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thimbil · 3 years

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Having some thoughts about the references and inspirations used for the Bad Batch’s designs.

So Boba Fett is my absolute favorite character and Temeura Morrison was perfect casting. I went to see the 2008 TCW movie in theaters because I was so excited to see him again, even if he was animated. You can imagine my disappointment. Whoever was on screen was not Temeura Morrison. You could sort of see a resemblance if you squinted and didn’t think too hard about it. They replaced Temeura with Racially Ambiguous G.I. Joe. If I didn’t know better and someone told me the animated clones are space Italians from the moon of New Jersey I would buy it. One Million Brothers Pizzeria and Italian Bistro. Not that there’s something wrong with being space Italian, I just don’t think it’s the right choice for the Fetts. The design got slightly improved by season 7 but it still bugs the hell out of me.

I did eventually get into the show later and (of course) got invested in the clones. Unfortunately, they were largely sidelined by the Jedi storylines. Out of the two new main characters created for TCW, Ahsoka definitely got more development and focus than Rex. When they announced The Bad Batch, I was excited to see a show specifically devoted to the clones… at least that’s what it said on the tin. We have all seen what lurks beneath those stylish helmets.

Jango Fett, you are NOT the father.

So who is?

Based on interviews with Filoni, it sounds like the Bad Batch was a George Lucas idea. And like all his ideas, it’s super derivative. The original trilogy directly lifted elements from sci fi serials, westerns, and samurai movies, more specifically Kurosawa films like The Hidden Fortress. For The Bad Batch character designs, the influence is obviously American action and adventure movies.

Now let’s get specific. Bad Batch, who’s your daddy?

Hunter

Sylvester Stallone as Rambo in First Blood 1982. That bandana has become an integral part of the iconic action hero look. You see a character wearing one and it’s a visual shorthand for either “this character is a tough guy” like Billy played by Sonny Landham in Predator 1987, or “this character thinks he is/wants to be a tough guy” like Brand played by Josh Brolin in The Goonies 1985 or Edward Frog played by Corey Feldman in The Lost Boys 1987.

Hunter’s model is closest to the original clone base. If you look closely you will see the eyebrows are straighter with a much lower angle to the arch. His nose is also not the same shape as a standard clone like Rex, including a narrower bridge. It’s certainly not Temeura Morrison’s nose. Remember what I said about space Italians? It didn’t take much to push the existing clone design to resemble an specific Italian man instead of a specific Māori man. The 23&Me came back, and Hunter inherited more than the bandana from Sylvester.

Crosshair

The long narrow nose, the sharp cheekbones, the scowl. That’s no clone, that’s just animated Clint Eastwood. Not even Young and Hot Clint Eastwood from Rawhide 1959-1965. With that hair, I’m talking Gran Torino 2008. The man of few words schtick and family friendly toothpick in lieu of cigar are pure Eastwood as The Man With No Name from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns A Fist Full of Dollars 1964, For a Few Dollars More 1965, and The Good the Bad and the Ugly 1966.

In a way, this is full circle because the actor Jeremy Bulloch took inspiration from Clint Eastwood for his performance as Boba Fett in ESB.

Wrecker

In an interview Filoni lists the Hulk as an (obvious) inspiration for Wrecker. Ever seen the old Hulk tv show from 1978? Well take a look at the actor who played him, Lou Ferrigno. Would you look at that. Even has his papa’s nose.

You could make the argument that Wrecker was influenced by The Rock, an appropriately buff ‘n bald Polynesian (Samoan, not Maori) man. But look at him next his Fast and Furious costar Vin Diesel and tell me which one resembles Wrecker’s character model more.

Tech

Tech is a little trickier for me to place. If he has a more direct inspiration it must be something I haven’t seen. That said, his hairline is very Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard 1988. His quippiness and large glasses remind me of Shane Black as Hawkins from Predator 1987. In terms of his face, he looks a but like the result of McClane and Hawkins deciding to settle down and start a family. Although, Tech’s biggest contributors are probably just everyone on TV Trope’s list for Smart People Wear Glasses.

And finally,

Echo

Oh Echo. Considering he wasn’t created for the Bad Batch, he probably wasn’t based on a particular character or movie. But if I had to guess, his situation and appearance remind me a lot of Alex Murphy played by Peter Weller in Robocop 1987. However, Robocop explored the Man or Machine Identity Crisis with more nuance, depth, and dignity. Yikes.

The exact tropes and references used in The Bad Batch have been done successfully with characters who aren’t even human. Gizmo from Gremlins 2: The New Batch 1990 had a brief stint with the Rambo bandana. I could have picked any number of characters for Defining Feature Is Glasses but here is the most cursed version of Simon of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Suffer as I have. Marc Antony with his beloved Pussyfoot from Looney Tunes has the same tough guy with a soft center vibe as Wrecker and his Lula (also a kind of cat). Hell, in the same show we have Cad Bane sharing Cowboy Clint Eastwood with Crosshair. I actually think Bane makes a better Eastwood which is wild considering Crosshair has Eastwood’s entire face and Bane is blue.

So we’ve established you don’t need your characters to look exactly like their inspirations to match their vibe. So why go through the trouble and cost of creating completely new character designs instead of recycling and altering assets they already had on hand? Just slap on a bandana, toothpick, goggles, and make Wrecker bigger than the others while he does a Hulk pose and you’re done. Based on the general reaction to Howzer it would have been a low effort slam dunk crowd pleaser.

But they didn’t do that.

So here’s the thing. I like the tropes used in The Bad Batch. I am a fan of action adventure movies from the 80s-90s, the sillier the better. I am part of the Bad Batch’s target audience. Considering what I know about Disney and Lucasfilm, I went in with low expectations. I genuinely don’t hate the idea of seeing references to these actors and media in The Bad Batch. I don’t think basing these characters on tropes was a bad idea. If anything it’s a solid starting point for building the characters.

The trouble is nothing got built on the foundation. The plot is directionless, the pacing is wacky, and the characters have nearly no emotional depth or defining character arcs. They just sort of exist without reacting much while the story happens around them. But I can excuse all of that. You don’t stay a fan of Star Wars as long as I have not being able to cherrypick and fill in the gaps. This show has a deeper issue that shouldn’t be ignored.

Why do the animated clones bear at best only a passing resemblance to their live action actor? In interviews, Filoni wouldn’t shut up but the technological advancements in the animation for season 7. So if they are updating things, why not try to make the clones a closer match to their source material? Why did they have to look like completely different people in The Bad Batch to be “unique”? Looking like Temeura Morrison would have no bearing on their special abilities and TCW proved you can have identical looking characters and still have them be distinct. In fact, that’s a powerful theme and the source of tragedy for the clones’ narrative overall.

