the one, transfixing virtue of "Marie Antoinette " is its unembarassed devotion to the superficial. There is no morality at play here, no agaony other then bordedom, and until the last half hour, not a shred of political sense...

Lane

what i have noticed in most popular reviews of MA are variations of the above statement--i think that what is being missed, and what is being said thruout the film, and what isnt being picked up, are that

1) boredom, esp the boredom of idol capital, is a deeply poltical thing, the situtionaist corpse in the mouth, and by making the film extremely concentrated/insular , the absences of other places becomes screamingly obvious, the absence becomes presence.

2) what is called superficial or artifical, is a coded discussion of aesthetic messages--post warhol artifice adn surfaces are vital, that what is beautiful is vital. and that people who claim to seismeic change or marxist rhetoric, or deep reading or thinking are looking deep and refusing to look shallow.

3) i keep thinking of that question, at the beginning of the G04 song, the problem of leisure, what to do with pleasure--and how it contiunes from there, is a problem of great unending complexity, and its still a surface problem...we dont need to go deep to be ensared about it.

4) koons comes into this somehow, with his politics of scale, and his love of specatcle, adn his refusal to be ironic, and his reclaiming of verboten forms, including cute, soft, playful, delicate, voluminus, lush, lux, glam.

5) these are fashion words not art words.

6) art cant be fashion, its better then that.

(i dont know how this attaches, but listening to the classical operatic musical vocabulary that overwhelms the first words in the aria of the flight was smooth, in nixon was china...it sounds like court opera, french or austrian, gluck almost, but i dont know much about gluck's musical words--there is delicate eletronix thruout, in the background, plucked like harpsichords, and the music rises and falls into its excesses, and what is adam writing about:

yr flight was smooth i hope"?
smoother then usual i guess
yes it was very pleast, we stoppedin HAwaii for a day, And Gaum to catch up on the time. It's easier that way.

and it continues on that way for 4 hours.

i keep thinking that we ignore the delicate negotions of technocrats, gossip, the courts, and such things, because we are nominally democratic...

b/c its pretty it isnt political