Okay, since I'm a sucker for end of the year top ten lists, I thought I'd scratch out my Ten Moments of Most Affected Corpola with which to remember this slightly crappy, mostly scary, quick and busy palindromic year -
in no particular order...
1. Strindberg and Helium and the Lincoln Park Trixie Society- respectively the funniest and the scariest things on the web that I couldn't resist mentioning.
2. The Official Adventures of Grandmaster Flash - a pivotal pop history lesson, Grandmaster Flash recreates an old school block party set from the likes of Parliament, Blondie, Kraftwerk, and Yellow Magic Orchestra which, heard in retrospect, pick apart Hip Hop's early alchemy in a really fresh way.
3. Saudade do futuro - if any of you have seen Berlin: Symphony of a City from the 1930's, Saudade becomes a similar sort of unnarrated urban portrait for Sao Paulo. Filmmakers follow a group of Repentistas - Brazilian buskers who improvise these silly, baudy raps to each other in the public parks - through a mad megalopolis, meeting up with an art director, a cab driver, barkeeps, and other recently emigrated Nordestinas from a variety of classes and contexts. There's plenty crammed into this sharply cut 60-minute film to whet interests in urban portraits, highly inventive reworking of classic documentary forms, or defiantly non-nostalgic and uncondescending introductions to some of Brazil's viable folk cultures.
4. Tuff by Paul Beatty - this is the closest I can come to citing 2002's most affecting book. I think it was published in 2000, but because I'm pretty sure that I haven't read anything from 2002, I'm throwing down Tuff as one of the strongest and most recent of this year's reads (aside from David Sedaris who's really beyond talking about at this time). Tuff, set in the still-rough blocks of Harlem, hilariously overturns white-boy notions of ghetto romance and an innocuously nostalgic Hip Hop generation clinging to the tropes of 70s black militarism. Some fine and original satire. (Others worth mentioning - Reinaldo Arenas's Palace of White Skunks and Ruy Castro's Chega de Saudade
5. Ellen Feiss - best phenomena of 2002 that entered my head most intensely then was forgotten most quickly (and I should be embarrassed for even mentioning it).
6. Madame Sata - this film won the grand prize at the Chicago International Film Festival, and it's well-deserved. I'm reminded of a Salinger story called "For Esme With Love and Squalor" where (if I remember right) a writer meets a prodigious young girl who asks him to write the most squalid and beautiful story possible - I'm sure as beautiful and squalid as this film. This stylish urban legend - about a cross-dressing, street-fighting pimp set in the water-stained slums of Rio in the 1930s - does well in satisfying one's occasional ache for a drunkenly precious Bohemian love story.
[Okay now, so that I can stop wasting precious Top Ten lines on all the good films I've seen this year, the cinematic runners up - City of God - a new Brazilian director's clever, hilarious and heartbreaking use of everyone's favourite Scorscese tropes, in 2003 it's coming to a "select city" near you; Shanghai Panic - in the blurry half-document/ half-fiction style of Larry Clark, this is a cleverly banal portrait of urban China's "little emperor" generation; most pleasant surprise from the mainstream - Minority Report; most disappointing waste of potential from the pseudo-indie fringes - Pumpkin; most chilling documentary (while intentionally overlooking Michael Moore) - the Trial of Henry Kissinger; best cinematic use of a bike - a tie between Donnie Darko and Beijing Bicycle.]
7. Favela Chic - Postonove 2 - a brilliant DJ set from the way-too-hip Favela Chic club in Paris (and by the sound of it I wouldn't even be allowed to pass out in a puddle in front of this place). Despite a few clunky Brazilian rap tracks (please prove me wrong, but so far I've found Brazil, like Japan, to export some of the world's worst hip hop), the track list on Postonove are going to be the perfect cheat-sheet for me next year while I search out ever more out-of-the-way Tropicalia discs that don't find their way to the crusty North. Postonove features some funky numbers from familiar favourites like Gal Costa and Rita Lee, names I've never heard before like Tony Bizzaro and Ney Matogrosso ("Freddy Mercury had nothing on Ney" according to the FavChic website), tastefully mixed with some newer drumn'bass tracks, more shitty Paulista hip hop, and a lovely ending from the even lovelier Cibelle.
8. The J Crew catalogue - worst newly discovered guilty pleasure (in a three-way tie between (2.) my new quest to find "the absolute most pathetic personal ad from a heterosexual male" in Nerve.com and (3.) finally succumbing to having a cell phone (the three are quite related when you think about it)).
9. Grad school - my most depressing encounter of 2002 (link found a while back on Pureselipsquarejaw).
10. the June 2002 Chicago Critical Mass Ride - that picture in the sidebar of me on my bike, is cut out of the background of this posted photo (to go with the whole "surveillance" conceit of this weblog). By October 2001, I got a little burned out with mass rides that were becoming increasingly soured by snotty young pseudo-anarchos taking their shit out on stranded drivers. But come June, on a friend's invite, I made it out again to a gorgeous long summer jaunt of more than 700 (!!) smiling cyclists coasting through Chicago's west side, greeted by rather thrilled residents, then culminating with an ecstatic descent onto the rush-hour choked Eisenhower expressway as surly cars gaped at whooping bikers sailing through the space between lanes (skirting mass arrest), temporarily but completely reconstituting urban space, resocialising the cities most deliberately alienating architecture, in short - the most fun thing I've done this year.
posted by jeremy @ 12:07 AM
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