Happy to be with you, Rich! I always appreciate the chance to chat.

Old Photos of Portland. I didn’t grow up there or anything – I’ll have only been there six years in October, but how this city has changed. They’re knocking down these gorgeous historic buildings for neo-brutalist, soviet monstrosities going up in their place; sprouting like toadstools. I don’t know if you remember Fight Club back in ‘99, but there’s a moment when Jack - Ed Norton, returns home to find his posh condo detonated in his absence and his entire empty, generic, IKEA existence is strewn over the street for all to see. I think of his voiceover whenever I encounter one of these grotesque apartment buildings going up, “Home was on the fifteenth floor of a filing cabinet for young professionals...” I think we no longer value our history or heritage - it’s as if it’s become taboo to admire any part of the past, even a beautiful old building. Instead we have this bland imperial monoculture spreading across the land like some virus of bad taste.

It’s fascinating to think about how our idea of the future changes from decade to decade. In 1968 it was settlements on the moon by 2001. Since the early ‘80s it’s been this Gibson-esque, dystopian proto-cyberpunk urban sprawl, people crammed into boxes and stacked into the sky; everything atomized.

Who cares! There’s nothing I can do about it except move, and the jury is still out, so I collect these photos of Old Portland and learn what people’s lives were like. Truth is often far more interesting than fiction. For example, I acquired a chess set from the early 1920s and in the box were notes from an unfinished game played by the previous owner and his friend in 1923! He had carved his name and address into the box - the house is still standing. I am holding and playing games with this well worn chess set that was cherised by B.A. Little of Fargo St. NE Portland for who knows how long? 20 years? 50? Was he ever aware that eventually he would pass out of existence and his chess set would outlive him? The Japanese have a term for it, Mono No Aware. It describes a sensitivity towards ephemera, living one's life knowing that everything is fleeting, every everthing you own, every thing you love, every triumph, every tragedy, every sexual experience... It's all fleeting, yet we carry on every day in the face of that reality.

I think “will anyone own anything of mine 90 years from now?” I have box cameras from 1898, and 1905 that still work. I would love to know what moments in time they captured; who loved them. So many of us are pretending life doesn't end.

Oh you sensed that,eh? [Laughs]. Big topic. Look, there’s a film - one of my favorites - Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993). Johnny, played by the magnificent David Thewlis, is this angry, violent, vagabond - difficult to sympathize with, he doesn’t have many redeeming qualities…. Anyway, there’s a moment where he’s talking to an old girlfriend, and she asks him if he was bored in Manchester - the city he recently fled from and he says “Was I bored? No, I weren't fuckin' bored. I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody - you're all so bored. You've had nature explained to you and you're bored with it, you've had the living body explained to you and you're bored with it, you've had the universe explained to you and you're bored with it. So now you want cheap thrills and like plenty of them, and it don't matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new, as long as it's new, as long as it flashes and fuckin' bleeps in forty fuckin' different colors. So whatever else you can say about me, I'm not fuckin' bored.”

No, I relate to his battle with Nihilism. Thewlis, Johnny in the film, is a horrible person. Wounded certainly by things we’re not let in on within the film's diegesis, but he’s irredeemable. The Victorians probably would’ve referred to him as a “lost soul.” He would’ve been completely shut out of polite society and likely found floating face down in the Thames. He’s an idealist with real-world values, and he can see, perhaps too clearly, a world that values nothing but naked avarice. He’s disillusioned and increasingly out of control. That makes him dangerous, like a wounded rabid animal who does horrible things, yet you can forgive him. Why? That's incredibly interesting.

What I feel is not anger, like Johnny has. It's no different than the disallusion Balzac and Dostoevsky, or Nietzsche wrote about––a hyperawareness of the human condition and our inherent disconnection with our own natures, particularly in The West. It's a lament for everything we are shoving away, Jonesing that next hit of Dopamine. Validation is to the 2000s what Heroin was in the 1980s and it's deadly. With our generation, Gen X, it was pop-Nihilism, an a priori assumption of the pointlessness of things; Johnny Rotten screaming "NO FUTURE" while making the future live in real time. That has a storied irony to it. Contemporary pop culture is far more self-referential. It's what results from 20 years of droll deconstructionism––the postmodernists robbed us of our humanity. Human instincts, drivers, behaviours now regarded as part of a biological machine that is orderly, functionaly rational. We've become cold and judgmental about our own animal state, and I don't think this is any accident.

