Mixtapes for Hookers

The Mixtapes For Hookers Awesome Awards (Part 1)

While I’ll spare you some of my more esoteric ruminations on 2008, I thought I’d take a quick moment to look back at ten of the year’s more awesome individuals, who in one way or another helped make my year.

In alphabetical order, my first five picks for the 10 Most Awesome People of 2008.  (Picks six through ten will follow sometime soon.)

Cai Guo-Qiang

I made it to New York four times this year, but I still act like a tourist every time I go; I can’t help it.  Despite living just a couple of hours away for my whole life, it was always such a weird and magical place that I’m still awed every time I go.

Maybe that’s why I like when I’m in New York I like my art to be awe-inspiring, too.  This year I got to see Banksy’s amazing pet store and the so-so Home Delivery show at MoMA, both of which were probably humdrumto the average Gothamite but the scale of which was still super-exciting to my provincial New England eyes.  I was also quite taken with Cai Guo-Qiang’s I Want To Believe at the Guggenheim: cars suspended in the air, lifelike stuffed tigers pierced with arrows, paintings made by igniting gunpowder and, best of all, a mysterious, enormous fishing boat filled with broken crockery at the end.

I got so excited about the whole thing I was even briefly tempted to buy the t-shirt he designed for Gap.

Michael Cera

I must confess that I’ve only ever watched about ten minutes of Arrested Development and never got around to seeing Juno.  But I will confess that I have a giant crush on Michael Cera, the very funny and disarmingly hot actor that I first saw in Superbad.  (Well, I first saw him as the young Chuck Barris in the awesome Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but he was only thirteen at the time, so that doesn’t really count.)

He and Kat Dennings were awesome together in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, as they drove around in the dreamy kind of New York that’s full of happy teenagers and readily available parking.  Despite the fact that he’s basically a twink known mainly for trashy teen comedies, I’m totally smitten with him.

Pia Covre

A sixty-one year old Italian activist, Covre’s the founder of the Comitato per i diritti civili delle prostitute (Committee for the Civil Rights of  Prostitutes.)  This year, Rome decided that scantily-clad women were a threat to society (mainly because male drivers might get distracted and cause car accidents.)  Covre and the city’s prostitutes responded by dressing as nuns.  And in Florence, where police were cracking down on women walking down the street, prostitutes planned to respond by riding bicycles. (Not sure whether they actually went through with this or not.)

Covre’s had her hands full lately, with sex-hating ex-showgirl Mara Carfagna doing her best to rid Italy of prostitution.  I’m almost tempted to learn Italian just so I can follow this woman in the news.

Stephen Elliott

When 2008 started I promised myself I’d read at least one book a week.  And I read, um, slightly less than half of that.  But possibly the most beautifully-written book I read all year was Stephen Elliott’s 2006 novel My Girlfriend Comes To The City and Beats Me Up.  Not because I’m particularly into reading about straight people’s bondage escapades, but because the prose is mind-blowingly wonderful.  Every sentence is like a revelation, and I don’t mean it’s anything like The Secret, either.

But, you know, that was 2006 and I’m just slow to jump on that bandwagon.  And while this probably wasn’t Stephen Elliott’s biggest or most prolific year, he did take the time to release the anthology Sex For America.  Starting with a story where Dick Cheney cruises a Wyoming gun shop, the book tackles what Elliott considers the Bush administration’s eight-year war on sex.  War, torture and racism have all been glorified since 2000, but the slightest suggestion of sex outside of procreation drives people to madness, for some reason.  I reviewed the book here when I read it back in September, and some of the stories have a lot of lasting power.

Estelle

I’m not changing my mind about Kanye West, he’s still a completely annoying fool and if he were a sugary beverage for children he’d be called Douchy Juice.  But, I will say that I don’t completely hate Love Lockdown, even if he did feel the need to workshop it on his Myspace after he released it, and I certainly don’t hate American Boy, the song that united hipster blogpeople with pop radio audiences in the UK and the US.  Of course, I sort of pretend he doesn’t appear on that song, because who wants to listen to a sniveling jackass when they could be listening to the PRETTIEST LADY EVER.

Okay, not quite, but this woman is phenomenally gorgeous.  I hate to be the gay man that’s all “OMG, Lady Singer X is so pretty and her voice is gorgeous and I love her style and the way she makes everything her own,” but that’s exactly how I feel about Estelle.  American Boy, though I hate to admit it, is a great single, and Come Over (which has Sean Paul and no Kanye) is even better.

And she’s SO PRETTY I can’t stand it.  Pretty!  Prety pretty pretty!  I hope she becomes Beyonce-famous so I’ll have excuses to look at her all day, even if she’s trying to sell me DirecTV.

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