Life List: Pine Siskin

A few weeks ago, my husband called my attention to a flock of birds flying around wildly, outside our window.  He said they must be the same birds that weirded him out when, upon waking, he thought he was seeing bats outside.  Now these birds were not flying at all similar to bats, but they were shading in that direction much more than bushtits or starlings – the other birds I see larger flocks of at times.

There was just an erratic, manic quality – no cooperation, just dashing around.  Starlings are like fighter jets, Bushtits are bouncy little paper airplanes, and they both like moving in the same direction as the squadron.  Not so much with these guys – pine siskins.  How else can I characterize them?

I don’t have much to say.  They’re streaky LBBs with a wee bit of yellow in the beige.  My husband thinks they look green.  Word is they sometimes flock with goldfinches, but I haven’t seen it.  They’re not unusual in the region but it is unusual for me to see a big flock so close. Kinda fun.

This post was boring so I’ll do another one today.

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Are Black People Smarter?

Little bit of a land mine here, but I’m feeling insouciant today, so bear with me…  I’ve talked with thousands and thousands of Americans from all walks of life, and surely my impressions of that experience are tainted by biases.  Racists annoy the fuck out of me and are foolish as all hell; people who live on the receiving end of systemic racism have my sympathy.  I also relate a lot more to poor people than to the middle class.  So are my perceptions accurate?

There are standardized tests for “IQ” other cognitive faculties, and these have problems galore – not the least of which was their origin as a method for justifying racism.  I’m not even gonna bother with links; this shit is common knowledge among those nominally acquainted with the subject and with no delusions about their genetic superiority motivating the shit out of their reasoning.

But on a practical level, numbers aside, some people are just more thoughtful than others.  I characterize this as being willing to take new information on board, genuinely try to understand new things they encounter, and able to learn.

Ability to learn is a funny thing, because as we grow out of childhood, many of us handicap ourselves on purpose.  You mean I’m never gonna need this information again?  Fuck it, I chuck it, will re-learn as-needed.  I can feel that I did this to myself sometime around age 20.  While circumstance has pushed me into trying harder, I still allow myself the luxury of not learning shit, whenever I can.  There are people who either didn’t limit themselves in the first place, or are just more wise in how they apply that limitation, more able to get back into learning mode.

Willingness to try to understand new things is obviously a useful trait to have, but we don’t need it most of the time.  Our lives can be pretty damn simple in most ways, most of the time.  Whatever else is difficult about them, it isn’t the complexity of the problems in front of us.  It can get rusty, same as what I described in previous paragraph.  But I feel like this is a little different from that issue…  That’s about memorizing a new fact, this is about understanding why that fact is so – understanding a process.

The thing the reflexively ignorant don’t get is that understanding the process makes remembering the facts easier.  Like, remembering dates in history is rote, easy to lose.  Understanding what happened in sequence – what led to what – can make the simpler facts, like dates, easier to remember.

This is practical intelligence, not fancy logic or math or knowing big words.  A small child can be thoughtful, an adult can be thoughtless, and vice versa.  By this metric, I’ve spent a vast, unspeakable amount of time talking with thoughtless people, and less speaking with the thoughtful.  Of course, the average person is somewhere in between, but still shades toward the foolish side.

If I’m talking to an 89 year old who is still very sharp, it’s usually an upper class person with an ocean of privilege behind them, who worked in academia, finance, law, etc, on the pointy end of it.  That’s gonna shade white, tho not exclusively.  But stepping back from those rarities to look at people who are still very competent, who can look at a situation involving new information and deal with it, not shut down and get angry or cry about it?

Feels like the median black person is more intelligent than the median white people, in practical ways – which are the only ways that really matter.  I’m not interested in having a conversation with somebody that has advanced knowledge but can’t be fucked to understand anything outside that domain.  I want somebody that can be exposed to new information and understand it enough to have something to say about it.  That’s just conversation, but it’s indicative of the approach to other kinds of information as well.

It’s like white people feel more entitled to not have to think about things, to put that onto other people, and have anything they need sorted out for them with zero thought involved.  Black people are used to a society that is low key hostile to them getting their needs met in every way, cradle to the grave, so they need to be able to understand the shit that comes their way.

