IF YOU LISTEN TO FOOLS: I'm honored to hand out this year's ALOTT5MA Pop-Cultural Moment of the Year. Before I do, we need to work on the terminology. How long, exactly, is a moment?
A moment is less than the day or two it might take a full-grown adult, assuming indifference to familial and occupational obligations, to steamroll through a book that includes 200 pages or so on the difficulty of hiding from wizards in a muddy forest.
A moment is less than the 15 hours and 3 minutes it took a baseball team to delight its fans, the association of senile broadcasters, and absolutely nobody else.
A moment is less than the span of time it takes a white executive to reenact an entire group therapy session for racial sterotypes.
I'm not sure how long it takes to get rescued and go into the future and get all melancholy about wanting to crash on a deserted island with a bunch of pretty-but-damaged people, but I'm fairly certain that a moment is less than that. For that matter, it's also less time than it takes for an entire control room to fill with water and redeem a loathsome hobbit.
One might say that it only takes a moment for a person to shave one's head and kick-start an entirely new class of celebrity crazy and an entire year of celebrity jaily-lawsuity-ness, but to paraphrase Whistler: that kind of act may seem only to take a moment, but in fact it takes a lifetime of crazy.
Might a lingering glance, like FNL's Jesse Plemons imploring Mrs. Coach not to ask the follow-up question or Adrianne Palicki hating or pitying Lyla Garrity for her philandering father, be captured in a moment? Perhaps, but it doesn't matter.
That's because this category is easy. Whether a moment lasts a split-second or an entire year, the defining pop-culture moment of 2007 occurred when Steve Perry abruptly stopped singing, the family abruptly stopped eating, and Tony Soprano's story abruptly stopped. Some said that he was killed, some said he was doomed to a lifetime of sphincter-clenching tension (and it certainly was one of the tensest scenes I can remember), and some (I) said that it was neither -- just a meta commentary on the end of the story. Whatever it was, it resonated, in print, on the Interwebs, and around the water cooler. If I remember nothing else about music, television, film, literature, periodicals, web sites, advertainment, or found pornography in 2007, I will remember how hard I laughed when the screen went dark.
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