BRAINWORMS: February 2025

We're running late!

Okay so I’m late. You’ve done it before. I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again! Try and stop me! No time to waste, let’s go digging for BRAINWORMS.

MUSIC

Chart Courtesy of tapmusic dot net.

Earworm of the Month: I, Jonathan by Jonathan Richman

Is actually the album of the moment, I think. At least in parts. At least “Parties in the USA” is a great unintentional protest song. I dunno it just feels like “Resistance Art” has hit an evolutionary bottleneck and devolved into self-parody and so I feel we must look backwards to find a way around it. We need to find old modes and make them new in order to find expressions of condemnation for the state of affairs that don’t feel hackneyed and self-serving and 2016-brained. Richman is a tremendously empathetic songwriter and I feel that simple, slacker’s empathy and goodwill may be of more utility than the permanent keyed-up rictus of a Dash Dobrovsky.

So people are staying home more, not having fun

A cold cold era has begun, has begun

Now things were bad before, there was lots of loneliness

But in 1965 things were not like this

Okay I’m getting too serious about this. Here:

FILM

Eyeworm of the Month: Any Given Sunday Directed by Oliver Stone

Man, but I just haven’t been watching many movies this year! Maybe we can rediscover the movie mindset in March but it just hasn’t been my top priority so far. I think I’m in need of another project.

Of the limited field here, I’d say Any Given Sunday left me thinking most about it. I watched this on Super Bowl Sunday as part of a kind of vibes-binge on American football before the beginning of the long cold months between now and the end of August, which, of course, marks the beginning of God’s own sporting season (college football). I’d seen the film once before and remembered it as an insane artifact of late 90s maximalism but honestly I may have undersold it to myself. I don’t think there’s another film I can name with this much editing. Like there isn’t a single shot in this that doesn’t (apparently) require some sort of dissolve effect or jump cut. It’s Hollywood montage filmmaking and has about a million cool people in it (and also James Woods) but I unfortunately liked it less than I did the first time I watched it because I think this film hates women. Which made me wonder if Ollie Stone hates women. I don’t really like doing the thing where art is reflective of the artist’s personal opinions, but this is nothing if not the Stone Man’s football-loving id directed outwards (literally any random five minute stretch of this film makes it obvious nobody on this project was allowed to tell him “no”) and so I felt it was fair to at least look into it a bit. Googled it. Sure enough, twice divorced. Not causation by any means but yeah this movie has divorced guy brain. Women do tend to get frustrated when you think about the JFK assassination too much. That would be a neat segue into Annie Hall if I trusted you guys enough to get down to brass tacks about The Woodster in 2025. Alas.

VIDEO GAMES

Pixelworm of the Month: Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, developed by Strange Scaffold

Bit of a hodge-podge this month. I’m properly tucked into the next major video game project and will have plentiful thoughts on it in the coming months (a dedicated essay is a possibility). I’ve been sort of half-in and half-out on the fighting game grind and trying to take a break from Balatro (mostly successfully). It’s been a month to dabble. A bit of Dwarf Fortress (still totally impenetrable to me) a bit of Civilization: Beyond Earth (better than I remembered, the expansion is good). I’m giving the nod to another nasty little indie. I have a type and it is getting clearer all the time.

Despite its evocative (let’s go with that) title; Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator isn’t particularly gruesome. It is, ultimately, exactly what it appears to be. It’s a commodities trading and stock market simulator where the commodity happens to be living flesh. The player navigates the ups and downs of a fast paced market and the whims of rival traders to fulfill contracts and make a lot of money. More money means more reputation means more organs and more resources and more ways to make money. The satirical flavor of the game is immediately charming and adds to the overall comfy feeling of the experience. The actual trading is a frenetic race against the clock with a hyperactive soundtrack which responds to the speed and quality of your play (this never stops being cool). But starting that countdown clock is always the player’s choice. The in-between down periods are often rather relaxing. Strategize, plan, put your capital to use. Buy a larger meat locker. Invest in some organ futures. The relaxed pace lets the satire disappear into the background and ferment. That’s the real lightbulb moment. You get so much out of the gameplay loop of fulfilling requests, following the various potential story paths, and watching your profits grow and the line go up and you forget how weird and gross it all is. You hit a random event, the Organ Teamsters go on strike, the market takes a nosedive. Like a whale just barely visible beneath the surface of the water, the player gains some small context as to how fucked the world of their game is. But rather than being horrified, I was excited! Look at how cheap everything is now! We’re gonna clean up buying the dip and riding the market back up! It’s just sound business, after all. As Baron Rothschild put it; “buy when there’s blood in the streets, even if it’s your own.” Of course, it’s even better if you’re buying the blood of other people. You can have your blood and sell it too!

LITERATURE

Wordworm of the Month: Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

I like having projects and find it helps me read more, write more, watch more, listen more, play more, and get more out of every individual work and every unmeasurable unit of effort. Cohesive themes add motivation to my consumption and allows one thought and impression to build onto the next.

So when I decided I’d “read black” for Black History Month, you know I approached the project with the utmost seriousness. I read The Jewels of Aptor (a sci-fi/fantasy novel written by a 19 year old black genius,) Up from Slavery (a foundational but flawed memoir written by a foundational but flawed African-American thinker) and all four volumes of Hip-Hop Family Tree (written by a now-dead-and-disgraced white guy). I know, I know, hold your applause. I do it all for the culture.

He just like me for real.