I might be remembering the thoughtless white people at outsized rates because of the biases I mentioned above, but also because they make a much more acrid stink about having their right to not have to think impinged upon.  I might be remembering black people who figured out some tangled bullshit at outsized rates because my unconscious bias is to assume them less intelligent, and it comes as a surprise when it should not.  I know there’s no way I haven’t absorbed that poison on a cellular level.

But I dunno.  Maybe black people are just better than us.

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Note:  If my comments are half as foolish as this post itself was, I’m gonna have to shut ’em down.  It could get offensive in a hurry.  For that matter, what I wrote could be pretty offensive to a reasonable person, and they don’t deserve to get upset because I thought it would be funny to upset unreasonable people, right?  In which case, sorry, and let’s just move along tomorrow.  I’ll leave this post up as a monument to my folly.

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JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Spoilers

Been watching yewchoob horseshit on the TV downstairs when I’m in a living-room-adjacent chore.  By default when I first turn the smort teevee on, it’s in this app that has a variety of channels.  One is “Anime All Day,” which has often been showing JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.  JoJo has a wacky concept that the main character – the titular JoJo – is a different person from one season to the next.  This cursed family always has members whose names start with Jo, Joe, Gio, etc., who are destined to fight evil.  Of course there are superpowers and whatever whatever.

So there was a season a few years ago which is seeing a lot of play, where the JoJo duJour was trying to join the mafia in Italy, to become a “Gang Star.”  There have been a few things that jumped out at me as fun or noteworthy or weird about this show.  This be spoilery, but you aren’t going to watch this junk anyway, are you?

One.  People act surprised when somebody has superpowers, even tho superpowered people always wear wild-as-hell, very queer clothing.  But they’re all hetero?  Or not especially interested in boning down, that I’ve seen.  Ace?  But they dress like it’s always Mardi Gras.  What’s especially funny is they showed the childhood backstory of the supporting character Bruno Bucciarati, and his queer clothes were shown to be growing up with him!  Like, baby Bruno had a simpler version of the design, which added more details as he aged.  He always had hair like Louise Brooks, even tho he waited until he was a mob enforcer to add the little girl barrettes.

Two.  Bruno is the underboss of his lil squad of supergangsters, and is showing JoJo around.  One of the gang tries to prank JoJoJo by pissing in a teacup and handing it to him.  Now, this shit aired on TV in Japan, I imagine in an adult-oid-esque-ish time slot somewhere somehow, so there was no dongling on display.  They just showed a stream coming out from behind his hand, splashing in cup, steaming.  Then, “You have to drink this tea because I have offered it.  Don’t be rude.”

JoJoJoJo impresses the guys by drinking the whole mug.  They’re grossed out and amazed but surmise, correctly, he used a superpower to avoid swallowin’ that juice.  But here’s the thing.  That shit passed your lips, man.  You inhaled the vapors.  I don’t care if you transformed your teeth into jellyfish that could hold it until you spit it out later.  That’s just weird.  At that rate, you might as well swallow it.  I don’t know.  Maybe he had gout.

Three.  Trish Una is cute and cool.  The mob boss’s daughter.  Trish and Bruno are the obvious standout characters of the season, both looking way cuter and cooler than the JoJo.  Megan Thee Stallion did a cosplay of this character once, so you know she’s a winner.

People with superpowers have an inhuman projection of that power called a “stand,” which makes them “stand users.”  The stands are usually (if not always) named after rock or pop songs or bands.  Trish’s stand is called “Spice Girl.”  This gives me a Trish connection: Bébé Mélange is a joke off “Baby Spice“+”The Spice Melange.”  I can give more history on that in a separate post if anyone is interested.

Four.  The stands are named after music.  This shit would not fly in the USA, and good for Japan, frankly.  JoJo’s stand is named after Prince’s album The Gold Experience, Bruno’s is named Sticky Fingers after a Rolling Stones album, a character named Mista has a stand called Sex Pistols, and the big bad guy’s stand is named King Crimson.  One of the bad guys is ノトーリアス・B・I・G.  I’m tripping.

Five.  The best moment of the season (that I watched only in snipped moments) was when Bruno is taking Trish to see her father the mysterious mob boss.   They have this moment of tender melodrama, where she’s afraid of how it will go, and he’s reassuring, and she tries to act tough.  They hold hands as the elevator ascends.

