Happy new year to one and all. I hope our paths will cross sometime soon!
Until then, here is the annual list of worthwhile cultural products I encountered last year. Thanks to those of you who pointed these out to me - keep those recommendations coming.
Aaron Caplan
MOTION PICTURES
It was slim pickings this year. To make up for a lack of actual movie recommendations, I offer you this recipe for curried butternut-squash-and-pear soup that gave me more aesthetic enjoyment than any film I saw last year. (Note: the half-and-half is optional.)
For those of you in search of some good but not great cinema, here are this year’s honorable mentions.
Eighteen hours of linguistics improved this fall's commute. After thinking for years that English was too complicated to be a sensible choice for an international language, I now know otherwise. A few quirks of spelling aside, English is way easier than most other languages. Consider Tsez, a language spoken by a few thousand people in western Dagestan. All nouns must be assigned to one of four genders: (1) Masculine. (2) Feminine, plus certain inanimate objects, especially if they are flat or pointed. (3) Non-human animals plus some other things like "sun" and "leather." (4) Other inanimate objects that don't fit elsewhere, like "water" and "chair." You know it when you see it. A noun's gender is signified by a prefix, but don't attach it to the noun. Attach it to other nearby words in the sentence, unless those words start with a vowel. There are over 60 cases. And we haven't even talked about pronunciation: some words in spoken Tsez require you to wiggle your uvula just right.
English is way easier than Tsez. And it is more euphonious than Volapük, the artificial language that was a forerunner to Esperanto. So English is not such a bad lingua franca, even if it is only part Frankish.
I tried out for a game show this year, which required me to bone up on my pop culture given that it had ossified somewhere around 1993. My diligent study of the summer's Top Ten singles (or whatever you call them these digital days) revealed that at least half of were slathered with some very dull auto-tune gimmicks.
I have no clue why SebastiAn fancies the capital A, but "Embody" marks the only time I know of where the auto-tune fetish actually works, by conjuring up the sound of a lonely geek experimenting in the basement at all hours of the night.
I discovered this Mexican-via-Ireland speed-metal-via-classical-guitar duo via free tickets to the Hollywood Bowl. Considering how little I care for speed metal, I ended up liking them a lot. Here are some clips of their homages to Jimi Hendrix and Astor Piazzola:
TECHNOLOGY
How I learned to stop worrying and love cloud storage: Dropbox and Lastpass.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
I thought I had given up being surprised, let alone offended, when music I care about appears in commercials. That made my surprise a pleasant surprise when I saw a commercial for the Kinect for Xbox video game system accompanied by Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It.”
The jagged guitars are suitably kinetic for a game of virtual racketball or whatever else one does with a Kinect attached to one's XBox. But did the ad agency ever notice that the lyrics are a Marxist critique of consumerism? “The problem of leisure / what to do for pleasure / … dream of the perfect life / this heaven gives me migraine.” Perhaps a delayed realization that this was not the best choice explains why the ad seems to have disappeared from the web. Here is an interesting blog post on the subject from a South Carolina family lawyer who helpfully tagged the piece “Not South Carolina Specific,” and here is an interview in which Gang of Four instruct us to be neither surprised nor offended.