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My Year 2010: Shadows

Douglas Messerli

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In Douglas Messerli's 11th volume of his ongoing cultural memoirs, which began with the turn of the 21st century in 2000, the author contextualizes events of the year as having fallen into the shadows. Messerli had hoped for a sunnier volume representing, perhaps, a reality more similar to the belle époque of the previous century as opposed to a year mired in political turmoil and financial difficulties that he found. Many filmmakers, dramatists, and authors, Messerli noted, turned to the past wherein they found similar dilemmas, worlds that seemed as if they should be cloaked in golden possibilities, but where, instead, its citizens lived in the shadows of fear and even terror. If there seemed to be a glow it the sky, it emanated not from the sun but from the banks of gathering fires such as those the wide-eyed young Tootie discerned on Halloween night in the turn-of-the-century-based American musical film Meet Me in St. Louis, or from the dangerous outbursts of flame threatening the citizens of Max Frisch's small town in The Firebugs. Even the gods were consumed by fire in a new Los Angeles production of The Ring Cycle, while total human extermination faced the pre-Flood folks of Karl O. Knausgaard's Biblically-inspired fiction A Time for Everything. Bombs threatened the lives of everyone in The Hurt Locker, and "vast political, psychological, and sexual dilemmas loomed over the glorious Spanish court" of Verdi's Don Carlo. The returning soldiers of Stein's Brewsie and Willie, reinterpreted in a moving new drama performed in a Los Angeles highrise, feared for their futures upon returning to the US after their experiences in Europe in World War II. Even the blessed golden-haired baseball hero, Mickey Mantle, faced his last years with the recognition of his years of neglect of both his family and his own personal health. While so much pointed in the direction of joy and pleasure, life in 2010 was revealed to be a much darker affair.

Even the author's memories of life in his home city of Los Angeles, while bringing to light some of his pleasures, awards, and celebrations in that golden paradise, revealed also a series of riots, earthquakes, and mistaken choices.

Editor of Sun & Moon Press and, currently, Green Integer, Messerli was named Officier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and was awarded The American Book Award and ALTA Award for his publishing. His My Year volumes have been praised by critics and fellow writers throughout the world for their lively recreation of the culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Messerli has now completed these volumes through 2015, and is currently working on the 2016 collection.