Suddenly, Trish is gone.  Serious expression – what happened?  Then it’s revealed Bruno is still holding her hand – which is severed at the wrist.  It spews blood everywhere while he yells NANI?!! NANIIII?!?! with his eyes bugging out and wiggling.  The comedy, which I’m pretty sure was intentional, came from the contrast of the quiet, brooding, intense moment of dignity, of characters asserting their self-possession and humanity, contrasted with home boy losing his shit anime-style.

“Bizarre Adventure” living up to its name.  I’m down.  But still… Stop me before I weeb again.

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Tvxnp Wants You Stuck in Traffic

There are about three million federal workers and more than half of their collective work hours take place in person – telecommute is common, but most telecommuters spend some amount of time in office; few are exclusively remote.  Sixty-one percent of work hours are in person, so using that an extremely crude proxy for amount of time spent in commute, something something,

Tvxnp🖤Mvksk want to put like 1.8 million extra drivers on the road during your daily commute, with all the attendant pollution we as a nation have proven to not give a fuck about, but also adding to congestion, which we do complain about an awful lot.  That includes people whose entire-ass job is being on the phone and computers, whose work is constantly tracked and monitored, who couldn’t be doing less work at home even if they wanted to.

It’s also making any federal jobs that had offered telecommute before suddenly a lot less appealing than their equivalents in the private sector, driving people away from agencies that are already understaffed.  This only makes sense in light of their overt not-quite-fully-confessed desire to destroy the entire US government, except for whatever apparatus funnels working peoples’ tax money into the bottomless tax credits and loopholes available to the rich, and except for the police and military which are needed to keep the proles in line.

Never change, shitheads.  Keep making everything worse for everyone in every way you can, why not?  It’s who you are.

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Life List: Kinglets

Just wanna mention this before I forget.  And it’s a lumping post.  I didn’t want to do lumping posts but I have so very little to say about the one bird, and still want to say it.  I caught it like pokeymans.  So I’ll talk about it, then its cousin.

Kinglets are tiny-ass borbs.  LBB, but oh so tiny tiny.  Anna’s hummingbirds can be tinier, but they can also be larger – more variable size, at least that’s my perception.  Kinglets are tiny as hell, but do look a bit more conventional for perching birds, otherwise.  Anyway, at that scale, with proportionately huge eyes and puffball-shaped body, they are disgustingly cute.

There are two varieties in Washington state – ruby-crowned and golden-crowned.  I do think both are common enough, but also easy to miss if you’re not paying attention, and they often tuck themselves out of sight in dense bushes or up in canopy.  I’m pretty sure I’ve seen ruby-crowned before, but I wasn’t properly recording observations back then, and the memory has slipped.

But I saw one Friday Jan 24, pretty confidently.  It’s so small it’s very hard to be 100% positive, but in the slightly impressionistic view from over ten feet away, everything was right.  It was being quiet and I didn’t have bird app out, so I couldn’t confirm by vocalization.  And my phone’s camera is no better at distance than my eyes are.  But it was olive drab, small as a hummingbird or bushtit, but with very short tail, a contrasty bar in the wing area, etc.  And when I looked up info, it said they often feed on the ground, which is where this one was.

So ruby-crowned kinglet, snapped up in my pokey-ball.

Golden-crowned kinglets are either much more chatty or much more common, easy to detect on birdy apps throughout the region.  After I got priced out of living in Seattle for the first time as an adult, I landed in about the sixth worst apartment complex in Federal Way, so pretty shitty but not frequent gunshots when we were there.

The interior looked like it had been built in the ’50s or ’60s and there were homophobic slurs misspelled in the closet, “faget faget,” written in lipstick.  But just one step out the door and I got my best view ever of golden-crowned kinglets – a pair of them, right at eye level, within a few feet.  Fantastic.

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The Best Story in the World

A perennial subject of discussion with my husband is that he experienced every piece of narrative art that was capable of inspiring him twenty years ago, and the time has passed, like David Lynch himself.  Now there is nothing for him but memories.  Well nerts to that, somebody oughtter make something he is capable of finding exciting and cool again.  I guess it’s got to be me.

Now I’ve tried this before.  When my dude was scoffing at the idea every story should follow nazi fan jojo campbell’s the hero’s journey™, he introduced me to some other ideas on story outlines, including a “gothic” one.  That was not about triumph, in the heroic sense (tho it wasn’t wildly removed from it either), so it fit the idea of a dark melodrama.  I took this and tried to make a story that followed it.

