As MeToo vulnerable phase ends, confessional songs of reckoning and reconciliation to get a new start on relationships

When the vulnerable phase of the 15-year excitement cycle comes to an end, it gives way to the restless, warm-up phase, when people are no longer in a refractory state and feel like coming out of their shells and mixing it up with other people again, particularly the opposite sex.

During the transition, there are cultural hallmarks that reflect the bridge between the two phases -- they draw upon both the old emo vulnerability as well as the new urge to move on and connect with people once more. They want closure and new beginnings.

What better way to explore these themes than to write a song about reckoning with your past relationships, and perhaps even reconciling with someone you had a falling-out with? It is a far more honest signal of being over the emo withdrawn phase if you can re-connect with someone, than to just meet someone new -- you have to swallow your pride to deal with someone you were formerly close to.

Musically, these songs reflect this theme of bridging the two social-emotional phases by drawing on aspects of both, although primarily on the vulnerable phase musical style, since there hasn't really been a new style formed for the warm-up phase when it's only the first year or so.

That means the broad sense of "dream pop" as I've been detailing over the past couple years, as characteristic of the vulnerable phase. (See here for mainstream examples, and here for indie examples.)

The features of dream pop are a slow tempo, and multiple layers of repetitive drone-like "voices," whether human or instrumental. Harmonies (relaxing) over melodies (stimulating). The singing has an ethereal timbre. These features give it the subjective quality of being lulled into a meditative trance, and floating through an other-worldly space, where the multiple voices provide a rich array of distinct "textures" to the place, making the exotic dream-world feel palpable and relatable, akin to a lucid dream.

Anything with too much of a danceable or body-moving beat is excluded. The feel here is a passive rather than an active trance.

A recent post looked at vestiges of this style lasting into the restless warm-up phase. But the current look is different -- it's not late examples of a bygone style, it's transforming it to reflect the change of phases.

While the instrumental traits are largely carried over, the vocal delivery is totally different -- soulful and energetic, not collapsing or sighing (the background vocals may be sighs, though). Concrete and forceful, not ethereal and wispy. It's belting out a raw confession, wide awake, directly addressing a target -- not drowsily droning your way through a detached stream-of-consciousness exercise to yourself. And rhythmically, there is more of a simple but forceful beat that picks up, signaling the willingness to get out of bed from under your pile of emotional security blankets, and start moving your body already.

As the current vulnerable phase ends, we can expect to get hit by a few songs like these during the early 2020s. MeToo is over, and girls are going to want to connect, and re-connect, with guys for the first time in a long while. That will require a clearing of the air, getting rid of the "all male attention is rape" bad vibes that have infected the social atmosphere since about 2015.

Before conducting the survey over time, the purest example to study is "Nothing Compares 2 U" by Sinead O'Connor from 1990, as the late '80s emo phase was giving way to the restless early '90s phase. I'll only dissect this one song, but you'll see similar things in the others as well.

It opens with droning string layers, at a mellow tempo -- so familiar to those accustomed to the emo phase, that it sets off a cascade of dream pop stereotypes we expect to be fulfilled. Then a single bare vocal -- hmmm, not the usual vocal harmonies -- that is pained in a familiar way from the emo phase, but now strangely more melodic and pointed, woken up. After nearly a minute of this somewhat familiar set-up, we're hit with an entirely new kind of beat from out of nowhere -- a simple alternation between bass and snare hits, yet it's unavoidably body-moving, not letting us wallow in our dreamy emo state any longer. At the same time, the vocal builds slowly toward a crescendo, which feels even more tense because we're not expecting any kind of rollercoaster ride during a droning dream pop song.

In the second verse, they introduce sighing background vocals to bring us back into the familiar dream pop layered sound, all while the main vocal grows more soulful and restless, unlike what we're used to. The string layers continue into a solo, along with the sighing background vocals. The final verse is like the second, only now even more tenacious and clingy, not crestfallen and resigned, and with outbursts in volume rather than a uniformly mellow level like the typical dream pop vocal. After the final refrain crescendo, there's a lengthy outro in the usual layered style. In this case, it's serving as a denouement after a climax, whereas in a vulnerable-phase dream pop song, it would've been that way consistently all along, as part of the lazy river ride experience to lull you into a slumber.

This transformation of the dream pop style, along with the new lyrical themes of reckoning with the past, coming to some kind of reconciliation, perhaps re-connecting with a former partner, or giving a strained relationship a fresh honest start, mark a decisive end of the vulnerable refractory phase of the excitement cycle, and the transition into the restless warm-up phase.

For the survey, we'll start with the most recent warm-up phase, the late 2000s, after all that mopey withdrawn emo stuff from the early 2000s. (All examples made the Billboard year-end Hot 100 charts, showing how much they resonated with audiences at the time.) The first example was technically released on album during the final year of the vulnerable phase, in 2004, but was delayed being released as a single for over 7 months, in 2005, probably because it didn't quite match the mood of 2004, and needed the start of the warm-up phase to catch on as broadly as it did. The second example came a little late into the phase -- usually they're right there at the bridge moment -- but shows the unmistakable signs of this type, from the heavy droning organ intro, to the simple body-moving beat, to the soulful raw-energy vocals.

"You're Beautiful" by James Blunt (2004)



"Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis (2007)



From the early '90s warm-up phase, we've already covered the first example in detail. The second was a one-hit wonder, but it served its purpose at the time, moving out of the mopey and resigned phase of the emo late '80s, to a mood of making amends and turning over a new leaf.

"Nothing Compares 2 U" by Sinead O'Connor (1990)



"One More Try" by Timmy T (1990)



Coming right after a year considered one of the worst in pop music ever -- 1974, the capstone of the early '70s vulnerable schmaltzy phase -- there was suddenly a whole new take on the moody R&B genre, now more unabashedly high-energy and shedding the awkward self-consciousness of just a few years earlier. The second example rivals "Nothing Compares 2 U" for its mixture of droning moody instrumental layers from dream pop, with the soulful, urgent, hopeful vocal and simple forceful beat. Here, it's not so much a reconciliation with a specific person, but with his entire past -- and he's addressing a higher cosmic force, rather than a specific person, to deliver him into an exciting new hopeful state of being.

"Misty Blue" by Dorothy Moore (1975)



"Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright (1975)



Finally, from the early '60s warm-up phase, both examples come from a teenager who made this style her trademark. Doo-wop from the emo late '50s was moody, slow, and heavily harmonized with vocal layers. Early '60s doo-wop became more energetic and outgoing, but these newer groups (Italian, not black) did not provide the transition songs. Instead they came from the white version of moody emo music -- country -- only now with more impassioned vocals, and lyrical themes about closure and reconciliation rather than droning along in a limbo state of unhappiness.

"I'm Sorry" by Brenda Lee (1960)



"Break It To Me Gently" by Brenda Lee (1962)

With MeToo dead, girls getting flagrantly frisky in public places

Over the past couple months, I've experienced a major shift in how girls behave in public places toward guys -- random hot guys, at any rate. During the MeToo era of the last several years, their public flirtation level has fallen off a cliff, still willing to make eye contact, follow me around a store, giggle and do cute things among their friends in order to get attention -- but not establish physical contact.

That was a huge change from roughly 2005 to 2014, when it was common for them to come right up and say "you're cute / so hot / etc," brush against me as we walked by each other, or press their hips / shoulders into mine while sitting on public transportation. Deliberate initiation of physical contact between strangers. And that's not to mention how they behaved in dance clubs -- I'm only talking about ordinary public places with no expectation of flirtiness.

The last time I remember frequently getting brushed against in public was the summer of 2015, the first year of the current vulnerable refractory phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle. One last hurrah of horniness before the broad MeToo sentiment began to set in. It's not as though people had stopped having sex altogether, but their levels of public touchy-feeliness toward cute strangers had crashed into a hangover state. I can recall maybe one instance per year since 2016 of some girl brushing against me in a store.

Until the past couple months, as the vulnerable phase winds down, and the restless warm-up phase begins in 2020.

First, although it wasn't direct contact, it was a level of blatant hormone-mania that I hadn't felt in public for years. I was taking a walk around a park, and after descending a hill, there was a group of three teenagers who were absent-mindedly playing on some playground thing while chatting with one another. As they saw me walk by, they went dead silent, and hopped right off in order to tag along about 10-15 feet behind me on the walking path, giggling and competing to see who could talk the cutest / loudest. They're so unaware of how obvious they're behaving, it's so cute and adorable.

Then just last week, there were two cases almost one day after the other, both in ordinary retail stores. Both teenagers again. One was a blue-haired indie chick who was walking with her friend in my direction for a good 30 feet down a wide aisle, then shifting to brush against me as she passed by, she and her friend giggling most of the time. This is probably someone who was SJW-posting just 2-3 years ago.

