#then today he said every corporation is part of the capitalist machine so we can never make a Truly good choice

[mihotose]

unfortunately i can never truly get on with my mother's husband due to a terrible disease called Leftist Infighting

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

Garbage’s Shirley Manson: “Being human is to be messy. If you think you’re above all that you’re in deep, deep trouble”

As Garbage unveil their first new album in five years, No Gods No Masters, Shirley Manson talks getting political, cancel culture, and why speaking up is more important than ever…

A metaphorical low for Shirley Manson involved a poster, a car journey and getting dumped. A lawyer for Garbage​’s label Interscope records called and told her she was dropped.

“I was about 40 years old at the time. My mother was dying, I was abjectly miserable, my career was on the skids,” she remembers, convincing herself at the time, ​“You will never again recover, you’re a woman over 40, you’re screwed.”

On the journey home alone after this call, she drove down Los Feliz Boulevard, five minutes from her house, and looked to her right. There in front of her was a shop-sized display poster of Garbage being sold at a yard sale for a few dollars. ​“I looked at myself being sold on the street, literally. And I burst into tears and I slumped down in my car because I felt like everyone could see me. I felt deep, deep shame, which is not an emotion I experience often, for my sins.”

Shirley explains today from her LA home that shortly after that experience she had a revelation: ​“It doesn’t matter if you never get signed to a record label again. It doesn’t matter if you never perform again in public, you can still be a singer, you can still be a creator, you can still be an artist.” Since that moment, her career – and her relationship to it – has been a healthy one. Still, the lyrics she wrote based off this pivotal experience were words she was eager to use in a song for 12 years. Nothing quite felt right�� until now. They appear on a heavier highlight of Garbage’s new record, The Creeps (��I was so upset, I saw them selling me out / Right there on Los Feliz Boulevard’). ​“That song is about not listening to my feelings – that narrative I feed myself is often just as negative and inaccurate as a stranger telling me what to think.”

The capitalistic misogyny of the music industry and the world at large is just one of the weighty topics Garbage sink their teeth into on No Gods No Masters. Tinged with a gothic darkness, it’s a dystopian, slow-paced and angular album, and one that feels timely for all its ​’80s sonic influences. It stands out from their other releases for covering racism and police brutality and wealth disparity. A reoccurring image of white men as undeserving and cruel gods looms large. These themes that have been relevant for decades – if not centuries, millennia – but listen to it and you can’t ignore the fact it speaks to the last couple of years.

Speaking of the pandemic, Shirley is feeling grateful and thoughtful for her own circumstances. As a musician she’s been focused on the injustice in the lack of support for artists on both sides of the Atlantic (“You’re literally considered a nothing as a musician”). In the UK, those involved in the live music industry were encouraged by the Conservative government to retrain. But they’re fortunate, thinks Shirley, if only compared to America, where government furlough money didn’t help those whose jobs were in jeopardy or defunct.

“I’m concerned about all the young musicians who have not received any support from their government, and have been left to rot,” she says. ​“I know a lot of struggling musicians who literally can barely feed themselves. We’ve got a terrible homeless situation here in LA, and I have people living in tents two steps away from my house. And that is a very healthy reminder of my good fortune and my privilege.”

Opening up about adversity faced by musicians – especially female musicians – within the industry is something Shirley has done for years. The commentary around Garbage’s treatment by labels or ageism inadvertently leveraged against her has followed the band through almost every step of their career. It’s a significant part of the Garbage story.

“I think a lot of artists are fearful of speaking the truth,” she says when this is put to her. ​“I just think that the most powerful version of oneself is the most authentic version. That to me is when you have no secrets, you’re not cowed, you’re not scared, because the truth is out. I think people are very frightened that people discover things about them. And that truly does make you vulnerable. When you’re lying and deceiving, you’re constantly spending energy trying to hide your life. And I just don’t have time for that.”

No Gods No Masters is the first major label release from Garbage for years, and unusually – ironically, almost – it’s their most political. Their last two albums – 2012’s Not Your Kind Of People and 2016’s Strange Little Birds – were released independently through Garbage’s own label Stunvolume, which they set up to be free, of ​“greedy corporate interest”, as the band put it in a Facebook post at the time. The decision to return to a label was because they struggled to maintain their footing in the industry without it: ​“We couldn’t really get our records distributed. We couldn’t get on radio; nobody would take our calls. We simply could not compete. We realised that if we didn’t make this leap at this particular moment in time, we would drown entirely.” But returning to the corporate fold explicitly meant not giving up creative freedom. One of the key understandings was Garbage having total control over whatever they did.

But Shirley wasn’t overly concerned about the threat of control anyway.

“If you’re lucky enough to stick around long enough, the economics of [our] sort of discography allow you a certain kind of autonomy,” she says.

So there was no pressure from people telling you not to make a political record, for example?

“I think as you get older, you’re able to parse pressures more effectively. You’re able to set boundaries. You can hold that [boundary] and not fret that somehow you’re going to be punished for that. Because that’s the deal: if you have integrity and you don’t compromise, you will be punished for it. That’s how it works. As you get older, you stop caring so much about that threat and about that reality.”

Back in 2018, Shirley experienced another turning point. She was asked to speak alongside trans black activist Ashlee Marie Preston and sex educator Ericka Hart at an intersectional feminism event and was, essentially, educated herself.

“Both these women are phenomenal powerhouses and they have great minds, agile minds, and they really took me to school. And they were very gentle with me, I have to say, but I was mortified at my ignorance, regarding systemic racism and a whole gamut of things. I determined then I had to educate myself about the black experience that I knew nothing about.”

In these situations, it is often the case that white people get defensive and shut down. ​“I too had a flare up of defensiveness, but I knew deep down, you don’t feel your ears burning for no reason.” Her education involved reading Patrisse Cullors and Asha Bandele’s When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir and James Baldwin, Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. It was watching The 13th, the documentary by Ava DuVernay. It was learning about the murder of Trayvon Martin and the murders of other black people at white hands, the hands of police.

This drive to self-educate didn’t fizzle out after a brief spell. ​“I’ve spent 54 years, or 50 years, being an ignorant, white privileged woman in the world. And I’ve got a lot to learn, and I look forward to learning more,” Shirley says. Feelings of sadness and shame were mixed with an understanding that she was being compliant in ignoring black suffering, as she was trained and expected to. ​“We’re conditioned to not look, because once you start looking, you can’t turn away, unless you’re a monster or a devil.”

The year 2018 was also when the band started writing for the album, though Shirley says there was no intention for this to be a political record. ​“Nothing’s premeditated, and nothing is planned,” she reveals of when the band get together to write an album. It’s a process of them coming together and simply writing in the moment, with Shirley responding to the music the rest of the band provide. It just happened that it coincided with this reckoning in her personal life: ​“I just allowed who I was in my private life to come out into the record, all the preoccupations at that time, dripped out onto this record, simply because I didn’t put up a barrier.”

Most of the writing happened in Palm Springs at Garbage guitarist Steve Marker’s in-laws’ house. Even for a band as legendary as Garbage, there are financial considerations (“It was free accommodation,” Shirley laughs). ​“Bands now have to be really careful about their economics. That’s why there’s a plethora of solo artists and fewer and fewer bands, because they are hard to sustain. They’re these weird little microcosms that nobody wants to spend money on. We had a limited budget and we were like, ​‘Okay, how are we going to pull this off?’”

They honed in on their long-time influences of Roxy Music, Gary Numan, Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Cure and Talking Heads to create an ​’80s feel. The fact that Butch Vig received a delivery of a brand new drum machine the day they started writing set the pace of the record, quite literally. ​“He didn’t know how to work it,” she remembers. ​“The fact the drum tracks sound rudimentary are just because he was feeling out how to work this machine.”

From its opening track, The Men Who Rule The World, it’s evident this is a record about men who set up and maintain the capitalistic structures that are destroying the planet and lives for the vast majority in work. Mention the fact that nearly 500 people became billionaires during the pandemic and Shirley replies: ​“These billionaires are more powerful than any government in the world. How is that even legal? I said earlier about people living outside my house in tents: it’s heartbreaking, too painful, too obscene.”

To write songs like Waiting For God, a self-explanatory track about racism if you listen to the lyrics, opens Garbage up to getting it wrong. This is a small price to pay for speaking on these topics, Shirley says. ​“If that requires that I be a little discomforted, so be it. If that requires somebody pointing a finger at me and laughing at me or criticising me, so be it. I’m middle-aged, and I’m starting to see the end of my lifespan. And I don’t want to leave this world thinking that I didn’t lift a finger to try and make things better for generations to follow. I want to know that I at least tried to speak up in defence of someone else. As white people, we all have to just get over ourselves a little and be willing to be uncomfortable.”

And why is a fear of being cancelled by people for getting it wrong more important than having a go at making the right statement?

“Cancel culture is such a tool of bullying and again, a tool of shutting you down and shutting you up,” replies Shirley. ​“Every human being, every artist, every icon has made mistakes. You’re not going to find a perfect person in the world ever. And I think it’s so immature and silly to think that you will. And my God, how hard are you being on yourself, if that’s how hard you’re being on other people?

“Being human is to be messy,” she continues. ​“And if you think you’re above all that you’re in deep, deep trouble.”

It’s inevitable that some listeners will think this album has been written in response to the last couple of years, rather than envisioned three or more years ago. While the members of Garbage are pleased they’ve made a record that feels prescient, it’s both an ancient and timeless album: these are the oldest issues known to humankind. But in true Shirley Manson style, her feelings and opinions are disclosed to us listeners as evidence of where she was and where she is.

“I’m sort of grateful for the record,” says Shirley. ​“We have a public testimony of where we stand in this world as people currently. What we’re in disagreement with, what appalls us, and the hope that we have for the future.”

[theoriesontheory]

Pause: Basquiat and 100 gecs, name a more iconic duo I’ll wait.

In the process of researching a topic, sometimes a random thought will come into my head. Often, they are flights of fancy, a random rabbit hole that will distract from my work. Alongside this though, they occasionally add some extra context or a new way of understanding that I keep in the back of my mind while I work. This is one such flight of fancy. 

Jean Michael Basquiat is an African American artist who rose to popularity at the forefront of the neo-expressionism movement. 100 gecs are a music duo who rose to popularity at the forefront of the hyperpop movement. 

Image 1: Basquiat painting In Switzerland, 1983

Image 2: 100 gecs on stage in Wisconsin, 2020

Neo-expressionism was an art movement that arose at the start of the 20th century, depicting real and recognisable subjects (like heads and bodies) ways that rejected traditional standards of composition and design, were brittle in emotional tone – reflecting the world in which they were created, and an inherent tension between fun playful presentation of objects with a sense of inner disturbance, tension, ambiguity and alienation. (Britannica, 2019) 

Hyperpop is a genre that arose in the early parts of the 21st century, using real and recognisable forms (pop hooks, 808 drums, love songs) in ways that reject the traditional standards of composition and production, are extreme in emotional tone – reflecting the world in which they were created, and an inherent tension between fun playful presentation of lyrics with a sense of disturbance, tension, ambiguity and alienation. Or at least I think it is. Listening to the music I hear so many things I recognise and am familiar with like samples from well-known and niche TV shows and video games. I also hear songs that I understand and resonate with, more so than in other genres. I hear songs about love, loss, victory, rock bottom, drugs, sobriety, partying, crying, friends and isolation. I hear something that I can resonate with. Obviously while the genre is rooted in pop the production and construction of the songs is far from any ‘normal’ pop I have come across. A reviewer for pitchfork described the music as genre blending, a stacking of genres and sounds at their peak and extreme in it relatability, nostalgia and hookiness. (Patel, 2020). The nature of this taking elements from elsewhere at their peak results in a sound that in some way is always peaking, even in the quiet moments the auto tune or 808s are usually there or there is an unnaturally fast rhythm in some percussion which is reflective of the world we live in now. Content is getting shorter, tik tok and Facebook memes are the primary way we not only get entertainment but learn about more longform entertainment and so every second of a hyperpop track can in theory be in that small clip because it’s all so full of energy. The inherent tension is the most interesting part for me, while the production and musicality and performance and general feeling of the songs is often a party at the end of the world, the lyrics and stories being told are often at the extremes of emotion, a place I think all can acknowledge is not a healthy place to be all the time. While the songs feel light and fun and funny some of the lyrics are so infused with passion or anger or sadness that the two can almost exist in a harmony, one extreme balancing and highlighting the other. 

Looking specifically at Basquiat I learned that he took much inspiration from the things he was fascinated with as a child, comic books, textbooks, walking around museums, all of which he carried with him mentally and physically to use as reference for his work. In one video of the artist his work was describes as a cutting up and remixing of materials, informed by his current circumstance. (Saggese, 2019)

100 gecs described themselves in an interview as archivist fans, (Patel, 2020) fans who take all the pop culture and references that they like and cut them up and put them in their music. From the genre shift to hardcore at the end of ‘Money Machine’ to the use of a guitar riff from another popular tik tok song (Scotty Doesn’t Know – Lustara) the sounds and inspirations heard in a single 100 gecs track tells a story about the artists and their experiences. 

In closing this thought experiment, seeing hyperpop as the neo-expressionism of the 2020s, I can’t help but look at what happened to neo-expressionism after its rise in popularity. I found a newspaper article from 1986 declaring the death of neo-expressionism. Essentially what it came down to was an oversaturation of the market and many practitioners were seen to be trying to cash in on the popular media of the day. (Brenson, 1986) I think that the same worries could be held about hyperpop today. Now more than ever we see major labels and corporations trying to cash in on the hot sound of the moment and as a result many young producers are trying to make music to get on the right playlist and get signed. At the same time there are producers who are just making the music they like and trying to find communities of people who like what they do. Basquiat once said “I don’t think about art when I’m working I try to think about life.” (Saggese, 2019) and Laura from 100 gecs said “What we try to do is be honest, give ourselves to the thing that we're doing and not feel like we have a persona as much as just being ourselves.” (Moen, 2020) 

While the same dangers of commercialisation and oversaturation exist, I choose to remain hopeful. That while in the current, late-stage capitalist, internet age, commercialisation is unavoidable, but that doesn’t discredit the art that is being made because it is a honest reflection of the artist’s lives. 

References:

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2019, November 7). Neo-Expressionism. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/Neo-Expressionism

Moen, M. (2020, June 24). Skrillex Interviews 100 gecs About the Future of Music. Paper. https://www.papermag.com/100-gecs-skrillex-pride-2646244919.html?rebelltitem=140#rebelltitem140

Patel, P. (Interviewer). (2020, November). Pitchfork Review: 100 Gecs and the Mystery of Hyperpop. [Audio Podcast]. Get Wired. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1UnB4gNxTsInfjur0iVXEP?si=NXGfknGtTqSId4z-XhKNeg&dl_branch=1

Saggese, J., M. [TED-Ed]. (2019, March 1). The Chaotic Brilliance of artist Jean-Michael Basquiat – Jordana Moore Saggese. [video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX02QQXfb_o

Images:

Image 1: Basquiat in Switzerland, 1983  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-jean-michel-basquiat-masterpieces-close-online-exhibit-180975416/

Image 2: 100 gecs on stage in Wisconsin, 2020 https://www.emmiemusic.com/concerts-2/100-gecs-the-sett

[deranged-ink]

Dear editor in chief.

Yesterday I was reading a magazine -your magazine- while waiting for my coffee. I´ll admit that I was so into it that, to my embarrassment, I failed to notice the girl approaching until she left the coffee with some croissants on my table. That would be a big mistake if I were reading on the company time.

I was too involved in a single line of your last editorial:

What is your hobby? A simple and dull question, but not to my eyes. I can't help but wonder about what kind of person is asking. Is it someone intelligent? Someone with a really deep understanding of the human nature or just the typical dumb brick monkey behind a typewriter. I can assure you that one honest to god smile cameforth to your inquiry, simply because it is one of those easy-to-answer questions using a triviality, difficult to answer with The Truth.

