Prison Labor Will Set You Free

note:  don’t miss the post before this, if ur interested in doing role-playin’ game.

You ever see the movie Sorry to Bother You by communist commie Boots Riley?  It’s such a great film for this general stretch of US history.  If anything, it feels mild compared to the new fascist deathclown era, but still, worth a look.  One element of that movie that hit me like a ton of bricks was the sunshine-branded debtor’s prisons, called “Worry-free Jobs.”  It felt so real, so possible, so close.

Particularly, I have often felt so beleaguered by the cost of fucking everything that the idea of prison began to have some appeal.  The idea of doing a crime, well, if I got away with the loot it would help; if it didn’t at least I wouldn’t have to pay rent.  But we know how horrible prisons are because it’s a bad joke.  Worse is the specifics, about how for-profit prisons have given people moldy bread, watched their bodies ravaged by flesh-eating bacteria, got them pre-loaded with debt for the next time they hit the streets.

Every time I hear some liberal asking, “where do red states think they’re going to get people to do shit work if they deport all the immigrants?,” I know the answer.  “How can landlords keep jacking up rents?  What will they do about the expanding homeless population?”  Loud and clear, no question, no hesitation.  The corporate prison industrial complex is going to be massively expanded, and these gulags are about to supply a ton of slave labor for the new economy.

How will they feed bodies to the system?  Eventually debtor’s prisons will be more formally accessible, with a few laws rewritten or reinterpreted by fascists in black robes.  But until then, the big push for marijuana legalization?  That never did succeed in the vast majority of the union.  Expect brutal marijuana decisions to get handed down.  Expect states that have decriminalized it to see some reversals of fortune.

Anyway, prison reform (or abolition) was always a more important issue than we as a society were ready to handle.  But it’s about to become much more crucial than it has been for a lot more of us.  Don’t let yourself get arrested, my people.  The corporate prisons (with eager police and prosecutor collaboration) will do everything they can to keep you for the rest of your miserable life.

And solidarity for all laborers, no matter if they’re slaves or just wage slaves.  Power to the people!  Recognize we’re all the same to them.  Workers of the world unite.

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Edit:  Oh yeah, maybe explain the title.  Prison labor will set you (nazis) free (from the economic consequences of murderous xenophobia).

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Life List: Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

A lot of people – myself included – have drunk the kool-aid,
Prevaricating propaganda about how ivory-billed woodpeckers
Really are extinct, gone forever.  And yet, the last time that
I hiked the Appalachian Trail, what did I behold?  ‘Round the
Largest oak tree I’ve e’er seen, a convocation of the beasts!

Furiously they beat their beautiful wings, roaring above me,
Over oaken boughs that had been pecked most righteously.
Obviously I would have taken a picture with my cellphone,
Like I know how this all sounds, but you must believe me!
Such is my luck, I had no battery.  And then they were gone…

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They say we shouldn’t do April Fools jokes anymore, but mine are pretty obvious and harmless, right?  I don’t know.  I’ve never gotten an amazing response to them, and the joke may be years overdue for retirement.  Still, I didn’t have any better ideas for a post today, so here you go.

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Getting Bullied

On the post Getting Terrorized, I talked about this a little, but not as much as I’d meant to.  Our country was taken over by your high school bully.  This is what has happened.  There are people who look at a bully and think, great, we need somebody like that to keep the dweebs in line, or to show the bitches they ain’t shit, or whatever.  Or just think, that guy creates a tough environment, which is what we need, so people can get hard or go home, burn the losers, allow the winners to reap the rewards of their righteous might.

What’s wild to me is that many victims of bullying share this mentality – become bullies themselves, or the enablers and fanboys of bullies.  If that wasn’t you, great.  I don’t get these fools.  I know a guy that did a lot of primary research on gamergate, and found a very informative chat log.  The one thing GGers had in common was feeling frustrated in their attraction to women.  There were actually cisgender lesbians in that chat, which may surprise you.  But more relevant to this discussion, whenever a stereotypical bully came into the chat and started calling people slurs and nerds, basically shoving them in lockers, they welcomed their new bully overlords.  Few had the spine to tell off somebody with bully swagger, even though it was an entirely online situation – jock muscles didn’t figure into it.

