7/10 On AI, AI Art, and the Culture

Good evening folks. I just wanted to jot down some thoughts I've been thinking about since the last post. 

    First, I think more and more people are becoming aware to the fact that AI isn't really as great as its been doing on the stock market. Sure, the American economy is betting a lot on AI and the fact that AI is going to save money and automate things so that workers will be able to do work that is more important, creative, and more meaningful. That's what the techno bro AI companies want you to think. But the reality is that the best thing we've done with AI is create chatbots that aren't really thinking or sentient, rather they spew out things they've been trained on, and they've mostly been trained on the internet. 

    Me personally, I've found a lot of fun and tinkered a lot with AI. In fact, I use AI at my job everyday to look up the prices or products and items that aren't always easily figured out by just regular google searches. The use of AI in a retail environment is great, but again, it's still in a limited position. 

    For years, I worked as a Self-Checkout Cashier Clerk, mostly using the crappy automated AI self-checkout machines, but the thing is, that those machines can only do so much, you have to actually interact with the customers yourself to really know what's going on. These things are limited and on top of that a lot of times late at nights when the store was busy, these self-checkout machines would freeze, automatically shutdown and not work, and it would take forever for them to get back running again. 

    Basically, these AIs aren't coming for your job, not quite yet. You really can't trust any type of AI with basically, anything important, serious, or critical. And yeah folks, that means you can't trust AI with most things that actually matter. I've personally found a lot of fun and utility in using AI to create images. I've been doing it for like two years and its been a blast but of course there's always the dilemma of 'you're doing AI art thats not real art, that's not art,' versus the people who don't know anything about art, and the artists in between who are smart enough to have already been utilizing AI art generators over the past 2-3 years. 

    Secondly, even if you can create stunning great AI art, there's always the issue, how can you get paid being an AI artist or utilizing AI in your handmade art? Well therein lies the rub. You can create AI art all day and be amazing at it but you will still have to work hard and put in the work in order to get paid and actually have a career making a money off your AI art. 

    Even regular artists have to put in a lot of hard labor in order to actually make a living off their art. So just because you can create good AI art doesn't mean you can get paid or make a career out of doing it. See what I'm saying? Even as amazing as AI art generators are, it's difficult to make a career out of using and making AI art, basically they're not going to actually replace real handmade, hand drawn, hand painted, hand sculpted artists. Not by a longshot. 

    Now, that doesn't mean that real artists should shun the AI art generators and throw a tantrum, rather they should use it to enhance their creative abilities and artistic potential. Those that don't learn the new softwares, AI art generators, and products won't be quite as successful as those who do. For example, a lot of Americans love Japanese cartoons anime and whatnot. A lot of Japanese art studios are using AI in anime and have already been doing so for years. 

    I wanted to rant a bit on AI because I keep seeing that people are thinking AI is really amazing and great, and yeah it is, but only up to a very limited point. For example, AI could write something like what this post has written in it, but it can't do it with my personal style, timbre, or swagger. It will always pale in comparison to the real human behind the AI, the ghost in the machine will never be as smart, creative, or innovative as the human in front of the screen. 

    Time after time, I keep seeing people using AI in a way that makes them look like they've never done any thinking for themselves, or if they do, they just haven't figured out the right way to calm down, clear their thoughts, and put themselves in order to actually organize what they want to accomplish, so using AI becomes like their crutch. That's not a surprise and I'm seeing that more and more with customers in the retail environment checking prices with AI, employees checking prices with AI, and my various friends and associates around me who use it for their various reasons. That being said, I'll post my various most recent AI art pictures below this post. 

    Third, the Culture we live within has changed a lot since the 2008 Financial Meltdown during the Obama Presidency, which, oddly enough, seemed like a very normal time period and it didn't really seem that crazy even though we had gone through September 11 and the Iraq War and whatnot. In comparison, the post-covid Trump years seem much worse and the culture has become debased, extremely right-wing, nationalistic, and the main problem imo, very dumbed down and stupid to the point where people don't even do basic things like read and write anymore. 

