Mallory's Camera

Television! "Industry," "My Brilliant Friend"

2024-09-16T13:11:32Z

Third season of Industry is remarkable.

The milieu—the London world of high finance—is more or less incomprehensible to me. I still don’t comprehend what a “short” is despite having had it explained to me more than a hundred times; I feel about shorts exactly what I used to feel about the rules of football, which, similarly, I had explained to me endlessly when I used to attend Ichabod’s high school football games.

In the end, I realized my lack of comprehension did not signify I was stupid: I just did not give a fuck. The information felt—feels—irrelevant to anything that’s important to me. There’s no room for it in my brain.

“Short” is just jargon. But I think that’s the point. The characters are dehumanized by what they do. But the jargon could be anything.

The storytelling, that fusion of plot, characterization, status detail, & dialog, is so tight, so seamless, so immersive. How brilliant is this line? The story of our lives becomes the story of the detours our desires take us on.

I can’t recommend the show to anyone, though.

The characters are so brutal.

###

Money, finance, capital, these abstractions around which we design our lives, are a completely imaginary—if consensually agreed upon—concept. Money is not real. Money is the ultimate glamor—in the original sense of the word, meaning the sickly glow that certain groundworms emit that used to lure unwitting peasants off the path into the darkness where they would be devoured by wolves.

Money is a human construct with no equivalent in the physical world.

I wonder whether that’s why it’s so compelling?

In a weird way, the human obsession with money is the ultimate signal of human dominance over the physical world.

My Brilliant Friend is another show about money, or more specifically, the lack of money—especially that first season, which focuses on post-WWII southern Italy’s extreme poverty & privation.

I would recommend My Brilliant Friend unreservedly.

It has the same seamless, completely organic storytelling as Industry, but while the characters are just as flawed, they are immensely more sympathetic—possibly because the viewer tracks them from earliest childhood. To see someone in the context of childhood is to understand everything, and, if not to forgive it all, to forgive a lot of it.

One of the areas where My Brilliant Friend excels, in fact, is that it recreates the texture of memory in a truly remarkable fashion. I can’t think of any other film or TV show I’ve seen that pulls this off quite as well.

###

Since I, too, am completely subjugated by the imaginary construct of money, it is now time for me to get off my ass, stop free-associating, & start Remunerating!!!!

comments

That Dress! Plus Prokofiev Bender

2024-09-03T15:29:26Z

I did very little of anything over the holiday weekend except tromp, read, listen to music, and generally veg. Oh, and I put up Xmas lights—my home décor aesthetic is mid-century Mexican restaurant—& tried to go shopping. Hit three thrift shops & Marshall’s/TJ Max conglomerates in both Newburgh & Poughkeepsie: I need bookshelves, I need a new bathrobe.

Found nothing that appealed to me.

I hate shopping.

###

I do see clothes that I like from time to time. Usually on TV shows with French female characters—Celeste from Industry is a prime example; I swooned over her wardrobe. In one scene, she is wearing this dress with a Peter Pan collar—alas, all the screenshots are muddy, but I tracked it down on a vendor’s site:

You can’t get a sense of how the dress wears from this photograph, but trust me, it moves, it flows, it’s transparent in all the right places. And I am approximately 35 years too old to wear it—even supposing I had some place to wear it to.

Anyway, these are the kinds of clothes I like. (They are not to be found in thrift stores or Marshalls.)

And if I can’t wear them, I’d just as soon wear uniforms (which is basically what my invariable everyday jeans-mit-oversized-boyfriend-shirt is.)

###

I went on a Prokofiev bender last night.

Fifth Symphony, 2nd piano concerto, Lieutenant Kije back-to-back.

Prokofiev is my favorite classical composer. Was a big favorite’s of my mother’s, too; she had a huge stack of Prokofiev LPs, which I used to listen to whenever she was out of the apartment. (I was never supposed to use my mother’s turntable, but, of course, I did.)

