Danny babbles on about Zizek. I haven't read the movie... or watched the book... or smelled the lecture... to know what it is he is mumbling about. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it wasn't as good as the Cliff Notes. And I even did my final thesis paper on Hegel. Not that I understood it then either. There are these two things and they bash up against each other and the make a third thing. Sounds like having kids. But there is this other thing going on, this other thing lately. This thing with blogs that post visual ideas. They aren't quite diary blogs. They aren't quite art blogs. They aren't geek-out blogs. More often than not, they sort of exist to prop up a brand of some sort. It's like they are saying "hey, here is all this stuff we aspire to be, we didn't make these images, but they inspire us and what we are doing, so buy it!" They are producing a kind of outré branding vision board that has broken out of the agency conference room and is parading around, exposed. These bits and pieces plucked from here and there. This is what we're doing, see, do you get it? And it isn't any different, really, from all these nutty aficionados cultishly perving out on some digital trading cards. Because that's how the stuff gets disseminated in this Twenty First Century world. Recycle, reuse, rediscover, exacerbate. But the ostensible idea is to get it to the self-serving creation point. You throw it all in there as often as possible, fill the pot up so it boils down in your favor. It's like they are the director, and you, you're the cinematographer, and they've shown up at the pre-pro with all these crazy references stuck to white tack board and you are all "uh-huh, yeah, alright, yep, seen that, get it, yeah." Masters of Light stuff. But with the idea that whatever your brain makes of it all, it will lead you to their own front door. Are they pulling your strings? Are they somehow selling something to you that's not theirs? Does it matter? And that's how things work. That's how it's always worked, just slower maybe, more hidden. But this time, in the end, it has to boil down to something. Something has to be made. And inevitably, it will, that's the conceit. There is the hope that a universal is happening. A generous altruism of camaraderie. That's the thing that alleviates any moral nitpicking. We're all in this together. It's just that in the meantime there is that uncomfortable feeling that you're talking to the rich guy who sat next to Willy Loman during training.
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