On the DOCTOR STRANGE sequel.

The first 100(?) minutes of the Doctor Strange sequel, Multiverse of Madness, are a cartoonish mess, a Marvel panto featuring good actors chewing on bad dialogue. Cameos, callbacks, foreshadowing, brand-building. All of it stupid. Every quality-controlled moment of it is just…Disney Business, modulo the occasional moment when Raimi’s cockeyed indie humanism shows through the Product.

And then the bulk of act three, in which Strange does sorcerous battle with a hailstorm of musical notes, then performs a dread necromantic ritual and flies to a witch’s unholy temple on magical wings made from the souls of the damned, is like a teaser-trailer for an alternate universe in which Disney allowed its directors to make their own movies — not for adults, that’s too much to ask, but at least for people who’ve seen a non-Disney movie before.

The first Strange flick had some wide-eyed charm, a sense of good fun, a couple of groovy cosmic-psychedelic sequences, an unexpectedly excellent final act, Swinton, Mikkelsen. Here Raimi nails the dimension-hopping visuals; Wong, McAdams, and Ejiofor are welcome presences; Cumberbatch does his thing; none of it matters, none of it lands. It lacks magic. It doesn’t believe in magic — not until we briefly enter Raimi-ville at the end. By then it’s too late, and doesn’t last.

I’m glad Raimi made some money here, he deserves it, but this movie is a pointless waste of time, and I fucking well should’ve known better than to turn it on, much less stick it out. When the last Avengers movie came out, I predicted that Marvel’s run of luck was over. And you know what? I take pleasure in having been right.

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A bright center to the universe.

What is this? This is my one-page pitch/teaser for our upcoming Star Wars Roleplaying Game campaign — played by a bunch of my college housemates. The primary texts, beyond the sacred Original Trilogy, are Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters (a great West End Games sourcebook by Mark Rein-Hagen et al.) and a short-lived serial too obvious to name.

Things used to be simpler. A sly captain with a skilled pilot, a smart crew, and a fast ship could bring in thousands of credits running cargo on the up-and-up — and tens of thousands of credits, hundreds of thousands (or more…) if he had a little larceny in his soul and some hidden compartments in the hold.

A busy life for a more civilized age.

Things are different now.

Under Sheev Palpatine’s rule, the central government out of Coruscant — now unquestionably an ‘Empire’ — has moved to federalize control of transport, shipping, and interstellar cargo. Massive bulk freighters ply the spaceways on plush Imperial contracts, and starports from the Core Planets to the Outer Rim operate under Imperial scrutiny and oversight. Sector and system bosses, now almost exclusively human, are the usual corrupt mix: lazy bureaucrats, dimwit nepotism hires, minor tyrants, gladhandling political types, violent lunatics, true believers, even one or two competent functionaries trying to keep the starlanes open. The wrong customs officer in the wrong mood on the wrong afternoon can ruin a shipment or a career, toss you in irons on a made-up charge…and there’s not much to do about it, unless you know the guy on the next rung up the ladder.

The Republic had been a mess before the civil war, everybody knew it: stretched too thin and starting to break down at the edges. The Separatist confederacy were nuts, but they had a point — the Senate was a snakepit and the Republic only bothered to help the Right Sort of citizens. Yet it all still worked, more or less, right up to the end. A decent crew could make a decent living, especially at the edge of the galaxy or its underside, and if you could keep the engine running and the lights on, your biggest obstacles were more likely to be uselessness or venality (or mynocks) than…well. Than evil.

But that was 20 years ago.

The Emperor and his ‘ard boys (along with the usual soft ones) keep the star freighters running on time, pretty much, but his Moffs and stormtroopers and idiotic ‘purity’ laws replaced a relatively open but inefficient system with a draconian and corrupt one. ‘Madness and stupidity,’ to borrow Moff Tywin’s favourite phrase. No one likes the Empire who isn’t getting paid on it — but you keep your opinions to yourself, or else get labeled an insurrectionist.

It’s said a handful of star systems are in open rebellion. Maybe you sympathize with them, maybe you don’t. But you’re not in the war business, and would rather the gods bless and keep the rebels…far away from your ship. There’s an old Corellian curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Alas for you and yours, you do.

There is money to be made. There’s cargo to move around, and other stranger jobs when things get tight. There’s work. You might not live well, but you might live free.

Republic or Empire — or whatever comes next, if that’s how things go — the goal is the same, and it’s simple: find a job, find a crew, keep flying.

How’d that work out for them, by the way?