The next was a more typical girl-next-door cutie who was out with a group of friends (late high school or college). When she first made eye-contact she had a deer in headlights look, before composing herself. She walked slowly in order to prolong the contact, and I gave her a good pressing back with my arm -- not a push or shove, just giving her some pressure back with my forearm as she rubbed her body against it, to make her feel desired too.

A night or so after that, a group of teenagers had just entered the supermarket and barreled toward me, five or six standing abreast just in case I felt like dodging them. But the girl on the end who they were pressuring to brush against me (by all shifting in my direction) chickened out at the last moment and cut in front of the rest of her friends to narrowly avoid contact. No hard feelings from me, she's just less horny than her friends. Whoever's idea it was, should have moved to the end in order to do it herself, but that would have been too obvious of a signal and made her look desperate.

The damnedest thing is that this has all occurred during fall-winter, not even during the mating season when you might expect it.

In these cases, it's not as though we exchanged phone numbers, hooked up, or whatever. It's the fact that public horned-up behavior from girls toward their targets has started to surge recently. This is more of a social weather report. The winter of MeToo has begun to give way to the springtime of the next restless warm-up phase of the excitement cycle. And if the late 2000s are any indication, girls are about to get a lot hornier in public.

Thinking back over previous cycles, I don't remember much public horniness in college, which was the vulnerable phase of the early 2000s. In fact, I remember the same emo, anti-horny, "everyone's going to stalk or rape me if I leave my room" mood as we've been living through for the past nearly 5 years. But I remember very blatant physical contact initiated by girls during middle school (early '90s warm-up phase) and high school (late '90s manic phase). I don't recall much of it from most of elementary school (late '80s vulnerable phase). But during the early '80s manic phase, in pre-school or daycare, one of my most vivid early memories is during what was supposed to be naptime, a girl peeking out from under a tablecloth, waving me over to join her under the table, and then inviting me to show her mine and she'll she me hers. Good ol' 1984...

I think teenagers and girls in their early 20s are the most reliable indicators for this social weather report because their hormone levels are generally off the charts, and they are incapable of hiding their feelings from others. If they're horny, you'll know it -- and if they're not, you'll know that too. Their signals are very honest. Somewhat older women may have lower hormone levels to begin with, and even if they have high levels, they're better at disguising that from public awareness -- they only want their target to know, not the entire world.

As MeToo dies, look for reincarnation of "Don't Wanna Fall in Love" by Jane Child

An earlier post looked at key songs that heralded the end of the vulnerable, refractory phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle, going back to the late 1950s, as it transitioned into the restless, warm-up phase when people start to come out of their shells and mix it up together again.

The song featured from the current vulnerable phase was "Sweet But Psycho," which brought to mind "Buffalo Stance" from the end of the late '80s vulnerable phase. Turns out they're both in the same key -- D-flat major. The major key is a crucial detail, since dance music during the vulnerable phase tends to be overwhelmingly dissonant and minor-key.

There's an even better example of the cusp of the late '80s / early '90s transition, though I didn't realize since it was released as a single in April 1990, despite being released on the album in September 1989. (I go by first release in any format.) It was also a dance hit, and as it turns out, also composed in D-flat major.

It's far more upbeat than the late '80s freestyle sound, although it's still a bit ambivalent about coming out of one's shell. She's scared of letting go and just connecting with somebody, but it's thrilling at the same time -- a clear signal that the refractory phase was ending.

And the rhythm is more simplified, not as start-and-stop or herky-jerky as the freestyle sound was -- something that anyone can get out and dance to without fear of looking awkward. Reminder from the original post on the warm-up phase that simplified dance crazes are hallmarks of the phase, making it easy for everyone to come out of their shells and interact playfully with the opposite sex.

"Don't Wanna Fall in Love" by Jane Child (1989)



Now that the current vulnerable phase is ending, look for the reincarnation of this song in the post-MeToo era. It could have already been released on an album last fall, but just hasn't come out as a single because they're afraid it's too upbeat and socially connecting, putting it out of place among its emo "let me hide under a pile of blankets" peer songs. Musicians have been mining the late '80s more than the early 2000s for recent vulnerable-phase influences to channel, so it may sound more similar to Jane Child than you'd think.

Snakefinger: Disco-blues-rock Expressionism

While most avant-garde cultural production is too cerebral and conceptual to make good art -- which is fundamentally corporeal and immediately arresting of the senses -- there are exceptions, both individuals and sub-groups within the broader movement.

Beginning with the counter-culture of the late 1960s and early '70s, several musicians founded a new avant-garde for the rock era, first Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, later joined by the Residents. None of this music could be played in a dance club, whether rural or cosmopolitan, and get the bodies of the crowd moving along in fascination. And it's hard to find fans of it who didn't attend Ivy League or elite lib arts colleges.

Music and dance are as interconnected as the senses of smell and taste. Songs that don't provoke a body-movement response are like some strange food that only pleased the nose, without making the mouth water or getting the taste buds excited, and that you not only did not eat -- but that was explicitly intended not to be eaten. What the hell kind of "meal" is that, then?

The dance scene, as the '70s wore on, was dominated by disco. Some groups were eager to mix disco with earlier counter-cultural approaches, such as Talking Heads, but these were mainline rock groups first, with avant-garde pretensions coming second.

What about the members of the avant-garde itself -- was no one willing to incorporate mainstream disco danceability into their counter-cultural project? In fact, there was a fellow traveler of the Residents -- an actual, skilled musician -- who distinguished himself by making body-moving music whose roots were in the counter-culture: Snakefinger.

Distorted, moody blues rock from the glam phenomenon, surreal and fantastical lyrics from the psychedelic heyday, shamanic guitar solos of the then-current rock gods era -- these could all appeal to introverts, druggies, lib arts students, and guys. What set Snakefinger's music apart from the Beefheart / Zappa approach was the danceable grooves that opened up the avant-garde's appeal to extroverts, normies, girls, and people who don't need drugs but music-and-dance in order to achieve altered states.

Not that his music ever hit it bigtime, but if you were to play anyone connected to the Seventies avant-garde to a normal person, he would enjoy the greatest resonance, hands down. Indeed, sub-cultural types look at him as at best an also-ran in the weirdness contest, and at worst a traitor -- someone who deliberately tried to court the normies with danciness. Someone who didn't want to keep the avant-garde weird enough. See this overview of his music, for example.

True rule-benders enjoy the carnivalesque appeal of dance, though, bringing together people from all sorts of backgrounds, as long as they're willing to temporarily submit their individual autonomy to the superorganism of the club-crowd, moving along to the same melody with the same rhythm. Keeping a movement insular, on the other hand, reflects a puritanical undercurrent.

But far from cheapening the counter-cultural attitude to appeal to mainstream audiences, Snakefinger's music spoke to their feelings of dread, anxiety, and alienation. It was a dizzy, evocative portrayal of the topsy-turvy times -- not a celebration or encouragement of deviance and disorder per se, unlike the anarchic attitudes that pervade the avant-garde.

In this way, his music had a heavy Expressionist character to it, and in fact there was a neo-Expressionist revival surging in the visual art world at the same time (late '70s, early '80s). Several older posts detailed the rise of such art movements across two waves of rising-crime times, roughly the '60s - '80s and the 1900s - '20s. See especially this post for its quoting of contemporary sources that reflected how novel and exciting it was to see Expressionism make a comeback after all the boring cerebral stuff from the falling-crime Midcentury art scenes. (See also here, here on Art Deco, and here on Fauvism).

You might raise Kraftwerk as another exception to the trend of '70s avant-gardists avoiding dance music like the plague. That's fair enough, but they're really more Art Deco than Expressionist or Fauvist -- not as wild, primitive, fever-stricken, and desperately yearning for an end to their alienation. And by the time they were making danceable music, they were no longer members of the experimental or avant-garde scene, and had broken into mainstream distribution channels.

That makes Snakefinger sui generis, although there is an interesting crossover between the two, as he covered "The Model", which sounds like the soundtrack to a Kirchner street scene, and thus better than the original in rendering the ideas.

Below are links for listening to his first two albums, which embody the unique mixture detailed above, along with three embedded videos per album to showcase the variety of his output. After these two albums, he returned to a more purely experimental sound, then incorporating jazz, without leavening it with the disco-friendly grooves of his "hits," as it were.

* * * * *

Chewing Hides the Sound (1979)

Playlist and single video

"The Model"



"Here Come the Bums"



"I Love Mary"

* * * * *

Greener Postures (1980)

Playlist and single video

"The Man in the Dark Sedan"



"I Come from an Island"



"Living in Vain"

* * * * *

Before he returned to the purely avant-garde, Snakefinger released a new song for a compilation of his early music, which retains the funky, groovy, blues-y beat of that style:

"I Love You Too Much To Respect You" from Against the Grain (1983)

Bernie a member of the class-reductionist dance crew

Videos are circulating on Twitter of Bernie dancing carefree with fellow attendees of a labor solidarity event in New Hampshire. How refreshing to see from the Left.

