The Best Stuff of the Last Decade

Ahh, the end of the decade, how'd you come around so quickly? It hit me a few weeks ago that this was the first full decade of my life that I can actually remember, and what a decade...for me and my personal development, that is. Considering this decade spans my better years in high school, college, my initial foray into the working world, and, uh, law school, it's sort of hard to bring together all my personal experiences over the past ten years.

So, in lieu of substantive retrospective, I figured a trendy "best of" countdown would be a better way for me to think back on the decade in a manner fit for public consumption.

I was debating yesterday with one of my friends whether it would be proper to do my own list of best films (or whatever) when I likely never saw (or read or played) some of the biggest titles of the decade. The solution? I decided to list a mish-mash of the ten multimedia experiences which most impacted me over the decade, i.e., I didn't end up regretting buying the DVD.

Movies, CDs, and video games are all fair game; books, however, are not--I spent the entire decade reading textbooks and Harry Potter (and Freakonomics) so I'm not too well read. Onward!

Tom Cruise became a caricature over the course of the decade, Penelope Cruz isn't a particularly good (English) actress, and this film is both too long and a bit pretentious, but the story just haunted me for years after the fact.

Yes, Tom Cruise's character, David Ames, is a selfish human being, a character that is impossible to sympathize with. He leads a privileged life that he squanders away, but the film's larger message about finding real meaning in our relationships with others is worthy.

Alas, I think most self-centered high schoolers assume immortality is inevitable but worry their future glory will leave them alone and adrift in some way. Vanilla Sky shows how we can be our own worst enemies sometimes.

It also has a nifty science-fiction element that I certainly didn't see coming at the time--I wasn't an observant movie-goer at the ripe old age of eighteen. The audio-visual experience is pretty fantastic, too, with an awesome soundtrack played on top of eerily beautiful visuals of New York City. Jason Lee can also be my BFF any day.

The best (and only) sci-fi western in existence, firefly seems like an impossible combination: horses and gunfights on one hand and, uh, spaceships and high-tech evil government agents on the other. The concept probably doomed the show from the start, but there's never been another fourteen episode series which I've watched in one sitting (on Super Tuesday '08 no less). I haven't much cared for Joss Whedon's other ventures (Buffy), but firefly was probably the most charming science fiction universe of the decade...

And the follow-up movie was just awesome. Of course, no body watched either and the whole universe died a pathetic comic book spinoff death. It did, more or less, turn Summer Glau and Adam Baldwin into geeky icons.

My friends tend to think of me a serious gamer, but, aside from a prodigious amount of knowledge about the game industry, I didn't actually play a ton of video games this decade. I don't really think I sank my teeth into anything until Final Fantasy XII showed up when I was haplessly unemployed in the fall of 2006. Despite my limited monies, I took a flier on the game and ended up finding the perfect antidote to the depression that came with a thousand rejected job applications.

Final Fantasy began as a modest medieval adventure game for the Nintendo back in the late nineteen eighties. By the time the seventh installment of the, uh, final fantasy was released on Playstation in 1997, the series had been transformed into typical Japanese fan fiction: effeminate blond protagonists find angsty-love with magical schoolgirls while world-consuming demons threaten existence. Accordingly, my interest in the series was largely limited to the earlier releases.

Final Fantasy XII had a new development team and made for a whole new experience with the franchise. Though the game still featured an effeminate blond guy, he was the protagonist in name only--a character bolted onto the story at the last minute from above because, you know, Japanese role playing games need effeminate main characters.

Instead of angsty demonic love, this final fantasy told a story full of political intrigue, rebellion, and the corrupting influence of technology. It also played out in real time, with gameplay ripped from some World of Warcraft-esque MMORPG minus the whole massively multiplayer online aspect.

And I loved it. Maybe it was because I was unemployed and had nothing going on, but Final Fantasy XII was the first game all decade that I actually savored playing. In the midst of college and high school and now law school, video games served as momentary diversions--I'd either play them in pieces or race through them as quickly as possible. With Final Fantasy XII, I absorbed the game; I thought about the story and planned out my strategies for how I'd proceed with the game.

The experience was so awesome that I bought the collectible strategy guide for the game after beating it and then bought the game's bizarre Nintendo DS sidestory/sequel two years later just because.

