Brutalism’s often taken as a communist idiom, I think that’s largely an epiphenomenon of it being an eastern european idiom. There was a Polish church in my hometown that did some great things with stark concrete and stained glass. They more recently clad it in stone and added a niche and statue, which I think was a downgrade.

The place smelled of what I took as holiness, and maybe attributed to the holy water fonts. When I was in LA I noticed an office building in the same style with the same smell, so maybe it was just some fungus or something that thrived on such surfaces. (Ironically I think the building might’ve been owned and used by the Foursquare Church - it was adjacent to Sister Aimee’s original temple.)

It’s funny that so many of the canonical Polish jokes (screen doors on submarines, ejection seats on helicopters) focus on poor material design when Poland, and the whole region really, has such a strong engineering tradition.

I went to the Corning Museum of Glass once. It was the worst museum layout I’ve ever seen - exhibits were stashed in spurs and loops off the natural traffic flow such that they were very easy to miss, exhibits near the entrance made reference to terms and processes that wouldn’t be explained until much deeper inside. There were a lot of beautiful figurative and geometric glass sculptures. Puzzlingly, the overwhelming majority were tagged as coming from Czechoslovakia. Puzzling until, right near the end of the walking loop, it was explained that non-representative glass sculpture was the only artistic medium not subjected to regime controls.

As far as I know eastern europe might have an equally strong humanities tradition, it’s just that how many different Slavic languages would you have to learn to appreciate more than a small fraction of it?

jakke:

ericmortensen:

jomc:

• Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe
• Nine Inch Nails - Head Like A Hole

Alt dl: http://www34.zippyshare.com/v/4428136/file.html

Very nice! 

See also:

• Nine Inch Nails - The Hand That Feeds (Allypitty Classical Mix)
• Nine Inch Nails vs Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood
• Nine Inch Nails - Discipline (Bubba ReBuild)

Oh my goodness this is such a winning combination I can hardly deal with it.

THE FATHERLAND IN MOURNING
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO
has unexpectedly died

The Poet-Soldier departed at 8:30 last night at his workbench - The
King and Duce notified - The body dressed in uniform of the General of Aviation

Intense grief in Italy and abroad

I’ve honestly run text from so many zentropista pictures into Google Translate that I’ve accidentally taught myself basic Italian and French literacy.

I’ve always prided myself on being able to see the turns of the zeitgeist coming. As Diablo Cody put it, “Actually, I try a lot”, and currently that involves browsing a few tumblrs each from the Contemporary Communist Renaissance and the Contemporary Fascist Renaissance. Without exception, the communist ones have more competent and compelling writing and the fascist ones have more competent and compelling imagery. I suppose that is the classic dichotomy.

The written form is more my idiom, but counterbalancing that there’s my various identities. There’s a reason I identify with d'Annunzio, a poet/playwright/journalist who once in parliament moved from the extreme right to the extreme left on fundamentally aesthetic grounds, who basically invented fascist spectacle but came to consider Mussolini and Hitler his enemies (mostly because they couldn’t live up to him), who was ultimately satisfied by being named a prince so he could wear a sword around and the cops couldn’t give him speeding tickets.

It’s kind of funny how the genderqueer ideal is Desire of the Endless, and the practice is so often a perfect synthesis of Despair and Delirium.

(OR: aim at Nagel, end up with Hegel. HEYOOOO)

For an economic crisis (crisis? it’s at least cris-ish) that propagated by way of household debt and first manifested in evictions and foreclosures, it’s really striking - if you’ve got a background in American history - how little pushback there’s been at the county level.

Nationwide debt crises used to happen regularly, and there were inevitably a few sheriffs or judges who would refuse to go along with the liquidation, creating a point of media focus and kicking the issue up to the state level, where governors and legislatures would usually compromise to some degree (especially if the lower officials had conveniently timed their resistance to match election cycles).

Which, if you’ve ever deplored the effects of “politicizing justice” and wonder why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to subject judges and law enforcement officials to electoral pressure, there you go.

Of course there was also the option of getting a few people with rifles, besieging courthouses and blockading auctions, but that died out even earlier - mind the Grapes of Wrath “Then who do we shoot?” bit - as railroads both enabled rural delivery and thus finance beyond local store credit and the one-branch bank, and also made it practical to send nonlocal militia troops into the boonies (first in coal and iron territory, back before the Rust Belt rusted, and then further west).

Everyone knows that after WWII the federal government grew at the expense of state power, fewer appreciate just how much county power - which used to be pretty much the face of Government - receded. Today movements that aim at its restoration, like Posse Comitatus and Sovereign Citizens, are marginal among the marginal.

I blame the telegraph, for enabling realtime communication across distance and thus obviating the necessity of feudal hierarchies. A court, after all, comes from the term for a retinue of power with identifiable human faces. There was always power, but it used to be close enough and personal enough you could make a CHA check against it. (Or Intimidate, which is STR, iirc). Plus there’s always the tendency to go native.