I’m old enough to remember when a version of the ‘Great Replacement’ just-so story was published by two Democratic consultants to wide acclaim, in 2002, under the title The Emerging Democratic Majority. It forecast unbreakable control of government by Democrats in the coming decades due, in no small measure, to demographic determinism: women vote Dem, blacks and hispanics vote Dem, high-paid professionals (men and women of every colour, esp. the young) vote Dem, it’s just inevitable.

The book was wrong about many things, let’s not dwell on it.

The explicitly conspiracist ‘replacement’ myth that’s long been bandied about by antisemites, fascists, and sundry far-right imbeciles and racist dipshits — demographic revolution is being encouraged, funded, even legally mandated by the Radical Left in order to brown/queer our God-fearing nation and commit ‘white genocide’ — is too stupid and evil to consider. It’s incorrect, ‘white genocide’ is a concept with no analytical value, and people who make such accusations should be dismissed from adult conversation. But you can imagine sane intelligent people, particularly working-class white hyphenates (e.g. Italian-Americans), believing a related story: as America becomes a majority-minority country, hostility to some idea of ‘whiteness’ drives the promotion, by political and media figures, of a vision of America being morally improved by becoming ‘less white.’ Not less racist, not less hostile toward minorities, but ‘less white’ per se.

If you’re an American (or bourgeois cosmopolitan) reading this, you probably agree with both the demographic fact claim and the moral claim. You probably feel, too, that racist\^H\^H\^H\^H\^Hworking-class whites ‘have it coming’ in a sense, whatever exactly ‘it’ is, for reaping the benefits of racial/racist hegemony and not doing their part to Lift Up the less fortunate. (Let’s not quibble about the fact that the working class has spend decades under the boot-heel of the same elites now most loudly trumpeting the virtues of DEI, etc., nor ask how ‘fortunate’ working-class voters of any race have been over the last half-century; nor should we quibble about the sincerity of elite trumpeting. Mouths gonna open, teeth gonna grind.)

Which is to ask: what part of the non-conspiracist (consensus) ‘replacement’ story do you object to, if any? What part do you think the New York Times objects to?

If you think the Democratic Party — an actual elite conspiracy against the laity, like the Republican Party — actually ‘cares about immigrants’ (or racial/ethnic/sexual minorities or indeed anyone else) then you’re a sucker and a fool or worse. Elite Dems care about guarding their prerogatives, like Republicans; they do what Capital tells them. Indeed they are Capital. And because the Democrats have no idea how to appeal to actual humans, they fucking love the condescending idea that Democratic voters can be made…which is why Trump’s successful appeals to minority voters took Dem elites (and rubes) by surprise in 2016 and again in 2020. They desperately want the ’emerging Democratic majority’ replacement-theory to be true, so that they can keep fundraising without actually doing anything for voters.

The Republicans want it to be true for the same reason. Remember: the minority party gets rich too.

Remember too that if demographic shifts are emergent systemic phenomena and no one’s driving — if, in other words, the ‘browning’ of the West is a mundane fact — then Capital is already efficiently moving to exploit it, everyone who can read a graph has begun to ‘price it in,’ and all that’s left open is how human beings feel about it. Regardless of what you want this country to be like, regardless of how you feel about Western Cultural Heritage (tired, wired?) and the many matters of identity wrapped up in how you look or speak and who raised you or didn’t and where you grew up or were kept down and what the State is or isn’t and has probably never been, there’s this nagging question right here and now: Who’s telling you how to feel? Are you cool with that?

Mash those Like/Subscribe buttons and try not to let your suffering interrupt the show, please and thanks.

The heavenly gate is down.

In The Matrix: Revolutions, the machines dig miles under the earth to reach Zion — heaven — while Neo rises up miles to the surface to reach the machine city and Smith’s Matrix: hell.

(Purgatory is within you.)

Irreal Life Top Ten, D-Day 2022.

