#he might have the soul of a middle-aged suburban dad but he's actually the same age as like. a post-grad student.

[voidartisan]

i'm not going to reblog it because i don't intend to offend anyone. but i just saw a post about how codywan shippers have based their entire ship off of a few screenshots of two middle-aged men standing eight feet apart.

and i'm just. i don't want to burst your bubble. but. i have some news for you about our dear commander.

[soulvomit]

80s/90s professional culture and recent self-help/"personal development" culture actually encouraged distancing from people whose lives were "too complicated." Too messy. "Don't associate with that person. They will ruin your life." About anyone who did not have the perfectly curated "I have it together, and am NOT NEEDY" image. Being seen as "together" was probably a proxy for social capital as well as "adulthood."

This probably started with people trying to enter the professional world in the mid-70s and still dealing with half of their social world living the poor young person crash pad lifestyle (because I argue that the cracks in the wall of the middle class may have already been appearing in the 1970s; people appearing to reject the "American Dream" may need to be analyzed as canaries and Cassandras) and the other half being on drugs.

For some people, like my parents, that's what it definitely was about. They had a baby/toddler and eventually they came to see their hippie and old school stoner friends as part of the instability they were experiencing. Some of these people eventually settled into full time jobs, but as of the mid-70s, plenty hadn't.

My parents couldn't live in hippie crash pads anymore. Not with a kid. They were running into too many issues with their equally unstable friends, and their financial situation trapped them in these spaces for years.

They drifted around to whomever would give them guidance - Amway (which had mainstream square culture values), a couple of attempts at religion.

They were typical.

At first this was just about trying to figure out how to live in an adult world still largely run on Silent Generation mainstream values.

For white, culturally middle class to affluent men, this was relatively straightforward: use the college degree or whatever existing skills and social capital you had, to get a traditional job. Male work culture of the 20th century very much assumed a wife was at home handling things. "Leave your personal problems at home" totally assumed someone else was carrying that bucket. It meant in the 70s and 80s as it had in the 50s, that a man's wife was handling all of the personal relationships and interactions that didn't have to do with his workday. His wife would be the stage manager of his non-work life from behind the scenes. That's what it REALLY meant to "leave your personal life at home."

But women were now working full time, middle class corporate jobs, too. And that same mentality was still the rule.

Codependency talk and a new re-embrace of corporate work culture, found their way into the same conversations, much the same way that government conspiracy theories, aliens, and New Age became bedfellows: because they shared the same shelves of the bookstore.

At around this same time you also started to see the growth of codependency ideas and later, a popular book called "Women Who Love Too Much." (A solid book, but needs an intersectional update.) WWLTM became a network of support groups in the 80s (...that helped my mom leave my dad.) But so many of the stories in WWLTM are of 30something women (often, ex-hippie) who had been exploited as the Giving Tree in 60s/70s culture, a specific gendered toxic dynamic.

But you know how we have all seen good memes go bad? Like, cultural appropriation being a solid analysis and real thing, but in the last 5 years, it's devolved into a set of arguments that in no way resemble the original thing? For that matter, remember when MRA culture was specifically about the legal rights of divorced men?

Yeah.

That.

That same thing is what happened to the growing 70s/80s culture of post-hippie "getting it together."

That very same thing.

In 1976, "getting it together" was relatively benign.

But by the 80s, it began to separate the people who'd played at the counterculture lifestyle from the people who had been trapped in it. Not everyone could "get it together." Because deindustrialization was already starting to be underway as the party was ending, and in many cases, because the American Dream simply had not been on offer to begin with.

If your only means of doing so was via a factory job or via even the shrinking number of nondegreed female-dominated non-care/nonservice jobs (how many career secretaries do you know now?) then you had way fewer options than did someone who could enter the computer field or become a professional. And fewer options than did someone who could fall back on fields that got to be the last dominos to fall (pro sales people could shift from industrial to tech or real estate), instead of the first.

What's happened is that the ONLY visible middle class narratives of the mid 70s and beyond, until the 21st, were yuppies. Everyone else was deplatformed.