Here’s Filoni’s early concept art of Crosshair, Wrecker, Tech, and Hunter. (Interesting but irrelevant: Wrecker seems to have a cog tattoo similar to Jesse’s instead of a scar. Wouldn’t it have been funny if they kept that so when they met in season 7 one if them could say something like “Hey we’re twins!” That’s a little clone humor. Just for you guys 😘)

None of these drawings look like the clones in TCW, much less Temeura Morrison. Let’s be generous. Maybe Filoni struggles with drawing a real person’s likeness, as many people do. But he had to hand this off to other artists down the line whose job specifically involves making a stylized character resemble their actor. Yet the final designs missed the mark almost as much as this initial concept. Starting to seem as if the clones looking more like Temeura Morrison was never even on the table. It wasn’t a lack of creativity, skill or technical limitations on the part of the creative team. I don’t think there is an innocent explanation. They went out of their way to make the final product exactly how we got it.

This goes beyond homage. They could have made the same pop culture references and character tropes without completely stripping Temeura Morrison from the role he originated. It was a very purposeful choice to replace him with more immediately familiar actors from established franchises and films. It wouldn’t shock me if Filoni, Lucas, and anyone else calling the shots didn’t even think hard or care enough about the decision to immediately recognize a problem. And I don’t think they believed anyone else would either. At least no one whose opinion they cared about. Those faces are comfortingly familiar and proven bankable. They are what we’re all used to seeing after all. They’re white.

Lack of imagination, bad intentions, or simple ignorance doesn’t really matter in the end. The result is the same. Call it what it is. They replaced a man of color with a bunch of white guys. That’s by the book garden variety run of the mill whitewashing. There’s no debate worth having about it. For a fanbase that loves to nitpick things like whether or not it’s in character for Han to shoot first or Jeans Guy in the Mandalorian, we sure are quick to find excuses for clones who look nothing like their template. Why is that? If you don’t see the problem, congratulations. Your ass is showing. Pull your jeans up.

#star wars #the bad batch #unwhitewashtbb #wrecker #crosshair #tech #hunter #echo

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Marvel’s WandaVision Episode 3: MCU Easter Eggs and Reference Guide

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This article contains WANDAVISION Episode 3 spoilers, and potential spoilers for future episodes, the wider MCU, and Marvel Comics. We have a spoiler free review here.

WandaVision episode 3 is the first full color episode of the series, and moves the setting from the black-and-white 1960s of the previous episodes to a vibrant Brady Bunch-esque Technicolor of the early 1970s. There’s lots of fun weirdness to find between the lines, both from a Marvel and MCU Easter eggs standpoint and callouts to classic sitcoms of its era.

Let’s get to work…

SITCOM INSPIRATION

Let’s start with the big one…

The Brady Bunch

This episode borrows almost the entirety of its aesthetic from all-time classic sitcom The Brady Bunch. Wanda and Vis’s house strongly resembles Mike and Carol Brady’s humble ranch home inside and out. The gorgeous wide wooden staircase in particular is a real tell – as is Wanda’s bold ‘70s attire that seems to be right out of Marcia Brady’s closet in later seasons.

The opening credits title card even adopts the 3×3 grid format as seen on The Brady Bunch. Of course, the Wanda and Vision household isn’t as jam-packed as the Brady’s but there is an undeniable underlying theme of family throughout this installment.

Mork and Mindy

Mork and Mindy was a 70s-into-early-80s show with a weird sci-fi couple, in the sense that the husband is an alien. In the final season, there’s a one-and-done pregnancy storyline episode called “Three the Hard Way.” In it, Mork is the one with child. Due to his alien biology, an egg comes out of his navel and out of it hatches an elderly man, as their people age backwards.

Other Sitcom Stuff…

When Wanda tries to hide her pregnancy from Geraldine, she holds a small basket of fruit in front of her large stomach. This is likely a playful homage to all of the not-so-creative ways that sitcoms have tried to hide actress’s pregnancies over the years. And funny enough, it seems like the fruit Wanda is eating at various points in the episode corresponds to the fetus size as outlined by their doctor.

The doctor’s name is “Dr. Stan Nielsen.” As in the Nielsen Ratings. And maybe Stan as in, you know, Stan Lee…

And now for the Marvel and MCU stuff!

Scarlet Witch

In the opening credits when Wanda is reading a magazine on the couch and using her powers to vacuum, she’s reading another issue of Glamorous (which we saw in episode one). This magazine features a woman in a red bathing suit, kind of like some of the skimpier Scarlet Witch costumes Wanda has worn through the years in the comics.

Vision

Similarly, the scene of Vision barbecuing on the patio shows him wearing an era-appropriate shirt in his comics colors of green and yellow. The swingset he’s struggling to put together is also in his colors.

Wanda’s Pregnancy and the Twins

When Wanda gave birth to her kids in the comics, something similar to what we saw here happened: nobody, not even the doctors, were aware that Wanda was carrying twins, so the arrival of the second child was a surprise to everyone.

Watch everything Marvel and more on Disney+, right here!

The way Wanda’s pregnancy rapidly progresses through the episode feels like a reference to Avengers #200, one of the most hated issues of any Marvel comic. In the comic, Carol Danvers is discovered to be suddenly pregnant and goes through the entire process over the course of a day or so. Nobody really bats an eye at this and all the creepy, questionable parts are handwaved as a good thing.

When Wanda’s pregnancy starts causing chaos, she and Vision strike a pose based on The Vision and the Scarlet Witch #1.

Not particularly relevant right now, but in the comics, none other than Doctor Strange delivered Wanda’s twins. Given all the ways that this show is supposed to tie into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (some of which we think we’ve already spotted), this is just worth a mention.

Billy and Tommy

The twins are named “Billy and Tommy” just as they are in the comics. They were later reincarnated as Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd. You likely remember them as Wiccan, the First Gentleman of the Kree-Skrull Alliance, and Speed…uh…his best man?

Very briefly, because a full discussion of this would take a while: Billy and Tommy were born to Wanda and Vizh in 1985’s Vision and Scarlet Witch. They were unmade when it was revealed they were figments of Wanda’s powers and imagination, imbued with shards of Mephisto’s soul and reabsorbed into Master Pandemonium’s arms in West Coast Avengers. They reappeared as heroes in the first Young Avengers series, and reunited with their mother in Avengers: Children’s Crusade. That is an extremely quick summary of what might be the most Gordian continuity knot in the entire Marvel Universe.

