ialdabaoth posted:okay il make some fuckin seitan and tell u if if/when it works out right, i got the next couple days off and the weather's gonna suck anyway
update, first round no go. unforeseeably turned out a little too dense and chewy. have a couples ideas for the next try
ialdabaoth posted:unforeseeably turned out a little too dense and chewy.
lemme know when you get it right though, I'm still interested. and, like, i know this has been a Tense discussion, harsh words have been exchanged, but don't pls ever threaten me or anyone else with visiting the USA. shit like that is just crossing the line man. too scary.
colddays posted:I thought Parasite was pretty good.
I saw this and agree that it was pretty good. The director made Snowpiercer (which was about a post-apocalyptic ice age train in which human life carries on, but with the different compartments segregated by class) so it shouldn't be too surprising that this movie is rife with class allegories too. There are lots of visual uses of verticality, climbing stairs to enter the bourgeois household, or following stairs flooding with water downward into the sub-basement home of the protagonist "parasite" family, who frequently get pissed on by a drunk local. The bourgeois family is personally rather nice while also being extremely classist, ignorantly considering the rain that flooded the lower class neighborhood to be a beautiful blessing. They complain about the stench of the underclass frequently and the father obsesses over whether his driver "crosses the line." He is killed for his crimes.
Ultimately however this movie is clearly a cautionary tale about the failures of the lumpenproletariat. The parasite working class family successfully attaches themselves to the bourgeois household and all seem rather capable at their jobs. They are becoming financially successful. Their undoing comes the night when they are celebrating their success by getting drunk; they wonder idly how the former driver they displaced is doing and the sister character says it doesn't matter, because they only should worry about themselves. The brother mentions she fits in best with the wealthy. She has no class solidarity and is later killed. The former housekeeper shows up at the house; she calls the mother character "sis" and asks for help but the mother says she's not her "sis." Even though the former housekeeper and her husband could clearly come to a cooperative agreement with the parasitic con family, the two families instead engage in battle against each other, which is the final cause of all their downfalls.
In the end, after the killing of the patriarch of the wealthy family, a new wealthy family moves into the house. Nevertheless, the poor brother dreams about becoming rich and eventually buying the house himself in order to liberate his entrapped father. This will never happen. Instead it only proves the brother continues to fall into the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" trap; this even after being literally beaten into a coma by a "wealth stone." He has learned nothing and is unable to achieve class consciousness even after all that has befallen them.
Edited by ilmdge ()
e: to elaborate, theres nothing in the text to suggest that the lack of any sort of class consciousness by any character at all was a "mistake" or anything of the sort. additionally, theres no real sense in which exploitation is demonstrated to have any relation to the creation of class, the rich family is mostly a set piece, they're barely even active in the story.
Edited by c_man ()
c_man posted:i agree with most of that but i think it makes it a reactionary-liberal movie instead of a movie with any sort of meaningful class content
e: to elaborate, theres nothing in the text to suggest that the lack of any sort of class consciousness by any character at all was a "mistake" or anything of the sort. additionally, theres no real sense in which exploitation is demonstrated to have any relation to the creation of class, the rich family is mostly a set piece, they're barely even active in the story.
Hmmm, although i agree that doing any Communist Reading of a movie you saw almost always is gonna be somewhat forced, i will push back a bit here.
The characters themselves admitted their clash with the previous housekeeper was a mistake, they say it got out of hand and begin preparing to take down some kind of meatball dish as a show of good faith (but it was already too late). Also my anecdotal findings are that viewers found that whole battle the moment where they felt they could no longer root for the protagonists and where they became unsympathetic, which means the movie is working as it should. Furthermore at the end instead of just unveiling the brother's master plan, they kind of hit you with the trick of making it look like the brother is actually buying the house before swerving and revealing that was just a fantasy, which seems like a deliberate choice to drive home that it is fantasy.