Shadow defines unconventional game design. Though the story is ultimately "save the princess," everything else about the game made for a unique game experience. The unnamed player arrives in a beautifully rendered but utterly empty game world, tasked with beating sixteen beasts in order to save his lady love. As the beasts are slain, the game character begins to take on a sickly appearance, suggesting saving the princess might require the ultimate self-sacrifice.

It's hard to describe how compelling the game's world is. It's a Playstation 2 title so it's not exactly HD-ready, but the developers crafted this gorgeous world full of forests and streams, deserts and misty lakes. Picture if you will, Gandalf galloping across Middle Earth/New Zealand in Lord of the Rings and you'll get a feeling for the visual majesty of Shadow.

Despite this beautiful world, the game exudes a powerful sense of isolation and despair. The world you travel in is completely empty, save for the colossi, of course. Most video games have boss fights, ultimate enemies if you will, but Shadow is probably the only game in recent memory where fighting the bosses is all there is.

The bond you develop with your trusty horse as you travel vast distances, over mountains, into caves to track down these enemies is tangible. The horse becomes your only friend as you, literally, take on the world. The experience is aided by (yet another) haunting soundtrack.

I list Shadow on here not because I had "fun" playing the game, because I didn't really. It was about the experience; it was also one of the only games I played through with a friend. My buddy Matt and I would play the game for a few hours each Friday afternoon, alternating attempts at taking on colossi. If I hadn't had him by my side (or at the controller), I never would have made it through all sixteen baddies and seen the end of the game. That alone makes it one of the more memorable experiences of the past decade.

More science-fiction! Though BSG ultimately devolved into a strained message about spirituality, the reimagining of the camply 1980s series began as a critical treatment of social issues disguised as science fiction. There's not a lot of teevee shows out there that seriously address abortion, suicide-bombing, and violent class struggles, but BSG could evidently get away with taking on dicey political issues by using an ample amount of sexy robots.

Since this list has made it apparent how much I like science-fiction, it may be a bit surprising that I didn't even know about BSG when it launched in the fall of 2003. I caught an episode or two on SciFi "SyFy," but I didn't get invested in the show until I decided to pick up the first season on sale at Best Buy last winter. Even then, I didn't even crack open the first season until I caught one of those nasty colds that makes it impossible to do anything but sit and watch teevee around the time of last year's Super Bowl.

It took me a week to get through that first season, and I managed to watch through the entire show before viewing the series' finale live mid-March.

Though my opinion shifts regularly whether the show ended in satisfactory fashion, the scope of the series is unquestionably phenomenal. BSG showed military life in a way that was neither glamorous nor cynical. The female characters were more powerful, compelling, and memorable than the male characters. The story-arcs were clever; the twists surprising. And the sexy robots weren't even the coolest characters--I was a bigger fan of the Secretary of Education-turned-President of the Colonies who spent the series fighting breast cancer or the ship's second-in-command who was a bitter, functional alcoholic.

Nowadays I probably watch too much teevee, but, surprisingly, up until I got hooked on a second season DVD of The Office in December 2006, I didn't really have any regular teevee shows I cared about. Even though Arrested Development came before it, The Office was the first show I expected to make me laugh week-in and week-out.

The show was relevant and quotable (at least for a few seasons) in a way something like Friends just never was. Also, Jenna Fischer made for a pretty damn cute receptionist.

I didn't quite expect this list to be so dominated by science-fiction, but my love 2007's Mass Effect doesn't actually have to do with its sexy blue aliens or futuristic sensibilities. Instead, Mass Effect was the first video game I ever played that made me question my decisions.

A massive role-playing epic, the game thrust you into a militaristic earth put into a precarious diplomatic position. Sure, sure, you played as a heavily armed-space marine, but the game forces you to choose between playing the noble hero or pragmatic villain in such delightfully nasty ways. The game lets you encourage racists and political terrorists or execute greedy albeit unarmed and impotent ex-corporate CEOs.

