short musings on "the best"

I recently got in a fight with a friend after telling him that I was going to Buenos Aires for a semester. Without hesitating, he quipped, "Oh, of course you are... Going to 'Williamsburg of the South.'" Yes, this comment reveals how incredibly wrapped up this friend is in a certain subculture of New York to even make this comment (i.e. New York "anti-Hipster" culture), but there's something deeper here: the idea of what is best? Can someone decide what is best? Who decides the "canon"?

These questions are all floating around in my head because Frankenstein is such a ridiculously good book. I had never read it until this semester, but for some reason, I just assumed, "Oh, it's one of those books you just read 'cause you're 10th grade English teacher says that it has a lot of SAT words in it." And this is fundamentally connected to the idea of Buenos Aires as one of the "best" cities in South America (sound familiar... i.e. New Yorkers claiming NYC to be the "best city in the world"?)

What I'm saying is this: there's a reason something is known as "the best," and that's not a bad thing(!). Diclaimer: this isn't always right, but it shouldn't be attacked outright. And the irony is, it's especially hard to give something known as "the best" a chance in this self-devouring Indie culture that hates something the second it gets "big."

I'll sum it up in the words of another friend, named Nick: "It pisses me off when people say their favorite Beatle is Ringo, just to be different. If your favorite Beatle is Paul, then just fucking say it."