The stench of all people who would ever ride the subway or whatever is a clear class signifier throughout but yes I do think you are right that they don't really delve into exploitation of the working class by the wealthy family at any point, or show the rich doing anything nefarious to achieve their wealth (although we do see the parasite family do so). but I would say if the theme is what i claimed (failures of the lumpen) then that's why there wasn't more focus there
Edited by ilmdge ()
cars posted:i watched Lindsay Ellis's 101-level primer on film theory, probably the only film theory thing on YouTube that someone might find by accident while looking for million-view videos on how Toy Story 4 secretly takes place in Batman world.
you don't have to justify how you found it.
Petrol posted:cars posted:i watched Lindsay Ellis's 101-level primer on film theory, probably the only film theory thing on YouTube that someone might find by accident while looking for million-view videos on how Toy Story 4 secretly takes place in Batman world.
you don't have to justify how you found it.
Petrol!!!!!
cars posted:like: Disney could have prevented all fan badmouthing of their new star wars if they had just stuffed a garbage bag full of crumpled-up dollar bills and tossed it into the backyard of someone who had written a crappy prose "canon" sequel to the movies so they could adapt it for the screen. it's not like they have to carefully tailor those movies for today's general audiences to get them to buy tickets, and all the unpaid-publicist franchise fans want is to go into the theater already knowing what's going to happen in 90% of the movie, because if that's what they see, it retroactively justifies their questionable decision to purchase and read novels about space wizards. they don't even have to have read that particular book. if the fan wiki says it's already "canon", they lack the vocabulary to complain about it.
you underestimate nerds' ability to be unreasonably dumb about what happens in their space stories. the first film of the new trilogy was dismissed as entirely derivative, the second as too disrespectful to the canon but also not experimental enough(?!), and now the new one is too much of a 'retcon' of the previous film and 100% fanservice. none of complaints totally lack any basis in reality but the exaggeration and laser focus on all the problems betrays a weirdly aggressive attitude towards what is, after all, a piece of mass entertainment.
as a music nerd, i look upon all this with bewilderment. it is after all hardly unusual for a band you love to put out an album with a few dud tracks but that you appreciate nonetheless, or indeed to churn out absolute garbage after 1 or 3 or even 20 years of great work. it's incredibly easy to compartmentalise these things. in fact, even star wars fans used to manage it! they could appreciate rotj even if they hated the ewoks, for example. now they just want to mutter darkly about "plot holes" and "reshoots" and, indeed, "SJWs". to hell with them all. i am glad the new films bothered, if only for moments here and there, to rise above the lowest common denominator fanfic and reach for something that looks from a distance a bit like art, if you squint hard enough. and to otherwise entertain me with rollicking adventures of moon men and ladies and their robot and puppet friends with the big explodey.
cars posted:one part that does make me a little sad about tpaine destroying his post history is losing half the conversation on here about how writers have to pander to "fan theories" and "canon", because otherwise every point of ambiguity in the writer's work gets interpreted through some spin-off script credited to five transients whose bodies are later dumped at a construction site
it's extremely 'cool' that tvtropes and wikis and other stuff like that have destroyed a bunch of people's ability to engage with art and understand the concept of metaphors and so forth and so on.
http://exiledonline.com/american-movies-are-dead-so-party-down/
ilmdge posted:There was a site-wide back-up before tpaine deactivated... I can see all his posts there, on the secret page
I don't have access but I heard that you first have to join all the orgs and read all their theory and take a bunch of scantron tests with a brittle pencil that snaps in half when you try to fill in the bubbles, before working your way into the ultra-secret Ray O Light group (final boss). Then in the process of ROL indoctrination you are subjected to unbelievably sophisticated Frankenstein threshold brainwash radio inculcating propaganda and filling your body with horrible diseases. Then finally with your body distorted into an impossible and irreversible shape you can access the secret page and read the tpaine posts that reveal the full extent of the worldwide mad deadly communist gangster computer god which has condemned humanity to an eternity of biomechanical living-death eternal slavery!