    That being said, I am the Culture too and I'm here to say to young people its okay to be smart, you don't have to pretend to be dumbed down around other people, you should read books, write, educate yourself to the best of your abilities, and who knows, maybe you're goodwill and influence will spread to others around you and they will become smarter just by having interacted with you even briefly. One can only hope.

    I fear that we're in such a dumbed down society that because people are very uneducated and unschooled and have less morals and standards, these qualities in a nation, in a state, in a city even, even in a job or workplace, this means that things are much more disorganized and it makes it easier for bad actors to wreck havoc in various forms. 

    One of the scariest things that has happened to me recently is that something bad or off happened [not particularly to me but near or around me] and pretty much everyone including those in charge and those who were subalterns were all basically so dumb that they didn't do the right things and things went south. I think for me the fact that I was surrounded by people who just wouldn't think it through for whatever reasons, people who just couldn't think at all very well, that for me, was absolutely terrifying.

    Lastly, I'll end it like this. I'm not exactly a stable genius like Trump says he is, [he's a dumbass lol] but I've gone through a lot of work to educate myself without even going to school or anything, and when I interact with other young people 20s, 30s, even my own age, there is a general vast difference in the amount of knowledge between those people and say people who are in their 40s-80s. 

    One of the things you'll find is that even older people could be a bit uneducated and set in their ways but overall, they have more common sense and smarts that those of us in our 20s, 30s. Respect your elders and learn from them, without them you would never really be able to become wise which is above being learned. 

    I'll end it like this, if you aren't very well studied, don't read or educate yourself in anyway whatsoever, you just can't really become successful in life or in your goals. How do I know this? I've learned this the hard way through the school of hard knocks. I struggled through my 20s and 30s and I didn't go to school, I never got a degree, I'm just a 40 year old black guy with a high school diploma, an imagination, and curiosity. Nowadays, most people are kind of coasting, trying to provide for their wives, their kids, its hard to actually free your mind and educate yourself. 

    If you ask me, this is the main reason why Trump came to power and the country is in decline. If you keep the Culture happy with futbol [special shoutout to the World Cup], football, basketball, videogames, porn, sex, drugs, alcohol, its no wonder that they would never really be able to think for themselves. Remember, knowledges makes a man unfit to be a slave. Watch this space.

New year, Happy 2026

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Happy 2026! It's already been wild this year but we must keep pushing on with our goals and work. 

Personally, I've been tired a lot this year so far but I try to balance out a lot of rest with a lot of work at the job and activity at home. I've been reading a lot and listening to a lot of music. I discovered Bach cantatas and I found a correlation between Bach's cantatas and Mozart's opera work, its downright fascinating. I've also been tuned in to Small's jazz club in Greenwich Village NYC, tuning into a lot of live performance music as well as their nightly jams. There's a community online there and we chat and talk a lot about music, everything from straight ahead jazz to avant garde jazz to classical and sometimes even rock. There was a funny moment during Christmas where a random jammer at Smalls went viral for having a breakdown and cursing out the other jammers. It went to the heart of how people that have breakdowns in public often get made fun of and criticized even though it could happen to anyone, and that we need to be more understanding of others. Other people thought he was rude and probably on drugs. The incident went viral and lots of youtubers made response videos about it. Yeah, that was a interesting phenomena during Christmas. 

In addition, it wasn't really that the guy was terrible. However, he brought an acoustic guitar to the jazz jam, which is a no-no, but he said in a interview video he's been struggling financially and doesn't have money for a regular electric guitar, which goes to him struggling mentally and apparently even being homeless for a while. I would agree that the hardcore jazz elite who shamed this guy publicly on YouTube got it wrong, and that we should be more understanding of this guy and his problems. He wasn't really that good at jamming, and he's not really a 'jazz guitarist,' and he doesn't know the songs per se, but his rhythm comping to the tunes and under the soloists was decent enough to be there onstage and I thought a lot of the jazz elite were publicly shaming him, to their own detriment. I think, even as hardcore musical afinados, we should be more understanding of different musicians and their ability to play the music, especially jazz, because not every jazz musician is a Charlie Parker or a Wes Montgomery. I've seen high caliber jazz fusion musicians perform at The Baked Potato in Studio City, LA, and a lot of times even their playing was uninspired and mediocre albeit tuneful and tasty.