This could not possibly have taken place in an intersectional space, since now everyone knows what a DSA convention looks and feels like -- a crushing, joyless, humorless, brutally cerebral, anti-corporeal scold-o-rama. No clapping! No loud noises! No strong scents! No touching of any kind without continuous affirmative consent! No talking without adhering to a million micro speech codes! No friendly informal addresses like "hey guys"!

It had to be some place where normies congregate in order to tackle real, material problems facing the entire collective -- labor unions, churches, local schools, anything but an incestuous narrow clique of weirdos making a culture war of foisting their individual deviances onto the collective.

The cerebral radlibs at Current Affairs -- who have been concern-trolling Bernie throughout his campaign to "keep socialism weird" -- are trying to obfuscate about the Left promoting dancing, when they're the number one social pressure against corporeality in general and boy-girl touching in particular. "The man leading the woman's physical movements? Uh yikes, violation of her autonomy much?"

it matters that pete buttigieg won't do the high hopes dance. as emma goldman said, if there's no dancing it's a shitty revolution. a willingness to dance is a willingness to let yourself be human, vulnerable, free. bernie leads by example. https://t.co/1AyPaE7kY9

— Current Affairs (@curaffairs) November 24, 2019

From a comment I left to a recent post on the topic of dance music, corporeality, and the puritanical Left:

The real sexual repression in 2019 is not from Christian fundamentalists toward gay furries, but from irony-poisoned leftoids toward thicc-booty cuties who just want to get their groove on.

"Trance-inducing dance music -- yikes, horny on main much?" Shut the fuck up puritan. You're just jealous that your nerdy little body has no rhythm (you're bad in bed).

Dancing is not going to the opposite extreme, though, of slutting it up in defiance of the horny police (whether on the left or right). It's corporeal, even ritualistically sexual, but not actually sexual. It channels the libido and allows for catharsis after the night is over, all without having to "have sex".

The volcels have already promoted weightlifting and exercise -- now it's time for them to reclaim dancing in order to live a proper full life, neither puritanical nor debauched.

Current Affairs has also got the nature of dance completely backward, framing it as something that is liberating of the individual, when it is fundamentally a subordinating of your very bodily motions to something beyond yourself -- the rhythm -- and having your movements bound up with those of another person, whether you're dancing one-on-one or within an entire group, as in a circle dance.

Dance is part of a broader class of kinesthetic activities that are designed to de-individuate the participants and promote group cohesion, along with military drills and marches, the wild movements of a spirit possession cult, "the wave" and "stomp stomp clap" to "We Will Rock You" among a team's fans in a sports stadium, and so on and so forth.

Far from heightening an individual's autonomy, they are about surrendering self-control to the will of the superorganism. That's why every liberal individualist who makes up 99% of the current Left feels awkward and downright frightened when they find themselves in such a situation. "It was so fashy, all those normies pressuring me to join their mindless mob!" In contrast to these SJW-ists, true socialism (populism) demotes the individual values of liberty, autonomy, etc. since they conflict with solidarity, cohesion, and other interpersonal and collective values.

That's why there was a more thriving collectivist dance culture during the Great Compression / New Deal era -- from the Jazz Age and swing, to disco, new wave, and Latin freestyle / breakdancing -- unlike today's thoroughly neoliberal culture of posting videos of you dancing by yourself to the internet for virtual validation. Today is terrifyingly like the first Gilded Age of atomized laissez-faire subjects joylessly watching exploited sex workers dance on stage in some fin-de-siecle red light district.

During these dark days of the second Gilded Age, would-be realigners must always keep the focus on making populism or socialism both fun-loving and normie-friendly, and prevent the scolds and weirdos from hijacking any mass movement. The proto-socialism of the Midcentury resulted in wholesomeness, not degeneracy, which was instead the result in the libertarian Gilded Age. We can still see that legacy in the labor solidarity dance with an old-school socialist, and we ought to follow his lead.

Dream pop vestiges in the post-emo phase, across 4 waves of the cultural excitement cycle

Earlier posts here and here have detailed the regular appearance of dream pop music during the vulnerable phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle.

The features of dream pop are a slow tempo, and multiple layers of repetitive drone-like "voices," whether human or instrumental. Harmonies (relaxing) over melodies (stimulating). The singing has an ethereal timbre. These features give it the subjective quality of being lulled into a meditative trance, and floating through an other-worldly space, where the multiple voices provide a rich array of distinct "textures" to the place, making the exotic dream-world feel palpable and relatable, akin to a lucid dream.

Anything with too much of a danceable or body-moving beat is excluded. The feel here is a passive rather than an active trance.

However, the disappearance of this style is not day-and-night during the restless warm-up phase that follows. There's still a lone hold-out for the style, even as the emo mood has gone away, now that people are no longer in a refractory period where they just want to be left alone and float off into a cozy dreamscape. And since the hallmark of the restless warm-up phase is a new-found craze for dancing, some of these dream pop hold-outs now actually do have something of a beat to them, albeit not as much as the disco-friendly songs of their time.

So, to round out our look into the cycles of dream pop, let's look at these hold-outs. They appear during the first or second year of the restless warm-up phase -- they don't drag the style all the way through the phase, but just over the boundary line. And there really is just one example per phase, plus maybe an honorable mention -- they're vestiges.

As we close out the current vulnerable phase in 2019, we can still expect an ethereal spacey hold-out for 2020 or '21, in the vein of "Never Be the Same" by Camila Cabello.

To see what particular type of dream pop these ones are developing from, see the earlier posts, especially the one on mainstream hits. The following were all entries on the year-end Billboard charts, though dated by their year of initial release (on either an album or single).

"My True Story" by the Jive Five (1961)

Keeping the flame alive for the moody, harmony-heavy type of doo-wop from the late '50s, even as the mainstream was shifting toward a more upbeat, energetic type focused on just one singer.



"I'm Not in Love" by 10cc (1975)

The soft rock heyday of the first half of the '70s was already over, shifting radically into the disco age. But not without one last spacey soundscape more at home in the early '70s. This is the purest example of dream pop lasting beyond the vulnerable phase -- no disco-friendly beats to accommodate it to the new restless warm-up phase, just zillions of layers of ethereal sighing vocals.



"Sadeness" by Enigma (1990)

New Age mania of the late '80s had peaked, but give the style a more danceable beat, and it could last another year into the neo-disco environment of the early '90s.



"Say It Right" by Nelly Furtado (2006)

As with the previous song, just giving a basic dance beat to a dream pop song could make it catch on in a phase that had mostly left behind the emo-ness of the early 2000s. Honorable mention goes to "Speed of Sound" by Coldplay, but the Nelly Furtado song has more vocal layers, each having a more ethereal timbre as well, the voices and instruments are less melodic / more droning, and the overall tone is more enigmatic, moody, and New Age-y than the Coldplay song.

Alison Balsam's dance mixtape for depressive cerebrals, to block out their self-consciousness and let the music take over their body

An intriguing character from the not-so-woke Left is Alison Balsam (@foolinthelotus on Twitter). Her persona is a depressive, cerebral wordplayer whose disillusionment with horniness is leading her to becoming a spinster (volcel). Although not-so-woke, she attracts followers from the liberal and radlib parts of the Left because the online Left's fundamental shared trait is mental illness of one kind or another -- so someone who makes depression central to their persona is bound to have broad appeal among leftists.

I use the word "persona" because there are times when she breaks character and we get to see her passionate and corporeal side. It's not often, but regular enough to know that it's a core part of who she is, always stirring beneath the surface. This makes her unlike the depressive leftoids who just whine and rage all day long, and whose light moments only amount to numb, mumbling sarcasm. Thoroughly depressed people are boring -- they may or may not be insightful, but not entertaining. And Alison is entertaining even to non-depressives, especially the recurring theme of her charming yet exasperating encounters with the critter world.

today a squirrel came in through my open window and started riffling through my stuff (rude!). when i walked in on him he shot out the window but then looked back in upside down from above. WHAT is this guy’s problem??

— Alison Balsam (@foolinthelotus) July 1, 2019

engaged in psychological warfare with my cat who wants me to feed him but I’m pretending to be asleep whenever he approaches

I’m 37

— Alison Balsam (@foolinthelotus) November 7, 2019

If she hadn't mentioned it, I'd have thought she was 10-15 years younger. She has a distinctly youthful mode of expression, which I attribute to her post-horny / volcel tendencies. Not piling up a certain body count has kept her from sounding jaded, weathered, and grizzled. Her tone is more like a precocious college student -- and so is the eagerness and yearning for something fun to happen in life, in contrast to most depressive cases. She's more of a frustrated fun-lover than a numbed-out buzzkill.

And if she were a total cerebral, she wouldn't have such a fondness for physical, tactile objects like old editions of books, vinyl records, and vintage furniture. If it's only the informational content that counts, who cares what material form it comes in?

