The Proletariat Christmas

The last two weeks have been pretty rough at the retail gig. The holidays have come and gone, save for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. It's been rough. That's a phrase I've been saying a lot at work. I'm just a little stressed. That's another likely quote. How do you fight back against this stress, this holiday frenzy, eating away at the core of modern American society? 

Well, the thing is, you just have to rise above like the Black Flag song. Inevitably every little thing in our lives affects us at least somewhat on somewhat of a scale. One of the best pieces of advice my manager at work gave to me was, "no matter what happens, just go with it." At first, this sounded to me like a plea of defeat. But then you put it to practice and see how useful it really is. 

There are two kinds of customers in retail work: assholes and friendly people. There is no in-between. You might think you're a tough guy and that nothing anybody says to you can ever affect you but in reality, every interaction we have affects us in some way, however small, or large.   

Think of all the people you've met in retail work [if you work in retail] that you've ever had contact with.  Most of it is overwhelmingly positive, at least for me. I'm pretty much something of a celebrity at my job, just for the sheer fact that I'm a unique personality [I talk a lot to people about books, music, guitar] that people never forget me and want to talk to me more the next time they come in. I think that it just shocks people that I'm a big black dude that shreds the guitar like Hendrix and reads Heidegger. They will never meet a black man quite like myself ever in their entire lives. In that sense, I'm something of a novelty. The other side of it is the depressive, melancholy that comes with the retail experience. 

A large chunk of that melancholia would be bad interactions with customers. Customers who are overwhelmingly rude, customers who want to take advantage [return things with no receipt, demand cheaper prices, yell if it doesn't go their way, etc], upper management that tries to tell you how to do your job even though you've been working there longer than them, and the rest is just low-level grunt work that gets old fast.

There's also a sort of late-night depressive side of retail. When you work 430pm-1am 5 days a week for seven years straight you start to find that you're thinking more about the darker side of life at the later hours of the shift. Ironically it's at these hours that I feel the most awake, the most alive, in a sense. When I come to realizations. 

But wait. Here's the good news. This is happening to other people too. Not just you. The modern American workers need to rise up in solidarity. The middle-class, upper-middle-class, and rich people with their nice cars, their mocha frappuccinos, their office jobs, and their gym memberships know nothing of the true struggle of the proletariat.  If it were up to them they would stay rich and you would stay poor, indefinitely. And if you don't recognize this truth, then you aren't one of us. 

This is why it is so important to have a worker's movement in America. The modern American worker is losing so much right now. The rich are so happy with their fancy video games, their pornography, binge-watching their favorite Netflix TV shows. They know nothing about what it's like to be a true proletariat. 

The next worker's revolution is coming sometime. There will be no video games, pornography, or Netflix in it. 

The revolution will not be televised. Say goodbye to the bio-mass. 

Disenchantment, A Riff on Fantasy

Disenchantment is a new comedy animated show written by Matt Groening (Futurama, The Simpsons) and Josh Weinstein (The Simpsons). The show is about a princess who's friends with an elf who loves her and a demon who's possessed her for life. Its a fantasy inspired show with Futurama artwork. Not only do we get the characteristic Futurama style artwork, we also get the humor, albeit much dryer in the first couple episodes. 

Characters
Bean is an alcoholic bad girl princess to a terrible King who beheads and kills his subjects all the time. She's no saint herself, accidentally sending people to their deaths and such. She is a bad egg, a misfit, which might be because her mother was turned to stone when she was a kid and she's longed for her ever since. Likewise, her father is hell bent on getting the Elixir of Life, in order to restore his ex-wife, even though he remarried and even has a son with the new wife, an heir to the throne. 

Elfo is an elf who's completely ignorant of most things. He left his elf kingdom and almost died before he met Bean. Bean's father, King Krog keeps him alive because he believes he needs elf's blood in order make the Elixir of Life. 

Lucy
Lucy is a demon that possessed Bean when she opened up this bottle in the castle. He's the devil's advocate in every way, causing Bean to make horrible mistakes, ruining her relationships even more. Everyone thinks he's a talking cat. Despite being a terrible person, he's one of the more likable characters, joke-wise. 

The early episodes are slow and have almost rocky starts. This isn't a show that immediately envelops you in laughs. Rather, it makes you work for it, like a art-style science fiction novel, I'm thinking of Neal Stephenson, that kind of thing. Where you might enjoy the writing style, but its so dense that it takes you a long time before you get to the meat and potatoes of the story or what the writer intends to say. Same thing with Disenchantment. 

