2014: good riddance. And yet, we at TNI feel compelled to celebrate a series of things that happened superlatively this year. Otherwise what would be the point of having a magazine in December? If cultural institutions never anointed things best of the year, how would we know what to buy for Christmas, how would we know how to feel guilty for our cultural under-consuming all year, and, most importantly, how could we fully inhabit the sheer repetitive horror of spectacularly cyclical time? If culture, current events, and even our personal lives (shoutout to Facebook's year in review!) weren't flattened into digestible, summarizable units of time, units without any real continuity across their boundaries, units that accrue slowly as debt in our bones, organs, and muscles until their payment comes due in our inevitable deaths, how would we understand our relation to art, culture, ideas, and politics?
Without further ado, let's find out who's won a golden banana in the 2014 TNI Awards!
Omen of the Year: The pope's peace doves attacked by a crow, January 26th
Best New Online Media Start-Up of the Year: Racket Teen
Vine of the Year:
Best Dead Celebrity That People Pretended to Have Always Cared about Immediately after They Heard about Their Death of the Year: The New Republic.
Burn of the Year: "Igloo Australia"
Affix of the Year: infra-. It was a great year for "infra-" this year. People couldn't stop adding "infra-" to nouns of all sorts.
Best Thing That Happened in December Right Before the Publication of This Listicle and Which Might Not Have Been So Awarded Had It Happened in March of the Year: Meet me in Temecula as Twitter Beef of the Year
Year of the Year: 1948. It was a really great year for 1948 this year. No one could forget its dramatic events nor its often wild personae. 2014 will almost certainly go down in history at the year of 1948.
Best Zombie Apocalypse of the Year: Clinton/Bush for President, 2016
Jumpsuit of the Year:
Romantic Comedy of the Year:
Preposition of the Year: Through. Edging out among and about for its ability to evoke complex connections in a year of great dialectical flux
Album of the Year: Loath though TNI is to go along with a critical consensus, moribund though the mainstream critical community may be, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. With its combination of technical innovation, political significance and musical genius, TNI can't help but announce U2's Songs of Innocence as the album of the year.
Correction of the Year:
And there you have it, another year consigned to the dust heap of history! Until next year's coup de grace, comrades!
