One time in LA Devendra Banhart, I think this was maybe when he was dating Natalie Portman, had a show in that loft region near the refrigeration district, it was like “dress as the concept of love”

And I was like “hey, you know, I’ve got candyraver gear, I’ve got these leopard print phat pants I sewed for my high school graduation project on the recommendation of the happycore listserve; I’ve got this Ryo-Ohki backpack I can fill up with Jolly Ranchers; I can get some glow bracelets”

When I showed up I realized I was the only person who tried to dress as love and

FUCK

I guess the only option is to totally own this

I was surprised both at how many people wouldn’t accept candy from a stranger and how many would

You know what media property’s due for a reboot? Birth of A Nation.

Griffiths’ movie came out in 1915, The Clansman (and the rest of Dixon’s Klan trilogy) in the 1900s, so it’s all public domain up for grabs. Maybe I should do it.

In honesty I’ve never seen/read either. The summaries I’ve read make them sound pretty damn silly, but it’s easy to make things sound silly in summary. Anyway, you don’t have to be deathly faithful to the original plot, maybe take a few touchpoints and a few character names, and tell a tale of Reconstruction and Redemption. It’s an interesting time that we don’t have many popular representations of.

I certainly don’t think a modern version would end “and then the noble Ku Klux Klan triumphed over vile mongrelization, restored the proper order of things, and they all lived happily ever after”, but it would pretty much HAVE To end “and then Southern Redeemers, including the Ku Klux Klan, did in fact defeat Republican coalitions and establish a white regime”.

See, back when, every Black History month, George Washington Carver came up, the takeaway message was basically

1) Man that guy liked peanuts
or, at furthest
2) Black guys can do peanut science with the best of them

But the really interesting thing about Carver as a historical figure was that for a while there, it was conceivable that a black professor could be the public face of a government program in the American South. Because slavery didn’t transition directly into Jim Crow, there were three steps forward under Reconstruction, and then two back to the “nadir of American race relations”.

(The other interesting thing Carver stands in for in history was that with the shift from the plantation system to sharecropping, crop rotation with nitrogen-fixation crops became pretty imperative, so building a market for peanuts was important. An oft-overlooked advantage to slave labor was that the agricultural economy could exhaust the land and shift towards the frontier with its labor force and labor relations intact. The plantation system relied on taking soil super-rich from aeons of floods and no intensive cultivation and applying a ton of labor to extract the hell out of it. And in contrast, the extension of feudal agriculture to Eastern Europe was slow, for lack of population, and involved offering substantial incentives and concessions to fugitive peasants. Later on the region featured the rankest serfdom, but that’s a whole other worm cannery.)

Every work of fiction is of its time, though, and there’s plenty of modern resonance to be found in the Reconstruction era.

For one, nation-building. The idea that America would invade and occupy countries to rebuild them in accordance with American values… I mean, America invaded and occupied America once to rebuild it in accordance with American values. And failed. In the same way. Not because its armies were defeated in the field, but because local elites, with patience and paramilitary violence, rebuilt their position; and with a combination of weariness, expense, and electoral shifts, Washington eventually shrugged, said “good enough”, cut a deal, and turned to other priorities.

And I mean, America might not have converted the South, but it did keep control. And I expect Iraq and Afghanistan to stay in the American sphere of influence for at least a good generation or two. I suppose there are stronger competing powers in their region, that’s a difference. An independent CSA miiiight have aligned with the British Empire, but it’s not like reconstructed Florida was going to become a puppet state of the Cuban landowners (um). Though I guess Texas and the desert states weren’t firmly distinguished from Mexico until after WWI with the Border War, arguably Operation Wetback in the ‘50s.

(That’s why I don’t dismiss the Arizona anti-reconquistadors as cranks. The notion that after a relatively short period of hegemony, a major population shift could lead to irredentist conflict is… well-precedented, actually.)

