On a wing and a prayer in 2010
Seriously? Jon Gosselin and Aling Dionisia as household names? Noynoy Aquino and Erap running for president? 2009 must have socked us in the face good.
I think we all blacked out somewhere between Ashton Kutcher leading us into a communication revolution within 140-character confines and the trailers for Ang Darling Kong Aswang. It’s only now that we’re waking up to find that the skanky socialite species has somehow retrogressed into what is now known as the Kardashian and, holy shit, did I really line up for New Moon?
A last word on the vampire… maybe
It was a year that sucked, undoubtedly. And as if you haven’t had enough cultural correspondents telling you already, the suckery went well with the vampire’s sucking on the zeitgeist. With a high death toll in 2009 that included our pristine perception of Tiger Woods as well as the near-death of the dollar and the First Marriage (Manny and Jinkee’s, of course), all the pretty vampires made quite the deathly distraction from it all.
Reminded of the world’s mortality through natural calamity, mourning our own through famous funerals televised and tweeted, and being both witness and accomplice to culture’s decline through reality TV (thanks for a great year, Heidi and Spencer!), it was hard not to fall under a vampire’s trance or “glamour,” as they say in HBO’s True Blood; to embrace the dark decadence of being undead. Consider then Tru Blood orange soda, Twilight cosmetics lines, and more and more of Stephenie Meyer’s bloody-bad literary kind part of the damage incurred by humanity’s latest escape outlet. And with pop priestess Lady Gaga easing her latex-wrapped body out of a space-age coffin, don’t expect fang fatigue anytime soon.
“I can feel your halo”
You could say the past year was like a continual screening of The Final Destination — who’s next on Death’s shit list? What’s next? What else have you got, 2009? But just when you started to think the end of this century’s first decade was starting to look a lot like the End of Days, there seems to be a golden light seeping from where 2010 is.
At the dawn of a new decade, it sure feels like we can do away with our coping mechanisms and get back on a sturdy hoping mechanism. Already, the word “crisis” is starting to sound foreign, especially with the Obama camp declaring the recession pretty much over. And then there’s Efren Peñaflorida and his CNN Hero of the Year award, which, apart from the ubiquity of frozen yogurt, was the year’s saving grace, reminding us of what the Filipino is capable of apart from being able to tolerate Kris Aquino. Even under-the-influential Lindsay Lohan, whose one act of sacrifice this year was going easy on penis, shows more of the new year’s promise by “doing something real” and shooting a doc on impoverished children in India.
Of course, as whatever’s yanking at the trainer bras of tweens ends up reflecting the times and determining our fates (see Twilight), what might soon arise is an attraction to angels. That’s right, the winged messengers of God may just triumph over love-muzzled vampires. Take the Young Adult novel Fallen, for example, which retains the fangirl formula of different girl-meets-way-different-boy, except that instead of an abstaining vampire with glittery skin, you’ve got a fallen angel with shimmery wings. Set in a small, somber town? Check. Prose that’s gold to li’l goth chicks? Check. Strange love triangle? You know it, but the hundred-year squabble between two angels for the protagonist’s affections is more a plot-check of The Vampire Diaries. And ‘cause onscreen flight will soak more heart panties than the tree-climbing Edward did to impress Bella, Disney just bagged the film rights to the Lauren Kate-penned four-book series.
But why angels, you say? Well, if two years ago, you’d told me some fangless vampire-playing dude named RPattz would be hounded at urinals by horny, middle-aged moms, I probably would have said, “What kind of a name is RPattz?” Now, signs of the angels’ coming are imminent, beginning with queen of the damned herself, Anne Rice, getting all spiritual with her new novel, Angel Time. And with archangels-at-the-apocalypse fantasy-thriller Legion swooping into theaters in January, looks like we’ll be seeing a lot more salvation via celestial being.
Surrendering from the dread of humanity — and thus, loving us some vampire — may prove to be so last year. Besides, after 2009, you wouldn’t mind a guardian angel now, would you?