Thus was born Love and Torment, which languishes in about 70% done hell, with many other projects.  The problem with Liebe ist Qual is that I was still hot to make it something I can easily enjoy, so it was in a scifi / fantasy setting adjacent to Josefina y Blasfemia, lousy with super-powered fuckoes doing backflips around neon green space goblins.  (see also this story)  This is, suffice it to say, not goth enough.

He needs a serious story with believable but heightened emotions, that you cannot help but feel because they are earnest, not manipulative, and because they speak to a goth soul.  It can have supernatural stuff in it, but nothing you could imagine being reduced to a role-playing game rule system.  It should feel mysterious, ideally making you want to come to it, rather than being pushy with its narrative.  Gotta have gay dudes in it.  Mulholland Drive is one of his favorite movies ever but gaydies instead of gaydudes probably cost it some points.  In a perfect world it should have iconic stature, emblematizing itself as perfectly as the writing of Franz Kafka, or Angela Carter, or cetera.

It should have all of these things, which means suspending my ego and my desire for self-indulgence, to have a shot at tha brass ring – Best Story in the World, for at least this one guy.

I’m gonna aim to write something like that this March, for what it’s worth, but I got no strong ideas at the moment.  Anybody wanna chip in some notions?  The point of the Spooktober event is to show that ideas are cheap, and we should not have to be precious with them, but if you wanna keep it like the kaiser, fine, no advice for me.  I’ll get through on my own.  But could it be fun to help somebody write the best story that ever existed?

Some things he likes, as notions for inspiration:  Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, Twin Peaks: Firewalk With Me, The Thing, Perfect Blue, Paprika, Paranoia Agent, Silent Hill Games in Order: 3, 2, 1, 4, and after that they are dead to him, Yume Nikki, Kafka’s Metamorphosis (tho he has Josef K’s dying words from The Trial tattooed on his arm) and A Hunger Artist, the goth music of The Cure, Bauhaus, and Joy Division (again with the tattoos), the movies of Kiyoshi Kurosawa like Pulse, Cure, and Sakebi, the comics of Suehiro Maruo (Laughing Vampire, Panorama Island), Al Columbia (The Biologic Show), Charles Burns (Black Hole), and Junji Ito (Uzumaki, Hellstar Remina), and some things less goth: Katamari Damacy, ’80s one hit wonders / fashion…  Maybe that’ll do for now.

If giving me suggestions for this project not so interesting, maybe just reflect in the comments on the things that are your faves of all time, and what they have in common, thematically, if anything.

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Something else I wanted to mention but forgot and don’t feel like editing in:  This is similar in some respects to my notion of trying to write a christian romance.  While stories are almost invariably better if the material is something you’re super into, I still think it’s possible to make something great in a domain or circumstance where you’re not welcome, like Jewish musicians writing christmas songs.  What if I could write an amazing love story that would move hearts around the world, within the genre constraints of shit-fascist-moms-like?  Of course I like all of the things my husband likes, if differently sometimes from how he likes them, so this isn’t directly comparable.  But it’s still trying to work under a creative constraint: Don’t do something that tickles all my peccadilloes, do something for somebody else.

I won’t have as much fun as writing my usual whack shit, but it will feel very worth doing, very worth having done it.  Because my husband is not the only guy in the world who is criminally underserved by pop culture – this could work for anybody else out there who is like him, and feels the sadness of that.

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RIP David Lynch, Properly

I was very busy when David Lynch died, and only had time for a lazy link and a cheap thought on the matter , but his art stands tall in my world, and deserves much more thought.  What bothers me is that I cannot properly verbalize it.

Which is weird for two reasons.  One is that I can usually express my feelings with close to perfect accuracy.  I know myself well.  Whether that’s because I’m wise or because I’m simple-minded is a matter for debate (don’t debate it or I’ll punch you in the kidney).  The other reason is that I “get” David Lynch, where many, many other people do not.

Like when I’m watching Blue Velvet or Eraserhead or Lost Highway or whatever, I am feeling exactly what he intended me to feel.  I’m under his spell.  Yet most people who watch those movies just don’t feel it, and are dismissive about the fact it went by them.  Totally blithe, like, “eh, whatever, too weird, didn’t like, moving on…”

I’m not saying that you can’t have different opinions from me on your enjoyment of those films or interpretations of them.  I can imagine the person that does “get” them the way I do, and doesn’t like what they’re getting.  But I’ve never fucking met that person.  People just tell on themselves and stroll.  That’s fine, but if you didn’t get it, I don’t care to fucking hear about it.

