| OUT | IN |
| Dubai | Qatar |
| public transportation | cab fantasies on the subway |
| Kate Middleton | Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway |
| overlooking Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” | Oliver Stone |
| the upper middle class | the middle class |
| tabloids | online gossip |
| Harry Potter | reading grown-up books |
| Stephanie Meyer | Harry Potter |
| Donald Trump | Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz |
| credit cards | zero balance: the new status symbol |
| Champagne | sparkling water |
| partying like it’s 2007 | sanity and sobriety |
| the grocery store | the grocery store |
| Paraguay | Uruguay |
| Monaco without a Casiraghi heir | Liechtenstein |
| arriving ignorant anywhere | remembering to say “the polo” |
| drama queen medical shows | Nurse Jackie: so realistic that they just don’t care |
| ultra high heels | dignity |
| dreadlocks | Hungarian Pulis |
| Bryan Ferry making dance music | that jackass Kanye West |
| oppressive good taste | Jackass 3D |
| Anna Wintour | Carine Roitfeld |
| Arizona | Hawaii |
| reproducing | population control |
| the term “partner” | gf/bf: childish, but doesn’t sound like your fellow cop |
| the Ritter subplot in “The Event” | Sophia the alien on “The Event” |
| Rescue Me’s latest season | “Luther” from BBC |
| the midterm elections | thinking of anything positive to say about them |
| SNL | Bronx Beat and Weekend Update on SNL |
| Versace | Bvlgari |
| American Vogue | The Approval Matrix in New York mag |
| smoking | longing to smoke again with every fiber of your being |
| 127 Hours and other sadism marathons | Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps |
| Shia LaBeouf | Josh Brolin |
| BP forever | remembering last season’s apocalyptic disaster |
| the music of Janelle Monae | the idea of Janelle Monae |
| Pyxis machines | pharmacists |
| even the words “tea party” | garden parties at Buck House |
| Obama fatigue | fatigue fatigue |
buy 300 mg Quetiapine
Monday, August 16th, 2010No Country for Old Men
Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem
2007
I defy you to keep easy track of the kills made by Anton Chigurh. His first, with perfect symbolism for a novel and film about law and order and crime and chaos, is of a silly young deputy in a jail where Chigurh is handcuffed. He gets the cuffs around the young man’s neck, and then it is just the work of holding on as the deputy thrashes and thrashes. Chigurh’s eyes are bulging, and the deputy’s death rattle provokes an obscene swoon from the killer. This may be the film’s only vulgarity.
It put me in mind of a documentary I saw about tarantulas. One couple, known honest to god as Tucson Blondes, rolled around and kicked with all sixteen legs at each other and the ground when a gentleman came calling and the lady wasn’t in the mood. The male didn’t make it; the female was largely uninjured. I bet the wild action painting the Coen Brothers organized with black shoe polish and legs trying to get a purchase on the ground matched the markings scratched into the dirt by those frantic spiders.
The West Texas land gives of itself almost nothing, but things are perched on it like rocks and soil hostile to life: dirt more like it. It does a good impression of the middle of nowhere. There is a kind of beauty for those passing through. Staying means death. In his introduction, hunter Llewellyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) takes aim at an antelope and misses. And there we have it. A hunter: but will he prove good enough? G.W. had the iconography of the cowboy more or less right, as did Reagan, but you see immediately that the real thing is as hard, spare and grim as Cormac McCarthy’s writing. The men’s faces are masculine, hard, with unnecessarily thick moustaches. Their bodies are sinewy, thinned, realistic, without decorative musculature or even decorative asses. They are masters at tracking. Every man in the film can read the ground, and does routinely like we read a clock. It is all nature, no culture, in the sense that the nature/culture divide intends.