Just heard the ion response ep, “This is how we walk on the moon,” and it turns out the roxy did not cancel the screenings. Curt and KJ just didn’t book any more of them. So the entire thing was predicated on a falsehood and Curtis cannae read and Betsey Brown is an embarrassment of a filmmaker. I want to see tjhe fucking movie for chrissakes
I saw Nope with some college buddies on a Sunday afternoon and I had an interesting time pretending I had any idea who Bad Bunny is when the trailer to Bullet Train came on. I don’t really know what he looks like and I don’t really like his songs. I was confused as to why this cast member was apparently so interesting. But when the Easter Sunday trailer played I said “Brandon” out loud when Tiffany Haddish tells Wardell’s character she used to lay his dad. After the Bodies Bodies Bodies trailer I said something, wow, there’s a couple reasons I’d see that, maybe two. I said I don’t mind Skete’s acting; he was very good in Big Time Adolescence with Griffin Gluck. Nor Racial Senate; Shiva Baby was good, a tight 80-something minutes of anxiety and coming-of-age. Definitely healed some people.
Oh, uh, the bad guy from Rockstar’s Bully on the PS2 invited a party-writer on set to berate him in front of hundreds of people and Dasha and a canceled member of Generation Alpha and Honor obviously for having the gall to review his sister’s movie negatively. And it’s the fault of those sage-like Sarah Lawrence grads with the hot-girl podcast that this Brooklyn guy even got in there? I don’t know. He’s sorta clouted himself?
I’ve been fixating on that text from Betsey Brown in that Crumps thing
This is the exciting thing about art. We can wildly disagree, and it can offend some and heal others :)
because she’s not wrong or whatever. About art. Sure it seems no one in that camp can deal with one guy from Virginia thinking their stuff is - not even bad, just fascist! Or disgusting! Look! You transgressed! That’s what you wanted, right? You wrote a reactionary movie about gender to examine the complexities of cis women’s lives as you perceive them and people read it as transphobic. You used transphobia as a vehicle to look at identity in art-making and sibling rivalry and what people might put-on to promote their work. I can’t speak to that - it’s definitely transphobic - because I haven’t seen it yet. I don’t know how. If The Roxy bumped you because of an article no one IRL read then fuck The Roxy? Sure. But you should not have doubled down on it not being transphobic. You should have prostrated yourself. Like Petra in the movie. You should have said, oh I’m so sorry, I’m working through stuff from this viewpoint and if that’s how it’s being read it still has a right to being seen for its general merit. You say that and then Crumps has no angle. He’s just a guy saying a movie is offensive. Instead, he’s catching you in lies, in intellectual subterfuge, in working with ‘bad guys’ like Moldbug. He went like 8 months before he went histrionic with it, talking about
If it was true that my review was what cancelled the Actors run at the Roxy, then good, because that film had no business ever being shown there in the first place. If this is the power that my writing has, then I’m proud of it.
That’s… uh… a not super sick brag. Betsey should have said some bullshit and shooed this guy away. I guess that’s on Curtis, too. Giving him clout and all that. It’d still hurt trans people inevitably but you could have tricked other cis people into giving the movie a chance. Getting too in your head about talking about your stuff, or what people say about it, you’re not even selling it. Why not get one of Pete’s Web 3 friends to front the cash. Crumps is a guy who texted you, not your friend you weird baby. This bit is insane, and it’s gotta be real because there’s hundreds of witnesses:
What mean things? He said you might be transphobic. Maybe you made a mistake, maybe you intended it, but you gotta own up to ideas you’ve gathered when they’re put together into a full fucking movie. This isn’t a bad tweet. You made a movie where a fictionalized version of your brother pretends to be trans for artistic clout. Crumps (and somehow every tgirl south of Delancey) thought the narrative was “wildly offensive.” He stripped your shit down with some big words and you’re reading it as betrayal? Can any of these fucking freaks read?** It’s criticism! About a movie! That’s how everything fucking works! You don’t just write a positive review because the filmmakers worked so hawd spending Mr. and Mrs. Brown’s money on a movie about how weiwd it is to have a brother who made a movie with Mr. and Mrs. Brown’s money. A movie that reviewed pretty poorly.
Crumpler is just one guy. Other people could share his opinion, also. That happens sometimes; people consume art and have takeaways. People with actual reach. The world does not exist to suck your dick for the incredible task of just making the art. Just reflected your mundane New York life in the most offensive way you could fathom. So you could out-butthole Peter Vack’s movie about buttholes?
It’s cucked. Better Brown and Petey Pack cucked themselves out of releasing a shitty (or good! I’ll probably never know) movie because they’re cowards and they're afraid people might see the stuff they actually believe in. Ion guys as well. Dasha’s getting flown around the world for prestige television with hours and hours of crazy shit on tape and you can’t stand behind one offensive/cruel/unsettling/not progressive/whatever idea? Just flushing somebody’s opus down the toilet because of one guy.