The game also features amazing production values, a haunting electronic soundtrack, and ::horror of horrors:: blue alien sex which no one save Fox News cared about. 2007 was a helluva year for emotional experiences in video games: Mario orchestrated, Ayn Rand brought to life in Bioshock, and the feeling of virtual jihad in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

But probably because I didn't like Bioware's previous efforts, I had no comprehension by how much I'd be impacted by Mass Effect. The sequel comes out January 26th--it'll be a personal holiday.

Yeah, I know it's fashionable to like The Wire. That doesn't mean it's still not the best show that seemingly no one actually watched when it was on air.

The series was a shockingly depressing view of the seedy world of Baltimore--Bodymore, Murdaland. I love multifaceted dramas, but I'm not sure there's a single show out there that had more layers than The Wire. Sure, sure, Lost has its many mysteries, but, by the end, The Wire had a cast of dozens and dozens that interacted among each other in surprising ways.

While the show was largely the tale of a city's failed battle against the "streets," each season of the show explored a particular facet of modern urban America: dying industry, city politics, the schools, and, hilariously (if less effectively), the mainstream media.

The show had an amazing amount of humanity and a few happy endings, but it was mostly five seasons of sad ends and worst-case scenarios. There are few television programs that can make you depressed enough to stop watching, but that's the price you pay to walk through the garden of The Wire.

But, hey, Law & Order: SVU's Detective John Munch lie at the end of the tunnel.

Zach Braff's Garden State was one of those coming-of-age/explorations of twenty-something existence that came along at just the right time in my life. I think everybody my age gets hit by feelings of aimlessness, a desire for purpose and meaning, and Garden State was an amusing romp into how lost my generation feels sometimes.

However, the best part about the film was Frou Frou's "Let Go," which closed out the film. The moment I heard the song when I saw the film's trailer in 2004, it dug its way into brain for a long time. The song was pretty much my theme song of the decade--there definitely is "beauty in the breakdown." Ahh, sweet song.

Alright, some honesty: I'm not sure Chuck really belongs on this list, but, dammit, if I don't feel like hyping this show up some more in lieu of it's third season premiere next Sunday. Seriously: Sunday, January 10th, 9/8c on NBC...NOTHING ELSE IS ON.

Chuck is a really stupid teevee show; it's also the one I regularly enjoy the most. The premise? A twenty-something big box store employee gets all the government's secrets downloaded into his brain. He goes on crazy adventure fighting terrorists with a hot blond CIA agent and a gun-toting, Ronald Reagan loving Adam Baldwin (see firefly).

I'm not sure how the show has survived two seasons, but thankfully NBC is such a terrible network that the show keeps living.

Everything else on this list was brought to me in some fashion, but Chuck was a show discovered. I literally got bored with a Monday Night Football game, flipped through the channels, and got sucked into the world of Chuck. I've been a regular viewer ever since, even eating at Subway last spring as part of a fan-effort to get the show renewed for a third season.

Chuck really stands out in a world where teevee programming consists almost exclusively of "gritty" soap opera drama, CBS-procedural, or mind-numbing reality. Unfortunately, the show's awesome mix of hot women, weird 1980s cultural references, and orchestrated covers of "Mr. Roboto" doesn't seem to appeal to anyone but me because, try as I might, I've yet to get anyone to embrace the show like I have.

So, yes, I sit with my Chuck 3D-glasses and watch by myself, thank you very much.


Of course, as soon as I concocted this list of ten things, another ten popped into mind. Since what else is this blog for than me to wax on about such things, here's my honorable mentions or, better put, the stuff I thought of after the fact:

