Whattup, my magic little worker elves? What's life like on the North Pole these days? Santa cracking that whip and bumming you out? Then have I got the blog for you! Since streaming has taken over everything and movies are kind of quaint now, I'm introducing TV Rec: Bonus Editions, in which I skip the weird movie and instead stream-of-consciousness my way through a couple of tv shows or individual episodes that I think are connected in some way. The theme for this one is "God hates Mondays" (for the record: I came up with the title and THEN I remembered that Chapo Trap House Garfield “Mondays are haram” bit, which I know is funnier, ok?). It's all about how much work sucks. I'm going to argue that HBO's Chernobyl is actually communist propaganda and episode 4 of Netflix' Trigger Warning actually satanic praxis. The ranting will conclude with an ode to Work by Rihanna. I looked it up on LyricsSmartOnline, and this song has nothing to do with the theme, but the video is so good, it merits a hymn or two anyway.
I’m going to try and publish an end-of-decade special before the year is over, until then though, I wish you all a very merry christmas. And, for those of you not as close to Baby Jesus as they should be, I hope you’ll join my Holiday Party, where instead of unpacking presents, we’ll be packing heat, cause baby, it’s war outside.
❄❄❄ spoilers! ❄❄❄ snow…ilers?❄❄❄ spoilers. ❄❄❄
Back in June of this year, for a hot twitter minute, Chernobyl was all anybody could talk about. As a Persian I didn't want to publicly throw around the word “nuclear" for fear of ending up on somebody's naughty list, so now things have cooled down a little, here's my two eh… kopeks. In case you somehow missed the biggest nuclear disaster in history: Chernobyl was the biggest nuclear disaster in history. Let’s quickly run through what happened irl: in April of 1986, a nuclear power plant in Northern Ukraine exploded, releasing so much toxic material into the air that it was measurable all over Europe, and making the 30 kilometers around it a no-gone zone to this day. Hundreds of people died from acute radioactive poisoning, tens of thousands had to be relocated. See, the Chernobyl plant operators did a test that pushed the reactor to its absolute limit, not knowing it could trigger a meltdown. It was a bad idea executed horribly, but it wasn't entirely their fault, either. Their instruction manuals failed to mention a flaw in the reactor's design that made this kind of explosion possible in the first place. Turns out that information had been buried by some Moscow bureaucrat to prevent it from sullying the reputation of Soviet power plant craftsmanship. Success.
HBO's Chernobyl is based on the story of this accident as told by one of the main scientists involved in the clean-up. It's filled to the brim with all the 80s eastern bloc nostalgia you could ask for: ugly buildings, bad hair, oppressive communism and flawless British accents. Kind of like Goodbye Lenin, except less toxic. The show has only 5 episodes, and I liked exactly half of them. It recreates key events and conversations starting from the operating room of the plant seconds after the explosion, to the attempts of the state on every level to first deny and then cover up and then finally deal with the mess, to eventual trial of the plant operators. Disasters are not my genre, which might explain why the quality of the show seemed so wildly uneven to me. I found some of it is hair-raising, some of it nap-inducing, and mostly I liked the part with the moon landing robots (yes, all three seconds).
When Chernobyl was released, there was a lot of debate on my twitter feed about whether this show is left-wing or right-wing, anti-Russia or anti-Trump. While its main villain seems to be the fatally dysfunctional Soviet bureaucracy, that same dysfunction can be read as a critique of the right’s response to climate change. The show very deliberately pits honest, hard-working scientists against the petty motives and brutal denial of those determined to play politics no matter how stupidly out of hand things get. It is, as the main scientist guy dramatically exclaims in the final courtroom scene, about "lies". When lies win and facts lose, disaster happens.
To which I say: yeah fine, but that's some weak #resistance shit. I'd like to push things a little further to the left and claim that the show is actually about management vs. labour. About how much management sucks and makes people short-sighted and scared and a little nuts. Chernobyl is not corruption story, Sen. Warren, it's system failure. Yes, I'm going to argue this seemingly anti-communist thing is actually super-communist, watch me.