This surreal narrative art is important to me.  I think it deserves to be understood, and if you know that isn’t you, don’t even talk about it.  Fine…  Quick aside, I’m a very self-aware person, and can’t help but think of ways I could be perceived as hypocritical or foolish in my statements.  On this one, the analogy that jumped out at me is of a catholic apologist saying he isn’t interested in atheist arguments because they ignore the splendor and majesty of faith.  Whatever, I’m running with it…

Well, another aside on that:  I just recently said I look at everything critically and stan nothing, and some might see my lack of interest in hearing from haters as stanning.  No, I can see flaws aplenty in David Lynch’s work, and am quite confident he did some dirt in his life.  I’d rather not hear about it, but if one insisted on showing up with receipts, I’d believe them.  Still, at the moment, please don’t.

So as much as I get it, I can’t explain it.  I can talk about some aspects of it, and I will, but the most genuinely important thing about David Lynch’s oeuvre is the hardest to describe.  I can think of reductive clichés and movie review jargon, a little art school lingo, but maybe it’s nonverbal.  In that last article I linked to, I also said that I am “very aware of artifice.”


One track of my brain can play pretend and take things as they are, the other is always seeing the construction of things, both concrete (that’s where they cut between the actor and the stunt double, this is wires, etc.) and abstract (especially writing tropes, but manipulation in general).  David Lynch movies don’t shut that down completely, but they’re better able to turn down the volume on it.  That helps me experience the “magic of cinema” more fully.

I can’t put my finger on what he was doing.  Is it as simple as being earnest?  Alien concept to my jaded ass.  I’ve tried, actually, to isolate the elements, come up with a formula, so that I could try to write something that hits the same.  Looking back on those attempts, they seem so superficial and weak.  Now I’m disadvantaged in making Lynchian narrative art, because I don’t have the medium of cinema.  If I had no other hobbies and obligations eating my time, I could probably make surreal shorts with free video editing software, but it’s a huge time commitment.  But I still believe it should be possible.  The writing of Leonora Carrington is a different flavor of surreal but has similar power.

I can feel it, “get it,” but I can’t explain it.  Can’t understand it?  Maybe the understanding is aspirational.  I move toward it, it moves toward me, sometimes we touch and sometimes we miss.  Another disadvantage I may have is not being autistic enough.  r/evilautism had love for the guy, who met a lot of the criteria, but was able to go through life being himself.  He didn’t “mask” the autism as many do; they called him an “unmasked king.”  He just explained whatever weird shit he was up to matter-of-factly and kept it going to the end.

I’m going to hint at how his movies express that condition, but I don’t want to say anything too declarative, lest I get something wrong.  Far from an expert.  David Lynch movies feature a lot of “humans as monsters” not in some cynical misanthropic way, but just literally “I don’t get some humans and they’re scary.”  Some characters are monster 100% of the time, some are human 100%, some mode switch to express a crucial feeling or theme?  Or does service to the theme emerge from characters following a natural arc, like it’s successful as a byproduct rather than intent?  I don’t know.  Another thing is strongly evoking dissociation, with worlds made out of Edward Hopper-style liminal spaces and overbearing sensations.  To whatever extent I experience these feelings, it doesn’t rise to the level of a diagnosable condition legit way of being.

The entertainment I’m most drawn to in life is basic bitch power fantasies, like action heroes flying through the air and beating what bothers them.  Maybe he just stands as far from that as possible, and the contradistinction elevates him.  Of course, mumblecore movies about hipsters getting divorced is far from Tsui Hark, but that doesn’t hit the same.  There is something of melodrama in his stories, which is why the recurring soap opera bits in the first season of Twin Peaks (“An Invitation to Love”) were so cool.  They were an admission that Twin Peaks is a melodrama, but the contrast with the fakeness of the soapworld suggested the main events were another layer of reality.

One thing a lot of people don’t know is that “surreal” doesn’t mean unreal.  It means “more than real,” which is so apt.  When you’re getting it, it feels profound the way dreams do.  It cuts through the layers of narrative we use to interpret reality, make everything safe enough to proceed in life, as if we know anything.

Maybe it’s all smoke and mirrors; it just worked better on me than caring about whatever The DoD’s Pentagon’s Disney’s M&M Mars’s Marvel’s The Avengers™ were up to.  But it felt real, and still does.  Estoy llorando.

