Time to think of funny episode names.
I think plots come first, episode names later. Like one where they first move in together and Zizek has to decrypt Butler’s two-page long fridge note that asks him to take out the trash.
“The Dustbin of History”
“The Death Drive” - Zizek and Butler get stuck in a traffic in NYC with a taxi driver who is a huge fan of Karl Popper.
“The Parallax View” - A bombshell moves into the building across the street and Slavoj begins to spy on her out of obscene delight. Once he is noticed by the woman, she begins to try and seduce him, in which case Slavoj no longer feels the delight of the perversion and loses interest.
“Jouissance” - Slavoj brings over his new girlfriend, Lady Gaga, who gets on Judith’s nerves when Gaga tells her how she was “born this way.” Zizek remains fixated on anal fisting.
“Undoing Slavoj” - Judith must do her best to console Slavoj, who, having been broken by years of being thought of as reactionary, Stalinist and so on, comes to grips with his penchant for polemic performances.
“Anal Retention” - Slavoj explains ideology by the way in which different nationalities take a shit, which doesn’t go over to well with Lady Gaga’s parents.
“The Woman Does Not Exist” - Judith goes missing, and in his search for her Slavoj debates feminists and post-modernists as he talks to her colleagues. At last she is found in an out-of-the-way laundromat, where she has been obsessively peeling lint from dryer screens. (Slavoj, needless to say, readily joins her.)
“Ivory Tower Symptom” - After years of supporting public education, with her partner Wendy spearheading the fight against privatization at Berkeley, Judith decides she needs a higher salary and accepts a position at Columbia. Wendy, infuriated that her bb has “sold out,” seeks out Slavoj to help convince Judith to stay at Berkeley. Slavoj laughs: “capitalism is evil, but it is better to be a greedy hypocrite and recognize it, than to try to make yourself ‘feel good’ about your perverse capitalist desire.” Wendy kills him.
“Bodies that Matter”: After Judith finds Slavoj has fainted from the exertion of climbing the stairs to their fifth floor walk-up in Bushwick, she decides to approach him about his worsening physical well-being. Slavoj declares her a “New Age fascist ” and refuses to have anything to do with what he calls Judith’s “obscene liberal fixation” on feeling good and not having health problems. The tables are turned, however, when Slavoj learns that Judith’s gym has a Hitcock-themed sauna, and he must convince Judith to give him one of her monthly guest passes by pretending to be adopting a more health-conscious lifestyle. Guest starring Jack Halberstam as the gym owner.
“Grindr Trouble”: Slavoj tries out Grindr, Judith comes down with a bad cold and must decide whether she will break her own policy and buy groceries online.
“The Ticklish Subject”: Judith and Slavoj decide to watch Mad Men, which makes them realize that despite their long intellectual collaboration and shared interest in psychoanalysis, they have never actually spoken about sex with each other. Things get awkward.
“The One with All the Tulips”: Judith accidentally pours bleach on Slavoj’s flowers, so she goes on a desperate quest through New York City for replacement tulips. Slavoj has a day at the spa.
I, Tonya
In the watched column. Basically, it’s the antimatter-Yuri on Ice.
1994 me only ever watched figure skating, The X-Files, and Unsolved Mysteries, so the Lillehammer ladies’ event occupies OJ and Monica-type real estate in my brain: boy, it sure is eerie when they recreate a televised clip that’s been burnt into your neurons for 25 years! Whadda blast to the past! A.A. Dowd notes adroitly that the approach is diet-Scorsese (shading into diet-Coens), but when you put it like that, what isn’t? And all the performances are great, down to Bobby Cannavale whose character is - as far as I can parse - completely redundant, except insofar as you might want to elevate the funniest tweet in a ratio to represent the whole.
What I remember from 1994 is an irritation that, per usual, Americans assumed their media narrative was the only one going. Meanwhile, Torvill and Dean were making their ten-year comeback, Elvis Stojko got more robbed than Tonya Harding ever did on the basis of not being balletic (let’s not begin on Surya Bonaly), Chen Lu won the first ever fs medal for China, and - well - Oksana Baiul actually took the gold, lest we forget. Then promptly disappeared into a body-destroying $$$ pro contract (something of the sort happened to Tara Lipinski too, right?) and a raging case of alcohol addiction because… Oksana is a whole other Lifetime movie.
I mean, all this is why history’s verdict has ultimately come down against Nancy Kerrigan: RBF at best, amirite.
A Few Questions About the Culture: An Interview with Iain Banks
Finished reading Use of Weapons - finally - as most everyone I know who were reading Banks did so years back, before he passed away, and most of the online forum discussion dates from then as well. I’m trying to decide how much I liked it. It absolutely delighted the formalist in me, but the formalist in me also saw the general outline of the thing coming a mile away**, even if the specifics still shocked (neat trick, btw, to present a Thing so beyond the pale that readers fail to guess out of sheer paucity of imagination, but also doesn’t come off as ridiculously edgelord in execution). And seeing the outline, one can’t help notice it’s fifteen filigree variations on a theme of Whomp and Manpain, even the first time through… War sure is Hell, I mean… I guess I’m making an argument about the Culture series (thus far) that I’ve seen made about The Left Hand of Darkness, which is that maybe, they would be more fun to read if less grounded in the POV of a (consciously positioned by author as) relatively un-evolved and therefore more “relatable” male protagonist. Would it be impossible for some, like, blue-haired fanfic-writing furry enby useless MOR-for-Culture person to stumble into a Special Circumstances mission like Gurgeh and actually pull it off? I mean, obviously something like that could be Badly Written, but anything could be Badly Written. It could be hella fun for a Banks-type to execute at a Banks-level.
