Yes. It got me thinking about McDonald's and the dreaded N word; the one that ends in eoliberalism. I've been looking up Mac Tonight; a promo from when I was in the Army sans television. I thought that it was ironic that something from Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill was repurposed by a Dow Jones Industrial member. Of course this was after Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong covered Mack the Knife so most people didn't get the connection. I didn't know that it had a Pepe the Frog vibe online but I'm Gen X.
As a former cigar smoker, this scent talk has me wondering about the cigar fad of the 90s. Was it bucking the anti-scent trend or did it precede the trend? I thought of smoking as more of a fashion thing than a scent thing (think Virginia Slims.) It wasn't until the Bloombergian smoking bans in bars and restaurants that I noticed the smell. To me most cigarettes now smell unpleasant, but I don't think I noticed until then. Malls around here voluntarily banned smoking but I think that it was an insurance thing.
Johnny Mnemonic fetishised the Dead Mall in the late 90s. Spengler talked about "Faustian man" being obsessed with ruins. The aforementioned movie had as a plot point a subculture called the "Loteks", who eschewed modern technology for previous-generation technology as a socio-political act. All of these observations should be taken seriously by imaginative people who write more than me.
TPN sounds like a Huysmans character. I'm not surprised when I went to an earlier ep and heard Huysmans mentioned. Also, this ep made me think of Mark Fisher and Capitalist Realism.