She also wouldn't have such a weak spot for dance music:

fuck i love this songhttps://t.co/bWZIFuxJ3s

— Alison Balsam (@foolinthelotus) October 16, 2019

I can overlook the minimalist euthanasia soundtrack stuff she posts in a depressive mood, if she overcomes that with body-moving lose-yourself music like that. She's really fond of the second half of the '80s, the vulnerable phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle. That was the hangover after the manic first half of the '80s (which overall would be a little too bouncy and upbeat for her personality).

An earlier post examined the turn that dance music takes toward minor-key, start-and-stop rhythms, and heavy layers of repetitive trance-inducing hooks, during the vulnerable phase of the cycle. This appeals to audiences who are in a social and emotional refractory state -- and so, most like a depressive and socially anxious person. They aren't feeling invincible like in a manic phase, so they can't just throw themselves out there on the dance floor -- they need to be coaxed and comforted, and to feel like they don't have to make a firm decision. Rather, their body is merely being possessed by some spirit or force, and they're passively going along with whatever it's making them do.

I think the late '80s vulnerable phase has songs more to the liking of someone like her, instead of the early 2000s or the late 2010s, because they built up more slowly and steadily back then. Someone who feels awkward about putting themselves out on the dance floor does not want to be overwhelmed by a sudden maximum level of energy, right as the song begins. They can ultimately resonate with a high energy level, they just need more time to get comfortably immersed in the groove, one level at a time. And it can't ever get too fast of a tempo, or too major-key of a tone, or else it wouldn't strike a chord with their fundamental depressive core. It needs to stay moody.

Since the late '80s is tailor-made for these types, let's explore further examples. This isn't so much of a standalone mixtape -- it's more of a list of initial songs to get the person to loosen their inhibitions, dissolve their self-awareness, and just let go of their cares. Then other higher-energy songs could fill out the playlist.

First, a precursor that still belongs to the new wave era of the early '80s, but points the way toward the second half. Laura Branigan's cover is even more early '80s, way too overpowering for a depressive cerebral. The original by Raf is slower in tempo and in its build-up, it's more moody and haunting, and the vocal delivery is more anxious and insecure.

"Self Control" by Raf (1984)



And now for the late '80s proper, dominated by the freestyle genre (I chose extended mixes for their even more gradual build-up, to ease the listener-dancer into the mood).

"Dare Me" by the Pointer Sisters (1985)



"I Can't Wait" by Nu Shooz (1986)



"Fascinated" by Company B (1987)



"Show Me" by the Cover Girls (1987)



"Cross My Heart" by Eighth Wonder (1988)



It's only Sunday, so that leaves plenty of time to get familiar with these songs in order to use them as inhibition-dampeners by the coming weekend.

From status contests over wealth, to lifestyles, to personas, as each generation gets poorer

Related to this thought from our anti-woke Left princess:

As late capitalism runs out of new frontiers and natural resources to plunder in the actually existing world, it will delve further into your emotions and existential anxieties as sites of capital accumulation.

— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) November 4, 2019

Five years ago I detailed the generational structure of status contests, where Boomers competed over material wealth and careerism, but after they had saturated that niche, the Gen X-ers had to find a new niche to compete within. They chose lifestyle contests instead, which don't require nearly as much money as material possession contests.

In a follow-up post, I detailed the invention of persona contests among the Millennials, who don't even have enough money to properly pursue lifestyle contests. Crafting your persona and projecting it into the public arena for competition only requires time, effort, and enough money for wifi to connect you to social media.

The "currency" of status has gone from material wealth, to lifestyle points, to persona points. But within each niche, most people are hyper-competitive pigs struggling to over-feed themselves at the trough. Within each domain there is an over-production of aspiring elites, leading to maximum chaos and fragmentation.

And within each niche, if you rob the competitor of their "currency," they take that as a mortal threat. Millennials don't care if you take their wealth, since they have none and don't compete over that resource. But if you threatened their persona on social media, let alone got their account suspended, that's the end of the world to them. Banned from competing in the persona-construction status contest.

You can use Google to search this blog for other posts on the topic, using "lifestyle strivers," "persona striving," etc. One of the more original and insightful projects I've undertaken, if I do say so myself.

Each of these qualitative shifts began at the grassroots level among individuals whose overweening ambition required an outlet. It's only after that groundswell that business owners capitalized on the development -- they did not invent the trend and get customers hooked on it. Most professionals and owners are too lazy and incurious to invent anything, they just chase after popular trends for as long as they seem profitable.

What will it take for individuals to dial down their overweening ambition and hyper-competitiveness? Material conditions must get so disastrous, and the fabric of society torn apart, that they realize where the worship of competition leads -- to their own destruction. Only then will they adopt the opposite norms, based on humility and harmony, leading to more egalitarian material outcomes.

Obviously we all wish you could just tell people where it has always led, and will lead again this time, but those words are just pointless speculation to the hyper-competitive striver. They need to get their block knocked off before it feels real to them. See Peter Turchin's work on the dynamics of ideology and material outcomes, linked in the first post above.

Weakest Halloween ever, during final year of vulnerable phase of cultural excitement cycle

Last year I wrote a comprehensive post on our affinity for Halloween's social and cultural rituals, over the phases of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle. It peaks during the manic phase, and falls off a cliff during the vulnerable phase. That has left cultural commentators with little to discuss over the past several years, because nothing is going on with Halloween anymore.

But just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, it's almost as though the holiday didn't even happen this year. About 5-10 years ago, Halloween-themed decorations went up at the beginning of October in most houses in most neighborhoods. I don't care for such an early date because it robs the holiday of its uniqueness by the time October 31 actually arrives -- you're habituated to it, and it's not a carnivalesque break with the ordinary.

Still, this year there were hardly any decorations anywhere -- including on Halloween night, so it's not that they just waited till the bitter end. I drove around different places just to be sure. Having a pumpkin or jack-o-lantern on the porch was common, but nothing more. They used to put up all sorts of other decorations on the porch, the front windows, driveway, yard, anywhere. I counted 1 or 2 houses per street, in between cross-streets, that had similar decorations as 5-10 years ago. Otherwise it looked absolutely dead.

Of course, no trick-or-treaters to be seen roaming around. Not only is it not the rising-crime and outgoing atmosphere of the 1980s anymore -- it's not even a manic phase of the falling-crime, cocooning atmosphere of the '90s and after. At least during the early 2010s, there would be a handful of kids out and about, albeit few in number and constantly supervised by their helicopter parents.

(I still can't forget the parents who were driving their kids in the family car, house by house, keeping the car on the whole time. Bam-bam-bam, we're gone -- and without having our kids spend any time in a dangerous public space like, dun dun dun, the sidewalk!)

The only -- and I mean only -- place where I saw any trick-or-treaters tonight was in the public library, where I was dropping off some horror movies and looking for new ones to check out. The workers were in costume, with candy ready. There were nearly 10 families that showed up during the half-hour that I was there, vs. literally zero that I saw on the streets anywhere. And this was all 7-8pm, not when it was too late.

Helicopter parents are so paranoid during this vulnerable phase that they've consolidated the holiday into what was only a major trend during the earlier manic phase -- taking kids to trick-or-treat centers that are supervised by some institution. Mall, business district, library, etc. Any private residence is too suspicious, likely concealing a bunch of child molesters -- that's who these freaks think their neighbors are -- so they can't trust them with hosting their kids for 30 seconds while the trick-or-treat ritual takes place.

I didn't see many young adults out and about either -- maybe a couple dozen, in the most youth-packed area of downtown, right on a major college campus of tens of thousands.

I observed back in 2012 that Millennials were shifting the main party night to "the Saturday before Halloween" rather than October 31, because they're OCD pussies who can't tolerate partying on a night other than their routine night. That's the whole point of carnivalesque rituals -- up-ending the usual order of society. There's nothing beyond the ordinary about partying on a Saturday night, dorks. (Link in appendix to post above.)

At least I got to go to a late night screening of Psycho, and on film rather than digital. Three other parties there, totaling 7 people including me. Not the greatest turnout, but I'll take it in this climate.

This ought to be the last year of uneventful holidays, since this is the final year of the vulnerable phase. I don't expect it to really pick up until around 2023 -- it has to rise gradually while people are starting to come out of their shells. I seem to remember 2008 being the first year I really noticed the return of Halloween as a mass public ritual, which was a few years into the restless warm-up phase of the late 2000s. From there, it'll soar again until a new peak in the late 2020s.

Until then, some manic-phase Halloween music to tide us over...

"Every Day Is Halloween" by Ministry (1984):

Anna Khachiyan and Mediterranean / Eastern witchy sensuality

Ania Pieroni as the Mater Lachrymarum, trying to bewitch the protagonist of Inferno (1980):

Anna Khachiyan, trying to bewitch someone off-camera (2011):

Mediterranean and Near / Middle Eastern faces work best for vampires and similar characters. They combine severe bone structure with full-sized soft features -- eyes, eyebrows, and lips -- mixing danger and sensuality into a heady witch's brew. The restrained expression of Easterners intensifies the power behind their visage -- the energy becoming highly concentrated rather than dissipated.