I suppose that if you force me to answer with nothing but said Truth I would have to admit, with the proper amount of blush on my cheeks, that I like to look at the people, please take note that i am not a stalker, it's just that in order to be good at my job I have to describe myself as a rather avid observer.

I like to look at people, especially on my job. You have to understand, sitting on an uncomfortable chair for countless hours, drinking cheap coffe and killing cigars in some dirty ashtray, just waiting for the phone to ring to do my job... I would have turned crazy long, long ago if I wouldn't found a way to kill some time.

But from my hobby something really good came up.

I learned, no. I found something fascinating while observing these biological machines. Well first, I´ll confess, everything started with a game: Guess what it will do now?

From that game I discovered that all this elaborated, commercialized and consumed idea of freedom is -for most of these poor bastards- fundamentally, a lie . A lie that may or may not be true, that's the beauty of the whole subject. A liar's truth.

Before you burn your brains trying to imagine something like that, let me add something, whatever you imagine, it will be right.

If you think about it, it's a beautiful "oxymoron". Freedom is a useful farse (A dream for the most) where you must be aware of what you do and stop doing. You must fully understand each of your actions from its very root. Thats the really hard part.

Do not get me wrong, I have always said that true freedom is real, a primordial part of what reality is. The problem lies in the excuses that the lower minds uses to escape from the weight of freedom.

They fall for the supposed "unmeasurable plots" of some great powers and some others imaginary enemies (that for some not-even-god-knows reason will try to brainwash or enslave them).

They gave these plotters this divine attribute of being untouchable. And closing their eyes, they turned themselves into beings without a real opinion, without control over their lives. That's nothing short of stupidity. Themselves wrote the fairytale that they now fear, and did it in order of escaping the responsibility of knowing/taking control of their lives.

Themselves choose their imaginary chains and in the same thought, choose the more imaginary saviour that will come to brake them! Just look at those pocket warriors of the social networks, reading only what supports their ideals and burning the rest!

-Oh, traditional book burning! The irony!-

Thats how they define themselves acording their position on said system: left, right, pro-life, pro-choice, feminist, traditional, pro-system, anti-system, pious, atheist.

But what they call "the system" is just a playing field. Not some godwritten rules that will never change.

And there they meet failure without being able to realize that they act as the said system expects them to act. All the pieces on the board have a use. Even when trying to escape, when trying to think and act outside of the box, they only succeed -in a beautiful way if you ask me- to prove that they are wrong.

They do not realize that the system is not a box, but actually a box of many, each box is full of boxes and the fact that you can "get out" of the box only confirms this.

You can -with ease- point out all the poor bastards who buy a t-shirt with the face of Che Guevara (or someother communist symbol). Ironically, they are being part of a capitalist market with them as their target. The same can be said of those really patriotic friends, they really love America and they also really love their flag to be made in china. Sweet irony.

This is the same for freedom. To be free, you must be aware of what you are, truly aware, also accept what you can and can not do and that each of your actions has an effect on the great cosmic pool that is this life, each action is a small or a large stone that falls on water. You will imagine that with so many rocks that big pool is not calm at all. And thats life my friend, actions that modify our actions in one way or another. The real freedom lies in understanding this, accepting it and continuing to live.

Playing "Guess what it will do now?" I had an eureka moment some years ago. From an open window I was looking at the people on the street with my telescope, when I learned something that saddens me: "People" sold their freedom for a manual.

Life is not easy and that´s why most decide to live thinking it is. I honestly ignore the reason behind such a stupid decision. "People" gave away their freedom in exchange of beliefs, just to not question. Just to take the world as it was presented, without thinking, without asking. Only assimilating it and calling it true.

Name your manual however you want... Luck, Destiny, God, the almighty Horoscope, Reptilians or Super corporations that plan to dominate the world. It is in their hands that our world and our lives rest and not on us.

I bet that sounds better than the truth.

Everyone is free to believe in whatever they want, even when those beliefs take away their freedom.

Especially when they take away their freedom

The "manual" depends on many things, such as their upbringing, the books they had read, the books they didn't, their general education, but above all these things, of something greater, something with more force than those preconceived ideas of a man's life being the direct and ultimate result of those first twenty years of his life.

-Those who affirm that are the "intellectuals" who seek to justify mediocrity by blaming society.-

I discovered a truth, a sad truth, that goes beyond. Are you ready?  Our life depends on ourselves

-Surprising, right?-.

It depends on our decisions, our actions and how much we want to be ourselves. How much do we want to be free.

For the rest the world you have that manual that handles their lives or that simply points to the people or entities that will do it. Manuals that dictate the routine of each of them, from how, when and where they go to work, to what they stop to eat and why. What they believe in, how they think, how they feel.

So many "children" blame the manual and I can only feel sorry for them.

I can only look at them straight in the eye and say: Do not blame the manual, blame yourselves for accepting it. Blame your weakness for letting yourself be destroyed to that point.

To the point of acting... In automatic, each and every one of "them" lives like this, in automatic.

I say "them" because I do not know if "you", whoever reads these words, also do it. And no, do not let the fact that you are a reader of newspapers, books and intellectual publications make you think that you are beyond this fundamental flaw of the human being. Maybe you are also, a zombie, a computer that acts according to a list of things to do. That is why I refer to them as "It" or "them", maybe you are, or not, so I consider that these words can be one of two uses for you;

1: A call to wake up.

2: A lesson in what you should never do to yourself.

"They" are predictable, "they" are stupid. A person is a completely different topic, the problem is that there aren't many individuals left, individuals are now an endangered specie. But there are many "people". There were many individuals who decided to stop being individuals to become people.

Good people. Bad people. That doesn't matter. Cuz people is predictable. And it's something that in my line of work I've learned to do, it's a fundamental part of it.

For example; Look at this guy, for the last six days I've seen he it come and go, always in the same old beige suit and dull shoes, with its eyes on the ground, dragging its feet every morning. That's when I guess it goes to work. But not so surprisingly, it walks with the same vigor when it goes back in the afternoon. Two days ago was the day of "bring your son to work" but it didn't bring anyone. I got curious so during one impromptu walk to the donut shop I passed by it and could not help noticing that it doesn't have a single ring in its hand, nor a scar, much less any characteristic feature or mark added by life experiences. It was programmed that way, throughout his life it decided to accept what the rest thought of it, from its parents to its classmates, it let each and every one of their opinions form what it is today, unfortunately those opinions were everything but positive.

If forced to guess I would said that when It was a He, was one of those people with an artistic mind, a characteristic completely undervalued by his parents, repudiated by his peers and misinterpreted by his teachers who were unable to see beyond their own mediocrity.

If I have to bet: I would say that he did not grow up in the city, he was born and raised in a dying small town, one of those that somehow still linger in the 21th century. His parents decided that the life of an artist was not for him, that he deserved better, that he had to be someone "normal". He decided to listen to them. And being a person of unique thinking is not difficult to guess that he ended up in an office job that hates, earning a pittance to make his boss buy a new car every year. Thats how He became It.

But it's not the boss's fault, it's just that It is not good at what It does, it's almost like wanting to screw a chair using a rock. The wrong tool for the task. That is why this could be the best thing that ever happened to It, it may be the wake up call that leads It to recover its life. To become a He.

We can also see the perfect opposite; with a badly rolled joint in the mouth, practically finishing learning to smoke without coughing or looking like a complete idiot: A skinny boy in a leather jacket that barely fits him, too tight jeans, expensive but too big shoes, hair full of hairspray and tinted in three shades of pink that I do not have the slightest intention or desire to learn how to differentiate.

I always see him in the same place, the alley that is right beside the donuts shop, pretending to be the most badass punk of the block for hours. Actually, that doesn't seem to be the place he choose to spend every morning, I think that it's the place that was chosen for him.

He is never alone, always accompanied by others who dress just like him, the same spiky hair but of different colors. They skip school to spend their mornings laughing at the people passing by, provoking them, intimidating them, smoking, but until now they have never said anything to the police.

- Every time a cop walked in front of them they just kept quiet hiding their eyes in their expensive last generation smartphones. They even treat the "autority" with the utmost respect! It's funny but sad.-

This is fashion. Just a trend, fighting against the system, to rebel against their parents, against society, to paint walls with messages of anarchy and rebellion. With no actual desire to do so.

Just playing to be free without accepting consequences or duties, to be free to do what you want while keep on sucking from the old tits of your mother, a whole case for Freud to write two more books. Want me to guess? He never felt hungry. He must come from a boring and average middle-high class family. His parents gave him everything he ever wanted, but never a proper slap, must be the only child or at least the youngest of the siblings. And the only reason he plays the whole punk behavior is that he is bored

That's why he came up with this whole idea of rebelling against the system or rather, copied it, like his friends, without noticing the most comical aspect of all this, wanting to be different they all became the same. Acting the same, acting from a manual.

I bet that He will run, shout, beg to the police as soon as he sees the red rush. If he is smart, he will realize that he is wrong, that the system is not the enemy, is not the monster that makes this world the shit hole it is. The actual monster is the man with the rifle.

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Sleep Tight For Me...I’m Gone

Lately I’ve been writing these Better Days Are A Toenail Away™️ posts in Microsoft Word, selecting all and changing the font to Garamond, which is so readable and beautiful, and posting the Word docs, paragraphs by paragraph, inside these Tumblr drafts. It makes things look nice, to my old fashioned sensibilities, but fixing errors is a time-consuming and needlessly convoluted four-step process.

First, I have to copy, then delete the paragraph containing the error. Then I open the doc. and paste the error-ridden paragraph back into Word. After I find and fix the error, I need to save it and copy and paste it back into the post. It's time-consuming because I’m not just copying a paragraph. As you can see from more recent post, what I copied looked more like a photograph of the paragraph, not the words themselves written in Tumblr’s default font Arial. For an example of this, see below. I like the way it looks like old newspaper clippings. I posted an article about how my fent dealer John Smith kept getting robbed, and had resorted to putting a machete in front of his front door as a way of preventing this, a lever of sorts, which is plainly visible in the video I posted,

So today I’ve given up on trying to make my posts look like books or zines, and have given into the Tumblr font, which is about as pretty as a horse with his snout shot off.

There are two much longer posts I’m working on right now, one about Nirvana and one about Soundgarden, respectively, and how both bands were very unlike their public perception, but those posts are taking a lot of work so I’m putting them on the backburner because today is some dumbass corporation’s day where it tries to synthesize mental health and profit and the end result is as baldly capitalist and clumsy as you would expect. 

I’m not gonna name the company, or repeat their stupid fucking slogan. As far as I can tell (which isn't very far), talking about my trauma has never made me feel better. And in fact it has sometimes made me feel worse, because in telling you what hurts and scares me, I’ve given a part of myself away that I can’t get back. When you’re like me, and you’ve lost everything multiple times, sometimes the only form of power you have is how you choose, or do not choose, to tell your story. And in a world where everybody wants to tell “their truth,” silence is power. 

You don’t get to know me, sorry. I’m not gonna hand you my life, both my bad and good experiences, and conclude: “Welp, that’s why I’m so fucked up. Case closed.” 

Honestly, I used to be a little confused, or miffed that my former partner (who is an amazing person btw, in every respect) almost never spoke about some of the traumatic things she’d experienced in her past. I took it as a sign that she either didn’t trust me, or she didn’t think I would be a sympathetic listener, or the mere fact of my gender precluded her from sharing because I couldn’t truly understand what it was she had gone through. It’s not like I ever asked her to talk about it, but I did say, once or twice, “hey if you ever wanna talk about that stuff, I’m around.” She never took me up on it, and I let it go. 

But as I watched her, and saw her life unfold, over the years we spent together, I began to realize I wasn’t exactly in any position to be telling her how to live her life or how to be mentally healthy. After all, she has found success in a number of avenues, both creative and occupational, and I’ve found neither. I'm not saying the fact that she didn't talk much about her trauma is the reason for her success. I'm saying that she's forged a better path through life than I have, and maybe I should take a cue from that.

She never told me what to do, per se. It was more like living by example. But because I’m pretty dense, and a severe addict, our time together actually sorta reminds me now of that Cornell lyric from his first record: She’s going to change the world. But she can’t change me.

I have certainly found that talking about how shitty my life is only makes me feel more shitty, not free, or unburdened, or better. If you wanna talk about your problems, and you find it helpful, more power to you. Just don’t wait for a corporation to tell you it’s okay to not be okay. 

When Chris Cornell died I was so shocked. Of all the grunge icons he seemed the most stable, and he'd survived the rise and fall of two major label rock bands. If anyone had survived the media machine that chewed up and spat out Staley, Cobain, and to a lesser extent Andrew Wood and Shannon Hoon, it was Cornell. He would be the last guy to support hashtag activism like #StarbucksMyLifeSucks. Chris Cornell actually loved to fuck with the best laid plans of corporate rats. Molson once had a few promotional concerts in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, called Molson Canadian Rocks Arctic, with both Hole and Soundgarden playing to a crowd of flown-in grunge fans and bemused locals. But the whole anti-corporate thing grunge was known for actually came through when Courtney Love told the crowd she “use[d] Molson Canadian to douche.” Lol. Here’s a photo of Love arriving in Tuktoyatuk.

Cornell told the same people “so we’re here because of some beer company? Labatt’s?” Both artists’ jabs are funny. Cornell’s was a bit more subtle, but that’s what Cornell was like. 

So today’s post is about Chris Cornell’s suicide, more specifically the media’s reaction to it. For whatever reason, when Cornell died, every single news outlet, from CNN to Fox to CBC, posted “Black Hole Sun,” as if it’s the only song he ever fucking wrote, or – and this is far worse – the only song he wrote that’s worth hearing. The problem with this is more than twofold or threefold. It's fucking hydraheaded. 

Not only is “Black Hole Sun” a mediocre piece of music, it’s a complete misrepresentation of Soundgarden’s sound. 

Now, I’m a huge fan of the A.V. Club series HateSong, in which public figures gleefully talk shit about the one song they hate more than any other song in the world. The Max Bemis (Say Anything) one where he talks about Nirvana’s “Rape Me” as a terrible rewrite of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is terrific, but comedian Anthony Jeselnik’s HateSong takes “Black Hole Sun” apart, and I love it. I think the best line is: I think the more I hear it, the worse it gets. AVC: After the song became a huge hit, Chris Cornell said that he’d written it in about 15 minutes. AJ: I totally believe that. I don’t believe that Soundgarden likes that song. Like, I remember Eminem once said that he knew his song “My Name Is” was going to be a huge hit because the first time he heard it he was annoyed. It’s something about an annoying song that just grabs onto people. But I don’t think that anyone likes “Black Hole Sun.” I’ve never heard of anyone who likes it. I don’t understand why it gets played so much. It’s become a summer jam, and it’s not a summer song at all. Jeselnik is right that Soundgarden didn’t think much of the song. Guitarist Kim Thayil wasn’t kidding when he disparagingly called it the “Dream On” of their live show. And Cornell himself, known for a meticulous approach to his songwriting, had admitted that with “Black Hole Sun”was “probably the closest to me just playing with words for words’ sake, of anything I’ve written. I guess it worked for a lot of people who heard it, but I have no idea how you'd begin to take that one literally.” I mean it’s obvious from the opening lines that Cornell is just playing with words and how they sound: in my eyes/indisposed/in disguises no one knows What songs would have been more appropriate for Cornell’s untimely death? Glad you asked! Cuz there’s like…fucking at least ten that would have been better. I’m not tryna be one of those “the deep album cuts are better maaaaaan,” but with Soundgarden, it happens to be true. With some bands, the single are their best work. With other bands, the singles are the hors d’oeuvres for the entrees. So what deep cuts would have celebrated Cornell’s death a bit better? Well, to begin with, Superunknown’s strange and stately closer “Like Suicide” would have worked, for obvious reasons.

