HATE BREAK!
A preview of movies, books, music, and other ephemera originating in the 2000s
that I actually loved.
Here’s the deal: the list of stuff I hate is actually negatively affecting nearly every aspect of my being. Still, I promise to finish it (by the end of next week, even).
However, I also promise to follow it up with a run-down of materials for which I felt profound admiration and affection during the previous decade.
In the meantime, a paying gig and a weekend away from the computer are propelling me—dare I imagine?—into a new and different (albeit temporary) direction.
So peruse this quick, impromptu, off-the-top-of-my-hot-head list of 2000s stuff I dig, like, severely.
Full loving explanations and celebrations with proper outside linkage will follow, following next week’s return-to-the-”I’m so MAD!”-madness.
The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #50-41
January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. Ten years that shook the septic tank. And overflowed it.
All right, we’re halfway to the bottom. Parrr-teeee!
Ten more leaps downward, with nadirs including “foodies,” what’s become of Bill Murray, horror-comedy, Aaron Sorkin, the decimation of the word “douche”, George Clooney, and more.
Always more… ever further … lower … and lower….
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The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #60-51
January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. It was a long ten years. And sucko.
Wallow with me once more—won’t you?—through 
an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.
One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.
Come, now. Again. Then rue … forever.
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The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #80-61
January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. It was a long ten years. And sucko.
Wallow with me once more—won’t you?—through an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.
One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.
Come, now. Again. Then rue … forever.
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The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #100-81
January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. It was a long ten years. And sucko.
Wallow with me—won’t you?—through an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.
One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.
Come, now. Rue … forever.
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Worst of the 2000s: The Complete and Utter Goddamnable Castration of Mainstream Rock Music
Our ongoing look back at this dying decade’s dankest of dire nadirs.
Time was, when you added cellos, French horns, woodwinds and such to rock music, per se, you got In the Court of the Crimson King, Days of Future Passed, “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict“, and Rick 
Wakeman’s monstrous, uttterly mind-roasting King Arthur on Ice at Wembley Stadium thing.
Giants roamed the earth and stormed countless stages in those days. Giants with tubas and bassoons and, above all, engorged genitals aching to concoct racous reveries.
Then came the ’80s, when the presence of orchestral instruments produced Bourgeois fucking Tagg (two g’s, I made sure).
Hang on to you colostomy apparati and watch this video.
Seriously. Click play on that video. Watch the Bourgois Tagg. You’ve got to do it.
Then come back here and read more.
Homicidally nihilism-igniting and just plain old stinky, ain’t it?
LINKSPLOITATION: December 16, 2009
Where goeth maniacal psychedelic noir wizard Damon Packard of late? He freaked me out good and plenty a few years back by sending me his Reflections of Evil DVD out of the blue .
Worst of the 2000s: Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS
Day one of a look back at the most damnable detritus from a decade rife with 
detestable doozies.
ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)
WRITER/DIRECTOR: Cameron Crowe
CAST: Patrick Fugit, Kate Hudson, Billy Crudup, Jason Lee, Frances McDormand, Zooey Deschanel, Phillip Seymour Hoffman
Okay, let’s get one important stumbling point out of the way pronto.
Yes, formerly pubescent/permanently pudgy Rolling Stone scribe Cameron Crowe did write Fast Times at Ridgemont High, both the book chronicling his undercover investigation into late-’70s California teenage wastedness, and the screenplay for the classic 1982 film comedy upon which not enough 
praise can be heaped and which, therefore, needs no further addressing here.
Probably ever.
So Cameron Crowe does have Fast Times going for him.
That, and nothing else.
Almost Famous isn’t the most heinous Cameron Crowe crime-against-stomach-lining to date—that honor goes to Elizabethtown (a dementia-inspiring atrocity that you must not miss)—but it does perfectly embody everything despicable about this mega-drip 
whose goopy sentimentality can not even be dwarfed by his Abominable Cro-Magnon Man jaw.
Worse, and more importantly, Almost Famous perfectly illuminates the awfulness of those who don’t properly despise Cameron Crowe and all his mawkish oozing.
You know who they are: adults who see John Cusack hoist that boom-box in Say Anything and then don’t automatically erupt into lust for prison-rape (“In Your Brown Eyes”, indeed … just the brown one) or, worse, those who invoke the name “Lloyd Dobler” while reminiscing about the impossible standards the characters set for all “us guys”, haw-haw-haw.
The 2000s: Horrible Times, Wonderful Horror (Except for the Goddamned Zombies)
The Beginnings of My End-of-the-Decade McBloviations: The Internet as the Enemy, French Horror, Underground Atrocities, the Vagification of Vampires and the Death of the Living Dead.
Right about this time, ten years ago, my sphincter violently clenched shut at least a dozen times a day in response to one loathsome anti-wit after another who’d cock a phony grin and wonder aloud: “So this is the year 2000? What the heck, man? WHERE ARE THE FLYING CARS?”
And now, in retrospect, I wish I would have just let fly and exploded feces, right there on the spot, each and every time.
A knowing wink-wink and/or elbow nudge-nudge, implied or explicit, typically followed the “FLYING CARS” quip, 
and the specific punchline may have been “teleportation” on occasion, and numerous salty yuk-meisters substituted “fuck” for “heck” (prompting me, just this minute, to realize that that euphemism is actually an amalgam of “hell” and “fuck” and, therefore, our mightiest pseudo-obscenity).
But the infantile fluid-flinging was on the wall. Or more specifically, it was on the Internet, which meant it was everywhere, all the time, in everything. And then it was all anybody could talk—not talk about, mind you, just … talk.
The larger implication of the “FLYING CARS” idiocy crapping up everywhere on mass auto-repeat was the ultimate catastrophe of human communication that this miserable race has thus far devised: the internet “meme” and its attendant assaults on adult 
discourse, both spoken and written— e.g., “LOL!”, “WANT!”, “DO NOT WANT!”, “OM NOM NOM NOM!”, “OBAMA! OBAMA! OBAMA!”, and grown men punctuating sentences with smiley faces.
In keeping exactly with pronouncing the name of the department store Target as the fake en francais (and therefore fancy) “Tar-zhay”, the dribbling meme-goloid always, always presents his nugget as though he has just thought it up on the spot.
Consider phrases such as the prefix “SUCK IT, [whoever or whatever]!”, the suffix “['Go do something' or 'See you somewhere'], BITCHES!” and the grotesque incorrectness: “Glee really amazingly captures the American high-school experience.”
But … ah, Jesus Jim Caviezel Christ (there’s a timely outburst. Credit me). Who cares?
Those #$@*ing Adorable ’70s & ’80s Kids Movies
Out of the filthy mouths of babes: Remember when family fare felt incomplete without obscenity-spewing children being presented as though they were just darling as SHIT?
The Bad News Bears (1976) is nothing less than a little masterpiece (and I don’t just mean that as in “little league”), which—coming directly after the brilliant So-Cal teen beauty pageant send-up Smile (1975)—should have permanently established director Michael Ritchie as Hollywood’s 
humanist (as well as humane and maybe even just human) Robert Altman.
Alas, it is not for Ritchie’s joyfully spiky satire, flawless evocation of time and place, or his uproarious, yet wonderfully warm, humor for which The Bad News Bears is most immediately remembered.
It is for the fact that the movie’s pint-size ball-players swear like sailors or, perhaps more accurately, like actual grown-up ball-players.
