I live very close to the Hollywood Palladium, which for the last week has been overtaken by movie trailers and tow away signs for, apparently, Green Day’s new indie film. Good for them. I didn’t get any photos, but please just imagine it. The sidewalk has been hosed down, windows cleared of debris and advertisements and remade with fun little Green Day posters, the building repainted. Great. I like all that. Not that it affects my property value, because I rent and in Hollywood every building is worth 3 million dollars but is also derelict, so whatever. But what does it mean to have a movie literally scrub the street, removing all evidence of Living In The World? Art is the representation, the artifice of the real thing: This is not a sidewalk. Can’t have any ads populating the screen - and trust me, the front of the Palladium is littered with ads. For itself, for other venues owned by the same promoter, for open job listings for security guards, for “public art” on display, for grime. Maybe it does look better on camera this way, but it certainly doesn’t look real.

Every day I drive to work by taking Sunset Boulevard west for ten miles through the Strip. It’s like driving through - I was going to say Times Square, but it’s not. It’s like driving through the Sunset Strip. There are homeless sleeping in front of Whisky-A-Go-Go while thirty thousand Netflix billboards shadow traffic menacingly. I don’t have to read the trades anymore, because it incurs psychic damage, but also because I know exactly what is for your consideration, because every square foot of empty wall space is filled with an FYC ad for three miles.

Brands are My Friend, as they have paid handsomely for me to think so. Netflix even has one of those letter signs (marquee?) with a different pithy little comment obliquely referencing one of their disposable movies every week, keeping me engaged and googling “who is Sofia Carson?” HBO owns (?) the east and west sides of a tall building and pastes over them every four days with a new gigantic imprint of Pedro Pascal’s face. Apple installed a zipline between two billboards across the street from one another for a cardboard Miles Teller to hang from, but he’s only recognizable when you’re stalled in traffic in front of the DryBar. Brands have invested in filtering into my psyche, but to be quite real with you, these ads are only for the celebrities and agents who live in the immediate vicinity of the Beverly Hills flats and the Bird Streets, so they think the Services have invested in their star power/clientele. They haven’t. The Services are bleeding money and subscribers.

Brands are My Friend, because they have paid handsomely for me to only interact with Brands. There is no Unbrand. Communities are Phone. Yesterday I had the misfortune to learn that my and your enemy number one, T*vi G*v*ns*n, was going to give a reading (“A Reading”) at an “independent library” (“independent library”) located in Echo Park, but it was sadly canceled. Not the real public library. An “independent” one! It’s just a store1, because fortune rewards those who replace third spaces with stores. Third spaces exist just fine so stop saying they don’t, but if you keep rewarding “people who open stores” then they won’t for much longer!2

I digress. Brands are friend. Brands are my only friend. Brands are my only constant. Old burrito place closed down, but Greg who made the good burritos works at the new burrito place now. Nice coffee place closed down but turns out the better coffee was across the street anyway. Niche internet platform one is bad now, but there is niche internet platform 2 at least.

The Green Day movie exists in a beautiful fantasy in absentia of brands, except, most lovingly, the little sign on the Palladium at the very top of all the non-ad words, which certainly got the beautiful crane shot flying down into the crowd of begothed extras flooding the entrance, that did say “Live Nation Presents:”

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A few other things I didn’t get to yesterday:

1. Who will be tortured as Yoko? I can’t do this.

2. Can someone pick a sweater pattern for me on Ravelry? And also yarn? And buy the yarn for me? Decision paralysis

3. Iceman, a proud homosexual from Juilliard, forever