As to what I meant by “you can take David Lynch out of the world, but you can’t make it any less Lynchian” is that the world is a melodrama of monsters and people and people turning into monsters and vice versa, played out chiefly in anxious enclaves of manufactured reality dotting an utterly alien landscape of liminal spaces and broken wilderness.  We’re all smoking cigarettes nervously under the flickering streetlamps of life.

Anyway, not at all satisfied with my efforts on this.  Enjoy a monkey.

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Should I Write This or That?

I think I got Josefina y Blasfemia vs el Muro de Hielo to a quasi-exciting stopping point, and the story features a lady fantasizing about giving god a colombian necktie (do not google this), so you know it’s metal.  I really think people should read it, even if it isn’t finished.  Consider it a premiere for a new TV show that might get canceled.  I will finish the story at some point, but meanwhile, what’s there is compelling.

I was thinking I may continue it at one chapter a day, or every two days, until complete…  But I dunno.  One, getting the drip feed may feel frustrating to people who are at all into it.  Two, when I’m posting that, traffic goes down.  Not the end of the world; this isn’t a money-making venture.  More of a costing-PZ-money-for-dubious-return venture.

Plus I have upcoming biz like MonsterHearts and some IRL stuff that results in no posts but takes up time…  And I never did finish Centennial Hills, after getting pretty dang close.  Plus I still feel pretty bad about how many people feel sad and scared of the nazi deathclowns and feel obligated to do more encouragement even tho I don’t know what I’d say that I haven’t said before or how.  And I’d like to start getting final drafts of some projects, so I can start properly self-publishing before I die…

When I titled this post, I thought I’d be presenting alternatives to choose between, but my train of thought has broken, and I don’t know what those would have been.  But given the things I’ve mentioned, what would you most like to read here?  As I ask from time to time…

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Destroy Pop Culture?

FtB’s Abbey St. Brendan wrote about the outing of Neil Gaiman as a cruel sex criminal, from the perspective of someone who has had a lot of affection for his and others’ contributions to the constellation of pop culture – from the perspective of a fan.  I’ve never fully held the fan point of view, and less so now than when I was young.  Even when I’m looking at a piece of pop media I greatly enjoy, it’s from a critical perspective – if not an especially incisive or thoughtful one.  I’m just very aware of artifice, and stan nothing.

And so watching somebody else deal with these repeated failings of famous purveyors of narrative art, not being someone who ever was fully on board with that art, again set me navel-gazing about my anti-fandom instincts.  Why do I get to be immune to this brand of hurt, and could or should that benefit be extended to others?  It feels more significant with Gaiman, because he was, in a sense, the last man standing of big fantasy authors.  There may be other people making books -especially for kids- who are making more dollars, moving more ink, but his cultural stature was top tier.  Whedon, JKR, and Gaiman were the big ones of this young millennium, inspiring the most fan content, the most devotion.  Bing, bang, boom.

I still haven’t quite hit the nail on the head of what makes me uncomfortable with fandom itself.  I could put all sorts of aphorisms to it (“I’m not a joiner” etc.), but none of them fully express it.  Maybe it’ll come to me while I’m on the john seven years from now, and if FtB still exists, you’ll find out.  In the meantime, the simple version is that I’m more of a cultural outsider than the typical “geek” – been isolated in my own dreams and the weird shit my husband shares with me for decades now, and anything outside that is dabbling at best.

Like when I last had cable and I would watch kung fu movies on El Rey.  I never did put posters of kung fu boys up on the wall, never cosplayed as the master of the flying guillotine, never rewrote Five Deadly Venoms to where my author insert gets to bone down with the Venom Mob.  (Shit, maybe I’m missing out…)

I don’t communicate with people who share unreserved excitement for the same things, and I think that communication is key.  My husband and I like a lot of the same things, but the things we love the most are just slightly out of sync, never quite the same stuff.  So neither of us has the shared excitement that is foundational to true fandom mindset.  I’m deffos more normcore than that goth bastid, but still not truly a fan of anything anybody else is a fan of.  (am i the only person on this blog network who does not see the appeal in terry pratchett?)  And so I find these affections easy to discard.