“Tighter and Tighter,” a song that is actually about the moment of death and what it might feel like, is one of my all-time fav Soundgarden songs. Not only is it a creepy and prescient prediction of what Cornell’s death by hanging himself may have felt like, it’s opening line is a good description of the personification of death: Shadow face/Blowing smoke and talking wind

Another sample lyric: “A sucking holy wind will take me from this bed tonight/and bloody wits another hits me and I have to say goodbye/sleep tight for me, I’m gone/and I hope it’s  a sweet ride/here for me tonight/cuz I’m feel I’m going/feel I’m slowing down.” 

The morning after Cornell’s death hit the news my buddy and bandmate James told me that en route to work his phone, which was playing music randomly through his car speakers, landed on “Tighter and Tighter” and he had to pull over because he was tearing up. 

“Fell On Black Days” is another song about depression and mortality. Cornell had the following to say about the song: “Fell on Black Days” was like this ongoing fear I’ve had for years ... It's a feeling that everyone gets. You're happy with your life, everything’s going well, things are exciting—when all of a sudden you realize you’re unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared. There's no particular event you can pin the feeling down to, it's just that you realize one day that everything in your life is fucked! 

Now, if that’s not a cogent and even-tempered explanation of suicidal thoughts, what is? Why else would Cornell have admitted to being “really really scared” by his depression unless he knew what that depression could ultimately leasd to? Here’s some lyrics to “Fell on Black Days.” Dig the high literary use of “whomsoever” and “whatsoever.” Whatsoever I’ve feared has come to life Whatsoever I fought off became my life Just when every day seemed to greet me with a smile sunspots have faded and now I’m doing time cuz I fell on black days

Whomsoever I’ve cured I’ve sickened now Whomsoever I’ve cradled...I put you down I’m a searchlight soul they say but I can’t see it in the night I’m only faking when I get it right I sure don’t mind a change but I fell on black days how would I know that this could be my fate?

Eagle-eared listeners might think this version different from the album version. They are right. The rendition in the video was recorded live off the floor @ Bad Animals, the Seattle studio owned by Heart, where Soundgarden would record Down on the Upside. 

“Boot Camp” is a scary meditation about loss of agency that for years was tied with Zeppelin’s “I'm Gonna Crawl” for Creepiest Song to Cap a Discography, until Soundgarden reunited and released King Animal.

“Taree” is about ghost light, influencing events after dying and features Cornell’s most exhausted, convincing “yeah” @ 2:57.

“Applebite” is a Matt Cameron-penned ponderous clunker about Adam’s original expulsion from Eden. Doomy and death-laden.

“Let Me Drown” is a song about letting someone die.

“The Day I Tried To Live” is frequently cited as Soundgarden’s finest achievement, its odd time signature somehow sounds straight, thanks to Matt Cameron’s brilliant time keeping.

“4th of July” is a song about a post apocalyptic urban landscape, where the speaker isn’t sure whether he is seeing fireworks or bombs. 

“Limo Wreck” is a cool death song and has an eerie 9-11 prediction. “Building the towers belongs to the sky/when the whole thing comes crashing down don’t ask me why.” 

ANY of the above songs would have been better than that fucking asinine dirge-like major key fuckaround that has somehow not just become Soundgarden's signature song...but their ONLY song. 

Does nobody remember Johnny Cash covering “Rusty Cage?” 

“Outshined?”

“Burden In My Hand?”

“Blow Up The Outside World?”

Did none of these other songs get stuck in the electric head? (The electric head is Rob Zombie’s term for the technologically advanced culture we have found ourselves enmeshed in, or imprisoned by. It was the subtitle for White Zombie’s 1995 hit album Astro-Creep 2000: Songs of Love, Destruction, and other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head.)

For my money (which ain’t much honey), the song that best fits both Cornell’s artistic integrity and the sad circumstances of his suicide is “Tighter and Tighter.” I once wrote a whole article on the way artists use “yeah” as a placeholder or as a way to convey emotion when words themselves aren’t adequate. Dig that tired, world-weary exhausted “yeah” at 5:35 of “Tighter & Tighter.”

Or the creepy line going into the first chorus: remember this...remember everything’s just black or burning sun. Not that I agree with such a bleak worldview. It’s a writer’s line. And Randy Bachman has said, “when you’re a writer, you’d step over your own mother.” That’s the Cornell I want to remember. Not that he would step over his own mother. By all accounts he was a committed family man. I mean, I want to remember the Cornell who created strange atmospheric sonic worlds, who explored the dark side that sadly, eventually won out. His otherworldly beautiful music is what I choose to remember about Chris Cornell, not his estate tastelessly exploiting “Black Hole Sun” by using a line from the song to title a posthumous Cornell album of covers No One Sings Like You Anymore. Sigh.

First Cornell’s widow said this was “Chris’s last album.” Okay. What about the Soundgarden songs he recorded vocals for before he died? Kim Thayil was pretty diplomatic about it when asked recently. Cornell did record vocal tracks for the follow up to King Animal.

Kim Thayil: “Given our love for Chris, I do not see us reconfiguring without him.”

But he makes it clear in this interview that Cornell’s widow Vicky has those tracks and won’t release them to the band. Maybe because she blames the band for Chris dying that night? She’s not wrong to believe that they would have known, and seen, what kind of shape Cornell was in, at least at the venue, maybe not later at the hotel.

Kim Thayil: “It’s entirely possible that a new Soundgarden album will be released. Certainly. All it would need is to take the audio files that are available. I tighten up the guitars. Ben does the bass. We get the producers we want to make it sound like a Soundgarden record.”

Interviewer: “Is there an obstacle stopping that?”

Kim Thayil: “There shouldn’t be. There really isn’t. Other than the fact that we don’t have those files.”

Interviewer: “They’re not under your auspices?”

Kim Thayil: “Right. It would be ridiculous if [the record wasn’t made]. But these are difficult things. Partnerships and...property.”

You’re just gonna keep those wav files? And why title his covers album Volume 1 if it’s his “last album?”

Oh right. $$$

No one does sing like Cornell, but is “Black Hole Sun” really the best thing he ever did? The best song he ever sang? Should an album of covers be the last thing he gives to the world?

The only honest answer is no.

Sleep tight Chris. You’re gone.

[awasikonis]

A Girl and Her Pig

In Bong Joon-ho’s movie, “Okja” currently airing on Netflix since released in 2017, Mija is a 13-year-old Korean girl played by Seo-Hyeon Ahn. She embarks on a journey to save her best friend, a super pig named Okja, from the evils of a meat corporation called Mirando Company. Throughout the story Mija, experiences constant obstacles when others do not take her seriously, however she navigates her way through the dominant culture of capitalism by playing the game and proving the “adults” wrong.

“Okja” is a social commentary on our meat industry and capitalism. Our consumer culture is almost laughable because of the lengths we will go to get meat on our plate. Mirando Company creates the “super pig” that consumes less feed, has a minimal carbon footprint, less excretions, and most importantly, “taste fucking good” (​Okja​ 2017). The company announces a competition to send out 26 naturally bred super pigs to farmers all around the world and wait 10 years to unveil “super pig” products to the whole world. Fast forward 10 idyllic years of Mija and her grandfather raising Okja on the remote mountains of South Korea. Now, the Mirando Company is ready to reveal the super pig to the rest of the world, and Okja is crowned best super pig and is forcefully sent back to America to be slaughtered. Mija is lied to constantly throughout the process. She thought her grandfather was able to pay the company to claim ownership of Okja, but unfortunately, they were no match for a huge corporation like Mirando. Mija and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) work together to recapture Okja and to reveal the message behind what really goes on behind the clean image of Mirando Co. It is a riveting story of a girl who will go to great lengths to be reunited with her best friend, despite the world literally being against her.

A young girl like Mija is not the usual protagonist of the stories we read, and it is refreshing to see a badass girl take on the world despite the oppression she faces. Evidence of the obstacles she will face is revealed in the first couple of scenes of the movie. Her grandfather doubts her when he says, “you’re nearly a grown woman now. I don’t like you playing with that pig all day. You should go to town, meet a boy” (​Okja​ 2017). This undermines her character while implying she is expected to meet a boy and that is her only real purpose in the world. She can’t be happy with her pig. When the workers of Mirando come to crown Mija and Okja as the super pig, Dr. Johnny (the face of Mirando) says to her, “a special sash for a special little lady, who I’m sure helped raise this super pig in her own special little way” (​Okja ​2017). The repeating diction of “little” and “special” undermines Mija’s effort in raising Okja. He accentuated her part to make himself the hero to show he “loves kids” and wants to see them succeed. Once Mija makes global news for her wild escape from police by trying to take back Okja, Mirando, to save their image, invites Mija to NYC to be crowned and reunited with Okja on the reveal day of the global meat product. Lucy Mirando, the founder of the “super pig” announces, “let’s all welcome an extraordinary little girl.” They continue to disrespect Mija by making her all “dolled-up” with blush, and making her wear traditional Korean hanbok, which makes her even more of an object for advertisement.

There is another layer of stereotyping and disrespect shown in the language barrier with Mija only knowing Korean. The ALF uses this to their advantage as the Korean translator intentionally mistranslates Mija’s words so they can follow through with their plan. Later, he learns “translation is sacred” and Mija learns that she needs to learn English to not be fooled again, which she uses to her advantage later in the story.

The anti-capitalist commentary is strong in the movie and it uses Mija as the person to navigate through this world run by money. In Johnson’s interview with the director, Bong describes “scenes of torture, killing, and a river of blood flowing through the facility” and said these graphic images were “absolutely necessary” to “make the audience feel uncomfortable. It is witnessing your family being dragged into a slaughterhouse” (Johnson 2017). These purposeful choices highlight, “’this is the state of capitalism today, and this is what I wanted to convey’” (Johnson 2017). The meat industry is an impenetrable system that dominates our consumer culture and yet, Mija plays the game and gets her best friend back with a free market exchange. Right before Okja is about to be slaughtered and rolled off the machine to be cut up and sold like every other pig, Mija takes her solid gold pig statue, given to her by her grandfather to use as her dowry, and exchanges it for Okja’s life, bringing her back home alive. The head of Mirando couldn’t resist the offer. The exchange makes the statement that money is the most important thing in capitalism and you lose control if you don’t have more money. It is also implied that it’s a treacherous cycle and it is hard to break the system. Nancy Mirando, who took over Lucy’s failing attempt at running the company, lets Mija walk away with the order, “our customer and her purchase get home safely” (​Okja​ 2017). And with that, Mija is able to return home safely along with a runaway baby super pig she obtained from the slaughterhouse and continue on with life. The two lone “holocaust survivors” were the only good thing to come out of the whole escapade into capitalism.

However, the important thing to note is that capitalism still persists. It isn’t like Mija stopped factory farming and the world is good. While Okja is alive and well, and Mija has her best friend back, it didn’t solve the bigger problem of capitalism, because no one has the power to usurp the faceless dominator. It is impossible to craft an alternative world autonomous from capitalism. You have to get what you want by playing the game, which is what Mija did.

We can influence the industry by changing our consumer culture, though. We “bond with the dogs and cats that live with us and then we sit down to a steak dinner, without a thought about how that steak got onto our plate” (Taubin 2017). We must bring awareness to what we buy and what we are influencing, and “Okja” is a great way to communicate these issues. The movie, “accurately teaches that each individual affects the world by choosing which products to purchase. Every dollar is a vote for or against a good or service” (Johnson 2017). This might be our way to craft a better world, but it is very hard for us to change our set ways when capitalism is rooted in our society and ingrained in our minds.

In conclusion, Mija is a badass girl who proved everyone wrong by not letting anyone or anything get in the way of getting her best friend back. The multiple scenes of her being disrespected as a “little girl” with no agency or power are prevalent. Despite all the attempts to mold her into an image for the good of the company, she had none of it. Protagonists like her spread hope to young girls and women and people of color that they can save the day, or at least use their power for change. While society tries to oppress you from all angles, you can rise above it with determination. Society is capitalism and capitalism is society, and while we are oppressed from the system, we can see change if we try hard enough like Mija. While she was able to get her best friend back, and everything still continues on, the overarching message to the viewer is that we can change that. If we make conscious decisions and know how much our individual choices influence the market, we can have an impact. We live in a world that consistently doesn’t take us seriously, but there could be the possibility of crafting a new world that can usurp the dominant culture we live in by changing how and on what we spend our money. This is simply playing the game in order to change the system because sadly, we have to use our money to change the money around the world for a better future.

[valuentumbrian]

The Invisible Hand Will Sink These Markets

Image: Nan Fry

By Brian Nelson, CFA

Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” is often thought to be a blessing by the capitalists of the world. The free-market economy will find the right answer, they may say. Self-interest and greed will inevitably push humankind to new horizons and achieve levels of greatness no person before thought possible. What fools we are to believe.

Irrational behavior around shares of GameStop (GME) continued Friday, February 26, with the company trading in a huge range of $86.00-$142.90 on the session. We re-released our 16-page report on the stock and peg a fair value estimate of just $4 per share, with the high end of the fair value estimate range of $7. A Bank of America analyst reiterated a $10 price target. GameStop shares closed at ~$102.

There’s clearly no reasonable basis for owning GameStop’s stock at current price levels, in our view, and there certainly was no reasonable basis when the stock was trading as high as $483 per share earlier this year. An equity capital raise by management would result in a fair value estimate increase (perhaps a material one depending on how many new shares the market can stomach), but the takeaway is the same:

These markets are nuts. The iceberg is coming, and we’re still going full steam ahead.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) noted February 26 that “as part of its continuing effort to respond to potential attempts to exploit investors during the recent market volatility,” it had suspended trading in 15 more stocks—all “because of questionable trading and social media activity.” We applaud the SEC for its swift action, though much more is needed, and it may be too little too late.

Unlike the dot-com bubble roughly two decades ago, the fervor of the price-agnostic trading frenzy of 2021 has an aura of permanence to it. This “craziness” is here to stay. Where during the dot-com bubble, sell-side analysts were in a race to set the highest price target, regardless of their underlying opinion of the firm, there was a solution to the problem. Get rid of the bad apples. But today, we have a fraction of the sell-side analysts we used to; they’ve been out of a job for some time now.

Fired – in favor of underperforming statistical quant work or the fantasies of artificial intelligence and machine learning. More than 60% of trading in the marketplace is now driven by indexing, algorithms and quant traders chasing momentum or following trends--or moving stocks higher or lower based on simple P/B or P/E ratios. The quants know statistics, but of finance they know little.

Moreover, there are trillions in indexed products, and their overseers believe we still operate in an environment like that of even a few decades ago—when sell-side analysts were pulling seven-figure salaries because the invisible hand rewarded price discovery. We are not operating in such an environment. The price setters have almost all left. Shown the door, even.

The best finance schools aren’t teaching how to responsibly evaluate the fundamentals of a company and haven’t been doing so for decades. Heck, they think they’ve “solved the market” with backtests and “made up” factors. They are teaching coding or indoctrinating students to believe that any share price is as good as the next (GameStop at $450, for example – what a deal! – yes, sarcasm), or that the market simply knows best. Maybe years ago, the market was once a decent price-setting mechanism, but today, it is most certainly not.

GameStop is just one of at least a few dozen rather large stocks whose share prices make no sense--and I’m not talking about Tesla (TSLA). There's actually some reasonable basis to Tesla’s valuation. It’s not just the two dozen or so companies that the SEC suspended trading today either. This nonsense is everywhere. Do we really believe that a $7 trillion asset manager like Vanguard, or the trillions in indexed products today that pay little attention to intrinsic value are not also distorting market prices?

Pretty straightforward, no? But some of the brightest minds on the Street today may say in disbelief: “Full Steam Ahead!” Of course, some of them are just stubborn. They’ve been singing the same tune for decades, finding different ways to say the same thing over and over again, and they can’t change it now. They’d be wrong, and their egos couldn’t take it for one second. The invisible hand is yet still working overtime.