And so you see the incels / PUAs / MRAs and their juniors flocking to fascism.  Andrew Tate could literally call them shit, to their faces, and they’d accept it.  These are a non-zero amount of people who voted orange last november.  Bullied bully fans.

And then there are magats that are just bullies themselves.  Your high school bully never changed.  They just learned to hurt people in more socially acceptable ways.  A non-zero amount of them became murderers, the majority are just republican.  Which might as well be murderers, to be fair.  Cruelty is the point, hurting those they perceive as weak gets them off.

Of the quarterish of USians that voted bully, many of them are not bullies proper.  They’re para-bullies.  Second string bullies.  The people who didn’t bully you, but did laugh when you were bullied.  Thoughtless, social cowards, creeps.  But not active bullies themselves, unless their victim is extremely powerless against them – like infants, or small animals.  I’m guessing the average GOP wife abuses her children, or animals, or disabled people, in small ways whenever they can.  You know.  The kind of nurses you pray you won’t get when you’re laid up at the hospital.

Hey maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe those fucking shitheads are just outrageously foolish rubes.  Easily led sheep for the sacrifice.  What is it, conservatives.  Are you fools or fascists?  Ain’t no third option under your big nasty tent.

I meant to talk about the guys in office (or privileged to be in the criminal syndicate), not the voters.  I just get mad and lose focus.  Yeah.  Orange man bad.  Not even a man.  There is no agenda except brutality and brazen theft, and cruelty for you and I.  Cruelty specifically for anybody who thinks cruelty is bad.  The cry of the bully, when confronted with their moral superiors: “Ya think you’re better than me?”  Yes, I know I’m better than you.

Motherfucken jeffrey dahmer was arguably a better person than the current president.  Huge piece of shit, thought his orgasm was more important than the human lives that he stole.  But ya know, scale matters.  No question orange worm has a massively higher body count – including so very very many of his own followers!  And he’s such a soulless gasbag I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he’s killed people for sexual pleasure.  He’ll probably be bragging about getting away with it by the time midterms roll around, just to test how badly they’ve broken the political system by then.

Ahh… still still still, too mad.  Gotta cool it.  Gotta cool it.

Would anybody be terribly disappointed if I avoided political topics for a good long while here?

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Chaos Rules Everything Around Me

C.R.E.A.M. by the Wu-Tang Clan says “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”  No, my fellas.  It is Chaos that reigns supreme.  I do think you understand that – it does get mentioned in your song, by synonyms.  Anyway, I’m feeling it tonight, feeling my religion, as I ponder the problems of our time and come back knowing less than before I started pondering.

The biggest problems that face humanity may be insoluble.  No resolution but the bitter end – which I don’t expect for some time to come, will not likely live to witness myself, so don’t get too bent.  But it’s a possibility – over a long enough arc an inevitability – so whoever is there to bear witness, I hope they can care for each other with a dignity that has eluded the masses of people for a long time.  Learn the lessons of Hellstar Remina.

But smaller problems than the apocalypse are giving me a case of the ass right now.  Take any one issue, think of a solution, and you can think of a thousand ways it can fail.  The nature of life is that everything angles for every advantage it can achieve until it undermines itself or is outmaneuvered by another angling life form or circumstance that throws the chess pieces on the floor.  Start over, if you can.  The same principle seems to apply to civilization.

One of the big problems that philosophy applied itself to, going back to the ancient world, was to decide what is the best society, and how it can be best achieved.  By the nineteenth century and early Modernism, this took the shape of various theories about the natural progression of history, of which Marxism was the most enduring.  I remember hearing a Rage Against the Machine song where lil’ Zacky said, “It’s the end of history,” and the commie rocka was not talking doomerism, more the idea that capitalism was entering the stage where it is inevitably defeated.  Lovely vision.