That’s what happens when your parents are nice to you; you never learn how to get away with anything. You never have to when nobody’s gonna hit you. You learn how to survive, maybe, and anybody criticizing you is malicious. It feels so, so bad when someone disagrees with you.
There are a serious of lessons you’re supposed to learn at home, lessons about humility and giving things and purpose, and good parents can model those things just as terribly as bad ones.
You could have so easily avoided this whole thing. I don’t think these people are operatives of Peter Thiel so much as they think they are better at hobnobbing than making interesting work but they don’t know how people think anymore. An overeducated ‘woke’ guy, which is like, every guy in art and media, confuses them. Types of guys who went to college with them and are now journalists or civil servants. They live blocks from these guys. They have a million connections on LinkedIn. And Crumpler destroys them with an essay where he’s probably just remembering something a trans woman told him once or twice. What is this strange world where wokeism is a new religion but the transgressors have no idea how to get away with anything? You’re Doug Hopkinsing yourself with slurs.
They value how different they think from the mainstream, how they’re the silent majority, and then their work is about how hard it is to be from an Upper West Side filmmaking family. It’s about how they’re jealous of like, blue-hairs. It’s tiny, irrelevant shit. Just make your fucking movie, man. How can you not figure out how to sell that. There is not a cabal of taste-making trans girls keeping you out of these rooms, man. You fucked it yourself. This isn’t some kind of political battle, either. If it was, they’d be as chill as possible. Try to weasel their shit in lowkey. World Peace would have been cancelled last week instead of 6 years ago. Of course, World Peace was funny. Sam Hyde and I have a different vision for the world, but it was a show in a world of Call of Duties and Hilary Clinton. A blip. A funny blip.
If this is the state of this fascism Crumps is looking at, then what are we worried about? Dark shakycam dramas with potential audiences of 2,000 people? What can we can hope for - what? Less art? Or, less apparitions of art. Something lefty? I do think a reactionary work is often made by a clouded mind. They come out shitty. Unconvincing. But like, woke shit is bad sometimes too. I read Clementine. I’m not gonna rally behind a guy for maybe getting a movie cancelled. Fuck The Roxy for taking a side and then dropping it. For watching a movie and letting public opinion change how they felt about it. Fuck this movie, Actors, sure. But the heads at that theater don’t care either way about transgression or hurting people or art or anything if it took backlash and not just watching the movie. I haven’t seen it but if the shit is in there, it’s in there. If it quacks like a duck.
Just how do you back down like that? To Crumps? He barely speaks your language!*
It’s the backing down where I’m like, oh this is a move and randomly all the twitter schizos were right about Felix from Chapo being CIA and Thiel money and everything.
Full disclosure: Ion Pack, alongside therapy and group therapy and meds and internet pdfs and my loved ones and my friends, have taught me a lot about myself, and about art or whatever. Though -is advice from kids with supportive parents tainted? No, right? It’s like do you want to insights on life and romance from Woody Allen? Even if it’s packaged well? They know a lot more about themselves than poor kids sometimes. But I digress. These two stupid guys have interesting things to say about artistic practice, abstaining from drugs, relationships. And they get deep people on sometimes. They are definitely wacker than Crumps, though. And maybe I am wasting my time- HA! Obviously, it’s a podcast. But maybe I should spend less time mulling over making art a process of sucking your own dick and Caveh and Annie Hamilton and just read a book.
More disclosure: Crumps inspired me to start this thing. To walk into thing with secret, snake-like disdain - disdain somehow illegible to people, like the people namedropped in Gutes’s newspaper, or anyone at Ponyboy or 169 or Vig Bar or La Linnea or La Caverna or the back of Clockwork or Dymphna’s or Carmelo’s
**Honestly, Peter Vack’s response to crumps and weird defense of Betsey like she’s some kind of blind dog and not a woman who literally directed a movie is a very pro skater move. Kyle Beachy used SAT words in a positive review of the first 917 video and basically an entire scene of skaters in LA and New York got so offended they refuse to this day to work with Jenkem Magazine - a prominent independent publication Kyle freelanced for like twice. So now like a third of skating’s heavy hitters just do not fuck with one mag of like three doing anything resembling journalism. Kyle said Aidan looked “uneasy” on a board - which is objectively true and still is. It’s part of his charm! Having an insanely adverse reaction to two sentences observing that your friend, like, turns backward when he skates switch is Vackian thinking. Just escalating the most mundane shit ever instead of reading at a 10th grade level.
*He doesn’t know that the original MillionDollarExtreme page got nuked years ago and the Brooklyn/LA man-on-the-street series is not called “Asking Hipsters Questions they don't want to Answer,” a title some moron teenage clip aggregator came up with that doesn’t even describe the videos. They really want to answer the questions.