1. Phish, Spring Tour 2022. I didn’t notice until the eighth and final show of this mini-tour, when they played their second ‘Sigma Oasis’ of the run, that the band was avoiding any song repeats. They do this regularly, most memorably on the 13-show ‘Baker’s Dozen’ stand at Madison Square Garden, such that it’s now almost unremarkable; you can’t imagine how challenging it is to remember 150 songs until you’ve tried learning three — never mind improvising on them, never mind doing so compellingly. Pianist Page McConnell turned 59 a week before the tour started; what other musicians approach 60 in anything remotely approaching Phish’s condition? No other band in American history, in or out of ‘rock and roll,’ has consistently engaged in the kind of musical risk-taking that’s long been Phish’s basic approach to their art. That’s the positive read; the negative is that this was an unexceptional tour in ‘purely musical’ terms, if those exist, on Phish’s terms. The other positive read is that the rare show-opening ‘Character Zero’ from Orange Beach on 5/29 is instantly one of the two or three best versions of that tune, featuring perfectly seamless transitions in and out of an extended open jam, and the other other positive read is that a ‘bad’ Phish show is still one of the best times in American popular music — and they didn’t play any bad shows this tour, not even close. You might not like their music, I get it, but you’re obligated at this point to understand that in 2022 Phish are a miracle.
2. Mass shootings and matter. We’re at the point where you can accurately predict demographic information about the shooter based solely on whether and how the national ‘news’ outlets cover the event — corporations like CNN are only interested in ‘motive’ when it suits a political agenda they don’t even realize they have, which is only to say that Capital never changes but changes colour. It’s worth asking yourself whether you’re more scared by stories about one lone nutjob going uptown with ten guns, or ten ordinary sociopaths going downtown with one gun each. It’s worth asking why.
3. ‘AI alignment risk.’ Doomsday cults, like bugs in open-source software, don’t go away just because they’re publicized. Sane people have to fix them. Because the real risk from AI, already being realized (cf. your Twitter feed), seems to be the slow ruin of functional if inefficient social controls, it’s a lot more satisfying for socially disengaged pseuds who did better in Math class than English class to spin nerdfic about murderous superintelligences than to, say, reckon with the real (social) world, its boring politics and unmanageable actual people. See also ‘Effective Altruism,’ a form of fantasy football for people too annoying to play D&D with.
4. 16″ Macbook Pro. After using a 15″ Retina model at home for years, I got a 16″ lappy from work — last year’s M1 (‘Apple Silicon’) model. This laptop is a proper chonky boi as the awful wankers say, unexpectedly bulky: nearly a pound heavier than the 15″ machine I already thought was unwieldy at just 4lbs. What does that weight buy, though, in addition to the massive gorgeous screen? It is blinding fast and gets wild battery life…not to mention the eerie silence, which I noticed because I noticed I wasn’t noticing fan noise. I’m reminded of Steve Jobs’s weary, shrugging insistence, when questioned about the ‘Apple premium’ at a conference: ‘We don’t ship junk.’ A difficult thing to hold onto, in a world where junk is what everyone’s used to.
5. Thunder. A Fortnite streamer on Youtube, presumably an intolerable late teenager or early 20something. When he teams up with his buddies to play group games he has no charisma, nothing to say, no evident sense of humour; his solo gameplay videos are mercifully silent. But he plays like a fucking demon, a goddamn avatar of death — no gimmicks or trick shots, no comedy, no leaning on dull rote strategy, just the lunatic intensity of a boy in his sensory-integrative prime, perfectly in command of a complex instrument and manifestly addicted to the headlong rush of virtual motion. This kid plays Fortnite like pure poetry; it’s hard to imagine anyone being consistently better. Yet in the competitive scene he appears to be a nonentity — which for me is like being awed by an NBA player and then finding out there’s a human city somewhere, deep in some jungle, where everyone’s twelve feet tall. Put it this way, I check Youtube every day just to find out whether Thunder has posted a gameplay video that day. Best of all: the (rare) videos where he comes in 2nd or 3rd out of 100, and posts the clip anyway.
6. Sweeney Todd. My son can’t stop listening to the beloved 2005 small-stage Broadway revival with Cerveris and LuPone, neither of whom could do an English accent to save a dying relative — LuPone’s is fucking atrocious, embarrassing, which colours the whole cast album for me (same with Dinklage’s mongrel accent as Tyrion Lannister — though he’s an immeasurably better actor in the role of a lifetime). The leads are very good overall, as they’d better be, and Sondheim’s fantastically complex score is the peak of Broadway composition. But there’s something irritating about the production, perhaps linked to the brilliant and daft cast-as-orchestra staging — a weirdly clumsy artificiality of phrasing, e.g. Anthony’s seemingly arbitrary accents during ‘Johanna.’ I bet it was hell to play. The best single performance of the 2005 revival might be Donna Lynne Champlin as Pirelli; she just kills it on her big number, plays flute and accordion too(!). Alas, the cast album suffers from ‘nearby movie’ syndrome: Tim Burton’s film (w/Depp, Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, and Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli) is musically far weaker — marred by ham-handed score redactions and simplifications, e.g. goodbye to Sondheim’s infernal dissonances in ‘A Little Priest’ — but beautifully acted by expert screen performers free to play to the camera and mic instead of the back row. The 2005 recording has its sublime high points (the quartet!) but it’s too wired or something. It’s come to sound…pleased with itself, with its cleverness? Somehow, this all-time classic production lost me.
7. Renewal. We got an email from The Economist saying the cost of our 12-week autorenewing subscription was going up to $80 — I’ll let you do the annual-cost math on that. Lunacy. Three-year subscriptions cost $210 annually, a savings of 40%. I completely forgot that we were on the ‘gullible idiots who mistake hesitancy for caution’ plan, pissing away money for several years now. Of course, because the whole mad concept of ‘money’ is just a plaque in my brain, I immediately started thinking of ways to piss away the savings on something else. Can’t wait.
8. Star Wars novels. You have to actually try reading them to remember what you’d tried to forget, all those years ago: they’re almost all just terrible. What a thinly, lazily imagined universe. What a waste of story. The haunting Youtube video ‘Obi-Wan Has PTSD’ is better than any Star Wars novel except maybe Timothy Zahn’s breakthrough Thrawn trilogy — and that’s grading generously.
9. After the moonlanding. A little more than a month into the grand split/tented/mechanical/programmable keyboard experiment, the haunting realization that my layout — designed for efficiency and sustainability — is a grotesque misshapen waste, with an underutilized left hand on several layers and a couple of dead keys on the primary layer. Right there! Embarrassing, amateur-hour stuff. Why did I even go to college, why do I even breathe.
10. Community, Season Six. Years 2 and 3 of Dan Harmon’s show were one long delirious dissonant crescendo, a work of sustained self-lacerating genius — one of the most complexly emotionally intelligent shows in TV history. But Harmon was an abusive alcoholic pill addict and an asshole, so they fired him. I suspect it saved him creatively and personally. He went off to do Harmontown, got unhappily married, and came back to do the excellent but uneven Season 5. Then it was off to Yahoo TV or some bullshit for the beautiful Season 6 — stretches of which are the deepest, strangest, darkest, wisest work of Community‘s whole run, culminating in the simple perfection of the finale, one of TV’s surest landings, a rich (self-)reflection on relinquishing and departure more mature than fans of Harmon’s earlier work might’ve thought possible. Harmon’s writing, here and on the impossibly complex and demanding Rick & Morty, deserves not just ‘an Emmy’ but all the Emmys — but so does his heartbreaking performance of Community‘s final monologue, which can stand with The Singing Detective‘s word game or the eulogy for Wild Bill on Deadwood: the highest compliment I can give. I expected to enjoy (again) this valedictory season; I didn’t expect to end up thinking it was some of Harmon’s best work.

