Notice that cost on the left margin means it costs 7 more unless you have the Politics resource (land), which unlike the other 4 resources (colours) had no game effects other than making celebrity pilots and “orbital bombing” direct damage cheaper
Somehow at the time this was not obvious as a metaphor for the post-Cold War “New World Order”, because the comparison set was like On The Edge and Illuminati and Netrunner and Illuminati and the X-Files CCG
The ‘90s were paranoid conspiratorial as hell, just like the ‘50s shit doesn’t make sense without that
me: the Getty Villa is closing for the Malibu fire
also me: not for fear of burning, the Villa and the Getty Center in the Sepulveda Pass (of the Santa Monica mountains cutting through LA) have elaborate systems to protect their priceless classical collections from smoke, fire, and earthquake
me: but isn’t it just a great summary of California’s — and America’s — land baron, extractive, unsubtle history that we build these boomtowns and put these (hey Hearst Castle) absurd collections of ancient classical art right in the path of every natural disaster you can imagine?
also me: you realize that the Roman practice of collecting fancy prestige objects and putting them in pretty rich-guy villas on Mediterranean-climate coastlines to be overrun by landslides, earthquakes, and volcanos is half the reason we still even have this stuff
People loved their work once, and it didn’t matter if they worked in the public sector or in the private one. The men who worked in the CCC would take their grandchildren to see the forests they planted, while the men from the auto plants would point out the cars they’d built as they passed them on the new interstate highway system. The women who fastened the engines on the wings would watch the B-17’s fly off to make a liar out of Goering, and the women who taught in the public schools would point with pride when one of their old students got elected mayor. Work was about making money, certainly. It was about feeding the family and keeping the roof where it was, and maybe having a little left over at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, for some amusement. Maybe a trip to Lincoln Park or White City or a hundred other places, where you could take a moment and enjoy the cool of the evening, music riding the nightwind from a dance pavilion down along the lake.
But it was also about Doing A Job, and doing it well, which was different than simply Having A Job. It was about making good cars and strong steel and sturdy furniture. It was about learning a craft, even if what you were doing wasn’t recognized as one. There was a craft in tightening rivets, or feeding the open-hearth furnace, or planing the wood just so. You had your craft, and the person next to you had theirs, and, when all the work was done, and all the craft was practiced, and practiced well, there was something you could look at with pride and say, that is something I have given to the world. Job well done, as they used to say. You could teach seventh grade civics and then, one day, you’re on a podium outside of City Hall. That kid right there, you could say. That kid is something I have helped give to the world. Job well done, as they used to say.
Unions were greatly responsible for the pride that people took in the work they did, especially in the middle of the last century, when unions helped build the most formidable middle class in human history.
-— -— -—
There was an autoworker, Ben Hamper, who wrote a column in the Flint (later Michigan) Voice, which was the alt-weekly Michael Moore first made his name by running. A lot of his columns got collected and repackaged in an excellent book, Rivethead that I read in college.
I read it in a class by Stuart Blumin, who was my favorite professor and de facto advisor. He was an American historian, focused on labor and class and the development of capitalism, you could tell he was heavily influenced by EP Thompson and the Communist Party Historians Group over in the UK.
He was quite open that he had expected Communism to ultimately triumph, and that he had been wrong about that, and in subtext that he had wanted it to ultimately triumph, and didn’t think he had been wrong about that.
Anyway, Rivethead. The story is that Hamper was born in 1956, a fairly clever kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, the chronological and geographic apex of American industrial unionism, where everyone’s dad worked for GM.
And he could have gone to college but he gets some girl pregnant and so he goes to work on the assembly line not even really out of obligation or Catholic guilt or whatever but because that seems as good a life course as any, it’s what every man he’s known does, under the mighty UAW the pay’s on par with the kind of “educated” jobs you could get anyway, why not.
And so he goes to work on the line and eventually he ends up writing a column about it, and he talks about the color of the factory culture, playing soccer with rivets for balls and cardboard boxes for goals, drinking mickeys of malt liquor in your car on lunch break, the absurd fursuited mascot “Howie Makem, The Quality Cat” that GM would feature at rallies and shop-floor tours, being laid off in economic downturns and put into the “job bank” where you get paid waiting to be rehired in the next upswing, developing a perfect rhythm with your partner, training into a rhythm so perfect you can each trade off doing the two-person job yourself for 4 hours while the other one goes out to a bar on the clock, the dignity and solidarity of the American worker.
