Good morning. Hello. How are you? #597
Plots are bad. War is bad. Not capitalizing currency names is bad. Bad bad bad.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am okay. I had a nice dream where my SoHo loft apartment was attached to this house, and it was pretty much perfect. That loft was in my dreams because I read an article about Sam Levinson, creator of Euphoria, and how Euphoria fans don’t like him. Sam Levinson is Barry Levinson’s son, and Barry Levinson rented my loft before me. It was his pied a terre for the city. His signature was on the docs before mine and everyone thought that was kind of mildly interesting at the lease signing. When I looked at the place before I rented it, it had a hookah pipe and a bunch of pillows up in the loft (the loft had a loft), so, yeah, you know, teens and drugs I guess. I tried to watch Euphoria last night and it was just so, so bad. I mean, I guess not “bad,” in the sense that it seemed competently constructed, but it suffered from having a plot.
Here’s where I’m at lately on this topic: Plots are terrible. Specifically, moving picture plots are, by and large, terrible. They are terrible mostly because they’re plots. But they’re also terrible because they are a subset of all plots, just the plots we decide we can adapt to moving pictures. Plots are like the 12-tone scale. We think that all notes are encompassed into the 12-tones, because it’s all we know, we’re unable to think beyond the fully man-made construct of the twelve tones. We think Partch or Stockhausen were, like, clever for looking past the twelve tones, but microtonal music has been with us throughout history, throughout the world. Debussy got into it because he randomly heard some Balinese gamelan at an exhibition which had been cranking along for thousands of years.
The monomyth is absolute bullshit, and it’s a blight upon motion pictures. Books, of course, handle this better. They still have a lot more plot cliches at their fingertips, but they’re still just dealing in the twelve tones. All this seven basic plots bullshit. No no no no. I refuse. There are so few counter-examples, we’re all stuck in a rut. But they exist. Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. Slacker, A Scanner Darkly, Waking Life (wow good job Linklater). But even all of these are just showing a glimpse.
We need something like The Mezzanine in motion picture form. Maybe a three-episode miniseries about a middle-aged alcoholic woman attempting to dispose of her bottles. Not because that leads to “wacky hijinks” but just because it’s a thing that happened. There’s a reason the groundhog plot in Caddyshack was so popular. Because it’s just a boring-ass non-plot about a gardener doing his job. Until the explosives part, and that is, I submit to you, simply the head-fantasies of a boring-ass gardener doing his boring-ass job.
Down with plots.
I might have to write a small chapbook about this.
While I’m ranting, it is bullshit that currency names are not capitalized. Rupee is a bullshit Wordle word (we can talk about this now that it’s in the past). Yes, I got it, in four even, but it is bullshit. I did a bunch of digging on this last night, and the problem very clearly seems to be that grammarians are completely illiterate on the topic of international economics. I found this single Stack Exchange discussion where someone acknowledged that yes, when discussing currencies in terms of international economics, there is a strong argument for capitalizing them. The first argument people give against it is that you can put “a” or “the” in front of them: You can have Bob the Dog in your lap, you don’t have “a” Bob the Dog in your lap, You can’t have dollar in your lap. But of course there are plenty of exceptions to this. The next one is there are lots of different dollars, the Australian Dollar, the US Dollar, except then they tell me that dollar shouldn’t be capitalized even then, which is BS, and of course there are plenty of currencies, where there is only one of them: the Renminbi, the Yen, the Yuan.
The strongest argument for all of this is that we do not capitalize units of measurement, like miles, and these are units of currency. All of that could sort of make sense if you had zero knowlege of the world of international finance, where people routinely refer to a currency as a specific system, a specific thing, a specific organization. Currencies aren’t just units of curency, they are also systems of currency. The Japanese Yen rose against the American Dollar. Those are 100% proper names. And you can’t put them in your lap, but you can’t put Venus in your lap either or The Gambia or The Netherlands, Zen Buddhism, and in any case, don’t they tell us that the Almighty Dollar is a religon?
Watched Biden’s State of the Union last night, it was fine. Got a little laundry listy at the end, and even with the laundry list people still find ways to complain about how he left something off. I would have preferred to see the entire speech as just a stand-up comedy routine mocking Republicans, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. Just a complete roasting on the world stage. Wore his Aviator shades. Maybe sipped on an O’Douls. In the real world, here is a good point made by Ezra Klein that the war and the economy are now intertwined, and Biden maybe could have driven that point home a bit better.
All my doctors have abandoned me. Yesterday I went into MyChart to email my ENT doctor to get more of my allergy drops, and went to compose a message. I clicked “non-urgent medical question,” like I usually do, and there used to be a whole range of recipients, from my PCP to my ENT to my neck doctor to my sleep doctor. They are all gone. None of them are listed. I called the ENT clinic and left a message like I usually do, they have not called back. I’m convinced UNC medical is just hollowing out, and soon the entire thing will be run by an industrious rat who has made an alliance with one of the garbage men.
Yes, I know I just referenced a plot right after an anti-plot rant. I contain multitudes.
The lack of doctors is a small, personal, slow-rolling disaster waiting to happen, but I guess that’s fine because we have the large, universal, slow-rolling disaster actually happening with Ukraine, and the accompanying large, universal, slow-rolling disaster waiting to happen in the form of global thermonuclear war (would you like to play a game?) Wake up, look at the Times, Post, FT, try to figure out what happened in the war while you’re asleep. Curse time zones, pray that Russian convoy is still stalled, wish to god someone could just wipe it out, have a giant moral dilemma about your urges toward violence, cry a little bit reading about refugees and racism at the border. Super healthy way to start your day. Go to work, pretend you’re actually going to get enough time to do your actual work, look at your meetings, spaced perfectly throughout the day, engineered to not give you a single block of time to get anything done. Moan, look at the rest of the week, wonder when you will actually be able to write those two, three pages you need to write. It’s just two or three pages! But it’s two or three highly teechnical pages. It’s hard! It needs uninterrupted time. You have none. Moan at the injustice, remember that there’s a war going on, chastise yourself for your irrelevant problems. Wonder how there’s a single person in America not going through the exact same circle of thoughts.
It’s Wednesday gang, hang in there!
Okay W Hotel mix for you, I am definitely cheating and expanding the boundaries here but my god man I have made like almost 600 mix tapes since this pandemic started I might be going a little crazy. There’s a little connection here as the woman in Pucifer is also the woman on the new Tears for Fears album, which is awesome.
Hey good news tomorrow will be Thursday and it’ll be another day.
Have you watched "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975) by Chantelle Akerman? That might be a film you would want to watch.