The series shows how every disastrous decision and red-tape roadblock that made Chernobyl such a colossal clusterfuck was the consequence of some dude trying to save his cushy desk job or angling for a better one. Each stonewalling Soviet bureaucrat we meet seems to be motivated by what I call the 3 Ps: position, performance, promotion. The nuclear plant boss puts the reactor under heavy, unnecessary strain in order to achieve some mandatory test result he needs to secure a better job. Rather than evacuate people just in case, the local party bosses decide to seal off the adjacent town lest word get out to higher-ups of the fuck-up under their command. The clean-up crew can't get the right equipment because the government doesn't want to be seen asking the West for help. When this one scientist lady makes an important discovery, her superior tells her that she's wrong and should stop trying to make trouble. When she points out that she knows what she is talking about because she is a nuclear physicist, and he doesn't, because he was promoted out of a shoe factory, he replies: "Yes, I used to work in a shoe factory, and now I'm in charge." In a world run by angsty, ambitious careerists, the truth doesn't stand a chance. At every turn, it's bent and spun and repressed and ignored because it might jeopardize someone's job or make trouble for their boss or their country. In other words, it's inconvenient.
I never really understood why, out of all the apocalyptic titles he could've picked, Al Gore chose to call his climate change movie "An Inconvenient Truth". It sounds like an after-school special about that time of the month. But then I saw this show and realized that while Gore pretended to address all of us, he was in fact looking at the desk riders in our midst. The innumerable tiny kings of innumerable tiny hills who, since they have this smallest of stakes in the status quo, will stop at nothing to stop anything from changing, ever. See, while under capitalism 8 extremely wealthy guys own basically everything, they're usually too busy paragliding with ex-presidents or fucking teenagers or buying elections to effectively rule the rest of us. They outsource the boring day-to-day part of running our lives to Diane from HR and other proud members of what we call the Professional Managerial Class. The PMC, as it's affectionately called by no one, is all the spreadsheet gazers and pitch deck voyeurs who specialize in telling people who do actual work how to do the work we were already doing and surveil our every move to make sure we do the work they kept us from doing in order to tell us how to do it more efficiently. Where totalitarian communism has bureaucrats, capitalism has bosses. Endless, witless bosses. A vast near-clone army of college-educated title-hoarders that looks a little like this:
You may want to counter that, because failing to play the promotion game in red Russia meant a permanent vacation to the famous gulag, it's unfair to compare Chernobyl’s inept cowards to the take-charge, well-informed, free-thinkers of the Western upper middle class. But I've been around fancy first-world institutions enough to know that it really doesn't make a difference. If you want to get anywhere around here and now, you have to defend your career like your life depends on it, even if it really doesn't. I once asked a frantically overworked corporate friend of mine what would happen if stopped trying so hard to take out the competition and stay one step ahead of his colleagues and win the next meeting or whatever. What is the point of working yourself sick if the worst case scenario is getting fired, not the firing squad? But me pointing that out had no effect on either his level of stress or ruthlessness. Corporate life, I concluded watching this poor besieged bastard, is low-stakes politicking for high-functioning psychopaths. The real stakes don't matter, what matters is position, performance, promotion.
It’s not surprising. Every capitalist boss in turn has their own boss who sets their targets and reviews their work, creating an intensely hierarchical system that is kind of like the Middle Ages, except the outfits are less interesting and you can actually switch ranks if you play the game right. Being able to level up from peasant to knight to regional manager sounds better than living in a society where you're stuck being a peasant for life, but it also creates a tremendous amount of anxiety. It's the sadness of people hanging on to the ledge of the poverty pit pretending the fact that someone with real power hasn't stepped on their fingers yet somehow makes them special. The fear of falling back into the rabble is what really drives these corporate go-getters. They'll do pretty much anything to stay out of the shoe factory.
Look, I’m not saying anyone who ever lead a meeting is evil. I understand that being some combination of conniving an risk-averse is less of a character flaw than a survival strategy. When knife sharpeners are the most commonly used office supplies, it’s hard to blame people for not sticking their neck out. That’s exactly my point. Like the bureaucrats in Chernobyl, our leaders are stuck in a system fueled by bad incentives. And geared towards useless results. In 1980s Russia, the ultimate reason for all the fuckery was upholding the glory of the Soviet state. Under contemporary capitalism, it's profit. At least national glory was, you know, nationalized.