Moving on, more importantly, everyone I know who has a heart has been disgusted by the murder-killing of Rene Good by an Ice Officer. What can I say about this? It's an outrage and should be denounced by our government but of course with Trump and the Trump administration he has decided to double down and say that Rene Good was in the wrong and that the Ice Officer did the right thing to do what he did. Compare the way the Trump Administration is treating Rene Good with the way they treated Charlie Kirk, that pretty much sums up the divide between the so-called woke far-left and the maga Trump republicans. But the way its being talked about through the media is that this is left-wing versus right-wing but the truth of the matter is that its more about the way American citizens are treated by Ice Officers and those in law enforcement like cops. It's more like a George Floyd killing than anything particularly political, but the media has us all divided on the issue as if it matters that she was a left-winger. I suppose in a way, it does matter, but for me personally, I see Rene Good's killing as like a George Floyd killing, for white people. 

In addition, I think race matters here in this context because I believe white people think that they have certain rights when it comes to law enforcement. Well, this incident rebukes the whole idea that white people have rights when it comes to law enforcement, because we see in this particular incident that Rene Good didn't have rights and that she was seen as something 'less than human,' and this particular Ice Official decided it was in his best interests and that it was okay for him to deny her her human rights, and kill her, murder her. 

Downright chilling stuff. Her story should chill us and warn us that we're not in Kansas anymore. This shows us Americans that Ice has been politized and policed against us as Americans and that if you or anyone is on their list you are in for a lot of trouble. We're probably too far already down the Maga Republican rabbit hole to get out of this deep backwater that we're in. What's the answer to this? I guess the Democrats would have to come to up with some deep strategy to win and take back control in 2028. But there are lots of problems with voting such as the fact that most voters aren't even politically aware or smart enough to make decisions that would be in their own best interests. One man's vote has to equal one man's education and without that, the system develops an outsider character like Trump to somehow win the White House for the second time after being convicted of rape and being two times impeached. And don't forget about the Epstein files. 

Lastly, there's a lot going on and it's hard to follow if you're just one person trying to live your life, provide for yourself and your family, and to be a productive intelligent member of American society. After all, if you're too busy struggling to make money at a job, providing for yourself and your family, and don't have enough time to dedicate to learning and educating yourself, then there's no way you can actually think about how things are so bad in America right now. You have to sort of have some kind of privilege to be able to read the news everyday, learn more about what's really going on in society, read books, educate yourself, these are things that not everybody really has time or space for. In fact, you'll find other people my age are spending their time playing video games, working nonstop at their 9-5 jobs, maybe they drink and/or smoke weed, they gamble, they're doing stocks, they're doing crypto/bitcoin, but most of them aren't politically aware or class conscious to the fact that things are going south very fast, probably faster than I can keep up to even write about in these blogs. Let me rephrase that, they're politically aware, but they're struggling so much that they can't do anything to change the System from within. Even from the last post I wrote, a lot has happened. 

In conclusion, there's a lot we can do but most people are going to be too busy trying to survive and maintain and cope with the life they've been given. We as young people are struggling to maintain the lives we've created for ourselves and our families. Not everybody can sit around and write blog posts about their thoughts or even read the news daily. And this ends up working in the bad guys' favor, because we have developed into an uneducated underclass that is too busy playing video games, gambling, and too busy working all the time in order to survive, that if you even think about the idea of questioning the status quo or the government, or the system itself, you will looked upon as like some kind of weirdo. "Is that a conspiracy too?" You tell me.  

Thoughts on Language Learning

-These are my thoughts on language learning after learning Spanish for three weeks, he estado aprendiendo español por solo tres semanas pero planeo aprender de por vida.

-You're brain is actually learning something so new, so different, that it's teaching you to think differently, think differently in another language.

-It's like that science fiction movie from 2016, starring Amy Adams, Arrival, in which she learns how to communicate with aliens. 

-Her brain gets rewired, she learns to think so differently, that she learns to think like the aliens and communicate with them.