And time goes on and eventually his marriage fails but he takes it in stride, and his column gets recognized and he takes pride in that and then eventually he has an epiphany, and a complete breakdown, which are basically the same thing. And the inciting incident is when an older line worker, some guy he’d looked up to as a model of quiet, philosophical stolidity, just shits himself and is barely coherent enough to even notice this and he realizes the guy hadn’t been a Zen master, he’d just been checked-out mindless drunk on the line every day.
And he realizes that the rivethead life is destroying him, that the only thing holding it together was a budding alcoholism, and that it’s doing the same to all his co-workers, and looks back and realizes it had done the same to every grown-up man he knew, his father and uncles that growing up he had looked up to as models of masculine strength and fortitude really had just had their spark snuffed out and the life beaten out of them long before, and whatever pride they took in the cars out on the road was a defensive attempt to locate in an external form the sense of self-value that had been exterminated within them.
When Marx talked about “alienation”, well.
And he went crazy, and couldn’t bear to work on the line anymore, and there’s no redemption, that’s where the book ends.
And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were
1) avoiding work and 2) drinking
Back in the premechanized age of small-group workshop manufacturing, workers would celebrate “Saint Monday”, which was to say just not showing up for work, hung over after the weekend.
(This was riffing off of Catholic feast days, or holy days, from which we take the word “holiday”, and as time went on counted an increasing share of the days of the year. There was a reason that poor workers were aligned with the Church, and nobility, in “Altar and Throne” coalitions resisting the development of industrial capitalist liberal democracy.)
In the ‘80s, the crap time of American auto manufacturing, one trick that was passed around (pre-internet, so by word of mouth largely) was to look at the codes stamped on car bodies, which would tell you what day of the week they were manufactured, and to avoid Mondays and Fridays. Because those days had the highest defect rates, because the workers tended to be drunk, or hungover, or absent.
And back in the workshop days, you’d drink at work. Apprentices would be sent out for growlers or buckets of beer, there were elaborate rules of who in the hierarchy of workers was expected to buy rounds for who and when. And there was hellacious resistance to attempts to get them to knock this off, as the industrial era kicked into swing.
Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water- or steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, stories of little kids getting their hands mangled by the machinery? One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-manglers.
And I mean, this maybe sounds like an argument for socialism. Though not of any actually-existing- variety, as capitalist propaganda will be glad to tell you, Soviet work culture, at least when the morale thrills of the Revolution and Great Patriotic War faded from personal to institutional memory, was all about shirking and vodka.
So those complaints about how America celebrates Labor Day instead of May Day, ignoring the true meaning of labor - solidarity - in favor of mindless distraction? Psssh. Labor Day is a celebration of the truest, most ancient, most fundamental traditions of labor: not working (especially on Mondays), and getting drunk.
Happy Labor Day!
Christian Identity and Creativity are funny because they basically have the same backstory as Odinism or Wicca - someone committed to a project of palingenetic nationalism thought it needed a religious component, and decided to “revive” the “ancient, historic faith” of the nation, which they did by combining one part contemporary folk tales and practices projected backwards, one part avant-garde neo-mysticism, and two parts of the founders’ personal charisma and off-the-top-of-the-head mythology.
Now the ancient, historic faith of white Americans was, obviously, Christianity, and the hilarious part is that the fact that this was still a living and well-documented religion in no way prevented the whole process from proceeding along the exact same lines.
3dspacejesus asked: Are there any Amhist topics you've been meaning to write effortposts on, which just haven't come together for some reason or another?
