all is quiet on New Year's Day


Roberto Matta, Jazz Band, 1973

* From an essay pondering new ways to measure incompetence:

Sometimes it seems as if we're not all watching the same TV shows and seeing the same movies and listening to the same records, even when we are. We live in the ruins of what used to be a monoculture and we are never, ever getting back together. So we need things to fail abjectly, because it brings us together. The most amazing communal experience I had with a work of art this year was probably the first time I saw The Master — opening night, packed house, stunned silence from first shot to last, a whole room holding its breath so as not to break the spell. But the second-most amazing communal experience I had with a work of art in 2012 involved the Lifetime docudrama Liz & Dick. My understanding is that Liz & Dick starred Lindsay Lohan and someone who played a character named "Cooter" on True Blood as Richard Burton and (are you serious right now, IMDb?) Creed from The Office as Darryl Zanuck, and kind of resembled a school play Max Fischer would have taken his name off of; I didn't actually watch it. But I watched Twitter watch it. I read along as Twitter pecked it to death, and it was magical, like a slow-motion casino demolition with tipsy color commentary by an Algonquin Round Table as big as the world. The movie itself was a ratings disappointment — it did about half what the Steel Magnolias reboot did for the network a few months earlier — but that doesn't matter. Did any other movie made for TV this year fill this many people with this much wonder and glee? Did any other movie?

* "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." - Haruki Murakami