that cruise ship in italy

speaking out of complete ignorance, i strongly suspect that Carnival Cruise Lines is guilty of big time negligence with their boats. this saga of vilifying and ridiculing the captain of the ship is legitimate because that guy's a coward and grossly irresponsible. he's emBARRASSING.

but that ship had thousands of people on it! it was fucking gigantic! this story is doubtless bigger than a story about italian profanity and duty but that cruise ship company has a vested interest in making sure it stays about one little sissy man. i mean, really, if all it took was one blundering sissy to topple that ship so catastrophically that guy was meticulously incompetent. it's a big enterprise. there were more than a thousand crew members on that boat. this is a sissy-ass irresponsible COMPANY in all likelihood.

aaaaaaggghhh

Seth Stevenson's criticism of advertising is painfully uncritical. he wrote this article about Crispin Porter + Bogusky, an ad agency that got huge in the 2000s producing ads that targeted bros. Stevenson hated their campaign for Burger King: "its raunchy, bro-focused vibe rubbed me all the wrong ways, targeting the lowest common denominator...[their] campaigns valued provocation above substance and casual cruelty above inclusiveness." Their ads were sexist and prurient and gross; they didn't have Stevenson's values.


But values and "inclusiveness" are a pretty weird way to talk about an ad agency. Ad agencies don't have values. They sell stuff. You don't have values if your marketing campaign for Burger King is full of wholesome signifiers; you're exploiting wholesomeness for profit. It's kind of the opposite, actually.


God bless Crispin Porter & Bogusky for siccing themselves on one demographic that was, culturally, asking for it -- for the disgusting ads they produced for the disgusting food they loved. When Stevenson wails about how Burger King "could potentially find solid customers among women, children, and men who don’t wear Ed Hardy T-shirts," what kind of moron thinks ads for children bespeaks care for children?  Ads for children are the height of soulless, treacherous capitalism! Young children can't even distinguish ads from other kinds of programming! You evil fool, Seth Stevenson!


Stevenson, who watches ads professionally for Slate, has evidently seen too many of them to remember that they're not just entertainment. They're things to sell stuff to people, which entertainment makes easier.


He closes his article by discussing Crispin's "wholesome" transformation. They're doing a campaign for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It's got little kids in it, it's real fucking cute, and Stevenson is pleased. Good to know he sleeps well at night knowing children are loving unhealthy, world-destroying food just as much as they can. AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGG

let there be a race. let there be a rat race, even. but let there be one uniform, one track and one starting time. and let there be one breakfast beforehand and one, great parent in the stands.

but this "race" alone is a terrible metaphor because let there also be one training schedule. some people are definitely stupider or lazier or stupider and lazier than other people, but let there be a truly gigantic stadium for this race, one with a gravity greater than homes. let there be no inheritances.

america fucking sucks

This talk of red lines and the Straits of Hormuz and terrifyingly everyday chatter about battle plans against swarms of armed Iranian speedboats is really upsetting me. This country of mine has got to stop making war on everybody. It's also got to stop being so damnably hypocritical. The US is obsessed with the idea that Iran is "rogue" and "opaque" and it's come to the point where this fucking country doesn't believe Iran has any reason at all, no instinct of self preservation. Everything it does is understood as Israel-swallowing crazy Muslim shit and never understood in the context of the constant nuclear threats against it.

One major absurdity underpinning the tension and terror is the insistence that Israel and the West can have nuclear weapons and they can't. It's not a crazy idea, Israel and the West are democracies and don't have a  tradition of threatening to obliterate countries. But wait, they do! This apocalyptic relationship might've been started by Iran (or not, I'm not sure), but it's definitely a give and take these days. I remember during the 2008 US election John McCain sang an insane ditty "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of Barbara Ann by the Beach Boys. Because it's the Beach Boys it's hard for us to realize that this is a preposterous and terrifying normalization of making war on Iran by a guy who represents a solid half of the United States. Iran may call us the great satan and have press releases in that tight, priestly rhetoric of third world dictatorships, but they only do it that way because they don't have our rich pop music tradition. Also, it's a kind of self defense to seem crazy (an explicit strategy of North Korea) when powerful Americans sing about taking you back to the stone age.