(The most functional method of countering this tendency was requiring courtiers to spend about half their time accumulating power at their own courts in the field and half spending it down at their liege’s court - this was arrived at independently [as far as I know] by the Japanese bakufu, the French royalty, and the American DoD, where high ranking officers rotate back and forth from field command to the Pentagon. Probably parallels in pre-computerized large firms doing rotations between home and branch offices, but I think that was derived from DoD. Well, DoW, back then.)

Histories of the New Deal often acknowledge the federalization of power but then account for the TVA, rural electrification, Rural Telephone Service, etc. either as the political cost paid for that power, or as something that centralized power made possible, when they were in fact constitutive of that power.

slowleaner:

Leonardo DiCaprio’s doing an impression of Jack Nicholson on a Japanese tv program

When I was in LA Jack Nicholson gave me shit about the contents of my cart in a supermarket checkout line, not even kidding. In the Albertsons on Alvarado there was this dumpy old guy behind me wearing mirrored shades and out of nowhere he said “I can tell you don’t have a girlfriend, ‘cause you don’t have any fish in there”. And it just went from there. He asked what I was doing in LA and when I explained the spec script I was writing he said “fuck, that sounds terrible”.

Eventually he put his groceries on the conveyor belt and it was like, Capri Sun and boxes of microwave burritos. I was like “dude, what the hell”, and he said that yeah, one of my friends lost his job and I’m buying food for his family to eat, ‘cause god knows I’m not about to let him stay at my place again.

It was all really charming and towards the end I was starting to suspect, but I was like “no, Jack Nicholson isn’t that old and decrepit” and a short drive and google later, well.

Also I knew a girl who told me this story that she went clubbing with her cousin once, and at the end of the night the cousin was like “let’s go to Jack’s place”

So they went up into the hills, got buzzed in at a gate, there are other girls there and obviously they and the cousin are used to this, walk in to a kitchen with the glasses and the ice and the gin and the tonic and the cut limes laid out, and prepare their drinks, and head out to the hot tub - and if this wasn’t the exact hot tub Polanski banged that girl in, it would be its successor - and there, of course, is Jack Nicholson.

And the girls take off their clothes and get in, and so does she, and then suddenly all the girls started making out with each other, and Jack turned to her and said

“You know, I’ve had sisters, but I’ve never had cousins.”

She was really freaked out and got out of there.

She told this story five or six times one night shortly after, and each time afterwards she was left looking at the listener, waiting for commiseration, and they blinked at her, uncomprehending, and said “wait, you turned down sex with Jack Nicholson?”

I was one of them, and I’d do it again. I mean, if you’ve seen Stevie Nicks lately she’s on a roughly comparable glide path, but if she told me to get down on my knees and eat her, like, she’s Stevie fucking Nicks, you know?

Other LA celebrity encounters:

I went to the AdultFriendFinder Christmas party once, in the hills. The thing about Hollywood Hills - the bird hills, really - houses is in terms of living space they’re actually pretty small, often just one bedroom, most square footage is actually entertainment space. Most competently organized and catered party I’ve ever seen. They had H.R. Giger prints on the wall and eventually I was like “oh, no, Giger paintings”. Sculptures by the Tool guy, too. I was directed to park in this parking structure that’s normally like medical offices, with “Dr. Goldsomething” plaques on each space, and originally I turned around because I felt like obviously I’m not supposed to be here.

There were a bunch of porn stars I assume but didn’t recognize because I’ve never been into Valley industry porn. Also Mystery, the PUA guru. He really was inexplicably, absurdly charismatic, slouching in a deck chair with his ridiculous hat and ridiculous coat and ridiculous goatee, literally no one could resist glancing over at him every so often.

I’ve also been to a porn wrap party, but no one I knew by name and it was kind of depressing. It was one of those houses on the crest of the hills that’s only used for shoots. It was supposed to be an open bar, but the guy throwing the party got angry that we weren’t tipping enough and started charging.

The girl working the bar was wearing a tear-off Alice in Wonderland costume, at one point she went to do a dance on the pole built into the patio deck support. Then she went upstairs and when she came back down her eyes were glassed like an inch of Vaseline. I gave her a $20 for a $4 drink, and she slowly plucked out $7 in change and looked at me with pitiful, confused expectation. I said “honey, no.”

They say the porn community’s like family, and that’s correct in that if you grow up in a supporting one you’ll probably find a place in a supporting one, and if you grow up in a fucked up one you’ll probably find a place in a fucked up one.

Also I literally walked into Britney Spears once because I was headed down the sidewalk reading a newspaper. She was wearing mirrorshades and a Steelers jersey, and for 3 blocks afterwards (and LA blocks are long blocks) I was like “where do I know that girl from?”