So, there’s some lessons about humility in foreign policy. But really, there’s no way to read the history of Reconstruction as a modern liberal parable. (Actually I hear The Traitor, the follow-up to The Clansman, depicts the Klan degenerating into causeless violence and banditry, but ends with an optimistic message of peace and reconciliation through personal openness of the heart and mind. Among the white race, of course. Don’t be silly.) To the extent there’s inspiration to be drawn there, it’s reactionary inspiration. Just because previously subjugated groups have been making advances for a few decades doesn’t mean the worm can’t turn and they can’t be repressed. And heck, even if whites become a numerical minority, with solidarity, cleverness, and a dash of violence, it’s possible to set up a system that leaves them in absolute control.

And let’s not pretend that’d be a message without contemporary relevance or appeal.

Not to say you couldn’t find role models if your politics run the other way. There were carpetbaggers who were activisty true believers in racial equality. There were scalawags who put class before race, solidarity-wise. There were freedmen who, though uneducated and inexperienced in power, took to the democratic project in earnest, with high hopes. (And there were the incompetent and the corrupt and the obnoxious. Always and everywhere.) And in any competent retelling, they’d show up, and be taken seriously, maybe be viewpoint characters for parts. They’d just lose, in the end.

This is the first place I’ve ever been where I’ve wanted to reshape myself to fit it rather than the other way around, and I really do appreciate the way people get along, but

I’m still suburbanova professional class stock, loyalties attendant

I was in a bar once and overheard a ‘tender talk about how she and her boy made a baby, and this gay dude couple adopted it, all 4 of them co-workers, and all took 3 months off on family leave

And this is all unpaid leave, and it’s pretty much impossible to walk a dog in this town without running into 10 people looking to pick up bar shifts, and now that I look it up a single employer can insist couples go consecutively rather than concurrently

But jesus christ did my sympathies immediately go out to the owner/managers.

monetizeyourcat:

Adam Curtis also claims to be a libertarian which is genuinely bizarre considering how much energy he has invested in exposing and demolishing  neoliberalism but it’s his life I guess

Yeah in the UK it’s used in the sense of “liberationary”.

Basically when you cross the Atlantic, “liberal” and “libertarian” swap places, it’s kinda funny.

“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

“Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world”

William Moulton Marston - reputed psychologist, polyamorist, inventor of the polygraph, creator of Wonder Woman. Y'know, wielder of the Magic Rope of Domination +3. (Though in the early stuff she sure does spend a lot of time tied up herself.)

Strong Female Characters, 1940s edition.

Honestly, I love genre fiction for the way that even the really good, well written stuff will be spiced with completely unreflective takes on the author’s kinks.

Like, Kim Stanley Robinson will write these great epic sagas about politics and ecology and postcapitalism and the role of scientists in society, all sorts of settings, and good money says there’s gonna be intergenerational sex in a public bath.

And my, Joss Whedon sure does love stories about psychologically vulnerable teenage girls who beat men up.

(Also pioneer of the “redhead geek girl” thing. Said once it was his explicit goal to make Alyson Hannigan a sex symbol. Plus Christina Hendricks, Felicia Day, Kitty Pryde, Kaylee hired ‘cause she can fix engines on her back with dudes she just met)

And well okay, that’s men. Except that the genre fiction by and for women is like pure kink. Before the internet, grocery and drug stores used to have, just hanging out there, a section full of rape/submission fantasies for women. Now it’s relegated to fanfiction. Or, y'know, the bestseller lists, like Twilight. Or bestselling Twilight fanfiction.

So remember how I said I dreamed a whole episode of Family Guy once? Well last night I dreamed a few episodes of a new (yet another) Eva reboot, this one as a 26-episode series.

In this version, there had been a bunch of Children, but before the first episode they were all doing a synchronization test when they started to synch together racing past 100%. The test was emergency shutdown because they were threatening to start an Impact wrong, and the kids were left unconscious in LCL-filled stasis tubes in NERV HQ.