I don't buy Slavs as vampires -- the bone structure is not high-relief enough -- not so threatening -- and the tendency toward an epicanthic fold keeps the eyes from achieving maximum size -- not so sensual. The vampire legend had to draw on Romanians because Westerners can code them as Slavic (hence Eastern European), but they're substantially Mediterranean (Balkan).

Some resist the idea of Mediterranean / Eastern vampires because they're supposed to be pale, not swarthy. Still, Italians, Armenians, etc. are olive-toned, not dark-brown like the Arabians. Light skin functions, in this character type, as a signal of a more sober temper than a more earthy and lusty one. They're not bloodthirsty predators always on the prowl, they pass for normal in temperament -- even seeming somewhat delicate -- and only occasionally give in to their passionate side.

Gen Z less attention-seeking than Millennials? As Gen X was to Boomers

Although Gen Z is not a culturally self-aware generation just yet, some of their core traits should be coming into view very soon. (I'm putting them as those born after 1999, perhaps 2005 and after, although we won't know for sure until they become culturally self-aware and can tell us roughly where the boundaries are.)

One of the main traits attributed to Millennials by outside observers, as well as inside informants, is their attention-seeking. It's wrong, or hyperbolic anyway, to describe it as narcissism. But certainly always wanting to be the center of attention, getting jealous when others receive attention, and behaving competitively in order to grab more of the spotlight from others. At each level of social scale, there's only so much attention to go around, so getting it is a zero-sum game.

That was visible by 2005 or so when MySpace exploded in popularity, and Millennials developed their lifelong addiction to taking and posting selfies. That was back when they were around 15 years old. In fact, they're still obsessed with selfies, despite their vanguard members aging into their 30s.

I don't see that behavior from Gen Z. They're around 15 now, and yet they haven't taken over today's counterpart to MySpace or early-era Facebook with endless selfies and status updates. I mean actual status updates, like when Millennials used to let the world know what they were up to throughout the day, imagining their audience following them around the reality show of their lives.

It's not enough to just "take selfies" -- they have to be addicted to it, and more importantly to spread them far and wide to reach the greatest possible audience. They might send them to one another, ditto for status updates and random thoughts via DMs, but not like the Millennials did at the same high school age -- or well into their 20s and 30s, for that matter. This is a difference of generational membership that follows them throughout their lifespan, not just a phase they went through.

It reminds me of the qualitative difference between Gen X and the Boomers before them, which was noted by all at the time the younger generation came of age (wallflowers, dropouts / burnouts, apathetic, slackers, etc.). The same contrast emerged with the Millennials after them, who seemed to resemble the Boomers in their attention-seeking and competitiveness. And of course the Boomers were noted for attention-seeking behavior relative to the Silents before them. Presumably the Silents got their name from a contrast with the earlier Greatest Gen, who were more fun-loving performer types.

A simple model of frequency-dependent selection could explain these oscillating dynamics, but I won't pursue that in detail here. The basic point is that when everyone else is a wallflower, an attention-seeker reaps massive gains due to no competition. But as more and more pick up that strategy, it yields lower and lower rewards, as the niche for attention-seeking behavior becomes saturated -- as it clearly has gotten by now with the Millennials. It's impossible to hog the spotlight in a world where everyone is an attention whore.

So that leads to selection for the opposite type, the wallflower. They don't get the rewards of "fame," but then in a world where those gains have all but evaporated due to over-saturation of the niche, you're not losing much by foregoing the attention-seeking strategy. And you save all the immense costs that go into seeking attention -- especially in an over-saturated niche for it, since you have to devote more and more resources into attention-seeking when everyone else is doing it to.

You lose next to nothing, you save a bunch in costs -- so long to the attention-seeking strategy. You might as well adopt that as a defining positive trait -- chasing after fame is a fool's game, pursued by insecure posers, and we're not that desperate.

These differences also make me think that when the 15-year cultural excitement cycle changes phase next year -- from vulnerable and refractory to restless and warm-up -- it will be more like the 1990 shift than the 2005 shift.

The manic phase of the early 2010s felt much more like the early '80s than the late '90s, which was fairly low-key for a manic phase. This is probably because the main group of young adults were attention-seeking generations in both the early '80s (Boomers) and early 2010s (Millennials), giving it a higher energy level, while the young adults during the late '90s manic phase were wallflowers (Gen X), making it feel more mellow.

If Gen Z are also wallflowers rather than attention-seekers, then the next manic phase of the late 2020s will be relatively mellow for such an exciting phase -- echoing the late '90s. And therefore the restless warm-up phase that builds up before it, during the early 2020s, will feel more like the early '90s than the late 2000s.

If Billie Eilish is any guide, the early 2020s will kick off a new cycle with bands more like Smashing Pumpkins than Queen or Black Parade-era My Chemical Romance, both of whom were over-the-top showmen compared to the anti-frontman alternative rock of the early '90s, even though all three periods were restless warm-up phases.

To close on an inspirational note for any Gen Z musicians out there:

Joker: neo-naturalism for the new Gilded Age (Part 2 on characters and themes)

Part 1 on visual and musical style here.

Almost none of the reviews I've read and listened to have accurately characterized Arthur Fleck / Joker in his role as a violent criminal. This is partly because most people came in with hardened preconceptions about the nature of the Joker as a character, but they still should have noticed how different he is in this movie.

First, Joker is not a vigilante a la Taxi Driver or Death Wish. A vigilante targets an entire group of people who represent a collective threat -- pimps, drug dealers, robbers, rapists, etc. For him, any member of that group is interchangeable with the others -- bumping off any pimp, robber, etc. will achieve his goal of stopping crime. Although a vigilante may have been the victim of a specific criminal, he generalizes that relationship to other criminals similar to the original one, seeking collective rather than individual revenge. His targets have not done anything wrong to him -- he sees them as a threat to a wider group that he belongs to, and is acting on behalf of that group.

Joker, by contrast, only hurts people who have already hurt him: the yuppies who attack him unprovoked on the subway, the co-worker who got him in trouble by giving him a gun, his mother for subjecting him to ongoing physical and mental trauma as a child, and the TV show host who sought ratings by humiliating him before the audience.

He spares another co-worker who treated him decently (and says so). Plus he spares Thomas Wayne, who he could have held a grudge against for telling him the brutal truth that his mother was delusional, that he was adopted, and to stay out of his life or else. It turns out that Wayne was the victim of Arthur's mother's delusions, and she has involved him in her delusions, causing him to get told off by Wayne. So rather than pursue a feud, Arthur takes his licks and leaves him alone. Arthur recognized that he himself was in the wrong, albeit from believing his mother's delusions.

Second, Joker is not a nihilist, anarchist, or other figure who believes in no rules, or that the rules don't apply to him, or that violence and destruction is fun and rewarding per se, a la the Joker from Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan. He does not practice indiscriminate and callous violence. He follows fairly common and traditional rules for who you may harm (specific individuals who have already harmed you without provocation, and not those who have done you no harm). The same goes for property crimes -- he does not smash in the windows of random businesses, or blow up buildings of his targets in a propaganda of the deed.

When he says he "doesn't believe" in any of the political protest motives, he does not mean he believes in nothing, but that he does not have collective and larger-purpose motives. It's entirely personal for him, and that is a traditional ethical code (get revenge against the individuals who've wronged you).

And third, Joker is not really a sociopath. He doesn't torture or toy around with his targets like a sadist, he gets right to the point. And again he doesn't choose targets who haven't harmed him, like a sociopath would. He's not a predator, stalker, or hunter. He never tries to force himself on anyone. He does not hold a lowly view of other people in general, nor does he demean them.

And he can sense when he is in the wrong, how the other aggrieved party feels, and does not try to put the blame on them for feeling wronged. We see this not only when he leaves Wayne alone after their confrontation, but also when he's doing his rent-a-clown act at a children's cancer ward and his gun accidentally falls out of his pants and onto the floor, spooking them all.

In fact, a sociopath would only accept a job at a children's cancer ward in order to gain access to them as a child molester or serial killer. During a bus ride, he makes funny faces at a small child in front of him -- not to try to get close enough to harm him, but simply because he's an aspiring performer and wants to make his audience laugh and reward him with smiles. This is echoed later when he approaches young Bruce Wayne -- to make him laugh, not to harm him after getting him to let his guard down.

He is certainly dissociative, suffers from self-aggrandizing delusions, and is socially awkward or cognitively impaired at empathy -- like an autistic person, he can't easily comprehend what others are feeling. But a sociopath is not cognitively impaired -- they can understand what another person is feeling, they just can't emotionally resonate with it. An autistic is clueless, a sociopath is callous.