-The revolutionary philosopher Wittgenstein says, "life is language games," well the more different words in different language that you know, the more you see that this is the case.

-Sometimes when sleeping and upon wakeup, you're thinking about all the new words, phrases, and accents that you've learned. At first this freaked me out because I wasn't used to a cacophony of words of different languages in my head, however, you soon realize that you'll become used to it, and that you've begun to learn to think in those other words/languages.

-It's a fun activity for me, I learn on the google translate app or google translate on my computer, sometimes I learn for 5 minutes a day, sometimes for over an hour, and sometimes 20-30 minutes. Because I'm not being forced to learn against my will, my mind is open and I've even begun to become something of a miniature polyglot. 

-The vast wealth of beauty that exists in language appear to me in the form of Spanish, Italian, and French. However, I do find a different kind of beauty in the languages from the Far East like Chinese and Japanese.

-Upon reaching my fourth week of Spanish language studies, and learning bits and pieces from other languages, you soon realize that all of the information will be forgotten unless the material is consistently repeated and reworked over and spoken aloud with others, speaking the words aloud is the most consistent way to reinforce your memory. 

-Once you learn more words in other languages, the sound of the languages, the sound of the culture becomes a part of you, thus you are able to articulate and understand English much better as a result.  

-Spanish is the best language for me because it is the first language I wanted to learn, then next in line is Italian because it sounds muy bonita, then French because its very useful and also sounds great.

-There is somewhat of a correlation between the thick European languages like German, Russian, Swedish, and say Chinese [Mandarin, Cantonese] and Japanese, although it is very small.

-The root of all my language learning, as what Wittgenstein would call language games is all based on Latin, the godfather of Romance Languages; Learn Latin, and I can finally read Ovid's Metamorphosis in its original format, a true worthy goal of artistic expression and understanding. [Very difficult and would take years]

-The case is that once you start learning you can't stop otherwise your vocabulary of phrases, words, grammar, visual memory of the words, and accents will slowly fade away, so don't give up. 

-An end goal would be to travel across the world and speak whatever languages I need with ease. 

-A much more difficult goal could be to learn Spanish, Italian, and French, and become a translator and do that as a career.

-An easier goal, move to another country that speaks Spanish, Italian, or French [or even China to speak Mandarin], and get a job teaching English, and learning their language from the locals. 

-You're brain is rewired and overloaded with so much new information every time you learn, you must remember to always get plenty of rest. Day naps and night naps are both needed!

-Sometimes upon wakeup you'll think thoughts in Spanish as you get out of bed, at first it's a bit scary and unusual, but you soon get used to it, and recognize the fact that you're thinking in another language but that you're fundamentally the same animal. 

-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote is one of my primary inspirations for my Spanish learning, as Cervantes' has been called the godfather of the Spanish language, for good reason, his Spanish language style is unmatched. 

-After quarantine is over, I want to visit Mexico, and have a blast with Spanish.

-What better way to spend your time in quarantine than learning other languages and appreciating other cultures? The world doesn't revolve around just America or just English. In the brand new emerging world, the times they are changing. 

The Tale of Genji

The Tale of Genji is a Japanese masterpiece of literature [considered the first novel] from the Heian period, roughly (794-1185). Written by a woman named Murasaki Shikibu. She was born into a minor branch of the Fujiwara clan. Her father was a governor. Men wrote in Chinese. Women wrote and read in Japanese, which led to female writers of Japanese, highborn women. She started writing this novel, which is over a thousand pages after her husband died. Scholars tend to disagree on the writer. Some say it was the work of many authors, as says Royall Tyler, who's translation [only 300 pages] I read. Others say its solely Muraski's work. The actual story itself has a continuity that suggests there is only one writer, her. 

The original manuscript is gone. This brings up the issue of translation. Heian Japanese is so different from modern Japanese. Translating Heian Japanese into English is a daunting task unto itself. However, a literal translation of Genji is impossible. Not only that but each English translation of Genji is so remarkably different. Consider these renderings of the same sentence by different English translators. 

