The year-end Top 10 list is obsolete.
I write this even as I am deep into writing a couple of those inevitable end-of-the-year best-of pieces, one about books and one about movies.
I'm not questioning the utility of these features -- there are a lot of readers (including me) who find themselves interested in them. I love to read about what someone thinks are the best movies, books, albums, TV shows or what have you of a given year. I still get excited when I receive my ballot for the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop Poll of the best music of the year, and I'm miffed I've never been invited to vote in their similar poll of the year's best films. I will ask a bunch of folks to send me lists of the Top 10 movies of the year, and I'll probably run a lot of them either in Friday's Style section or on the blood, dirt & angels blog. But in the current cultural climate, these lists seem impossibly quaint and narrow.
There's far too much out there for any one critic to have a reasonable idea on what "the best" may be -- all we see is that which is presented to us, vouchsafed and vetted. And while individuals make an effort to experience art beyond that which is presented in a mainstream context, none of us can pretend to have experienced in a meaningful way more than a sliver of what is available.
For every book I review, probably 15 are rifled through, 50 are left unread and untold thousands never crease my consciousness. I read (and enjoyed and reviewed) Nathan Hill's The Nix (Knopf, $27.95), but I never got around to Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28) which at least looks (and hefts) like a work of similar ambition. I meant to break into The Library of America's new The Unknown Kerouac ($35), a collection of previously unpublished private journals and newly translated stories written originally in French-Canadian patois (Kerouac's first language), but I haven't gotten past removing the shrink wrap.
I haven't read this year's National Book Award fiction winner Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, $26.95), or Noah Hawley's Before the Fall (Grand Central Publishing, $26), or Zadie Smith's Swing Time (Penguin Press, $27).
I'm a couple hundred pages into Ann Patchett's semi-autobiographical novel Commonwealth (Harper Collins, $27.99), and though I love it I probably won't finish it for a while because, instead of a physical copy, I have it installed on my iPad, which means I forget about it until I'm on an airplane or in a hotel room.
As far as nonfiction, I've started David Oshinsky's Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital (Random House, $30), which means I'll probably finish it sometime next year. Which pushes back the start dates on Ronald C. White's American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (Random House, $35) and Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the AmericanRight (The New Press, $27.95).
No one can read everything -- and I apologize to all those authors out there (especially those publishing with small independent and university presses) who haven't received my attention. It will give you little comfort to tell you I know how you feel, but believe me, I do.
NOT A HIPSTER
All I have to do to feel hopelessly clueless is to glance at any of the year-end best album lists put out by the cool kids. Even NPR's list of 30 favorite albums of the year (they also understand the empty promise implicit in the word "best") "so far" (it was published in June) made me feel out of the loop.
While I recognized most of the artists on the list -- safe plays like Beyonce, Corinne Bailey Rae, David Bowie, Esperanza Spalding, Kanye West, Paul Simon, Rhianna, Sturgill Simpson and Jack DeJohnette -- I hadn't listened to more than five or six of the albums. I was embarrassed to realize that while I had ripped the CD into our digital music library, I hadn't listened to Xenia Rubinos' Black Terry Cat. What's worse, I'd misfiled it in the CD racks -- I'd assumed Black Terry Cat was the band's name.
I have no trouble coming up with a personal Top 10 of the year's releases. The Drive-By Truckers' American Band deserves to be heard by everyone who thinks they like rock 'n' roll, and you dismiss The Monkees' Good Times! at your own peril. That opinion drew some of the most vituperative email of this whole unhappy year, which makes me wonder if some people just don't get the show.
Still, a lot of what some people are raving about eludes me. I haven't heard the Rolling Stones' Blue & Lonesome yet. It was officially released Friday, and record companies that still exist aren't as liberal with advance copies as they used to be, but something tells me I ought to know more about Car Seat Headrest, Young Thug, Thundercat, The Haxan Cloak and Japanese Breakfast.
If you poke me I'll give you an opinion, but you should understand it's only narrowly informed.
MR. BIG SHOT MOVIE MAN
Movies are different -- I typically spend a lot of the last two months of the year catching up, and it's highly likely I'll see close to 100 movies in December. At this late date even the number of mainstream needle-movers I haven't seen might shake your faith. Over the Thanksgiving holiday I was twice asked to give an opinion on Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge -- the best I could do was to say that I'd read it was very Mel Gibson-y, much concerned with the mortification of flesh and the triumph of the spirit. But I couldn't say whether it was any good.
As of this writing I haven't seen 10 Cloverfield Lane, Don't Breathe, Chevalier, Louder Than Bombs or Men Go to Battle. I haven't seen Doctor Strange or Moana or A Monster Calls. I haven't seen experimental documentarian Robert Greene's Kate Plays Christine or Christine. I haven't seen Christi Puiu's three-hour drama Sieranevada or X-Men: Apocalypse or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I haven't seen Star Wars: Rogue One, and I don't know anybody who has.
EVERYBODY'S A CRITIC
As it gets easier for people of modest means to exhibit their work to a potentially large (and international) audience without the intercession of major corporations, we're going to be overwhelmed by the number of works that are produced. While most of these works will be mediocre to terrible, a few are going to have a lasting impact on the world.
This democratization of the art-making process obviously benefits would-be creators looking for an avenue for self-expression, but it also has disrupted the traditional modes of commercial distribution. It's easier to get published and harder to get paid. I think the gains may be worth the losses -- the only road to something like rock stardom anymore may be through a dumbed-down reality show, but every town can have its own singer-songwriters producing interesting work.
It cuts both ways: In exchange for a Top 40 that provided us with a collective reservoir of common songs, we have a diverse and teeming universe. In exchange for the authority of a Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley, we have a 24-hour news cycle, driven by shouting hosts competing for our attenuated attention spans.
You might not care that critics have been put in a precarious position. But the digital world means fewer paying outlets and self-published opinions proliferate. The only way to establish authority these days is to earn it, reader by reader.
Over the next few weeks you'll likely see a lot of year-end Top 10 lists. If you like that sort of thing, feel free to enjoy them. But just remember what they are: core samples taken of an individual's taste at a particular point in time.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
blooddirtangels.com
Style on 12/04/2016