Geraldine

Teyonah Parris returns as “Geraldine” for this episode, but this time it’s even clearer that there’s more to her than meets the eye. As we’ve pointed out before, “Geraldine” is a cover for Monica Rambeau, the daughter of Carol Danvers’ best pal Maria Rambeau, and someone who will play a significant role in Captain Marvel 2.

“Geraldine” tells a rambling story about her boss, “Mr. Haddix.” There’s no obvious immediate Marvel connection with the name. However, it might just be part of the motif – the stork tries to eat the fish on Geraldine’s pants, maybe it’s actually “Mr. Haddocks”? We’re still not finding any Marvel connections with this one, though.

It’s also probably not an accident that Geraldine’s cover story involves her working for an ad agency. The commercials are one part of the show where reality peeks through vividly. Ad agencies are, in a sense, manipulating reality for consumers to make them want a product more, and there’s no shortage of reality manipulation going on here.

Geraldine is rocking a striking blue and white outfit, with starburst type designs on them that could either recall the log she wore as Captain Marvel, Pulsar, and her other superheroic identities…or possibly dimensional portals.

SWORD

Geraldine is wearing a SWORD pendant, so it’s pretty clear who she’s working for. Those pesky SWORD agents seem to be everywhere, from our pal The Beekeeper to the folks monitoring Wanda in that command center to…well, who else in Westview is working for SWORD?

While we’re talking about Mr. Haddocks and Geraldine’s job, the cereal in Geraldine’s work story – Gravity O’s, with the marshmallow moon men – is likely a nod to SWORD’s mission in the comics, when they used to watch space rather than “sentient weapons.”

We wrote more about SWORD here.

AGNES

Agnes’ brooch looks like it has three witches, one holding a scythe. There are a few options for what this might be referencing:

The obvious one is the three witches from Macbeth who use prophecy to steer the main character to his doom.

Less obvious and much more unlikely is the Weird Sisters, Quasar villains (!) working for Maelstrom, an Inhuman/Deviant hybrid who has had several run-ins with the Avengers

And the least likely: Jennifer Kale (from Man-Thing), Satana (sister to Damian Hellstrom and the Daughter of Satan), and Topaz (of Werewolf by Night…fame?), three Marvel witches who starred together in a four-issue Jemas era series in 2004. It’s definitely not this one.

Pietro and Age of Ultron

Geraldine mentions to Wanda that Pietro was “killed by Ultron,” referencing the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron. This is clearly one of the memories Wanda is trying to suppress with her sitcom antics, and it doesn’t go well for Geraldine/Monica…who finds herself “banished” back to the real world of the MCU.

We wrote more about what the Pietro connection could mean here.

Westview

We actually just wrote in detail about the significance of Westview (which is kind of a real place, too), but here we see the town’s slogan: “Home, it’s where you make it.”

Wanda is indeed “making” her home in whatever image she feels most comfortable with at the moment, so this is a further clue to the House of M-esque shenanigans that seem to be going on with her.

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Other Marvel Stuff

Not strictly a Marvel thing, but the opening credits feature a lot of hexagons, the same kinds of shapes you see in beehives, which brings our creepy beekeeper friend from episode 2 to mind.

The paint cans in the nursery are from a fictional brand known as “Simser” which promises “a universe of color.” Jeremy Simser who works as a storyboard artist on WandaVision, and who is also doing work on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. So…perhaps “a multiverse of color” might have been more appropriate?

Dottie’s husband fill is reading a newspaper with a headline that says “TWO FIRE HYDRANTS ADDED ON MAIN STREET” but the paper is folded so it says “TWO FIRE HYDRA” at one point. Also…twins. Note the “twin motif” on Phil and Dottie’s lamp, too.

Wanda sings a Sokovian lullaby to the twins.

The episode goes from fullscreen to a more MCU-appropriate and cinematic widescreen when it cuts to Geraldine/Monica back in what appears to be the real world. Not that there was any doubt, but whatever is happening in “sitcom land” is definitely not reality, and time travel has nothing to do with whatever’s going on here.

The final song is The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” which was also used in trailers. The title is pretty on-the-nose if you consider the dominant House of M-esque theory about what’s actually happening on this show, and that Wanda is using her powers to manipulate reality.

THE COMMERCIAL

Hydra Soak implores its consumers to “Find the Goddess Within.” We don’t have to tell you what HYDRA is, but what about this “find the goddess within” stuff?

Well, we can kind of speculate that this is a reference to the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, in which Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster will end up becoming the new god/goddess of thunder, just as she did in the comics.

Spot anything we missed? Let us know in the comments!

The post Marvel’s WandaVision Episode 3: MCU Easter Eggs and Reference Guide appeared first on Den of Geek.

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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There is, as happens so often these days, a spectre haunting the imagination of the western left. That specter is most commonly dubbed ”strasserism”, though it has other names, such as ”redbrownism”, ”nazbolism”, or more unwieldy names like ”Angela Nagle leftism”. When I came into the left at the beginning of the last decade, these terms did not exist in any meaningful way. As far as me and the people I knew were concerned, ”strasserite” was an incredibly obscure term used exclusively by online neo-nazis is their petty, internicine conflicts. None of us paid them or their silly ideological totems any heed.

At the beginning of the first half of the 2010’s, the left I was a part of was finally starting to feel hopeful again, after the disorientation and loss of direction that came with the fall of actually existing socialism. During the long winter years of the 90’s and early 00’s, people either hopelessly and bitterly clung to a prophecy that everyone else had now fully discarded, or they tried finding new boutique causes to replace the ones that had failed. To take my native Sweden as an example, two of the more significant new causes were opposing the neo-nazis and opposing globalization. There were some victories – or at least, people liked to think so – but the idea of actually achieving political power was dead in everything but name. The left mostly came to accept the role as the social conscience of liberalism, or in the case of antifascism, fancied itself as the Batman protecting end-of-history Gotham City. The streets of triumphant liberal society might have been gritty, the politicians corrupt and undeserving, but antifascist Batman still rose out of bed every night to protect the craven and the low from monsters lurking in the shadows. Or so they liked to think. Most of the time, they just hung out and drank beer.