Slow early episodes
Things don't really start to become interesting until episode four, with each episode being 30 minutes that means you have to sit through almost two hours before things get rolling into a comfortable drama with jokes. In a way I've come to expect this, especially as a modern literary device, where writers can spend forever building up one idea, only for it to come to fruition and finish in two seconds. 

There are certain episodes where Bean does just this. She's put into a confrontational situation and she panics and we are wondering what she will do. Instead of something interesting or grandiose, she instead comes to a conclusion in two seconds, the plot is finished, episode done, fin. 

Now, I can certainly be critical here and say this is a result of lazy writing. It could be for all we know, we weren't there when they wrote it in their work room. However, it might not be lazy writing, perhaps they saw the easy way out and just went with the easiest solutions. Either way, I don't see it as entirely bad. Its just a cartoon after all. 

One of my favorite episodes was this one where Bean gets exorcised by a creepy guy who imprisons Lucy, and plans to throw him in a volcano at the top of a mountain, think Mordor. Turns out he had tons of Lucy's demon race people and he was throwing them all to their deaths! Bean almost falls into the volcano in order to save Lucy from death. Quite the surprise because we are given an understanding that none of these characters care about anything. When the old creepy priest is throwing demons to the fire, a female demon shouts out,"I possessed your aunt and she loved every second of it!"

End of season thoughts
The show takes a surprising twist near the end of the series when they get the actual Elixir of Life, and Bean uses it on her mother's stone corpse, which reanimates her to life. What will begin in season 2 will be a much different altogether piece of work, where Bean isn't at the beck and whim of her father, where she will be able to drink with her mother, and who knows, go on a quest and become a real warrior? They've been nudging Bean unto the warrior path a little bit. Which brings me to my next point. 

Is this real Fantasy? 
Have any of the writers of this show every read any real fantasy novels? Perhaps they have, and perhaps they haven't. I certainly haven't read any comedy fantasy novels, although I'm certain they exist. This isn't your high fantasy like Ursula K LeGuin or even low pop fantasy like Game of Thrones. In a way its just a fantasy skin, other than the fact that the time period is like the Middle Ages, albeit with swords and sorcery, this isn't like CS Lewis or Tolkien come to cartoon. Its video-gamish at times. There's a scene where the gang is flying atop a griffin, which is stereotypical of World of Warcraft fast traveling.

Critics of the show say it isn't fantasy enough, it doesn't satisfy fantasy fans. I say its okay, but that it needs to supercharge it fantasy credentials into high gear for season 2, otherwise I would say its pandering to the nerdy, intellectual, female, fantasy crowd. 

Female Lead
I've talked to friends about the show and some of them can't get into the female protagonist perspective. He said,"I don't find her funny." I think that's sexist, but perhaps this is a trend. By making progressive shows about female lead characters, TV shows are having an influence on gender politics and such. I think its great. In fact, I can relate to Bean in many ways, not because she's a girl but because of her alienation, which could be a symptom of being a woman in this universe. If the female protagonist is going to become a trend, I think its a good one because women aren't main characters much on TV (I mean this loosely, as the show is a Netflix exclusive). Its a nice touch. 

The verdict 
Although this show isn't as great as Futurama or The Simpsons I'm sold. I found it so good that I finished season 1 in three days, which is pretty fast for me because I don't watch TV shows too much. I see the entire first season as a slow buildup for more hip and happening fantasy-driven plot in season 2. I think that will be what brings in even more fans, and we'll see if the writers can 1) write better 2) write real fantasy 3) do more interesting things with the characters. I think if they do these things the show will not only become more popular, but develop into a cult classic, a new part of the geek culture, although in some ways it already is. Check out the show now, its on Netflix. 

Wind River

Wind River is a movie described as a neo-Western murder mystery film. The film stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olson as a US Fish and Wildlife Tracker (hunter) and an FBI agent who try to solve a murder on an Indian reservation. Director Taylor Sheridan wanted to create a film inspired by thousands of stories just like it, involving sexual assault of women on reservations. 

The movie starts off with Renner going to a reservation to hunt down some lions that are bothering this guy's livestock. He finds a woman's body in the wilderness with blood on her groin and he determines that she died from exposure, pulmonary hemorrhage caused by inhalation of sub-zero air. Obviously its a murder and the FBI is called in. On Indian reservations the FBI has jurisdiction over cases like this. Also, Renner knows who the girl is and is disturbed by the whole thing.

