Recently, Is Greater Than asked a wide array of acquaintances, associates and contributors past and future to send in their year-end recaps in the most succinct way we could imagine — a simple (>) equation. This is partially because since the Internet has driven reading comprehension down to a preschool level, the Internet demands the most succinct recaps one can imagine. It is also because top ten lists are invariably tedious and allow too much room for petty quibbles over rankings and the like.
It’s an eclectic mix of observations, thoughts and realizations — and we’re pleased to be able to share it all. Without further adieu, the year’s most succinct year-end recaps yet. If you’re so inspired, leave your own in the comment section:
Paul M. Davis
Big Media > New Media > Old Media
TV and movie writers go on strike, freelancers are cut, and reporters are laid off, but the execs still get year-end bonuses. Despite the endless hype from the blogerati, this year demonstrated the continued primacy of the old media. Until bloggers monetize real reporting and stop getting 98% of their content from old media sources, so long as old media has the FCC in its pocket, the Murdochs, Doug Morrises and the Tribune Companies aren’t going anywhere soon. We gotta regroup and try harder.
Paul M. Davis is the editor of Is Greater Than.
Levi Fuller
Hot chocolate with rum in it > Regular old hot chocolate with no rum in it.
Not sure why this took 10 years of legal drinking to concoct, but goddamn if this isn’t my winter drink forever. You get all the sweet, hot chocolateyness of cocoa, plus just enough rum to give you a nice, warm buzz. Bring on the cold!
Levi Fuller plays music, DJs on the Internet, curates a quarterly series of compilations, and generally runs himself ragged in Seattle. www.denimclature.com
Jennie Gruber
Making a mixtape from vinyl and listening to it on a walkman > buying music on Itunes and listening to it on your Ipod.
Dubbing a mixtape is to making an Utunes play list what cooking your own dinner is to buying fast food; cheaper, more time-consuming, and healthier. In the age of digital accessibility and cultural over-saturation, be the agent of your own consumption.
Jennie Gruber’s snarky observations on pop culture have appeared in the likes of the Believer and Kitchen Sink. She lives in the Bay Area and plays the drums. Email her at jenniegruber@hotmail.com
Elise Herbruger
Buying from local boutiques > wearing luxury brands
My junior high health teacher had a poster of an awful looking junkie up in the classroom with the caption “smoking is very debonair.” meaning that it isn’t. once you read the new WWF report “deep luxury,” you’ll feel the same about your Marc Jacobs bag ( http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/7186).
Free Rice > Scrabulous
Scrabulous became all the rage among 30-somethings on facebook this year. but seriously? Ditch the Scrabulous once in a while and play a word game that feeds hungry people in Africa ( http://www.freerice.com/). Beats a triple word score any day.
Dorky reusable coffee mugs > Paper cups
This year, even big box stores like staples began offering reusable shopping bags. So get on the sustainable bandwagon yourself! stop taking those paper cups from your favorite cafe. Tell the clerk at the drugstore that you don’t need a bag. Carry a sigg.
Preventive > Preventative
“Preventative” is pervasive, but “preventive” is its streamlined, sensible predecessor. “Preventive” can also function as a noun or an adjective and is free of that annoying ‘t’ alliteration to boot. Employ it in your next conversation about health care and you will sound way better than George Bush.
Skinny jeans > Boot cut
No, they haven’t gone out of style yet, even though many hoped that they would. Not surprising—who’d want to look like their mom when they could look like their hot younger sister instead?
Elise lives in the East Village of New York City. She is not hip enough to live in Brooklyn but she does own a pair of skinny jeans.
Hilary Hulteen
what’s happening > what’s happened
Hilary Hulteen is a New York-based photographer. Find her work at www.SoulClapProductions.com
Gabriel Levinson
No Country For Old Men > No Country For Old Men
McCarthy’s dubious “speed-read” could only have been written with film rights in mind; how else to explain this over-simplified oddity within his oeuvre? The Coen Bros have outdone themselves, turning one of McCarthy’s lesser works into one of their finest.