Elon Musk tweets out a Clubhouse app and a completely different company with the ticker CMGR soars. The same situation happened to another company called Signal Advance (SIGL) over another one of Musk’s tweets. Yet another instance like this but without a Musk tweet occurred with confusion of ZOOM last year. There’s no fix to this, and these are just the distortions we see clear as day.

You can’t convince a die-hard index aficionado that’s hauling in $20 million a year on a book of business that he’s built based on the faulty efficient market hypothesis and underperforming modern portfolio theory to all of sudden care about the greater good of society. What did Upton Sinclair say: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Nobody cares that these markets are going straight to the bottom of the ocean like the Titanic, no more than uninformed nations can heed the warning of climate change before it's too late. We’re headed for disaster one way or another. The incentives have been in place for a long time. “Sell index funds. Look – random factors can explain these returns.” Most of what’s coming out of finance today is nonsense, padding the wrong pockets.

How many people celebrate when they get the fair value of a company, correct? Where’s that on the news? Pay a man twice as much to not do individual due diligence on stocks, and just mechanically rebalance assets every six months or so and not give a damn about the health of the marketplace, what do you expect? You don’t think Jack Bogle is hailed as a hero by advisors for saving individual investors money, do you? Jack hasn’t saved the prudent stock picker a plug nickel.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand of active management used to result in the optimization of price discovery, where participants would do their very best work to buy and sell to “uncover” the best market price, creating a positive externality for all investors--even those quants and indexers that are now polluting the system. Today’s invisible hand is leading us off a cliff. Incentives are in place to continue to discourage price discovery, and to no surprise, we’re seeing just a glimpse of it.

Iceberg ahead, and very few see it. Sure, there are perma-bears that have been bearish for the past two decades that are right twice a day like a clock, but we’ve been bullish. The ship is damaged, the markets are going to sink, and it’s not the “little guy’s” fault. The distortions in the financial markets are clear when viewed through the lens of a $6 billion company GameStop, but they are no less evident than implicit distortions caused by a bunch of index funds piling into the same name at once.

We didn’t hand out Nobel prizes just for Long-Term Capital Management to blow up. We didn’t hand out Nobel prizes for EMH just to witness what’s happening in the markets with stocks like GameStop doing what they’re doing. We didn’t hand out Nobel prizes to provide excuses for why modern portfolio theory in the form of the 60/40 stock/bond portfolio has failed investors for the past 30 years relative to a monkey throwing darts at the WSJ pages.

Why are we handing out Nobel prizes -- and why doesn't Warren Buffett have one? You get the type of academic work you incentivize, and incentives are out of whack. I’ve said jokingly that finance for the past 60 years can easily be summed up by two developments: 1) Oh, you can’t do stock analysis? Well, here’s indexing. 2) Oh, you can’t beat the S&P 500? Well, here’s some quant jargon.

Indexing and quant jargon are doing far more damage than a few traders on social media. Believe you me. These markets are not well, and the invisible hand is guiding through a fog of misinformation to disaster. Markets have bounced right off the high end of our fair value estimate range on the S&P 500, and we’ve raised cash. The violins are playing on the Titanic. The “unsinkable” ship we call the price discovery mechanism of the markets can sink. Let us not be fools to think otherwise.

There will be an epilogue to Value Trap, and you and I both know that I don't want to write it. Let's keep playing the violin for now.

Tickerized for GME, CMGR, SIGL, TSLA, ZM, ZOOM

Temporarily Suspended Trading: Bebida Beverage Co. (BBDA); Blue Sphere Corporation (BLSP); Ehouse Global Inc. (EHOS); Eventure Interactive Inc. (EVTI); Eyes on the Go Inc. (AXCG); Green Energy Enterprises Inc. (GYOG); Helix Wind Corp. (HLXW); International Power Group Ltd. (IPWG); Marani Brands Inc. (MRIB); MediaTechnics Corp. (MEDT); Net Talk.com Inc. (NTLK); Patten Energy Solutions Group Inc. (PTTN); PTA Holdings Inc. (PTAH); Universal Apparel & Textile Company (DKGR); and Wisdom Homes of America Inc. (WOFA),  Bangi Inc. (BNGI); Sylios Corp. (UNGS); Marathon Group Corp. (PDPR); Affinity Beverage Group Inc. (ABVG); All Grade Mining Inc. (HYII); and SpectraScience Inc. (SCIE)

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Valuentum members have access to our 16-page stock reports, Valuentum Buying Index ratings, Dividend Cushion ratios, fair value estimates and ranges, dividend reports and more. Not a member? Subscribe today. The first 14 days are free.

Brian Nelson owns shares in SPY, SCHG, QQQ, and IWM. Some of the other securities written about in this article may be included in Valuentum's simulated newsletter portfolios. Contact Valuentum for more information about its editorial policies.

[cecilspeaks]

Ghost Stories

You can purchase Ghost Stories here.

Transcript of the bonus tracks here.

1. Intro

Meg Bashwiner: And now, listeners of every kind: the voice of Night Vale, Cecil Baldwin!

[applause]

Cecil: We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Also many other things, several of which can be found in your home. Welcome to Night Vale!

Listeners, honest honored listeners, Cecil here as always your voice to carry you through the lonely hours. Today is a very special day indeed. Today, as we all know, is the annual Night Vale ghost story contest. In which every citizen is required to put forward their scariest, spookiest tale of spectors and haunts. The City Council chooses their favorite, and the winner is, through a process that is truly terrifying in its simplicity, turned into a ghost. The losers are forced to continue in forms that primarily depend upon the containment and transportation of oozes and glob.

Now I’m sure that you’ve all been preparing your own entry for the ghost story contest, since all of you will soon have to stand up and deliver it to the gathered people. But before all of you each individually have your turn, I thought that I might indulge myself for a moment and tell you my own entry to your ghost story contest. Are you all OK with that? [applause] I have no idea what you just said so, gonna nod and give myself a thumbs up and I think we’re all good here.

2. Horoscopes

But first, let’s have a look at today’s horoscopes. Leo? [silence] Leo? [audience whoops] Leo! Bet all your money on red! All those material possessions were only weighing you down. Soon you will be in many ways – free-er than the rest of us.

Virgo? You know that one spot on your back that itches and itches and itches and you just can’t stand it? Well, good thing: you won’t have to deal with that or anything else after tomorrow night.

Libra? Draw your loved ones closer to you. That first drawing you did was no good, no, draw them like closer to you. There’s too much white space on the page! How are your loved ones supposed to love you if you can’t even draw them right?

Scorpio? OK so, I think we all know by now that this is the sign of.. uuughhh.. Steve Carlsberg. Who is my sister Abby’s husband. Now, usually the horoscope just happens to turn out something quite mean for Scorpio. Purely through the unknowable combination of fate and random chance that is the meeting of the stars. But Abby said that the stars had better knock that off! Especially if they want to be invited to their niece Janice’s first ballet fight. So, let’s see how this goes. Scorpio. Things are looking bright. What a great day you have before you! Look how clear the sky, how green the grass how – dumb and oversized your feet look. [gleefully] No really, I hope you don’t trip or rip your pants not even once! How terrible it would be if that happened! But it probably won’t through, so there you go. [mutters] Scorpios…

Sagittarius?  Ahahahahahahaha, aahahahahahahaha, aaahahahahahaha!

Capricon? Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood (--) [02:42] tide is loosed upon the world and everywhere! So your home carpentry project will not go well next week. There’s just too much blood.

Aquarius? OK, you are just two dogs in a trench coat, Aquarius. I mean I hate to break it to you, but you have no opposable thumbs, or language skills. And you’ve always been two dogs in a trench coat! [cooing] Yes you are, yes you arrre!! [kissing noises] Now go outside! Good dogs!

Pisces?  If you don’t have anything nice to say, try saying something mean. I mean there are lots of options for things to say.

Aries? Ooh. OK, so this horoscope is just a picture of a bear. And next to the bear is the lizard and next to the lizard is the pelican. And there’s a combined speech bubble above them all that says “We regret the storm that took your lives.” And they’re smiling and (-) [0:03:57] some mugs of beer together. And they have their feet up on skulls. And if you look really closely you’ll notice that they’re not standing on a pile of sticks, but on a pile of human bones?! And unfortunately I believe that in this cartoon, Aries – you’re the pelican!

Taurus? No sunshine for you, Taurus! Nope! The sun’s light has been blocked, but only for you. Oh yes, everyone else will walk in sunny rays, sunshades and shorts, wide smiles and hat brims, SPF 50 and a Frisbee at the beach. You will likely lose feeling in your skin due to the cold of a [sinister voice] sunless world! [friendly voice] Good luck!

Gemini? They say an onion has many layers. Gemini, you are like that onion. Time has peeled away, one after another, each of your hard, pungent layers: snap, snap, snap! They (pry) off and urgent fingernails pry away the remnants as you grow smaller, wetter, less complex. Ooh, also like an onion, your odor makes as cry.

Cancer? Well this just says “chainsaw accident”. So I bet that’s a metaphor for something really goood!

3. A Word from our Sponsors

Cecil: And now a word from our sponsors. For that, we have a sentient patch of haze here in the studio with me, and her name is Deb! Deb?

Deb: Thank you Cecil. Today I am here on behalf American Airlines – your partner in the sky.

Cecil: Fantastic. What does American have to say to us today?

Deb: American Airlines is committed to.. [giggling] your safety! And comfort.. [giggling] and getting you into the air. It is our promise that we will get you up there. You will rise from the ground. For sure, that will happen. And you will soar above the clouds.

Cecil: Well that’s wonderful to hear, you know it’s reassuring to know that American Airlines will see us safely and comfortably through takeoff, flight, and landing!

Deb: [long beat] No Cecil. We didn’t say that. We don’t wanna promise we can’t say for sure we can deliver on. We will get you up there.

Cecil: And then what then?

Deb: Oh, what anywhen? Do we see the future?

Cecil: Oh?

Deb: No.

Cecil: No.

Deb: Life is chaotic, and it would be irresponsible to start making promises.

Cecil: Yes, but mostly you land those planes, rights?

Deb: I haven’t checked lately. But if it helps you to say that out loud, then certainly you should do that, yeah, mm hm.

Cecil: Why do I always end up so worried after talking to you, Deb?

Deb: American Airlines. What goes up, must come down. We guarantee it.

Cecil: Alright, well thank you Deb.

Deb: So you’re all telling ghost stories, huh?

Cecil: Oh yes, yes we are.

Deb: Good. I have a wonderful story of a haunting to tell. It’s very popular among us, sentient patches of haze.

Cecil: Oh please, tell it.

Deb: Once upon a time, a nice family of sentient patches of haze moved into an ooold house. They were young and optimistic and ready to start a home, but soon they realized something was teeeerribly wrong. They heard noises in the night. Voices, folky yet slickly produced singer-songwriter music. At first they assumed it was just their imagination, but soon they saw shapes in the halls and bedrooms. They noticed movement in the corner of the parts of their haze that they used to see with. One day, one of the sentient patches turned the corner and there – [disgusted] was a human standing there! As clear as a day, as opaque as flesh. Well, that poor little patch screamed and floated away. But now they knew, [creepily] there were humans haunting their house.

Cecil: Now wait. Humans often live in houses, I mean did the humans own the house?

Deb: Oh Cecil, there you go again. Serving as a propaganda mouthpiece for the capitalist machine that says sentient patches of haze aren’t allowed to move into and take over any house that a human “owns”!

Cecil: Wait, a mouthpiece for the capitalist machine? Deb, your job is literally to be a spokeshaze for multinational corporations!

Deb: Hmph! Hmph! Hmph! How dare you! My contradictions are my own to grapple with. I’m leaving. Thank you for giving me time on the air, I appreciate it.

Cecil: Well it was an ad, and I’m assuming you get paid for those?

Deb: Sure if that assumption is helpful to you, goodbye Cecil.

Cecil: Alright, thank you Deb!

4. Ghost story #1

And now, listeners, a ghost story. MY ghost story.

It begins ten years ago, on a night just like – tonight. Heavy fog covered the town of Night Vale, turning the world into a blurry approximation, familiar landmarks into educated guesses. No stars, and the full moon diffused by the mist into a soft, feeble light from all around.

A man was driving down a dark road, there were no other cars around. And on the side of the road, up ahead, he saw a figure. A figure made strange by the half-hearted moon, a brief pause in a long fog. Now the figure had its hand up. It did not (thumb) (-), but instead gave a languid wave, more of a summons than a request. And the man shivered, for he knew that it was on this very stretch of road one year to the day before that day that was ten years ago on a night just like tonight. The oooold mill, finally burned down. And when it went, there was a woman inside of it. Now, it’s hard to fathom why she was there in that abandoned disused mill, but she was. And the unthinkable happened, without anyone having to think of it at all. And since then, it has been said that in the darkest hours of the darkest nights, a young woman flags down cars on the side of the road where the old mill used to be. And if they’re foolish enough to let her into the car, she stares directly at the driver. And if the driver is foolish enough to look her in the eyes even once – she takes them to her home. A dark, eternal place from which no one, ever, returns.

Still, he couldn’t leave behind what could be a person in need of aid just because of some spooky old story. So he pulled over, and the figure reached out her hand and opened the passenger door and – there was a cold breath, air from dead lungs that the mist curled into the car, and the figure sat.

And the driver was careful to look not too closely or for too long. “Um, uh, where are you headed?” the man said, but the figure was silent. So he began to drive once again. And the fog billowed as he drove, and he could swear that he could see that old mill as it had once stood, leaning and ramshackle. Now, that mill had not been in working order in decades, it was probably just its time to go when it burned, but still. He mourned the loss of what had been a part of his own. “Where to?” he said again without turning or looking at his passenger. And the figure spoke. The figure spoke with a voice that sounded like a body hitting freezing water, like the distant thud in an old house in the smallest hours of the night. [creepy voice] “You know wheeeree,” the figure said. “You know where I want to goooo.” And he did know. “I want to go – hoooooome.”

And he held the wheel tighter, and he pressed the gas harder, and he stared unblinkingly at the door because he knew that the figure’s face was only inches away now, and staring directly at him.

Oh, listen to me yammer on! Haha. You know, I should really get to some of the other business of community radio, or Station Management will [chuckling] just kill me. [long beat] At least I hope that’s all they’ll do to me.

The rest of this ghost story soon.

5. Tamika Flynn

Cecil: But now I have a really special guest in the studio today, who has their own ghost story to tell. She is one of our community’s most active young people, having formed a militia to keep our town safe from corporations and librarians, oh – and she is also an avid reader. So please welcome to the show – Tamika Flynn! Hi Tamika!

Tamika: Hi Cecil. [chuckles]

Cecil: You said you have a ghost story that you wanna share?

Tamika: Yes. I love books so much, and one of my favorite kinds of books is the ghost book.

Cecil: The ghost book? You mean horror novel, yes?

Tamika: You say potato, I say pohtata.

Cecil: You do?

Tamika: Yeah!

Cecil: Pohtata?

Tamika: Pohtata chips, pohtata salad. Pohtata poutine.. [chuckles]

Cecil: But that’s kind of a weird way to say potato.

Tamika: Well I learned English from reading it Cecil, not from listening to it! [chuckles, snorts repeatedly] Anyways. I love ghost stories because they’re so rich with symbolism and meaning. A lot of people think that ghost stories are just a one-note tale about a ghost haunting an old house, but if you look deeper under the surface, ghost stories are really about dead people who are now invisible or translucent beings who interact with the living in antiques homes, so..

Cecil: Very important difference.

Tamika: Would you like to hear my favorite ghost story, Cecil?

Cecil: Oh yes, please!