Elizabeth Olson comes on the scene but she's not prepared for what's to come. She didn't even bring a jacket. They start off by going to the girl's family. The mother is seen in her room cutting herself in the arm with a knife, a hearth-wrenching scene for sure. The father is annoyed by Olson who's asking her stupid questions. The father says his daughter was last at her boyfriend's house but he didn't know his name or whereabouts. But he suggests they go to see his son. 

So they go see his son and after a scuffle (gun firing, leading to a dead Indian man) his son tells Renner that the boyfriend works at a nearby oil drilling site. The oil drilling personnel are all sketchy and they say that they heard about Natlie's death via radio, Natalie being the girl that died. Olson mentions that her name was never mentioned on the radio. The Indian police officers with Olson start to put their guns up and the drilling personnel do the same but Olson calms everybody down and they go to the boyfriend's living quarters. 

Unfortunately when Olson opens the door she gets shot down hard and fast. A gunfight ensues and everyone except Olson and Renner (who's farther away with a sniper rifle) dies. Renner snipes all the drilling personnel and the guy in the living quarters runs away on foot. But he doesn't get very far. 

Renner captures him and takes him to the top of the mountain, where he forces him to confess his sins. He admits that he raped Natalie and that he killed Matt (the boyfriend) by beating him to death. This is a dark scene. Then Renner lets him free and tells him to run barefoot and see how far he gets. He mentions that Natalie made it six miles and that she was a warrior. 

The murderer runs a few yards before his legs give out and he spits up blood from his lungs. He dies. Renner then meets with the father, who is seen sitting outside in his "death face" paint. He admits that he made up the death face paint. Renner tells him that the killer went out with a whimper. They then sit together in silence, mourning. 

After that there's a message onscreen that says statistics are kept for every demographic except Native American women, whose numbers remain unknown. That to me was mind boggling. How can that be? What's wrong with government officials who can't even track something like that? Racism seems to be a big factor here.

The movie was very good and the characters were complex, especially Renner's character. The movie has a bold message about Indian reservation life and women, something that most people don't know anything about. For that reason the film is important. The harsh cold environment of the mountainous region of Wyoming gives the film a dark and cold gritty feel. It wouldn't be the same if it were on a reservation in California. 

Although the film is dark and the mystery element of it is given away in the end, (in a flashback scene of Natalie and the boyfriend in their room, disturbed by the murderer) I would say that the film isn't hurt by this reveal, instead it shows the audience the brutal nature these people were subjected to. 

Its a good film and did well in the box office and reviews. Check it out. 

Your Name 君の名は

So I saw a fantastic anime film the other night called Your Name. The film is arguably science fiction, romance, and deals with the fact that nothing lasts forever, which is very Japanese. You could say the film is science fiction because its about a boy and a girl who swap bodies through the mystic mystery of a shrine and the impending doom of a large crash landing comet. And the film is obviously a romance because although they don't realize it at first our boy and girl are star-crossed, and this is made even more evident when they finally meet, where instead of the boy writing his name on the girls' hand he instead writes I love you. The film was a huge commercial success and aired at Anime Expo 2016 (which I attended, but didn't see the film at), but only recently came out on DVD, made available through Netflix shipping.

The film is very slow-paced and mysterious at first. But once the film gets going about thirty minutes in you start to understand where the film is going and the fact that they are living in different time periods, although its only a small difference of three years. But its still so much of a time difference for them to have a hard time finding each other. There's religious elements because the girl lives with her grandmother and they take care of a shrine. The shrine is said to be ruled by a guardian spirit who rules human experiences and connections.

There's a comet that the boy finds out is going to destroy the girl's town and he tells her to evacuate the town. Once back in his own body and time he finds out most of the people survived the comet miraculously and he spots the girl with her soon to be husband in his Tokyo hometown. They chase each other down and ask,"Your name?"

The artwork in the film was very good too. There was some 3D shading effects and details, like when the comet came crashing down. Apparently the art work was all mostly done by one guy. Pretty impressive stuff. The anime art style of the characters is drawn in a modern way and there are some funny Japanese sort of mannerisms, like how every time they swap bodies the girl always touches her breasts, and likewise the guy always grabs down there. Pretty funny but not something that would happen in an American animated film made for the box office.

This is a film I would recommend to all anime fans because although the film is slow it has a lot of meaning in it. The idea of love, trying to find love, always having it within your grasp but then only to have it slip away once again. This is an idea we think about our entire lives even if we think we've found our true love, weather it be a person or vocation. For that reason I'd even be down to watch the movie again with a girl or even my friends who like anime but not so much the thoughtful sorts of anime like this.