This makes Arthur more of a pitiful and doomed character out of Steinbeck. Lennie dreams of petting soft rabbits, but his lack of awareness of his own brawny nature leads him into crushing them to death as he pursues this dream. And Arthur dreams of fulfilling his life's mission of making an audience laugh and feel better -- and getting rewarded with laughter and applause -- while his socially autistic nature means he will never be able to read the room and know what the audience would like, so he only ends up making them feel worse, and he only receives distancing reactions from them.

He's not quite so doomed in his quest, though, since he does ultimately receive rapturous applause from the rioting protesters, after he has set an example of striking back at those who have wronged you.

Making this movie an "origin story" is therefore a decision to return to naturalism and various forms of determinism (heredity, upbringing, current class role, etc.). It's not the typical origin story of a villain from comic books, horror movies, or whatever else. Those villains always rise to the level of sociopath, serial killer, nihilist / anarchist, and so on. Because their violence is so extreme, it feels wrong to reduce it to a naturalistic explanation -- Michael Myers became a serial killer because he got bullied at school, or whatever.

But since Fleck / Joker is not that level of a villain, but is a fairly powerless and pitiful figure who is lashing out at those who have already wronged him, it's totally fine to assign him a naturalistic origin story. And his psychology may be abnormal, but it's not inhuman -- so, sure, investigate its origins in his upbringing, his class position, and whatever else. In a twist, we can't explore the role of heredity through his mother (a delusional psychotic) because he's adopted.

But he was adopted by a delusional psychotic, profoundly neglected, beaten to the point of traumatic head injury by the mother's boyfriend, had been institutionalized himself, perhaps a victim of Munchausen Syndrome by proxy (at the hands of his mother), and loaded up on various psychiatric drugs (some of which may be inappropriate and causing iatrogenic harm, if his mother misled the doctors as to her son's condition).

Current circumstances -- dim job prospects, rising crime, urban anomie, austere government policy -- may play a role in other narratives about psychological breakdown and violence, but it's rare to see one focus so much on childhood and parental influences. There's no such investigation in Taxi Driver, any Batman movie, Blue Velvet, Silence of the Lambs, or scores of others. The brief scenes of childhood abuse in Natural Born Killers is a partial exception, but the throwaway exposition tacked on to the end of Psycho does not count as an in-depth narrative investigation. This places Joker more within the mainstream of Gilded Age naturalism than Midcentury existentialism (free will, agency, making your bed and lying in it).

As our material and ideological conditions have returned to those of the Gilded Age -- hyper-competitiveness, laissez-faire economics and morality, Social Darwinism, and widening inequality -- the subjective sense of hopelessness and determinism will re-emerge into the zeitgeist. When society keeps breaking further and further down, the forces of the world feel too over-powering to be stopped. Only when societal breakdown has been tamed -- as during the Midcentury -- do people feel like they have more agency and are not merely molded and tossed around by fate.

Joker: the return of naturalism for the new Gilded Age (Part 1 on visual and musical style)

After one of my rare visits to the movie theater, I sided more with the audience than the critics on Joker. The movie may polarize responses because it's trying to integrate two different movies, one about his background and origin and another about his initial acts in his new criminal role as Joker. It wasn't the most seamless weaving together of the two narratives, but it did the job.

It may have also polarized responses for bringing such crystallized expectations to it -- choosing a protagonist from a high-profile franchise, and a director from a comedy rather than thriller background -- and then frustrating those who had showed up wanting something different. I've never paid much attention to comic book franchises, in film or elsewhere, and I haven't seen a single one of the Hangover movies in full, so I didn't go in with any hardened view of how it should have been.

I did see it after having read and listened to extensive spoilers, though, including endless comparisons to Taxi Driver (whether they enjoyed the supposed parallels or not). Joker bears little resemblance to Taxi Driver -- it's the contrasts that stand out more, and reveal the differences between the zeitgeists behind the two.

I'll split up my review into two parts, this one on the physical aspects of visual and musical style, and another on the conceptual aspects of themes, characters, and narrative style.

On the cinematography, it differed from the earlier Batman / Joker movies by Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan in opting for a more realistic than heavily stylized look. The cinematographer is mainly known for the Hangover movies as well, so this could have been making the best use of their limitations (comedy films rarely stand out visually). And certainly it's less stylized than the neo-Expressionist look of Taxi Driver's scenes of city streets at night. Joker rarely uses striking compositions, dynamic camera movement, bold colors, or chiaroscuro lighting.

The low-style visual approach reinforces the naturalistic themes, characters, and narrative. This is not a real comic book or superhero / supervillain movie, nor do the Joker's crimes rise to such a level that they seem unnatural and in need of a more stylized visual delivery.

In fact, the only memorable stylistic device is the frequent use of shallow focus, putting Arthur Fleck / Joker in focus, and rendering everyone and everything else blurry, even his immediate surroundings and people sitting right next to him. This choice was not just some fashionable gimmick, nor was it used for utilitarian purposes (e.g., to de-emphasize things and people in the background that might distract our attention from key figures in the foreground).

When he's sitting in bed with his mother watching a late night talk show, there is no clutter of distracting objects -- just him, his mother a foot away, the bed, and a few odd pieces of furniture and decoration. And yet everything other than Arthur is blurry. Ditto for the shot of him looking out the window of a bus -- there's little action going on in the foreground, and not much in the background either. This shot is echoed later when he's in the back of a cop car. So minimizing distractions is not the reason for the extreme shallow focus.

What this does is visually convey not only Arthur's loneliness and isolation from the people, things, and places in his world, but his psychic state of dissociation and increasingly solipsistic retreat into his own mind. After what he's been through, he has begun to live so much in his own mind that on a raw perceptual level, anything beyond himself is just one great big blur.

By the end of the movie, his dissociation has gotten so bad that he feels disembodied from even himself. In one of the movie's iconic shots, only his head remains in focus -- the entire rest of his body below the neck has floated off into the blurry background of the dressing room. Usually shallow focus at least respects the integrity of a subject's body, but here this is violated in order to show how far he has traveled off into a dissociative fugue. The promotional still below is not the best example from this sequence (it's most striking when he puts a gun under his chin), but it's not out on DVD to do a proper screenshot.

Thus, the heavy use of shallow focus does not undercut the otherwise realistic visual approach. It is not used for purely stylistic effect, to delight the visual sense, but to try to render as scientifically and objectively as possible the dissociative breakdown and solipsism of the protagonist.

Unlike the effective naturalistic visual approach, the musical style did not achieve its goals. This may owe to the comedic background of the team of filmmakers, where music tends to use existing pop songs or well-timed flourishes to echo a bit of physical comedy.

To its credit, it did not rely on contemporaneous hit songs, which Arthur would have been oblivious of. Nor did it employ a melodic approach to the score, which would have suggested dynamism, action, and coherent structure in a movie about the cold impersonal shaping effects of the environment on a person, and a slow dissociative melting-away rather than a series of psychotic explosions. (Contrast this with the heavily melodic and thrilling soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, whose antisocial protagonist wields more agency and experiences more exciting events than that of Joker.)

This approach to the score is one of the few similarities to Taxi Driver, whose score is mostly simple variations on a single motif, and plodding dissonant harmonies. However, Joker's score is too dramatic, almost bombastic, in its energy levels for a movie that is not very dramatic. Taxi Driver's score is more appropriately moody, despite being more dramatic in its plot.

And the instrumentation for Joker is too orchestral, taking away from the movie's overall naturalistic approach. Taxi Driver used a Midcentury jazz arrangement that feels more at home in New York during the 1970s. Joker needed an arrangement that was softer and more informal. Perhaps an elevated take on the moody, mellow country-crossover music that was dominant throughout the '70s, leading up to the year that Joker is set in (1981). Not the most exciting genre or period of music, but it would have done the job better for this movie -- more plausible as the background for lower-class characters, and more evocative of the tone of pity, disappointment, and bleakness that pervades the plot (at least until the final act).

The use of "Rock and Roll Part 2" for Joker's triumphant dance was great -- drawing from a moody, emo period that is more simple riffs than full melodies (early '70s, glam), rather than other stadium hits like "We Are the Champions" that are too melodic and high-energy to fit into this movie.

There should have been a counterpart to this song in the earlier part of the movie, to set up a contrast with the triumphant final act. Keep it in the glam rock genre, to make the comparison obvious, but one that is more yearning and self-pitying. Not melodic, layers of droning instruments, and a final vocal layer that is just disembodied sighing, to suggest dissociation or disintegration. With lyrics about one's childhood. The perfect choice -- "Cosmic Dancer" by T. Rex (also hits on Arthur's penchant for dancing).

Why dropping ID pol in favor of class is harder for left than right; Why only finance can save Dems from libtards

Below is an expanded version of a comment to a recent post about the interplay of class and ethnicity in the Democrat primary system. Naive Marxist theory would predict the clustering of groups by class, and perhaps secondarily by race, and yet it was the exact opposite way around. Whites of both elite and working class status lined up behind Bernie, and non-whites of both classes lined up behind Hillary.