The "getting it together" meme came to be a proxy for your very fitness as a human being. It now included a backlash against the sharing and mutual aid culture of counterculture spaces, because many white, middle class Boomers didn't really know how to navigate the social world outside of the Hayea Code curated world of their suburban childhood. They were the first generation to try to figure out how that worked, and many failed. They were navigating drastic changes in social norms. It became a commonly repeated meme that your problem was the people in your life. (Because it often was. But this went the way many culture memes do.) Fuck em, focus on your job and only the people who support your getting it together. But the milepost kept getting shifted. "Getting it together" in the early to mid 70s might mean just getting a job and a stable place to live. That's how it started for my parents. As of the mid 1970s, it started to become apparent to a lot of people that holding a corporate job and raising a school age child were both often totally incompatible with having your burnout friends stay up until 2am playing folk music (this was a real thing my family did before my dad got a middle class job) on a weekday, let alone traipse a variety of lost souls through your living room on any given day of the week.

But the mileposts for "getting it together" kept changing up (just as "getting it together" of the 70s turned into "early yuppie" of the 80s) and probably because corporate standards were always about curation and appearances, "getting it together" came to mean that you did NOT have a hippie crashing on your couch, you did NOT have complicated personal life in *any way*, you did NOT socialize in a space where everyone openly slept with the same people or had complicated breakups, you did NOT ever have complicated caregiving arrangements... basically, either you were heterosexually married or you were a very, very cool-as-a-cucumber, self-contained single who never, ever felt heartbreak.

This is the sociopathic core of yuppie culture.

My analysis will hit the 90s at some point, but we wouldn't have had the 90s without the 70s and 80s.

I'm sure lots of the Divorce Boom of the 80s followed on 70s people marrying for all the wrong reasons, because they were trying to "get it together." And sometimes "getting it together" meant different things to the two people.

My dad became an early techie and stayed relatively close to left wing and liberal culture. After he and my mom split up, he married the hippie of his dreams. And he made good incomes off and on, but also struggled off and on and retired in a trailer; he *would* have been much more successful if indeed he had played the yuppie social games, because he willingly took on dependencies that yuppies shunned. There was a strong meme in yuppie culture, fueled by codependency discourse and a warping of Women Who Love Too Much but also "positivity," of not ever helping people, of not being close to people who could potentially financially rely on you or take time away from your work. "They've all made their own bed."

If my dad had followed that lead - he might have become stable, he might even have become rich. But he married a precariat class ex-hippie who had multiple poor dependents, and formed some "found family" around their mutual friendships. And as the person in the group with the most money, he was often relied upon for help.

That's exactly what late-stage Getting It Together non-neediness discourse was supposed to prevent.

For my mom, "getting it together" meant doubling down on respectability politics and traditionalism, putting herself in rich circles, and marrying a professional man with square values. She scrupulously avoided anyone who could "take her down with them." Which is good advice in many cases but in yuppie parlance, effectively meant distancing from any person who was not in your aspirational social class, and distancing from any person in any situation you have left behind (she dumped her single friends once remarried, as instructed by this culture meme.)

The difference between the outcomes for my mom and dad:

My dad lives in a trailer with his wife and their cats, but he has a huge extended family of family and found-family. Lots of people care about him. He's not going to have the problem of being alone in old age.

My mom really does risk being alone in old age because her whole social world was oriented around social capital pissing contests and that only works as long as you actually have the money to purchase a substitute support net.

[newstechreviews]

Arguably—or maybe even inarguably—the spirit of a movie counts more than any objective ideal of quality. You can’t inject a soul into a movie in the editing room; it’s either got one or it doesn’t. There are people who have been waiting nearly 30 years for Bill & Ted Face the Music, the follow-up to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), and there are people who haven’t been waiting at all. But what people want from Bill & Ted Face the Music matters a lot less than what it actually is, a crazy, imperfect but deeply gratifying burst of optimism at the end of what has been—inarguably—a terrible summer. Its ramshackle earnestness, its certainty about nothing beyond the fact that we need to get our act together as human beings, is its great strength.

Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves were in their mid-twenties when they first played Bill Preston and Ted Logan, a duo of goofy but open-hearted teenage guitar obsessives from San Dimas, Calif., who change the world—and pass a history class—via a time-travel machine disguised as a phone booth. In the first movie, they meet the 15th-century princesses who will become their wives, Joanna and Elizabeth; in the second, they outwit Death in a game of Twister. At the very beginning, they were told that their fairly lame band, Wyld Stallyns, would end up making music so great that it would foster a future utopian society. But as Bill & Ted Face the Music opens, Bill and Ted, well into middle age and still noodling around with their guitars, have not yet produced any game-changing toonz. And although they’re married to their beloved princesses (here played by Erinn Hayes and Jayma Mays), there’s apparently a bit of trouble in suburban paradise: both couples have signed up for couples counseling, and because Bill and Ted can’t envision doing anything independently of one another, they make it a group affair. Their identities are so entwined, even as they push 50, that they haven’t really figured out how to be adults.

Read More: Why It Took Keanu Reeves 30 Years to Become an Overnight Sensation

They and their wives have, however, produced two lovely teenage daughters: Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving) are named after their dads, and they take after them, too. Thea has a slouchy gait and a curtain of floppy dark hair; Billie is blond and effervescent, a spring of nervous energy coiled within her. The young women are best friends, just as their dads are. And they’re dismayed when they find out their fathers are in trouble: A messenger from another world, Kelly (Kristen Schaal), touches down in a giant egg to whisk Bill and Ted into what has turned out to be a not-so-utopian future. She’s the daughter of Rufus, the time-traveling emissary played in the earlier movies by the late, great George Carlin (who appears here briefly in hologram form). And it turns out that her mother, Rufus’ widow—played by Holland Taylor in a fabulously imperious sparkle cape—has some dire news for Bill and Ted: because they have not yet produced the song that will change the world, reality as we know it will end in 77 minutes and 25 seconds. Which is pretty much, at that point, the movie’s remaining runtime.

Orion PicturesBrigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving, flanking Kid Cudi, play Bill and Ted’s teenage daughters.

How do they pull it off? The answer involves time travel, of course, but also Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, a killer robot named Dennis Caleb McCoy, the mythological Chinese flautist Ling Lun, and Death (once again played by the marvelous William Sadler). The princess wives and, especially, Billie and Thea also play key roles: The girls believe so wholeheartedly in their dads, including their not-quite-proven ability to make music, that they jump in to help, proving that the next generation is ready and able to take the reins.

Bill & Ted Face the Music is a cosmic swirl of a movie, as unapologetically ridiculous as its predecessors were. The script is by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, who wrote the two earlier movies and created the characters of Bill and Ted; the scenarios they’ve cooked up here grow more outlandish by the minute, which is part of the fun. The director is Dean Parisot, and what he, his writers and his actors have pulled off here is so positively nutso, and so sweet-spirited, that he deserves his own statue in a utopian movie future. Parisot also directed the extraordinary 1999 science-fiction/fantasy spoof Galaxy Quest, which has become a cult classic for a reason. Bill & Ted Face the Music doesn’t have the same glorious comedic ebb and flow of that film, though it does have a similarly generous beating heart.

Orion PicturesWilliam Sadler plays Death.

And that, again, is something no movie can fake. The Bill & Ted movies, including this one, work because Winter and Reeves have always taken these not-very-serious characters seriously. As teenagers, Bill and Ted were daffy and joyous, innocently horny but also unfailingly gallant, kind of dumb but intuitive in all the ways that count. Winter’s Bill still has that goofball electric energy; Reeves’ Ted is more laid back, and more philosophical. Yet there’s something piercing about seeing them now as middle-aged guys who haven’t been able to pull off everything they once dreamed of—they’ve aged well, physically, but even so, their zest for life has flagged. It happens to almost everyone.

Still, things could be worse. The plot of Bill & Ted Face the Music introduces us to future would-be versions of Bill and Ted who aren’t quite so nice: In one scene, they’re bulked-up prison inmates, tattooed and pissed off; in another, they’re paunchy rock stars who have adopted phony, Madonna-style British accents. These sour versions of Bill and Ted are so implausible that they’re hilarious—Winter and Reeves run with them, delight in them. The time-travel conceit of Bill & Ted Face the Music allows these characters to reflect on a lesser reality that might have been, had they and their families not intervened. And they shape the future by remembering the contributions of those who made the best of the past. Bill & Ted Face the Music is the feel-good movie of this infinite time loop, and the next. And although it’s pure fantasy, it also represents a leap of faith we all have to be willing to take. Even without time-travel phone booths, people have the power.

