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rametarin · 7 months

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Cities irritate me. Pondering them.

People that love cities seem to enjoy the selling point that your personal liberties are inherently compromised either by hard laws, or just by the nature of the soft laws. Such as, gun rights.

There's hard laws that are laws that arbitrarily punish your discharging of a firearm, whether it does or could damage anything. Those laws are hard because they exist purely to punish you based on what you MIGHT do accidentally or on purpose.

Then there's the soft, indirect, asymmetric laws. These ones punish you based on the circumstance. In a city, you virtually cannot discharge a firearm without it hitting something man-made and owned as property, be it brick walls, windows, street lights, or a herd of people walking around. You are almost guaranteed to be taken to court and sued into oblivion for it.

People that stand to make a great deal of money off available labor and the expenses of the people that live there love cities, because it's a large population and pool of people that can do labor. But then they also rope the city into taxing the people that live there in order to finance city life- which gives the city more control over the space above the earth, where they DO control the erection and construction of dwellings, workplaces and institutions deemed necessary for the function of society. They make the people pay to live in the cities and build the cities, and the city and wealthy tolerate one another's influence because they need one another. All to create a large population of people that have needs for both living space and creature necessities.

But the rub is you simply do not and cannot have the freedom of suburban or rural life. You give up certain amounts of personal autonomy, like the freedom of gun ownership without being charged out the ass if your discharged bullets hit anything, and more arbitrary laws that punish you for carrying when you are forced just by the layout of the city to pass by buildings where you aren't allowed to carry or concealed carry, just to live your life.

And the only people that can live under these laws, live around them illegally. Those willing to violate the laws and sacrifice any notion of legally living in society and try to live in the cracks, cede legitimacy in return for doing whatever they want, at the cost of possibly going to prison. These ones carry and intend to commit crimes and predate on people. The ones that live legally become marks, the ones that live illegally prey on them.

Real estate becomes an impossible luxury, because there's simply so many people and so many (necessary and not) zoning ordinances, and regulations, making new housing is practically impossible. You have to build new parts of the city just to keep providing for the people.

Simply put, after a certain size, cities become too intimate and congested. There's no room to live.

You can't have a space to work on your car in your yard, you can't go over to a friend's house to crash because their breadbox apartment isn't "zoned" for guests and the landlord's ire.

Cities just aren't designed for people, they're designed to treat people like hamsters that pay to live in a cage for the betterment of those that believe in the idea of caging people (one distinct group) and the people those cagers deal with (business people, whom are distinct from the ideological cagers and are just in it for the convenience such workers bring.)

So I've come to a conclusion;

I think in the future we're going to have more rural and urban sprawl, and tele-presence will be used for a kind of national commuting. Imagine cities that serve only as large factories; the workers are effectively machines connected to a wireless internet in the factory. You connect via VR and haptic feedback peripherals in the hands for tactile perception. Cities of the future will be designed to house a minority of people who maintain these factory conditions and don't mind the industrial limitations of city life.

The actual workers and employees will enjoy lives outside said city, perhaps connecting from thousands of miles away in different states. Not needing to go by rail or bus or car to commute, always having a machine to boot up into convenient workstations, where they are for a human hand to serve function there.

Doing it this way you eliminate so much need for congestion in cities and can maximize exactly how human inhospitable the city layout is. You'd need far fewer schools locally, fewer sidewalks, fewer residential buildings, fewer sewers, less garbage dumps, fewer hospitals, smaller government. Cities become centered around the people that specifically want to live in a city for the sake of living in a city, which means the sacrifices based on location and necessity become less of a consequence of living there and more the point. Where a minority population can exist there in comfort and the majority can earn city-life wages while living in whatever home community that they wish.

This means that cities can focus less on making breadbox apartments out of necessity to fit as many people as possible, and can afford to make vertical properties that are actually able to be physically owned. Because the people that would be paying taxes to work there as a toll to access the jobs and thus also provide for the city, would not similarly tax the city with their living, physical existence for their needs. The city could suddenly AFFORD, with both space and real estate and labor, to improve the quality of living conditions.

That would mean fewer tiny apartments with small square footage of space and more condominiums with as much space and square footage as farmhouses, able to comfortably house a family of 6-8. With the equivalent of a yard.

That'd mean more piping, infrastructure and real estate for something that's usually, "NIMBY." Imagine cities meant to be natural containment for nuclear power plants, so if there was an explosion (god forbid), they're designed to soak up the energy and spare populations- perhaps even a skyline meant to absorb sunlight and buildings designed not with the priority of habitating people and more as giant vertically-erected but horizontally spinning wind turbines. Cities that themselves are the sources of massive amounts of carbon sinkage, using renewable energy to remove it from the atmosphere.

To me, this seems like a good compromise. The way we're currently doing cities is enormously inhuman for individual rights, and it compromises too much just to be viable. And I'm not commenting on the financial side of things; I'm meaning specifically from the civic side.

It offers all the advantages of a city but removes the sources of poverty in a city when the jobs go away. It eliminates the urban decay and crime. It eliminates road congestion. Cities should logically be populated by fewer people but provide the sort of close proximity, high industrial employment that rural and suburban places don't.

The benefits it'd offer outside of that are great, too. Because you'd have tens of millions fewer people driving to work everyday, you'd have tens of millions fewer people consuming gasoline, diesel or electricity as fuel just to move the person to get to work. You'd have less wear on our roads and streets from traversing.

Overall, the idea of a city as a more serious business industrial zone habitated by tele-presence robots and a smaller human population to service them and keep the place running in ways that require a human presence (and get adequately paid for the inconvenience of city life) just seems to be the more human hospitable model.