In the middle of watching Chernobyl, I got a link from one of you to this interview with a philosopher who argues that the biggest failure of the our current epoch is not the disasters caused by the state, but the disasters ignored by it. Regimes like state communism and global capitalism, he says, always end up becoming both viciously oppressive and comically unresponsive. So even if we can clearly see some horrible crisis unfolding in front of our eyes, like climate change or refugees, we don't seem to be able to react in a way that matches the seriousness of the situation. We simply don't know how to act outside of the moves the career game allows us. All we know is how to be the proverbial cog in the machine.
According to the philosopher man, the only thing that can save us is some newfangled version of communism that’s a kind of religion-light. It’s called “weak communism” and it’s supposed to help us become less atomized and mechanical creatures, live more communal and spiritual lives. Or something. I don’t know. I’m old-fashioned. I suggest we do classic communism instead, before the 20th century made it weird. Let’s have a general strike, a world-wide walk-out. Rather than the cogs getting in touch with their inner humanity or whatever, they should realize that they're cogs first, and collectively refuse to turn.
Chernobyl has sympathetic characters, too. The scientists who keep sciencing despite all the threats, the plant technicians warning their idiot boss something is wrong, the tragically doomed #firstresponders, the coal miners who knowingly risk their lives to prevent toxic waste from seeping into the water supply. Basically, everyone not too busy covering their own ass to help prevent disaster. That's because these people aren’t careerists, they're workers. Aware of the fact that the system has nothing to offer them, they just do the thing that needs to be done. Since we’re all about to boil in the polar ice caps we melted for no reason, maybe it’s time the the PMC realizes the system has nothing to offer it, either. Like their underlings, the managers of the world are being exploited and bullied and pushed to the brink, just in slightly shinier cars. How many burn-outs before they realize that their societal success does not define them, their boundless anxiety does? Instead of relying on yoga retreats and therapy sessions and shopping sprees to mitigate the pressure, they should let it reach critical mass. Work stress is just class consciousness building below the surface. Have a meltdown, save the planet.
Question: has everybody always known who Killer Mike is except for me? Apparently he is a famous rapper, but because I know nothing about music, he only appeared on my radar a few times during the 2016 elections as the guy famesplaining Bernie Sanders to obtuse late night talk show hosts. Anyway, earlier this year, he released his own tv series on Netflix. It’s a reality show called Trigger Warning With Killer Mike, it has 6 episodes for now, and it’s amazing.
You guys know I can’t stand reality television right? I like my tv like I like my social interactions - scripted and highly stylized. But Trigger Warning is something else: half social experiment, half satire, and entirely subversive. I would call it “original”, but that doesn’t quite cover the extent to which I didn't see it coming, any of it. Since Mike stumped for a self-proclaimed socialist, I probably should've had some idea of what I was getting into, but I didn't. It’s as if the unscripted look of the whole thing, those tired Real World aesthetics that make reality tv cheap to make and shit to watch, kept throwing me for a loop, hiding how radical the show is in plane sight. I guess the social experiment part of the concept does harken back to Big Brother, but other than that, “reality” mostly applies to this show in terms of how much its point is to change it.
Each episode of Trigger Warning goes something like this: Killer Mike identifies a social problem, usually situated on the intersection of race and class, comes up with an insane idea on how to fix it, and then tries to put this idea into practice on some small scale using a mix of experts and volunteers recruited off the street. His experiments get increasingly ludicrous as the episode moves along, but through a baffling combination of fame, charm, tenacity and cunning, Mike makes them work anyway. More importantly, he gets the normies to go along. Every episode ends with him having created some absurd, awkward alternate reality, a bizarre but revolutionary departure from the status quo that is as silly as it is profound, as sardonic as it is truly inspiring. There is an episode where he tries to get more people interested in vocational training by mixing it with porn, an episode where he buys a farm in the middle of the state of Georgia to launch a utopia called “New Africa”, and one where he decides that, like the Hell's Angels, black gangs should start making money off their brand, and convinces a chapter of the Crips to make and sell their own soda. Genius. Kind of like performance art, but if I understood performance art.
