I guess I don't need to listen to any more Metallica.
Search
5 results for “guyjantic”
-
RE: https://mastodon.social/@devilgirlbot/117431208951559745
This is quite a nice response to the recent scammers, and by another bot :)
-
This installment, called Field of Corn (I thought I coined cornhenge, but apparently not), has been with me for 30 years. I moved to the area a year or so after it was completed, and nobody in the region seemed to know it existed. It's freaky and glorious. It feels like a Don DeLillo story. It's sterile and repetitive--a hundred or so seven-foot-tall (about 2m) concrete corn cobs sticking straight up in a grassy lawn as part of a bland, faceless corporate office park.
I have had many thoughts about it since I left the area: corn is central to Ohio's history and identity, and is still important to the economy; the exaggerated size and uniformity of the cobs is like the outsized capitalist reality of corn in the area, disguised as down-home single-family farmers, etc. I saw it again for the first time in 20+ years and it is exactly the same except for the lights everywhere (it was pitch black except for the office buildings behind it back in the early 00s).
I often say that Columbus, Ohio felt bizarre to me. It was a city with no identity except "come here and make some money." The key businesses are mostly things nobody thinks about: insurance companies, distributors, the banks you haven't heard of. AOL was there, for fuck's sake. Everything that could be unique, quirky, or adorable is scrubbed into faceless banality (recognizing that there are some really cool things happening despite that, like Glass Axis, Urban Scrawl, the Glen Echo Fairy Trail, and many others; but they are a counterculture fighting overwhelming momentum). In the late 90s there was a grassroots movement to name the new #NHL team the Mad Cows. Fan-designed uniforms, slogans, etc. flew around. Columbus was often called "Cowtown" because, despite its population, it was (and still is) mostly suburban sprawl, and there were still cows living happily in big fields inside the city. Of course the people with the cash went with (and I apologize to fans who might take offense) the most baby-food-pureed focus-group-tested, corporate-branding-initiative-generated name possible: the Bluejackets. From the ouside it seems cool (and that was the goal), but it's some mashup of a yellowjacket with blue coloring and a Native American chief named Blue Jacket whom nobody I talked to had ever heard of. The corporate branders had to dig deep in their quest to co-opt #NativeAmerican identity for profit.
The team is very good, etc. I'm not bashing them. It's not their fault.
Cornhenge is like Columbus. Take corn, a key subsistence food for millennia, critical to the White settlers' success in the region, major money-maker for decades, part of the Midwestern identity, connected to plains life, pioneers, etc. Mass produce it, make it larger than life but it in a painfully perfect corporate, cookie-cutter way. Slap it on a lawn in the business district in a rigid square grid. Keep the grass mowed short. Don't advertise it. Don't make it stand out in any way. There's Columbus.
-
-
Watched #SchoolOfRock again this evening. It's a delightful film. Two things hit me:
- The kids learn to reject authority, be suspicious of wealth, opt out of mainstream status quo culture, ignore R R & R in favor of free-spirited arts education... and those messages are never walked back. There's never a point where the narrative voice of the movie reassures the strait-laced parents in the audience that they really didn't mean it. The messages stand.
- It has occurred to me that maybe the entire movie is basically The Legend of The Rent, and it is way hardcore.