In Chapter 4, titled “Yugao,” Genji comes across a run-down house, the abode of a young woman he is about to seduce. Waley describes the entrance like this: “There was a wattled fence over which some ivy-like creeper spread its cool green leaves, and among the leaves were white flowers with petals half-unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts.” Seidensticker: “A pleasantly green vine was climbing a board wall. The white flowers, he thought, had a rather self-satisfied look about them.” Tyler: “A bright green vine, its white flowers smiling to themselves, was clambering merrily over what looked like a board fence.” Washburn: “A pleasant-looking green vine was creeping luxuriantly up a horizontal trellis, which resembled a board fence. White flowers were blooming on the vine, looking extremely self-satisfied and apparently without a care in the world.” [newyorker] 

Each version is so different, yet say the same thing in their own inimitable way. It's remarkable. The act of translating itself is a science. One could write an entire treatise on the art of translating. It would be worth the read. Genji made me realize how important a good translation of a book is. Before that, I was in the dark about it.

What is The Tale of Genji about? A noble and his concubines. It's about the art of seduction. But even simpler I would say it's about relationships. A man and his relationships with women. In this society, the way to a woman's heart was through poems, delivered by a go-between, who was elegantly dressed, and of appropriate social standing.

Courtly lovers didn't see each other face to face often, certainly not naked. Women of the upper class sat behind screens, and sliding doors. Women were protected by screens even when they spoke with males in their own family. A guy could be driven wild if he saw a woman's sleeve spill out or the sound of silk rustling behind the screen.

But people still got it on. Nobles and their ladies were promiscuous. Affairs with court ladies and ladies in waiting were perks of an aristocrat's life. So was adultery sometimes. Genji, when he's still young, has an affair with his father's [the Emperor] mistress. And both father and son lust after a young girl, that Genji adopted as his daughter. 

The requirement of a gentleman was style. You could be forgiven for seducing a man's wife. But you had to know how to write good poetry, have good handwriting, and wear the right perfume. Despite the influence of Buddhism, Heian society was governed by style rather than virtue. Good looks meant everything, virtue be damned. 

The ideal man wasn't too much different from the ideal woman in Heian society: highly perfumed, smooth-skinned, moon-faced, extravagantly dressed. The decadence of the times led to what Genji called a time “where everything seems to be in a state of decline." A state of decadence.

All of this had a strong sense of hierarchy of course. Also, Heian politics was marriage politics.  

Three important takeaways from reading Tyler's translation of Genji. 

First, this book gave me my first real look at Japanese culture that wasn't from anime or movies. I understand Japanese culture and society a lot better than I did in the past, and am grateful for the experience of reading world literature. It opened up my mind to the literature of other cultures [non-western canon], and that is an amazing gift to oneself, and for anyone who cares to discuss the book with me or listen to me explain it.

Second, the idea of translation. Lost in translation is a big possibility here. But the fact that the first novel can be somewhat preserved and rendered into modern readable English from Heian Japanese is fascinating to me. How do they do it? It's like nuclear physics. The translations in English are all vastly different. The book is 1300 pages, and the version I read and bought is only 300 pages. Obviously, Tyler's version is heavily edited, abridged, and he took out many passages, but I still found the book to be thrilling. 

Third, the sense of style. The elegance of this book is vast. You don't need action and fast-paced fiction writing to create a sense of depth. As a writer, this is very liberating to see, read, and experience. In fact, I had to read this book very slowly because each page is annotated, there's more than one poem on every page, and if you don't read the footnotes at the bottom of the page, you don't quite understand the poems. However, when you realize that the poems aren't literal translations, and don't quite mean much to you, the reader, you realize that you should focus on the story itself, rather than trying to find meanings in the poems. Going through that was a tedious yet rewarding experience. 

I plan on going back through Tyler's version again. Because I was so impressed with it, I bought my own used copy. Definitely worth it. Although the book took me almost a week to read, it was a very fruitful experience. At the very least, now I know where Overwatch's Genji got his inspiration. Of course, the real, yet fictional Genji is so much cooler. 