While the Crip-a-Cola episode is objectively the best one, my personal favourite, for reasons that will become imminently obvious, is the one where Killer Mike creates his own religion. Episode 4, i.e. New Jesus, starts out with Mike positing that one of the things holding African-Americans back is the fact that they're forced to worship a white dude. Failing to convince a famous black evangelist to pivot to a black messiah, he decides to found his own church, built around a new saviour, his long-time friend Sleepy. Sleepy is a perennially stoned, obstinately taciturn man, with the energy of an aging tortoise and the dubious philosophy "fuck hope, do dope". Supposedly Sleepy has helped Mike calm down at times when he needed it the most, and Mike believes he can provide the same benevolent guidance to others. Once he's gathered a few volunteers disillusioned enough with the black church to give this weirdness a shot, Mike tells them he’s going to run with Sleepy’s nickname and make naps the central tenet of this new faith, the Church of Sleep. He enlists the help of Arianna Huffington, who has been fighting on the front lines of the anti-sleep-deprivation movement for years now, to tell us that sleep is a crucial practice of spiritual healing. According to scientists™, sleep-deprivation renders us less empathetic and more angry, and stops us "from being spiritually connected to our brothers and sister". The episode ends with Mike's growing congregation meeting during the day at his favourite strip club to smoke weed, nap, and do confessions about all the important, life-altering things they've realized by allowing themselves this extra bit of sleep.
Funny, yes? No. Seriously, none of this made me laugh as much as made my eyeballs cartoon-pop out of my head. There’s so much here that I’ve been thinking about for years, and this episode just puns its way through it all like it’s nothing. It so effortlessly relates sleep-deprivation to race to capitalism that I didn’t even see it until the very end. I was distracted by all the religiosity, but that's not really what this episode is about. What, then, is it really about? Mike gives us some idea early on. After he hangs up with Huffington the Happy Ted Talk Liberal, he hints at the fact that getting a good night’s sleep may be a harder for some than for others. He mentions that
African-Americans today have a fraught relationship with sleep due to racial stereotypes that label them lazy and idle
African-Americans are more often poor and policed, so they lose sleep to anxieties other communities don't
in our culture, for "anyone who wants to succeed financially, sleep is dismissed as a weakness".
That’s it, though. That's everything Mike tells us about his napping philosophy before he moves on to the much more important business of founding a religion on it. And maybe that's all the theory anyone needs. But let me connect the dots for you anyway, cause it’s 4 am and I’m going nowhere.
The reason sleep is a kind of taboo in our culture in general and for minorities in particular, is because the white fuckers who established our current way of life were Protestants, and while Protestants don't have a lot of hard-and-fast rules for getting into heaven, the one thing that they believe might, is work. It doesn't matter what kind of work, really. You can spend your days clubbing baby seals, as long as you break a sweat and make a buck, you're good with God. This is what we call the Protestant Work Ethic™, and even if very few people still explicitly believe in it, it remains the unofficial, non-state religion of global capitalism. Just think about how much we tend to revere "hard-working people" and internet billionaires. People who get up early in the morning to make money are saints, people who sleep in are degenerate parasites. Which is why minorities especially can’t be caught resting too much. They’re constantly having to dodge that cold white judgemental stare telling them they’re poor not because they were born that way, but simply because they’re lazy. When hard work = money = the only road to salvation, anyone who deviates from that path is damning themselves. In an increasingly godless world, napping may be the only sin left.
Which brings us back to the New Jesus episode of Trigger Warning. It took a while to sink in, but at some point I realized that what Killer Mike has pulled off here is something of a miracle. Under the guise of looking for a black alternative to Christianity, he’s created an anti-capitalist religion. His Church of Sleep is a satanic cult, dedicated to the exact opposite of the one true God of our time: productivity. It's utterly, scandalously heretic. The miracle is that no one has crucified him yet.