Tamika: Many years ago, in this very town.. [whispers] there was a librarian! Ooh! And the librarian would creep around the public library, hunting and slaughtering book lovers for sport! Innocent people would go to the library hoping to find a good book, something new and interesting. Maybe a classic of modern science fiction by Octavia Butler, or some surrealist literature by Amy Bender or, oh, maybe some pedantic buzzkill space essays by Neil deGrasse Tyson. [chuckles]

Cecil: Now, wait a minute! To be fair to Neil deGrasse Tyson, his Victorian era romances are really goo-oo-ood!

Tamika: [long beat] Anyways. One day, there was a young girl, a really smart girl. [chuckles] She was also really fit, like REALLY fit! [chuckles] But also smart like the smartest girl you can know. Ahem. And also really tough. Anyways, she went to the library to get a book, and just as she was perusing a collection of plays by the 17th century poet and spy Aphra Behn, she could smell something terrible, like an infection, like wet fur. It was humid suddenly, and she felt something watching her, slithering about just over her shoulder. 

But this girl, she was fast too. She jumped to the side quickly just as a spiked tentacle came crashing down next to her, crushing the shelf containing play scripts by Pulitzer winner Annie Baker. Without thinking, the girl – she was also intuitive, like [whispers] soo intuitive! [chuckles] – she grabbed the tentacle before it could retract into the librarian’s protective shell. She then grabbed a copy of the “Complete Works of William Shakespeare” by Francis Bacon. It was the special edition that had the machete taped right there on the book jacket! [chuckles] She tore off the large knife and swung, striking the tentacle at its base. She swung again, landing an accurate blow between the soft small crevice and the hard skin. This girl was amaaaaziiiiing! The librarian shrieked, then with a double back flip – which was pretty easy for this girl… she narrowly avoided the splattering acid blood of the flailing creature and dealt a mortal blow right to its disgusting neck! She didn’t even need a blade to finish off the monster, she just used her fist! Splat! Pffffff! [breathes heavily] True story of the badass book loving girl there ever was! [chuckles]

Cecil: So this is a story about you, right? And how you defeated the librarian during the Summer Reading Program a few years back?

Tamika: Oh no. That story was about my best friend Jessica Littleton. She’s so smart and talented, [high-pitched] I just love her, she’s the best!

Cecil: OK Tamika, while I hate to nitpick, that was a really great story but that was like, [hoarsely] monster story, not like a ghoooo-oooost story.

Tamika: Well. Jessica jacked up that monster and now it’s a ghost, boom, ghost story! Well I gotta go do my math homework, and then we have the teen militia meeting this evening at the new skating rink, so bye Cecil! [chuckles]

Cecil: Bye, thank you Tamika!

6. Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner

It’s time for another edition of the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner!

Did you know that time travel exists? OK well not yet, but we have learned from time travelers that it will be invented in just under 30 years. Now given that knowledge, I thought it’d be kind of fun to do a little experiment together, so. If you are legally allowed to own a smartphone, take that out now and open up that calendar application. No go ahead, don’t be shy!

Now what I want you to do is create a recurring event that starts on this exact day and time, and title that event, well, “travel back in time”. Ooh, and be sure to note your exact location, OK? Now, when you’ve done that, set that event to recur every year on this anniversary. That way, when your future self does eventually have access to a time machine, they’ll know to come back to this. very. Moment. And then once you’ve done all of that, hit “save” and your future self should appear immediately right in front of you!

OK, so do you see your future self? Alright, well you may have to look around just like a little tiny bit. Hold on, hold on. Do none of you see your future selves? Uh oooh…

[long silence]

Well, this has been the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner!

7. Teddy Williams

Cecil: Now, a look at the Community Calendar. So let’s start off with an event that is happening today. To get in on the annual ghost story contest, Teddy Williams, owner of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, announced that he will be offering 20 per cent off admission and double game tokens for anyone who dresses up like a deceased ancestor, historical figure, or departed pet.

We have Teddy in the studio with us now to talk about some of the themed activity going on at the fun complex. Teddy?

Teddy Williams: Hello, Cecil.

Cecil: Hello.

TW: We are really getting into this ghost stories festival over at the Desert Flower today and we wanted to celebrate the spirit of the event [chuckles], no pun intended.

Cecil: No pun understood.

TW: OK well we’re getting into the ghost story.. mood. Over in the bowling lanes, we’ll be turning off all of the lights, and as customers try to navigate and stumble around in the dark, our staff will sneak up behind them and shout classic ghost things like “BOOO!” and [hoarsely] “Hello again son, I miss you, it’s so cold here”.

Cecil: Well that sounds like great fun that people will remember not unpleasantly for the rest of their lives.

TW: We hired some pretty expensive lawyers to make sure of that.

Cecil: Now Teddy, you seem to really love this day. Do you have a ghost story you wanna share?

TW: Well, OK sure. As you know we built the new skating rink on top of the old pet cemetery. And there’s this gost cat, a Persian cat. Super cute like you just wanna grab his little flat face and go [high-pitched squeaking] with your own face against his..

Cecil: Awww.

TW:..but you can’t. Because he’s a ghost and so your face just goes through, it’s just.. it’s like rrow, rrow. Anyway, turns out this cat belonged to former town billionaire Marcus Vanston. Marcus of course disappeared one day and no one knows for certain what happened to him..

Cecil: Oh, I-

TW: Or we do know, but none of us are legally allowed to say.

Cecil: Of course, because we can’t legally acknowledge the existence of..

TW: None of us are legally allowed to say Cecil, it could have been anything.

Cecil: Yeah of course. [whispers] Angel.

TW: So this ghost cat belonged to Marcus, and Marcus was so rich that he had taught the cat French.

Cecil: Ooh.

TW: Yeah. Now I myself don’t speak French, but I do have a Russian dictionary, and I feel like both languages are so dissimilar form English that they must be similar to each other.

Cecil: That’s an excellent point.

TW: Right? Anyway, the cat told me that his name is Peanut, and that he died of sorrow when his master, whom he loved so much, passed from this earth and left him alone in their vast palazzo. That as a cat, he cannot cry, so he simply shivered with sadness by himself under the basement stairs every night, until his body wasted away into such a thin whisp that the wings of death could easily and sweetly carry him off to be with his owner once again. But he has yet to reunite with Marcus and so now he has only lonely immortality and no conceivable escape.

Cecil: That’s heartbreaking!

TW: Yeah. So then I told him, [excitedly] “My name is Teddy, and I love video games!”

Cecil: Oh.

TW: [laughing] I tried to feed him one of those little fish treats. It just fell right through his… He’s forever hungry and he can never eat! Ooo, anyway. So I’ve been trying to learn Russian better so that we can speak in French.

Cecil: Sure, yeah.

TW: And he’s been coming around more often saying something that, okay sounds a little bit like “Je suis triste”, “Je suis mort”. Which I figured out means, “Hey Teddy, it’s great to see you!”

Cecil: Umm, now it’s been a moment since my French brainwashing in high school, but I’m pretty sure that “Je suis mort” means..

TW: “Great to see you” yeah, I know Cecil. Alright well, I gotta get back to the complex and I hope to see everyone out there. Now don’t forget that it’s happy hour from four to six at our bar. If you can be happy for those two straight hours, you get three-dollar draft beers and well drinks. So far, no one has been able to do it. Well, je suis mort, Cecil! Ha ha!

Cecil:  Aha, thank you Teddy! [whimpering] Oh, Peanut!

8. Steve Carlsberg

More on the Community Calendar.

So listeners, I love ghost stories because they are so disturbing, but. Within the safety of a fictional narrative. Unlike my brother-in-law Steve, who just showed up uninvited to my studio and is disturbing in real life.

Steve Carlsberg: Well, now Cecil, you asked me to come up to the station to tell my ghost story!

Cecil: What, I did? Wait, why would I do that? Is that the kind of thing that – oh yeah I do remember (--) doing that. Well, go on with your story, Steve.

SC: Okey-dokey. [clears throat] Down by the old railroad tracks, on the eastern edge of town, it is said that if you go there just after dusk, you can see the ghoooooooost childrenn!

Cecil: Alright, well, we should go now, you know. Lead the way, Steve, and all of us will be right behind you, eventually.

SC: OK. Many decades ago, a school bus full of children stalled on those train tracks. The driver – whose name was Mab – tried to stop the engine, but it just kept grinding and grinding. There was noo moon! See, this was before the moon was invented by NASA scientists. Remember I told you?

Cecil: [mumbles]

SC: Alright. Mab probably didn’t know she’d stalled on the tracks, she just kept trying to restart the engine, to nooo avail. Suddenly there was a loud horn and a deep, rhythmic rumble from below them, as the tracks trembled!

Then, in the darkness, came a light. A single yellow glow, small and distant. The light was growing, as the sound of the horn and the rumble of the tracks crescendoed. The children spotted it first. [funny voices] “It’s the sun!” one of them called. “No, it’s a lightning bear!” called another.

Mab kept trying to start the bus, the horn of the train boomed, the tracks below the bus barked and rattled, and the light was so big, moving so fast, and the kids screamed “Traaaaaiiiin! It’s a traaaaa-a-a-a-aiin!” And then they all cheered because they love trains, hahaha! And then they all watched the train pass, clapping and laughing the whole time because hey, they got to see a train! [chuckles]

Cecil: So wait, the train didn’t even hit the bus?

SC: No no no no, see, turns out the vibration of the tracks had made the bus roll over them. A near miss, whew! Well, Mab called the Bus Barn and AAA and everyone got home safe and sound. But. It is said that out at the old train tracks, just after the dusk, on a night where there is no moon, if you put some powder on the trunk of your car and stop on the train tracks, your car will begin to move slowly off the tracks, without you touching the gas pedal. And then, if you check the outside of your car, you will see a series of small handprints on the powder! The ghosts of those children who were on that stalled bus so many years ago will push your vehicle to safety!

Cecil: But those kids didn’t die, I don’t understand how they, like how are they ghosts?

SC: It happened 70 years ago, Cecil, I’m pretty sure most of those kids are ghosts by now.

Cecil: I mean, are you leaving the car in drive, because then it’ll just move on its own without you having to press the gas. Oh and plus, those handprints are probably just your own handprints that form as the powder absorbs the oils that were already there.

SC: Sounds like you’re too chicken to go out on the old train tracks..

Cecil: Ugh.

SC: ..and see the ghost hands of ghost children who all died after bearing on that stalled bus!

Cecil: Yeah, from natural causes, yeears later!

SC: Which is all after they were on the stalled bus! Who-o-o-ooo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo, spookyy, spookyy! Do you need a hug?

Cecil: No. [beat] OK Steve. [sighs]

SC: Look, it’s very scary, OK? It’s not just the handprints, but if you get there too long after dusk, the sky will be mostly void. You’ll stare into that infinite maw, sizing yourself down and down, until you understand that you are a fleck, a speck, a nothing nobody loser, who will be gone and not missed. Even the stars, for all their mass and might, are replaceable dots, soundless and similar. Even a ball of nuclear explosions, 2000 times the size of our own Earth, and which will burn mighty for millions and billions of years, is an indistinguishable blip that most can’t even name. What is the use of any of this?

Cecil: OK, now I’m actually scared.

SC: [breathes heavily] So yeah, make sure you show up at the exact right time [chuckling] to see those handprints, OK?

Cecil: OK. You’re done talking now?

SC: Yeah.

Cecil: OK, great. So listeners, we now continue with our Com- OK Steve, you gotta, you gotta go.

SC: Yeah, one hug.

Cecil: No oh geez, alright, fine.

SC: Oh there it is! Ah, we did it! Ah, I’m so scared, it’s so spooky! [chuckles] You’ll need another hug later on, (big guy).

Cecil: Alright. [sarcastically] Thank you Steve.

9. The Community Calendar

Where was I? Friday morning, the wooooop will be whoooooaaa and then later, ah ah a-a-a haha, if you catch my meaning, hahaha! [beat] Oh yes, that was probably very confusing for the radio, so. Friday morning there will be nuclear arms testing just along the canyon east of Route 800. Please remember to take shelter inside your car or under a very sturdy table. As lovable cartoon character, Andy the Atom, always screams: “A nuclear bomb is probably more afraid of you than you are of it!”

Saturday night is Night Vale high school’s annual prom. Afterwards there will be a casino-themed lock-in party. Now this is to encourage kids to stay in one place together, having fun with friends, and not being out on the streets drinking and driving. It is also to encourage kids to gamble. Some of the fun casino games featured will be lottery scratch-off tickets, Three Card Monte, and trust falls.

Monday is the day that Nostradamus told us would happen. [long beat] You know, Jeremy Nostradamus told us that this particular Monday would happen and listeners, Monday is indeed happeniiiiing-ah.

Tuesday evening at 7 PM, the Night Vale school board will be holding a hearing to discuss whether or not testing helps measure children’s abilities, or whether it’s already pretty obvious that the electrified maze is just like totally unbeatable. This hearing is open to the public.

This Wednesday will be re-experiencing last Wednesday. I mean, last Wednesday was just so much fun, we are gonna repeat it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over… [mumbles] and over.

10. Ghost Story #2

Back to a ghost story, already in progress.

[dramatically] It was ten years ago, on a night just like tonight. Here was a man driving down a dark road. No other cars. Where are all the other cars? Where are all the living people in the dead of night, I don’t know.

And this, the anniversary of the burning of the oooooold mill, in which a young woman had died horribly, by fire. And here beside him, a passenger with a strange voice asking him as the woman would ask all doomed innocents that stopped for her to take… her… home.

“Oh you [clears throat], you want to go home?” the man said. “Yeah sure, sure. Umm, where is home?” [growling] “I will give you directionsss,” the stiff dead throat of the figure rasped, and a hand touched his shoulder. He could just see it. Flesh and bone? Maybe. Meat and (symmetry), perhaps. But that does not make a thing human. And he knew from the stories that those who followed the directions of the woman from the mill would find themselves taking narrow, shaded lines, winding downwards  and downwards, to a destination and hollow as the pupil of a dead eye.

“Oh sure, well I’m heading into town myself,” the man said, grasping for any kind of human conversation. “Well maybe I can drop you off somewhere – close to home, like the Moonlite All-Nite Diner or Mission Grove Park?” [growling] “No! Take. Me. Home!”

And before he could stop himself, the man turned and met her eyes, and the man saw, the man saw her face crearly. Stop. Stop right now. I want you all right now to close your eyes. Close your eyes and imagine – trench warfare. Imagine bodies writhing out of holes in the ground to die in muddy no man’s land. Imagine a plane in a thunderstorm where the whole of the universe becomes nothing but lightning and quake.

Imagine closing yourself into your bedroom at night and seeing the shadow imprints of your eyelids after you’ve closed the door. A hunched figure at the end of the hall, flopping around on the floor, in a sheet and muling.

Imagine pulling into your driveway in the dead of night and seeing, you think – but did you? – a grey face with a crude smile peeking from your bedroom window. Imagine being home alone in the middle of a vast nowhere. [click] And the power goes out. And it’s a long, long night until sunrise. Be quiet for just a few moments, and imagine all of this.

Now imagine the face of the woman in the car. Yes. Yes. That is it. Exactly that. [growling] “Tuuuuurn heeeere,” she said, incdicating a dark narrow side road, its pavement cracked and buckling, a side road he had never seen before. [increasingly scary voice] “Tuuuuuurn heeeere, take meee hoooooooooommmmme”. And without knowing why he did it, or where the path would lead, he turned down that side road and left the main road behind.

11. A Public Service Annoucement

The finale of my story coming up. But first, a public service announcement.

After a few recent wildfires, the Night Vale Fire Department would like to remind our listeners about fire safety. They began a new campaign to help parents talk to their kids about this important civic issue. The campaign is called “Your Treachery Has Been Noted”. And the mascot is this adorable cartoon vulture with a camera for a face.

Fire chief Ramona Incarna(-) that it’s important for parents to teach their kids about the three R:s of fire prevention: relent, renounce, repent! She said that  most common house fires and wildfires are started by your kids. And here she pointed straight at you! And then she said, “Those children came from your body!”

