January 1, 2002
Happy New Year to one and all, as we enter the first palindromic year since 1991 and last until 2112. In commemoration of this monumental symmetry, Seattle is planning to have the year both begin and end with scattered showers and very few hours of daylight. Here's hoping whatever mirror images you have planned bring you much happiness.
The list of enjoyable cultural artifacts I encountered in 2001 follows.
Aaron Caplan
You know about these.
Had the Darwin Awards (for the most creative method of removing oneself from the gene pool) been given back in 1914, Ernest Shackleton's plan to be the first to hike across Antarctica should have been a shoo-in, except he managed to live. The documentary answers the age-old question of whether man can live on penguin meat alone. (A: for a while, but not very happily.)
A Serb and a Bosnian stuck in a trench act out a parable about war, politics, and television.
Where all the best parts of Young Frankenstein came from. The pleasant surprises included that it was actually quite funny on its own (on purpose) when it wasn't utterly heartbreaking, had visual effects that can't be improved upon, and provides a thorough feminist critique of Victorian science and letters. To paraphrase Leslie Gore, you would scream too if it happened to you. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
More tuneful than humanly possible.
A "fingerstyle" guitarist who must have more than the usual number of fingers. His liner notes list Julian Bream and Sly Stone among his influences, and explains that one song is where Pat Metheny meets ZZ Top. Don't be alarmed if your record store files it under "New Age." It is nonetheless HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Chanteuse with hints of Beatles and Bacharach. Since she is under 25, her presence on the list means I am just barely able to avoid shuddering at my age when looking over these musical recommendations.
The song that stalked me. It began when I rented an out-of-print videotape called That's Irritainment and finding, tacked onto the end after the credits, a musical number from a Bollywood movie, set in a very brightly lit Hindi version of a Vegas nightclub, with dancers in sequined cocktail dresses and Lone Ranger masks, a band in skinny ties with a twanging Duane Eddy-style lead guitar and a mariachi-influenced horn section, and a singer with Brylcreemed hair and pencil-thin mustache struggling to hold up an enormous microphone. I returned the tape, but two months later had to see it again to ensure it wasn't a fever dream. Sadly, the store was going out of business, and while most tapes were being sold at liquidation prices, the owner was keeping the rental copy of That's Irritainment for his personal collection. (I had to console myself with a set of driver education films from the Ohio State Patrol.)
Flash forward to August and the opening credits to Ghost World--where our heroine Enid is watching the very same dance number! I had not imagined it after all. Realizing at this point that I had to now stalk the song instead of vice versa, the magic of the internet allowed me to hunt it down to its source: Gumnaam, a 1965 musical remake of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians that has not only this astounding musical number, but a mad butler who enters the film by rising from under a shroud to roll his eyes and flick his tongue like a lizard. Maybe it should have stayed a fever dream.
Hoboken's finest played a live musical accompaniment to a set of short documnetary films of sea creatures made by M. Painlevé from the 1920's onward. A precursor to Jacques Cousteau, he hung out with Dadaists and claimed he liked to make movies of shrimp and squid because you get to eat the actors when you're finished.
So there it was, two hours of the labor pains of the male seahorse (he carries the eggs just under his ribcage), the mating dance and incubation chamber of the octopus, the little twirling molluscs, and, for soome reason, time-lapse photographs of green and blue crystals racing across petrie dishes (the latter accompanied by pure feedback squall). The best part? Knowing that this affront to taste and logic was COMPLETELY SOLD OUT, and only being able to nab the second-to-the-last seat in the house because they released the unclaimed tickets from the guest list a minute before showtime. In a year filled with international and intranational conflict, isn't it nice to know there is such a thing as consensus?