My current model of what is now called ‘rationalism’…

…is a network of fan-communities, e.g. the large SSC/ACX readership and the small personality-cult surrounding Yudkowsky — largely experienced, like most fandoms by most fans, as a set of exclusionary social/style markers (pseudotechnical language like priors and ‘my current model of…’) and a core activity or two (e.g. performative handwringing about ‘AI risk,’ laundering parochialism/self-dealing through ‘effective altruism,’ boundary-testing their reactionary views on Twitter, etc.). While ‘rationalists’ make reference to the cognitive-bias memes that spread through online nerdthusiast circles a few years ago, the subculture has largely put that shit behind it; why pretend?

I’m glad that socially inept people are able to find one another and get backrubs at group-house parties, but what’s good about Yudkowsky-style ‘rationalism’ fits on a couple sheets of paper with room for a phrenological diagram and a picture of Aella with a big heart around it.

Syllabus: 69 Love Songs.

(from the manuscript in progress)

If he’d released them as a series of albums — 18 Love Songs, 15 More Songs About Love, Nine Songs for Bored Lovers (and a Song of Thwarted Hope), 16 Love Songs Involving the Wondrous Accordion, and the 10-track promotional release Love at Leeds — would anyone but diehards ever have given a shit about Stephin Merritt’s showpiece/monsterpiece, or bothered listening? Part of the genius of the work is the fact that it’s too big, specifically this much too big, never mind the marketing hook of the whole 69 thing, ‘ha ha.’ Well, love is too big, specifically (for some people, sometimes) that much too big, and its dual status as narrative series and random-access collection says something (to us, sometimes) about its subject. It’s all these things and not the sense you make of them, but go ahead make sense; the album’s a lot like love, and love is a landscape. You occupy it and vice versa. It makes sense of you. You should move freely inside it while you can, so that sensemaking goes on when you leave. It doesn’t all make sense. You’re too smart for your own good, dumb as a post, needy, infinite, still giggle or primly purse your lips at the number 69, got it figured out, nowhere close to figuring it out. Any of it.

I’m not kidding about genius either. It’s probably ‘too big’ and a few of the songs are wastes of space on their own terms, but that’s the thing — each song’s terms are shaped by that very stupid mega/metacontext. You can only hear these tunes as part of the larger thing, which is truer in itself than any willfully insincere piece would ever cop to being. You can only tell someone so many details about a mountain, can only answer ‘What’s it like?’ so many times, before you have to point to the top and say ‘Just go already.’ The whole thing is the truth. Love is a landscape.