Culture Shock 12.29.11: Not everything was annoying in 2011

Once again, it's time to say goodbye and good riddance to another year.

As far as years go, 2011 isn't winning any awards, but at least it isn't the end of the world. For that, we have to wait until next December, or so I'm told by people who don't really understand how calendars work.

On Dec. 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar "runs out." This uneventful event is apparently regarded as cosmically significant by people who don't realize that our own Gregorian calendar runs out every Dec. 31 — at which point it cycles back to the beginning, as it has since it was introduced in 1582, replacing the Julian calendar, which ran out with virtually identical frequency, give or take a few doomsdays.

At this point, however, if the world did end, I'd be hard pressed to say we didn't have it coming.

When I look back at 2011 and see that one of the cultural high points was the return of "Beavis and Butt-Head" to MTV, I know the pickings are pretty slim.

Still, in keeping with the spirit of the season, here are a few things that did not annoy me in 2011:

The sixth season of "Doctor Who" was the best since the show's revival in 2005, and Matt Smith firmly established himself as my favorite Doctor since Tom Baker's tenure in the 1970s.

"House" is never going to be as good as the first three seasons were, but at least the current Cuddy-free season is an improvement over last year's. Nothing against departed co-star Lisa Edelstein, but after the writers decided to have House and Cuddy get together — and then break up — her leaving was the only thing that could save the show. It has been more than 20 years since Dave and Maddie's kiss of death on "Moonlighting," yet TV writers still tempt fate.

C'est la vie.

At the movies, the best of the best was Werner Herzog's 3-D documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," which I reviewed a few weeks ago.

For superhero movies, it was a down year, with "X-Men: First Class" the best of the bunch, despite glaring flaws like January Jones' non-performance. I have higher hopes in 2012 for "The Avengers," but I'm worried about "The Dark Knight Rises," which seems dangerously close to taking the whole "taking Batman seriously" thing way too seriously.

Apart from "The Avengers," the two films I'm most anticipating are both prequels: Ridley Scott's "Alien" prequel "Prometheus," and Peter Jackson's return to Middle Earth with "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," featuring Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins. (If you're honest, you'll admit "The Hobbit" is a much better story than the bloated "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.) Speaking of Martin Freeman, he and Benedict Cumberbatch return next year for a second season of "Sherlock," the BBC's modern-day version of Sherlock Holmes, from the creative team of Mark Gatiss ("League of Gentlemen") and Steven Moffat ("Doctor Who").

The best books I read in 2011 were mostly nonfiction: "The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human" by V.S. Ramachandran and "Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark," Brian Kellow's biography of the still-influential New Yorker movie critic whose style the rest of us all lamely try to imitate.

I'll have to take an incomplete on Haruki Murakami's newly translated novel "1Q84," which I've just started and is approximately the length of the Tokyo phone directory.

And lastly, on the music front, a word of advice: If you have a chance to see thepau Alabama Shakes perform live, take it. This little band, originally from Athens — as am I, so I confess a slight bias — is probably about to hit it big, and deservedly so.

For the Shakes, 2011 wasn't a bad year at all. But 2012 will be even better.

Culture Shock 01.07.10: Say goodbye and good riddance to awful Aughts

Everyone seems happy to be done with the Aughts. But are the Aughts really, as some claim, the worst decade ever?

They certainly have the worst name. "Aught" means "zero," which should have been an early warning that the Aughts were trouble.

Still, despite 9/11, the war in Iraq and the late-decade economic collapse, the Zero Decade doesn't have anything on the 1930s and '40s, which gave us World War II, the Great Depression and the Holocaust.

The 1960s were pretty bad, too. We had riots, presidential assassinations, the Vietnam War and, worst of all, hippies — dirty, stinking hippies.

Yet when I consider just the four decades I've experienced personally, the past 10 years are definitely a contender for the worst of the lot.

In retrospect, the 1980s and '90s seem pretty boring. But the momentous events that did occur during those 20 years were, for the most part, all for the best. At the top of the list, communism collapsed, freeing millions of people from tyranny and forcing alleged stand-up comedian Yakov Smirnoff into exile in Branson, Mo.

Those were good times.

But how do the Aughts stack up against the most maligned decade of my lifetime — the 1970s?

In most respects, even the '70s look good in comparison. And that's taking into account stagflation, long gasoline lines, the Iran hostage crisis and Watergate.