I’ve mentioned I’ve wanted to write about historical travel/communication routes:
Roads - the organic growth of local roads, the tendency to form road districts, corvee labor as a support mechanism, the iffy history of medium-distance private roads (profitable mostly in support of land development w/ poor long-term income streams); above all the historical novelty of roads as city-to-city transit modes, previously a thing of railroads or
Coastal and Inland Shipping - historically the fastest, most efficient method of transit; the significance of the Appalachians and the East Coast’s lack of lengthy rivers; the way command of New Orleans (and thus the Mississippi system) and the St. Lawrence (and thus the Great Lakes) played into trade empire strategies and how that interacted with US settler colonialism (, how this experience played into the Chinese Exclusion Act as a defense of the American Pacific presence focused on the trade city of San Francisco); the way Philadelphia came to early prominence due to the Delaware Water Gap offering a rare route to the interior and how New York stole her thunder with the Erie Canal offering an alternate route to the Great Lakes, with a potential portage to the Mississippi system at a site we now call “Chicago”
The Post Office - overlapping a lot with the above two on modalities; how post-carrying contracts promoted, structured, and regulated American shipping and railroads before the dawn of the modern regulatory state; how the era where the federal government was “just the Army & Post Office” actually meant a lot of recognizably contemporary programs got shoehorned in (compare the Army Corps of Engineers, Lewis & Clark Expedition, various imperial overseas administrations). The Post Office as a domestic spy and countersubversive agency - against abolitionists, Confederates, anarchists, antinatalist feminist race-suiciders. The Post Office as the major source of federal patronage, and the reason the same parties operate at federal and local levels where issues and pressures are otherwise perpendicular
ALSO:
Roads - the Good Roads Movement; auto clubs and the stitching-together of long distance routes; Route 66; the Eisenhower Interstate System; that between internal combustion and dynamite and the rediscovery of concrete and then tarmac America literally exploded its way to a modern marvel nearly as impressive as what the Romans did millennia ago by growing wheat and yelling
The Post Office - Rural Free Delivery, Parcel Post, catalog shopping, second- and fourth-class Mail subsidies: Sears as the original Amazon, the fucking *mail* as the original internet. Maybe some pneumatic tube shit as comic relief.
An issue looking over this is I already know the significance of all those things, so by listing them I kinda feel like I have written the effortposts
You only hear about someone being captain of their soccer team or class president or homecoming queen when they are a teenager and something awful has happened to them. She was president of the model UN, and now she is missing; he had spent a semester abroad, and now he is dead. In an effort to understand who they are, like a college admissions committee, we turn to their resumé. We do this in part because teenagers are fundamentally uninteresting, and listing their achievements is more compelling than saying that they were often hungry and slept a great deal. But it’s also done, it seems to me, in an effort to vouchsafe their sanctity in a secular age. Teen tragedies are more tragic than other tragedies because they occasion the death of an innocent, and the more innocent, the more tragic. Maybe in the past we could have talked about their chastity, their good works, the time they spent in church, or their good fortune. Such things now seem less meaningful, or uncouth, though there’s still the implication that the longer a teen’s resumé, the less free time they’ve had to be naughty. So now we turn to their achievements as evidence of their purity and worth. Being captain of the soccer team isn’t necessarily evidence that you’re going to do any more in life than anyone else, but we tell teens it is - just add one more line to your resumé and you’ll get into the right college and get the right job! - so we need to continue the charade in telling teens about the death of one of their own.
Also a really perfect little story about the ‘70s is that there was this peripheral music industry dirtbag who’d go out to Sunset Strip rock clubs and be like “hey, there sure are a lot of unsupervised eighth grade rocker girls here you can fuck, that’s great, people’ll love that, but how can I monetize this”
And he made novelty records so he formed a novelty band, and that was the theme, like a professional wrestling tag team, “unsupervised eighth grade rocker girls you can fuck”. Like they were called “The Runaways”, and their big hit “Cherry Bomb” was literally “fuck you mom & dad, time to run off to party and lose my virginity with everyone”
(Also he took them under his supervision and fucked them)
And that was just straight up a thing, kind of a big thing, there had been plenty of (dirtbag-assembled tbf) girl groups in Motown but an all-female rock band had never really taken off until the “unsupervised eighth grade rocker girls you can fuck” band
(taking the context a bit further back, remember that one of the earlier battles of the culture/counterculture wars were, depending on your view, riots or civil rights protests when The Man tried to keep the Sunset Strip nightclubs from being a late-night teenage scene)
The term was lifted from anthropology where it meant a system where individuals freely chose their own partners, contrasted with “closed marriage” where partnering was determined by broader social structures, and only a small part of the book addressed nonmonogamy, but that’s the association that stuck.
