of The Stranger and constant This American Life contributor put together the “It Gets Better” project, where straights and gays alike tell stories and promise young gays to not abandon hope and life. But, what Dan didn’t mean to do with this website was communicate with honesty to straights how hard it is to be gay. With these stories the tellers murder gay stereotypes, and that is the only way it will ever get better for not only gay American, but also the country as a whole.

Stimulus Money
So, where did it all go from the 2009 stimulus? Looks a lot like The New Deal to me.

Mike Vanderjackt Liquored Up Idiot Kicker of the Year: Eric Cantor
The G.O.P. representative from Virginia had stiff competition this year. Oh, we had the Tea Party faithful, Glenn Beck but together his lie-rally so he could sucker more twits out of money, and we even saw the return of my old nemesis Tom DeLay. Yet, Cantor took the cake. This repugnant scum was “owned” by Obama in the heat of the health care debate, as the POTUS surgically sliced his hollow talking points to ribbons, but when Cantor took control as the Majority Leader in the House o’ reps he has encouraged his voters to go to his website and recommend programs and funding the voters wish to have cut from the budget. How might they know what to “cut”? Well, Cantor has a sexy website called “YouCut” where you “suggest” what to cut like “Terminate Tax Funding for National Public Radio”, the “new non-reformed” welfare program (it’s non-reformed because Eric didn’t like it), and cutting grants that have the word “culture” attached to it. Cantor gives his people the chance to cut humanitarian programs, so he can say, “the people choose” what to cut, remove all responsibility from the gutless bastard. All of this comes on the heels of Cantor threatening to remove cash from the Smithsonian because he thought the art was offensive (by the way, they actually did remove the art which was ants crawling on Jesus. Hey, Eric, Google “Mapplethorpe”.) Cantor gets this award because unlike Stupack, or Obama, or even Dan Savage, he shows no responsibility for his worthless, drunken behavior. Worse yet, Obama and Stupack might be making enemies with some of their voters, but at least they aren’t pandering to them. Cantor plays fast and loose with the facts and pretends to be cavalier with the American budget, but what is clear about Cantor’s lack o' grace is that he doesn’t care about America as whole, only what he appears to be to his voters, like a drunk frat boy trying to pass a sobriety test. And, like that drinking frat boy, Eric Cantor is a danger now that he is behind the steering wheel of law making. Glenn Beck might be a fraud, but Cantor is a fraud who makes laws.

Runner-up: James Frey. The self-professed “Bad Boy” of the literary world has created a sweatshop of MFA students to write young adult lit that he slaps his name on, giving false hope to these kids that they will make it big under his soiled name. The infamous Frey is not the bad boy of literature, he is the bad guy and he has earned every piece of scorn that has come his way.

The Arts
I saw art in Austin, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa Fe this year. Same as it is ever was, I consider SITE Santa Fe to be among the best galleries in the United States. This summer SITE ‘s Eight International Biennial featured The Dissolve, a sorely needed presentation of contemporary animation. Animation is the most delicate and visceral of the arts, and I applaud not only the fact that SITE pushed forward with the project, but bringing the haunting work of such animators as Oscar Munoz, Bernie Searle, and Brent Green to a larger audience.

The Webs
Everynone. Pictures are worth a thousand words. With that, check out “Words”. I use this video in my writing labs emphasizing that things don’t happen one after another in writing, things happen because of one another.

The Tweets
"Let's not forget who killed Jesus -- ambitious politicians pandering to religious
Conservatives." -Patton Oswalt
This year on Twitter I was placed on a “list” by @1776LibertyBell, a person who seems to watch a great deal of Glenn Beck. The list is called “Gay-Hate-Mongers-Of-Glenn-Beck”. I wrote Mr. Liberty Bell and explained that I am not “gay”, I am “happy”. Sadly, this twitter user has blocked me for my offense. I was going to send him a fruitcake for Christmas but I can’t get his address because, you know, the whole “blocking” thing.

The Stages
LA based Cloud Eye Control’s “Under Polaris” was twisted, weird, fun, and very beautiful all at the same time. I don’t believe in most theater anymore, but I believe in Cloud Eye Control.

The Foods
I had a hard time saying goodbye to CBGB’s, but the beyond lifeless rock club has been replaced by DBGB’s. Chef Daniel Boulud gave me the best meal I have eaten in years. The setting might be glass and steel, but the food is splendid combination of thought and reason. And I had the burger with glass of Hudson Valley Bourbon on the side. Simply fantastic booze.

The Drinks
See above.

The Music
Album of the Year: The National’s High Violet,
It is best to hear High Violet as the third part of a somber trilogy that started as a game between lovers with the band’s Alligator, then continued with the famed Boxer, and now the closing act of High Violet. No song sticks out (Okay, maybe “Bloodbuzz Ohio”), rather the album functions as a Rubik’s cube poetic adjustments to post-modern, post–Bush America. Each line is like a Sunday morning crossword gone wrong. “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe” is only trumped by lines like “Lay my head on the hood of your car, I'll take it too far”.

Song of the Year: The Hold Steady’s “The Weekenders”
The episodic Twin City rock band (by way of Brooklyn) has churned out the most heart breaking and thought provoking albums of the past ten years, but last May’s release of Heaven is Whenever was an uneven collection of love songs and riffs on relationships. However, the album still generated the best song of the year in “The Weekenders”, about a weekend hook-up that went wrong when longing came creeping into the picture. With lines like “The theme of this party was the industrial age, and you came in dressed as a train wreck”, my envy for lead singers/song writer Craig Finn’s talents will not die easily.

