March 11th, 2021
guy who thinks all his friends are re-watching 'Chernobyl' for the episode that's mainly about killing dogs
I took last week off to get stuff done and then didn’t get as much stuff done as I wanted to because I lapsed into a Dutch Fugue and that’s just how life is now so I missed the little imbroglio that Gen Z and millennials were involved in on TikTok, the app I mainly recognize as the place where all the dead-eyed comedians I did improv with have begun using to foster parasocial relationships with teenagers.
I don’t have too much to say about the specifics about the conflict because I will never watch a TikTok video someone RTs into my timeline, doubly so if the caption is something like “This is…I can’t…why would you do this” because that deprives me of precious time I could be using to re-watch “Role Play Tourney (Be Aggressive)” by Brad Neely.
Here’s me writing personal statements for grad school ha ha ha
I try not to get involved in this stuff because I’m positively ancient by posting standards and doing that would just put me dead in the sights of one of my mean, young mutuals to completely duck hunt me for having a bad opinion which would in turn cause me to quote-tweet myself getting colossally owned to say “either just drive to my house and kill me like a normal person or shut the fuck up i swear to god” and there’s probably just no coming back from that. What I will say however is that millennials deserve any and all derision and scorn that gets heaped upon our brows for posting cringe because millennial posting has always been pathetic and deeply needy, we just didn’t realize it at the time because there was no one younger than us to make fun of us for doing it.
The coolest thing you used to be able to do online in the early 2010s was post a line break tweet about how you were going to pay your server a 50% tip regardless of how bad the service was in a really weird, mothering tone because you were also working a shitty job and you “knew how it was,” which is fucking lame and embarrassing. There is perhaps virtue in tipping well but there’s certainly no virtue in posting about it. The entire millennial posting economy was predicated on being the ultimate virtue signalers which anyone could have told us was going to come across as cloying and annoying almost as soon as we’d hit “send.”
You can’t avoid being replaced by someone younger and more ruthless than you who’s going to make fun of you, so you might as well just enjoy the ride. If someone making fun of your middle part on an app that’s downloading their biometric data so that a facsimile of their personality can be imprinted onto a mining drone stationed at a Huawei-controlled mineral extraction operation on Ganymede in 2177 is all it takes to flush your self-esteem down the shitter, you gotta relax, man. Either that or log off and focus on becoming physically strong enough to beat the shit out of anyone who makes fun of you online.
The Movie Zone: Inherent Vice (2014)
I wanted very badly to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice when it came out but I was scared off by the fact that it didn’t release to widespread critical acclaim, something I thought was a prerequisite for getting girls to like me back in 2014. A foolish choice, but one that I made often in 2014, a year that saw me ponying up $20 each to see Foxcatcher, Birdman and Whiplash—three movies I’m now convinced aren’t worth the film they’re shot on. It took me a while to learn this lesson however, since even by 2016 I was forsaking the perfect idiot-man film The Nice Guys to watch Marvel films like Doctor Strange, a movie that doesn’t even let Mads Mikkelsen be a giant freak at all.
Speaking of kicking the shit out of people
Based on Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, Inherent Vice is basically just The Big Lebowski chopped and screwed, but with more weird sex stuff in it since it’s based on a work by a writer of literary fiction. If this sounds like an insult I promise it’s not, this actually rules and Joaquin Phoenix wears some powerful fits as burnout/private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello.
While living in Gordita Beach in 1970, Doc gets hit up by Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterson), an old flame, who suspects that her new boyfriend, real estate magnate Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) is being set up by his wife and her lover to be committed to an asylum so they can make off with his money, and they want to cut Shasta in on it or potentially kill her off after she helps them. Point being she’s scared and insists she has nowhere else to turn to.
She promptly disappears but Doc continues to get cases sent to him that bring him back into Wolfmann’s orbit and cause him to run afoul of pretty much everyone from LAPD Lt. Detective Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) to a vertically integrated heroin cartel called the Golden Fang that owns everything from the heroin distribution to the society of dentists that fix its former addicts’ teeth to the cult that cures them of being addicted to heroin in the first place.
Joaquin Phoenix looks so goddamn good in this movie and I’m not afraid to say it
In true L.A. noir fashion however, it’s not really important what mysteries Doc unravels or doesn’t unravel because he does it pretty much accidentally in the service of trying to make sure his former old lady is still okay.
West Coast noir has always held a special place in my heart because it posits that people in power are gaudy idiots who just kind of openly break the law because they’re stupid as shit and half-believe that everyone is too image-obsessed and venal to ever really do anything about it, which I think is basically true. The wins your neo-noir protagonist ekes out are usually personal and small because the idea of taking down one corrupt actor working in the open is pretty patently ridiculous when there exists a whole system in place to keep the wheels spinning for everyone else.
Something Inherent Vice does pretty well is showcase how everyone who’s trying to live in society in a normal way is about 1000% more weird and fucked up than all the weirdo burnouts who live on the fringes. This is probably best exemplified in the film’s ending when Doc ends up with about 10 kilos of heroin (long story, watch the movie) which he’s trading in exchange for the freedom of jazz musician-turned-government informant Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson). Doc turns up at the drop point only to find that the people Golden Fang has sent to pick up the heroin are a white, blonde haired family of complete squares who respond to his attempts to make small talk about whether they like being in the Golden Fang by flipping him off.