The Fifth Symphony is inextricably linked in my mind with the E. Nesbit novel, The Magic City—I must have been reading that book when I first listened to it. In particular, I have this very vivid woodblock illustration in my head superimposed on to that last allegro giocoso movement: a group of circular boats helmed by storybook children on a wide river perilously close to the edge of a steep cascade.

But when I hunted down The Magic City on Project Gutenberg, there was no illustration of children in circular boats and nothing to suggest a strange adventure in swirling water.

So, go figure.

I wonder where that image comes from?

The complete orchestral suite of Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet is my very, very favorite classical piece of all time.

But it’s so tied up in my mind with memories & lost love that listening to it always makes me weep. So I can't listen to it very often.

###

Meanwhile, autumn is here with a bang.

Temps this morning are in the 50°s and not expected to rise much above 70°.

Though oddly enough, the trees haven’t yellowed much. When you look across from the Poughkeepsie side of the Hudson, the trees on this side of the river, the forested side, are still an unbroken swatch of green.

comments

Privilege, LGBTQIA+, and the Starbucks Model of Consumer Choice

2023-06-24T14:31:54Z

It’s raining this morning!

Which is good.

But apparently, Russia is on the brink of some kind of civil war.

Which is bad.

Sentient cockroaches reading this 247 years after it was written! (Once you’ve finally figured out that human codex.)

This is where your creation myth started to get interesting.

###

I twisted my back yesterday in a moderately uncomfortable fashion. You know when it feels like an electric current is shooting vertically across your lumbar spine every couple of minutes? That.

But I was macho! I scoffed at pain! I went out tromping anyway. And for the first couple of miles could barely move. But after that, for the last three miles, the pain went away and didn’t come back.

Thereby reinforcing my belief that exercise really is the cure for everything.

###

Apart from that, I Remunerated, watched the final four episodes of Industry, and read Andrew Sullivan.

###

Industry is just an astonishingly good show. But it's not for everybody, focusing, as it does, on the lives of two incredibly damaged young women with high-power jobs in the finance industry.

Succession bored the shit out of me—so it’s a bit odd I like Industry as much as I do. I guess that’s because in Succession, privilege is a given, what we economists like to call a cetis paribus, whereas in Industry, money may be the ride on the merry-go-round but privilege is the gold ring all the characters keep snatching after.

Money bores me.

Privilege does not.

###

Andrew Sullivan has done a series of absolutely fabulous articles over the past few weeks about the difference between being gay and being queer.

(And yes, I do have a dog in this fight, liking boys and girls just about equally as sexual partners.)

My own thoughts?

Since I doubt very much that the functional act behind all this (which is to say, the sexual act) is all that different from alphabet category to alphabet category, the categories themselves must be a kind of marketing tool.

What are these categories marketing?

Edge, disruption... relevance.

Relevance is attention, after all, and attention is currency in the strange social sea in which we float these days. Staying relevant is everybody's favorite performance art.

Sullivan makes the excellent point that at the end of every successful revolution or civil rights movement, the differences that gave rise to the movement should become irrelevant because those differences will have entered the mainstream and thus, should no longer exist as significators any more important, say, than a favorite color or a favorite flavor of ice cream.

Using this metric, the struggle for racial equality has a long way to go before it can be deemed successful.

But the struggle for gay rights actually did succeed: The Obergefell decision may have been controversial when SCOTUS first handed it down in 2015, but by 2020, two-thirds of Americans supported same-sex marriage.

Those numbers have been steadily going down.

Are Americans becoming more intolerant?

Or has the LGBTQIA+ contingent become more obnoxious?

Dunno!

###

As a marketing category, LGBTQIA+ is also selling consumer choice.

Like I say, I don’t see a helluva lot of essential variation in the underlying product formula, which I think can be modeled thusly: sexual attraction—>sexual availability—>genital manipulation—>orgasm.

Sexual attraction is the product component with the most room for variations, of course, and it’s those variations LGBTQIA+ is selling.

LGBTQIA+ is rather like Starbucks in that respect. Starbucks became a $115 billion company by peddling 255 variations on the basic caffeinated drink model!

You probably think your consumer choice of caffeinated drink is important!

But honestly?

It’s not.

comments