If you look at something like Donna Haraway's The Cyborg Manifesto (1980), that abysmal monstrosity, rendering human communities into machine units that be programmed for function life robots in a car factory, that is the sort of Nihilism that's become culturally mainstreamed.

Far more politely than it does with Johnny! [Laughs] No, Look, I’ve been at a creative impasse and I think it’s because I’ve reached a point where what I want to do with my chosen medium - film, and what is possible by the culture are out of alignment. With notable exceptions, I think Cinema is dead, Jim. Toast at room temperature, because we can no longer be authentic. We can’t make anyone uncomfortable. We can’t hurt anyone’s feelings. We can’t ask tough questions. We can’t use film as the catalyst for introspection. See, humans have this tradition goes all the way back to the hunter gatherer roots; we sit around the campfire and tell stories. The stories invite us to reflect on existence, power, sex, conflict, family, mortality, ethics, good and evil, our own nature. Going to the movies simulates that epigenetic habit–only now we gaze into the fire itself and watch these mythical figures play out their dramas. Imagine if Quetzalcoatl was owned and licensed by Taco Bell. Gilgamesh by Pepsi. Thor quite literally is owned by Marvel as intellectual property–the mythology itself can’t be owned, and no one is stopping you from reading it, but what I’m getting at is that these mythical figures, who used to be proxies for us to experiment with monumental questions, are now jacked-in to Imperial Culture. Everyone thought World War Three would be fought with nukes, nope. We’re well into it already, and it’s a semiotic war of symbols, memes, ideas and the entertainment industry itself is the new Western Front––and it's far more comfortable than it's 1917 namesake!

Joachim Trier is at the top of my list. Reprise and Oslo: 31 August made me believe in cinema again. I would move Heaven and Earth to have the opportunity to work with him. He shines a spotlight on a generation, perhaps mine Generation X and some of the older Millenials too, that’s trying to claw meaning from this precarious moment between history. His films are complex, at times brooding, at times whimsical. Plus there are nods to his cousin's [Lars Von Trier] DOGME 95 movement, while at the same time rejecting the clichéd idea that the art of the people must be lo-fi and raw in order to be authentic. It’s a pendulum. In the 1970s Punk was a dirty, crass and exciting two-fingers up at the stuffy, twee over-produced establishment. Art went so far in that direction–crass, rude, decadent, that to make anything traditionally beautiful now… Well, that may be the new Punk.

First-off, I despise the term "skeptic" as an identity, really. Calling yourself a skeptic just means you get off on being a proper bell-end at dinner parties. I am not skeptical of modern art, I just think that many who call themselves modern artists are hiding behind the loose definition of what constitutes art. This is the splash damage of deconstructionism and postmodernism; a lack of standards repackaged as virtue. There’s a spectrum, and who cares? It’s just my opinion. Look, New Year’s Day I went and checked out the Paige Powell exhibit at the Portland Art Museum right now and was over-the-moon. Let’s face it: It was mostly personal photographs and VHS video of her time in New York with Warhol, Basquiat and that wonderful crowd–there’s even a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Polaroid of a very young maybe pre-Good Will Hunting Era Matt Damon mixed in, if you spend hours pouring over the photos as I did. That’s an invitation into something–a window in time and a woman’s personal experience with these luminaries of the art world and you bring your own baggage to it. I can relate to that in a way that I can’t with these formless acrylic tantrums on canvas you see going in galleries for $600. You watch people stand in front of these things trying to analyse the artist's use of taupe and its inherent commentary on Marxist Alienation Theory and consumerism. It’s a Rorschach test for bullshitters.

I think in The Arts we should be careful of over-democratisation; People should have every opportunity to show what they can do, but there must be standards and reasonable barriers-to-entry in all disciplines. Other modes of work have this, your mechanic, your doctor... there's a body of intent, skill and competence that we expect from those practitioners. The Arts often aren't taken seriously, because of the subjective nature of the products and the relaxed standards of what constitutes Modern Art in particular–it lacks a certain legitimacy.

