2012: A Pop Culture Year In Tweets

2012 started with a party, of course

After completely failing to celebrate my birthday the previous year, 2012 saw me take a whole bunch of friends down to London, where we bought comics, ran around Hamley's and the Science Museum and ate a grotesque amount of BBQ at Bodean's.

This wasn't due to anything. I just still think this is funny.

I stand by my original assessment. Michael Fassbender's penis is gigantic. Also, Shame was very good. Probably the best looking film I saw all year, and with tremendous performances from all.

A good couple of days - the never-ending gift that was Maya Rudolph hosting SNL, the announcement of Phonogram's approaching third series, and Helena Shepherd kicked ass.

The Warriors is a great film, but watching an original print of it at midnight then wandering back through the deserted city makes it even better.

Saga has been one of the consistently great comics of the year - smart, funny, original and heartfelt, with astonishingly good art from Fiona Staples, who combines flawless storytelling, great character design and a flair for conveying emotion to brilliant effect.

Los Campesinos! are my favourite band, and their shows are always great: amazing energy, great banter and stellar performances. Plus, I got to hang out with the now sadly departed Ellen afterwards and chat about podcasts and stuff.

New Girl took a while to win me over, and definitely had a shaky start, but its slowly proved itself to be funny week in, week out, often reaching the heights of hilarious. Plus I've realised I share Schmidt's control issues in the kitchen.

I can't even remember why we were throwing a party on this particular night, but I think we can definitely call this The Year Tim and Bret Perfected Their House Party Skills

 It may not be high art, or even among what I consider my Top 5 films of the year, but Avengers was the most fun I've had at the cinema for a long, long while, and isn't that what really matters.

This still saddens me to think about. I think it may be the first celebrity death I can honestly say I've felt affected me. We miss you, MCA.

Parks and Recreation continues to be amazing. This, the final episode of Season 4, saw Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope elected as a city councilwoman, and honestly had me welling up alongside her as she cast her ballot.

 

Race issues aside*, Girls has proved itself to be pretty damn good. It feels a lot like a series of short stories at times, but that doesn't put me off of it - in fact, more television could do with doing smaller, better observed stories. Still needs more Shoshanna though.

*My two cents: yes, it's awfully white. So is most TV, but for what is meant to be an honest portrayal of contemporary New York, that is either a massive oversight or says a lot about Lena Dunham's world, and when she says she doesn't care about those sorts of things, she sounds like an idiot.

 

 Always a pleasure to see official Friend of the Blog Alex Spencer, and finally meeting Robin and Michael in person was great. Had a lot of fun recording a podcast with them, and it was a great taster for Thought Bubble in November...

The Dark Knight Rises wasn't good. Deal with it. Neither was Spider-Man 3, but at least it had a sequence in which James Franco danced and made an omelette.

 

Shut Up And Play The Hits was one of those bittersweet experiences, watching a band you love perform their last ever show, knowing they're finishing on a high. So glad I got to see it on a big screen.

 I didn't watch nearly as many classic films as I should have in my quest to watch 100 films I'd never seen before this year, but at least I got round to watching The Godfather. Maybe this year, I'll watch Part 2.

 Another trip down to London town, this time to see the talented Michael Eckett perform in his own quickfire play that runs through the history of comics, and drink with Alex Spencer. In addition, I got to spend the next day walking around London, taking reference photos for The Broken City.

This was also the Year We Started Bros & Cons, our frequently anarchic comedy advice podcast. If you're reading this and you haven't already listened to it, go now! What are you waiting for?

My housemate Bret managed to devise a version of fantasy football that used actual fantasy figures - my team included Doctor Doom, Lion-O, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and River Tam. Our group of friends are not sports people, but for nine weeks we talked tactics, passing strategy and whether Deadpool is a good goalkeeper.

My friends in Cheesemint outdid themselves this year in producing a hilarious, ambitious web-series in "Unlocked". I can't wait to see what they do in the future.

Hallowe'en is the best holiday. Drunk Hallowe'en is the besht holiday.

Finally got round to watching the rest of Breaking Bad this year after watching seasons one and two in fits and starts. After about midway through S2, watching the next episode became an obsession that kept me up way to late way too often. Cannot wait to see how Vince Gilligan and company end the series this year.

I stayed up until 7.30AM watching the election coverage, but, as a US politics nerd, it was totally worth it. Obama is a long way from perfect, but he's a hell of a lot better than Romney.

We rocked Thought Bubble pretty damn hard this year. As always, the mid-con party was the highlight, but sketches from Emma Rios and Kate Beaton, Kieron Gillen's "1000 Words" keynote speech and just the general atmosphere of the weekend were all wonderful.

As the year has gone on, we've been regularly dragging people back to ours to drink and sing impromptu karaoke via Rock Band 2. It's been a trend I approve of.

It ended up being Point Break.

And the first tweet of 2013?

Wise words, Drunk Tim. Wise words indeed.

Play To Z: Mapping The Future With Music

In what I'm sure will be the first of many serendipitous co-incidences, Janelle Monáe's The Archandroid leads directly into M.I.A's Arular (putting aside an RAC remix of Phoenix's "Armistice"), and listening to these two stellar albums right next to each other set my brain spinning. Produced 5 years apart, by very different artists, and with profoundly different sounds and aesthetics, they nonetheless feel like a vision of the future.

  When Arular arrived in 2005 it was a wake-up call, at least to my ears. We talk a lot about the shrinking globe, how technology and 24-hour news cycles are bringing an increasing awareness of the world beyond our doorstep both on a large and small scale, but Arular felt like the first record to capture what that means in the 21st Century. It carried a wider awareness, speaking to the experiences of people across the planet, dealing with topics like immigration, terrorism and the global economy without ever getting bogged down in preaching. It was about human stories in this new world, filtered through a hip-hop/electroclash/punk mix. Politics you can dance to.

 Arular is about the future that is now, a grimy, sweaty world forged by the Internet where the voices of people stretch from Haiti to Hackney to Hanoi. It's worth remembering that Arular arrived before Twitter was launched, in a time when things like watching the Arab Spring unfold in real-time, not filtered through the BBC but in the words of the people who were actually there, wasn't exactly commonplace. It showed a vision of the world to come, where our connections to people across the planet become much more visible and explicit.

  The Archandroid is, of course, more about the far-future than the near-future, but it still tackles a lot of the same themes. A huge sweeping concept album, encompassing Suites 2 and 3 of four-part story of a messianic android leading a revolution, The Archandroid draws influences from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the works of Philip K. Dick and a thousand musical genres. In her story, Monáe positions the androids as an underclass, the "other" that are oppressed by the wealthy and slowly rise up to revolution, and there are explicit links between their fight and the contemporary struggles of minorities and the working class. The album exists in the tradition of Afrofuturism, which fuses the political allegory and utopian ideals of science fiction with the issues facing people of colour in society today.

"Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism.
African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart, literalizing Gibson’s cyberpunk axiom, “The street finds its own uses for things.” With trickster elan, it retrofits, refunctions, and willfully misuses the technocommodities and science fictions generated by a dominant culture that has always been not only white but a wielder, as well, of instrumental technologies."
                                                                                          - Mark Dery, Black To The Future

  Monáe's album (and the larger story it forms a part of) are both a critique of contemporary society's racism and a vision of a world beyond it. Like M.I.A., she fuses a huge grab-bag of musical influences, moving between hip-hop and film score-like orchestration with ease and forging a coherent whole from the jumble of imagery. More importantly, she makes fantastic, hook-ridden, propulsive pop music, and to paraphrase feminist anarchist Emma Goldman, if I can't dance, it's not my revolution.