Back to the point: Seeing people go through this ordeal reminded me of a time when I saw somebody viscerally upset by the idea of dispensing with fan culture.  During some kind of discourse, an iconoclast suggested we should truly commit to elevating the indie by refusing to follow the big properties, and this fan felt personally hurt by it in a way that surprised me.  I then realized there is an inherent value in large shared fandoms, and pop culture in general, and it is something they share with religion and folklore going back to before Gilgamesh.

When we are given a narrow selection of cultural content, elevated through whatever means to be the only shit we’re allowed to look at, we are all on the same page.  It’s common culture, a bond that can be shared among all who experience it.  I’m about to get into what I hate about it, but this is, I think what feels needful about it.  The fan culture defender above was given a glimpse of a world without touchstones, where a million microfandoms are scattered like bricks from the Tower of Babel – a world where everyone is alone in what they love, and what they live for.

I don’t have a good answer for what to use to replace that, if art radicals were able to magically abolish pop culture, but I’m going to make the case for just that.  We should destroy pop culture.

Firstly, I’m going to define my terms.  By pop culture I mean art that has been elevated to the commercial mass market, be it fiction or music, video games or cinema or visual art.  If millions of people can pay money to experience it, if there’s an oligarchy of business creeps speculating on it, if there is a brain drain in the legal profession of your country as all law students flock to the lucrative field of intellectual property, if there are a million starving artists facing verbal, physical, and sexual abuse in order to be a part of it, it might be pop culture.

Pop culture can be very entertaining.  It can even have artistic merit.  Kurt Cobain was once on the cover of Rolling Stone in a white T-shirt with the sharpie-penned slogan, “corporate rock still sucks.”  But does it?  I don’t know.  I still love Guns ‘n’ Roses, get a goofy kick out of Def Leppard and Queensryche.  Major labels.  Shit, The Butthole Surfers were on Capitol Records, right?  What is it to suck?  Suck can be found everywhere from MTV to podunk night club, as can genius.  And of course, pop culture has the benefit of being a shared experience, in the way indie art cannot achieve.

But the pop culture machine is evil, and the best way to break that evil would be to just walk away from it all.  For the moment at least, the internet has a lot of avenues for pursuing obscure art.  You don’t have to special order a magazine from Norway to find out about the latest metal bands.  You don’t have to listen to the only radio station that reaches Tierra del Fuego.  You don’t have to watch any TV show that’s been produced in the last thirty years, and can still have a lifetime of TV to watch.  Sometimes it’ll take some work, but you can make it happen.  And if more people walk away from pop culture, the alternative avenues will increase.

How is the pop culture machine evil?  Abbey touched on it in her article, even if it wasn’t her intention.  She mentions that getting one’s art published means you passed a gauntlet of gatekeeping, with schmoozing and playing the game – a game that serves the privileged, that rewards questionable practices.  I say like everything under capitalism, it’s driven by a greed that can never be sated, which corrupts or harms everything it touches – including the art itself.

Auteurs are elevated and surrounded by lawyers and agents and media leeches, people who shovel drugs and sycophancy and manipulation upon them, play their egos until – even if they started as a decent person – they turn into creeps.  The movie Swimming With Sharks was a fantasia that arguably justified the cruelty as the cost of Hollywood magic™ – or the opposite intent, you know how hipsters be – but it gives you an idea of what the gauntlet can look like.  You want to make art, expect the legalized slavery of internships, expect abuse, and forget a livable wage.  The “casting couch” of sex abuse isn’t just for actors, though it hits them the hardest.  After Dr. Luke faced allegations of sex abuse from Ke$ha, how many women in the industry were still willing to work with him, hoping to squeak out another hit, ride the fame rocket into the ground?

Even the union jobs got people living like migrant workers, working multiple jobs just to afford splitting the rent with multiple roommates.  People in the higher tiers have reason to see the newbies as competition to be suppressed.  In the field of publishing, there have been multiple scandals involving “mean girls clubs” of established authors meeting in internet backrooms to shit on and plot against newer authors.  Everybody hates everybody and everybody is out for blood.  The sausage of pop culture art is made out of people.

People say organize, unionize, organize, like that can make a real difference in the arts.  It can’t because the magic of reaching pop status – of even secondhand fame – lures a bottomless well of replacements into the grinder.  There is no amount of unionization that can barricade the World War Z flow of zombie scabs.  I haven’t even mentioned nepotism yet.  You get the idea.