I was in my undergrad at the University of Colorado and I had come in just as Stan Brakhage was retiring from the University. He was passionate, unapologetic and scared the Hell out of me. I liked him a lot. I studied under him for a very brief time and of his films I only cared for the photographic ones; The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, Sirius Remembered and so on. I didn’t care for the re-photographed paint on celluloid like Dante Quartet etc. I understood their technical value, and knew how difficult and tedious making them had been, but at some point I’d read that, at the moment of death the human brain floods the body with DMT and theoretically there’s a psychedelic sensory overload that occurs that would show up as a flurry of colours, sounds, sensations and God knows what else. Every time I watch one of Stan’s abstract films I would get this gut wrenching panic that I can only ascribe to my associating it with that mortal DMT release. In fact, it got so bad once that I ran out into the hallway while projecting a 16mm print of the Dante Quartet, experiencing a very public panic attack; hyperventilation, vomiting, the whole thing. Phil Solomon, my old professor and long-time friend and collaborator of Stan’s had to come after me into the hallway and talk me off the ledge of my panic. He would probably hunt me down for sharing this, Stan is like a demigod to the film community I made my bones in. Phil, If you’re reading this: I love you, man.

No, it’s objective. We respond to certain visual cues because of biological conditioning. The meanings we attach to those things may or may not be environmentally conditioned––that's complex and dynamic. Still, put a Picasso and a Waterhouse side-by-side and ask people which one they find more beautiful, but then you must ask them which one they find more interesting?

I wouldn’t agree with that at all. This is from the Situationist argument that workers and consumers are passive receptacles to mass media. As much as I appreciate the Situationist folding of media and science into a discipline of cultural critique, I don’t subscribe to their determinism because any class of functional adults with cognitive ability have moral responsibility and therefore agency. We can choose what we consume. We can express consumer preferences.

I'll give you an example: Hip-Hop. It's everywhere, ubiquitous, monoculturally "cool." I can't stand it. I despise Hip-Hop. I think it's revolting, abrasive, annoying, unintelligble, low-IQ, cultural slime. Now I'm exposed to it every day; in advertising, tumbling out of passing cars. I still despise it. I'd rather listen to Classical, Heavy Metal, or Rock 'n Roll. I don't think Hip-Hop is good, so I don't listen to it. That's me excercising my will and my preference against the collective consensus. The response is individually constructed, not socially constructed.

This isn’t my concept, It’s from Neil Kramer. Essentially, he defines Empire as an ethos meant to restrict humanity to a lower state of being. It’s what happens when humanity disconnects from the authenticity that enables an individual to reach full potential, instead accepting the immoral, apolitical, collectivist control system. Most insidious: It’s not maintained by a secret cabal of Bond Villains, it’s a social submission that requires the implicit consent of the people. It shows up in the spectrum of world government–from totalitarianism to liberal democracy, economics, mainstream religion, the media, science, industry, education, and culture at large.

Here's my addition to Neil's thought: some out there have used The Matrix as an analog. To “un-plug” from The Matrix or become “Red-pilled” is touted as awareness of Empire and reclamation of individual agency. In fact it may be an initiation into an alternative dogma. The "blue-pill" and the "red-pill" are each one half of a Hegelian dialectic; no matter which one you take you're still within the cultural control system. To be aware of both, yet chose neither, that's true freedom.

I can practically hear your eyes rolling from here [laughs]. You think I’m nuts, and that’s perfectly fine! Empire is a framework for understanding the zeitgeist and I grapple with it internally, my interest in it is not ideological. I’ve never been the sort of man to take anything at face-value. My data gate is always open and I dig deep into everything I’m exposed to. I’m drawn to many different theories and frameworks, and while Empire is something that makes an incredible amount of sense to me as a theory, I don't understand how anyone can be involved in the arts, or media, cinema, music, literature–take your pick–without grasping the semiotic frameworks at play. I do think that in some fashion what we're seeing in the world is a low-intensity conflict between modernism and postmodernism. This shows up in the degree to which, at least in The West, we are being encouraged to embrace a curation around how we engage with everything. Prefabricated conclusions from the ivory towers of mainstream media, without methodology, critical thinking or debate; Social-Engineering. I think the case can be made that a totalitarian postmodernism is the Operating System Empire is currently running.