Highly recommended!

Real robots and fake Indians

Master of none is this Netflix comedy/drama created by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang. The show is about the daily life of Dev (played by Ansari), a 30-year old actor living in New York city. The beginning episodes of this show are so good I would say its amazing-possibly a masterpiece? However, the more you get into it, you realize its not what you thought it was. By this I mean I thought the show was like a straight hilarious comedy. But then they try to throw in this real life drama crap like having a relationship and stuff. Let me tell you about some of my favorite moments from the show.

There's this episode where Dev receives an email from some show people that he auditioned for. He wasn't suppose to get the email but it was somehow forwarded to him. It was just written that way. He finds out they said something super racist. "Lets see if he can curry our favor". Pretty fucking hilarious. Later, the white guy that said the racist comment tries to win over Dev by taking him to a Knicks game. The guy buys Dev some nachos and some young white kid eats some of his nachos. "Did that kid just eat my nachos? What the fuck." Dev tells the kid those are his nachos but apologizes once he realizes the kid was waiting for his absentee father that wasn't going to show up. Also, Busta Rythmes shows up at the game and apparently he's friends w/ the white guy who said the racist comment. Dev talks to Rythmes in private about the comment and Rythmes is all like,"Mmmm nope. Because Indians eat curry? That's some racist shit. You should play the race card." Obviously its more funny once you see the delivery of the vocal lines but that episode was definitely one of the best in terms of the comedic content.

There was another episode where Dev and his Asian friend go out with their dads for dinner. The Asian dude's dad's memories pop up of when he was a kid when the guys ask him what he did in Taiwan. Then it cuts to a super stereotypical scene of him as a kid in Taiwan with his pet chicken. And then his parents say they need some meat for dinner and that they want him to kill the chicken. The kid walks out with a knife and pushes the chickens head down and the scene fades. Great scene. Super racist and stereotypical but funny. Every immigrant has a chicken story like that it seems.

Then there's the episode where Dev sleeps with a married woman. The guy catches them at his house and he's all upset, as he should be. The guy's all like,"why the fuck are you still here!" And Dev's like,"I don't know. You said you were leaving. I thought it might be awkward if we were in the elevator together." True comedic gold with that scene. Also, there's the scene where the guy the woman is married to skips Dev in line at the ice cream shop. He points to a fat guy and says,"I'll have what Chubbs is having." Then he takes a bite out of the ice cream and throws it at the garbage can, yelling,"that's disgusting!" Super funny stuff.

My personal favorite part was when Dev was working on a black virus movie (lol) called the sickening and the virus first was exposed and he was auditioning on his laptop in a coffee shop all like,"Oh my god! The sickening! It's happening! Holy fuckin' shit!" Then this stereotypical big black woman that runs the coffee place says,"I don't know what it is you think you're doing but you can't do it here". There was even a guy who was afraid to leave the coffee shop because of Dev. That was a nice hilarious touch.

Okay, so now you know for sure that the show is super funny. However, at some point around the 6th or 7th episode (there are 10) Dev gets in a relationship with some chick that he used to know back in the day. He met her at some party and at first things don't click because she was still w/ her boyfriend but somehow she gets into it w/ Dev. I'm not into relationships and I don't enjoy watching shows about relationships. Their whole relationship is super cute but its sort of cringe worthy in terms of the acting and the overall characters. I know girls who are like the girl Dev was dating but its not necessarily something I would want to see in a show that I thought was suppose to be funny. I guess what I'm saying is that I wasn't into the lovey dovey stuff. It distracted from what I thought made the show great-the great delivery of the jokes.

I do believe there's going to be a second season for this show but you know w/ these Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming only series it does take them longer to create more seasons than regular TV networks. There is definitely something special about this show. At first when my brother was watching it when he visited I thought the show wasn't my thing. But Ansari is a hilarious and good actor. He isn't quite brilliant but he does know how to deliver the lines well. In this day and age to be a funny actor I think you have to be able to improvise better than reading and memorizing lines. I think Ansari is that type of actor. The modern day actor. He's good at what he does. Also, its good to see a brown guy be able to write and act and do it so well. We need more minorities in the spotlight and media. We're all over the music world but everywhere else we're pretty scarce.

If you like funny shows then you should definitely check this show out. Hopefully season 2 delivers some more great comedic material. Hopefully there is a season 2! I can talk about this show with my friends and quote the lines and we all get it and find it super funny. It's all on Netflix. Go check it out.