THEY'RE JUST LIKE US. THEY'RE RATIONAL. THEY AREN'T GOING TO CLOSE THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ BECAUSE IT'D BE ECONOMIC SUICIDE AS WELL AS ACTUAL BECAUSE WE'VE GOT A SPANKING ENORMOUS MILITARY AND A TRADITION OF HORRIFICALLY INHUMANE WAR MAKING (SEE JAPAN AND THE ONLY TIME ANY COUNTRY HAS BEEN EVIL ENOUGH TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS)

I haven't justified a conclusion of mine because I don't know enough and this is short and facile, but we have no more right to nuclear weapons than Iran. We just got here first and now we're bullying them. We should offer to get rid of all nuclear weapons anywhere near Iran, maybe just all of our nuclear weapons, with IAEA inspectors checking on us, in exchange for them dropping their program and letting in IAEA inspectors.

for whom the bell tolls

i've been reading for whom the bell tolls and it's almost embarrassing because every nincompoop approaches you and tells you what a good book it is and doesn't remember anything about it. they're right though. pilar in particular is a pretty fascinating character, she's so profoundly bitter and mean sometimes and i can't grasp it but i believe in it. it's impressive to call forth all this complexity and pain and those insoluble struggles for which there's only the hope one will stop thinking so much. robert jordan calls himself "a windy bastard" because of all that dangerous thinking and i've thought of that really often. 

it makes me want to be back in school, i want to write a paper about language in the book, about a story where the protagonist speaks and thinks in different languages and the occasional breach of that divide and the significance of all those "thees" and "thous." i was just reading a passage where a character gets a bit longwinded in denouncing another and everyone practically falls over in the agony of listening to him. not that it's boring or tedious, but that he's a bureaucracy in a man. he also just talks too much. there's a kind of fragility in the laconicism of the rest of them; there's a lot they don't talk about because they could die for something that doesn't even begin to exist. the "republic" is all the less real every time they invoke it for every good thing. one can't talk much about such things because losing faith would be so easy because they're so perilously unreal.

and many other things too

NYU's 2031 Plan

This evening Community Board 2 moderated the first public hearing on NYU's 2031 plan. The hearing was planned to happen at the NYU architecture building on LaGuardia Place but an overflowing crowd, kept out by fire regulations, made themselves known by banging on the windows and chanting. Nothing makes a very young man cringe like the political activism of people who could be his parents; I felt the character of my generation, embarrassed and yearning for some decorum during The Man's powerpoint presentation. 

The hearing was moved to the basement of Our Lady of Pompeii Church to make room for everyone. An unofficial count had the crowd at 500 people. There the NYU presenters did their best to be monotonous, for the success of the 2031 plan depends on boring the populace into acquiescence. And zoning laws can do that. But when the slides started sprouting buildings everyone came to life. 2031 calls for four gigantic buildings, all as tall as the tallest neighboring buildings, all promising at least twenty years of destruction, construction and no access to the public spaces that make the area a place to live. 

Still, NYU proposed the expansion of some public spaces and the inclusion of a public school and a playground in the proposed building where the Morton Williams supermarket is now, clear concessions to irate neighbors. But speaker after speaker invoked a rich history of NYU's alleged broken promises. They claimed the plan laid out is a best case scenario, that it's a deal with a university famously forgetful about nice things not notarized. "They lie. They lie. They lie" said a very sincere looking woman.

Worse, all of these buildings were shaded red with infringements on current zoning laws that ensure you can still see the sky with your head not tilted 90° up. "The rules exist for a reason" thumped Andrew Berman. If these buildings are built there will be less sky, less ground and less green. Several NYU professors claimed 2031 is no good for NYU; new buildings that will drive away NYU professors by destroying their quality of life is not the savviest way to attract new professors.