Petrol posted:i saw the new star war. its good. not as good as last jedi but thats to be expected. a lot of people are, predictably, Caring about it too much one way or the other. newsflash: its possible to enjoy thing without making it a central part of whatever is dysfunctional about your identity
I sat down in a buffet and two guys sitting at two separate tables with bored families in tow were talking at length to each other about why the new Star Wars movies have ruined Star Wars. Neither had seen the new one yet but it wasn't looking good, they thought, especially after the last one made Luke angry and sad. The Star Wars discussion was going down in the buffet and they were also rehabilitating the prequels to each other, which they thought were good... except you know for the midichlorian thing. Didn't know what to do, but I guess it did lead to me writing up this extensive post which probably makes me caremad as well and owned online
Petrol posted:you underestimate nerds' ability to be unreasonably dumb about what happens in their space stories. the first film of the new trilogy was dismissed as entirely derivative, the second as too disrespectful to the canon but also not experimental enough(?!), and now the new one is too much of a 'retcon' of the previous film and 100% fanservice. none of complaints totally lack any basis in reality but the exaggeration and laser focus on all the problems betrays a weirdly aggressive attitude towards what is, after all, a piece of mass entertainment.
imo you underestimate exactly how quickly a nerd can silence debates today by saying such and such is already established as "canon" in the "universe". if it's new they'll argue it's "not canon" if they don't like it, but if it's been established as "canon" for years they treat it just as that term would suggest, as though challenging it is universally futile because it's holy writ.
again there was a good conversation in this thread about it but some of it died along with the poster.
in the case of these movies though nearly all of the current fan rage freaks would have become vicious defenders so long as not much was changed about them. there would be some edge whining about how so-and-so was bad casting but they'd all go see the movies and purchase the home versions and version after version of them. and the average person who goes to see a Star Wars movie would maybe hear this one was based on a book, maybe, and wouldn't ever pay any attention to it.
lo posted:it's extremely 'cool' that tvtropes and wikis and other stuff like that have destroyed a bunch of people's ability to engage with art and understand the concept of metaphors and so forth and so on.
yeah TV Tropes is kind of a disease infecting a ton of non-bourgeois-born/non-"literary" writing in the English language IMO... nowadays, in the rare circumstance where a popular writer of around my age or younger in the U.S. or UK wasn't born to billionaires in a NYC or Saint-Germain penthouse or sired by some tenured creative writing professor in the Ivy League, they probably came up through some fan-centric writer's circle online, and so they talk and think in terms of sites like that one. You read young genre writers and wannabe writers from outside the bourgeoisie going back and forth on some place that's exposed to others, Twitter or whatever, and so many of them are just wrecking their critical thinking with this stuff. And even if they go into academia or get shamed by some decrepit Saussure acolyte into stepping up their game, they still feel it necessary to pay homage to this stuff as faux-populism, especially since self-examination isn't why you win the lottery through Amazon self-publishing or whatever and become the next thing everyone has to have an opinion about as a pop-culture-writing freelancer.
For anyone who hasn't read it, and stick to that policy if you haven't, the idea behind TV Tropes is that every single thing in every single story in every single medium, Ovid or Joyce or Star Wars or Mario or whatever, every character or event or description or theme, is a "trope", that is, a significant motif, simply because it exists, and it can be yanked out of the story and encased in lucite along many, many others like it in a single category with no attention paid to whether it really fits or to the value of the story it's from, or in three or six or ten categories like that, all named by some Online rando after some kids' cartoon they remember.
These "trope" categories then become the ways that writers and wannabe writers in these circles, mostly focused on schools of "genre" fiction, talk down to each other, and, eventually, describe and even plan their own stories: this character is kind of This Trope and a little of That Trope engaged in The Other Trope, please click the links to TV Tropes to see how my character is a lot like Darth Vader, Luigi and Piers Plowman. And if they expect to see a "trope" in some story somewhere—and they do, because they've trained themselves to expect the most hackneyed and predictable element from every single story they read or write—and it doesn't appear, they still put the thing on the page, they just say it's "subverted". So they create and enforce these crowd-sourced rules under which every single story must be the most hack dumb predictable shit possible or must be subordinated to it as commentary on the "trope".