…

All the details of the intervening decade are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s fair to say that the left today is more broken and politically defunct than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, a case can be made that the crisis facing the left today is more serious than the crisis of the late 80s and early 90s. ”Left populism” as a political model has failed. Jeremy Corbyn has presided over the worst labour party showing in nearly a century. The ”Sanders moment” is over, and there’s no sequel to any of these failed left projects anywhere in sight. This decline is likely terminal and irreversible, because unlike the decline in the 90s, the left no longer has any significant working class support. In fact, with each new ”left revival” a la Corbyn, the constant bleeding of working class support only seems to accelerate. Comrade Bhaskar at Jacobin magazine touts the (in)famous AOC as the next new great presidential candidate and hope for global socialism, but anyone with an IQ somewhere north of the melting point of water – or at least, anyone who doesn’t have a paper he’s eagerly trying to sell you – knows that this is a truly desperate flight of fancy that will never come to pass, not in a million years.

…

We first begin with the obvious. Strasserism does not actually exist. Nobody reads the Strasser brothers, not even the neo-nazis who threw accusations of strasserism at each other decades before anyone else. Nobody outside of Russia – and for that matter, nobody inside of Russia – cares about the intellectual output of the National Bolshevik party, if such an output were to be shown to exist. The reason the term strasserism has been brought out from the dustbin of history by the contemporary left is because said left is currently in the middle of a social and political panic, and this panic has at least two central functions. Firstly, panics such as these are one way for a group of believers to deal with a situation where prophecy fails. For the left, the only thing it knows today is constant failure. Like any religious cult, the failure of prophecy can only be redeemed by shedding the blood of those members identified as polluting the faith. The price of social cohesion is the turn toward constant purges.

…

Partaking in this ritual of self-depreciation does not mark you as an outsider. It is only if you break the rules of the game, only if you acknowledge the man behind the curtain, only if you point to the basic truth hidden behind this outer layer of ironic self-mockery that you become one of us, one of the so-called strasserites. This truth is a fairly simple marxist truth. Classes have class interests, and so the idea that you could have a political movement – the left – that was well and truly dominated by one class, yet still wholly committed to the class interests of another class, but also just too bumbling and out of touch to ever do a good job of looking out for the class it supposedly ”really” cares about is, to put it extremely mildly, a dubious idea. It is much more likely that a political movement dominated by one class will also be more or less entirely dedicated to pursuing the class interests of that class, while also being unable to take any strong action that goes against the interests of its dominant class.

…

There was a socialism before Marx, and it was utopian and based on human reason and moral progress. There are good reasons for why this brand of socialism fell out of favor, but within its context one can definitely hold the view that a small class of enlightened and educated well-to-do people, acting out of the goodness of their own hearts, will eventually bring about socialism by lifting up the poor, racist and/or stupid proles. You don’t have to agree with it, but it fits together.

A central premise of marxist, materialist or scientific socialism, on the other hand, is that classes simply cannot act this way. Classes pursue their own interests and act politically not out of greed, or generosity, or any other personal bit of sentiment, but due to historical and economical pressures. It is this very simple fact that makes the ”materialism” of someone like Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin magazine, and of most leftists of his stripe in general, so incredibly contradictory. For it to work, there has to be an unstated agreement among the faithful to never seriously use the tools of marxist analysis on the left itself. Any and all self-examination must remain on the level of personal discussion (”can person so and so really be a socialist, when her parents are so rich?”). The punishment for transgression against this agreement, for breaking the most sacred code of Omerta the modern left has, is swift and severe: you will get cancelled for this, and you will be added to the ever growing list of ”strasserites” and ”secret nazis” who tried to lure the faithful away from the true path. What happened to Angela Nagle is instructive in this regard; her article, The Left Case Against Open Borders, was an attempt to argue against unrestricted immigration from a class-based, materialist perspective. It’s quite likely – and also quite amusing – that she would probably have recieved less sustained hate online if she had written that immigration shouldn’t be allowed as long as non-white people talk funny and smell bad.

…

I bring my own example up not to relitigate old battles but to underline the point that the sin that earns people the label of ”strasserite” or ”chud” or ”redbrown nazi” has nothing to do with racist animus, or even the issue of immigration more generally. Conjuring up the threat of racism and the ghosts of Nazi Germany is not done because it is true, but because it is necessary. In my case, having a father who came to Sweden to work from central Africa proved to be an embarassing but fairly minor speed bump on the way to declaring me a fighter for aryan blood purity. There is nothing foolish or irrational about any of this; our esteemed comrades are simply doing the only thing they can do, faced with a contradiction they are unable to resolve and a movement that is rapidly falling apart.

…

While I don’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself, I would claim that the ”strasserite” class-analysis of politics in the west and the role of the left today has a few central features. To start: as the economies in western countries have shifted over the past decades, a new sort of class of people has sprung up and grown in social and political importance. In the united states, the most common name for this class is PMCs; the professional-managerial classes. Their name is less important than their function and political trajectory. To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class, ideally by means of state transfers. The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire ”ideas people” to write up reports and thinkpieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who by dint of belonging to this class feel that them taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a revolution. The most radical, put-upon and economically insecure parts of this class today naturally gravitate toward the left, because the left is – no matter what leftists delude themselves by saying – a fairly focused, competent and credible class project. When Corbyn came out of nowhere and became Labour party leader, it was a real grassroots movement that brought him there; a grassroots movement of students and people who either have ambition to move up the ladder or a legitimate fear of looming proletarianization, of falling down the social and economic ladder and finding themselves joining the proles.

The particular form of ”pro-worker” rhetoric these members of the PMC use mostly boils down to a sort of charity. Vote for us, and we’ll give you higher benefits and free broadband, Labour recently tried to tell the recalcitrant workers of the north. It didn’t work. This mode of ”charity” is hardly selfless – it would be a free ”gift” from these PMC activists given to their precious salt of the earth proletarians, and like all gifts it would be reliant on the goodwill and generosity of the giver. Its main function would also surely be to feather the ever growing number of nests for this class of comfortable, university-educated administrators. And when some leftists start seriously debating why ”racists” should be denied medical care from the NHS, one starts getting a sense of just how much hierarchical domination their future ”worker’s paradise” promises to deliver to the working poor.

The point here is not a moral one. After Labour lost, one exasperated member and activist despaired over how blind the workers were, how easily fooled they were by tory propaganda. ”Don’t they see how evil capitalism is? How brutal and unfair it is?”, this activist wrote: ”I have many friends with good grades who are stuck working at grocery stores, stocking shelves”. Anyone who pretends to be some sort of materialist cannot in good conscience make fun of sentiments like this; it is completely rational for someone in that position to think that ”the evils of capitalism” are somehow laid bare for the world to see when their friends are forced to stock shelves like a common peon in order to pay the rent. That the other workers at the grocery store probably find this way of thinking completely ludicrous and arrogant is obviously besides the point. Politically speaking, the fury and energy that proletarianization engenders should never be underestimated, because it causes political explosions. Jeremy Corbyn successfully challenged the political cartel that had been running Labour on the back of such a political explosion.