It's difficult to wage a fight against the new, one can seem huffy and reactionary and mired in the past. After all, NYU is a growing university and a center of culture and smart people, and it brings an awful lot of money to Greenwich Village. But the fact is that NYU doesn't need to perpetrate 2031 on the Village; the Financial District is clamoring for NYU development. The sites in question in there are two subway stops away from the rest of NYU's campus. Few people live in the Financial District, the place exists as a thing to be swallowed, a place validated by the disappearance of its public space. A park in the Financial District is fallow land, a failure of some colossal entity to claim that earth and that sky for its corporate might. It's a place for NYU. Stop it from building more in Greenwich Village, for its own sake.

Rocky

Rocky is pretty much the worst movie in the world. Nothing has ever been more bogus. Never has the American Dream looked a more monstrous charade.

I'm also disgusted by how Apollo Creed is made into this decadent and corrupt anti american. Having him pervert the mantle of Washington and Uncle Sam and be smart and handsome and care about his hair reminds me of the black carpet baggers in Gone With the Wind. It's part of a racist tradition of claiming America for the white man.

And the stuff with women! The beginning, with Rocky as Saint Francis of Assisi is fucking intolerable. And the speech to the 12 year old about being a whore! And the textbook sexual assault in his apartment! This movie is fucked up!

I've been thinking a lot about boxing lately, and one thing that stands out to me as proof that it's kind of the worst thing in the world is the idea of taking a punch. It's the most sickening valorization. Maybe this is just something in popular culture, but the jab's associated with this ignobility. The real man in the ring throws gigantic punches and gets his nose broken 300 times and Alzheimer's when he's 40. It's a savage and hideous thing.

I really wish Rocky had run more with Butkus the dog, nothing would undermine the idiotic achievements of Rocky's workout routine than the impatient panting of a dog alongside him, tireless and oblivious. You can have the biggest, smelliest most sexually aggressive muscles in the world, but you still can't outrun your ugly-ass dog.

YO RENT SHIT!

I want stores where you rent stuff to come back.
I want those stores to come back because they'd have to have quality stuff in them because they wouldn't just be pawning it off on some sorry-ass consumer who bought it in a frenzy and then forgot it when it wasn't new or because they only needed or wanted it briefly.
I want to see a study on how frequently people even touch the stuff they have in their houses.
The number of private storage facilities in the United States is fucking nuts and tragic. We are cripplingly burdened with cheap, broken, forgotten stuff.
I want to not throw out all my stuff like everyone else every time I move.
I want to have the community those bike collective hippies have, but for all kinds of stuff. I want mad neighborliness to be felt because the waffle iron's been used by everyone you know.
I watched a video of Jacques Pepin making a French omelet and talking about how he had the perfect omelet pan when he was younger. The pan, he explained, was only perfect because he ate so many omelets. The cast iron was horrifically sticky at the start; the flux of grease made it what it was. But eventually Pepin's diet improved and his pan got sticky and he's too old to be breaking in pans. That pan is dead. But what if there were institutions to pass down pans, to ensure a gloriously greasy lineage for all time? Remember the bitter tears of the Toy Story toys, forgotten in their bin! Stuff wants using! Disuse is abuse!

Yo, there's much more to this I'm sure but this is all I've got for now. The essence of it is that I want to not be forced to buy stuff in the first place. I'm going for that Feng Shui thing of trying to own just a hundred objects, but it's much more political than feel good aesthetics.

grand illusion

jean renoir loved people so much and so subtly and intelligently. grand illusion's got so much in it, many of the scene's are really vignettes about class and ethnicity, and they're all so GOOD! there's working class parisian marechal chewing the fat with the working german cow. there's that immortal clown, singing like my grandma  there's boeldieu, who reminds me a lot of my brother in law michael, with that impenetrable charm and nobility. one can't even say thank you to that guy. renoir the humanist! most exalted humanist!

and war! manmade war! one thing that really isn't in this movie is the ugliness of war, grand illusion is circumspect about it, refracting it through the monocles of great aristocratic talkers.