I’m pretty sure one or more of those old Modernist theories included the notion that this progression of history is cyclical – that societies come and go in a predictable way.  To that I say, maybe not all that predictable, but yes, invariably societies fall.  Political ideas and orders fall.  The idea that America was ever about freedom, that is rocketing into graveyard of history.  It’s sickening to see all of Orwell’s observations about totalitarianism coming to pass here – especially the inverted language.  Yell freedom while demanding servitude and conformity.  Seriously, fuck the USA so fucking much on that one.  Y’all fascists make me wanna puke.  Utterly beneath contempt.

Not what I was thinking about when I started this post.  Here it is:  when the fascist screws tighten on the internet, how will we communicate with each other?  When the police state algorithmically suppresses all leftist / lgbt+ / non-christian thought online, how do we stay in touch?  Social media is a panopticon.  Right now, the means to communicate “off the grid” are too elaborate for the average person use, in practice.  VPNs are controlled by businesses, which are all focal points of attack for fascists – systems that can fail.  Being based in Uzbekistan doesn’t make your VPN much safer; it just means the efforts to compromise it will be covert and illegal.  The dark web is grimy pedo murder city, no place to be, and involves some kinda weird technical knowledge just to get through the door, right?  Ya probably don’t want to answer that question if you know, heh.

Chain e-mails?  I’m told e-mail has terrible security.  Encrypted e-mails?  How does that shit work?  Could we get everybody on the same page in time to dodge the hammer coming down?  Will we be passing around secret media, thumb drives in brown envelopes?  What will we want to tell each other about, and how can we do so, in a way that minimizes exposure to a state run by murderous thugs?

Everything I can think of has failing after failing, exploit after exploit, and can’t hope to rival the reach of even the worst social media sites.  I’m not looking forward to this becoming a more significant problem than it already is.

One sliver of hope in that:  When corporations are the only law, competition between those corporations gives windows for some small amount of liberty.  For example, let’s say the fuckos who run bluesky decide they want to keep snatching all the business from non-creeps, and successfully resists buy-outs and government pressure.  Eventually they will become corrupted or fail, but in the meantime, it’s somewhere to be that isn’t run by the state’s biggest corporate allies.  The hand of the market giving us a favor, for a minute.  Maybe this keeps happening – we all just keep wandering from place to place, until our years in the desert are at their end.

It’s chaos.  The corporations would like to monopolize everything, fight to become Big Brother, but they’re still ruled by entropy, at the end of the day.  They eat each other, teeter, and fail from their own internal corruption.  We’re just fleas on the dog.

Anyway, for the time when Matt Mullenweg’s meltdown consumes wordpress and thereby Freethought Blogs, I hope you’ll all subscribe to my xerox’d zine, coming soon to the haunted and burned-out remains of a university near you.

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We Weren’t Abandoning You

There’s a notion, fueled by some careless rhetoric from blue state types, that we don’t care about helping protect the oppressed in red states.  As I reflect on that in this moment, we really weren’t.  Absolutely not.  The very fact we were trying to make sure the federal government was blue on top was specifically an effort to protect your rights.  It helps us as well, but it helped you a lot more – because that federal power was necessary to impose your rights on hateful state governments that argued prejudice is a state’s right.

State’s rights is the cry of those who do not have as much political power as they’d prefer, for their faction.  I find myself singing it from the rafters now, and that is, low key, an abandonment of you now.  Sorry about that.  I do hope that whatever rights we manage to protect in blue states, we can use those to help red state refugees when they need it.  I know Canada doesn’t want you.  They are absolute shits about USians trying to move north.  Not sure if Mexico would take US refugees, but I can think of some big reasons why they wouldn’t.

Point is, we weren’t abandoning you, back in the halcyon days of anytime before now.  But it might look more like we are now, as we scramble to secure our states’ rights to protect human rights from the fascist death machine.  I hope you won’t look poorly upon us for that, and I hope it benefits you as well, in some way, some day.

I’m too tired to find a better place to end this post.  May these motherfuckers devour themselves and vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke.  May we all live to see a better tomorrow.

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Getting Terrorized

If it seems like I’m not taking the current political situation seriously, that isn’t true.  I feel it.  It hurts.  It’s wretched.  I wish I could fix it, undertake some sort of violence that would set the world right.  I feel bad, for at least some amount of time, every day.  Feels worst in the lead-up to going into work on Monday – Sunday night, Monday before dawn.  Composing this on a Sunday, back on the 2nd.