Alternately, it could be all comedy cocktail party scenes with quippy AIs, all the time.
(Alternately-alternately, Banks solved this in ensuing novels, as he hardly seems into treading old ground for the heck of it.)
One wishes Banks were still around to speak for himself in these trying times; and the more so going forward, one suspects, now that Musk’s naming rockets after Culture ships and Bezos is buying up the TV rights. (As with The Expanse’s Amazon pickup, there should be a word for the odd mix of comfort and fury that comes with any reminder that Jeff Bezos was, in a distant past, a dweeb who sold books on the Internet. But it could be worse! He could be obsessed with the lives and works of Roman emperors! Anyway, these books would make great big-budget streaming series. Banks is the best SFF author I’ve ever read at designing action set pieces with massively physical CGI-logic, and as for the backwards timeskip parallel narration or what have you, we’re in a post-Lost/Westworld/Homecoming era now.)
** OK, straight talk: I wondered if Use of Weapons had been an influence on Final Fantasy VII. (I never wonder this sort of thing about Squeenix games other than FF7. But I was shook™, the first time I saw Metropolis, by how obviously it had influenced FF7, in the level designs and spatial conception even more than in plot.)
Happy 2019
Watched: nothing yet today
Read: 90% through Elizabeth Sandifer’s A Golden Thread - An Unauthorized Critical History of Wonder Woman. The book’s structure is basically “[insert number of] days since DC Comics’s last nonsense.” I didn’t go in with much WW background, so my mind was blown to learn that 1) the DISC Management personality profile, on which I had to take an employer-mandated but tragically lasso-free seminar, originated as a bastardization of Marston’s psychological theories of dominance and submission; and 2) Gloria Steinem once got Chuck Delany fired off the book, probably without actually reading said book.
A Twitter thread I posted yesterday, compiled and added to and manually crossposted to/from Pillowfort, ayy:
In 2018 I did more tidying than the rest of the decade put together. The full Marie Kondo (I have never read a Marie Kondo book tho): carloads of stuff went to the Renaissance depot, library donation box, sold on Kijiji, gifted to friends. I furnished the baby’s room and filled it with hand-me-downs and shower gifts, but that stuff doesn’t feel like mine – it’s his. The big entertainment system is mine, though, to compensate for not being able to go to the movies.
In retrospect 2018 was more ending than beginning, this sort of intentional pruning/last hurrah of Stuff I Own and Stuff I Do – that, let’s be real, I can’t keep up anyway (into my 40s?) – but am now giving up, instead of the gentle, organic phasing out of the last few years. “Not being able to go at all” differing from “eh, I’ll check it out for an hour or two then leave,” the pregnancy has taken on a sharp nostalgia: I “took the baby with me” to concerts/film fests/marketplaces/conventions/etc., however abbreviated or alcohol-less, and got into a mindset that we were exploring the world in tandem, though for him that consisted of changes in my blood sugar and novelty noises.
In actuality the baby currently evinces enjoyment only of breast milk, my yogic breathing practice (a memory fragment from the womb?), and – admittedly – Schubert. Tandem exploration will follow a long process, if lucky.
Endings have also been positive, in 2018. Mortgage, aforementioned; an 18-month work project that all involved agreed to declare a success (having shifted the definition thereof, to accommodate); the two major pieces of writing I signed up for and completed (One Week One Band, the Ravage fanbook novella). Don’t love being invalided out by the field surgery on my pelvic floor – on which more later, lucky yous – but am going into January feeling like I may not have to pop Advil 4evr and uh… 10lbs below pre-pregnancy weight. So. That’s a thing?
I’m not much for resolutions, but as 2019 must perforce consist of beginnings, it deserves a degree of intentionality. Thus:
- Write every day, or rather in lieu of job to go to (as opposed to the diffuse 8-12hr daily job of breastfeeding) just open for business, like a shop, a couple hours every morning – as per Amos Oz, in the Paris Review interview reposted this week.
- Maintain a list of things watched/read/listened/etc, even if not commented on, such that a year’s end list becomes theoretically computable - tweet, at least, though I’ll try on here, Medium, whatever.
A proper Happy New Year to everyone reading: the Internet doesn’t work like this for everyone, but it’s always been most (if not all) of the social life I need. I’ll never feel isolated as long as I have you all to talk to, or even just to listen in on. <3
I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America.
I read Lauren Hough’s originating viral Twitter thread, a while back (…glanced at the avatar and took her for a guy, in point of fact). It was a great piece of writing, and so is this.
Alejandro Cartagena captured Mexican workers on their way to job sites in Car Poolers. This is such an amazing and simple photo series.
(Source: ufunk.net)