Four weeks ago, Wonder Woman arrived on tracking at $65M and just grew from there — to $75M three weeks out, and $90M a few days before its opening. Not only is that evidence of Warner Bros’ marketing machine working effectively, but it’s also an example of what happens when Rotten Tomatoes works in a tentpole’s favor, especially as there’s a groundswell of great reviews days before a film opens.
Against the Russia news onslaught the administration has adopted a novel stonewalling strategy. Henceforth, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the White House will now refer all questions about the investigation to Trump’s outside counsel, Marc Kasowitz, as a classic crisis-communications fix. Spicer might as well have told the pressies that he was depositing all of their Russia questions in a black hole in a galaxy far, far away. Unfortunately for the president, he doesn’t turn invisible whenever he covers his eyes with his hands.
Media Research Center, the long-running conservative media watchdog, and a new group called Media Equalizer say for too long the left has successfully pressured advertisers to stop advertising on shows featuring hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, who were eventually forced off Fox News, and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who have so far fought off their critics.
“Fighting fire with fire is just to point out this can go both ways,” said Brian Maloney, a former conservative radio host heading up the Media Equalizer movement. “We’re trying to show [that] if you’re going to play this game, live or die by this sword. I don’t think the left is used to the right firing back on this.”
From here. Yes, the left is definitely not used to the right being on attack over… every single fucking thing in America. Not at all.
I was one of the last in a generation of identifiable weirdos – a group anyone could name on sight. Born in the 1980s and coming of age before internet ubiquity started the mass disinfecting of differentiation. For years I’d glutted on my mother’s records – Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure, Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie Sioux – wondering how we’d gone from this to Britney and S Club 7. I traded my acoustic guitar for an electric, joined a youth club and had my first brush with punks, metallers, riot grrrls and goths. It felt like a homecoming. I was hypnotised by sidereal girls with alabaster faces. Otherworldly, with lined eyes, raven lips and inky hair. I wanted to be one. This was a tall order for a Fife mining town girl, where the most exotic spoils of the local Superdrug were brown lip gloss and foundation in a spectrum of artificial peach. So, a trip to Edinburgh. An inaugural excursion to Cockburn Street for “supplies”, to begin a transformation that would see me through teendom and beyond.
Nearby Fleshmarket Close was enveloped by swarms of scene kids. Fishnets, chokers, jeans as wide as big tops, skyscraping mohawks. Independent shops for inchoate rebels – records, hair dye, leather, body jewellery, chains, tarot cards, tattoos. I was in love with this alternate reality at first sight.
I found my way to Whiplash Trash – a dingy grotto of perspex heels, neon bongs and cheap PVC militaria that I’d end up living above six years later. I made my first purchase of my future uniform. A mempo of Stargazer makeup: white foundation, kohl liner, black lipstick.
I put it on in Princes Street Gardens, unable to wait the length of a Fife circle train home. I watched my face change through each layer. First de-saturating with dabs of moon-coloured liquid, then contrasted in the extreme with jet liner and charcoal lips. I saw myself – I was sure of it.
We are accustomed to personality politics, though its 2017 incarnation – with the prime minister sending out leaflets that don’t mention the party, preferring “myself and my team”, and the opposition leader seeking to sail into Downing Street on a wave of 20,000 Libertines fans singing his name – is pretty rum. We are less accustomed to politics in which the personalities are sold as the diametric opposite to what they are. A woman who changes her mind on everything, and days after she’s said something says the opposite, is running as the immovable rock in a turbulent world, while a man who hasn’t knowingly changed his mind on anything since 1983 is presenting as the pluralist, the one who can listen.
All the restraints on political discourse, which force the elegant manoeuvres where you soften or pad out or re-contextualise reality so that it better fits your story, have been removed. To say the opposite of what is true is now more than acceptable: it amounts to a core strategy. Or, to put it more simply, they will just say any old bollocks.