The west coast noir vibes with me because it allows me to revel in the fantasy that just managing to spend another day burning one down with someone nice is a victory against the powers that be. It’s also lightly nihilistic because it basically implies that no real victory against the status quo can ever happen, which I think could be a problem if you spend a lot of time trying to extract cognizant social analysis from media that you can design your life around. I don’t, but good luck to you if that’s how you treat movies though. That seems like it would really suck ass to me but you do you.
The Girls Report
I have started watching the HBO show Girls in earnest. I am three episodes into the first season. This concludes The Girls Report.
The Anime Zone: G Gundam Episodes 1–4
When you remember the Gundam for Neo Mexico is called “Tequila Gundam” and incorporates a little mustache and a big sombrero into its design
At the time of its creation, the Gundam series represented a pretty major sea change in the giant mecha genre, because it depicted its robots as machines that required upkeep and technical skill to use correctly. It also normally has a lot to say about war, the military industrial complex and the muddy shades of grey the people who fight in these wars are forced to navigate in the service of the state. So naturally the Gundam series that I have the fondest memories of is the one that opts to go “fuck all that garbage, giant robot fighting tournament!”
G Gundam’s first four episodes do a…decent job of explaining the main conceit—that anyone who could left the blighted earth to find a new life in space, but every four years every country in the space colonies (which are just the same countries on earth but with “Neo-” put in front of their name) drop a fuckload of giant robots onto the blasted surface of the earth to duke it out to determine who gets to rule space for the next four years.
Our hero is Domon Kasshu, the fighter for Neo-Japan and pilot of Shining Gundam, whose only loves in life are quoting the rules of the Gundam Fight Code to his opponents, being an antisocial dick and crushing the heads of the other countries’ robots with his special move, the lustily named “Shining Finger.” He also loves showing people a yellowed photograph of a guy who looks suspiciously like him and asking, “hey have you seen this man” which I’m certain will never come up again.
The funniest part of G Gundam currently is that many of the other pilots’ moralities are entirely dependent on whether or not Domon decides to end the episode by crushing the head of their Gundam. This is important because, as Domon helpfully informs every opponent he faces, getting your head crushed is grounds for immediate disqualification from the Gundam Fight. So every time he decides one of his opponents is “aight” enough to be allowed to continue fighting, he does not crush their head and this is the show informing you with all the subtlety of a baseball bat across the head that THIS IS A GOOD GUY OR A RIVAL, NOT A VILLAIN.
Even though the staff of G Gundam did a ton of on-location scouting in preparation for the show, they did a fucking terrible job and many of the Gundam designs are incredibly racist (like Tequila Gundam, mentioned above) or are basically incomprehensible mishmashes of stereotypes about the country they represent to the degree that they actually loop back around 180 degrees to being fucking awesome again. This is probably best understood in the design of Neo-America’s Maxter Gundam piloted by Chibodee Crockett, which has a football helmet, detachable shoulderpads that turn into boxing gloves and a surfboard for some reason, and also in Neo-Germany’s Gundam Spiegel, which sports a German stahlhelm and wrist blades so that its pilot can use German Ninjitsu techniques.
This is the ideal Neo-American form—you may not like it, but this is what peak destabilizing the Global South looks like
I want to state right now that even though every Gundam pilot in this show gets encased in a skintight goopsuit to pilot their giant robot which probably unlocked the tumblers in the heads of a thousand DeviantArt fetishists, this is not a horny show. Domon is so focused on being rude and crushing peoples’ heads with his Shining Fingers that he could simply never even consider fucking at any juncture in the story.
This leads to a fucking amazing exchange in episode for where the Princess of Neo-France (???) devises a plan to kidnap herself so Neo-France’s George de Sand will fight for her honor, and Domon’s mechanic/love interest Rain Mikamura basically has to tell her, “hey girl, when guys are fighting in their goopsuits they’re not thinking about fingerbanging or p-in-v like at all, they just want to get sweaty as hell and feel the heat of battle with another dude in a goopsuit” which the Princess vociferously denies until George says over his Gundam’s loudspeakers “no that’s absolutely correct, I will never fuck as long as there is goopsuit fighting to do.”
Incredible stuff.
The Sweetie Of The Week: Raymond Cruz
I wish I was as delighted by anything as much as Raymond Cruz is when Eric Andre tells him he’s 69 about 1m23s into this clip.
The Digestif: “Black Mirror,” A Giant Dog
Win Butler and all 473 remaining members of Arcade Fire reported to be on critical life support for almost two years now ever since Austin, TX punks A Giant Dog released their cover of “Black Mirror” in Aug. 2019. This cover rips so hard it blows the original out of the water so I’m unilaterally declaring that the original release is to be stricken from reality and the A Giant Dog version of Neon Bible is now the de facto original.
To add insult to injury they also made the cover art a send-up of the original’s so that instead of a literal neon bible it’s a person spreading their cheeks to post hole. A Giant Dog rules.
Anyway that’s all for this week. I hope you’re setting attainable goals for yourself during the spring. Myself? I’m working on cultivating a permanent demon brain so I don’t become too normal if I get into a communications program for graduate school because I’m too much of a dumb fuck-up to figure out how having a career works otherwise. I’m going to be such a freak if I learn how to use Adobe Dreamweaver. I’m going to weave a fuckload of dreams with that shit. Just watch. Gonna be like Satoshi Kon’s Paprika up in your brain 24/7 when old Borky gets through with you.
Yours in the pursuit of democratic freedom,
the creep