The Beats

The Beats: A Very Short Introduction by David Sterritt is a cute one hundred and twenty six page book about the Beatnik writers and poets from the 1950s. The lives and works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S.Burroughs are covered with great detail in addition to Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth. I must also mention LeRoi Jones, Anne Waldeman, and DiPrima too, as they are mentioned near the end.

My dad found the short book at the library and thought it would give me a better perspective on the true Hipsters (not the Arcade Fire fans), the Beatniks, as I formed an interest and I've been reading Kerouac's On the Road, which I found out is one of the most important works to come out of this movement.

I learned that the Beats mostly came from middle class and sometimes even bourgeois background, which gave them the comfortable life, which enabled them to becomes Beats in the first place. You can't become an artist and dissident of society if you are struggling to survive or pay rent. They were mostly white males who explored with sexuality, drugs, and religion. Ginsberg and Burroughs were gay in a time where being gay could get you beaten up or possibly killed. The Beats were avid readers of Oriental religious text, and were heavily inspired by Buddhism. Interestingly enough I had a book on Zen Buddhism that I read everyday for a while until I could understand the hermeneutics  of it. I can leave the gay sex and drugs (especially hard drugs) behind though (lol).

Another important influence on the Beats was jazz music, particularly bebop. Ginsberg had a name for Kerouac's improvisational writing style where he would write and write without stopping, creating the sensation of a saxophone player blowing on the bandstand. I like that very much. I'm beginning to see jazz's influence on literature a lot more now after reading this book whereas before when I was just reading about the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a book by George Lewis) and biographies (Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch), I couldn't see that correlation. But now I see that jazz has an even longer extended reach than I previously thought, interesting indeed.

I especially liked the ending of the book where Sterritt makes a bold universal claim; nearly all the movements that sprang up in recent times owe something in part to the Beats. He makes references to the Tea Party Movement, Occupy Movement, Cyberpunk (of which I am definitely apart of) Movement, and more. In a lot of ways I can see that he's right. In order for various movements to be started people have to reject society in a certain way, to create their own form of society through art, in this case through artistic literary works. It's quite wonderful.

All these writers will be legends in the future. The world won't forget them. It seems as society has become more conservative (the Reagan years and now in the Trump years) the ideas of the Beats have never sounded so universal. Sterritt says that there are Beats (in a different sense) in other countries but especially China, where there are people who are different kinds of Beats that might come to important and historical light in the upcoming years. All interesting things to think about.

Its quite a good book and if you want to learn about these great writers, their works, and the Beatniks in general this would be a great place to start. Very informative, engaging, and most importantly fun to read.

Lastly, learning all this stuff about the Beats makes me realize that most of the young people today who believe that are true outsiders are actually quite conservative conformists. The idea of young people today believing that they are 'different', 'cool', outside of the norms of society is quite wrong. Most of them will never truly be outsiders because they will never have to deal with status inconsistency. These writers did. That's the difference.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/jack_kerouac_119789

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion. -Kerouac 

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/jack_kerouac_119789

Metropolis

Metropolis is a science fiction film from 1928 that's inspired by the book of the same name written by Thea von Harbou, an actress (who plays Maria, a working class prophet) in the film and also Fritz Lang's wife. Where do I start with this film? There's so much going on, much of it is open to interpretation from the viewers. Here's a basic synopsis.

The story follows Freder, the son of the city's (Metropolis) ruler and Maria, a poor worker. They try to overcome the societal differences between the poor that live beneath the city and the rich who (live above ground) wear white shirts and shorts and play tennis. The movie is said to have Communist ideas, I can see that but to me its not overtly pronounced. I see the film more for its beauty, to find that common ground between the rich and poor.

So Freder is hanging out in some sort of garden relaxing and Maria comes in with a bunch of poor kids to show them how the rich live. "Look at them. These are your brothers," Maria says. Maria and the kids get sent away but Freder follows her to a machine room. He sees an explosion that kills some workers and experiences a hallucination. In the hallucination he sees workers being fed to the Machine, a sort of Aztec sacrificial ceremony, at least that's what I thought when I saw it.