TV Tropes isn't analysis, and it isn't the analysis-free cauldron of the "natural" writer or outsider artist or even of the slavish "fandom" itself. Instead, it's the crowd-sourced hypertrophy of "murder to dissect", a cargo cult of analysis by people who learned the term "MacGuffin" and decided that everything needed a name like that, a secret password to the Burger King Kids Club.
I doubt reading Saussure has inspired much fiction worth reading, so imagine reading something from a LISA-style chatbot that was trained on Bartlett's Quotations from the guy. Not that the TV Tropes-style school of young writer would be anything but shocked and offended by that edgy new kid Saussure, because this school of pseudo-analysis really just repeats a time before "Turn of the Screw" was written, a sort of 19th-century paleontological taxonomy of fossils. (Far right genre babies probably blame this on "post-modernism" somehow since their particular shit isn't allowed on TV Tropes.)
I probably care more than I should but it's just degenerate and sickening to me as a reader, because for the next writer to get their work published, they either need to have a bunch of NYT bestseller writers and literary agents at their christening, which is like 90% of successful "literary" writers now, or be a TV Tropes cult member who panders enough to their peers' expectations to get noticed, first by some pop-culture-sewer-dredging "news" site, then by someone willing to exploit that article's topic. And that's the work that everyone's going to hear about, the work that's going to get recommended to me by people in my life for the foreseeable future and because they're good people, they're going to explain that yeah it kind of sucks too.
Edited by cars ()
lo posted:i think i am slightly more optimistic than you cars in the sense that i do think there are a few good contemporary 'literary' writers, however, most of the time either they have to be published by small presses and so no one reads them, or they're not writing in english and their translation is dependent on a bunch of factors that more often than not aren't satisfied so no one in english reads them. also it's not a good sign that most of the really good current people i can think of are all older.
that's why I specified English-language, I agree that it hasn't injected itself into the entire world yet, but given that it's the Internet, it could spread nearly everywhere before anyone in the field finds the armored-up language to criticize it without being raked over the coals by as a snob by their eager-beaver pseudo-populist peers.
as far as English-language small presses go, a lot of what they put out belongs to post-grad creative-writing academics, people who teach in smaller and less prestigious university programs and similar types, that is, mostly bourgeois brats or petit-bourgeois thoroughly dedicated to bourgeois values in imitation of those who just might get them a bigger advance and better sales next time around. people outside of those circles seem to mostly want to self-publish nowadays, because digital makes it slightly less expensive and pathetic and because that's how an unauthorized jack-off story based on a popular vampire movie became its own movie that made $570 million on a $40 million budget.
lo posted:i've been having some vague thoughts recently about how high culture isn't really hegemonic anymore, since it seems to have been almost totally displaced by mass produced popular culture even for the wealthy who back in the day would have been attending operas or whatever, and this might represent an opportunity for oppositionally minded artists since it means that all that high culture is just sitting there ready to be pillaged of anything useful. but i'm not really sure about this as like, a strategy for anything in particular
might be related to what we've talked about on here before, where in the U.S. at least, decorum as a signifier of class (and even of divisions among the bourgeois, polite "old money" vs. boorish "new money"), and crude and bizarre behavior tolerated as "eccentric" when it occurs among the wealthy, have both been replaced by simple positive correlation between how wealthy you are and how rude or crazy you should act—not can, but should—to indicate your bourgeois status.
among the non-bourgeois, one response has been desperate cargo-cult thinkers trying to kayak up a waterfall, figuring if you act rude or crazy in imitation of wealthy people you see on TV, you're "thinking rich" and your bank account will spontaneously fill due to psychic energy, even though what happens to the "think rich" guy is, he gets thrown out of the place, and what happens to the rich guy is, he gets a personal apology from management for his own tantrum because they knew who he was before he walked in, so no one's mistaking one for the other even if the people making those calls couldn't already tell from glancing at wristwatches. and then there's the smaller group of con artists that have exploited that cargo-cult thinking for books or YouTube "lessons" and so on, and if that pulls down even, like, a thousand bucks gross a month for someone, i'm sure they truly believe in it.