kingtycoon | (no subject)

Been kind of a weird couple of days. Days go by not fast not slow, they just continue on with or without attention. I've been... working? I've been busy doing my analysis of Galbraith's Crash of 1929 - which is charming but also kind of... well it's imperfect but only because it has to be. I like that he wrote it because his friend was asking him to write a history of the great depression. Naturally he just writes the history of a few months in 1929. Naturally! This is a favorite failing of mine - getting lost in details. I was trying super hard to answer some question about life in the twenties and ended up with five pages about Ford - the accidentally narrowed focus, lost in details. Big questions? They come together from the bigger image, once all the details are settled. I have... I'll get to that. In the meantime - for reasons I decided to watch AKIRA last night. I haven't seen it since the early 90's it turns out - which doesn't seem that long ago, but which time is long ago.

When I first saw it I was living with all the Japanese people in some godforsaken place where the Mothman used to haunt all those years ago. The Japanese kids were amazing and threw in their resources to have a rave. A rave was a thing that you could just accidentally show up at in those days. Forsaking Extacy I just watched AKIRA, which they had playing on a big screen in the hall. I watched and watched and wasn't really sold. Later I'd go back to my room and one of my Japanese roommates was playing his horse-race-betting simulation on our Super-Nintendo which he had modded (by burning parts of it out with a cigarette) to play super-famicom games. He had been at the rave thing and then met some ladies and then sexed them and then settled down to play his horse-race-betting simulation. A week or so later he took ten of his friends to go to the Kentucky Derby. They all painted their faces like goblins for that.

It's weird to think that that was so long ago, and yet it was. It's weird because I remember not going to the Derby because I had to study. I took it seriously that I had to study. I guess I still do. I lay in bed all day yesterday reading, and then when I couldn't really do that anymore I watched AKIRA. Then I woke up and was thinking about ideas that relate to AKIRA and my lifespan.

If I had known I would live this long I'd have been nicer to people...

Seriously though. I think about the last ten years - well - not all ten of them, but the trajectory of things. You know - in the last ten years I kept falling for this dream of middle-class prosperity and so on. I fell for it and chased it kind of stupidly. Not because it's a stupid thing to chase! Just I'm not suited to pursue it. I got all weird, in the way that you do when you've spent the day studying instead of looking at other people and having conversations and good times and ended up being kind of crazed. Ten years ago. Or so. That time ago, I should've? I won't say should've cause I did alright, I just think... It was a tour of something else - some other life that wasn't for me. I kept feeling, at the corporate enclave, like I was wasting my time. Started writing some books. I've written a book every year for the last three years in fact! It's how you stop yourself going crazy thinking that that you've been doing things you shouldn't. You do something you obviously should do. Like make up the weird specific details of a whole culture and then try and reconcile those details into a kind of story. Just saying - the details assemble the reality, talking about the reality is basically pointless. Talk about something specific.

Specifically today - I've been reading The Spider Eaters, which I honestly can't recall if I've read before. Back when I read quite a few memoirs of the Cultural Revolution - the interesting thing is that a lot of them kind of blend together. It's not an indictment of the quality of them to say so - it's just that the collective experience - the experience of being made into very similar people who did very similar things - it's strange and compelling. Thought reform! It's very, very interesting to think about how a whole culture could be diverted into such a strange direction by the overwhelming national mood and structure of education and cultural norms. Thought Reform is a lot more... Confounding a process than any you really deal with in the West though. In commercial culture it's best not to analyze your thoughts, impulses are rewarded, intention is relegated to inconsequence so much that most intentions are purely atavistic. How to get food, shelter, how to attract mates. There's never a higher purpose and heaven help you if you hope to serve a grand purpose, your only real function is to buy and to produce saleable services - it's such a daunting reduction of human existence to such a base level - it's rather amazing how limited a function a person is really allowed in our society - and compare to the Maoists. Purpose is everything. I remember reading accounts of newlyweds during the Cultural Revolution who couldn't even understand how to fuck. They'd never put it together. Higher purpose had consumed their impulses. That's compelling to think about- that people can be made to be... Just anything.

What you could do is go to Youtube and watch all of the East is Red - and then you'd be amazing.

The really interesting thing to me is the mass rallies that happened in honor of Mao. These were huge events where the youth culture of the CCP was all bent and sideways just to see the Great Helmsman - and they were going on basically at the same time as things like Woodstock. You can extrapolate a sense of a zeitgeist - the spirit of the age - all youth culture and mass events. Of course - easy to explain in the post-war baby boom and the cold war hush and the early generations weaned on mass media. There's a lot going on to make international corollaries.

If you can spot the details you can describe them and if you can do that sufficiently, you can understand the whole better than if you tried to seek it out from the top view.

Eh, have some more The East is Red