I am feeling a little less dreadful today partly because the weather has been amazing all week, really great fall-ish weather. I have not been outside enough but I am hoping to change that in a week or two.

In other news, I tried to watch Freedom Writers (why? I don’t know) but had to turn it off when, after some classroom misbehavior, Hilary Swank, who has previously tried to win her unruly students over by playing them the poetry of Tupac Shakur, begins to lecture about gangs by dropping some science about a “really bad gang,” the Nazis. Ummmmmmmmm….

I know this is supposedly a true story about a Los Angeles school in the days following the riots, but I really can’t wrap my head around this comparison! I should probably watch the rest of it if only to make a better/more articulate critique, but since I’m in my slump, I think I am going to just send it back to Netflix.

In other news, I brought home Lucky, a magazine entirely about shopping. I haven’t looked at one of these in a year or two and I don’t remember exactly what it’s deal it, except that it comes (Or used to come, I haven’t checked for it on this one yet) with stickers so that you could mark different products “yes” and “maybe” to purchase. In some ways, Lucky is probably genius because it brings the popular publishing industry’s relationship with consumerism to the forefront, and cuts out all of the filler (features) that are about consuming anyways, but it also maybe further obfuscates it by creating an agent of promotion that isn’t explicitly tied to a product, or at least not in an obvious way.

Tags: 1990s, consumerist, film