[sandwichbully]

Frank from Philly 2: Electric Boogaloo, 16 September 2017

 It’s September, everybody, it’s time to check your Gophers schedule if you want to maintain your soul’s healthy, lustrous coat. Today, I made the mistake of venturing into Dinkytown without first consulting the college football schedule and found I had no fucking way out because the police - who should have been arresting and beating the shit out of everybody but me - had closed off all the exits. It was like they corralling us toward the stadium like some nightmare “Down In The Park” scenario; since this is Dinkytown, the presence of “rape machines” is totally plausible.  Please, tell me you get the Gary Numan reference.  Anyway, there is only one way out of this labyrinth of douche-sluices clad in gold and maroon vertical striped overalls - yes, that’s a thing. That everybody was wearing. Five hundred thousand Clearisil’d goddamned teenage date rapists walking around dressed like Pogo protégés and don’t act like you don’t know who the fuck Pogo is with their Dads behind them wearing cop shades and cop ‘staches, and their main squeeze walking in front of them with her skirt hiked up to her titlets and her chicken cutlet ass cheeks hanging out, not having graduated junior high yet, and not one of these doofus Brock-bros, their apologist dads, or their underaged girlies can pay attention to a crosswalk signal WHERE THE FUCK WERE THE COPS TO BEAT THESE FUCKERS TO DEATH!?  So, as mentioned, I, the lone Argonaut, my brethren slain, surrounded by the gold and maroon gophertaurs, found my one exit from the labyrinth: Just book a straight line on SE 4th to Bullshit Central, the confluence of Hennepin, University, 1st, and some other streets, too. It’s where my union hall is, I can take refuge there. There’s also a White Castle if I need a colonic and the Gopher Bar which nobody can remember if that’s racist anymore after the whole Club Jager thing a week back but the art on the wall is still creepy. Kramarczuk’s is in Bullshit Central, so is Brathaus. There’s that Japanese joint that Ron and Jo took me and Tosha to. Nye’s, god rest its overpriced soul, was over there. Bullshit Central really isn’t a bad place to be if you have fifty dollars and absolutely nothing responsible you have to do with it. If I take SE 4th all the way to Bullshit Central, I can make it home, alive, unscathed. I’m feeling pretty good about this, actually. Two Jehovah’s Witnesses buzzed my apartment while I was jacking off this morning and I just powered through that. I think I can make it.  And that’s when I see it.  Frank From Philly.  Cheesesteaks.  Real cheesesteaks.  I love cheesesteaks.  I have nothing else to live for. I mean, I did make a half dozen jars of pickles today but I don’t think I’ll live through the next ten days, let alone the next ten minutes, given that I’m in The Land That Consent Forgot.  So, that was it. Frank cast out his line. He hooked me. I went inside.  My previous review of Frank’s is a far different animal. I told a tale of suburban gym surrounded by antiseptic teens who’d never touched a cigarette or their own clits. Affable lil’ duders who could sell you a Xanax come midterms. A bunch of kids who looked like they did safe things like check in with their roommates if it got late, dipped their bread in milk, had no intention of ever fucking bareback. But that was summer time. That was when the Hitler Youth’s Townie Division was in full force.  This?  Heh.  This is fucking football season, bitches.  Everything I’ve ever told you about Dinkytown is like something from Bizarro world.  I have never in my life seen so many absolutely sinister looking white kids gathered in one place in the day light. They looked like they want to beat me up just for being old and better sexed. They looked like their genital warts were burning. They looked like they did abortions the way their grandparents did them: a couple kicks to the stomach and a straightened out coat hanger up the kid shitter. And there were about two hundred billion of these absolutely psychotic looking fucks in Frank’s today. My god, the terror.  Fucking football season.  Little Asian lady greets me at the register and asks me how I was doing. I didn’t go into any elaborate detail over how panic-stricken I was at the moment because one: she wouldn’t care. She has to work in this environment and I bet she carries a firearm of some sort. It’s football season. And then two: She’s hot and I want her to think I am strong and capable so she will like me and ask me to stick around until she clocks out so we can go to a bar, have a few drinks, and then she takes me back to her place and her and her identical twin sister roommate take turns pegging me until the sun comes up. So I said, “Good.”  “What can I get you?”  “From behind,” is what my sick man devil brain wants to say but what comes out of my mouth is, “Yeah, I was looking at a cheesesteak. Can I get that with cheezewhiz, peppers, and onions?”  She starts typing on the register, muttering what I think is, “God, this customer is so fucking good looking and refined, not like these short-dicked boys that always come in and out of here,” but turns out to be, “OK, cheesesteak… pppeeepppppeerrss… oooonnnnions…” She looks at me and does not tell me, “You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a sexual partner and I would like to give you a tour of our walk-in cooler,” opting instead to say, “You said cheezewhiz?”  I want to say, “Take me to bed and lose me forever,” but I said, “Yeah.”  She asks, “Is that for here or to go?” because you know I’ve beaten this joke to death when I break out a Top Gun reference.  “For here,” I tell her. I’m not going to bike with a sloppy ass cheesesteak in my bag.  And, unlike the last review where there was nothing going on and I had to wait a week and a half for my cheesesteak, in the middle of this crowded, hectic scene, she walks by a guy coming from the back and yells in his face, “CHEESESTEAK!”  I expect him to make it but he looks confused. She starts making the cheesesteak. She’s not wearing an apron or plastic gloves or nothing protective. She just gets right on the goddamned grill like its her fucking personal grill from home and starts chopping fucking steak on the grill.  I go to Trieste for two specific reasons: They have the best gyros in all of Minneapolis - I’ll put money on that statement until someone brings me to a better gyro shop - and I love watching the Greek guy in the kitchen work. It’s like watching Michaelangelo paint the Sistine, this fucking guy. And he wears an apron and gloves.  And here I’m watching this little Asian lady do the same thing on this grill, just -  “Hey, Dustin!”  - just rocking the fuck out of -  “Hey, DUSTIN!”  Sorry, she’s working this grill like -  “Dude, I’m going to sit over here!”  Anyway, she’s -  “Did you already grab your drink!?”  Goddamnit.  See, I can’t even enjoy watching her work the grill because whatever this shit head’s name is is yelling right next to me to let Dustin know he’s going to sit over wherever. I’ll give you three guesses how they were dressed and the first two don’t count.  The Asian lady yelled “CHEESESTEAK!” at the dude from in back again and he kind of ducked as he walked to the back.  Within minutes, however, my cheesesteak is ready. A lot faster than last time. The Asian lady struggles with the cheezewhiz pump and looks at me, handing me the plate. “Cheesesteak?”  I say yeah, thank her, and find the cleanest table for one that I can, with a window to my right and a beam directly across from my chair. To my left, an angry young black man glowers at me over his girlfriend who is unconcerned with anything but her phone and I’m afraid I might have just done something racist.  Did I do something racist?  Oh, fuck, was I being racist?  Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, Jesus Christ. These fucking college kids, man, they’re all fucking football crazy and they’re woke “AF”. It’s bad enough I’m twice their age and I don’t rape people, I’m also fucking racist or something, too. Did I not check my privilege? I came in here and ordered a fucking cheesesteak. With cheezewhiz. And peppers. And onions. Why was this angry young black man glowering at me? Did I just unknowingly do some alt-right shit? Because those guys change their memes all the time. Did they pick up cheesesteaks and nobody told me? Is the cheesesteak the new sandwich of white nationalism? I mean -  Then he looked at his table of white friends and returned to his pizza.  One of the clown-suited white kids got up and said, “Dude, call me,” as he left, presumably to assault somebody and do debit card frauds, and the young black man nodded.  The place was packed with a lot of little white fuckers. White boys, white girls, all straight or straight-seeming. Maybe the dude who glowered at me felt underrepresented. Maybe I did something racist without knowing it. Maybe his pizza tasted like shit.  