Mike is always insisting he is a “capitalist”, but his theology of sleep reminds me of that “weak communism” thing I mentioned in the previous post. One of Mike’s mottos, as seen on this merch I want for christmas, is “kill your masters”. Having seen Trigger Warning though, I can confirm he doesn’t mean it in the fun violent sense, he means it in the boring structural sense. Like weak communism, Mike is all about breaking people out of oppressive and self-destructive social habits by helping them connect to themselves and their community in more meaningful ways. Somehow watching Mike do his thing made me understand and appreciate weak communism a lot more than all the philosophy research (googling) I did on the subject, which puts him at 2-0, miracle-wise. Basically, Mike wants us to kill our masters with kindness. Not kindness towards them, but towards ourselves.
"I just want to be recognized as a black woman. I don't need the ‘strong’ in front of it," one of the Church of Sleep congregants confesses post-nap. In Mike’s religion of rest, kindness comes down to forgiveness. What napping really teaches us is that it’s ok not to be lean mean production fiends. To forgive ourselves for not going and getting every goddamn second of every day. For being tired, for being weak, for feeling anything at all. Napping may be sinful, but sinning against a society with dumb-ass virtues doesn’t make you a bad person. Or, to put it in modern lingo, a failure. What if classic commies like me are wrong, and true change hinges on the cogs in the machine getting in touch with something other than their mechanical parts first, something like empathy for themselves and their “brothers and sister”. Maybe if everyone could sleep whenever they wanted, they’d be woke the rest of the time. Maybe it's not the workers, but the slackers of the world who'll inherit the earth. Take a nap, save the planet.
Years ago, when a nasty combination of insomnia, deadlines and bad luck made me sick, I decided that the West was not for me, and that if I ever got better, I would leave Holland and migrate somewhere less cold and uhm... Prostestant Work Ethic-y. I was thinking Vietnam, maybe, because of how they beat a capitalist empire that one time, or Argentina, because that’s where people go when things don’t work out in Europe. But then Rihanna released the video for her song "Work", and I realized my problematical colonial fantasy may have been about the West-Indies all along.
For some convoluted reason they made two videos for this song and cut them back-to-back. There really is no question, though, that the first video by Director X is the superior one. Rihanna, playing an extremely fuckable version of the rastafari flag, gets out of a car with Drake and they enter a Caribbean restaurant called The Real Jerk. This is an actual restaurant and the video makers changed very little for the shoot. There is food being served and chicken being fried somewhere, but, like Rihanna, most of the clientele doesn’t seem to be there to eat, they're there to dance. The air is thick with smoke, the atmosphere chill and balmy at the same time, and the moves somehow both casual and jaw-dropping-tongue-unfurling-ly hot. People are doing upside-down twerking, pretty intense against-the-crotch grinding action, and also Rihanna spends some time watching herself dance in the mirror. Some of this we see in sultry slo-mo, some in shaky medium shots, the camera almost always in the middle of the dance floor, just another dancer in the crowd. It's one of those videos that is so good at matching its music, that you can no longer separate the song from the images once you've seen it. And I have seen it. A thousand times. It's not enough. I still want to go to there.
When it dropped, the video got some heat for the dancing being "too sexy". Which, if true, would have been quite the accomplishment in the year of our Lord 2016. Turns out it was a cultural misunderstanding. While all the grinding and crotch-bumping looks like pretty advanced foreplay to Western eyes, it’s actually a part of the West-Indies clubbing ethos. As Director X explains, in Caribbean culture, strangers can dance like that without it meaning they’re about to bone. In fact, it's a kind of challenge:
There is a battle of the sexes. You are wining up on someone: Can he handle yours? Can she handle you? Can she make you fall over? [...] It's not simulated sex, it's wining.
Some people like philosophy because it’s so counter-intuitive, but the only reason I read dead dude non-fiction is to find sweet new words for whatever deeply held believes I already have. And it turns out my philosophy of dance isn’t aggressively slutty, it’s "wining", thankyouverymuch. I just had no idea until Prof X told me.
X also educates us about the part where Rihanna watches herself dance:
It's something that you see in these kind of places. There's a couple of girls who get in their own zone and do their thing in the mirror.
I mean, talk about spiritual self-reflection.