The human cost is the worst aspect of mass media art, but intellectual property law, corrupted to hell by media oligarchy lobbyists, has caused irreparable damage to history.  How many movies, novels, songs have been lost forever, rotted in the vaults of dragon kings?  Or sued out of existence because unreasonable boundaries drawn up by Disney and the RIAA?  Current events have poor artists clamoring for expansions of copyright law, which is like Palestinians clamoring for Israel to get more bombs.

And everything corporations do just gets worse with time, in rolling boom-bust cycles.  See what Disney is doing with its multi-billion dollar franchises.  Waste of fuckin’ time.  The only good thing about it is watching them lose money.  And also, for me, to watch the corporate art I used to find diverting twisted, at last, into a form repellent enough that I can look away, in full confidence that I am missing nothing of value.

I’ve mentioned before that I want to see art emerge from the shadow of commerce.  This will probably never happen until commerce itself eats the world, but I view it as something to aspire toward.  Anybody that can make art for free should.  Maybe I’ll have the gumption to do that someday, but for the moment I’m too economically insecure to throw away a lottery ticket chance of commercial success, no matter how slim.  Some things I do will be for free, like the first draft of Josefina and Blasfemia vs The Wall of Ice, or Centennial Hills.  But I hope you don’t think me too hypocritical in charging for some things.  We (artists) are all hobos rattling tin cans on the street corner, at the end of the day – or bourgie sellouts propping up the abusive system that lets a few token successes man the ramparts.

But one beautiful day, let it come, maybe we’ll all say “fuck that noise” and leave corporate media in the dust, to chase better dreams.  Maybe we can destroy pop culture.

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Add:  It occurs to me some may see this as saying artists should not be paid.  I only mean that insofar as I think nobody should be paid for any kind of labor, or everybody should be paid enough to live on and that’s it.  The idea is you work every angle until you get the magic golden ticket, that this proves you are better or more deserving than those that suffer in poverty?  I used to be more OK with it, but it’s the fuckin’ lottery that’s been sold to us as a way to let lich lords destroy everything that’s good in the world for ugly, ugly gold.  I don’t know shit about fuck, but I do know I hate competition for resources, for affection, for life itself.  Clearly civilization is on its slow hideous way out, and when it goes, I hope survivors will learn to base the next world on cooperation instead.

Dreamposting – Cat Jobs

In terms of the queue, this post was written ten days ago?  I had trouble sleeping, then fitful and shallow sleep, then passed out real hard and had heavy, sludgy dreams for an hour before the alarm got me.  I was in a murky disgusting house with some fire damage, but stuff had just been moved in on top of it, crap like paper towels and housewares piled in the sides of halls waiting to collapse underfoot.

There were multiple tracks of things going on.  Some girl child was crawling around on the floor trying real hard to seem disgusting and insane, eating cockroaches while leering at people and such.  Mostly I ignored her.  My late old sickly cat Mochi was there and I was trying to pet him.  He was real playful, which I remembered he had been for a brief moment the day before he died, but for some reason the memory of his death didn’t stir a recognition of incongruence in the situation, of the fact I was dreaming.

Somebody had left a cat with the job of selling food services, with a little outfit and cardboard sign stuck around its head.  The cat was trying to do this job, meowing to bring in customers (from the street? thought I was in a house), until it got something caught in its throat.  It had eaten some of the food that was left with it to demo the goods – rice and eggs cooked with soft yolks – and I helped dislodge it with a kitty cat heimlich maneuver.  I doubt I did it correctly.  There is a correct way IRL to help a cat barf.

Before during or after this, I was hanging out with some guy talking about jobs and the feral child said she was giving up looking into work with my employer because she heard the job sucks.  “Why would I want to do that?”  I threw out some salary figures that could be impressive to a youth that doesn’t know better and she thought about it.  Though by this time she was a hairless sphynx cat.

I asked the guy I was hanging out with, “Why can that cat talk, when the other two can’t?” (mochi and barfy) … About this time recognition of the mixed up details and the alarm converged and I woke up.

Years ago, my husband (then boyfriend) had a dream that he woke to find I had called off work sick.  Then he realized, “You called off sick, but Momo didn’t!  Oh no!”  So we had to help our cat Momo get dressed in a little outfit and make sure she got on the bus, didn’t run away.  I was a security guard so Momo was too in this world, and the outfit was scratchy blue polyester pants and collared shirt.

Anyway, cats should obviously get jobs and pay some bills.  Skivers.

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