Jordan Ruimy has posted a list of the leading 21st Century American directors…you know, the ones with vision and chops and cojones to spare. Obviously defined as directors who broke through and became a brand during this century.

Here are two lists — the ones that I really believe in are on top, alphabetized and boldfaced — and all the others. 25 in all.

HE preferences: Ari Aster, Sean Baker, J.C. Chandor, Damien Chazelle, Alfonso Cuaron, Robert Eggers, Tony Gilroy, Alejandro G. Inarritu, Bennett Miller, Chris Nolan (10).

Ruimy respect & acknowledgment: The crazy Safdies, Jeff Nichols, Jeremy Saulnier, Jordan Peele, David Lowery, Barry Jenkins, David Robert Mitchell, Charlie Kaufman, Shane Caruth, Craig S. Zahler, Trey Edward Shults, Greta Gerwig, Eliza Hittman, Dee Rees, Mike Mills (15).

Who’s missing?

…controls the relationship. Each and every time I’ve been submissively, ecstatically, head-over heels in love, it’s been agony. The women love the worship at first, but eventually they don’t respect it, and they’ll put you through hell as a form of discipline or punishment.

I was deeply in love (or deeply obsessed) with a very sexy woman around nine years ago, and I remember saying to her at one point, “You know what our relationship is about? Your moods. When your mood is cool, we’re cool. But when your mood goes somewhere else, it’s a briar patch.”

Every relationship levels out and loses the euphoria fumes sooner or later, and once that phase kicks in you’re in trouble. “Don’t worship me,” these women have more or less said to me. “Worship yourself, and if it’s real I’ll tune into it and become a fan. But don’t fucking worship me because most of the time I’m nothing but trouble, and if you want that you’ve come to the right place.”

Love less, be cool, feel your center, be Bhagavad Gita, be yourself. And if she doesn’t like that, fine.

Yesterday I posted about a photo of Malia Obama and a gangbanger cosplay companion, and titled it “Will You Look At This Guy?” The usual HE comment-thread bullshit prevailed, mainly accusing me of being grumpy and out of touch, etc. Bobby Peru wrote that “there’s nothing wrong with how [this guy] looks or what he is wearing, and to call him a ‘gangbanger’ is a cliche and says more about you than him. You really, really don’t want to be in this modern world (or with the people in it) anymore, do you?”

I responded within the thread, but for the sake of emphasis here’s HE’s front-page reply to Peru and the other piss-sprayers out there:

Don’t try to crap a crapper, Bobby Peru. I’ve been all around this great big world for decades and I’ve seen all kinds of garb. Life is choices and this guy is definitely projecting an allegiance with the mindset of Los Pelones. The Mexican mafia thing is his adoption or creation, not mine.

Whatever his actual social background or scholastic aspirations or core convictions or deep-down identity**, he’s saying that the sartorial guise of certain inner-city Latino dudes — shaved head, sandals, baggy pants, ugly K-Mart hoodie…his idea is to project a support of or a basic agreement with big-city youths who dress like this all the time.

It’s a bottom-of-the-social-barrel aesthetic — a form of play-acting or cosplay…and truly, deeply repellent.

Certain Zoomer dudes have been too sartorially consistent for this statement to be accidental.

There are all kinds of creative ways to convey a sense of style or to project some kind of flair or attitude or personality, and yet this guy is saying “I have seen low-rent, shaved-head Latino high-school youths on the bus in shitty areas of Miami or St. Louis or Oakland or East Los Angeles…guys with that shaved head thing, man…a shaved head and a K-Mart bargain basement mark-down aesthetic…the absolute ugliest threads ever worn in the history of human culture.

“And I’m choosing this K-Mart ugliness because it means something to me…I relate to the mindset and lifestyles of the social flotsam, the empty Coke bottles, dudes without a fucking clue or much of a developed mentality…obviously I have something on the ball or I wouldn’t be hanging with Malia but nonetheless I feel this kinship with the dregs of society…guys with shaved heads and tats and machismo but not much edge or taste…that’s me. I feel it, I get it, I embrace it.”

** His name is Dawit Eklund, and he’s 33 — 9 years older than Malia. Excerpt: “Eklund is the son of retired State Department officer Jon Eklund, 72, who worked at several US embassies in Africa and his Ethiopian wife Yeshi, 66. Dawit is co-founder of Washington, D.C.-based record label 1432 R, which specializes in Ethiopian music.”

Even if I do say so myself, one of HE’s most enjoyably-written pans appeared on or about 10.3.17, or a little more than five years ago. I am genuinely proud of some of the phrases, sentences and paragraphs in this thing, particularly the following:

“It lasts an eternity — I checked my watch at least five or six times, and my muttered mantra all through it was ‘I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this, I don’t give a shit about any of this’ — but it’s certainly a major vision thing. Pay your $16 dollars and sink into a thoroughly gloomy realm of super-holograms (including ones of Frank Sinatra and Vegas-era Elvis Presley), rot, ruin and industrial scrap, a toxic shithole populated with grim-faced characters you would just as soon squash as look at, a world of hair-grease and sprayed sweat and impassive, cold-death expressions, and all of it blanketed with rain, snow, sludge and chemical mud-glop.

