BRIAN WHITNEY

chicago writer/performer/filmmaker/rabblerouser

[artfilmfan]

The Red Circle (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)

[dukeofhellington]

[a-bittersweet-life]

Andrei Tarkovsky Polaroid Photography

In 1977, on my wedding ceremony in Moscow, Tarkovsky appeared with a Polaroid camera. He had just shortly discovered this instrument and used it with great pleasure among us. He and Antonioni were my wedding witnesses. According to the custom of the period they had to choose the music played during the signing of the wedding documents. They chose the “Blue Danube.”

At that time Antonioni also often used a Polaroid camera. I remember that in the course of a field survey in Usbekistan where we wanted to shoot a film–but finally did not do it–he gave to three elderly Muslims the pictures he had taken of them. The eldest one as soon as he took a glance at the photos, immediately returned them with these words: “What is it good for, to stop the time?” This unusual refusal was so unexpected that it took us by surprise and we could not reply anything.

Tarkovsky thought a lot about the “flight” of time and wanted to do only one thing: to stop it–even if only for a moment, on the pictures of the Polaroid camera.”

Tonino Guerra

[flowerinaflame]

[lalocorleone-deactivated2026041]

Harry Dean Stanton and David Lynch on the set of Twin Peaks, 2017 (photo by Cori Glazer)

[thebrianwhitney-blog]

When I was in 7th grade my English teacher showed us Dead Poets Society, but just three scenes: Keating's First Day (up to the Carpe Diem part), The Part Where He Has The Students Walk In Unison, and the Oh Captain My Captain scene. For a little while I thought Dead Poets Society was a twenty minute long movie where a teacher gets fired on his second day for giving one weird lecture.

[thebrianwhitney-blog]

current obsession: this video of randy newman on letterman from the night before i was born

[thebrianwhitney-blog]

this song fucks with me, i fuck with this song, and on and on forever.

[mrangst]

untitled 90.

[thebrianwhitney-blog]

just used this as a reference for a short film i’m working on, if you’re in chicago you can see the original in the modern wing of the art institute.

[theartofmoviestills]

Dogtooth | Yorgos Lanthimos | 2009

Mary Tsoni, 1987-2017.

[crackatyourlove]

[netscapeshawty]

Brandon Jennings Full Highlights 2009.11.14 vs Warriors - 55 Pts in 3 Quarters!

[criterioncollection]

Happy 79th birthday to that supreme Nicholson presence!

[quoms]

the narrative people understand about ‘investing in the stock market’ is a fundamentally disingenuous one: ‘buy low, sell high’. people understand ‘investing in real estate’ the same way - buy a piece of land that’s cheap now and will be expensive later. this is what it means, in the common parlance, to ‘invest’

but investment and speculation are two very different things. a person who ‘buys low, sells high’ is, at best, a merchant, scraping his comparatively miniscule margins off the bottom of the capitalist economic system. at worst, and most commonly, he is a speculator who is about to lose all his money in spectacular fashion

real capitalists do not buy to sell, they buy to exploit. a finance capitalist selects stocks not for their price next month, but for the dividends they will pay out over the next few fiscal years. a landlord buys a parcel and constructs a building on it not to be sold as soon as the value of the land goes up, but to rent it out to people at the highest possible price (while ceding, of course, the lowest possible amount for maintenance)

how do investment and speculation differ? well, primarily, in that investment is not a way for people to get rich. it is a way for people who are already rich to get richer. if you only have a couple thousand bucks to invest in stocks, you shouldn’t be disappointed when all that rolls in are shitty $15 dividend checks. on the other hand, if you had a million dollars to invest, those dividends would look a lot more substantial in absolute terms

the rebranding of speculation as ‘investment’, which has been going on for easily a hundred years if not more, is first and foremost a way for poor people to get played like suckers. everyone knows capitalists ‘invest’, that our economic system runs on ‘investment’. people who do not know the details of what precisely that means are prone to credulity when an evidently wealthy person comes along and tells them they, too, can have wealth if they only buy what the person is selling - for the price will surely be higher a few months from now!

the sales pitch is that you, the person who only has a few thousand dollars tucked away in your child’s college fund - you can be a small-time rockefeller or buffett! that what separates you from the people who own you is not a matter of kind but of degree. and saturated with disingenuous sales pitches of this sort, people begin to believe this is the logic by which industrial capitalism actually operates

it’s extraordinarily american

[thebrianwhitney-blog]

@geocities

[corvid-420]

How Iowa Flattened Literature

With help from the CIA, Paul Engle’s writing students battled Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing still lingers.

I got an ask about a link that wasn’t working, so i’ll post here, too.

Long story short: the world-famous university of iowa creative writing program was established as a CIA front whose sole purpose was to create a literary movement that was supportive of capitalism.

it was part of a greater feat of social engineering called Operation Mockingbird, wherein the CIA would either invent programs like Iowa creative writing, take over existing ones like Washington Post or CBS news, or create literary journals and magazines devoted to state capitalist propaganda.

[justpokemongo]

A good quote from the long article to sort of summarize the ideology engineered by these MFAs:

One can easily trace the genealogy from the critical writings of Trilling and Ransom at the beginning of the Cold War to creative-writing handbooks and methods then and since. The discipline of creative writing was effectively born in the 1950s. Imperial prosperity gave rise to it, postwar anxieties shaped it. “Science,” Ransom argued in The World’s Body, “gratifies a rational or practical impulse and exhibits the minimum of perception. Art gratifies a perceptual impulse and exhibits the minimum of reason.” In The Liberal Imagination, Trilling celebrated Hemingway and Faulkner for being “intensely at work upon the recalcitrant stuff of life.” Life was recalcitrant because it resisted our best efforts to reduce it to intellectual abstractions, to ideas, to ideologies. 