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: an amazing filmmaking achievement, LOTR made for event viewing between 2001 and when The Return of the King's ultimate DVD was released in 2004.
2. The West Wing: the teevee show that made me want to love government, it made for some brilliant television. Alas, I never watched the show consistently when it was on the air, and some of it was really really bad...
3. iPod (5th Gen): I've never been much of a music aficionado and I saw no reason to ever get an iPod. Then my dad decided to get me one anyway for the holidays in 2005, and, well, my life really hasn't been the same sense. Even though I still only have 800-some songs and my click-wheel iPod was replaced years ago, I have a definite sense of life being different before and after iPod.
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: it's the perfect film to watch after a break-up and it's a visual delight, as well.
5. Fallout 3: probably transcends what it means to be a "video game." A dark humor post-Apocalyptic take on a Washington, D.C., that takes place in an alternate future based upon a 1950s-style American golden age, the game is a real experience.
6. Charlie Wilson's War: If The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin's peak and ::ugh:: Studio 60 his bottom, Charlie Wilson was an impressive return to form, and, somehow, a morbid cost-tally of all the Soviet equipment blown up in Afghanistan was one of the funniest individual scenes I remember all decade.
7. WALL-E: best romantic comedy of the decade and ample evidence that Pixar can do no wrong. I really didn't enjoy Pixar through the whole Monsters Inc./Finding Nemo/Cars era, but since then? Movie magic.
8. Mad Men: could usurp the title of best show ever from The Wire, me thinks, and it's got an equally catchy theme song, too.
9. Metroid Prime 3: Nintendo had a pretty bad decade in my mind. All the soccer moms didn't think so, however, so my disgust in the company was fiscally rewarded when I sold my stock in Nintendo when it was at a near all-time high. Anyway, Metroid Prime 3 remains pretty much the only Wii game to actually make the Wii's gimicky motion-control pointer seem like a useful contribution to video-gaming, and, golly, it's a science-fiction shooter, too.
10. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: not only is the game like playing a Saturday morning cartoon, but it was also another one of those games I ended up playing through with a bunch of kids freshman year of college. Nothing like staying up till four a.m. in the common room figuring out a dungeon while eating pizza in the dark.

You know, it's a wonder I found the time to do any real substantive work this past decade...

Jay Rosen's Sunday Morning Talk Show Fix

It wasn't until midway through college that I "discovered" the Sunday morning political talk shows--Meet the Press, This Week, etc.--and, in addition to serving as the sort of angry wake-up call one needs before a day of football, embracing the Sunday talk shows aided in my transformation into would-be elitist follower of the political.

Ha! It took a few of Tim Russert's patented "gotcha" journalism moments for me to realize what a joke these shows actually were (and are). I started watching the shows in the hopes of being able to portray myself as well-informed about national politics, but it quickly became apparent to me that the Sunday talk shows were just more respectable forums for the airing of the political propaganda spewed hourly on cable news.

I realize this isn't news to any serious political junky, but I'd wager the average American actually believe David Gregory and company do a decent job holding our elected officials' feet to the fire. (Reality: they don't.)

NYU's own professor of journalism, Jay Rosen, I think says it best:

[I]nviting partisans on television to polarize us some more would seem to be an obvious loser, especially because the limited airtime compresses political speech and guarantees a struggle for the microphone. This pattern tends to strand viewers in the senseless middle. We either don't know whom to believe, and feel helpless. Or we curse both sides for their distortions. Or we know enough to know who is bullshitting us more and wonder why the host doesn't.

His solution? Do a midweek fact check of everything the pols on the shows say. I guess David Gregory, in the name of journalistic objectivity, doesn't feel compelled to point out how almost everything anyone on Meet the Press says is at best spin, at worst an outright lie, but, golly, why isn't our media doing...anything to keep the people they interview accountable?

It seems absurd to allow anyone from Sarah Palin to, yes, David Axelrod to have a national platform to say things that are untrue without being called out of anything other than semantic gotchas!

Of course, as we head into ::sigh:: another election year, the inanity on Sunday morning will only increase, but I might try to follow Prof. Roson a bit during the looming 3L doldrums.

Happy Holidays!

I turned in my final paper Monday evening at 10:58 central standard time, that'd be two minutes before my east coast midnight deadline, from a empty corridor at Chicago O'Hare, bringing half of law school to an end. Since then I've spent most of the past week in front of the teevee, playing video games and chugging eggnog, i.e., "quality time" with the folks.

This is two years now when I race out of the fall semester with tons of stuff I'd like to do, and end up returning to Iowa for a prolonged nap instead. Maybe tomorrow? Anyway, this JibJab summary of 2009 is better than my take on the year:

Hoping for Change...

Exams have largely distracted me from the news, but, from my superficial perspective, it looks like the Obama Administration is looking everywhere from a win: concocting a year-late jobs summit, smiling over another non-binding inadequate global climate initiative, and, oh yes, gutting most of the heart of health reform for a political win. Meanwhile, the President's approval rating continues to tick downward.