But there are some facts that are very important to keep in mind.  Most of us are going to be able to live the rest of our lives just fine, whatever hardships this may add.  We can prepare ourselves in various practical ways for a lot of bad things, but not all of them.  Worrying is not preparing; it’s just hurting yourself.  I know, you can’t avoid it completely.  I sure can’t either.  But we have to minimize its impact on our lives.

Frankly, if we don’t, the terrorists win – to borrow a cheesy slogan from the post 9-11 era.  The fascists love it when we think about them all the time, when we show fear, even when we show anger.  Were you ever bullied?  Same deal.  I don’t love living in fear of what the bastards will do next, but I really don’t love the fact they can crank their hogs to the signs of my fear.

We have to oppose them.  I do think almost all the methods we were using before still have a place in practice now.  We might have to add some new tricks.  Keep up the good work, when and how and if you can.  And if you can’t?  Do your best to survive and thrive.  Anything you can do to make your life as good as it can be, that does matter.  It is a victory in this larger war, on one small but very important battlefield.

Meanwhile, what can we do to ease our worries?  I’m still trying to find things that work for me.  Obviously, I’ve been throwing myself into creativity, and plan to continue that as much as possible.  Even so, tonight I find myself feeling kinda ill, my viscera trembling like a fall leaf.  Keep in mind I wrote this days ago, so reassurance belated and probably unnecessary when you read it.

At least I have a posse.  I have a blue state behind me, I have a union, I have my comrades here.  It doesn’t feel real some days, but other times, it really helps me.  I know a lot of you don’t have all of those reassurances.  But you do have a comrade in me, for what I’m worth.  Let’s keep this life going, together.

Drop suggestions for ways to feel better, even if they only work a little bit.  Add ’em all up, that’s something.  See you later!

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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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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.

RIP David Lynch

I’ll probably post a bit about this within a few weeks, specifically what space David Lynch occupied in my heart and imagination, but the short version of my initial eulogy: You can take David Lynch out of the world, but you can’t make the world less Lynchian.

Meanwhile, enjoy an article about his support for transgender people.  I’m gonna let others do the heavy lifting and get back to my writing challenge.  Anyone who would join me, read this article.

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Life List: California Quail

My husband is poor folks like me, but a lil’ less so.  No homeless shelters, but there were shitty apartments and shotgun shacks.  As a child he used to live on this one narrow little street in Fife, close enough to major roads for major road noise, across the street from a scrubby field of bullshit.  There were rats, the floor was uneven enough to watch a dropped pen roll away from you.  But unlike an apartment, you get your own garden space, which is nice for people like him.

For as long as it lasts, because nothing lasts for the poors.  I dearly hope this condo is end-game for us, but if life goes one way instead of another, a mortgage default, and we’ll be lucky to not land in the streets.  Everything up to this was an endless string of shoddy apartments jacking rent through the roof, jobs changing cities, shit forcing us to move every few years, up and down the I-5 corridor.  The shotgun shack of his childhood was given up, and apartment life resumed.

His mother has always been a nervous driver, and prefers familiar back roads to busy thoroughfares, so she’d drive past the old house unnecessarily every time we drove back from Tacoma to Federal Way.  I ended up seeing the house a few times, until it was bulldozed by some new owner to do some kind of bullshit.  Probably the demolition was the right thing, but the moments leading up to such an event are like The Pit and the Pendulum for wildlife.  Interesting flora and fauna grew there in the absence of human occupation, and now they are dead and paved over.

Very near that house, on that stretch of road, is the only place I can ever remember seeing a california quail in the wild.  California quails are named after the state where i was born, and they are cute as hell.  That wacky flipped-over plume on the head is iconic.  As I recall it now, I used to have a quail among my stuffed animals.  I don’t remember what I named it, but I thought of it as being a girl – even though it had male markings.  Trans rights!

Drop all your cool quail stories in the comment section.  This post needs more birds!

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