Shinji was revived in Episode 1, I think Rei was already awake. By the 6th episode the 5 Children from the recent movies were all up and running.

It was fairly light and fun, there were some cool battles. One running thing had been that whenever the Eva units operated outside there would be a few spectators who would gather to watch them and cheer, like picnickers at a Civil War battle. I was thinking “heh, Eva fandom”.

Then in the 7th episode things got darker. It was mentioned that some of these fans had become a cult worshipping the Evas, and then suddenly Nerv HQ was invaded. By who - the cult, SEELE, ??? - I don’t know. But Misato was shot through the chin point-blank in a perfect reversal of that scene from EoE, and the invaders smashed all the stasis tubes and executed the Children inside.

Ritsuko organizes a counterattack and kills the attackers, and then the last shot is this wide hall of NERV HQ littered with corpses, blood mingling with LCL.

Then there was a black card with white Japanese text on it, subtitled in English. It was a message from Anno, saying that now was the point when fans who got into Eva from this series (he called them “tan fans”) should consider looking into the other versions.

It’s funny that of all the fucked up shit that happened in this dream, “tan fans” was the one thing that seemed odd.

(Update: Oh you know what? Maybe he didn’t mean the color but the stereotypical childish mispronunciation of “-chan”, because this series would be the “baby” of the Eva metaverse.)

Just how much does it matter to modern anti-Semitism that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a forgery, and how much does debunking it actually accomplish?

Here’s another way to think about it: How much does it matter to modern Christianity that The Screwtape Letters were not written by an actual devil?

Maybe there’s someone out there in a rural singlewide with a mimeographed and uncredited copy who thinks they in fact were. And behind her there are more people who think there are actual demons plotting out there, even if these particular letters were written by a man who would be their enemy.

But behind them I think the majority of people who appreciate the work simply think “evil” is a valid and useful way to name a thing to be fought.  And that “how would you act if this were authentic” is a pretty good rule of thumb for “how you should act”. And telling them that no, actually, this is all the invention of a man named C.S. Lewis isn’t going to do much to change their worldview.

And I wonder if the same isn’t true with the Protocols and “the Jews”.

(And with the Willie Lynch speech among black nationalists, or, really, the Bible among Christians outside of a sola scriptura literalist tradition)

So I saw the new Red Dawn a while ago at a 3rd- or 4th-run theater.

It was an absolute block of solid cheese, you could tell they just had a list of ideas for Totally Sweet Scenes, or Shots even, and then were like “oh shit, we need a plot and some characters to paste these together with”. The thread about the dude resenting his brother not being there for him was hilariously halfassed and obligatory. When that guy yelled “Wolverines!” on top of the building I just broke out laughing.

This movie was basically drawn on the front of someone’s binder. But for all that, good goddamn was it inspiring.

Hear tell they reedited it to change the occupying forces from Chicoms to Norks in deference to the Chinese market. And I mean whatever, they’d pretty much sold out even before that, an honest attempt to update the right-wing zeitgeistiness of the original would have made the occupying forces American.

So I have this memory from when I was younger of a TV ad for this weird flat flashlight that only blinks when you squeeze it, where a young guy uses it in a club to flirt with an attractive woman.

And I had never been able since to find any mention of such a product. No one seemed to have ever heard of it, or remembered the ad. This almost sounds like creepypasta, but it was just too goddamn goofy.

I finally just rediscovered the name, it was the Polaroid PolaPulse, and it came out in 1997.

I found this page at FlashlightMuseum.com, which allowed me to search and find this mention of the ad campaign at AdAge (apparently they were sold at Spice Girls concerts as SpiceLights?), and the holy grail, a copy of the ad at AdForum.

This is basically the product’s entire online presence, aside from a few threads looking for replacement batteries. I think you couldn’t even get replacement batteries at the time, it was purely disposable. They say it used the same batteries as powered the flash in old Polaroid cameras, so you can hack those in.