Gabriel Levinson, reviews editor for Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine, thinks you have a beautiful smile.
Chanda Prescod - Weinstein
Jane Austen > the Bullshit Movies put out about her and her literature in the last year
Jane Austen deserves better than Keira Knightley! And a film that doesn’t reduce Austen’s life and storytelling to romantic drivel. Her life’s work consisted of substantive social satire that contributed to the contemporary discourse on the relationship between slavery, women’s rights, and English capitalism.
Chanda is a PhD student studying quantum gravity and cosmology at the Perimeter Institute in Canada, and if you check out her blog @ http://disorderedcosmos.blogspot.com. Maybe she will update it with something other than Law & Order: Special Muppets Unit youtube videos.
Jordan Smart
Jason Isbell’s song “Dress Blues” was greater than any other anti-war protest song in the year 2007.
Coming out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, “Dress Blues” is an anti-war song for written for the small town kids who signed up to fight in a war that has been nothing but lies since day one. Heartbreaking and oh so true.
Jordan Smart is the guy frowning at you from behind a record store counter. He can be found at http://shyviolence.blogspot.com.
Kira Wisniewski
Chicago > DC
Sure, it’s the nation’s capital and the winters aren’t horrible, but DC lacks the awesomeness of Chicago. Chicago has approximately 100 more music venues. You can’t buy Jack Daniels at your local Target. There’s no Hot Dougs. DC isn’t bad – it’s just no Chicago.
Kira Wisniewski is project manager at J-Lab: Institute for Interactive Journalism.
Paul M Davis
3 Comments
Laura Pearson
Is Greater Than > a lot of things.
10 Dec 2008 10:12 pm
Is Greater Than » Is Greater Than Year-End Equations: 2008 Edition
[...] Join us as we break through the year’s rhetoric and double-speak as simply as we know how, and leave your own equations in the comments. For the historically minded, take a look at 2007’s edition. [...]
Chanda
As a postscript to my equation, this letter appeared in the 14 May 2009 issue of the London Review of Books:
Frank Kermode gets at what 21st-century Janeism is about: ‘It is said that among the television audience there were some who saw Darcy’s emergence from his pond – an event Austen omitted from her narrative – as the high point of the book’ (LRB, 30 April). And things have got worse since Andrew Davies’s 1995 serial. It is sad to think that there is a generation who, when they try to conjure Lizzy Bennet from the page, will have to fight back images of Keira Knightley pouting and pretending not to be beautiful in a mud-hemmed dress.
Janeism wasn’t always so aggressively female-friendly. Rudyard Kipling wrote the endearingly odd story ‘The Janeites’ (making the term famous) in 1924. His Janeites are not mob-capped elderly women of Bath, but soldiers and officers on the Western Front. Soldier Humberstall, invalided out of the army with a head wound, finds a way back to the front, to discover that he is only fit to be an assistant mess-waiter. He survives in the officers’ mess by being introduced into the ‘cult’ of Jane by the head mess-waiter – chalking ‘Reverend Collins’, ‘Lady Catherine de Bugg’ and ‘General Tilney’ on the battalion’s guns brings him 100 cigarettes instead of a ticking off. But being able to speak to superiors on equal terms is not Jane’s only godmotherly power. When the battery is destroyed in a barrage, Humberstall is the only survivor. After he jokingly calls the senior nurse Miss Bates – a plot twist Ian McEwan would envy – she makes room for him on the hospital train, saving his life: ‘You take it from me . . . there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.’ Endowed with such healing power, it is no wonder that Pride and Prejudice was prescribed to shellshocked soldiers, or that Churchill said it was Austen’s novels he turned to when things seemed bleak during the Second World War. So it has not always been girls sighing over Darcy’s wet shirt; Lizzy has also had her devoted boy fans. In a lecture to the women of Newnham College, Cambridge in 1911, A.C. Bradley needed no scriptwriter’s prompting to say of Elizabeth Bennet: ‘I was meant to fall in love with her, and I do.’
Kate Brayshay
Melksham, Wiltshire
18 May 2009 01:05 pm
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