Basically it was a Walt Whitman-esque, Ameri-typical shift towards the individual story about FEELING and the real experience over the intellectual, the political, the reflective, or the critical, contextualized through liberal supposedly anti-fascist/anti-bureaucratic reactions to WWII and the USSR. 

Funded by the CIA, Rockefeller Foundation, etc.; not only took over popular rhetoric about how to write American fiction, but also specifically targeted foreign nationals to come write for the program and propagate this “imaginative, creative” America. 

Hallmark styles sanctioned by (though not created by) this approach include modernism, lite literary fiction, and magical realism (though, I’d argue, not exactly the Márquezian variety, definitely the more watered down modern versions). 

An example the author was taught is a pyramid diagram with “Meaning, Sense, Clarity” at the bottom and thus the most principal; then “Senses,” then “Character,” then the ‘fancy stuff’: metaphor, symbolism, allegory, i.e. the theoretical and critical. 

[olive2004]

@guavapaste ummm holy shit?!

[geocities]

@thebrianwhitney hmmm wow

[thebrianwhitney-blog]

Has anyone seen my jaw

[geocities]

Last week, a friend of mine mentioned that Charles Bissell of the Wrens was hosting semi-impromptu listening parties of the new album at his Brooklyn home. A Facebook message and some lucky timing led to us being there for a few hours today, shooting the shit in his basement studio while his kids ran around outside. He played most of the new album for us, and it sounded incredible. I’ve been so passive in my listening lately. And the way I consume music has changed drastically; I’m broader in my scope, stylistically, but I have less patience on an individual basis. It makes me think about the way that Spotify and Apple Music etc. try to curate listening experiences; their algorithms lack context and can’t make up for it. Historical, stylistic, evolutionary context, sure. Band A sounds like Band B, who was on the same label as Band C who was heavily influenced by Bands D and E. People who listen to Band C also seem to love Band F. It’s a process that makes a neat web on paper but is devoid of so many intangible, unquantifiable factors. I don’t always know how to find things anymore, and I don’t trust the new processes at all.

What I’m trying to say is that I don’t know why the Wrens have meant so much to me over the years, but I have some ideas. I was an avid pitchfork reader when the Meadowlands came out in the beginning of my freshman year of high school, scoring a cool 9.something. I bought the CD and it was the only one that worked in the CD player that my parents had set up for me in my bedroom. Therefore, I could play it extremely loud on my stereo. When my crush didn’t like me back and started dating someone else, I remember crying into a Mogu pillow and listening to “She Sends Kisses”. When I met Emily in college, she had also been a fan, and we spent the next few years desperately trying to see them play a show. Finally, they played in Baltimore; Megan drove us and played bubble spinner on her phone while Emily and I were blissed the fuck out. After I came back from Denmark, I got really into Secaucus in a big way. I was lusting after everyone. “I’ve made enough friends” seemed like an appropriate song to play on repeat every morning when I took the bus to campus. Not releasing anything after 2003 left them untarnished and pure and nostalgic and succinct and perfect.

After we left Charles’ house, we went to Danie’s, to hang out with the same friends I’ve always had, to talk about the same band that I’ve always loved for as long as they’ve known me, and things were just as good as always. We left, warm and giggly from the whiskey we had guzzled, took the Long Island Railroad to Deer Park and listened to the first two songs on The Meadowlands on the car ride home . My mom protested like she always did, and we drove down Deforest Road like we always did. Passed my schools and my old friends’ houses, listening to this song loud and crying, like I always did.

[thebrianwhitney-blog]

this was also my day and it fucking ruled (mostly cause I spent it with @geocities)

[fuckyeahmenwithlocs]

Philadelphia MOVE Organization were a group of mostly black, freedom and nature loving activists who lived in Philadelphia in the early 1970s to early 80s until the Philadelphia police department dropped a bomb on their house from a helicopter on May 13, 1985, silencing their central figure, John Africa. Eleven MOVE family members, five of them children, clawed their way out of the inferno, only to be beaten back by police gunfire. The Philadelphia Police and Fire departments let the blaze continue for hours as the 11 people and their numerous rescued animals all perished. Their crimes? They were raw vegans protesting zoos and pet shops, taking in stray animals, composting, home schooling and preaching about the sacredness of life in the middle of a city that had no time to listen. 

[thebrianwhitney-blog]

The history of MOVE is way more complicated than this. What the police did is absolutely horrific and shameful (look up Frank Rizzo if you want to know what policing was like in Philadelphia in the 70s and 80s). That being said, MOVE’s crimes also included leaving piles of garbage and human waste on their property, which led to serious rat infestations in their neighborhood. They also broadcasted their ideology by bullhorn 24 hours a day for YEARS. The neighbors that complained about MOVE (and subsequently had their neighborhood destroyed by the firebombing) were largely middle-class and African American. Not to sell short that the Philadelphia police did a variety of horrible, fucked-up things to black radicals in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and this was the worst of those offenses. Nobody deserves to be killed over garbage and noise complaints. At the same time, if MOVE were your neighbors, you’d be dialing 311 too.