The present is 88 miles per hour, not a second faster or slower. Question is: how can long can you maintain the DeLorean, balancing on that precipice between past and future? When one slight itch of the gas pedal leads you into some interminable trajectory away from either?
Read this article. Then tell me whether it is paranoid of me to suggest that we start up a trust fund to buy and distribute 24,000 copies of “1984″. Or that the parallels between Himmler’s “SS” - basically a secretive Army within an army - would be a paranoid connection. Or when Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for being a poet. I can imagine Ginsberg, if he were still alive, writing a poem about how Sept. 11 emasculated America. And then some Fortune 500 accountant carts him off to a Gulag while he goes home to his white picket fence.
“One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation-and what their role might be.” And when I read that line, I’m reminded of the Jews who’d usher their peers into gas chambers, for the reward of a few more weeks before their turn.
Freedom isn’t free. But it’s not that you have to work for it. You have to conform to it.
Theroux’s Weird Weekends is some of the best, and most fucked, TV I’ve seen. I’ve watched all the ones I can find, and would have to say in order of fucked, these are the ones to watch:
1. Thai Brides
2. Westboro Baptist Church
3. Swingers
4. San Quentin
5. Neo Nazis
6. Vegas
7. Porn Industry
8. Legal Nevada Brothels
The first three are there because they strike me as people doing something patently wrong; something hideously unnatural. I’m sure that Theroux is, like me, not exactly prudish, but I share his sentiment when he encountered the Orgy Room at a swinger party: a nightmarish, writhing cacophony of flesh; not so much DH Lawrence as HP Lovecraft. The Thai Brides episode seems to take all the detritus of society, the aggregate oppurtunity cost of our post-Aryan gleaming refridgerator white culture of affluence, grind it up, and bake into a turd-flavoured Big Ben Pie of Despair. San Quentin is a purgatory; it’s between worlds, full of not-quite dead, not quite living souls, who are so lost as to make limbo their home, so without reference to anything outside their own inherited guilty conscience that they find it easier to do the time then commit to either heaven or hell. The Westboro Baptist Church is a concentrated anti-matter nugget of pure crazy that’s just been thrown in a supercollider inside a DeLorian from the future. Vegas is a place where friends are knife-recepticles and a smile costs several million dollars, where the thrill of the win costs more than the thrill of owning of your own home. And surprisingly enough the porn industry and the legal brothels don’t really bother me so much. The only difference between the brothel and San Quentin is in the decor and the subtly of despair. The porn industry is something I guess I’m so desensitised to; it’s like your redneck neighbours who kick their dogs; it’s terrible, but meh.
So yeah, watch Louis Theroux.
What we have here is half a thought. It’s critically hailed as a literary text, poetically told. The lingering shots, the lighting, scenery, weather. It’s pretty and interesting and reflective and moody. Good things. But it is not extended, and seems kinda… nailed down by it’s narrative. It wants to soar away to vistas. But we end up with Brad Pitt. I feel like I am watching a film which has been better expressed before. I keep wanting to watch Dead Man again.
I think we need to have a version of Lord of the Rings as a Western. Legolas: “Do you ever wish you were the moon?”. Sauron telling his Ringwraiths: “And I want that pinto back”. I would buy the DVD.
Juno suffers from hyper-conformity, a condition which affects hipsters who struggle with their desire for individuality, but conform anyway. Don’t fight it. Just turn the pretentiousness down from 11 and stop thinking so hard. Be the calm ocean!