Oh, hey you guys. Is the Tumblr Blackout of 2010 over already?
This is, what we call in the business, “crunch time” for me, so I’ve been a bit distant. But beginning next week, I’ll be rolling out the year-end business for fifteen days until December 31. Admittedly, I have not finished my list. But I have given a lot of thought towards how I want to approach it, and this is how things will be different from previous years:
- People who make lists with names like “The Top 50 Albums of 2010!” totally confuse me. Because that seems to make the assumption that a truly awesome album is released every single week, and as someone who spent about seven years of his life working at a record store — and basically all of my life obsessively collecting records — I can assure you this is not the case. At any rate, the point of my list-making this year is not to be exhaustive, but to be subjectively definitive.
- Definitive? This means that I have the final say over everything that was produced in 2010, and that my opinion is better than yours. Kidding! Seriously, though, I think that more so than in previous years, I really want my year-end reflections to be wholly personal. Which is a totally maudlin way of saying that I’m going to put away the critic’s hat and exclusively consider how I experienced the world this year and give credit to those worldly things that left the deepest impressions on me.
- But what do I mean by “things?” Well, I guess I really mean just that. I can definitely say without even thinking about it that there weren’t fifteen albums or songs that came out in 2010 that actually affected me in a way worth writing about. But other things did! Like books and movies and coffee and television and food and design and inspiring people and that It Gets Better video where the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles fucking killed me by singing “True Colors.” (I mean, fuck Arcade Fire. Give these guys the Grammy!) So I want to consider that. Also important to mention: It is not my intention to judge things based on their copyright date. So if something was created in 1876 but I only discovered it this year, it’s fair game.
I’ll be deep in the trenches of writing (more) academic papers this weekend, but you know I always come back. More soon.