And just when you thought nothing could surpass the awfulness of '70s fashions, the Aughts stepped up to the challenge. The '70s gave us leisure suits, but the Aughts gave us Crocs. And while we may have worn bell-bottoms in the '70s, at least we didn't wear them low enough to show off our boxers. (Hardly anyone wore boxers back then, anyway. It was briefs or nothing.) Also, we all knew back then how to wear a baseball cap. (Hint: the brim faces forward.)

So, no matter how badly people dressed in the '70s, at least nobody dressed like the cast of "Jersey Shore."

The '70s also used to be the target of bipartisan contempt. Republicans hated them because they're when 1960s values went mainstream. Democrats hated them because they're when 1960s values "sold out" to the Establishment.

But I prefer to think of the '70s as the last decade before sex could kill you. Love was in the air, but AIDS wasn't. Not yet. It was a simpler, sexier time when Playboy Playmates didn't all have breast implants and you could still smoke indoors. We didn't realize how good we had it.

Comparing the '70s to the Aughts, the '70s come out on top just about every time. Just compare the music: Southern rock beats "new country," rhythm and blues beats hip-hop, and disco beats techno. These are facts.

As for movies, the '70s compare favorably to every decade, not just the Aughts. Name three movies from any other era, and I'll raise you a "Godfather," a "Jaws" and a "Star Wars."

The one thing the Aughts have in their favor is television. TV during the past 10 years was better than ever before — and that's true even after you deduct points for the glut of mindless "reality" shows. During the Aughts, all of the cable channels that popped up during the '80s and '90s started to pay off, from "The Wire" and "Battlestar Galactica" to "Dexter" and "The Shield."

Technology also plays in the Aughts' favor. When the decade began, I was using a huge desktop computer with a dial-up modem. Now I carry around a broadband connection in my pocket.

But, overall, the Aughts sucked. There's no getting around it.

So, to the Aughts I say, "Goodbye and good riddance."

Bring on the Teens.

The new year is a good time to look ahead, not back

Other dates are more associated with division. There’s always some excuse to fight over the “true meaning” of Christmas, Halloween and even Columbus Day.

But while no one actively fights over it, no date reveals a greater divide than New Year’s.

That divide is between people who look forward and those who look backward. As 2007 ends and 2008 begins, we spend most of our time looking back at the year that was: who died, events that shaped the world, Time magazine’s Person of the Year. We spend a good deal less time, it seems, looking forward to trends and issues that will shape the new year and years to come.

If we spend more time looking backward than forward, that’s understandable. The past is easy. We usually know what happened even if we don’t know what it all means. The future, however, is unknowable. We can only imagine it.

Still, even if predicting the future is more difficult than reflecting on the past, that’s no excuse not to give the future a try.

Yes, as George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” History is important, obviously. But as The Amazing Criswell once said, “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” A phony, showbiz psychic has never spoken truer words.

Looking forward, beyond the short run, doesn’t come naturally to us. In fact, it’s a recent phenomenon. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have to look beyond the next hunt. And our agrarian ancestors, who came later, didn’t worry about much beyond the current growing season. As far as most people back then were concerned, the future was going to be pretty much like the past — awful. So, there was no point dwelling on it.

That didn’t really change until the early 1800s, and with good reason. According to Gregory Clark, chairman of the University of California, Davis economics department and author of “A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World,” living standards remained basically stable — and low — from our hunter-gather days through the 18th century. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution got under way in the 19th century that living standards (for some) shot up, technological advancement exploded and life spans increased.

Suddenly, the future mattered. In a big way. It’s no accident that the late 1800s saw the birth of science fiction, as seen in the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. People now had to speculate about the long term.

But before the Industrial Revolution could take hold, it needed the proper intellectual climate — one that fostered scientific discovery and entrepreneurship. That climate was the Enlightenment.

From the late 1600s through about 1800, scientists, philosophers, historians and economists — people like Isaac Newton, David Hume and Adam Smith — pushed forward the boundaries of human understanding. This was as forward-looking a group of intellectuals as the world has ever seen. By enabling the progress that followed, they helped make the rest of us in the West forward-looking, too.

Science fiction writer David Brin divides the world into forward-looking Enlightenment societies and Romantic societies, which look back to some long-ago Golden Age.

Romanticism in the 1800s was a reaction to the Enlightenment and idealized a pre-industrial bliss that never existed. Today, America still has elements of both its Enlightenment and Romantic heritages. But it’s the ratio that counts.

As we enter a new year, there is no better time to set out sights toward what is to come. We can indulge in nostalgia anytime. The past will always be there. But the future will be here before we know it.