We should not make fun of an activist who despairs at the state of the world when good, solid middle class people with solid middle class grades can no longer achieve the middle class lifestyle they were promised. It is however a basic political truth that a worker’s movement consisting of people who are angry at the prospect social and economic ”demotion” – in other words, people who are fighting against the cruel fate of having to become workers – cannot ever succeed. Promising free broadband, or unlimited Space Communism, or some other stupid fantasy world where getting angry at having to work like a normal person is acceptable because nobody has to work won’t really change that.

…

The grand political divide that sundered the house of modern ”socialism” boils down to the question of which class should have its interests taken care of in the first instance. It is all well and good to talk about ”doing both”, or try to soothe workers by saying that once socialism wins, nobody will work, so they’ll all be taken care of then. A century ago Joe Hill mocked the preachers who tried to placate starving workers by promising them there’d be plenty of pie up in the sky after they were all dead. Today, Aaron Bastani does an even more pathetic job within that vaunted political tradition, promising the british working class asteroid mining and fully automated communist holodecks once The Revolution(tm) succeeds. Until that day comes, though, it can’t really be helped that they’ll have to stay under the thumb of – and fight the battles for – the downwardly mobile professionals, huh? After all, who will build all those fancy asteroid miners if little Junior suddenly has to work at Starbucks like a common plebeian?

This is not a question of left incompetence, or Brexit suddenly wrecking everything, or something that Bernie woulda, coulda, shoulda done. The left is bleeding working class support everywhere. The left is picking up support among the more affluent and well-to-do stratas everywhere. The left is merging with greens and liberal ”progressives” everywhere. This is not incompetence, or cowardice. It is not personal, nor can it be fixed by the actions of individual persons; it is a vindication of historical materialism, and it is playing out right before our very eyes.

It is time for the ”socialism” of the professional and managerial classes and the socialism of the working classes to part ways. The former is moribund and a historical dead-end. The latter, I think, still has a case to be made for it. More importantly – and personal experience from outside the left bears this out – it still has an audience that is willing to listen to it.

…

Workers aren’t stupid. They’re not evil. They haven’t been ”tricked by the media”. They need no false shepherds to guide them, no well-paid moral commissars to teach them to not randomly slaughter their neighbors because of muh racism. They have abandoned the left parties because the left parties have abandoned them, not ”culturally” as some proponents of identity politics would like you to think, but materially. They know their own class interests, and they know that the left is inimical to those interests. This is good news, at least for those of us with the courage and political will needed to help them free themselves from their so-called ”betters”. Let the Labour activists of London lament over how ”disappointed” they are that the working class has stopped following orders. We will not be like you. We will not promise new masters and new yokes to live under, new aristocracies and ”vanguards” to subsidize, new cadres of people selling them moral sermons and sensitivity courses. We will promise them a chance at revenge.

#malcom kyeyune #read the whole thing #professional managerial class

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ahouseoflies · 4 years

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The Best Films of 2019, Part III

Part I is here. Part II is here.

PRETTY GOOD MOVIES

80. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (Martin Scorsese)- Can one put a star rating on Bob Dylan, with renewed purpose, belting out "Isis" in a head and shoulders close-up to New Hampshire teens? What about a naked moment when he and Joan Baez simultaneously realize they should have married each other, and he, for maybe the first time, has nothing to say? As a Dylanologist, I'm glad that this footage from an under-reported period saw the light of day. You can start to think about stars when Martin Scorsese, my other dad, does everything he can to complicate and ultimately undermine that footage with his contributions. I appreciate that he uses his documentaries to experiment and chart his passions, and I think that I get what he's doing with his present-day chicanery, but it does not work for me. Shout-out to when Bob Dylan claims, of one of Scorsese's fake people, "He seemed to need enemies. Even when there weren't any." I felt that.

79. Serenity (Steven Knight) Djimon Honsou: Lawful Good Jeremy Strong as "The Rules": Lawful Neutral Anne Hathaway: Lawful Evil Diane Lane: Chaotic Good The Kid: Chaotic Neutral Jason Clarke: Chaotic Evil The Bartender: Lawful Neutral Matthew McConaughey: True Neutral Me, Believing Almost Sincerely That This Is a Good Movie: Chaotic Neutral

78. Atlantics (Mati Diop)- It's plenty effective as a window into a patriarchal society I wasn't familiar with, but Atlantics doesn't ever match the heights of its exquisite opening. At the risk of getting banned from this website--and I do realize what I'm implying here...not enough happens.

77. Birds of Passage (Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego)- After enjoying the formal invention of Embrace of the Serpent, I was interested to see Guerra and Gallego's spin on a well-worn genre like crime. So I was surprised to see how conventional Birds of Passage was. The indigenous Colombian rituals provide some color and grandeur, but otherwise this is a rise and fall that I've seen before, complete with a hothead character that threatens the whole operation. Perhaps my favorite part of crime movies, the alluring sinful fun that ropes the viewer in and makes him complicit, is nowhere to be found.

76. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot)- I admire Joe Talbot's debut more than I like it. It's straightforward in its ideas of African-American and masculine performance, and it boils its essence down into a really effective scene near the end (on the bus). It does get tedious though. The protagonists' goals keep changing in a way that makes it seem like the film is overcompensating for how simple it actually is.

75. Running with Beto (David Modigliani)- Beto O'Rourke is both inspiring and goofy, able to get me to look to the stars and roll my eyes within the same breath. This movie is pretty standard for its genre, but its greatest strength is getting us to see that all people present those contradictions on an individual level, while most people, if we're talking about blue and red states, are the same collectively.

74. Gemini Man (Ang Lee)- Ang Lee treats Gemini Man like a test reel for 3D high-frame rate presentation, and I think I would have liked the film much less if I hadn't enjoyed the bells and whistles. (Find me in the club and ask me about the HDR--I can go deep.) You could read the film as a comment on Will Smith's Movie Stardom: We're the product of our experiences, and up-and-comers lack some of the character/baggage that Smith brings even if those imitators can approximate his bluster. (The fact that the film is a commercial failure adds another layer. Perhaps the cultural bridge that Smith created is no longer necessary.)

But you'll notice that none of that stuff is dealing with the text, which rarely does the unexpected, especially when it comes to the mustache-twirling Clive Owen character. The film pointedly avoids a romance between Smith and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and that's another absence that I'm pretending is a plus.