One year out is too early to judge a presidency, and, in my jaded opinion, the President himself still seems an admirable figure in touch with reality that his mission remains unaccomplished, but Obama's new politics have failed to deliver--if they even existed. The problem with building such high expectations is that when you fail to deliver people are even more disappointed than with business as usual.

In the case of modern American politics, the result has been tea parties on the Right and a liberal base that appears almost dumbfounded by the inability of its party to get anything done.

Jane Hamsher has a good piece today that posits that the Administration is completely underestimating the degree of populist rage on the Left/Right:

Rahm Emanuel has managed to convince enough of the people that any inadequacies in this bill will be forgotten if the Dems can claim a “w” and pass any piece of shit health care bill. And that if Congress just spends 2010 naming post offices, any objections that Americans might have to paying 8% of their incomes to private corporations who will use the IRS as their collection agencies will just disappear.

Glenn Greenwald, articulate as ever, discusses how the health care debate shows how liberal and conservative politicians go to Washington and create a center that literally has nothing to do with political compromise:

Whether you call it "a government takeover of the private sector" or a "private sector takeover of government," it's the same thing: a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else's expense. Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.

President Bush effectively used government to subsidize war in the last decade, and President Obama has started out by using government to subsidize banks and potentially insurance companies. Listening to the President last week on 60 Minutes, I think he understands the issue. He just seems resigned to defeat cynical political face-saving.

I'm not sure if Obama's desire to be a "national" bipartisan leader is to blame so much as his apparent passivity as a negotiator in American politicans. The head is good, but the body sure ain't. Superficial and flashy as it may be, but Obama's skills were revealed during the campaign to consist largely of inspiring rhetoric.

That's been largely absent for the past year, and the President would be wise to get fired up on something before he mortgages the entire country away to people in power and hampers his ability to become the transformative president he aspired to be.

Late Night Law Student III

Today I woke up bright and early, which means it was during the approximately fifteen minute window each morning when sunlight pokes into my room whenever that actually is. I chugged a glass of water and then began my eight hour take-home evidence examination.

It was painful. A disappointing amount of stuff that I focused my studying on didn't even pop up on the test (or so my limited-intelligence thinks). After my exam, I took a brief respite before plunging into the last third of my unintelligible paper on humanitarian intervention. It's 3:30 am and I've still got a few pages to go and, oh yes, BlueBooking to do.

But before anyone thinks my point here is to complain about the content of law school finals, think again! No no, instead, I thought I'd share my appalling diet for the day:

1. One Twix Bar
2. A pack of Welch's Fruit Gummies
3. 1/2 Stick of Raw Cookie Dough (Nestle-style)
   
4. 6/7 large bag of Cool Ranch Doritos

I'm not sure what hurts more: my brain or my tummy.

The Futility of Exam Postmortems

I hate many many things about law school, but one particularly irritating thing law students love to do is exam postmortems. The structure of a typical exam, i.e., issue spotting, and the time constraints involved mean no one save for the law school maestros will ever hit all the points the professor has planted into the questions. Thus, the result of rampant post-exam discussions is really just a profound sense of disappointment. Everyone spews forth with a sort of nervous energy out of the hope of soothing their fears of failure, but, by and large, talking about an exam after the fact only makes students realize what issues they missed, what lines of attack they failed to pursue.

It's comical, really, to see the expression on a student's face when it hits him/her that he/she missed something "big." Of course, everyone misses stuff--it's the nature of the damn exam. My strategy post-exam is to immediate purge my surroundings of all things related to that subject. With seven of my fifteen credit hours consigned now only to exist as a future numerical factor in my GPA, all treatises on international law, all outlines on property have been thrown away or exiled to the depths of my closet, only to return at the end of the year to be boxed up for a trip to my parents and hazily remembered for law school posterity.

Of course, that hasn't stopped people from sending me texts and trying to elicit my opinions about my exams anyway. Last night, after a four hour type-type-type-athon, I raced to the bathroom and could barely get a second's respite from assessments of various hypothetical ejectment issues. I very nearly stuck my fingers in my ears and began chanting, "Nananah!"

The Prison Irony

Post exam euphoria be damned, I couldn't help but notice the irony of these two pieces out today.

