Nerd Shed @nerdshed - Tumblr Blog

ccml

I Believe in America

Bonasera famously begins the Godfather with the words, “I believe in America. America has made my fortune.” Those words have sung out to me from the first time I saw Godfather. I did not see it until the early 90s. It was a bizarre April or May blizzard in Boston and I worked the 7 to 3 shift at the Charles Street Garage. Since there was no T service or cabs on the unplowed streets, I had hiked to work for triple pay in 1-2 foot snow drifts. By the time I cabbed home, it was in the low sixties and the snow banks were melting so fast that the water was backing up to the grates in all the corner drains.

My roommates were all puffing joints and getting ready to start the movie they had rented from Blockbuster…or Videosmith…. That’s right, you heard me. They rented a tape from one of two or more video stores that were walking distance to our apartment.

I told them I had never seen it and everyone gave me the same:

“WHAT???”

“Really? You? McFadden?”

“DUDE, kinda need to see this.”

I think the big part of the disbelief is the previous quarter, I had performed a satirical Brando-esque Voodoo mob boss. The movie was called Akira Kurasawa’s Knuckle Sandwich. It was a voodoo gang vs a Kung Fu gang. It sounds better than it is, but it was all Moxie, I can guarantee that.

So I had phoned in a ridiculous performance of Brando mimicry, down to the cheek stuffing I used to blow up my still-developing jowels.

We started the movie and I was immediately sucked in. The Corleone family dynamics and the wedding scene that goes on and on. I have often thought if just the wedding itself could be a stand alone movie. It is insane. It is a genius device to introduce the large set of characters we are going to see play out over the next few hours.

The Godfather, to me, is not really a gangster movie. It is a movie about America. The crime family is more of a metaphor to me. Behind every great fortune is a great crime. America hasn’t paid for hers yet, and our living in denial of those crimes is why the Don Vito/Don Michael plan to go straight or legitimate is a fool’s quest. When Michael confesses to the priest in III, the priest says, “Your sins are terrible and you deserve to suffer,”

Are any of us living today directly responsible for the great crimes that led to our great fortune? Not really, but some our ancestors are still in living memory. While the world has changed so quickly over the last 130 years, It has made dealing with the trauma’s of the era very hard to comprehend.

Think of it how our food systems work. In my grandparents time, they almost all worked constantly. People could pretty much eat what they wanted as it was all burned off on the farm. A great majority of us burned thousands of calories a day. Within two generations we went from waking with sun to milk cows before school to sedentary office cows that drink fake creamer. Historically, there is no other rapid change like this that I aware of. Of course, we got obese with a quickness. People didn’t understand how much we changed, how much the world changed.

It is the same with the trauma of our history. Large portions of our population were dragged here in bondage, add in a whole bunch of religious zealots considered to weird for Holland…HOLLAND! To round out this fine setup is a colonist movement that relied on the unknowing killing of probably 90 percent of the locals by disease to make landfall, then voluntary genocide of those people that had survived the smallpox.

We were basically handed an easy conquest. Now, before you jump in and say, “But, Nate, this was hard work and rugged individualism and so forth,” — Yes, shit was hard, I would never survive this era without my creature comforts. That being said, compared to most things of the time, it was a piece of cake.

So why do I love America? It is because it is a place of aspiration. The American story that always hooks me is the idea of making things better. Yes, the beginning was total bullshit — White men with property…you’ll notice this head start has been almost impossible to overcome. Some folks hit the lottery, both figurative and metaphorically, but generally you stay where start for the first 150 years of this great experiment. I didn’t used to think it was possible, until I did it.

America loves mythology, looking back and saying, “It was bound to happen!”

Sigh….it’s a load of hot freedom.

Usually it is about being at the right place at the right time. Granted if you can be less risk averse you will do better with your wave when it crests. Yes, I worked hard to get where I am, but I took a few huge risks. Also I had the help of a lot of people and programs. Scholarships, student loans, assistance…they all helped me. I didn’t even graduate college, but I did the hustle, and did the work. If it had not been for all the help though, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.

