Michael Musto on 2000-2009

Happy 2010, my noodles. I just treated myself to some banana bread and coffee at El Biet on Bedford, and then sat and read the paper! Heaven! Okay, usually “the paper” in my life is The New York Times. Today, however, it was The Village Voice. I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Musto’s essay on the end of the year and the decade. He talks a bit about how privacy and good old tact went bye-bye in the last few years. He begins:

The Naughty Aughties are over, and I’m LMFAO. It will be remembered, if at all, as the decade of the TMI generation. The 15-second fame gang. The micromanaging maniacs. The attention-whoring-for-lunch bunch. The iPhone, iPod, iMac, IMAX, and eye-lift folks. The people who have already forgotten this paragraph.

Breaking news about every possible global brain fart was instantly accessible, and you spent most of your time sneaking a peek down at your BlackBerry to read it during intimate dinner dates. Everyone was a star, a critic, and a victim, and—as traditional media dwindled and reshaped—they were journalists, too, from the guy who dressed like a pimp to entrap ACORN to the man with a camera who got tossed out of Gypsy when Patti LuPone screamed, “Who do you think you are?”

Social networking became the way to catch up with old friends you’d avoided for years and to tell the world about your latest mood swings, moviegoing experiences, and bathroom achievements. Even celebrities—who’d long built up a wall of privacy by hiding behind lying publicists—couldn’t help Tweeting their every thought, caught up in the universal need to connect, to emit, to admit, and to bore.

Read the rest of it here.