Dear 2007, By the time you read this note, you'll be dead. I will live on.

This is my recap of the year 2007, or, as I like to call it "The Year You Loved to Hate and Sometimes Hated So Deeply You Felt Nothing."
I'm choosing to recap you abstractly, 2007. Using the poetry of youtube to highlight your various tones and shapes and affects.
Like, remember how in many ways you were this:
?
2007: the year that slowly, unobtrusively moved either upward or downward and featured people saying words.

But 2007 wasn't all an abstraction of Meredith Viera and John Mayer talking in an elevator. It was a lot of other things. Remember how, in many ways, it was this:
?
This one highlights how you, 2007, were insane, and proved to us, people, that everything good dies.
Do you know why they killed that robot monkey? Fear, you guys. It was fear. What is so scary about a half-robot-half-monkey? Look one in the eye and tell me you see something you should fear:


Okay, back to 2007, abstractly!!!!!!!!!
Unless you lived under a rock this year, you can't forget:

Okay, this one represents how you, 2007, were kind of like something I've already done, only shittier. More accurately: it seemed shittier at first, but then I realized it was always kind of shitty.
Even the original "The Munsters"= not that good. In many ways, you, 2007, are the true spirit of that sentiment.

And finally, what would a recap of 2007 be without:

This, of course was filmed at "Club Penguin." A virtual world where 8 year olds interact with each other using self-created penguin avatars. Interestingly, I was recently told by an 8 year old that shyer 8 year olds are moving to Club Penguin Australia, because Club Penguin America is getting too crowded. Oh, 2007. That really says it all. You made no sense, were seemingly harmless, and kind of made me unomfortable for some reason.

So, goodbye 2007. It was real. As we embrace for the last time now, 2007, I can't help noticing the part of you that was totally
. You know, that might be the part about you I miss most, 2007. Of all the parts of you I'll miss after you die. Die the death you must, at this verymoment, be so frightened to die. In just a few short hours, 2007. Death. It is death for you.

2007: Triumphs and Tragedies

Triumphs:

Here's to hoping that in 2008, every song is an 18-yr-old girl just rapping about lip gloss:

Lil Mama- Lip Gloss

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and congress gets taken over by babies:


Tragedies

America mourned the deaths of one of its favorite shows:


and one of its fave national pastimes:



That pretty much covers everything.
So long, 2007: I never though I'd say this, but I'll miss you and your zany, year-related antics.
[cue mash-up of "I'll Be Missing You" and "Sweet Little Lies." And "Hit 'Em Up Style."]
[Nobody steal that mash-up idea from me.]
KIT,
The MC

Oddly Enough: The WeIrDesT WiiIIlDeSt wAckIEst news from all around the world

Dateline Pakistan: Hope was murdered. More like Wackystan. But at least it taught me that I should just do whatever people who threaten me with violence tell me to do. Cause I don't want to get murdered.
>
You bros wanna play some wacky sack after I go to Radio Wack and return Amy Winehouse's "Wack in Wack"?

HEY LOOK OUT! A tiger is going to murder you.

That brings us to our next wacked out news item.

Dateline: San Fransisco: A tiger murdered a man.

2007: The year where horrible things came out of nowhere and murdered you. Your body AND your spirit.

Have you guys seen Slip Sliding Away?

Stick with it through skiing intro. Watch it all the way through to the end. It all comes together. And it pays you back whatever you put into it.
Happy New Year. We got you that.
WE'RE BOTH BLOGGING AT THE SAME TIME RIGHT NOW.*

*window into our lives

Have you guys seen The 40 Year Old Virgin?

So good, you guys. I just saw it. You should check it out, with some friends or by yourself.



Do you guys remember this part, those of you who have seen it?


BUYING IT!


Listen to this song, >>THIS SONG<<<and tell me what you think happened to the girl-subject of the lyrics. Here are the three camps of hypotheses I've come up with, broadly.
1. Molested/raped
2. Just a woman coping with the pain of being as such
3. A conscious play on 1 as an expression of 2.

I wrote the title to an article about the state of jazz in the NYT Sunday magazine

"Nu Jazz, New Jazz, Who Jazz, You Jazz?"
The article is light but insightful, and the rhythms of the music at hand, Jazz, are present in every sentence.

Speaking of the Power of Art...

This was one of the links on my NY Times homepage today:

Movie Review | 'Flakes':
Cereal as a Metaphor for Capitalism

You had me at "metaphor for capitalism."

You Are What (Shamelessly Partisan Things) You Buy

This is from an article in The Chronicle about the dangers of personalizable media:

Every year filtering and niche marketing become more sophisticated and refined. Studies show that on Amazon, many purchasers can be divided into "red-state camps" and "blue-state camps," and those who are in one or another camp receive suitable recommendations, ensuring that people will have plenty of materials that cater to, and support, their predilections.

