It Girl, Saturday, February 24: Sophia Coppola

Sophia Coppola is my latest It-Girl for her stunning direction in Marie Antoinette. Based upon English historian, Antonia Fraser's biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey, the book and film cast the traditionally wretched queen in a completely different light, as a young woman who was more naive than anything.

The movie combines a 1980's pop and new wave soundtrack, and the values of that materialistic decade, with Marie's time and place and circumstances of being a teenage girl with, essentially, a trust fund that never disappears. The movie touches upon the fact that her famous evil line "Let them eat cake" was never actually uttered. Coppola paints young Marie Antoinette as a victim of revolutionary propoganda ... and this fact is startling in and of itself, for I have always considered propoganda to be a fascist tool, used from the top on down.

In many ways, I wonder if the United States of America is similar to Fraser's and Coppola's image of Marie Antoinette, naive, spoiled and ignorant, a teenage girl having the time of her life ... but not malicious. If the queen was congnizant of the misery of the masses, she may have taken a compassionate angle of public policy and changed the course of history. Likewise it's so important for us to spend less time with the television and more time getting active. Our fate may depend on whether we touch and respond to the world's suffering.

Screw the Brite-Lite Bombers

I haven't posted in a while, but I felt the need to jot my opinion on the "brite-lite bombers" from Wednesday, January 31st.

What a couple of idiots!

Even though I usually identify as a progressive, I think this time around the suspects should be tarred and feathered. I have complete pride in my city's best and brightest for taking action to dismantle these blinking items, suspicioulsy attached the the sides of bridges. In a post-9/11 world, such actions are inexcusable.

But worse is the action of Turner Broadcasting System for being so out-of-touch with the everyday citizen that it thought these gurerilla marketing tactics would fly. Not in this town; I think in Boston, we have a higher degree of caution because the terrorists of September 11th departed from Logan. We should take these irregular happenings seriously.

And why should we tolerate illegal advertising on our public property and infrastructure? Aren't we already bombarded enough by advertising and marketing ... now we have to spend time, money and manpower reviewing whether something is an ad or a bomb?