Jess Harvell

about to mute this one because people have once again presumed i use twitter to have any sort of a conversation let alone debate

that issue in particular is so far beyond what "image comics" meant at the time (or even now really) that it's kinda extraordinary

an oasis of genuinely weird and genuinely popular personal expression at a time when going to the average american comic shop mostly made you want to walk in front of a bus, r.i.p. big man

speaking of which the fact that i can still probably name 300 x-men characters off the top of my head is probably less shameful than me ever knowing the name of a single right-wing twitter personality

mueller dying made me realize i basically no longer see the conservative nut side of twitter, most of the millennial podcast fans who retweeted right-wing morons are gone and my for you tab is for some reason largely 20 year olds posting in indecipherable slang about spider-man

@hoosteen the algorithm now seems to know with laser accuracy exactly the kind of tweets i *don't* want to see about a particular subject

my For You page is all weird people posting totally off the wall shit about The Pitt i need to never mention that show again

(art has always been a playground for the slumming well-off, they can always slink back to mommy and daddy if it goes sideways, but it wasn't *just* that before the average studio apartment started to be seen as an unattainable luxury)

people will still find ways to barely scrape by and make art because they always do, but the vastly more punishing conditions now mean that fewer have the resources (material/mental) to do so, and of course the more precarious/marginalized will be the first to be denied access

i was actually thinking today (unrelated to this tweet) how the post WW2 version of US urban bohemia increasingly seems like a half-century-ish long economic fluke, the conditions of which are unlikely to be repeated again

in a way it's comforting that this place seems to bring out the worst in everyone regardless of background

lately the for you page has been giving me a lot of foreign posts in (probably bad) translation, and it's been a nice change of pace getting to experience the psychological and cultural dementedness of other nations

(normally i'd refrain from shitting on a guy's life's work on the day of his death, and to be clear i have a deep and abiding and only slightly guilty love for crappy conservative actioners, but the guy was a p.o.s., so fuck it)

stallone circa cobra/rocky iv/rambo was and remains the true avatar for late cold war reactionary action cinema, but norris actually felt more like the presumed suburban audience for the stuff, which i guess was borne out by his subsequent long and incredibly boring career

as a child i watched every action movie i possibly could, but there was always something off about chuck norris, it wasn't the politics (again i was a child), but more that even in the late 80s he had a real "old guy in the club" vibe, like being lectured by someone's lame dad

these characters aren't inherently *anything* because they're corporate trademarks who've been handled by a bewilderingly large array of wildly different people over the course of decades, mostly they blow with the prevailing mood of the time because that's where the $$$ is

even leaving ditko's bespoke randian insanity aside, one of the defining characteristics of the early marvel books is that they were rabidly anti-communist, and lee only really eased off when he started getting those college lecture checks in the late 60s/early 70s

in a way pop culture has actually been on this trajectory for a long while now, at least since ad agencies started cutting deals with the estates of dead celebrities to edit old footage so that gene kelly could dance with a vacuum or whatever, but still exceedingly grim

the (ridiculous at the time) 0.0 for the basically inoffensive m.o.r. crossover pop album becomes even funnier given the site's general drift over the past 10 years

@FranziaMom (they fucking rock obviously and deserve it, but when they broke up i never would have guessed they'd be seemingly more beloved than oh let's say fugazi 25 years later)

@FranziaMom the 90s gen z reclamation project that remains both most surprising (band i barely remember from the time) and most explicable (sounds good on playlists) to me is duster, but yeah, unwound going from semi-obscurity for the devoted to RYM-core seemingly overnight is very curious

There is something deeply fascinating and bizarre to me about how Unwound went from being Unwound to being the default “Perfect Band” for a certain age group.