(no subject)

Dear livejournal genie,

Like a year and a half ago I downloaded a batch of desktop icons from, I think, the Apple site, where anyone can post icon sets or screensavers or whatever they make. Because I am deeply stupid and until today I didn't know how to attach an image to a folder, I assumed that these icons had a glitch (b/c they were just images, not folders, and when I tried dragging documents into them nothing happened), so I think I eventually deleted them.

They were really, really cute, it was a set based on Magnetic Fields songs, where each icon was a cartoon depicting a song. So, 10,000 Firefles was a jar of firefles, and there was one of an Eiffel Tower, etc.

I want them. I just went through what's available for downloads on the Apple site and they are not there. Does anyone know what I am talking about, or where I can procure them?

Merci.

the scopophildonohue gaze: Rasee????!!!!sm and healing America

Yesterday I watched "Crash."

Only in America are films like "Crash" made to Address the Issues of Race and only in America are they then described by the critics as "complex" and "provoking." It's like that machine in Moscow 2042 which makes shit into food, which is then digested and excreted as shit, which will, in turn, make more food.

I would like to apologize to theophile for deadpanning "wait...do you think this movie is about...race?" every 2.5 minutes

But really, everyone in this movie is both Racist AND Complicated and these two vectors of their personalities are developed along the Pay It Forward axis, sans the satisfying payoff of Haley Joel Osmond's death, but in sundrenched slo-mo. Augmenting the visual semiotics of aforementioned sundrenched slo-mo is the binary soundtrack, which consists of EITHER hip-hop, signifying the gritty urban blackness (but never the XXXTRA Black African Blackness that is brought by Hollywood to its white audience in films like "Tears of the Sun" or "The Island") OR the redemptive/walkintothelight! progressions of "eeeeeee, aaaaaeeeeeee." (It has two mommies: Enya and whoever writes that ER music that plays during, like, Important Moments like when Luka the Bosnian Refugee freaks out and goes to Africa to be all Heart of Darkness Sans Frontiers and is about to be shot by XXXTRA Black African rebels, who at the last moment decide to spare him when they see his little golden crucifix suddenly and prominenetly sunlit in slow-mo, which promps them to fall on their knees).

Anyway, back to "Crash."

Matt Dillon, the racist cop, harasses the black couple and sexually harasses the wife, Thandie Newton (RACIST), BUT later saves the wife from a burning vehicle (COMPLICATED). Then he tells the guilty white boy Ryan Philippe that racism is endemic to everyone (RACIST) but then is partnered up with a hispanic partner, whom he cheerfully greets as "amigo" (COMPLICATED). He is racist towards the woman handling his father's HMO file (RACIST) BUT only because his father, who hired black janitors, when no one else did, and paid them equal wage, lost his business because of affirmative action legislations (COMPLICATED). Said woman seems moved by his father's story (COMPLICATED) but at the end yells at a Chinese woman who hits her car to "speak American!" (RACIST). The guilty white boy Ryan Philippe helps the TV director, who goes all primal after being emasculated by the wife-fondling incident, BUT does it in a way that affirms the dominant white power paradigm (RACIST AND COMPLICATED, all twisted together like a candy stripe) and then he picks up a black hitchhiker to prove to himself that he is Not Racist, but shoots him on an incorrect hunch because he is, in fact, Racist. And Ludacris is blase about running over a Chinaman (Koreaman) (Racist/Desensitized by Harsh Life in a Black Ghetto), but then FREES THE (ethno-checked as Cambodian) SLAVES (trafficked by said Chinaman/Koreaman??) and sets them loose in Chinatown with instructions to "buy yourself some chop suey" (no longer Racist, but Redeemed and Aware, this film's equivalent of, like, a misogynyst action hero prolly played by Mel Gibson reluctantly, begrudgingly, grunting at some female co-hero that she is "a hell of a lady"). There is some insane Cat's Cradle of Racism and Complication with the Persian shopowner/Latino locksmith subplot, at the end of which all I could think of was that the little girl with the "invisible coat" protecting her is totally going to feel free to play in traffic now, and Sandra Bullock is an overprivileged bitch who is Racist, but a Life Crisis (sprained ankle) moment makes her realize that her Latina maid is her Best Friend (Complicated, with a side of Big Blind Spot for Class Issues). Also, really funny, albeit unintentionally so. And so on, and so forth, and, of course, everyone in this film is magically connected, because it is a movie about how Los Angeles is Fragmented (see also: "Grand Canyon," "Short Cuts" and the Baroque not-so-crypto-catholic horror that is "Magnolia") and humanity is conducted through, like, these parallel flows that defy the three-act story arc.

Anyway, If you want to see a really smart, interesting, in-depth American film that deals with racism and ethnicity and history and memory, and not in a Point/Counterpoint "Racism is Bad vs. We Are All Human and Complicated" way, see John Sayles' "Lone Star."" Leave "Crash" to its shit-->consumtion-->shit circle of life, Hakuna Matata.