73. The Hummingbird Project (Kim Nguyen)- At first, the film has trouble selling itself, almost underplaying how quixotic the characters' plan to beat the stock market is. Once it settles in after a few false starts, it expands into a story about how precious time is in general, an idea that Jesse Eisenberg sells in his sympathetic performance. The other characters don't fare as well. Skarsgard's foil is comparatively static and dull, and a dialed-up Salma Hayek makes this a more external, obvious picture than it should have been. But there are long stretches that I like. 72. Escape Room (Adam Robitel)- I was exhausted in a good way as the movie rocketed through its setup, showing us the backstory of half of its characters while bypassing the rest. I was exhausted in a bad way by its fourth ending. Basically though, this movie does its job. And I'm glad that some of these thrillers are still envelope-pushing PG-13's. 71. Late Night (Nisha Ganatra)- There's a preposterous scene swinging into the third act that I just cannot accept or get behind, and it introduces a wave of Serious Scenes of People Getting Real with Each Other. But I haven't seen such a distilled juxtaposition of second-wave feminism and third-wave feminism before, let alone in a comedy. Some solid jokes. And John Lithgow playing piano while feeling bad about himself! 70. Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas)- Non-Fiction is a sign that Assayas, always prolific, is entering the Woody Allen Zone. That is, he, a filmmaker capable of great formal beauty, has left behind formal rigor for a moderately funny tale about pseudo-intellectuals having conversations that would have been provocative five or ten years ago. 90% of the film depicts infidelity, but it isn't really about infidelity. Just as every latter-day Allen picture has two or three immaculate jokes or inward moments, Non-Fiction, despite its lack of ambition, has some perfect Assayas inter-textual flourishes. The Selena character bemoans the disposable nature of the TV show she works on, but Assayas drops us into one of the show's wintry, over-exposed shoot-outs as if to capture a genre he'll never fully pursue. He also writes a joke in which Selena, played by Juliette Binoche, claims that she'll try to talk Juliette Binoche into recording an audio book.

69. Crawl (Alexandre Aja)- I guess you could say something negative about this movie, but you would also have to mention that ol' girl lets off a full clip from inside the gator while it is chomping her arm off. So it pretty much has that Academy Awards category sewn up. 68. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)- as Chinese Jerry Seinfeld once said, "Why don't they make the whole movie out of the hour-long unbroken 3D take?"

67. The Art of Self-Defense (Riley Stearns)- The Art of Self-Defense is a film of two halves--in a way that, actually, Riley Stearns's previous film Faults was. For me, those two halves, one being slow and pre-ordained, the other being wild and unpredictable, are too extreme on either end. The vagueness of the setting is a weapon that goes a long way in unifying those parts though. Even if I couldn't get down with the silliness, The Art of Self-Defense is worth checking out for Alessandro Nivola's career-best performance. The movie is about performative masculinity, so he has the challenge of playing a sort of confident monolith while also being totally specific. He's everything you would imagine a karate instructor to be, but he also takes his glasses out of their case in a way I've never seen before.

66. Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer)- Keep in mind that I couldn't make it all the way through Dolemite proper, so I'm not the intended audience for this film's "let's put on a show" awe. The structure is notable: It starts with Rudy Ray Moore as a failure who has tried everything, crests past the shooting of his movie, and uses that completion as a plot point, only to focus on the distribution for the third act. That is, the screenplay breathes new life into the plot right when it needs it. Eddie Murphy's best performances always seem like regretful commentaries on his own relationship with the audience, (I'm picturing the final speech of The Nutty Professor.) and he follows suit here. Even better is an effete Wesley Snipes as the too-cool-for-school D'Urville. Despite all of the talent involved, however, the thing just isn't funny, and it's least funny in the comedy club scenes that are supposed to sell us on Rudy Ray Moore's genius. If it's not supposed to be funny, then why populate the movie with five comedic supporting actors?

65. Harriet (Kasi Lemmons)- History classes could do a lot worse. Like a history class, the film has so much ground to cover that it has to make choices for pacing, and even then it still feels like a greatest hits. It does have a surprising, brazen edge though, and it's more spiritually curious than I was expecting. Kasi Lemmons leans in to the mystical side of the story, using Tubman's spells as conversations with God that give her the confidence that she needs. The device is a double-edged sword though: What distinguishes and others Tubman, what makes her the chosen one, is also kind of passive and out of her control. Speaking of out of control, Joe Alwyn plays the slaveholder who ain't gonna be as nice as his pappy was. "Seems to me things have gotten a little too easy 'round these parts." 64. Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton)- Like Edward Norton, Motherless Brooklyn is sincere and smart and shows its work. Also like Edward Norton, it sort of tires you out after a while with how hard it's trying. I respect the ambition--the film tangles itself in race and jazz and urban planning and makeshift families--but by the third or fourth time that the hero blacks out while getting roughed up, the film reveals that it can't quite thread the needle between noir pastiche and noir cliche. It's satisfying enough as a mystery in general.

63. The Two Popes (Fernando Meirelles)- I'm the target audience for 21st century papal fan-fic, and even I started to zone out during the flashbacks. Jonathan Pryce sort of disappears, but I think this is the first Netflix prestige project being judged on a curve.

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funnythingshere0-blog · 6 years

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The Funniest Tweets of the Week

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/the-funniest-tweets-of-the-week/

The Funniest Tweets of the Week

At least two major events happened last week: the Royal Wedding and the Yanny or Laurel meme. Unfortunately I neither watched the wedding nor listened to the Yanny/Laurel clip so I can’t say much about either. I’m sure they were very exciting and meant a whole lot to a bunch of people. Truth is, I started playing Fallout 4 last weekend so I just really haven’t been keeping up on the zeitgeist. But I am up to level 33 and I’ve got about a dozen settlements, all with happiness levels in the 70s or 80s. So, not a bad week last week if you ask me. And as for this week? Let’s just say I’ve got a good feeling about it. Okay okay, here you go:

I honestly have NO idea who’s getting married to who….. Not on my Radar.