People ache to be kind. they give you harmonicas and never want to shoot -- what am i saying, this is a preposterous war movie, an exceedingly narrow slice of a war rotten through with sentimentality, but that rottenness, those contradictions that bog down victory or defeat in universal human love, are the only hope. put that way it sounds unforgivably soppy, but that's definitely my fault and not the movie's.



my father suggested i write something for the westview about world of video. i think it's a terrific idea, that place is my happiness in this neighborhood.

the conformist

This was another beautiful movie. It's full of daring symbolism, of shots crammed relentlessly with meaning, of two peoples' faces lit blue because their relationship is blue, of fascists carrying fascist sculptures that take the place of their heads, of a man flashing red in the night. It's still incredibly elegant though.

Though there are big problems when the references get more specific. The invocation of Plato's cave thing was hopelessly clunky and the Caesar murder, if you actually think about Caesar, was a gorgeous thing shoehorned in for the gravitas. And the dream he recounts just before! What strenuously poetic obviousness!

I came out of it reeling, feeling I'd seen an exquisite commentary on the agonies of complicity in an evil world where one simply has to advance in one's career. And it definitely is exquisite and explicit about how Italy hadn't (hasn't) come to terms with its fascist citizenry. But it's also got a lot it doesn't live up to. My mom said that when it came out it was hugely provocative, the sort of thing she was told she wasn't old enough to see. But now, the bisexuality and the inner struggles all seemed pretty contrived to her.

I can't really reject that. A signal drama in the movie, the relationship between the conformist and the blonde one, with all their sadistic, tortured passion, is something I've been taught to believe in by movies like The Night Porter, but perhaps that stuff is better left to metaphors; their relationship is reasonably fleshed out and so ends up begging (beggaring?) belief. But I'm not that kinky (I like to wrestle?), especially not ideologically, so perhaps I'm not one to judge. And that she's bisexual seems like cheap thrills, maybe. But I'm super ready to be persuaded otherwise.

But the dancing! And Manganiello, my happiness! And that scene with the bisexuality IS the sexiest thing I've ever seen! And the ineffable moments by the window of the car! And his confession! And I think his way of dealing with that childhood trauma, that whole last minute saga, was neat and thought provoking. And Italo, the blind man! That guy was a gold mine of jokes about fascism. He was pretty splendid, poor fellow. Yo, this movie's worth seeing.

Days of Heaven

i just watched days of heaven. i feel happy and peaceful. that was a beautiful and enormous movie. the train smoking at dusk, the otherworldly clouds, the apocalyptic and tedious munching of little insects, "the water that looks ghostly in the sun on a cold clear day"or something like that, Richard Gere's guileless face with those two teeth peeking like the handsomest rabbit.

One plain old achievement of this movie is refusing to send up an interpretation of itself. The thing contains multitudes; it's pretty well irreducible. The world is full of so many things and they are all sincere in their angst and passion and wrath. In the criterion magazine someone wrote something about Sam Shepard being a ghost, a wisp of emotions about the windows, and it's super true and it's a beautiful thing.

One weird thing is how the relationship begins. Maybe it's just masterfully boot-footed and understated, but it's weird how their dreams of a better life shoehorn her and them into that house. I guess I expected Gere's character to be a more classical man with all the attendant oafish pride. But he just ends up a humbly ignoble fellow.

It IS gorgeous, gosh golly gee that was fucking beautiful.

love,
frank

yo rick santorum is the worst person in the world

yo fashion is super bogus. there is a relatively new rhetoric in the fashion industry about having stuff for a long time, about durability, even. there's lots of terms for this, the most disgusting being "investment pieces." but i'd love to track all the "must have" shit that gets named, all the stuff so necessary for this or that occasion. it's the minutiae of appropriateness that sinks everything. yo you GOTTA have this hat for all golf outings, and this suit for traveling. there isn't some fat closet being advocated, just readiness for all these important occasions in a life. i guess it's like the lifestyle, sneaky way of telling people to buy mad shit. anything becomes absurdly necessary if you look at it in a sufficiently narrow context. like, yo my wardrobe's super lacking for syrian weddings or skydiving in autumn.

i'm listening to a conversation with my dad about marriage i recorded. i need a less derisive voice. this is unrecognizable and super weird. it rises and falls in relentless condescension. this is pretty revelatory.