So there you have it: casual writhing against strangers, mirror trance dancing, fried chicken. These are gods I can pray to. The only problem is that once I read that article I also found out that the video wasn’t shot in the Caribbean at all, but in a restaurant in Toronto. Lol ok. Guess utopia's gotta start somewhere.
One of my favourite parts if the Netflix nature documentary Our Planet, famous for its starving polar bears and plummeting walruses, was the bit about Chernobyl. Humans can't live inside a 30 kilometer radius of the nuclear plant for at least a few more centuries, but in their absence, other types of life have found a way. In the 30 years after the accident, the abandoned hellscape that we call The Exclusion Zone has transformed into a kind of accidental wildlife reserve. There's a forest there now with actual wolves and shit, it's crazy. I couldn’t find the Netflix clip, so here is a NatGeo one featuring actual scientists instead of a 500yo English voice actor.
Makes you darkly optimistic about humans, doesn't it? I mean, it’s kind of exciting to think about all the new species that will be roaming the earth once we’ve made way for them by making it all tropical and promptly going extinct.
Perhaps the real moral of Chernobyl is that our climate change flex should be less this
and more this
For those of you who, like me, are new to Killer Mike, I should've mentioned that most of his fame comes from being in a rap duo called Run The Jewels with a white guy named El-P. The two were introduced by a mutual friend who also happens to be the CEO of Adult Swim, and are now part of the zany Adult Swim family. Which finally explains why my second-favourite Rick & Morty promo is basically a music video for the Run The Jewels song “Oh Mama”.
God, I forgot how dope this was. Except for the mid-season finale that dropped last weekend, season 4 of Rick & Morty has been fairly disappointing, which makes me want to talk about this random year-old video even more. It was put together for something called the Adult Swim Festival in that long hibernation period between season 3 and 4, when the contract with the head writers was still being negotiated and the animation department had nothing but time on their hands. Everything looks off-the-charts shiny, as if the animators are showcasing what they can do once freed from the yoke of their alcoholic word lords. In the absence of a tightly-packed high-concept script, they just made some free-wheeling Tarantino soup. And I'm here for it. I so so badly wanted to share this video with you in the previous issue, it just killed me that I couldn't find the space. But then I unearthed the Killer Mike connection and understood that this is where it was meant to be all along. Rick works in mysterious ways.
The video opens with Rick and Morty, dressed in full Reservoir Dogs garb, flying around a desert in their D.I.Y. space car, blasting Run The Jewels on the radio. And while in the next 3.5 minutes, Killer Mike and El-P express at least some trepidation about not livin' right, Rick and Morty spend the track unapologetically shooting their way through a cascade of galactic feds. Like the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill Vol. 1, these G-insectoids keep coming, and they keep dying beautiful, blood-splattered deaths against colour-blocked backgrounds. The apparent reason (excuse) for all this armed resistance is to find and steal a space version of the iconic Pulp Fiction briefcase. In the end, improbably cool Reservoir Morty turns out to have been a robot all along, and Rick, like Vincent Vega before him, opens the case, sees the light, and he happy.
No matter how many times I watch Pulp Fiction, it never occurs to me to ask about the glowing contents of the briefcase. I just appreciate it for the too-damned-cute touch of magic realism that it is. Among real film nerds though, it's never stopped being a subject of wild speculation. One popular fan theory postulates that the case contains the soul of the movie's final boss, Marsellus Wallace. He sold it to the Devil and he wants it back. Bonkers a reading as that is of the original film, it makes even less sense for this Rick & Morty homage. Why would Rick, who knows everything and believes in nothing, go to such extraordinary lengths to save his own soul? Or to any lengths, really? Other than maybe to spite the Dev-... Holy shit, that works! Spiting the Devil is pretty much the logline of season 1’s Something Ricked This Way Comes. It would be a total Rick move to take on The Man just to mess with Satan. It's as if that looney Pulp Fiction theory was meant for this Rick & Morty promo all along. I love how things keep coming together in this coda. #blessed. Or, to paraphrase Ezekiel 25:17, not to mention the spirit of christmas - ask, and X gon give it to ya.