Honestly, reading those pages - check the comments at the museum site - it still sounds like creepypasta. But now that I know it actually existed, I’m absolutely convinced that this was part of a marketing experiment or hell, even a bet, to see how many units of an absolutely pointless product you could sell based on X dollars worth of ad buys.

avrillavigneamvs240p:

i feel like the only reason there’s a small part of downtown LA with skyscrapers is because people felt like a large city is just supposed to have them in some part

Those skyscrapers are the result of a slum clearance project on Bunker Hill, which was previously old Victorians, once upon a way-back time the classy suburbs of tiny little baby LA, that had become flophouses. Also it was an attempt to lure banks, and their taxes, back from independent cities like Glendale and away from the planned office development of Century City which turned into a giant traffic clusterfuck. (In part because of terrible midcentury modernist planning, in part because of its defeat - the freeway system was designed on the assumption of a freeway decked over Santa Monica Boulevard, but Beverly Hills got it cancelled because ugly and poors and the rest was built intact.)

At ground level a lot of these buildings are blank, multi-story high stone walls. In City of Quartz Mike Davis talks a lot about how this is all militarized fortress architecture in response to riots and poverty but also that hill is really steep such that one side of the building is three floors deeper (or taller, wevs) than the other, and there’s basically no demand for Class A office space in which half of the floor has no windows, and not much foot traffic with any money to spend. So you might as well just stick infrastructure (electrical, water, HVAC, elevators, anti-earthquake suspension systems) in there.

LA has basically been trying to make downtown happen again ever since the 1950s, and it’s always just around the corner, there are some hilarious stories in there. Like, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a classic Gehry design, had to have its curved metal surfaces roughed up after they focused and reflected light so well it was blinding drivers and raising the temperature by 20 degrees in nearby office buildings.

Also LA had this strong-council weak-mayor system where the council kind of lets each councilman run their district themselves with no coherent citywide vision, while departments like the DWP and LAPD got to run themselves. So when Governor Reagan shuttered the asylums and people initially tried to make a “neighborhood services” system to replace it, under NIMBYist pressure everyone refused things in their district, except downtown which didn’t really have any residential constituents of any influence, so all the shelters and rehabs and services ended up there, and in consequence parts of downtown became the homeless district, with tent cities on the sidewalks and addicts wandering zombie-eyed in the street. Downtown’s revival is right around the corner for real this time though promise you guys, lofts and artwalks, so the city’s been sparring with the ACLU and whatnot to get the authority to hassle them away.

It was a big part of the new city charter a decade or so to fix that system (also to preempt Valley secession, also to create Neighborhood Councils as a Potemkin government timesink for Concerned Citizens) but then Villaraigosa (a weak mayor indeed) pissed it away and the council’s clawed most of its power back. Villaraigosa’s election was basically the story of the Eastside Latino/labor branch of the Democratic machine affiliated with Gil Cedillo’s Latino Caucus triumphing over the Westside Jewish/professional branch to install its smile-in-a-suit figurehead.

LA is a terrible place. You’ll notice that anyone who makes money in LA immediately spends it on not living in LA, either through migration or seclusion, or else is an absolutely horrible person.

That said, when I was in LA I was always, always waiting for some New Yorker to ask “what’s Echo Park got that Brooklyn doesn’t?”, just so I could respond “The Dodgers?”

(Lore is that LA destroyed a thriving Latino community in Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium. That’s not true, they destroyed it to build public housing, but then didn’t because that’s communism. Then later hey, there’s all this open space going to waste & a desire to show off that LA Is A Real City Now)

So I heard about Ready Player One, it sounded interesting, finally got a chance to read it.

Jesus.