And then she retched. Sorry.

As part of the campaign, the Fire Department issued a pamphlet to help parents with the education business. Now this pamphlet is adorned with colorful drawings of pyramids and floating eyes, you know, to make it more relatable to teens. And these pamphlets will be distributed to all Night Vale Public School students via repeating audio loops while they sleep.

12. Pamela Winchell

So, because the ghost stories competition is such an important event in our town, Night Vale’s Mayor has sent her Director of Emergency Press Conferences, Pamela Winchell, here to deliver an emergency press conference. So please welcome Pamela Winchell!

Pamela Winchell: Hello, Cecil! Hello, people of Night Vale! Hello, people or whatever of space, who are receiving this long-ago podcast millions of light years away, millions of years in the future. Hello, mutant hollow-eyed child in the dark corner of the radio studio!

Cecil: Oh my god! What.. But..

PW: He’s cute right?

Cecil: I ha- I have never noticed him before. [long beat] [whispers] Pamela!

PW: [whispers] Yes?

Cecil: [whispers] He’s staring right at me!

PW: [whispers] That’s what he does!

Cecil: [whispers] He’s horrifying! Is he a ghost?

PW: [normal voice] You can tell by his grey complexion and glowing yellow eyes and complete lack of facial expression, he is not a ghost. That, my friend, is one of the undead hollow-eyed messanger children from City Council.

Cecil: How long has he been here?

PW: Probably since the last time City Council issued a press release.

Cecil: But that was like a month ago!

PW: Well you answered your own question there, didn’t ya? Cecil, you are supposed to send the undead messenger children home when you’re done with them. If you don’t, they’ll just hang around in the dark watching you all slack-faced. I mean, kids are innocent but they aren’t very smart!

Cecil: So he won’t like hurt me, right?

PW: [singsong] I never said that!

Cecil: [laughing hysterically] Aahahaa, hahaha, he-hey there little guy! What’s your name?

[music]

PW: Oh, that was my grandfather’s middle name! [chuckles]

Cecil: How do you even spell that?

PW: Oh, B-U-M-P-F-B-U-M-B-F-F-F-G-G-G-W-silent Q. It’s Welsh. Also, my grandfather was a bird. He is no longer with us.

Cecil: Oh, I’m so sorry for you loss.

PW: What? Why?

Cecil: I mean your grandfather passing away and..

PW: It was just a bird. Calm down, Cecil. Anyway, the Mayor sent me to do an emergency press conference about ghosts.

Cecil: Excellent, go right ahead.

PW: Quiet over there, kid, I’m talking. 

People of Night Vale. There is a certain rock in the desert. The rock is cone-shaped, perfectly smooth and inverted, balancing precariously on its point. If you stand in the long shadow of the rock, you can see the entire universe in the midday sky. Stars you have never seen before, every. single. star. Constellation spinning out great and terrible forgings. You will understand that history is a myth, and humanity a fever dream, and you will also hear a very dull hum. Really dull. I got bored like 30 seconds into it. [sighs]

But the rock is really cool, OK? It is stone, white and carved into it is the entire text of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling thriller “Gone Girl”. The words are printed upside down and in Latin. Now, no one in Night Vale knows Latin, the only books on it are in the library and there’s no way any of us is going there. So I’m just assuming that it is “Gone Girl” because while I never have read the book, I’ve definitely seen the movie and it’s awesome. I’m not sure why they called movie “Furious 7” instead of “Gone Girl”, but it was really really good! So I’m just gonna say that’s a Latin translation of “Gone Girl” on the rock and not some ancient curse of rare religious relic.

Cecil: OK, is there a ghost anywhere in this story?

PW: I don’t have to say that there is a ghost in a story for there to be a ghost in a story, Cecil. Like 16 billion people have died since the lizard people first invented humans. Ghosts are everywhere, all the time! I mean, I mentioned a desert, do you need me to say that there is sand there too, or cacti, or shirtless 20-year-olds burning a giant effigy and buying 8-dollar bottles of water from corporate sponsors? Of course those things are there, it’s a desert! [sighs]

Cecil: So I’ve never seen this rock, but I’m actually really interested because I loved that movie too. I actually like the book just a little bit better. I’m actually not sure why they called the book “Ms. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs”, but it was still really good. So where can I go to get a look at this fascinating rock?

PW: I ate it.

Cecil: What- you what?!

PW: I. Ate. It. It wasn’t good, I mean I liked the movie way better than I liked the stone, the stone is terrible, ugh. I haven’t been able to use the restroom in weeks.

Cecil: Ugh.

PW: Really turned me off ever reading Gillian Flynn. Anyway kid, you wanna go back to City Hall? Alright, cool. I’ll give you a ride, just hop on this horse with me and let’s go.

Cecil: Oh wow, I just now noticed that you were sitting atop a horse.

PW:  Sure am. See you, Cecil! YAAAAOW!

Cecil: Oh, oh..

13. Ghost Story #3

Cecil: The finale of my ghost story. It was ten yeears agoo, on a night just like tonight. The man and his passenger drove through a road that cut through the low branches of the forest. You know, the (dry) of the desert, trees take strange forms. They writhe and loom, their shape a history of their tortured growth.

“Keep going,” the figure rasped. “Yeah I know the way,” the man said, and he did. Because the road, like this story, leads to only one place. A dark and secret place, from which no one ever returns. “Do you know why I was in that mill when it burned?” He did not. “It was because I loved that mill, and I couldn’t let it go alone. Where were you, Cecil? Where were you when that mill burned down?” “I dunno, I was, I was at work,” the man said. “I I I didn’t know it would burn down that day. I mean, I guess a part of me thought that nothing burns down and everything is forever.” “Old mills burn, Cecil. That’s what they do.” “I know I’m just I’m I’m trying to say I’m sorry that I wasn’t there.” “It’s OK. You’re here noow!” And the car reached the end of its road, the asphalt giving way to thick bramble. And the bramble rose and fell, like it was the hair on the back of a huge breathing (animal) and above them, the mill burned. It took up the whole sky. The whole night sky seemed like it was on fire, and the man, hardly able to breathe through this terror, turned and he met the face of the woman and she turned back to him and he saw, he saw the face of the woman clearly, and her face was gone. And in its place was the face that the fire had given her. And her lips opened into what would have been laughter, and she reached for him with what would have been her hand!

[quiet speech] Listeners… I’ve been lying to you. Or not lying, I’m sorry, but what’s the word for when you tell someone a fiction that you would like them believe about you, whatever that is but listen I can’t go on doing that, I need to tell you the truth. And I will. Coming up. The real story, the… the true ghost story that I have been trying to tell you. But first, the weather.

15. Epilogue

This is the true story. It is also a ghost story.

Ten years ago, on a night just like tonight, a man was driving down a dark road, a man who defines himself much of the time as a radio host. But on this night, he was just a driver. And he saw a figure ahead, on the side of the road, a brief pause in a long fog. But he knew exactly who it was, and he took five seconds to collect himself.

And he let her in. Because he know on this very stretch of road, one year to the day before that day that was ten years ago on a night just like tonight, a woman died. Oh, not the woman by the side of the road, she was still alive. Or she IS still alive. The woman who died was an old woman.

And this old woman did not die in a mill fire, there are no old mills in Night Vale, it had just been this woman’s time to go. And this way of passing was mundane. The way that death always is. But still. He mourned the loss of what had been a part of his life.

“Where you headed?” he said. And the woman from the side of the road spoke in a voice that sounded like – a normal voice, like anyone’s voice. “You know where,” it said. “You know where I want to go.” And he did know, because well, she called him and told him where she wanted to go. “I want to go home,” she said. And he looked into her eyes and he saw the familiar face – of his older sister, Abby. She looked tired because she, too, had been thinking about that woman who had died. Because before that old woman had been just a memory. She’d been their mother. The unveiling of the gravestone had been that day and… There were stories to tell. Too many stories, and the weight of them started to seem physical. And now this, her car breaking down on the side of the road?

“The service was nice,” she said. “I think Mom would have…” she said. “Yeah um, yeah. Mom would have,” he said.  

See, my mother disappeared when I was only 14. Abby had just started school, but she had to drop out to return home and raise me, and I thought that Mom would be back at any moment, like maybe she was away on business. Our out for a walk. Or just hiding.

But Mom did not come back, not for my entire childhood. And I was petulant and subversive, and Abby was reserved and controlling and she blamed me for having dropped out of school and I blamed her for just… not being Mom.

But in our adulthood, my mother did return home, sick and sorry to two children who barely spoke to each other in the morning. But we came back together to be with her and Mom… [softly] She looked older than she was. And her face – was gone. And in its place was the face that time had given her. She’s lost many battles to herself. Alcohol, debt, and lack of treatment or even awareness of a mental illness.

See, some creatures have claws, and and and and some have have pincers and and and some have venom, but some creatures have wings. And Mom flew away, when all other defenses failed her. But still, Abby and I started talking to each other, once again, trying to heal ourselves and navigating that dark and narrow path of forgiveness. And then a few months later – Mom left us again. This time for good. And a year after that on a night just like tonight, a man drove his sister home. And she gets out of the car, and and and she goes into her house, and and and he drives away, it’s it’s simple it’s this, then this, then this, then this, then this.

You see, the reality of ghost stories is that they would be comforting, not scary, if they were true like reassuring proof that we go on, after the after. Or a chance to speak with someone that we will never be able to speak with again, but instead we live in a story about us, and about our relationships, and about our families, and the choices of our families going back and back and back. And this story in the same way that a ghost story is scary because it is – unresolved. And filled with symbolism that we just don’t understand.

And family history, after all, is just another kind of ghost story. So ten years ago, on a night just like tonight, when the fog lay heavy on the lowlands, a man drove his sister home. And eleven years on a night just like tonight, their mother died, and it didn’t –mean- anything, but it happened. And the sister stood by and watched it happen and the brother, talked on the radio and didn’t even know that it had happened until afterwards, and there was nothing that they could have done. But still they regretted everything they didn’t do, and when she called to tell him what had happened, they were both silent for ten. full. seconds.

[sighing] [long beat] Thirty years ago, on a night just like tonight I, I tripped on this wire, here at the radio station, and now sometimes I can still feel it. Fifty years ago on a night just like tonight, a baby was born. Oh, no one important to this story, babies are always being born. A hundred years ago there was a war, or not, you know, a hundred years ago exactly but more or less a hundred years ago on a night just like tonight, there was a war. On a night just like tonight 300 years ago, a woman picked up a handful of grass on a sunny day and realized she was not living the life that she wanted to live. She was not sure why she picked up that handful of grass, she was not sure why she did that either. On a night just like tonight 600 years ago, feudalism. [long beat] I think. I’m actually not quite sure when feudalism was.

Oh, a 1,000 years ago on a night just like tonight, a man had the best pear he would ever have. But he didn’t know it at the time, he just thought, “Wow, this is a really good pear. 1,002 years ago on a night nothing like tonight, the same man would have the worst pear he would ever have. Oh, but he knew it at the time, he was like, “Agh, this is a terrible pear!” 3,000 years ago on a night just like tonight, people scraped in the dirt for food or they looked for it in trees or, they reached their hands into water and came out clutching what they found there, which in essence was another day of life, and they took that, wriggling, into their bodies and consumed it. 22,000 years ago on a night just like tonight – trees. That one I’m entirely sure of. There were a lot of trees then. And now but then, more of them now. 103,000 years ago on a night just like tonight, a child felt very bad about something that he had one, but not knowing how to make up for it, he ran away. But then having nowhere else to go, he returned home the next day to a family that had already forgiven him. 100 million years ago on a night just like tonight, there was (-) and stars and accidental beauty that would not be described as beauty for millions of years, and colors that were not colors just yet, just a different type of light.

And millions of years later, a man would drive his sister home because he loved her, and because it was their story to tell, they were living in a ghost story that did not have the comfort of fear, but merely a dull ache and tangle, at the heart of it. And millions of years before that, a volcano erupted and for just one moment, it looked like a fountain of jewels, but no one was around to see it happen. And hundreds of millions of years later, there would be babies born at every moment and everyone would see everything happening and it would always be so loud, but millions upon millions of years ago, before ghost stories, before even stories, it was quiet sometimes, sometimes it was quiet for a long time. Hundreds of millions of years ago it was very, very quiet for a very long time.

[long silence] And then of course, there was small talk. Laughter and love. Love of every kind. And getting to sit next to your sister, watching her daughter, your niece, in her first ever ballet fight. Feeling – lucky to be haunted by the family that you have. Huh. Well. That’s my story submission.

And it looks like I got it in just in time, as the City Council indicates that the ghost story competition is coming to a close, and they will announce their dinner very soon. Win-winner! Winner! They will announce the winner very soon, that’s yeah mm hm, yeah.

Stay tuned next for that uncertain moment of silence between the last word spoken and the first applause. And from a night that is so much like tonight, as to almost be – indistinguishable.

Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

[applause]

Meg Bashwiner: Welcome to Night Vale is a production of Night Vale Presents. It is written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor with original music by Disparition. [applause]

[oasis-nadrama]

The evolution of politics in the original Alien trilogy

Oasis Nadrama, 31/01/2019

[Content warning: rape, misogyny, homophobia]

  [Artwork by H.R. Giger]

  ALIEN: A FEMINIST TALE

 The central figure of the movie is the heroine, Ripley. Even if she ended up sexualized by the director in the final scene, and also in a heterosexual relationship with Dallas in removed material, Ripley was originally designed as agender – the character could be played by a man or a woman. And it shows in the story’s structure, her actions and fundamental personality are not gendered. There is no particular vulnerability in this woman, there is no exaggerate display of empathy, or “girlish” passions, or anything else stereotypically feminine. Ellen Ripley is a complete and focused character, often taking strong and autonomous initiatives, such as obstructing the exploration team from coming back to the ship, getting more data on Ash, or reactivating the murderous android to get even more data. Good information and firm decisions are the sinews of war, and nothing will stop her from obtaining the former and reaching the latter. In the fight for survival, Ripley may be the most proactive member of the crew – and that’s why she’s the one making it. And who is her best ally in the ship? Neither her male coworkers, who constantly talk down to her and dispute her positions, or her quickly collapsing female coworker… but rather the feminine-coded computer appropriately named Mother, whose cryosleep and interface rooms are the only places on the ship with clean light and warm colors. Despite her limitations, this maternal figure is a powerful protector.

 What threat is Ripley facing? The threat of rape. For the first movie is about rape. Not merely in the action – the invasive xenomorph reproduction cycle is based on the nonconsensual penetration and insemination of other species –, Alien was written from the start with rape in mind.

“One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex… I said ‘That’s how I’m going to attack the audience; I’m going to attack them sexually. And I’m not going to go after the women in the audience, I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number.”

(Dan O’Bannon)

 The extraterrestrial being is not phallic by mere chance; it is an incarnation of masculine violence.

 The audiences and critics back then understood pretty well Alien is a feminist movie. Also largely realized today is the anti-corporate message – as a faceless presence as the unamed Weyland-Yutani –which, like the rape and heroine features, goes way further than Parker’s line about the “damn company”. For Alien is a slow movie, often displaying laborious situations and actions. It takes the Nostromo crew thirty minutes to reach the subject matter, and this time is not spent in character development or precise worldbuilding, but rather in processes: go out of hypersleep, wake up, talk about the primes, consult with Mother, prepare the landing, etc. Most of these details are generally left to elliptical narration, but in Alien, they are the star, they are crucial. Everything is slow, heavy, this world is a gigantic, sultry machine whose Nostromo is a mere reflection of. This is the face of capitalism, a system bound to trap, enslave, use and discard humans. And yet these humans only talk about money, about orders, about regulations, and the first thing they think about when they have the opportunity to answer a distress signal (even more important, a non-human distress signal) is “What about the money?”. Capitalism destroys social link, empathy, curiosity and leaves only in place the function, the action to work to earn money, money becoming the only measure of value, pleasure, survival and freedom. In this system, people are worth nothing if they do not work to obtain money; they do not get the various pleasures of life if they do not have money; they do not survive if they do not have money; they do not have choices if they do not have money. So it is work, work, work, for money, money, money, and thus the worker becomes a cog in the machine, they are deshumanized and reduced to their function, and trapped in a factory-prison. Even in space, the ultimate place of freedom and infinite possibilities, they are surrounded by a gigantic machine, the mirror image of the custodial system.

