deux ou trois choses, 12 march 2023
For some reason I assumed Le Nouveau Jouet would be a comedy, however, that’s not the case - but I did like the heavy allusions towards the Arnault family. The film’s spoiled rich boy is even called Alexandre. His real life version, though, is a much better spectacle: it’s been a curious journey, watching the European prince Alexandre Arnault taking over the American blue blood lady which is Tiffany & Co. I was rooting for this amalgam to work, but up until now it’s all been utterly lackluster, with the sad recent Nike collab verifying the suspicions. I mean, you’re placing hundreds of millions on a shoe with a turquoise swoosh but your Instagram is mostly comprised of 2000’s-looking catalog product shots? That’s just weird prioritizing.1
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The fourth season of Netflix’s You is by far its worse, and if it sounds like I’m furious, it’s because I am. The show was always at its best when it made fun of certain people in certain places: NY hipsters, L.A freaks, Suburbia nutjobs. All the killings and psychosis were completely unnecessary - and if it sounds like I only wished for it to be a continuation of Gossip Girl, well, fine, that’s because I did. Anyway, this season in London holds up for a few Dark Academia frames, beyond that it blatantly wastes our time and the fact that the Guardian implies otherwise only adds to my fury.
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This weekend I got to Žižek’s text on Jacobin, one from January, and I will be keeping it very, very close.
If we are to confront properly the threat of a catastrophe, we have to introduce a new notion of time, the “time of a project,” of a closed circuit between the past and the future: the future is causally produced by our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by our anticipation of the future and our reaction to this anticipation. We should first perceive the catastrophe as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities (“If we were to do that and that, the catastrophe we are in now would not have occurred!”) on which we can act today.
Especially considering Tiffany’s existing foundation for a European invasion, with the unbeatable Givenchy & croissant cliché and whatnot.