Here’s a fun “thought experiment.”* I’ll make up an anonymous Amazon customer’s cart, and you try to identify his (or her) state color:

Hazelnut biscottis
Wilco CD
fair-trade scarf
Frieda Kahlo wall calendar
bike light
carbon steel wok
Ann Coulter's If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans
Apples 2 Apples.

Don’t you feel as if you’ve known that person for years? That’s because I just painted for you what creative writers call a “word picture.” You can thank me later.

*still not sure I understand what a thought experiment is.

Old Places

I just overheard this college freshman telling her friend about her impressions of Harvard:
“Everything is so old. It’s like going to Hogwarts.”
Hogwarts: one of the oldest places on earth. Predated only by Mordor and the place Where the Wild Things Are.
Take that, England and Europe: America does have history. Moreover, our history actually exists, whereas yours is just a confused jumble of young adult fantasy fiction settings.
Take that.

Gratitude Journal: Luther Vandross

Finals are over and I'm stoned. I decided to start a new feature here called "Gratitude Journal" where we can talk about what we're thankful for.

Here's to you Luther Vandross.
How kind are you? You're so mild-mannered and joyful. Then, in your spare time you just take it to the studio and dominate it, masterfully converting your overwhelmingly joyful kindness into wholly platonic love letters for the world, in the form of r&b. Your songs are almost the best sex jams ever, but then it turns out that they are the least sexy songs ever recorded. You have never had sex. You're just a warm, joyful friend. You are as pure as your are smooth. And I mean physically smooth. You have the smoothest face I have ever seen, and you are always covered in silk. Anyway, what's not to love? Thanks for existing.

"Just said she'd miss me every minute of the time
She wrote me that on a valentine"
Luther Vandross: relationship expert.

Here's to you female crackheads.
Because I heard one of you saying "It's Iraq now it's--MAMA! MAMA! I see you up there in heaven! (waving at heaven) I'M TRYING TO CHECK MYSELF! (histrionic collapse) Mama!...MAMAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaa!" Thanks for the reminder of the huge disparity in life experiences out there in the world. You are doing awful.

!GRATITUDE JOURNAL!

The National and the Problem of Other Minds

Nick:
Have you heard The National? I investigated them in earnest on the tip of a trustworthy blog.
Oh my god. Who is the world?

Liz:
I just checked out their MySpace. Lookout Barenaked Ladies. barf.

Nick:
Here’s my beef with The National. Do our peers really think that's beautiful? Like they live the lives we do, and then in their private time they sit down and really feel that vision of the world? Because I do not feel it, and I do not understand how you can live in the same world I live in and get that from it. And that's how things work.

Liz:
Well if that's the only basis for your beef w/ The National, maybe they'll grow on you? I agree, but on the other hand, music tastes follow certain set trajectories, and the one you end up on as an adult is the product of a lot of meaningless contingencies of your adolescence, so maybe those people who like The National aren't all that different from us. But it also seems like the taste trajectory you happen to follow still has to color your present-day worldview, if aesthetics means anything, so maybe those people are profoundly different from us and do experience the world in a completely alien way. [puzzled shrug]

Nick:
You're right. It's funny that I used to look for, like, metaphysical answers to those questions. Like I thought there was something in the music itself, then I thought there was a spirit of music that was progressing, and so on. It's like my brain went through the entire history of western thought just because I didn't understand why my heart was moved by certain things. And now I’ve come to terms with radical contingency. So, thanks again, Fleetwood Mac.

Liz: I feel our conversations sometimes operate on a strange plane.

Nick: I also like how this started by me wanting a girlfriend and convincing myself of how special I was.

This is your brain on the Millennial Crier

From the NYT Magazine "Year in Ideas," an entry on "Neurorealism":

A paper published online in September by the journal Cognition shows that assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans.

Laypeople are idiots hilarious.
Also, this Ideas issue is the most bloggable thing to hit the internet since Sonic the Hedgehog’s abstinence video. Stay tuned.

Lil Boosie: a Doctor

If you haven't read the new XXL, you don't know enough about diabetes. In the XXL feature "The Truth," readers are offered the essay "Lil Boosie: More Than Music. The Bad Azz Talks about Coping with Diabetes." Here's what the diabetes sufferer and rapper whose hits include no hits and whose tracks include no particularly interesting tracks lets us know:

- "weed come from the earth, so it be helping me sweat my diabetes out."

- "I feel like when I rhyme about having diabetes, it makes me harder...it's like ...You aint got to worry about "Should I eat this?" or "Should I eat that?"
[ed. who doesn't get hard when people rhyme about diabetes?]

- "If there was a cure for diabetes, I would buy that shit."

- "There's some things you can do to get [diabetes] out of your system, by exercising and things like that, but unfortunately I don't have time to do that right now."

- "I'm just trying to keep these millions, so I can take care of more problems with the money and power I bring."


Lil Boosie Official Myspace