“And oh, yeah, for a story that you won’t give two shits about. A dingleberry doodle plot involving memory implants and oscured lineage and a secret no one must know (no one! just ask Jared Leto!) and a little wooden horse with a date (6.10.21) carved into the base, and some shit-hooey about original replicant creator Eldon Tyrell having given Rachael, the experimental replicant played by Sean Young in the ’82 original, the organic potential to reproduce and blah blah. And a narrative pace that will slow your own pulse and make your eyelids flutter and descend, and a growing need to escape into the outer lobby so you can order a hot dog and check your messages.

“BR49 should have run two hours, not two hours and 44 minutes.

“Do yourself a favor…seriously. Before seeing it this weekend, read the Wikipedia synopsis. Doing so will remove the irritating, hard-to-follow story tease and allow you to just concentrate on the visuals, which is all this thing is about anyway. It doesn’t matter anyway — nothing does, it’s all shit and distraction, you’re all just contributing to the Warner Bros. bottom line, to Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford‘s wealth while you subtract from your own. We’re all punks, fools, suckers, knaves. Warner Bros. pours a little whiskey onto the plastic floor, and like Ford’s Blade Runner wolf dog we lick it right up.

“Fuck the story, fuck the lineage factor, fuck it all. Just sink into the chilly murderous vibe and Gosling’s impassive, glazed-over robot eyes, and Ford’s subtle emotional delivery (has he ever cried before on-screen?). Nobody cares and it doesn’t fucking matter if RG or Ford or Kevin Tsujihara are replicants. I’m a replicant with the capability of siring children and writing a daily column. What difference does it make if I’m an android or not, or if I dream of electric sheep? Nobody cares, nothing matters, it’s all bullshit.

“What of the virtual-reality ho chick, the homicidal super-bitch and the brittle, tough-cookie supervisor played by Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks and Robin Wright? Smart women will not be pleased. (After the show a friend was listening to a whipsmart feminist deploring these characters and the phony, piss-poor writing.) For these are cardboard, non-dimensional figures (women acting like men or fulfilling men’s fantasies) who would never be hatched by a woman screenwriter. Grow some soul and awareness, Hampton Fancher and Michael Green.

“How important is Gosling’s little wooden horse, and how does it feed into everything else? I’m still scratching my head about that, but I’m sure someone will explain it later today. Is Gosling’s ‘Joe’ the replicant son of you-know-who? I didn’t give a shit. Is there any kind of emotionally satisfying undercurrent in any of this? Fuck no.

“There’s one moment — one! — that made me sit up in my seat and say to myself ‘wait, hold on, this is semi-poignant.’ But the spoiler whiners will kill me if I get specific. It involves Ford and a younger woman — I’ll leave it at that.

“I knew this wouldn’t be a glorious, all-around triumph. I knew it would be brilliant but problematic. I knew not to trust those rave reviews written by balding, bespectacled and/or heavyset dweebs. If they’d written ‘it’s a bear to sit through and it makes you feel like shit, but it’s a masterpiece,’ okay, but too many of them just wrote ‘it’s a masterpiece!’ This is why people don’t trust critics. They live in their own world.

“America used to be a global leader in brainless entertainment, particularly featuring explosions, boobs, and weightlifters, but since Trump’s election Hollywood’s been in a funk and spent years trying to bury its baser instincts and reinvent itself as Highbrow and Caring. This resulted in a thousand iterations of self-serious films straining to make the miserable entertaining (Bill Maher’s take on the perfect modern Oscar hopeful was The Immigrant Who Shat in a Coffee Can).

“Of all the negative by-products of Trump’s election, one of the most subtly destructive was alienating America from the one thing we’ve consistently done well, the lowest common denominator. For no good reason, politics has made a big chunk of the country wary of Cheez Whiz, mud wrestling, commercials about pickup trucks carrying other pickup trucks up mountains of boulders, and a hundred other mindless awesome things in our blood.

“This country sucks at highbrow, we’re great at stupid, and since there’s nothing more stupid than stupid highbrow, we’ve spent the last half-decade exporting the most embarrassing conceivable content on a grand scale. This has just made everybody, left and right, more uptight and pissed at each other. When we get back to embracing shark panics, Hang in There Baby office posters, and weightlifters/models blowing each other out of the sky with billion-dollar weapons, my guess is we’ll all start feeling better. Thank you, Tom Cruise, you lunatic. You’ve helped the healing begin.” — from Matt Taibbi‘s latest Substack essay.

Friendo who told me to watch FX/Hulu’s The Bear: “Did you watch it? Whadja think?”
HE: “Yeah, I watched it. The first episode, I mean. Too much chaos, too much shouting, too much clatter and I don’t like Jeremy Allen White. Fuck that guy. If the entire crew had been killed by a terrorist bomb I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. And all for some fucking Chicago sandwiches.”

“These are the guys who think all complaints about identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture are just the dying gasp of reactionary old men, which is why they lie awake at night praying to god that they never get canceled. These are the guys who put their pronouns in their bios in hopes that doing so might get them a little pussy. These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.” — from Freddie deBoer’s “The Good White Man Roster — a database of progressive white men who are thirsty for credit” (6.13.22).