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) May 19, 2018

pic.twitter.com/BsF2KJBo90

— Chase Mitchell (@ChaseMit) May 21, 2018

me: h-meme account: meghan markle’s FRIENDS ?? set her up on a BLIND DATE with…. a PRINCE ????? my friends fucking SUCK they would never omg i HATE my “”friends”” i’m gonna KILL THEM ALL

— nicole boyce (@nicolewboyce) May 20, 2018

Been checking out this new little show, ‘Rick and Morty’, and it’s looking pretty good so far. Not perfect but OK. Thinking of maybe basing my entire personality around it

— H. Bomberguy (@Hbomberguy) May 20, 2018

the perfect event pic.twitter.com/4BL4e2sHvh

— Steven Markow (@Steven_Markow) May 20, 2018

I’ve never not had this pinned to my wall since I was 14 years old pic.twitter.com/SaScBzPng5

— maura quint (@behindyourback) May 19, 2018

Wow I was gonna see the new Star Wars movie til I saw the translation of what Chewbacca was saying pic.twitter.com/GPDdDBX7br

— Yassir Lester (@Yassir_Lester) May 17, 2018

“The Office” with Rajat @rajat_sureshpic.twitter.com/riMFlCdwh0

— jeremy levick (@levickjeremy) May 19, 2018

pic.twitter.com/0TuobxOKrD

— Jake Jeppson (@jakeyjeppson) May 19, 2018

JORDAN PETERSON: you know how witches live in swamps rightME: huh? oh yeahJORDAN PETERSON: and how old kings are always living in towersME: already left the room what

— DougExeter (@DougExeter) May 18, 2018

Elon Musk going thru his Random Phase to legitimize his freaky relationship with Grimes is so humiliating for both of them lmao pic.twitter.com/HT8XvSJH5I

— Christin Bailey (@hexprax) May 18, 2018

-tweeting about stuff thats off-topic is “Random”. never do this.-tweeting about current event stuff is “Topical”. and this is also a crime

— wint (@dril) May 18, 2018

Can you imagine auditioning for a supporting part on a basic cable pilot about a fake lawyer, not getting the part, and finding out that the woman who got the part is now marrying the Prince of England?!

— Evan Susser (@EvanSusser) May 19, 2018

pic.twitter.com/QfW4vftSm7

— David Chen (@davechensky) May 19, 2018

just got a sneak preview of what they’ll be serving at the royal wedding… honestly I’m a little surprised pic.twitter.com/K9EpfRg3k6

— Mitra Jouhari (@tweetrajouhari) May 18, 2018

this has to win some kind of record for the longest run up to the least funny joke in history https://t.co/KlgmfyUnl4

— derek davison (@dwdavison9318) May 18, 2018

I have a lot of respect for whoever told the president that Bill Gates was Yahoo Answers https://t.co/rBdkJqvSt9

— Jason O. Gilbert (@gilbertjasono) May 17, 2018

Neil deGrasse Tyson never calls out the most unrealistic thing in movies, adult friends hanging out

— DC Pierson (@DCpierson) May 17, 2018

I am quitting comedy to pursue my true passion – not doing comedy

— Harris Mayersohn (@harrismayer) May 16, 2018

Science finally does something useful. pic.twitter.com/DjYUcwpgih

— Howard Mittelmark (@HMittelmark) May 16, 2018

i love writing advice that’s like “don’t think about critics. don’t think about the market. don’t entertain even the passing fancy that anyone will ever look at your writing with a discerning eye. you fuckin sellout trying to make it so people like your life’s work. big idiot

— Alexandra Tanner (@alexbtanner) May 16, 2018

the funniest part of any live sketch or improv show is when the lady comes out in the end and yells “there’s another group coming in, everybody please leave NOW”

— dom nero (@dominicknero) May 16, 2018

pic.twitter.com/A4u6QQpzas

— maple cocaine (@historyinflicks) May 15, 2018

when i’ve got a funny story but i have to wait until my friend finishes talking pic.twitter.com/gkXmtoGAtC

— Kristen Arnett (@Kristen_Arnett) May 14, 2018

Haha I am sorry pic.twitter.com/Jspknl4CGl

— Marcia Belsky (@MarciaBelsky) May 14, 2018

“I am insane.” pic.twitter.com/APAt1QP8W9

— Patrick Monahan (@pattymo) May 14, 2018

pic.twitter.com/3IjiyLdYgI

— Jason Adam Katzenstein (@JasonAdamK) May 14, 2018

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chroniclesofawkwardness · 6 years

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Yellow Bird

Last Friday, I witnessed something I'd always thought would be funny to see in person. I laughed, but not as heartily as I thought I would.

Working second shift means I'm still in the building long after most other employees have gone home. Fortunately, summertime affords more hours of daylight to accompany the stillness that often envelops the building after six o'clock in the evening. I usually take lunch around six o'clock because I like to walk the quarter mile from one end of the building to the other in relative peace an quiet instead of having to play Frogger with my co-workers in the atrium. During business hours, I can usually spot three distinct types of employees. The first type is someone using his or her cell phone, head down, yet bent slightly forward, eyes and/or thumbs transfixed on a screen. It's amazing that people in this state don't account for more workplace accidents. I want to startle them like a caged animal who occasionally has to tap on the glass walls of his cell to remind the hordes of gawking humans who he is. I imagine a mass of humanity piling up like cars on the freeway after one wintery fender bender causes more chaos then it should. In the words of Talking Heads, as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention.

The second type of employee travels in horizontal packs of usually three, but sometimes as many as five or six across. These people are impossible to maneuver around whether I'm simply trying to get from point A to point B, or I've decided to just walk on a break instead of visiting Starbucks. My Fitbit has a unique way of making me feel like less of a man if I don't take 117 more steps to win the hour. The frustration of not being able to maneuver around type two is only compounded by the fact that if I do manage to find a clear path beyond a chorus line of co-workers, I immediately find myself on a collision course with a member of type one. Naturally, this person is oblivious to his or her surroundings. I have no choice to fall back in line behind type two before an incidental touch with a warrior from type one causes all hell to break loose. For all I know, such a tangible moment could result in a sexual harassment complaint to Human Resources, or accusations of attempted theft of a personal electronic device.

Employees in the third group must all have Fitbits because I can spot them just by looking at their shoes. This group changes into tennis shoes on breaks or lunches and power walks up and down the atrium. I don't mess with this bunch. Who am I to interfere with someone else's mission? Truth be told, some days I like to just people watch, especially when power walkers swing their arms while walking or insist on demonstratively touching a wall to prove that they made it to the end of a given segment of their journey. I have yet to see an instructor compelling them to do so by yelling words of encouragement into a microphone, though this would admittedly be hilarious.

Quarter miles in solitude are also meaningful because they remind me of my teenage years. This was the time when my taste in music began to take shape, owing to far too many hours in my room listening to bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden. Choosing to take steps as an adult in my free time is as empowering today as choosing the next track on my favorite CDs was then. Whether chaos stems from puberty or the workplace, there are few things one can control in life. Among these are musical preferences and the use of one's own body.