(The term “free love” went through the same progression in the 19th century)
And thinking about 70s stuff on the poly spectrum – “swingers”, as an identity for full-swap couples (not that F/F was unwelcome, but M/M def. was); the “key party” as event (a couples’ cocktail party mixer where at the end women would blindly draw from a bowl of the men’s car keys and go home with the corresponding man)
Like, that's… that’s where the 70s were at right there. Totally willing to accept nonmonogamy, totally assuming patriarchal marriage anyway.
Or maybe I’m looking at it backwards, and sleeping around was such the expected condition of unmarried singlehood it was just assumed, facilitated by singles bars, singles cruises, singles resorts…
So I suppose maybe the novelty is our having meaningful primary relationships that aren’t marriages, or on the marriage track.
Of course, the “divorce crisis” of the 70s was people deciding that the fact they once had a meaningful primary relationship with someone was not a good reason to be married to them, so fair enough.
(Of course, a lot of those people had been teenagers in the 50s, in the age of “going steady”, class rings and fraternity pins and letterman jackets, when the adults fretted this early sexual-romantic exclusivity would leave them socially stunted, and that they should play the field and go to “petting parties” like in the good old days of the 20s, so fair enough.)
This is at least one notch better than the usual “everything in culture is actually about Trump and his eeevil” hogwash.
(“Hogwash” means “shit”. You know, what hogs roll about in, as if to bathe?)
More than that tho, it moves me to put on my kontextgoggles and look at Stephen King in relation to his period of American culture.
King’s work always reflected on the culture around it, if only by the print era pulp-prolific tactic of filling pages by shoehorning every stray thought you have into whatever you’re writing at the time (Colin @spacetwinks reports his latter-day works are full of transparent, charmingly Maine-centric axe-grinding).
But his “golden age”, say, Carrie to Needful Things, was in the 70s-80s period that, if my cyclical understanding of history holds (it does) resembled the one we’re currently going through, so it’s particularly worth considering now.
One significant thing – as the cities were emptying out, to the point of memory-holing that the US had been a predominantly urban country since the 1930s, King’s work focused on rural small town life, often about outsiders moving into said. Pet Sematary, for example, it’s very significant that the narrator moved out to the sticks – long driveway off a truck route, charming local historic ruins, undeveloped enough to still show traces of precolonial life – to raise a family.
(A thing to do would be to contrast King’s use of of rural New England with Hawthorne and Lovecraft’s, but tbh I don’t know them that well)
Similarly, I occasionally hear guffaws that Cujo has a whole subplot about cereal branding, but it just serves to remind that Vic is a yuppie who moved out of NYC to protect his young family only to confront the fact that the countryside is actually uncivilized and bestial too. There is some woo “reincarnated spirit of evil” in there, but all the fundamental threats to his family – unreliable transportation and sparse services, unmanaged wildlife, irresponsible white trash neighbors – are real rural dangers.
There’s a lot of stuff about gender relations and changing expectations of marriage. In Sematary, the narrator’s wife grows alienated, channeling her attentions away to others; before Gage he revives her cat. For fear of abandonment he goes further and further to hold on to a family – embittered wife, bad seed child, evil cat – the last generation’s men might have abandoned themselves. In Cujo, there’s lingering issues with recent infidelity.
(You laugh about how 50s-80s High Literature was so obsessed with adultery, but if not “orienting your life to duty, purpose, order vs. orienting it to animal sensation and personal satisfaction”, I dunno what period art should’ve been concerned with.)
The Shining is very much about a guy born into the old dispensation – that men create and carouse and mount their genius to chase their passion while women tend the home fires – dealing with new expectations that he be an emotional provider to his wife and child, that he act as a supporting character in their life-plots rather than the reverse.
What else? It, and more grounded companion piece The Body (known in adaptation as Stand by Me) honestly strike me most as a exploration of the Boomer-era “generation gap”, how the culture of the previous generation may have brought about the “broad middle class” ‘50s but was unsuited to address the problems encountered there.
“To beat this evil clown, we’ve gotta gangbang our chick friend” seems weird as hell, but “to progress, we’ve got to create a New Adulthood that doesn’t define itself against childhood but instead adds sex” is pretty much the Boomer story.