I suppose the message here is that if you’ve ever read Raymond Chandler, he not only described LA and its people with complete, devastating accuracy but it’s all still exactly the same.

in-unitatespiritussanctiregnat:

imagine having to show kim jong eun around a waterpark in your bathing suit / would you ever like to see a grown woman spontaneously die from feeling like a horrible piece of shit

I know you hate Portland but we have a waterpark/Air & Space Museum run by an “alleged” CIA front

(“but”)

Finally, to combine tonight’s themes, one of the times a few years back when US-Iran tensions were high, there were a bunch of helicopter exercises over LA, rushing low over the 110 into downtown over and over, I think some other things further west where I couldn’t see

See the thing is

A) LA is, geographically speaking, a pretty good doppelganger of Tehran

and

B) LA is the center of the Persian expat community

clever.

From what I’m told (I’m told) the Iranian middle class is one of the more pro-American, Americanized out there, it would be nice if one of the regimes could have a rupture in continuity and reunification/it would be convenient if we didn’t and could play our peasants off each other

limegl0wstix:

me

limegl0wstix:

I would probably rip off this sign and put it on the front door.

I did a few video game manuals back in the day, bottom of the barrel stuff, the license I worked most often on was Bratz, most of the games on systems that had been superseded years ago. The betas were buggy and missing the art and sound assets, and let me tell you it’s a trip to realize it’s your actual job to restart a game 30 times so you can finally walk around a mall full of blank-faced mannequins and listen to Stephen Hawking talk about how fun it is to go shopping with your friends. That said Bratz has a reputation as My Little Hoochie Mama, but if you pay attention to the Bratz mythos, which is an actual thing I just wrote, it’s about how no matter what you look like or what your interests are, if you put in some effort you can make that identity seem awesome. I mean, as long as Commodities, right? I also did a Zoey 101 game, a Drake & Josh game, or maybe The Suite Life of Jack and Cody. Actually, I might’ve done both. The Nickelodeon games were mostly shovelware that THQ released as a condition of the Spongebob Squarepants license, mostly minigame collections though some of them were passable adventure. Real people worked on them though, the biggest part of my job was taking the two pages in the design document that detailed the one unique and novel thing the designers had come up with to justify this project to themselves and cutting it down to a sentence or two of Press B to Do A Thing. Oh also before that I was an intern for some managers who specialized in third-string boy band members, Broadway threat-and-a-halfs, SNL castmembers from a decade ago, and child actors. They had an office at Hollywood & Vine, which like pretty much of “Hollywood” still located in and around the actual neighborhood of Hollywood seems impressive to out-of-towners but screams “low rent” to anyone who knows anything. The world of child actors is basically the most dehumanizing thing in the universe, the DisneyLodeon machines are exact replicas of the old studio star systems, and anyone who says “it can’t really be like that, no mother would subject her precious child to such a thing”, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAAAAHAHAHA. Yes, I’ve heard all the Dan Schneider rumors, they’re completely believable but at the same time they’re so obvious that anyone could make them up, and god knows the industry likes being catty and there are people who would stand to gain from taking him down. Besides what would it matter, the studios can spend more than your life’s worth in one month doing discovery and are perfectly willing to spend a fraction of that on cutting you a check instead. They’ll make it back in a second selling ancillary merchandise rights anyway. Like, you know, video games. What did I say about Raymond Chandler getting it right? There were parents who wanted a wholesome life for their child and it needed to be explained that we aren’t a goddamned afterschool enrichment program, we make money when you book and if you’re not dedicated to booking why are we dedicating resources to you? I mean, I wasn’t capable of explaining this at the time, I yet needed some polishing but LA’s good at that. (If you actually want to make a living through skilled thespianism, as opposed to rolling dice on celebrity, go into voice work.)

[edit: the hell was I thinking? the sun was the first clock, the moon was the first calendar]

Man Monday was a pretty solid day and it started before I was even awake - had possibly the most intense set of dreams in my life (and each one involved discovering a new building on my old college campus) but yesterday - yesterday night especially - was just grinding and mean.

And the weird thing was everyone seemed tense yesterday. It was like a double full moon. Maybe it was mood swings from the contested beginning of spring

(or maybe I got in a bad feedback loop? this distant, superior manner – I’ve intentionally cultivated it since before I was 6 and I suspect it might be a defense against the fact that I’m actually too good at reading and mirroring emotions)

I should find another dojo, I miss hitting people and getting hit.

Or maybe I’m just a fundamentally angry person

A person with anger. Anger issues. An anger syndrome.

jesus christ. person-first language, psychologizing, medicalization

It’s funny, they all get justified by reference to “acceptance” yet they all function by distancing us from our selves

(the deadly sin of wrath)