What will live on from the '00s? Something bold, something open-ended, something New Jersey

December 31, 2009|By Christopher Borrelli, TRIBUNE REPORTER

What remains?

What lasts?

Some game-changing aesthetic movement? Or just a cheap flourish? A handful of grim images from a grim TV series? Or Aretha's gargantuan gray flannel bow of a hat at President Barack Obama's inauguration? A book? Or a single movie? A single line in a single movie ("Gretchen, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen" -- "Mean Girls")? The way a vainglorious rapper crouches in close to the stage, the microphone taut in his hands, pleading humility, begging his mother's forgiveness? Or a Chicago-trained comedian with a '50s swoop of company-man hair, speaking truthiness to power, a few feet from a fuming president?

The final ear-splitting rupture between an Oklahoma matriarch and her daughter, after three hours of familial evisceration? Or the stillness of the audience around you when that last sad inch of air gets sucked from the room?

Ask yourself tonight, at midnight: Of all the cultural milestones of the past decade that swam in your head, or were beaten into it, or even became the very ether you breathe -- Kanye, Colbert, "Mean Girls," "August: Osage County," whatever -- what will retain any significance decades from now?

A century from now?

What really sticks?

Set aside ego ("I was there when Radiohead packed Grant Park!") and reviews, ubiquity and bold pronouncements, and it's alarming how little sticks. Of the billions (trillions?) of songs and books and talk shows and video games and ballets and palate-altering menu innovations that a decade encompasses, it all collapses into a few flickering pins of light.

It always does.

Just watch.

Many years from now, when this decade has been picked-over and pulverized and smoothed out, defined by a few inevitably glib reference points and given its final shape, when it has been reinvented and remembered as something simpler (something we would not recognize), when it has been vivisected and stripped of everything that meant anything these past 10 years, how will this first decade of the 21st century be remembered?

The '20s are flappers and "The Great Gatsby"; the '30s are those stalwart Joads; the '40s are Glenn Miller and Tennessee Williams and the Jitterbug; the '50s are Elvis and bobby socks; the '60s are the Beatles and Andy Warhol; the '70s are "Star Wars" and disco; the '80s are fingerless lace gloves and Schwarzenegger; and the '90s are flannel shirts and "Seinfeld." But this past decade, which never did receive a proper moniker, these '00s?

What will carry its torch? "The Great Gatsby," keep in mind, published in 1925, was initially declared a disappointment, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, now synonymous with the '20s, soon slid from memory, only to be canonized after his death in 1940.

Often the tallying of an epoch is simpler -- unfairly or not, the most popular artist or masterwork becomes that decade's iconic bearer, with time and obscurity burying 90 percent of the rest, a handful of moments and images and artists representing what was almost certainly a much larger, more varied pool. Other times it takes generations for the contour of a decade to reveal itself.

What the '00s have burdened us with, though, is not the absence of a potential shape -- culturally, geopolitically, we lived a dark, disruptive summer blockbuster, arranged in three harrowing acts, from the spectacularly epic problems introduced in the first act, to the prolonged, mistake-laden struggle that dominated the second act, to the anxious, open-ended non-resolution of these final moments, a cliffhanger, with no clear sequel.

The trouble, rather, is that we see that shape plainly and still wonder what we are looking at. The '00s were one of those decades that will be considered transformative -- technologically transformative, certainly.

For the past few weeks, no matter where you looked, you have been told that the decade has forever changed the way we will listen to music, or watch TV, or read a book, and that is all correct. But it's not the image of a TiVo, the blue Facebook banner or even an iPod that will dominate that highlight reel of the future.

Tech is just a vessel.

Not that technology didn't define the art itself at times -- you could find the rabbit-hole structure of the Internet buried in the splintered frame of a TV series like "Lost," or its obsessiveness in the pop reference-loaded prose of Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"; a major new genre, the viral video, would never have existed without YouTube; the most influential new publisher of the decade, McSweeney's, founded by Illinois son Dave Eggers, gravitated to the fractured syntax of the Net and found its home there.