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god help me
Feb. 18th, 2003 12:41 pmlast night i was all touched by the finale of Joe Millionaire. i would have been really mad if he had picked sara, and had no sympathy or emotional investment, but he proved to not be a total tool by picking the right girl, and i was like "awwww"! which in a way is really counter to my entire cosmology of my imaginary of the "modern romance," because in one way it is all so standardly subscribes to all the romantic cliches, but in a way that's kind of post-pomo, rather than "authentic" with the layers of deception made explicit to the voyeristic viewer, and the participants at least having explicit subjectivity of being constituted in the context of a television show. on the other hand, i guess in some ways it is really appropriate to my views on the discourse of love in america, because really, the whole show? totally fucked up. i mean, this will be a relationship based on lying and and also elimination rounds between which joe (Evan) gets to do it with a bunch of girls. really, this show is the ultimate male fantasy. then it gets tautological. it's love because it's a fantasy (come true) and it's a fantasy come true because in the end they find true love that is reified in opposition to money (but is, nevertheless, rewarded by a culturally significant symbolic sum of one million dollars). but i still thought the end was sweet.
awwww.
that's not as bad as my equally emotionally affected roommate who, i guess, propelled by the momentum of tv-induced positive affect started "awww"ing when george bush was being humiliated on "That's My Bush"
also, we keep watching music videos for the last two nights. we are like grad school beavis and butthead, except all three of us understand the symbolic function of language (unlike beavis) and i'm gonna argue that we are not socialized into "the casual sadism of patriarchy) ( see On The Couch With Beavis and Butthead, http://www.geocities.com/jeff_l_schwartz/beavis.html ). There have been some amazing videos--the madonna video for "Die Another Day," (which incorporates all these plot elements from the movie of the same title, and what a belligerent over-the-top James Bond production that was! I mean, really! we all expect a certain amount of ridiculous panache from the JB industry, but shit--this movie combined evil faux-Soviet North Korean villains, genetic transformative surgery on a secret island in Cuba, and a villain who never sleeps who builds Project Icarus, which is the second sun, which he uses to melt shit, leading to an amazing scene where there is a glider chase on ice, as Sun #2 is melting the ice right behing the glider; then there are plane crashes and also the obligatory hot sex. anyway. the lesson of the movie is that it is evil to build a second Sun, which is signified by pseudo-satanic movie music, going oh-oh-oh in a demonic choir, whenever the second Sun is unveiled, to represent the character's hubris in harboring god-like but really Luciferian) ambitions).
Anyway, another video on the radar has been Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" which I still have not fully processed, but it's pretty devastating, and my new favorite video, "Frontier Psychiatrist" by the Avalanches which wins the award for "weirdest video ever." man, i would love to do a "dream analysis" of that video! except that i suspect that the video is a parody of the psychoanalytic dream analysis method. and if it's true it achieves it really well because the complete absurdity and surreality of dream sequencing is captured in the video, but since it is structired as a de facto narraitve (the format has to dictate one on some level) the meta-comment is in the descreptancy between the form and the content, as well as in the refrain, belted out by two psychiatrists, alternatingly saying "the boy needs therapy" / "purely psychosomatic."
There have been an abundance of Robbie Williams ungay videos that perfectly fuse macho fantasies with the gay aesthetic (at least in terms of execution) and by macho fantasies i mean fantasies of the sort that produce such pop culture phenomena as the upcoming bruce willis movie "tears of the sun" (rant on *that* is upcoming), the robbie williams video "hero," every "bros before hos" action film, and Ernest Hemingway) but they won't show that avril lavine video "sk8er boi" that i keep telling my roommates about, so i think they think that i made the video up. Dear roommates! I really did not! The song really exists! You can get a Nokia ringtone for it
awwww.
that's not as bad as my equally emotionally affected roommate who, i guess, propelled by the momentum of tv-induced positive affect started "awww"ing when george bush was being humiliated on "That's My Bush"
also, we keep watching music videos for the last two nights. we are like grad school beavis and butthead, except all three of us understand the symbolic function of language (unlike beavis) and i'm gonna argue that we are not socialized into "the casual sadism of patriarchy) ( see On The Couch With Beavis and Butthead, http://www.geocities.com/jeff_l_schwartz/beavis.html ). There have been some amazing videos--the madonna video for "Die Another Day," (which incorporates all these plot elements from the movie of the same title, and what a belligerent over-the-top James Bond production that was! I mean, really! we all expect a certain amount of ridiculous panache from the JB industry, but shit--this movie combined evil faux-Soviet North Korean villains, genetic transformative surgery on a secret island in Cuba, and a villain who never sleeps who builds Project Icarus, which is the second sun, which he uses to melt shit, leading to an amazing scene where there is a glider chase on ice, as Sun #2 is melting the ice right behing the glider; then there are plane crashes and also the obligatory hot sex. anyway. the lesson of the movie is that it is evil to build a second Sun, which is signified by pseudo-satanic movie music, going oh-oh-oh in a demonic choir, whenever the second Sun is unveiled, to represent the character's hubris in harboring god-like but really Luciferian) ambitions).
Anyway, another video on the radar has been Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" which I still have not fully processed, but it's pretty devastating, and my new favorite video, "Frontier Psychiatrist" by the Avalanches which wins the award for "weirdest video ever." man, i would love to do a "dream analysis" of that video! except that i suspect that the video is a parody of the psychoanalytic dream analysis method. and if it's true it achieves it really well because the complete absurdity and surreality of dream sequencing is captured in the video, but since it is structired as a de facto narraitve (the format has to dictate one on some level) the meta-comment is in the descreptancy between the form and the content, as well as in the refrain, belted out by two psychiatrists, alternatingly saying "the boy needs therapy" / "purely psychosomatic."
There have been an abundance of Robbie Williams ungay videos that perfectly fuse macho fantasies with the gay aesthetic (at least in terms of execution) and by macho fantasies i mean fantasies of the sort that produce such pop culture phenomena as the upcoming bruce willis movie "tears of the sun" (rant on *that* is upcoming), the robbie williams video "hero," every "bros before hos" action film, and Ernest Hemingway) but they won't show that avril lavine video "sk8er boi" that i keep telling my roommates about, so i think they think that i made the video up. Dear roommates! I really did not! The song really exists! You can get a Nokia ringtone for it