Your feelings are perfectly okay with me! Like I said: My interest in these topics isn’t ideological, we’re just two-people having a conversation, and honoring our two very-different points-of-view. That’s what it should be, right? Dialogue? Here's the thing. Look at the framing you just used in your response, you've said you're "not sure how to feel" about my response. First: Why should what you feel be something pre-ordained or approved? How you feel about something should be organic, instantaneous; it should come from within. Second: Why should how you feel have any bearing on your analysis of a proposition? What about what you think of the proposition? Why are your powers of analysis not engaged? You see this throughout the culture, people saying, "I feel," in response to an idea rather than, "I think." The lexicon has become feelings-based; feelings can be manipulated, it's what media and entertainment rely on.

No, I see a lot of ideological broadsides being exchanged for cheap thrills. There aren’t many people out there making actual arguments with evidence or methodology. It’s a lot of pre-packaged conclusions, corporate buzzwords, empty political correctness and appeals to emotion, as i was just saying. Dialogue requires a backbone, you have to be able to coexist with those who hold different views from your own. Now, disagreement can cost you big-time. Your relationships, marriage, employability all on the line for following your conscience; for being an individual. You saw this in the Soviet-Union, and during the Cultural Revolution under Mao. Disagreement used to be something we could tolerate in others. Now disagreement is seen as a direct threat to the existence of the disagreed with, and it must be eliminated or expunged! This is an accidental totalitarianism by the meek.

Compared to what? Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by sheer incompetence." I find it hard to believe this cultural moment is wholly some conspiracy managed from on-high. Perhaps some interests nudge things here and there, sure, but what I think we really have are people raised with such weak internal boundaries that they can't hold space for views that differ from their own. It's emotional fragility.

If you're an artist, you must resolve yourself that you are immersed in transgression––that's our job as artists, to examine the human condition and derive meaning; It's inherently uncomfortable. Accept that, or become an accountant, it's far easier.

It’ll be slightly more interesting than the usual Dog and Pony Show. Beneath the theatrics, it's the same old bollocks: two sides of a managed Hegelian dialectic, loving violence-by-proxy and pretending to have priciples.

Not really. It’s too early to say how things will take shape, and I’m more concerned with goings on closer to home at the moment - my relationships and so on. People are letting things get out of hand and drawing ideological lines, breaking up friendships and marriages over this farce of an election. I don’t want any part in it.

The fact that the entire world is currently caught up in American political pugilism is an example of what I was saying before regarding Empire. As America goes, so goes the world. Why should it have to be that way? I predict we will see more populism arising around the world. The powers that be will decry it and bleat about rising fascism, but it's really the pot and the kettle.

Ah ha! Now I get to unpack you, comrade! [Laughs]. Let’s start with two core assumptions in your premise: A) That I’m a black man, and B) that being a black man predicts or determines my worldview. Speaking to A: I’m not a black man. I’m a Biracial man. Both of my parents are Biracial, Black and Caucasian, both of my Grandmothers were Jewish and I can trace some of my heritage to places as far afield as Norway, Germany, England, Wales, Scotland - I have an ancestor who was an English Knight, and I have both Maternal and paternal Sephardic Jewish Lineage through Germany. I can’t ignore those parts of myself, and I shouldn’t. Now, as to the second point there is an implicit mandate in the U.S. that skin color is like a football uniform. People are classified into teams based on their perceived racial phenotype and that is supposed to predict their politics, their worldview... My contention is labels are prisons. I don’t accept them. However, if people get to slap a label on me because it’s politically expedient, I get to slap a label on them too: Idiots. I think most people mean well; they’re trying to do what they’ve been told is the right thing: be sensitive, mindful and progressive. They’ve been given bad information by my industry however, and they’ve been badly educated out of critical thinking by the public schools; They have no sense of history or nuance.

What really drove the point home for me was my interactions with American Blacks and White Progressives–by and large during the course of which I’d find they would claim me as one of their own without bothering ask me for my own feelings. Rarely was there any recognition that I’m an individual who should be judged on his own merits rather than as a token representative of a category, and I think it stems from how American Blacks and liberals have been conditioned to think of themselves - as a “collective” or “class.” I don’t want to be a part of an amorphous mass, I don’t want to be dehumanized, reduced to a prop for someone else’s agenda. I have these conversations with people over-and-over again where I employ the mantra “to assume makes an ass out of you and me.”