First, the San Francisco Chronicle recaps the Obama Administration's continuing efforts to have
complaints against Mr. John Yoo dismissed, despite the fact the guy pretty much encouraged the government to act unlawfully because OMG! TERRORISTS!!!

Second, the AP reports that the U.S. prison population climbed again last year. I have my issues with our criminal justice system, but I'm not sure if I think the Obama Administration's plan of, you know, the past administration's blatant disregard for the law because OMG! THAT'D BE PLAYING PARTISAN POLITICS!!!

Back to the books to study "law"...maybe this will all make sense someday.

The Matthew Palazzola School of Writing

My college buddy Matt was a master procrastinator, and I'll never forget how he cobbled together a term paper on the Roman Empire's relations with Egypt in an evening using Wikipedia. He took the sources from the Wikipedia page and cited them in generalities in the actual paper.

I could do little but scoff with disgust (and mild amusement) at the time. My method for paper writing in college was methodical, efficient, and, in my mind, fun. I always aimed for topics I was interested in, and, after reading background, would sculpt a thesis out of every last source I could gather in a week. This process worked well for me throughout college. The notion of literally cutting-and-pasting from a Wikipedia foundation was anathema to me.

Fast forward into the soul-crushing, confidence-breaking world of law school, and I'm so paralyzed by my intellectual inadequacy and limited time that I'm pretty much embracing the same work ethic I once ridiculed. Not two weeks from now I have a full forty-five pages of writing to do, of which eight are complete, on topics that elude me. I find myself combing the indexes of dozens of books, stealing...er...appropriately citing passage after passage in the hope that throwing bits and pieces of scholarship I only briefly peruse onto a page will somehow squeeze out a term paper.

My friend Pat warned me that law school could obliterate a student's ability to write, leaving them shell-shocked in front of a blinking cursor on a blank Word document. He wisely recommended breaking my papers into smaller, five-page chunks. This would be genius if I could actually concoct five pages on any of my topics' subparts.

Alas, that's not going too well, either. I remember when I was still naive, dare I say excited about law school and I stumbled upon an article listing the myriad reasons why law school is miserable sham. This situation makes me recall two of the bulleted point reasons why law school stinks: incessant time shortages and lack of writing creativity. Even though I have three other exams to worry about, these accursed papers have been weighing over me like a month-late credit card bill. While I've finally sorta kinda gotten a handle on my topics, I don't have the time to polish my prose in the slightest.

This is "professional" writing? To make matters worse, legal writing (and perhaps all academic writing?) requires such a prodigious amount of citations that the fun of actually stringing ideas together is lost. I want to say that French centrally-appointed prefects lack democratic legitimacy? Well, that certainly requires a "see, e.g.," nevermind I've just laid out how that prefects were appointed and often clashed with directly elected mayors. Egad! I need cites for these factoids, too, and a specific example!

Instead of writing in any sort of informative or explanatory fashion, I'm just stringing together citations. It pretty much is just the Matthew Palazzola School of Writing without the ease of taking from Wikipedia.

Things for which to be Thankful

Considering how self-absorbed I can be, I'm almost appalled with myself with not concocting a list of things I was am thankful for in time for Thanksgiving. But, hey, better late than never?

1. Adobe Photoshop: I sometimes often think I would have enjoyed a career in graphic design, because I can lose myself for hours playing around in Photoshop. It's twice as fun as legal "tools" like LexisNexis or West Law and just as complicated. I've been using Photoshop since my parents gave me a copy of Photoshop 5.0 LE, which has only one redo layer. ONE!
2. Minced Shrimp wrapped in Crispy Deep Fried Bacon: it's salty and it's sweet! It's greasy, too, and I love them something fierce.
3. Hearing my thesis adviser, David Fromkin, get name dropped in my federalism seminar while we debate the relative merits of installing federalism in the Middle East. I always have to hear all the cursed "scholars" at this school talk about who they studied under like it's a huge badge of honor.
4. Because NBC can't find a hit show if it's life depended on it, it's bringing back Chuck two months early with a two hour premiere January 10. Sure, the show will probably have less than five million viewers and get canned by March, but at least I get weekly television-viewing appointment back!
5. 

Happy Thanksgiving, readers!