That is largely true this time, except for the rift among whites along class lines, with working-class whites sticking with Bernie and professional whites defecting to Warren. Non-whites remain unified across class lines behind their machine candidate, Biden, and will easily defeat the deeply divided white camp of the electorate. Biden, a status quo candidate during a time of realignment, will then flame out to whichever GOP-er replaces Trump as the nominee.

This raises the issue of how Democrats, leftists, populists, or whoever, can undo the focus on identity politics in the Democrat primary system, given how entrenched it is. Basic sociological theory tells us it will be far harder for Democrats than for Republicans, because although both sides have identity politics to distract from class issues, it is easier to put aside those on the right, compared to those on the left.

I detailed these distinctions during the last primary season, and didn't see anything like it at the time or since. Most people with morally liberal brains just don't get any of this stuff, even if they have a PhD in sociology. If it has to do with in-group vs. out-group dynamics, they're color-blind to it (see Haidt's typology of morally liberal vs. conservative minds). So I'm reviving it now, and expanding on it a bit to reflect what's transpired in the meantime.

* * * * *

I hate being right so early. From way back in February 2016, the shift from ID pol to class will be easier on the right than left.

Reason: left-wing ID politics are about ascribed status, right-wing ID politics about achieved status. People stick to their ID guns more when the identity is beyond their control, an innate core of who they are.

In addition to evangelical Christianity, I'd add gun owner and non-urban resident to right-wing ID pol that are based on achieved status. They choose to own guns or not, and choose to live in rural or suburban places. They're not born into it, and it's not beyond their control.

Of course, this only applies to the electoral base of each party -- Trump defeated right-wing ID pol during 2016, but in office the GOP elites took over, buried economic populism, and threw meaningless right-wing ID pol to the rubes instead.

For Dems, it would be the opposite pattern. It's a daunting challenge for them to kill off ID pol during a primary, and focus on class instead. But if they successfully did so, they'd have an easier time doing economic populism in office (e.g., under a Bernie admin -- or FDR admin).

I think it's going to come down to the informational sector elites, who control the Democrat party, getting sick of being the opposition rather than dominant party, and defunding and otherwise shutting down left-wing ID pol during their primaries. Definitely not the media / entertainment cartel, since they massively profit from culture war content. And probably not the info-tech cartel, since they're neck-deep in ID-pol-motivated censorship.

Most likely would be the senior faction of their elites -- the finance sector. Sure, they're all personally woke, and their brands have been crafted to be woke as well. But they don't make profits from catering their services to culture war libtard rubes, and they do not have a mass audience interface like the social media platforms, so the big banks don't need to engage in culture war censorship. None of that cultural BS affects how much Goldman Sachs will make by bringing some phony tech bubble startup to its IPO. None of that impacts how low or high the central bank will set interest rates, how much quantitative easing they'll be doing, etc.

Of all the major Democrat coalition members, the ones who keep the most silent on culture war crap have been the finance crowd. It's amazing how little you hear of the typical libtard crap on MSNBC's sister network, CNBC, or on Bloomberg (let alone more culturally conservative Fox Business). That is true for all the major propaganda narratives of this cycle -- Me Too, Russiagate, impeachment, and imagining Nazis / fascists / white nationalists under every bed and in the rapid ascendancy.

The banks have incredibly stronger powers to wield -- they can make it so their targets can't hold any banking accounts, can't get loans, can't send or receive funds, can't even cash their paycheck without going to a payday loan shark. Compare that to the limpdick shit that the social media companies can do -- kick you off Twitter, oh no, it's the end of the world. Or slandering you on a libtard cable news segment -- oh no, please, not the hatred of over-40 wine moms.

And yet the banks have largely (not to say completely) refrained from using that power against cultural conservatives, Trump supporters, Bernie supporters, anti-Establishment types of any stripe. People already have such a low regard for bankers, they don't want to draw the public's ire any more by politicizing their business activities -- beyond the obvious of supporting one party over another, or one candidate over another. Not materially casting out huge swaths of the population for holding taboo ideas.

From a related post, Bernie's followers should bring back the New Deal coalition of big banks and labor unions, squeezing the professional-managerial class strivers from either side.

So far, there's little sign of improvement among the various groups in the Dem base -- they're pretending 2016 did not happen, and are right back to whites vs. non-whites as the first filter, and then professional vs. working class as the second filter (distinguishing Warren from Sanders among whites).

I don't pretend to be certain that there actually is a way out of this mess that the Dems started with the ID pol phenomenon. They obviously weren't planning ahead. But if there is, it will come from the working class and the finance elites, not from the broad professional class or the media or the tech sectors.

Aside from Dem elite intervention, the only solution is a hostile takeover of their primary by Trumpian populist Republicans -- they flood in and vote for Bernie in massive numbers, not giving a shit about Pocahontas or the right-hand man of My Cool Black President.

That needed to happen between '16 and '20 -- and it has not. So there will be no shift to class, away from ID pol, and we'll get another awful GOP admin after Trump leaves. Populist rhetoric, elitist policies, and right-wing ID pol to keep the rubes from grumbling.

In the meantime, Bernie supporters on the left should re-orient their efforts away from the media and tech world, and toward the non-culturally motivated finance sector, as well as organized labor and the broad working class (except for urban non-whites who are locked in to the Democrat machine candidate).

Mid-2000s nostalgia from Aimee Terese, in praise of catcalling

As the vulnerable phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle draws to a close this year, Me Too is dying because people are all emo'd out by now. When the restless, warm-up phase begins next year, people will be eager to come out of their shells and start mixing it up with each other again, to re-establish a baseline of normal energy levels.

And in order to overcome the oppressive taboos against sexuality that have prevailed during the vulnerable phase, they will start making quite overt signals that horniness is back in fashion -- just to make sure the awareness is public, giving people permission to stop feeling so negative about the opposite sex. Catcalling will make a major comeback, for one thing.

To the Millennials who don't remember, or to Gen X-ers and Boomers who've forgotten, this isn't the first time this cultural and emotional shift has happened. The first half of the 2000s were incredibly emo and sex-negative, and suddenly that began changing around 2005. The second half of that decade was like a return to the disco era, with no inhibitions about the two sexes getting up close and personal with each other.

Not all Millennials, though, have forgotten that atmosphere circa 2005. Here's the anti-woke Left princess praising catcalling:

I vividly remember the summer when I first started attracting wolf whistles/male attention, I was 16 almost 17, and I found it so flattering. I'm now 30 - it remains flattering and affirming.

Conflating "male attention" with hostility, threats & danger is an ideological move.

— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) July 24, 2019

Adding some fashion nostalgia to bring it more to life:

What is wrong with ‘catcalling’?
I was 16 and I was wearing a cami with denim cut offs, and super wavy hair for days. That summer it started happening frequently - and I found it flattering! https://t.co/wqgzVmYN9N

— Aimee Terese (@aimeeterese) July 23, 2018

TFW no almost-17 Lebanese big-hair gf...

Reminds me of some other Mediterranean Australians of the five-foot firecracker type, in full 2005 style and sex-positive attitude. Thank God we're almost there again:

Songs about traumatic childhood produced by vulnerable phase of 15-year cultural excitement cycle

During the vulnerable phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle, people's energy levels have crashed into a refractory state where everything feels painfully over-stimulating, and puts them in a mindset of being victimized or traumatized.

To see how this is reflected in pop culture, consider the ultimate level of victimization -- child abuse of one kind or another.

Wikipedia has a list of songs about child abuse, although it's not only physical abuse that's covered -- anything that leaves the singer psychologically traumatized. There has to be some kind of painful conflict within the family, whether the parents fighting with each other as the child tries to block it out, or getting heated against the child, all the way up to physical abuse by one parent toward the child or toward the other parent.

(And some are not about traumatic childhood at all -- they're just depressing songs that the list-maker associates with a damaging childhood, but are not actually about that topic.)

To ensure that these resonated with the popular zeitgeist, we'll only consider those that made it onto the main Billboard chart, the Hot 100. I'm going with the weekly charts, since using the narrower year-end charts only gives a handful of examples. As in the previous case studies here, I'm categorizing songs by the first year that it was released to the public, either as a single or on an album. These years are grouped into the standard phases of the excitement cycle model: 2015-'19 is the current vulnerable phase, 2010-'14 the last manic phase, 2005-'09 the warm-up phase before that, and so on back through earlier 5-year blocks.

The model predicts a concentration of such songs in the vulnerable phase, and sure enough that's what we find. Here is a table of the songs in order of year released, along with the phase that year belonged to:

The model makes no prediction about the overall number made, or long-term trends, only about cyclical patterns. As it happens, there were a whole lot of child abuse songs in the vulnerable phases of the late '80s and early 2000s, but not so many during the current vulnerable phase. That suggests a longer-term decline. But we see the cyclical pattern in the relative absence of such songs during either half of the '90s, or the early '80s, late '70s, etc.