 The extraterrestrial being is not biomechanical by mere chance; it is an incarnation of industrial violence.

 And, just like the creature mixes phallic and mechanical imagery, the feminist and anticapitalist thematics should not be considered as contradictory, or even simply coexisting: they are two faces of the same coin. They complete each other. For in true kyriarchic fashion, patriarchy completes capitalism. Heterocentrism is a facet of production (to produce workers through reproduction) and women are the lowest proletariat (the proletariat of the proletariat, supporting the male workers with their free domestic and emotional labour).

 In patriarchal imagery, the Man is a strong, powerful figure, who does not need to feel or to express his emotions. He is neither a listener or a “whiner”, he’s a warrior, he’s a worker. The Man is a cold statue going through life with ever-repeted motions, the face of a purposeful, productive society, and he will produce goods, services and other Men to keep the machine moving.

The patriarchal Man is a robot. Therefore, as a traitor, a protector to the creature, an agent of the faceless company, and the wannabe murderer of Ripley, Ash comes as no surprise: he is the synthesis of ALL of the movie’s thematics. He is the Man, the Robot and the Corporate Machine altogether. He is the epitome of deshumanization, the Man without humanity, feeling or even flesh. And despite his robotic nature, he’s biomechanical, as if he was a brother to the creature, Alien and android linked as twin incarnations of the same ills. Furthermore, Ash is sexualized through both his seminal (milky) blood and his agression: he tries to kill Ripley by choking her with a rolled-up newspaper, another oral rape echoing the parasite’s action. Ash has no feelings, only a function, the function to work/kill/rape.

 Today, Alien can appear as toothless feminism. Amongst other thinkers, the queer afrofeminist writer Caroline Colvin asked the question Is Alien still a feminist film?, a pertinent interrogation, opening a highroad to more in-depth analysis. But for now, we can notice it is not this toothless: it is a very consistent piece, a specific attack on patriarchy and capitalism. It is a radical feminist/anticapitalist movie.

   ALIEN$: ANTITHESIS

 The first movie was self-sufficient, and the sequel a capitalist action by itself: in this society of business and rentability, a successful movie needed an episode 2. This initial decision came to condition the entire development of the work; unlike Alien, the singular product of the reunion of various creative minds (most of them originally assembled for Jodorowsky’s stillbirth project Dune), Alien 2 was going to be a company product. Most of the artists behind Alien being discarded or simply not interessed in producing a sequel, the project quickly became James Cameron’s baby. Cameron took the final decisions regarding the film: it was gonna be bigger, louder, with a lot of Aliens and a super-Alien, a Queen. The creature had always displayed insect-like features, so why not bring the logic to its end and make it a space ant?

 So what is there to say about AlienS? Not much, really. It is a good movie, a very good movie even, an extremely efficient, clean, sharp blockbuster. And… it is extremely devoid of deeper meaning, mostly being about the survival of two species, through the fight of two enemy mothers.

 To be fair, the story does interrogate toxic masculinity. After Alien’s often arrogant masculine crewmembers come stereotypical “alpha” males. The Space Marines want to be manly; from their first appearance and initial bravado, they exude a desperate need of strength and recognition. Even the two female Marines are tomboys who gladly participate in the virile arms race. Take this early dialogue for instance:

Hudson: Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?

Vasquez: No, have you?

Pushing further the idea of absurd masculine assurance, Cameron only builds up these caricatures in order to set them for the fall. He wants to break these ridiculous superhuman figures, he wants these hercules to fail, to collapse and to disappear in this sci-fi version of the Vietnam war. Quickly, facing a stealthy and foreign enemy, the Marines are brought to their knees.

 But this time, things are not so streamlined as they are in Alien. For the toxic masculinity’s failure is only superficial, and other characters betray underlying problems.

For example, neither Bishop or Burke manages to convey anything meaningful about gender or corporate thematics; they appear as toned-down narrative sons of Ash, the android and the traitor now separate. Bishop is even repurposed in Cameron’s big project for the cast, the construction of a family, part of an even bigger project: the repurposing of Ripley.

 Rather than an individual struggling to survive, the director turns Ellen Ripley into a champion of her species – therefore she must incarnate her species/society’s values.

This time, she is not valued through her qualities of determination and search of information, but through her sheer bravery, physical courage, and her ability to work various weapons and vehicles, and even the Power Loader, a large humanoid machine. This time, the machine is not a vast and dirty trap as the Nostromo was, but a clean, friendly tool. The power structures of society, its workings and Ripley’s very work are not oppressive anymore; they are means to an end, they are a friendly thing she can use and leave as she sees fits. Furthermore, the tall, heavy, square Power Loader is visually a masculine-looking machine, as if Ripley was putting on a costume of masculinity. The tools (spaceship, dropship, armored car, tracking watch, weapons, Power Loaders) may be a little masculine, and lent by society, the army and the men around Ripley, but in the end, their only important feature is their usefulness. Their purpose. Their function.

 And what is the main function of a woman in patriarchy? To give birth.

 So Ripley is reinvented as a mother, first in the past (we learn the existence of Amanda Ripley, her late child), then in the present with the symbolical daughter Newt, and finally in the future with the budding romance between her and Hicks. Facing the threat of a mother of another species, she’s brought back to her real purpose in Cameron’s eyes. Big Jim is unable to imagine a strong woman without making her a mother, and basically turns Ripley into Sarah Connor. And like Sarah Connor in the soon-to-come Terminator 2, Ripley is given an entire family: a husband, a daughter, and even a paternal uncle, Bishop, who will be able to save Newt during the final fight.

 Ripley is no longer a character, she’s an ideal, a worker/warrior/mother ideal. An ideal of function and usefulness. An essentialist, productivist figure. For Cameron, women can be strong as long as they are workers, as long as they are mothers. They need the function, they are the function. While not misogynistic or procapitalist per se, AlienS is definitely a centrist, conservative piece.

   ALIEN 3: SYNTHESIS

 The next story immediately refuses and destroys whatever Cameron had built. In an iconoclast move, Fincher kills off all of Ripley’s family, only leaving Bishop as a half-dead creature, a ghost coming back for beyond the grave with a message: the Alien is here, you’re fucked.

 You’re fucked, it’s also what the superintendent tells Ripley. And indeed she is literally fucked – this time, she’s the one getting raped by the hostile lifeform, at the very beginning of the movie. She’s impregnated. And she’s almost raped in a more conventional way by human beings later in the movie. This time, far from being an ideal, an almost legendary figure of power, function and motherness, Ripley is a victim and a survivor. She’s a broken cog in the machine, she will fight against the machine, and once again she’s all alone in an hostile setting.

 Alien 3 mirrors Alien in more ways than one, and the spectacular return to the franchise’s roots is displayed through the environment: once again, vastness, dirtiness, heaviness, a nightmarish labyrinth of metal, the decor equivalent to the creature. As in the Nostromo, the entity does not need mucus secretions to blend in; it looks like the pipes, chains and wirings, and the pipes, chains and wirings look like it. This time, we are in a literal prison, the industrial society laying bare in all its ugliness; in this mechanical and destructive system, humans are unarmed, formatted, their skull shaved and their neck stamped with a barcode. More than ever, they are prisoners, workers and products. More than ever, they are also monsters, destroyed by society, dangers to each other. It makes sense that after criticizing the casual misogyny of the Nostromo crew, then the more aggressive toxic masculinity of the Space Marines, we end up with the most toxic and frontally male representants of masculin oppressions.

 In some ways, Alien 3 is a feminist failure, for it put Ripley in the role of the victim and receiver of the rape, something the series had avoided until then, something weirdly prophesied by the female colon victim in AlienS’ chestburster scene. In another text, Monster pregnancy and misogyny: putting women back “where they belong”, I talked about that, about the concerning fact that a series which was initially written about the masculine fear of rape came to mainly represent women being attacked and used as incubators by the Aliens.

But thankfully, and in mirror fashion to the superficial fauxminism of AlienS hiding conservative values, Alien 3 goes way beyond the fact Ripley was inseminated. The offscreen rape is a mere starting point to her final thematic evolution.  

 Ellen Ripley gets closer to the creature by adopting an androgynous look, by bearing an Alien herself – her role becomes more ambiguous and yet clearer.

 First, we get back to the seeker of truth of the first movie. Gone is the Ripley-worker, the Ripley-warrior, the Ripley-mother, or even the Ripley-wife: she mainly sleeps with Clemens in order to distract him, and answers “No” when he asks if she’s married. Once again our heroine is mainly looking for information. What happened to the EEV? Is Newt infected? What does the Company want? Each time, Ripley is rewarded with answers, and the final one will determine her final choice.

 But what does Ripley want?

 Ripley is not fighting for herself, she’s fighting for the survival of her species. And this time, she has seen the truth of the world, she has seen the prison. She fully knows the prison, the Company, the machine of society does not care about anyone, and destroys everyone.

 “What makes you think they're gonna care about a bunch of lifers who found God at the ass-end of space? You really think they're going to let you interfere with their plans for this thing? They think we're crud, and they don't give a fuck about one friend of yours that's died. Not one.”

 This time, the survival of the species doesn’t come from traditional, patriarchal, productive values; when Bishop II promises Ripley she can still have children, a family, the idea seems outright absurd. Ellen Ripley refuses her function.

Nuclear family, a traditional maternal role, productivity are not answers to the challenges of existence; rather, they are illusions and obstacles. For our heroine, the species, or the world, needs to be preserved in a much larger sense: the world and its well-being are absolute values. In this way, her philosophical alignment runs parallel to the faith of Dillon’s cult, for Ripley believes in something higher than corporate power and traditional gender roles. She believes in life, in freedom, in survival, in agency and autonomy. She knows the Company does not care about any of that and will endanger and destroy all of those without hesitation.

 Ripley’s final line is “You’re crazy” and in the end it is the only answer one can give to patriarchy, capitalism, and all kinds of systems of domination. They make no sense, they have no deeper purpose beyond short-term profit for the privileged and the reassurance of an apparently functional system. And these systems oppress, and these systems destroy. They are akin to the Alien’s face, to the secret behind the eyeless features of this dark phallic and biomechanical beast: beyond the dome, there’s no intelligence, there’s a human skull. Beyond the efficiency of domination, there’s only death.

[cakandivali]

Why tech CEOs are in love with doomsayers

Latest Updates - M. N. & Associates - By Nellie BowlesFuturist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”But lately, Harari is anxious about something much more personal. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley CEOs love him so?“One possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?” a puzzled Harari said one afternoon in October. “For me, that’s more worrying. Maybe I’m missing something?”When Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times.“I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede or shatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.”Harari, who has a Ph.D. from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher and a history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Harari tied together knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over. Translated into English in 2014, the book went on to sell more than 8 million copies and made Harari a celebrity intellectual.He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshipped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it.”His prophecies might have made him a Cassandra in Silicon Valley, or at the very least an unwelcome presence. Instead, he has had to reconcile himself to the locals’ strange delight. “If you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.”‘Brave New World’ as Aspirational ReadingHarari agreed to let me tag along for a few days on his travels through the Valley, and one afternoon in September, I waited for him outside X’s offices, in Mountain View, while he spoke to the Alphabet employees inside. After a while, he emerged: a shy, thin, bespectacled man with a dusting of dark hair. Harari has a sort of owlish demeanor, in that he looks wise and also does not move his body very much, even while glancing to the side. His face is not particularly expressive, with the exception of one rogue eyebrow. When you catch his eye, there is a wary look — like he wants to know if you, too, understand exactly how bad the world is about to get.At the Alphabet talk, Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less-free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive.Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn’t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”He was slouching a little. Socializing exhausts him.As we boarded the black gull-wing Tesla Harari had rented for his visit, he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World,” which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Harari said, often think it sounds great. “Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it,” he said. “And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.”An Alphabet media relations manager later reached out to Harari’s team to tell him to tell me that the visit to X was not allowed to be part of this story. The request confused and then amused Harari. It is interesting, he said, that unlike politicians, tech companies do not need a free press, since they already control the means of message distribution.He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. “Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,” Harari said.Still, their enthusiastic embrace of his work makes him uncomfortable. “It’s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don’t want to frighten them,” Harari said. “They can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.”Dinner, With a Side of Medically Engineered ImmortalityCEO testimonials to Harari’s acumen are indeed not hard to come by. “I’m drawn to Yuval for his clarity of thought,” Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter and Square, wrote in an email, going on to praise a particular chapter on meditation.And Hastings wrote: “Yuval’s the anti-Silicon Valley persona — he doesn’t carry a phone and he spends a lot of time contemplating while off the grid. We see in him who we wish we were.” He added, “His thinking on AI and biotech in his new book pushes our understanding of the dramas to unfold.”At the dinner Hastings co-hosted, academics and industry leaders debated the dangers of data collection, and to what degree longevity therapies will extend the human life span. (Harari has written that the ruling class will vastly outlive the useless.) “That evening was small, but could be magnified to symbolize his impact in the heart of Silicon Valley,” said Fei-Fei Li, an artificial intelligence expert who pushed internally at Google to keep secret the company’s efforts to process military drone footage for the Pentagon. “His book has that ability to bring these people together at a table, and that is his contribution.”A few nights earlier, Harari spoke to a sold-out theater of 3,500 in San Francisco. One ticket-holder walking in, an older man, told me it was brave and honest for Harari to use the term “useless class.”The author was paired for discussion with the prolific intellectual Sam Harris, who strode onstage in a gray suit and well-starched white button-down. Harari was less at ease, in a loose suit that crumpled around him, his hands clasped in his lap as he sat deep in his chair. But as he spoke about meditation — Harari spends two hours each day and two months each year in silence — he became commanding. In a region where self-optimization is paramount and meditation is a competitive sport, Harari’s devotion confers hero status.He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like “the customer is always right” and “follow your heart,” and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale.Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on building the future, Harari continued, while most of the world’s people are not even needed enough to be exploited. “Now you increasingly feel that there are all these elites that just don’t need me,” he said. “And it’s much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited.”The useless class he describes is uniquely vulnerable. “If a century ago you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can’t shoot all of us because they need us,” he said, citing army service and factory work.Now it is becoming less clear why the ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. “You’re totally expendable,” he told the audience.This, Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”On Sept. 14, he published an essay in The Guardian assailing another old trope — that “the voter knows best.”“If humans are hackable animals, and if our choices and opinions don’t reflect our free will, what should the point of politics be?” he wrote. “How do you live when you realize ... that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.”‘OK, So Maybe Humankind Is Going to Disappear’Harari and his husband, Itzik Yahav, who is also his manager, rented a small house in Mountain View for their visit, and one morning I found them there making oatmeal. Harari observed that as his celebrity in Silicon Valley has risen, tech fans have focused on his lifestyle.“Silicon Valley was already kind of a hotbed for meditation and yoga and all these things,” he said. “And one of the things that made me kind of more popular and palatable is that I also have this bedrock.” He was wearing an old sweatshirt and denim track pants. His voice was quiet, but he gestured widely, waving his hands, hitting a jar of spatulas.Harari grew up in Kiryat Ata, near Haifa, and his father worked in the arms industry. His mother, who worked in office administration, now volunteers for her son handling his mail; he gets about 1,000 messages a week. Yahav’s mother is their accountant.Most days, Harari doesn’t use an alarm clock, and wakes up between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., then meditates and has a cup of tea. He works until 4 or 5 p.m., then does another hour of meditation, followed by an hourlong walk, maybe a swim, and then TV with Yahav.The two met 16 years ago through the dating site Check Me Out. “We are not big believers in falling in love,” Harari said. “It was more a rational choice.”“We met each other and we thought, ‘OK, we’re — OK, let’s move in with each other,’ ” Yahav said.Yahav became Harari’s manager. During the period when English-language publishers were cool on the commercial viability of “Sapiens” — thinking it too serious for the average reader and not serious enough for the scholars — Yahav persisted, eventually landing the Jerusalem-based agent Deborah Harris. One day when Harari was away meditating, Yahav and Harris finally sold it at auction to Random House in London.Today, they have a team of eight based in Tel Aviv working on Harari’s projects. Director Ridley Scott and documentarian Asif Kapadia are adapting “Sapiens” into a TV show, and Harari is working on children’s books to reach a broader audience.Yahav used to meditate, but has recently stopped. “It was too hectic,” he said while folding laundry. “I couldn’t get this kind of huge success and a regular practice.” Harari remains dedicated.“If it were only up to him, he would be a monk in a cave, writing things and never getting his hair cut,” Yahav said, looking at his husband. “Can I tell that story?”Harari said no.“On our first meeting,” Yahav said, “he had cut his hair by himself. And it was a very bad job.”The couple are vegan, and Harari is particularly sensitive to animals. He identified the sweatshirt he was wearing as one he got just before one of his dogs died. Yahav cut in to ask if he could tell another story; Harari seemed to know exactly what he meant, and said absolutely not.“In the middle of the night,” Yahav said, “when there is a mosquito, he will catch him and take him out.”Being gay, Harari said, has helped his work — it set him apart to study culture more clearly because it made him question the dominant stories of his own conservative Jewish society. “If society got this thing wrong, who guarantees it didn’t get everything else wrong as well?” he said.“If I was a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment,” Harari added. “OK, so maybe humankind is going to disappear — OK, let’s just observe.”For fun, the couple watches TV. It is their primary hobby and topic of conversation, and Yahav said it was the only thing from which Harari is not detached.They just finished “Dear White People,” and they loved the Australian series “Please Like Me.” That night, they had plans to either meet Facebook executives at company headquarters or watch the YouTube show “Cobra Kai.”Harari left Silicon Valley the next weekend. Soon, in December, he will enter an ashram outside Mumbai, India, for another 60 days of silence. Chartered Accountant For consultng. Contact Us: http://bit.ly/bombay-ca