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holdoncallfailed · 1 year

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i enjoyed your thoughts on fic as criticism. How would you think about RPF within that vein? Do you consider your work (or just "good" band rpf in general) like, meta-criticism on the band as a creation/collective, as opposed to concerned with specifically one album? not that there can't be overlap but to me rpf takes a far different bent to how moments act in the narrative of a band - not culminating necessarily in music but perhaps instead in some sort of emotional or relational shift. and how would you see that play out into other rpf arenas that are deeply popular, such as hockey, where they don't have that metatextual engagement - is it a question of the function of the game itself and those types of relationships in society? You don't have to answer haha. Just some musings.

i think your first point is very salient—for me RPF is definitely more reflective of the perceived dynamics of the band and what circumstances yielded the music rather than the music itself, though i don't think they're mutually exclusive. it's also based on my relationship to the music and these public figures, trying to parse what makes it meaningful to me and trying to bring readers into the space that exists in my mind between myself, the music, my perception of the people who made it, and the ‘objective’ reality of their relationships to their own work (and to each other as artistic collaborators and to the world at large).

to use blur as an example (cos what else would i use lol) the 'non-fiction' 'criticism' that i've written of their MUSIC is just as steeped in their biography and associated cultural milieu because that is still the context in which the music was produced and consumed. personally i don't think that there is all that wide a gap between criticism and RPF in terms of my own work because they are both carefully researched and they both ultimately rely on MY interpretation of the music and the biographical/cultural context surrounding it. what makes it RPF is the insertion of dialogue and events, and therefore specific imagined context for the music, that i have no way of proving were real. any criticism, no matter how ostensibly non-fictional it is, involves a certain level of speculation on behalf of the critic—RPF (at least for me) is like a more extreme version of that speculation. i’m speaking on a purely formal level here, to be clear—in terms of what Kind of writing i am doing, or consider myself to be doing, rather than the content.

i can't speak as much to sports RPF because i've never been interested in sports on any level lol but from what i can tell it's pretty analogous—perhaps even more than bands or music, sports have a 'narrative' that's easy to identify, in terms of the individual games (who wins/loses, how strategies play out in people's heads vs on the field) and in terms of the season/larger structure of the sports industry (players getting traded, players retiring/getting injured, etc). those are all dynamics that the public is encouraged to make speculations on and develop emotional stakes in. so in that way i think sports RPF can function as a commentary on those preexisting cultural expectations for how fans are meant to engage with sports rather than commentary about the mechanics of the sport itself.

i think one must not overlook the other driving force of RPF, particularly sports RPF, which is that people want to imagine their favorite celebrities having sex and that's all it is for many lol. but even with that at the main motivation i would still classify as more adjacent to criticism on a fundamental level.

#i appreciate your delineating my stuff as 'Good band rpf' hahah #but this was really interesting to think about thank u anon!!!#Anonymous #writing tag

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spiders-hth-is-an-outlier · 2 years

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Pls I'm so sleepy, my brain is no good for this in wintertime, but I need you to understand. "Subtext" contextually means different things and, like other narrative tools, functions differently in different texts, so like.

Some kinds of subtext are meant to be clearly understood, it's just more artful at times not to directly fucking blurt out every little thing. For example, in Dirty Dancing, Lenny Briscoe's disapproval of Johnny as a boyfriend for Baby is textually about class and wealth (she's well-heeled and he's The Help), but also subtextually about ethnicity and religion (she's Jewish and he's not). The word "Jewish" doesn't appear anywhere in the movie, but you know that she is, and that all of Kellerman's patrons are, and that he's not, and that it's 196whatever and that matters. You know it because it's present, because the movie has chosen to let subtext carry that piece of its meaning, and you're supposed to be able to parse meaning presented subtextually.

Other kinds of subtext are there to obscure meaning, not present it. This is Hayes Code subtext, "family hour tv" subtext. Some things live in subtext because subtext provides plausible deniability. If Saved By the Bell has a Very Special Episode where the pressures of the music industry drive Jessie Spano to an operatic breakdown over her caffeine pill addiction, hipper viewers can be like, "cocaine, check, I get it," but at the same time, there is a reason they don't just say cocaine. The reason is that it prevents holy hell from raining down on everyone involved, because of course no one at NBC has been talking to 12-year-old children about blow, whoever would dream of such a thing? These are clearly caffeine pills, as was stated many times right here in the text. This kind of subtext only exists -- would only ever need to exist -- to divide and conquer. The audience isn't meant to agree on the reality of it. The fact that viewers won't agree on exactly what they just saw is the whole point.

Getting mad because less-hip media viewers don't identify all the subtextual coding you do is kind of fruitless and silly. It's designed to be divisive. The function it's serving in the text is to cast doubt, to be impervious to evidentiary arguments. They're caffeine pills unless they're lines of coke... but she says "caffeine pills," so prove they're not. They're best friends unless they're lovers... but he says "my best friend," so prove it on me. You can't. It's intentionally impossible.

"This reading makes the story richer, more effective, and more memorable" is actually a stronger argument than "The subtext is right there." It feels like you're abandoning the high ground of Pure Reason, but the thing about fiction is that this fucking owns actually is a better rubric for analysis than all the pieces fit -- because most art is crafted much more to hook your limbic system and produce a reaction than it is to adhere to the strictest sort of logic. (Hence why those dogshit Everything Wrong With videos fail to understand the first thing about any movie, but that's a tangent for another wintertime.)

Anyway, I can't prove that the reason Shawn Hunter dropped out of college was less about his father's death than it was about his bisexual awakening and the space he needed to grapple with the fact that Cory was never going to leave Topanga, but you can't prove the opposite, and mine's a way more interesting story. Why, what did you think I was leading up to?

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