Anyway, I picked up my sandwich as the conversation behind me turned to the straightest white dude shit you could think of: Hugh Hefner. I looked out the window and saw a dude try to hold another dude’s hand and thought, “Oh, maybe football season isn’t so -”  NOPE! He was just trying to ball-tag him.  Goddamnit.  I was in the nucleus of white jock bros doing white jock bro shit, like picking up kegs and getting young tight strange on the reg. I was the odd man out here, the stranger in the strange land, in my high-cuffed jeans, Frank Sinatra mug shot t-shirt, four week old beard that none of these kids could grow. Not a stitch of U of M color on me or a wisp of alcohol on my breath - it was five thirty, ferfucksake. The angry young black man wasn’t glowering at me. He’d been looking me over. I looked different. I was a white dude but not a white dude from around here.  Or maybe I had done something racist and hadn’t known it.  Still, though, he was probably checking me out and I just caught him at the wrong moment. Like when I saw Todd Trainer coming out of a Dunn Bros and I made my “Is that Todd Trainer?” face right as Todd Trainer looked up at me and saw my “Is that Todd Trainer?” face which, from the way the muscles in my face feel when I recreate it, must look an awful lot like my “Well, my IBS is fucking flaring up again!” face. It’s not a good look. That’s what Todd Trainer saw.  Anyway, I let it go because I had bought the ticket, I had to take the ride. It was time to eat my goddamned cheesesteak.  You’re probably wondering how it was.  I hardly remember the last time I was there, a little over a year I should think. So I can’t really compare it to last time. My meat was cooked, not seasoned, didn’t need it. (Note that, PepperJax. “America’s Favorite Cheesesteak” my sexy Black Irish ass. Lay off all the goddamned Lawry’s.) The peppers were nearly goddamned fluorescent, the onions translucent. The cheezewhiz looked like something I should not be eating, like it was really just plumbing caulk and annatto, but I’ve got a fucking deathwish, like that L7 song, so yeah, fuck it. Little Asian lady, because she was trying to send me signals, doused the goddamned sandwich with it. Like she was happy about it. Like she had a plan that day. She had woke up to kill round eyes and this was her first shot all day long.  It was fucking delicious. It was savory. It was heaven. All that beef grease and cheezewhiz dripped on my wax paper and I just sopped it right back up with the sandwich. As I did, the loud conversations turned to nothing but a gentle thromming around me, like the sound of my mother’s heart while I was in the womb. I had returned to the gentle place, the place before pain, the place of tranquility and security. I was home, my droogs, I was home.  Not around these bros, no. In the sandwich.  I pounded that fucker down in about four minutes.  Then the world came rushing back at me. Saturday. Dinkytown. Sun close to going down. Football season. Jesus Christ, I had to go.  Connors and Bethanies everywhere. A new throng of Bethanies entered as I got up to throw my wax paper away and all their ponytails were tied so high and tight that their eyebrows were in a constant expression of surprise, tight little non-cheeks poking out of skirts. I threw away my wax paper and tried to avoid physical contact, hell, eye contact and I SAW A GUY WITH AN UNDERCUT OH GOD DEAR JESUS HELP YOUR SERVANT PLEASE GOD MOTHERFUCKING JESUS AND MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL DELIVER THIS SINNER DELIVER THIS SINNER OH LORD SONOFABITCH THEY’RE MULTIPLYING! THEY’RE MULTI- DID SOMEBODY GET ONE OF THEM WET!? OH MY GOOD LORD IN HEAVEN BABY JESUS PLEASE I SWEAR I WILL NEVER TOUCH MYSELF AGAIN JUST DON’T LET ANYBODY FEED THEM AFTER MIDNIGHT!  I begin hyperventilating. I need air. I need a pink lemonade. With some Hennessy. And a cigarette dipped in embalming fluid. God sweet lord baby Jesus get me out of here. The exit! I see the exit! If I can just make it to the exit!  I make it! I’m out! I’m free!  I unlock my bike, put on my headphones, and hit start on my phone. Public Enemy. Classic cut. “911 Is A Joke”. I straddle my bike, look briefly through the windows at Frank’s Football Season Patronage. They’re. All. Staring. Back. At. Me.  I swear to god. They’re all staring back at me.  Shit was unnerving.  I got out of Dinkytown before sundown. Came back to the apartment. Slammed back a grape pop.  If you go to Frank From Philly’s, go during baseball season.