[anton-chigurhs-friendo-blog]

Credo

felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,

quique metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum,

subjecit pedibus strepitumque acherontis avari [1]  

                                            ~Virgil

  Credo

Canto I

 The Rain in Spain

  “the more religious a nation”

said Ayn Rand

(due to its anti-body anti-sex thought)

“the more varied

and violently obscene

its four-letter-word repertoire—

the Spanish”

she said

“are the most obscene”

 Hemingway agreed—

saying their blasphemy had to keep pace

with the austerity of their religion

 and there’s that part in War and Peace

after Balashev dines with Napoleon

and the emperor asks if it’s true

that Moscow’s called Holy Moscow

as “such a great number of churches

is a sign of backwardness—

nowhere else in Europe

is there anything like it”

 “I beg your majesty’s pardon”

says Balashev

“but there is Spain”

   where

during the Lisbon quake

of All Saints Day

cathedrals collapsed into rubble

killing thousands—

yet taverns and whorehouses

came through unscathed

 when these Spaniards stumbled upon the Americas

the Arawak brought them food

water

gifts

“with fifty men” Columbus said

“we could vanquish them….

let us in the name of the Holy Trinity

send home all the slaves

that can be sold”

 but so many died on the return voyage

that he set them to mining gold—

and those who did not fill their quota

had their hands cut off

 Stanley Kubrick called civilized man

an ignoble savage—

irrational

brutal

weak

unable to be objective about anything

(where his own interests were involved)

and he said that any attempt to create social institutions

based on a false view of the nature of man

was likely doomed to failure

 Tecumseh’s brother

Tenskwatawa

said this civilization came to America

as a great ugly crab

vomited forth from the sea

claws full of mud and seaweed

the spawn of an enormous evil serpent

that lived under the ocean

 and asked what he thought of this white culture

an Osage named Big Soldier said

“I see and admire your manner of living

your good warm houses

your extensive fields of corn

gardens

cows

horses

wagons

a thousand machines I know not the use of—

you are able to clothe yourselves

even from weeds and grass

you’ve the power to subdue every animal

and are surrounded by slaves

everything about you is in chains

yet

you are slaves yourselves

 I hear I should exchange my presents for yours

yet I too should become a slave—

as for myself I was born free

raised free

and will die free”

   Canto II

 hos epi to polu

                                                   “know in thyself and all one self-same soul

                                                                  banish the dream that sunders part from whole”

                                                                          ~from an anonymous Hindu poem

  an individual atom may decay

today

or in a billion years

with no way of telling when

yet their behavior in large numbers

is predictable

for science must be broad in order to work—

it develops in the sense of evermore general laws

 such with anthropology

 Gerry Spence called it the cluster-concept—

people’s personalities

viewpoints

prejudices

come in bunches

like grapes

and if you examine one grape in a bunch

you get a good general idea

of what the rest of the grapes are like

yet generalizations have garnered an ill-reputation

for being liable to exceptions

(those shaded unions in every venn diagram)

but in the long run these anomalies

hold little bearing

as broad anamorphosic effects

are produced by the accumulation

of plethora of minuscule causes—

and subtle differences in many individuals

create huge distinctions in cultures—  

sunny days in Seattle are nice

as are storms in the desert

but it takes legions of rainy days to create a rainforest

and the absence of a few

will not turn it to a wasteland

thus

playing blackjack with life’s probabilities

is not gambling

if

you count your cards wisely—

for generalizations oft point toward likelihoods

and the mind would be helpless without them

as in general liberals tend to be smarter than conservatives

as it takes less intelligence

to embrace stasis

than to welcome pragmatic novelty  

as in general people with lapdogs

are more intelligent than those with pit-bulls

and in general people who enjoy concertos

are brighter than those who like country

as in general patrons of Masterpiece Theatre

are sharper than those who watch nascar

and in general where there is dullness of mind

there too is an excess of fertility—

science is based on observable facts

these are observable facts

 Canto III

 Land of Jewelers

                                                                   “men never do evil so completely and cheerfully

                                            as when they do it from religious conviction”

                                                                                                        ~Blaise Pascal

 the time revolution of the 1860s

rendered the Garden of Eden

into Mesopotamia

where a left-brain farmers’ revolution

spread out in concentric circles

stretching west like kudzu

sowing seeds in its wake

that would germinate into factory labor

contractors

miners

dam-builders

real-estate developers

bankers

corporate lawyers

and CEOs

who confuse information with knowledge

wealth with security

credulity with faith

and gluttony with virtue

allowing the arithmetic of finance

to dictate profit-driven lives

that slakest still not the thirst of greed—

and as revolutions tend toward excess

holistic thinkers were cast from this garden

for the analytic western mind yields obedient soldiers

who will travel to every quarter of the firmament

to slaughter people they don’t know

over philosophies of which no one is certain

philistine weathervanes inflexible to reason

yet spinning in the tempests of popular opinion—

as the most pious Baptists

would have made the most devout Muslims

had they been but born into that faith—

when these opinions

(so often spoken of in tides)

turn against them

they swim with the current

dictating values

in the same manner they dictate fashion

giving no more thought to normative ethics

than what they wear to the office—

cookie-cutter personalities in cookie-cutter houses

shooting like invasive weeds

from once Edenic forest—

a civilization forged upon Vulcan’s anvil

and founded

(according to Freud)

upon the repression of instincts—

brimming with a false sense of security

fostered by clergy

and short-term individual self-interest

that weaves in its aftermath an elaborate latticework

of environmental degradation

fueled by men who can describe a grain of sand

in great detail

but know not

nor care

what the beach looks like

as making rent and feeding children

too often warrants mindless toil

that

ipso facto

damages the environment

and

devours time better spent on reflection

this

in a life where it takes near forty hours a week

of omnivorous reading

to even begin to understand the world

 this is why Robert Frost called the brain

a wonderful organ

that starts working the moment you wake

and does not stop

until you get to the office—

and it was of this left-brain work-ethic that Thoreau spoke

when he said the most amazing thing

about the pyramids

was that so many degraded men

would spend their lives constructing a tomb

for some ambitious fool

 and this side of the neocortex

responsible for logic

is

oddly

the side most likely to defy it

as this left-brained person is creative

in that he is imaginative enough

to allow himself to believe that which is most convenient—  

for I know people in New Madrid

who think dinosaur fossils were planted

to test our faith

reminding me of another Osage

who upon getting up and walking out of a sermon

(about Jonah and the whale)

said “we know the white man will lie

but this is the biggest lie

we’ve ever heard”

 and it was a Seneca

Red Jacket

who said these missionaries could make the bible talk to suit themselves

“if we had no land or money to be cheated out of” he said

“I doubt these blackcoats would trouble themselves

about our good hereafter”

yet

if the honorable light of western civilization

were run through a prism

it would split into art

music

literature

philosophy

and the science to which we attribute

a scientific method written in pencil

that invites challenge

as theology avoids scrutiny

and is stamped in ink—

ink that is bleeding into a rorschach stain

of the san marco dragon [2]

spreading exponentially

into a nightmarish reflection of the basilica

rupturing into temples for the worship of mammon

over a Venice flooded by receding glaciers

  expand or expire

a Sophie’s Choice decision

a pyrrhic victory

 a whitewashed tomb

   Canto IV

 The Beatitudes

                                                   “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology

                                                                                of the cancer cell” ~Edward Abbey

  people are geographically

sexually-selected biological organisms

not fallen from grace

but arisen from primordial earth

subject to the same laws of evolution

and constructed of the same cells

as every other creature—

cells that

(as Robert Pirsig so eloquently set forth)

“make sweat and snot and phlegm…

belch and bleed and fuck and fart…

piss and shit and vomit

and squeeze out more bodies just like themselves

all covered with blood and placental slime

that grow and squeeze out more bodies”

 and the human brain

(being part and parcel body)

begets a mind as shaped by these laws

as are eyes and thumbs—

just as the child’s psyche

has been sculpted by eons of evolution

to want to sleep between its parents

for it was under cloak of night

that the child’s very real killers lurked—

Plato said we can easily forgive this child

for being afraid of the dark

“the real tragedy” he said

“is when men are afraid of the light”

 but familiarity too blinds

and proficient perspective is a matter of distance—

as out the window unfolds the greatest mass-extinction

since the demise of the dinosaurs

whose soil was this

before Kinko’s/FedEx covered it in concrete?

whose blood spilled here?

what love lost?

 and though sharp lines be often drawn at peril—

this right-brained individual

is (normally) left

and the left-brained individual

is (by and large) right

and these hemispheres of the brain

analysis – synthesis

correlate generally with the hemispheres of politics

republican – democrat

and the hemispheres of earth

east – west

socialist – capitalist—

each hemisphere viewing the world

from a distinct vantage point

thus

understanding it incompatibly

and seeing each the other askance

giving credence to the old dictum  

where the dog gave meat to the ox

and the ox offered straw to the dog

and both went hungry—

as the left is equipped with a microscope

loupe

calculator

and the right with binoculars

globe

and telescope—

a telescope that has

historically

landed people in worse strife

than microscopes

(or even calculators)

for in a pedantic left-brained world

the truth will not set you free

as holistic tools produce holistic views

grounded in cynical reality

and harboring not ‘love’ of truth

(for quotidian minds

so often find it difficult to love that which is ugly)

but an innate respect for unadulterated honesty

as the suffering of great men

most reflects itself in marble busts

for the finest artists do tend toward despair—

ignorance is bliss

and depression is

far too often

a sickness for the intelligent—

but genuine progress has always stemmed

from dissatisfied people

 this right hemisphere

with its inherent aversion for caution and thrift

covets a life without fletchings

generally geared toward independence

empathy

generosity

and practical simplicity

freedom – honor – things of the spirit

and an affinity for the environment—

Kant having once said that loving beautiful art

was no indication that a person was decent

but he said that seeing beauty in nature

was the sign of a good soul

 and according to Aldo Leopold

though we strive for peace in our time

too much safety

yields

in the long run only danger

 the left hemisphere

emits a more optimistic disposition

geared toward collaboration—

as evolving in harsher climes

necessitates alliance for survival

and a monotonous life of redundant tasks

that fosters a conservative aversion toward change—

and it is this western mind

that conceived a western cornucopia  

that has poured forth its fruit out over a world

whose fate can now be calculated

by repeatedly punching the multiplication button

on a calculator

(like the king’s chessboard)

or watching the first three minutes of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy—

for the same inertia that keeps a people static

keeps them propelled along a destructive path

once thrust in that direction—

and a pendulum is inclined to swing

until it is forced to stop

 one and a half billion people at the start of the 20th century

three billion by 1960

in excess of seven billion now

and over twice as many hemorrhaging forth

every month

than walked the earth at the dawn of agriculture—

to even suggest

that an unchecked geometrically swelling population

where the least intelligent people

rapidly out-reproduce the more gifted

is anything other than a prescription for disaster  

is akin to denying 2 x 2 = 4

nor 4 x 4: 16

ad infinitum

yet instead of being restrained

we celebrate such behavior

with television programs like 19 Kids and Counting

where a conservative Arkansas family

breed like lemmings—

I doubt one of whom know

who Thomas Malthus even was

this

in a country where the average college student

can identify over a thousand corporate logos

yet cannot at the same time name ten plants or animals

native to his own soil

 and this western mind

harbors further subdivisions

as the teutonic mind tends toward rigidity

militarism

rules and authority

in a way the gallic does not

arbeit macht frei

and it lies within the boundaries of possibility

that the holocaust could never have happened in France

        and though they’ve begat their Bachs

Dürers

and Beethovens

this great germanic burden

dovetails snugly with their general excellence  

as engineers and scientists—

for the more analytic mind

derives morality primarily from social pressure

and is therefore conformist by nature—

medieval Germans had a saying too

stadtluft macht frei [3]

but much has changed

 and though all and sundry use both minds

every outlook is a matter of degree

dependent largely

upon which side of the cerebral meridian

the bulk of a personality dwells—

nor is it just an issue of lateralization

for there is the vertical y-axis of intelligence

creating a quadratic line-graph in which we all reside

and though deviations steer human history

the numeric strength of these general antipodes drive it

and though we cannot have larger meanings

without the small

this graph is far too heavily laden

in the lower-left quadrant

for the world to remain a sustainable biome

 great minds think in epochs

small minds in increments—

for context by its very nature

always trumps text

             Canto V

 Pathos

                                                                 “ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey

                                         where wealth accumulates, and men decay”

                                                                                       ~Oliver Goldsmith

                                                                                                                              ‘The Deserted Village’

  Goethe called Hamlet

a fine porcelain vase

in which an acorn had been planted

so too the seed of civilization

within the ecology of this planet

for there is a swelling chemical deadzone

at the mouth of the Mississippi

and on Diego Garcia

hermit crabs live in bottle caps

as in Denmark

kittiwakes weave synthetic straw

fishing line

and plastic Q-Tips

into cliff-nests overlooking an ocean

from which Tenskwatawa said the white race

emerged as a great ugly monster

an ocean that now has 46,000 pieces of floating plastic trash

per square mile—

thinking it’s food

albatross starve with stomachs full of Styrofoam

and discarded condoms

and as I understand it

there are now Wall Street think-tanks

calculating profit margins

from the longterm effects of global warming—

as parrots in Brazilian jungles

mimic the sound of chainsaws

[1] happy the man who has learned the causes of things, and has put under his feet all fears, and inexorable fate, and the noisy strife of the hell of greed

 [2]  c = – 3/4 + 0i

[3] city air makes one free