There were songs about child abuse released in the early '80s, late '70s, back to the late '60s, but they did not chart -- they were in the wrong phases. Still, you'd think there would have been some in the vulnerable phase of the early '70s, but none are in the list. They only became popular starting in the late '80s.

Perhaps the high number in the late '80s reflected the near-peak level of violent crime and child abuse, which didn't peak until 1992 (overall crime) or 1994 (child abuse: see Finkelhor). The early 2000s peak was most likely from Gen X-ers who were recalling their childhoods from that earlier crime and abuse wave, despite the rates having declined by the early 2000s. The shift in attitude from manic in the late '90s to vulnerable and emo in the early 2000s awakened those memories of victimization, leading them to write a bunch of songs about child abuse even though it was far less common by the time the songs were written.

By now, the late-20s Millennials making pop music didn't grow up during the crime-and-abuse wave the first time around, and rates are still declining into the present. That makes it harder for performers to tap into their personal experiences, or current affairs, to make songs about child abuse.

In any case, let's set aside the longer-term trends, and look just as the phases of the cycle. If each phase were equally likely to produce these songs, then there would be 1/3 of the total (22) in each phase, or roughly 7 per phase. Instead, it is heavily lopsided toward the vulnerable phase, which produced 14 of the 22, heavily away from the manic phase (3 of 22), and fairly away from the warm-up phase as well (5 of 22).

For now, we can test the main prediction that these songs will cluster most in the vulnerable phase, and collapse the other two phases into non-vulnerable phases. Then using a binomial test, the probability of getting a result as extreme as this one, or more so, is 0.0035 -- very unlikely. They do in fact cluster in the vulnerable phase.

A secondary prediction is that, among the non-vulnerable phases, such songs would be less common during the manic phase, when people feel invincible and on a constant high, and relatively more common during the warm-up phase. That is apparently true from these results (3 in the manic phase, 5 in the warm-up phase), but I'll run a tedious multinomial test later and post the results in the comments, maybe update the main post as well.

Hopefully this little study will serve as a hint into the cyclical pattern of widespread moral panics -- those involving victimization, at any rate. I'll get around to that when time permits.

For now, a reminder that the "Save the children" moral panic of the late '80s was not restricted only to the conservative busybody housewife types, like Tipper Gore and her Parents Music Resource Center. It encompassed the urban bohemian childless 20-somethings as well, who were no less earnest -- if less annoying and imperious. It was indie music made by good-natured social workers. In less cocooning times, the entire society was looking out for one another, and women channeled their maternal instincts into caring about unfortunate children in general.

Leftist bubbles during vulnerable phase of 15-year excitement cycle

You can already feel the air coming out of the current leftist bubble that goes back to around 2015. It coalesced around Bernie's campaign, but most of those people have already ditched him and gone back to their same ol' bullshit, cheerleading for a polarizing neoliberal culture warrior like Liz Warren.

It has reminded me so much of the early 2000s, when I was in the anti-globalization and anti-war movements in college. It's strange listening to political podcasts again, which I haven't done since then (back then it was streaming Democracy Now via Pacifica Radio on the RealAudio Player, downloading Noam Chomsky talks, Unwelcome Guests, and interviews / talks hosted by ZNet). It wasn't as developed as it is today, and the parasocial quality was lesser in degree, but it's hard for me not to notice the parallels to today.

That climate coalesced around Nader's 2000 campaign, generated a major protest during Bush's inauguration, and was undeterred by 9/11. There were massive protests against the war before it even began in 2003, and Fahrenheit 9/11 was a major hit at the box office in 2004 (#17 for the year). That mood was popular, not marginal.

Then by 2005, it had more or less evaporated. The late 2000s support for Obama had nothing to do with leftism -- just libs and even moderates getting pissed with 8 years of Bush, the recession, etc., wanting a change of pace but not a major change. Compared to the first half of the 2000s, they had now tuned politics out.

The early 2010s did not see a leftist bubble either. Occupy Wall Street was just a public space hang-out, a party in a carnivalesque atmosphere. It did not have widespread resonance, and did not even try to do anything specific (like blocking the FTAA, preventing the Iraq War, and so on, from the early 2000s). Most people were having too much fun, living too carefree of a lifestyle, to feel the need to pay attention to leftists.

As of 2015, though, it's come back big-time. The Bernie campaign, #MeToo, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Russiagate, imagining Nazis under every bed, joining the DSA, living a parasocial relationship with left-wing podcast hosts.

This rhythm suggests a reflection of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle (see an overview here). That is, it is the vulnerable phase, when people's energy levels have crashed into a refractory period, when they feel like they need to huddle in the leftist bubble for protection. It's not as if neoliberal austerity or imperial adventures just happened with Trump's election.

Rather, it's people's social-emotional states that have suddenly changed, causing them to react to external events in a different way, one suiting them to joining a leftist crowd. In a refractory state, all external stimuli feel painful, so you feel victimized by your environment -- not only your direct social environment, but the broader political current affairs.

Typically that leads to joining the left, although there is right-wing victim Olympics as well, so perhaps the phenomenon is more general -- politicizing the personal, and treating politics as therapy for your broken emotional state. Liberals temporarily become radical leftists, and conservatives temporarily become radical rightists.

During the following restless warm-up phase, people's energy levels have recovered to baseline, and they don't feel such a strong need for being shielded against painful stimuli (i.e., all external events). Having left their refractory period, they don't feel constantly victimized, and no longer in need of group therapy. So, bye-bye to the left bubble. This attitude prevailed during the second half of the 2000s, including the Obama campaign, by which time liberals had de-radicalized.

During the following manic invincible phase, their energy levels are spiking, and they really feel no pressing personal need for politics as group therapy. If they get involved politically at all, it will be to create a party for radicals (the kind where you have fun in public, not the kind that involves long meetings). This was the attitude during the early 2010s, epitomized by Occupy Wall Street, Slutwalk / Free the Nipple / No Pants Subway Ride, and so on and so forth. No strongly, broadly felt need to primary Obama "from the left" because everyone was in high spirits in 2012.

Before the early 2000s, the last time there was a leftist bubble was the late '80s with Jesse Jackson's primary campaign, anti-Apartheid, the date rape panic, etc., also during a vulnerable phase. It had popped by the early '90s, with the shift into the warm-up phase, and liberals de-radicalized into choosing a centrist like Bill Clinton. By the late '90s manic phase, there was no broad leftist zeitgeist at all -- no attempt to primary Clinton "from the left" since everyone was in such an upbeat manic mood.

Before the late '80s, the last leftist bubble was the early '70s -- the original leftist bubble, characterized by anti-Vietnam War protests, anti-capitalist organizations, second wave feminism (all heterosexual sex is rape), bombings, the Counter-culture, Watergate, the McGovern campaign, and the rest of it. That was a vulnerable phase.

Some of those topics were part of the late '60s manic-phase movements, but those were more upbeat and carefree -- the Summer of Love, Woodstock, student protests as an excuse to hang out in public spaces, and so on. And during '68-'69, they had not really radicalized into anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-sexist, anti-whatever. By the second half of the '70s, a warm-up phase, the Counter-culture was dead, and liberals de-radicalized into choosing Jimmy Carter. During the manic phase of the early '80s, there wasn't even a residue of the early '70s personal-is-political counter-culture.

I don't think you can go back before circa 1970, because that's when the New Left replaced the Old Left. Before 1970, there was no "personal is political" stuff, no politics as group therapy. It was materialist, seeking a higher standard of living and autonomy for working class people, mainly through labor unions. Certainly there was an awareness of problems that went beyond the individual to encompass entire groups -- The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the Feminine Mystique, etc. -- but they were not politicized into a pseudo-political movement, did not have a political candidate to rally around, and did not lead to temporary radicalization followed quickly by de-radicalization.

The speed with which people go through these phases -- radicalized, de-radicalized, politics as partying in public -- suggests something other than external economic or political forces are at work. It looks more like mood swings over the course of an entire rollercoaster cycle. And what do you know, they overlap perfectly with the phases of the excitement cycle, in just the way you'd expect (with the vulnerable, refractory phase making people feel victimized and in need of politics as group therapy).

This dynamic needs to be taken into account for those who are planning on leftist politics after 2020. During that year itself, de-radicalization will already have begun, since 2019 is the last year of the current vulnerable phase, and then it's on to the warm-up phase. They will still be shrieking culture warriors, but they'll be supporting outright libs like Liz Warren and AOC, not Bernie Sanders. That emotional state will last into 2024 as well. Prepare for a party atmosphere during the late 2020s.

This is yet another reason why populists cannot rely on leftoids for change -- they're only in it for emotional reasons, and even those are fleetingly cyclical. Yesterday's Free the Nipple babe has become today's MeToo crusader, and tomorrow will be rid of her post-horny victim mindset, ready to revive Slutwalk the day after tomorrow.

Focusing on real material issues, with audiences who keep experiencing them no matter what emotional mood-swing they're in, is the only way to replace the failed status quo with something different.