So really, the choice is obvious here. Aptor is a lovely yarn spun by a genuine wunderkind but it’s ultimately just very good pulp. It’s worth a read if you should encounter it, as Chip Delany’s flair for the weird, tragic, and subtle elevates Aptor above the crowd of novelized D&D campaigns that currently crowd the fantasy genre. But Up From Slavery left me with far more to chew on, not all of it positive.

We don’t hear too much about Booker T. Washington anymore, do we? I suppose that’s rather like saying “we don’t hear much about Woodrow Wilson” anymore. Both men can count themselves as figures of tremendous, foundational importance within their respective intellectual traditions but both have rather been surpassed in profile and renown by their successors. Just as Wilson’s contributions to progressive thought and the formation of a global society were ultimately both fulfilled and surpassed by future liberal progressive presidents like Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington has seen his profile dwarfed by black thinkers such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Intellectual traditions are kind of like paving blacktop. The new builds off the old, but often obscures it. It takes time and effort to chip away the veneers of current circumstances and to appreciate the rich layers beneath, and often people will give you a hard time for leaving potholes everywhere.

Though of course, thought isn’t blacktop. It’s not an inert thing. Opinions and norms evolve and this is the vital other half of how we explain why certain figures fall out of favor. Woodrow Wilson is no longer considered a progressive hero due to his unapologetic racism. Modern progressive thought is nothing if not racially pluralistic. Therefore Wilson’s racism makes him a figure to be problematized and examined, praised only in spite of his racist views.

Washington is ultimately a similar case. As black thought in America gained prominence and the modern movement for civil rights became what it did, it developed a symbiotic relationship with American liberalism. This left Washington, who can only really be described as a conservative, in an awkward ideological position. Washington is antagonistic to organized labor, disdains political agitation as a means to win concessions from the white majority of the Jim Crow south, and takes a somewhat-baffling “third way” approach towards measures meant to suppress the black vote like poll taxes and literacy tests. It becomes easy to see how later black thinkers, fifty, sixty, seventy years hence and no closer to that mythical equity that Washington posited would inevitably ensue through industry, education, and participation in the imperfect society into which he was freed, might have considered the great black educator to have exhausted his political and rhetorical usefulness.

All autobiographies eventually seem to fall into the trap of a cool, accomplished sort of guy telling you about the important trips he’s gone on and the famous people he’s met. Especially in its later movements, Up From Slavery falls into this trap badly. It almost makes Washington seem somewhat naive. It’s entirely understandable that a man with a long and successful career in raising funds by soliciting donations from the wealthy would have a somewhat skewed view of the supposed magnanimity of the rich. I don’t disdain him that opinion and find no small inspiration in his seeming refusal to waste his energy hating or resenting anyone. I can, however, disdain his failure to acknowledge that potential bias. When names like Carnegie and Rockefeller are brought up among the Tuskegee Institute’s foremost donors, one can’t help but wonder how many people of all races were maimed, killed, or disenfranchised in service of the industrial ambitions which allowed these oligarchs to donate large sums of money to the good work of educating the downtrodden.

None of this, of course, diminishes the vast power of Washington’s life’s work. Up From Slavery is at its best when Washington is able to express his deep love for learning and belief in the power of education. The birth of the Tuskegee Institute from functionally nothing is a credit to everyone involved in its success and Washington’s illustration of a newly-freed black America as desperate for an education by any means is a powerful contrast against our modern apathy about the state of American education. If anything, Washington’s old fashioned prioritizing of the trades and manual labor over liberal arts education seems to be in-vogue once again. It is in this capacity that I fear he himself may come back into vogue. Dead intellectuals have a lot of utility to modern cynics. It’s easy to imagine this early trailblazer in the fight for civil rights fashioned into a cudgel to be used against his descendants both racial and ideological. The thrift, industry, and self-reliance of Booker T. Washington could easily be used to harangue black America for its supposed lack of or disinterest in these virtues. However, more than anything else in American modernity, I suspect Washington would be deeply troubled by our failure to find dignity and fulfillment in labor. Scammers and speculators of our time seek an escape from labor by amassing vast sums of money through graft and luck and desire no greater end than sitting on their proverbial dragon’s hoard, fat and hedonistic. In this sense, we are not so different from Washington’s conception of the Antebellum South, a society which, as he saw it, was destined to fall to ruin because it could only scorn labor as something to be avoided or escaped. When the winds of change came, the masters of this system found they could not produce, create, or even maintain, only exploit.

BLOG BIZ

Genius of Loathe is on course to hit 100 subs this month and so I’ll begin this section with a brief, respectful request for you to share this blog around if you’ve enjoyed it. My plan for the immediate future is to try and put out three dispatches per month. Ideally this will mean one longer, more research-intensive essay (such as “Professional Nerds,” or “Is Everyone Racist Against Indians?”) then one shorter, more id-driven essay (such as “Post Election Zen” and “In What Year is Your Brain Stuck? (Disco Stu Syndrome)”). The third, of course, will be BRAINWORMS.

I have a few ideas in the chamber and so you should remain on high alert for my ambushing you with one, probably at around lunch hour in the middle of the work week. (I’ve had far more success with this than weekend uploads. Substack is an office procrastinator’s platform and this makes me feel all the more at home.) I have a couple ideas for longer-term projects which can feature regularly on this newsletter but for now I’m trying to keep it spontaneous.

As always, thank you for your time. You’re all diamonds to me.

-JW