Initially, I was drawn to the bands I mentioned earlier because their music was popular at the time. Many of my friends were listening to the same songs, and I wanted to fit in. Or so I thought. Pearl Jam's Jeremy and Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun were all over the radio and MTV, so being into them seemed like just the thing to do. I'll always be able to say that Superunknown was the first CD I bought with my own money and that Pearl Jam's Ten was one of two cassettes I still owned long after even CDs were turning into an antiquity. (The other one is The Joshua Tree by U2.) Though childhood nostalgia will always be tied to those bands that came out of the Pacific Northwest in the late 80s and early 90s, my attachment to the music has evolved as my own circumstances have changed along with the circumstances of the people who made the music.

Seventeen-year-old me was content to understand maybe one out of every five words of a given song as long as I liked the sound. I didn't think much about the subject matter as long as the beat resonated with me emotionally whether I was angry, sad, depressed, or something else.

Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights (2002) began to change the way I thought about music. When I bought it, I was waist deep in my Master's thesis where I explored the directions of rock and folk music in Yugoslavia during the wars of the 1990s. As a graduate student, I began thinking about not only how music sounded and how it made me feel, but also what the musicians were saying in the lyrics of the songs. NYC from Turn on the Bright Lights is a good example:

I had seven faces Thought I knew which one to wear But I'm sick of spending these lonely nights Training myself not to care

The song spoke to me at a time when I was still processing my parents' divorce, and reflecting on a childhood spent usually doing one of three things: Losing myself in a textbook, gazing up a stereo (most good Catholics were looking up to the Virgin Mary), or seeking sexual release through masturbation. It's amazing how hard some old habits die, and how lengthy the time of dying can be. Think of Unglued by Stone Temple Pilots:

Moderation is masturbation What is what and what makes you feel good? All these things I think about I think about Always come unglued Yeah I got this thing it's comin' over me I got this thing its comin' over me I got this feeling comin' over me Over me

When I got into Led Zeppelin, I began to wonder why many of the artists I'd grown up listening to hadn't included a few words of homage to these influential predecessors in their liner notes. As I discovered the blues of Robert Johnson and Junior Kimbrough, I wondered why Led Zeppelin hadn't done the same thing. More recently, I've come across artists such as Odesza and Pretty Lights, whose music is more electronic in nature. Yet something about the time in my life when I bought Superunknown still has hold of me.

Why do generations have to lose their heroes? Is the loss of such individuals as much a blow to the collective consciousness of men and women of a certain age as it is the true end of an era? I don't imagine musicians like Scott Wieland of Stone Temple Pilots and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden (both of whom haven't been gone all that long) ever set out to be placed on pedestals by throngs of adoring fans. I think their music spoke to a generation that largely wanted to be left alone to gaze up at the stereo. This is not because this generation is afraid of living. Maybe those like me, who can vaguely remember records, but were more concerned about filling the scratches on a randomly discovered copy of Nirvana's Unplugged in New York with toothpaste, found their voices through the music of the period in human history when cassettes were on the way out and filesharing was in its infancy. Maybe we didn't realize the influence their music had on us until we returned to it as adults to look beyond the sounds and into the lyrics. Until those who created it began to leave us.

As I drank a cup of coffee in the early evening of that Friday, I saw a small yellow bird fly full speed into the glass window nearest my desk. Being of a certain age, my first thought was of Soundgarden's song Like Suicide, which I'd read Chris wrote about a crow he killed to put it out of its misery after he heard the ill-fated bird crash into a window.

Dazed out in a garden bed With a broken neck Lays my broken gift

Just like suicide

I immediately thought the bird was dead. It lay there on its back without moving for what seemed like an eternity. His or her fellow birds probably thought so too. Moments after the collision, several even smaller birds hopped gingerly up to their fallen friend and began pecking at him or her. They say the animals are always the first to know. Still, the comedian in me wondered if, in a darker more cynical sense, the birds were laughing hysterically to themselves. I imagined their dialogue going something like this: "Did you see what Steve's dumb ass did? There's no way he's coming back from that! LOL!"

On a more serious note, some of my concerned co-workers went outside to check on the bird. After several minutes, it managed to stand upright and waddle its way into the grass, having surely sustained one hell of a concussion if not worse. I even wondered if this particular bird had planned to end its life. After all, just like with humans, one can never be too sure of exactly what goes through someone's mind right before making the ultimate decision.

One of the reasons I'd admired Chris Cornell was that whenever I'd return to the music of Soundgarden, be it after months or even years away, I'd discover a lyrical depth that both my academically-experienced ears and still-youthful soul could appreciate. I also felt that Chris had "made it" where many of his contemporaries had fallen short. He lived past age 27. He had children. Those aspects of his life reminded me that there was hope beyond the desire to be left to gaze up at the stereo; that the desire to be left alone with your thoughts, to create, is not always a bad thing. Chris and others showed me whether they meant to or not, that you don't have to be a social butterfly or a Social Justice Warrior to be happy.

All these thoughts occurred to me within the five minutes that passed between the bird hitting the window and it staggering away what I assumed would be its final resting place. It's no wonder that those five minutes felt like twenty years.

During those five minutes, I'm sure singular employees were staring at their cell phones to catch up on text messages or wish their cousin's boyfriend's dog a happy third birthday. The last of the packs of five or six across were about to break up for the weekend. Hell, even the power walkers who so demonstratively swung their arms at every opportunity were making plans to meet up at Zumba class on Saturday morning followed immediately by reconvening at the bar to unplug the Wi-Fi, drink wine, and get housewife wasted. Still looking good in yoga pants after two kids, a tummy tuck and a breast lift had to be worth celebrating.

Oblivious to the plight of little yellow bird.

That evening, like most, I chose to walk the quarter mile alone, and enjoy the long days unique to summertime. The bird's sudden and violent ending reminded me of the fragility of life, and how important it is to spend yours doing things that bring you joy. I fall off the wagon sometimes. I don't always eat right, and I'm not ready to publicly disclose my browsing history. But, more often than not, I think I make good choices. I just try to be a decent human being. At some point, despite my nostalgia, I decided I wanted more out of life than being left alone to gaze up at the stereo, but I don't regret listening to music alone in my room. I discovered some damn good stuff in the process. Your taste in music is another of few things you can control in life.

I'm still here though many of those who crafted the soundtrack of my youth are going or have gone away. Knowing they’re gone is tough, but it’ll be okay. I’ll be okay. I still believe there's hope, and no one can take away my freedom to choose hope over despair, life over death, and joy over sadness. Regardless, I’ll embrace whatever life throws at me. No labels. Just an open mind.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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