Ten things that cheered me up in 2010, not necessarily the most cheerful of years:
10. The San Francisco Giants’ first World Series championship! (And my favorite name for a ballplayer, or just about anybody: Buster Posey.) Go, eccentric underdogs, go!
9. Patti Smith’s emotional speech accepting the National Book Award in nonfiction for her memoir of bohemian life in sixties and seventies New York, “Just Kids.” Recalling her days as a clerk at Scribner’s bookstore, Smith said, “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf. Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book.”
8. The intelligent and thorough ruling in favor of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage written by district court Judge Vaughn Walker in August. Now onward and upward to the Supreme Court.
7. The new neo-soulish album “Good Things” by Aloe Blacc, and especially the song “I Need a Dollar,” a seductively catchy anthem for crummy economic times. And, while I’m at it, another example of galvanizing neo-soul: the Cee-Lo Green album, “The Lady Killer.”
6. The fact that California voters chose as their new governor Jerry Brown, a quirky septuagenarian with an undeniable dedication to public service, over the Republican eBay C.E.O. Meg Whitman, who spent an astonishing hundred and sixty million dollars on her campaign. And the cartoon that had an indignant Whitman saying, “But I was the highest bidder!”
5. And while I’m being cheerful about HBO: “Treme,” David Simon’s music-besotted portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans, which has been renewed for a second season—and its irresistible soundtrack album.
4. Gabriel Byrne as Dr. Paul Weston on HBO’s “In Treatment.” He makes listening sexy. And he’s helped to transform the show from a procedural about talk therapy into a meditation on the practice of compassion.
3. The Chilean miners’ rescue. And more than the rescue itself, the fact that the people involved in the operation thought so creatively for sixty-nine days about how to help the trapped men, providing everything from psychological and medical consults to movies, dominos, and empanadas, all through a tiny borehole that extended twenty-three hundred feet underground.
2. The fact that “The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1,” published, by the University of California Press, a hundred years after Twain’s death, is a bestseller.
1. Hermione Granger, as played by the lovely Emma Watson in the most recent Harry Potter movies, especially “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” At last: a heroine you and your tween daughter can both appreciate. Neither a hot-and-bothered vampire crush object nor a brat (obnoxious being the translation for “spunky girl” in so many recent kids’ movies), Watson’s Hermione is instead a person of character and playful intelligence.
0 comments:
Post a Comment