Freder tells Fredersen, his dad (and ruler of the city) but his indifference towards the treatment of the workers leaves him cold, so Freder decides to help the workers in any way he can, in an attempt to help the poor and disenfranchised. There's a lot of stuff that happens in between this as the movie is about two hours and twenty-eight minutes long but for the sake of a shorter blog post I'll summarize things more briefly.

Later, we see Maria is prophesying the arrival of a mediator who can unite the working and ruling classes together. There's a mad occult scientist who uses this machine-woman (robot) to create another version of Maria, who goes on to sow discord within the working class, creating many problems and dissent.

The workers end up destroying the Heart Machine, which the false Maria told them to do. This causes the city to flood, and all their children are left to drown unless somebody saves them. The real Maria and Freder end up saving them. The working class burn the false Maria at the stake as a witch and find out that it was just a robot, as the fire burns through to the metal. There's a fight between Freder and the mad scientist Rotwang but Rotwang ends up falling to his death. In the end Freder fulfills his role as mediator between the working class and ruling class by uniting hands with the foreman (in charge of the working class), his father, and himself, a sort of male triangular unity, perhaps even referencing the Holy Trinity, the father, son, and holy spirit.

So that's it. If you think about it and see the movie, the plot is quite simplistic. Its the ideas that go within them that's open to interpretation, which is where a lot can be said of the movie. First, I would like to point out the fact that there's a lot of science fiction based on this: the idea of a political break between the rich and poor. The poor trying to 'get whats theirs', a sort of futurist communism, although in this movie the Marxism is probably very high by today's science fiction standards, but at that time I would say its not quite as pronounced. I might be wrong on that though. So yes, the idea of social construckts, government, poor living underground, and the rich living above ground is something seen in tons of science fiction. Its quite a common trope.

Then there's the idea of love between Freder and Maria. They obviously love each other and find romance in each other. They ended up saving all the children of the underclass together, becoming surrogate parents to an entire generation. That's love for sure. One could say that Freder might have even become interested in following Maria to the Machine Room because he was interested in her, interested in a woman who wasn't from his social class. In doing this he opened up to the world around him, and found love in the process, a sense of discovery.

Then there's the ideas of science and the occult, another common idea in sci-fi. Rotwang, the mad scientist is a true screwball who planned on using the Machine-woman (named Hel) to take over Metropolis. In the scene where we first see the Machine-woman we see a giant pentagram symbol at the foot of her body. This signified a sort of luciferian procreation. Metropolis the book has more occult associations than this movie, which makes sense because its easier to do that in a book than in a movie that will be showed to thousands of people.

The science part was pretty cool. In Rotwang's lab we see all sorts of potions, tubes, lights, bells, and whistles. It was a cross between a 15th century laboratory and a science physics lab from the year 2000. Something like that. It was quite something. That was a cool scene indeed.

In the end we find that Freder has fulfilled his destiny as a mediator between the rich and poor. One could say he was swayed and perhaps even chosen by Maria to be the guy to do this. This shows us that perhaps leaders in government have to be certain kinds of people, come from certain places, have a lot of money, and perhaps be chosen for and by the people, much like the systems we have in place today for our political elections and office.

For example, if Freder wasn't the son of the guy ruling the city he wouldn't have as much power or sway over government. If he wasn't the son of the ruler Maria might not have come to him with the children. This ending gives me a lot of ideas about government and power. Can politicians come from anywhere, be anyone, and still be elected into high positions of power? I'm not so sure. I think it works in some cases and other cases it doesn't. There's a gray area for sure.

Take for example Donald Trump. He's been a media highlight for a long time and he didn't come out of nowhere. He was the son of a rich guy, thus making him rich. He started talking about government and the poor white working class of America voted him into the Presidency. It could not have happened if he didn't have those other traits: being born rich, using that money to political advantage, and using his political platform to speak to the poor white working class.

This movie makes me think about things like that, why certain politicians get elected into power. However, its probably more important to think of this movie as a great example of German expressionist art, of which it is a wonderful example.

You can watch the film here.

HEAD and HANDS need a mediator. THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN HEAD AND HANDS MUST BE THE HEART!