Being black in America in 2016 comes with a set of loaded assumptions, and I fail the litmus test: Apart from the Biracial and Jewish aspect, I grew up abroad and I had a very affluent upbringing–I was often the richest kid amongst my peers. I did not grow up poor. I did not come from the ghetto and was not immersed in black culture. I am not the son of a single mom and my Dad was with us every step of the way. I don’t get to claim any authority regarding the so-called "Black Experience" in America because it was not mine, so I find it frustrating when anyone tries to lump me into that category because they’re fundamentally assuming my experience. One would think anyone seeing me walking around Portland would get this intuitively on the basis of how I present myself: I dress like a ‘50s Greaser, prefer Rock ‘N Roll to Hip-Hop, and my English is impeccable. Yet heads to tend to explode, much to my chagrin.

How will Hollywood and the [entertainment industry] answer the controversy? You can expect overcompensation, they will placate the social-justice masses by playing up race consciousness in a big way next year. They'll toss an academy Award to one of the few Black directors anyone knows of–Spike Lee perhaps, then it will die down again as if to say, "OK, you have your pound of flesh. We can all feel good about ourselves now, so it's time to shut up, be good little consumers again and buy buy buy!" They will cast more blacks, parading them in front of the cameras in a show of racial justice, but those roles will still be curated–confined to a Black American stereotype in speech patterns and wardrobe. You will not see black directors, black editors, black producers and certainly not black cinematographers proliferated in the industry. The elite technical roles will remained quarantined.

Black is a fake identity; it doesn't exist. It's another managed dialectic used to push a grievance industry and keep certain politicians in power––it's a plantation of the mind.

If an ideology pervading an instiution argues a collective category of people all have the same experience–uniformly disadvantaged say, then the expectation that any individual associated with that category would be competent tends to be non-existent. We have a situation wherein activists have collectivised human experiences and the idea of taking individuals on their own merits has been demonised as "culturally insensitive" by these same intersectionalists, they believe identity category overrides merit. You're not allowed to be regarded as an unique individual with a unique experience–it's actually quite marginalising. I don't think this is intentional understand, just a consequence of terrible education–a lack of critical thinking. It's become institutionalised as people who had this education, which is especially prevasive in the Humanities–Critical Theory and Intersectioanlity–tend to hire each other; they end up prepetuating the very elitism they claim to oppose. What you end up with is gatekeeping.

Humans are categorising machines, we have to be in order to process the environment. I understand that, but we’re not talking about basic assumptions such as “the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow”, or “I’ll have air to breathe on Wednesday”. There is no moral component to categorisation by assumption inherently. When assumptions become policy, that people use to manipulate culture to preserve their own social status, I think we have to ask ourselves if we are serving our stated objectives.

Alternatively arguments have been made the Culture War itself is a sort of semiotic warfare employed the masses, but I think that's a fantastical view personally. Again, Hanlon's Razor.

The argument goes something like this: You’re a ruler of the biggest, baddest nation on the block. Your subjects are becoming disenchanted with your rule and are agitating for reform. Open rebellion breaks out, and you want to maintain power. You use your assets to infiltrate the rebellion and sow dissention in their ranks. A counter-rebellion breaks out against the rebellion and to keep your subjects distracted by these internal squabbles, you continue to prop up both sides behind the scenes. When one side escalates, you enable the other side to escalate. Eventually the unrest grows so bad that the noncombatant subjects - who have been trying to stay out of the conflict the whole time - begin agitating for increasing state power to quell the unrest at the expense of their own liberty. They ask you to double down on your rule with a vengeance. It’s the idea of controlled opposition and we’ve already seen this play out countless times globally throughout the Cold War, the Middle East, Ukraine (watch that space for the next contrived world war)… the list goes on.

I never said that. There are, of course. I just don’t believe pointing the government at every perceived social problem is practical or moral. I think a lot of these problems could be remedied by a change of mindset and some personal accountability. Furthermore, I would offer that those within the institutions–such as media and entertainment want to employ their discipline in service of activism they'd best make sure their own house is exemplary of what they want to create globally. In short: don't kvetch to me about diversity if you're not walking your own talk!