(Also, people who live in group houses shouldn’t throw stones.)
Carrie is very much about the ‘70s reintegration of a long-isolated religious fundamentalism to a mainstream that had only grown more secularized and libertine (appreciably more so than in the “family values”, “bourgeois bohemian” 80s-90s, which was the synthesis of this opposition) since. Particularly, it layers the discrepancy in mores – showing your dirtypillows vs. not, say – over an even deeper gap in worldviews, between bucket-of-blood materialism and a numinous, supernatural world.
And that’s just the stuff I dignify as serious. Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, and I guess The Stand all focus on psychic/telekinetic kids, which is a reminder that the 70s were full of woo, ESP was a serious topic, and the idea of the “gifted child” started out a lot closer to today’s “indigo child”.
(I like to think that Bill Murray’s researcher in the stylistically thrownback The Royal Tenenbaums was a callback to Venkman’s “negative reinforcement” introduction from Ghostbusters, like “back in the day we went looking for psychics but instead we just discovered autism")
Anonymous asked: why are some people so obsessed with fashion magazines? all i see are endless ad campaigns and only a few articles. it doesn't make sense.
Let’s say a 15 year old boy lives in a house with his dad and his six older brothers. He lives in a town where if you do not fit the stereotypes assigned to your gender, you are ridiculed for them. He tells his dad and his brothers that he’s going to off to football practice but in reality, he’s sneaking off to the store to pick up the latest issue of Vogue. He reads his Vogue under his covers every night with a flash light because he hopes that one day, he can achieve his long life goal of becoming a Fashion Designer.
Let’s say a girl is getting bullied at school because she has a strange teeth and her dentist won’t allow her braces. She buys a fashion magazine and she takes one look at these beautiful models with strange facial features. She idolizes models like Lindsey Wixson and Georgia May Jagger because they share the same gap-tooth teeth as her. She feels beautiful and less lonely in the world because she knows that you can be beautiful even if you have imperfections on your face. This magazine with her favourite model on it gives her hope, that one day, maybe she can be one of these beautiful women on the front cover of her magazine.
Let’s say a 17 year old gay boy buys as many fashion magazines as he can so he can collect every editorial of his favourite models. He is an aspiring fashion journalist and articles written by his favourite fashion writers inspire him. He is bullied constantly for his sexuality and he is always getting beaten up and verbally abused just for being gay whenever he steps outside of the house. He finds comfort in fashion because it makes him feel a little less alone in the world. He hopes one day he could be the new face of Prada, or maybe he could be an award-winning fashion journalist. He dreams of surrounding himself with people just like him who won’t relentlessly torment him based on the way he walks or his sexual orientation. Fashion makes this boy feel like he isn’t all alone in this world. And this boy is me.
Don’t you see? Fashion magazines aren’t just about glossy pages filled with clothes and campaigns etc…These magazines are a shining beacon of hope for people who sometimes may feel alone in this world. Fashion is such a huge community. Fashion feels like home to some people. Sometimes these magazines are all the hope we have left in this lonely world, and these magazines inspire us to work harder each day in order to feel accepted finally.
THAT is why fashion magazines are so important.
What he said.
Remember Bratz? The dolls, kinda like Barbie, except, you know, trashy. “My Little Hoochie Mama” and all that.
Back in college for a gag gift party I got someone a Bratz coloring book, except they left it behind and I ended up keeping it. And then in LA I ended up writing manuals for a few Bratz games, so to get the brand voice right I turned back to that coloring book, and other official Bratz media.
And I was stunned to realize how fundamentally Correct the official Bratz “message” was. I’d put it in one sentence as, “no matter what you’re like or what you’re into, a bit of effort towards style can put that across to people as the reason they should look to you as an interesting person”.
Like, there really wasn’t any more sexiness or boy-craziness to it than Barbie, hardly any at all honestly. (There’s more prominent makeup, I’ll spot you that.) So I thought further on what the distinction was, and I realized that Bratz, both as characters in the auxiliary media and as products packaged with coordinated outfits, are defined by a particular style - goth, or rocker, or raver, or whatever.