No Antennas
For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on — a need for sanity and to expand my horizons, perhaps? — I’ve been switching up the stuff I put in my head recently. I’m still reading a metric shit-ton of comics, because that really kind of is my job, but this past couple of weeks, I’ve been making an effort to balance that out with prose about… other stuff, again.The thing I forgot about summer — probably because it didn’t happen last summer, when everything was strange — is that I find time to read prose, in a way that I don’t manage during the winter, or even the in-between seasons. Right now, I’m juggling a handful of books on cultural theory and social changes driven by technology — The Ministry of Nostalgia, The Inevitable and The Industries of the Future, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, with Against Everything waiting in the wings — with some purposefully trashy reading (A trilogy of Star Trek novels, which have proven to be a lot of fun) and, of course, my preferred method of information gathering these days, podcasts.
The multi-use nature of podcasts — that I can learn things and be entertained while doing other things, on the move — is endlessly appealing to me, and so I remain fascinated by good use of the medium. Current podcast addictions are Says Who, Pod Save America and Lovett or Leave It for politics, The Daily for news (I listen every morning making breakfast) and Song Exploder for musical anal listening. I’m looking forward to the new season of Invisibilia and dip in and out of countless others, impatiently looking for some aural perfection that I can’t even explain if I wanted.
(No, really, I don’t know what I want from my ideal podcast; I wish I did. I’d just make it.)
Part of this is also a desire for new music, or at least, hearing new things in old music. My last couple of months has been all Humanz and Moondog and Jellyfish, and I’m not sure if there’s a connective tissue in there or not (The current Jellyfish obsession is particularly interesting, because I can hear all the influences I wasn’t aware of before; “He’s My Best Friend” is so clearly a Harry Nilsson song, but I never picked up on that before because I didn’t listen to Harry Nilsson). If there is one, I think it’s the quality of sounds, if that makes sense? What the three share is a value in the literal sound of their music, outside of genre or lyrics (or vocals at all, really): the interesting stuff to hear and unpick and embrace and enjoy. I feel like I need more of that, from new stuff or old: things to make me pause and unpick.
(Part of the impact of the Shock and Awe book has been to make me re-evaluate and draw lines between different music that I like, to try and find the connective tissue and see where the various pieces intersect; I’ve become fascinated recently with the previously unseen throughline between Big Audio Dynamite and Delakota, which means that the Clash and Gorillaz are connected beyond Plastic Beach, and makes me wonder where else that thread of… what, British cut-and-paste music culture has been, and gone? Time to revisit Coldcut, I suspect.)
It t would take a colossal dash cam—rolling 24 hours a day, filming in Cinerama, capturing it all in surround sound—to retain all the Donald Trump and Russia news that sailed by this week. As Air Force One carried Trump to the Middle East and Europe in the first big trip of his presidency, the images broadcast back home made him look like the star of a musical comedy directed by Robert Altman. There was some goofy sword dancing in Saudi Arabia, gaffe-ing in Israel, where he said he hadn’t said “Israel” to the Russians, and some body-control issues in Brussels as he dispensed semi-secret handshakes, under-basket elbows and lectures to befuddled European leaders who shunned him.
This was the week that the seeds of scandal and ineptitude planted over the past six months finally sprouted their first shoots, wrapping green tendrils around the president’s ankles and around the throats of his aides, yanking them to earth. This was the week the idea that Trump could stall or outrun his tormentors was put to rest as two congressional committees, one special counsel, the FBI and the deep state pressed him from every angle. Trump is now caught in history’s grinder, and the sparks and noise emitted are lighting up the media universe.
I like to leave at the end of the day. You can’t really leave if you don’t go in. When I work from home, there’s a casino effect: I don’t see people arrive or take off for the day, and without the natural rhythms of other humans I tap away for hours until it’s 6 p.m., 7 p.m., 8, because if other people are still online I should probably be too. Their green chat statuses blink like an accusation, a reminder that any activities and people in your off hours can and should be sacrificed on the corporate altar of productivity, all soft and small autonomies forever second to the god of industry.