For all of my poking a thumb in the eye of authority my entire life, I take being a citizen of the US pretty seriously. I fully acknowledge my privilege as a white man. It is not guilt and it is not shame about who I am or what I am. I owe this place for the tremendous opportunities it has given me. It informs a lot of things I do. (Much of which I don’t discuss publicly — It’s the Winchester Rule…from MASH…)

The two words that run through my mind about America are Liberty and Justice. A lot of white Americans or privileged Americans love to talk about liberty. Freedom don’t mean shit without justice. For the those with privilege it is easy to get caught up about liberty. I’ve been there. I didn’t know what it meant to be denied justice, at least on no scale that counts! (I’m looking at you decision to ban me from Facebook for 24 hours for photoshopping a dong to Mitch McConnell.)

So how to reconcile these two things? America was a place I could jump up to a higher class and be accepted there. I have immense gratitude. I also know it still isn’t as possible as it could be for others, and that is horseshit.

That is where we are the most broken, too. I used to get all those people that said, ‘it don’t matter who you vote for’, which is the more depressing and less poetic way to say, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing else to lose.”

The more all of us feel that we have a stake in what we do and where we live, the more we will be less likely to give our freedom away to oligarchs here and abroad.

That’s right, socialism saves democracy AND freedom AND justice.

No atonement means suffering our sins.

Rudy Is a turd sniffer.

#rudy giuliani #turd #turdsniffer

gonzo eyes

Hello

Idiocy

#idiot

tongue

Blade Runner 2049 (spoilers)

My first trip to Asia was September 2004. I was working for Schmonic Solutions[1] the time as an Engineering and Quality Assurance manager. Those familiar with how technology development works know that these two positions are supposed to work in ‘friendly’[2] opposition. The Eng Manager is supposed to deliver a product on time, a QA Manager is meant to make sure the product is of sufficient quality to ship to the public. Holding both jobs concurrently on a product is a constant conflict of interest. As it stood, I was about the deliver the first major release of the company on time. To contextualize how big of a deal this was, this was a company who at one time had shipped empty boxes, with a CD-ROM to follow later. It was the epitome of vaporware.

They were sending me to Shanghai to train a group of testers I managed. Officially, I was there to teach them the ins and outs of MyDVD 6.x, the flagship consumer product of the company. The idea was that it would free up the Novato testers to work on the ambitious slate of releases based on the 6.x platform. 6.0.1, 6.0.2, 6.0.3, and 6.0.4 as well as 6.1 were already in various states of planning and feature development for all of the OEM partners that Schmonic sold MyDVD to. Generally the Shanghai test team were not experienced enough to be trusted with the first iteration of any new release. I almost believed the plan, and it was partially true, but suspected it was part of a longer strategy to train the lagging Shanghai QA team to take over for the far more expensive local testers. Schmonic boasted a ‘lower than market rate’ salary for employees in R&D. The best part was I was a stockholder and got this report every year. They were cheap, and didn’t care who knew it. Such is the way of capitalism. It rewards short term gains astronomically, but tends to make sustainable growth or profitable stasis by saturation a waste of capital. As one of the 60’s cheapest philosophers wailed, “We want the world and we want it…..NOW!” It’s not enough to be greedy! Impatient greed is the story of capitalism.

One of the things that struck me most about Shanghai was how far I could isolate myself from the city if I chose. My hotel put me on the top guest floor with VIP access to the lounge. The lounge was located up one more floor with a 360 degree view of the city. I could sit up there drinking whiskey and smoking cuban cigars looking out at the Pudong District where all the new construction[3] was going on. The CCTV Tower stuck out most as it was like a giant 70’s Soviet Rocket, red and made of giant glass tubes. The sky scrapers there were all lit up in colored neon and far more decorative than our stoic American skylines. From my room or the lounge I sat alone in almost total quiet staring out and down. Down below was the Nan Jiang (Nanking) Road, a major thoroughfare and shopping street. I could see into the crack of the street and all the lights for the shops, but could see no people. It is very easy to lose perspective here, although it appears one has the most.

It is this sort of visualization that Blade Runner uses to great effect and the sequel Blade Runner 2049 improves upon. People at the top of these towers have no idea about the lives of those down below. What I also found very telling is that the skies in Blade Runner aren’t full of the hover Peugots that are reserved for the police and rich folks. They can fly from tower to tower, never mixing with the dregs on the street. The saddest part of this is that is where real life happens, or the life I want to see. The collisions of culture, whether human, replicant, or projected is where the true progress happens.

