Design: The 50 Best Automotive Designs of the 00s

Lamborghini Reventon

The decade started with such excitement. As the century turned it seemed that automotive design was on the cusp as well, looking backwards with retro designs like Volkswagen’s New Beetle, Chrysler’s PT Cruiser and Ford’s GT as well as forwards with Audi’s original TT and Ford’s original Focus series.

The 00s ended with excitement too – only it was the bad kind that leads to acid reflux and no jobs. Noted Italian design firms such as Bertone and ItalDesign were hanging on by a thread, if at all. Some of the most storied brands in the automotive world were similarly imperiled or had disappeared entirely: Saab, Pontiac, Saturn, Chrysler, Dodge.

Nevertheless it was a fascinating and sometimes frustrating ten years of automotive design. Here are my favorites in no particular order. Note that I’ve included both production models and concepts in the mix.

Read more

  • Share/Bookmark

Music: The 100 Very Best Albums of the 00s

Girl Talk live

If the 80s and 90s saw music fragmenting into hundreds of tiny subcultures the 00s offered a way out – in part by destroying the very music industry machinery that encouraged such fragmentation. File sharing may have killed music but it also saved it by letting people hear thousands of songs they never would have been exposed to.It also freed musicians like M.I.A., Radiohead, and Girl Talk to make music that was as boundary-less as their audience.

Here they are, my pick for the 100 best albums of the last decade:

Best of the 00s 100-76

Best of the 00s 75-51

Best of the 00s 50-26

Best of the 00s 25-1

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
  • Share/Bookmark

Movies: The 100 Best Films of the 00’s

Children of Men

Children of Men

The decade that’s ending has the ignominy of following the 1990’s, an era that will be looked back on as a creative peak rivaling the 1970’s for cinema. This is not to say the 00’s sucked as there were some great films and wonderful talents that emerged all over the world.

Pixar proved that the Toy Story movies were merely the tip of the iceberg when it came to animation that was artistic and commercially successful. Judd Apatow may have faltered of late but he also found a way to freshen the comedy genre and inject a sometimes Cassavettes-like realism into broad can-you-top-this flicks. Superhero films were abundant but Sam Raimi with Spider-Man and especially Chris Nolan’s two Batman films showed a new level of complexity within an often two-dimensional genre.

Then there was the aftermath of 9/11 and the ongoing nightmare of the Bush presidency. The films that grappled with this best were the ones that did so obliquely, even sub-texturally. The Dark Knight comes to mind here as well with a Wall Street Journal editorial even claiming to see a vindication of Bush in the film’s vision of Batman as over-surveilling rule-breaking vigilante against an amoral enemy. Or consider the TV in the background of one of Sideways most discomfiting, riotous scenes as Paul Giamatti sneaks into the bedroom of an amorous, thieving couple while Donald Rumsfeld talks on the screen behind them.

While undoubtedly I missed a few trends here are the 100 films that I truly enjoyed this decade, in rough order of release. Let the arguing commence!

Read more

  • Share/Bookmark

Music: The Best Albums of 2009

Sky Saxon of the Seeds, who died in 2009

Sky Saxon of the Seeds, who died in 2009

So the 00’s come to an end with a whimper, not a bang. These 25 albums were all great but I’d be lying if I told you that there was another 25 I was anguished about leaving off the list. Even so Dylan, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Raekwon, Monsters of Folk, Talbot Tagora and M. Ward all just missed the cut – to name a few. It was a dismal year for hip-hop but the likes of Wale and Kid Cudi give hope to the future. Merge records celebrated their twentieth anniversary while venerable Touch and Go announced their imminent closing.

Here without further ado, were my favorite 25 albums of the year:

Read more

  • Share/Bookmark

The Internet: Independents are Online

Yes it’s my newest post on the Huffington Post. Check it out to see how to talk to an Independent voter online!

  • Share/Bookmark