Like, I would describe the prose as “workmanlike”, in the sense of Homer Simpson making that spice rack. The thing is seriously held together not only by ‘80s geek pop culture references, but '80s geek pop culture references that get called out by name and explained in depth when they appear, like the novelization of a fucking Seltzer-Friedberg movie.

and this is all set in the what, 2020s? 30s? but the plot at least accounts for that, foregrounds it even and I guess there is that weird geek retro thing, girls at Ground Kontrol with 8-bit Samus tattoos across their colllarbones like wow I"m pretty sure we were into the 32 bit era by the time pooping became volitional for you

Also it’s got this quest narrative that gets interrupted for a bizarrely long middle section that’s all boy meets girl/boy gets girl/boy loses girl, except it’s really boy impresses girl on the internet through nerd trivia and then obsesses over her in a way that ultimately skeeves girl out, and maaaaybe this is a riff on John Hughes movie structure?

But it was a decent page-turner and I kept reading it, up to right before the end boss fight, and yes it was shaping up as a literal boss fight because of fucking course it was, and –

okay I’m not a “good guy” here. I’ve been reading a lot of tumblr “voice of the underdog” communists lately and honestly feminists for years, I came to tumblr by way of Sady Doyle, and maybe picking a bit up from them and that’s kind of conscious and intentional because I’ve long been aware of how impressionable I am by good writers and recently my superego was getting its eyebrow pretty high about how firmly I’d been nodding to fascists and white nationalists, and

while I’ll understand how people different from me are totally real and have totally legitimate desires that kind of only reaffirms me in looking out for #1 because I realize with everyone being real and legitimate there’s not a way everyone can win, there’s just not, fulfillment of one is always experienced as limitation of another and I want good people to win but myself first of all –

okay, when the book made the point that the liberating thing about the internet is that it enables School Choice, so that the smart deserving poor can escape the violent undeserving poor – I mean I’ll nod and affirm the critiques, but allowing the smart deserving poor to join me in ruling the world is basically the extent of my fantasy social uplift politics so whatever.

When it made the point that the liberating thing about the internet is that it makes cool old guys who think of themselves as wizards rich, so they can wisely use their money to enable the deserving poor persecuted geeks to escape their lives towards Oregon, I mean, that’s not how I’d put it but wow glass houses.

But when it made the point, and I’m barely even paraphrasing, page 320 of the Broadway Paperbacks first edition, that the liberating thing about the internet is that anyone can pass as a thin straight white boy, as long as they like Rush and objectifying women, I honestly yelled “fuck this!” and threw the book on the ground.

I would’ve used it to pick up dogshit and thrown it in the trash, too, if it were my copy.

The wonderful thing about genre fiction is the way it’ll be spiced with completely unreflective takes on the author’s kinks.

Multiple blasts at a location already flooded with live media? That’s pretty clever and competent. Be awful surprised if this was a self-taught first-timer lone wolf.

notahoe:

The future is now 

“In five years, the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman

–  John Varley, opening line of Steel Beach

I refuse to believe that I’m the first to describe the violent revisionist fantasy style of the ASoIaF books as “GRMMdark”

Both IRA campaigns of bombing and assassinations in Northern Ireland and American campaigns of bombing and assassinations against abortionists were motivated by a strongly felt Catholic identity, and a sense of grievance that that identity was not properly recognized as the correct organizing principle of society.

Both could, coherently, be categorized as “Catholic terrorism”. That in America they generally aren’t, and why they aren’t, can be an interesting dynamic to explore in its own right.

That said, it would be damn weird and not very useful to understand the two campaigns as facets of the same single thing.

(That said I bet that analogy would play best to a “left” audience who would think “ah yes, how ignorant and reductionist of rightists to attempt to understand the world in terms of such category as ‘Islamic terrorism’”, and then immediately turn back to their practice of understanding various and sundry identity-motivated campaigns of terror as facets of a same single thing called “European colonialism”.)

The thing I love about 4chan is how not only is it utterly ridiculous, but it’s completely self-aware about its utter ridiculousness in a manner that in no way precludes it from being 110% dedicated, mind body and soul, to being utterly ridiculous