Arcade Fire (They get their own category)
Frontman Win Butler grew up in the suburbs of Houston, an archetype of U.S. cities designed around the automobile: a giant, sprawling mess of endless pavement, strip malls, and prefabricated buildings. Butler understandably feels suffocated by the environment, but on his band’s not coincidentally sprawling third album, he finds a romance to times and places that never were. The Suburbs can be dense and should be heard in the comfort in your own home, but it also features some of Arcade Fire’s rhythmus and riffs to date. Check out the interactive video to “The Wilderness Downtown”. Place your zip code in and let Google maps do the rest.

The Movies
Only one movie knocked me out this year and that was Life 2.0. An in-depth study of four people sucked into the world of the virtual reality “game” Second Life, Life 2.0 delivers what second Life can’t: an ice cold glass of reality to people desperately attempting to escape it. This documentary was a none-stop surprise to me, not from the fantastic, but from the subtle. With that said, Scott Pilgrim was a fuck-ton of fun with its fantastical world. The fight between with the Katayangani Twins was just sick.

The Flicker Box
Archer on FX was nothing less than a brilliant combination of James Bond meeting a bottle of Boones Farm on a Friday night. Gleefully stupid, and close to negligent, Archer showed a fearlessness to comedy that we rarely see this side of South Park.

Louis
The people at FX should snag a Peabody for this semi-autobiographical show that portrays the life and times of a middle-aged white comic in New York with razor sharp accuracy. In this show Louis C.K. is less “funny ha-ha” and more “funny surreal”, more expressionistic, more self-aware in a dangerously dark way. I identified with every aspect and every scene in his life, all the way down to his opening credit entrance from the 4th street subway station on 6th Avenue, my old subway stop from when I was a New Yorker.

Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals on HBO documented the importance of enemies in ways few have. The relation between the two basketball greats was more like that of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla than Ali and Frazer. Electric and poetic, this documentary made me pine for a great basketball rivalry once again.

The Reads
Mark Twain’s Autobiography. Dead or alive, Twain is, and always will be, the best of American authors. His long awaited autobiography reminded us of the best Americans can be. It took Twain thirty or forty tries to get it “right”, but twain made the choice to dictate his autobiography in scenes and moments as he died. He made choices, just we have choices, and we must choose wisely, and Twain’s best line?

“History doesn’t repeat. It Rhymes.”

History is not destined to repeat itself, Ms. Bassey. History offers us, humans, men, women, Americans, musicians, authors, artists, chefs, and politicians a thousand paths in the road on any moment on everyday. We pick and choose how history will unfold and reflect our times, much in the way political parties lose and gain control, or what burgers we choose to eat at fancy restaurants. This year we saw after some debate the repealing of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the dumbest and most embarrassing acts of recent years started by the Clintons in 1993, and the introduction of health care. 2010 could have looked a lot like the early 1990’s, but we made choices and sang a different song. Clinton era failures became Obama successes. You are right, Dan Savage. It does get better.

Timothy Braun
December 27, 2010
Austin, TX

Five Easy Pieces (a quintet of other matters on my mind, super-sized for 2010)
1.) Wikileaks and Julian Assange are missing from the key points in my essay because I have no clue as to what they have been to 2010. I think we should have a better understanding of what this Assange and his followers mean for the world in the years to come. Is this an information revolution, or is this just gossip?
2.) This year humans cut global demand of oil by ten million barrels.
3.) We said good-bye to Lost with the most haunting image they had generated to date: as the final credits rolled no music played, just a picture of the plane wreckage on the beach.
4.) Newt Gingrich said the Chinese have 0 capital gain taxes, and we should be more like those cats. So, Newt, we should be more like the communists?
5.) I think Obama has something up his sleeve with new tax bill. Dems may not be thrilled with it, but I believe Obama is thinking long ball and putting pieces in place for a large, sweeping chess-like move against the G.O.P. What that is, I have no idea.
6.) The first-ever global census of marine life was published in 2010. We have 250,000 species under the sea. Cool.
7.) “The Modern Century” retrospect by Henry Carter-Bresson went on tour. Amazing art.
8.) After seven years, “Operation Iraq Freedom” ended. Fox News spent less then ten minutes covering this withdraw. MSNBC invested days to this event.
9.) Citizen’s United was able to get 100 years of law killed in the Supreme Court, which will now allow unlimited corporate money to be donated to political campaigns. I’m certain this won’t come back to chew us in the ass.
10.) Angry Birds is an immensely enjoyable game that combines math, strategy, a full-tilt ass-whippin’. No wonder it was the top game of 2010.
11.) The rent is too damn high.
12.) All I want for Christmas is for Sarah Plain to read, watch, and study every aspect of the life of Elizabeth Edwards.
13.) Trains tell all. Amtrak will have a speed-train up in 15 years. On the same day this was announced a Chinese train broke a land speed record. This is not your father’s Chinese dynasty, but it sure is starting to sound a lot like the ones we used to hear about.
14.) Rhetorically, is the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell problematic for right-wingers who say they support our troops all the time? Don't they need to support gay rights as well? Sarah Palin can't say she supports some of our troops. That wouldn't look good on her twitter feed. Perhaps it is too early in the morning for this line of thinking. More Patron, waiter.
15.) Once again on this blog, good-bye to Howard Zinn. I could not teach what I do without Howard, I could not write what I do without his voice in my ear, and I never gave a damn about the Boston Red Sox until him.
CODA
5 yrs ago I was hired to write a comic for Michael Chabon/Dark Horse they never published. I got home from Houston to a package from my boy, lighting designer/artist Chris Brown, who illustrated the story for my Christmas present. Will celebrate with pizza flavored Combos. BTW, the story I was hired to write was for Michael’s “Escapist” line. It’s a trip off the Icarus myth. Mr. Brown’s art is filled with awe, and the ink is so rich it looks as if it could drip off the pages. He also illustrated one of my short plays, and an interaction I had with a British performance artist I often joke about. Outstanding.