Whereas with Barbie, some of the dolls are oriented to a look, or to gimmicks like colorable hair, but a lot of the packages are a role - looking at the webshop I immediately see singer, soccer player, ice skater, chef, entrepreneur, ballerina…
And that’s really the distinction. If you bother to read the official backstories the Bratz have jobs, but that’s not how they distinguish themselves as people. Rather, the identity they present to the world is based on their personal taste and interests. Whereas Barbies define themselves by what they do for a living, and more specifically given how these tend to be “star” or “leadership” type careers, their position in life.
Which is to say, while Barbie is bougie, Bratz are working class.
Which is how it came to be decided that they were contemptible sluts.
Caught an episode of Tanked at the bar last night. That thing where all the blues and oranges are supersaturated and everything else is desaturated bugged me at first, but it started to grow on me. [edit: I think the bar’s flatscreen just had its settings fucked]
All the middlebrow documentary channels in the 30s-50s range have turned into channels about the working class experience. But interestingly, working class in a cultural and not economic sense - a lot of these people seem to have higher-than-average incomes, actually, it’s just that they’ve got ribald, down-home personalities and biker beards instead of college degrees.
Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch might count as working class in a Marxian sense, I didn’t watch and I don’t know if any of the operators owned their trucks or boats - but when you get down to it a lot of these shows are about owners of small businesses (businesses that seem to require a reasonable bit of capital, actually), their office and sales workers, frequently family (the “Duck” doesn’t negate the “Dynasty”) and experienced artisan tradesmen. They mostly avoid coming off as white collar by the literalist expedient of wearing t-shirts.
It’s telling that there’s a subgenre of this stuff (Storage Wars, Pawn Stars, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Lizard Lick Towing) that valorizes people whose jobs are at the expense of - whose jobs, while they may be private sector are in a real sense to salvage from and discipline - the actually poor and marginal.
It’s super-telling that the one eviction-themed show is called “World’s Worst Tenants”, and it’s about people who discipline those who irritate small propertyholders. And not, say, lower-middle class types in foreclosure. That one would probably hit too close to home.
But hey, if you ever did create a show with a focused appeal to the truly poor, who would you sell ads to?
Emergency Broadcast Network came out with this in 1993, over 10 years before Youtube was founded. They’re the forebearers of Youtube poop. Still holds up too.
this was made 22 YEARS AGO.
holy shit
oldtube poop
this has the structure and most of the standard joke formats of a modern 2015 youtube poop i’m completely blown away
I consider EBN one of the great influences in my life and have been fortunate to know a couple of it’s members Joshua (a tiny bit) and Greg (a lot.) Joshua is a brilliant video editor and Greg frikkin wrote frikkin After Effects (the greatest post production software of all time, imo.)
Really good YouTube Poop is hard to make. Making videos like EBN did in the early to mid-90′s was nearly impossible. This is because the tools for transforming video digitally were primitive, the machines costly (an Avid or Media 100 NLE cost upwards of $50,000 to build and thousands more to maintain) and hard to access (the only people who owned them were broadcasters, post production studios, and the like.) The source media itself had shitloads of copyright on it which has no practical meaning now but meant quite a bit way back when.
The 1990s were an age of tightly controlled analog mass media outlets and in it, EBN’s work was subversive for both its politics and its disregard of intellectual property rights. EBN wasn’t commercially viable (the legal sampling war had just begun) and it wasn’t pop (even though it was danceable in that 90′s techno rave sort of way) which meant that their work never traveled far beyond its most immediate social networks of media, art, and technology. EBN was signed to the indie TVT Records imprint but they considered themselves, primarily, live-remix performance artists who occasionally “recorded” albums (TVT distributed licensed versions of EBN’s work on CDs, VHS tapes, and 3.5″ floppies.) This combination of factors made it nearly impossible to experience the bulk of their work.
So while it’s unfortunate that more YTP creators aren’t conscious of their Emergency Broadcast Network ancestry, considering the time and circumstance under which EBN existed, it’s totally understandable and it’s great that people have even discovered it at all.
This is all amazing but of great personal importance: I loved Zoo TV–The Television Program and whenever I bring it up no one ever knows what I’m talking about. To the point where I was starting to get convinced I made it up / hallucinated it. I had no idea it was an EBN project! This is very exciting and validating for me.
What the fuck one of the guys from EBN made after effects???