A lot of the Blade Runner world is left up for imagination, but I’m guessing owning a maggot farm is considered lucky. The American Dream has always been control over your own destiny! Be your own boss, live on alkali soil, a dead tree wired to the ground to keep it upright as a memory of something once beautiful. It is a stark and sad warning of what life will be, and I do find it believable. The seawall is a prime example of how humans deal with rising waters. Never would we try to stop the rise, but just cope. A band-aid on a band-aid.

Blade Runner 2049 is the sort of story that lays out big ideas and critiques about how we live by showing frightfully possible outcomes of today’s decisions. I’ll be honest, I’m pretty much sold on the idea that 80 years from now, this planet will be a shitshow of massive proportions. I don’t want to be negative, but shit’s melting and a LOT of people will be displaced. A rather small amount of Syrian refugees is turning Europe and America into idiotic panic states. The migrations caused by our carbon problem will make the Huns that pushed millions up against the borders of Rome look like grains of sand in the wind. The Sea People, who basically ended the Bronze age, wreaked havoc. We don’t even really know why they did it either! The ignorance and hubris of the current world order is revving up to a fever pitch over what is only a fraction of what is to come.

Much like most of our existence here in reality, much of Blade Runner 2049 is about being ‘better than’. Humans are better than Replicants who are better than holograms and other forms of artificial intelligence. It is a microcosm of our lives played out in a compelling story about the power of love. Yeah I said that…the fucking power of love. People that read this blog will know that I am a firm believer in love. While I may stray sometimes from the path of love, I always come back to what love can accomplish. Sure, we can explain this all in scientific chemical terms like oxytocin and serotonin. We can also consider that free will is nothing but a trick the brain plays[4] on us. My rational brain might agree with that, but the part of me that feels says ‘Fuck that! Fuck that right in the lizard brain’.

This movie revolves around the love of Deckard and Rachel, a love that produces a child from one sure replicant and one possible replicant. The miracle is transformative for other replicants in their circle. It is a call to action for the replicant uprising, eager to prove that they are just as or more human than human. I don’t know exactly why K (aka Joe) decides to ignore the wishes of the replicant uprising of ‘his kind’, but I think it is about love. Surely he is disappointed to find out that he is not the child of the memory he possesses, and walking through the city he finds out that even his name was programmed into the hologram. Does it matter though? She loved him, he loved her. Maybe she was programmed to do so, but she was concerned for him. Sadly, he almost never saw it and dies wondering if it was all some trick. Who am I to say what existence is for anyone but me?

I wept real tears for a replicant and a hologram and their doomed romance. K asks if Deckards dog is ‘real’, whatever that means, and Deckard tells him to ask the dog. I was trying to explain to someone after visiting Iceland and eating Minke Whale, that I wanted to make sure I wasn’t eating a sentient creature. I explained that this was my line to not cross. But in the end, does it matter? I don’t know. It suddenly seems more arbitrary to me than before.

Why did I love K so much? For starters, I found his love of music interesting. He also goes from a guy literally asleep at the wheel to someone probing the boundaries of his existence. He is bothered by what he does ‘retiring’ replicants. He is only as tough as he has to be. He can bust through marble, making it obvious he didn’t unleash full strength against Sapper. He lets Deckard punch himself tired. I tried this once in a fight. It was strangely powerful. My friend punched me once and it fucking hurt, but I just looked at him. He punched me again and I said, “are you done?” He was confused by this and stopped. Years later he told me he felt horrible, but also was disarmed by my ability to not react.

How else do we explain K’s actions at the end? He knows where Deckard’s daughter is. She is empathetically and illegally inserting real memories into replicants so as to ease the pain of their existence. Of all his choices, he takes the hardest one. He could have easily killed Deckard in the car, but instead he sacrifices his life to save Deckard and take him to his daughter. This is a choice that can only be powered by love.

[1] The litigious nature of said corporation’s lawyer CEO precludes me from stating the full name correctly.

[2] At it’s best, the opposition is friendly, at it’s worst it can be fucking hostile.

[3] The Pudong District was bare in 1990, had 5-6 skyscrapers in 2004, and now in 2017 has at least 15? I’ll link a photo.

[4] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/free-will-could-all-be-an-illusion-scientists-suggest-after-study-that-shows-choice-could-just-be-a7008181.html