I'll give you an example from my own regional market: there is a creative agency in Portland who, in their marketing copy, grandstand about being "woman-owned" and supportive of "diversity and inclusion in the arts." That's fantastic! Good on them! I have no issue with that! Now, I've had meetings at this agency, pitched there, applied to full-time positions there. Each time I'm sat in a room of all white women, diverse in age, possibly in experience, but little else. I have been shot down by them every time. I wonder how they can call themselves "diverse" when that clearly isn't reflected in their staff or in the freelancers they work with–I know many portland [Directors of Photography] and other creative professionals who work with them; none of them "diverse" persons-of-colour. There is a disconnect between ideology and practice.

This is happening in Portland! The city is supposed to be a bastion if progressive ideals, but it doesn't translate into the local industry. Why? Well, if the well-meaning cultreworkers of the industry believe the ideology uncritically, then on some level they accept that individuals from "marginalised groups" haven't had access to the same opportunities and are therefore inherently less competent. It's the soft bigotry of low-expectations. What if the progressive elite themselves, who own the agencies and virtue signal progressive projects, such as "diversity," "equity," and "inclusion," have a vested interest in maintaining the dysfunction because it's profitable? What if actually walking the diversity talk would be painful? Would anyone really commit to that path?

I hear one endless refrain from Portland creative agencies, in-house agencies at global brands and production companies, "diversity is our strength and we want to hire diverse candidates, but we just can't seem to attract diverse candidates," or "It's tough to find diverse candidates to fill these positions." I've applied to plenty of them myself and have been turned away cold, despite my qualifications. It's business-as-usual in HR departments nationwide. Nepotism and unqualified people making hiring descisions remains the order of the day. There's also a lack of imagination.

Here's how you fix it. Say I'm running a creative agency, I'll hold 20 internship slots per year for candidates of colour for five years; they have to maintain a certain grade-point average and are paid minimum wage, but they recieve comprehensive training as [Assistant camerapersons], editors, colourists, grips, gaffers, [Production Assistants]. They graduate into a certification that qualifies them for working technician jobs on sets; they can go union and do their hours, or work strictly non-union from there, it's up to them. Here the agency has done its bit; the market recieves an infusion of 100 diverse candidates in their workforce. With the skills and certifications in-hand they can compete on their merits along with everyone else. Some of them go on to start their own agencies and production houses, they hire and pass their knowledge forward. It's not difficult.

You mentioned the Oscars So White Controversy, and I use that term loosely by the way because I really do think it was a PR stunt if it was anything. Here you have a number of extremely successful black celebrities admonishing the Academy for a perceived lack of black representation in this year’s Oscar Picks, yet their very status as exalted celebrities contradicts their claims of institutional racism. Their solution? Shame whites in the entertainment industry, as a class, for lack of inclusivity. What an insult, not only to whites in the industry - who tend to be very liberally minded - but also to blacks; essentially saying to them “you’re so hopelessly powerless, so lacking in agency that you need people to make special allowances for you in order for you to get ahead.” This is coming from people who have substantial wealth and vast social capital that transcends international boundaries. It’s diabolical. If these black celebrities genuinely care about the future success of blacks in the industry, they’re in the perfect position to apply their wealth and influence to the problem; found a film school. Create scholarships and grants for the arts. Mentor black youth who want to enter the industry. Exclaim publicly, “We’ll create the conditions where your success is possible, but you have to show up and do the work.” That’s an empowering message.

I'll give you the Macro and micro view. The Macro, and Thomas Sowell talks about this in depth - I’m only going to give a condensed case here, where the question of the post-slavery future of American Blacks was concerned there existed two prevailing schools of thought: In the blue-corner - Booker T. Washington advocating Self-sufficiency, Entrepreneurship, blacks building their own wealth. A very pro-Capitalist sentiment. In the red corner - W.E.B. Du Bois extolling political activism, government welfare, appeals to socialism. DuBois' school of thought won out on the prevailing tide of anti-capitalist fervor during the 1960s. In fact, since the 1920s there had been a rising Marxist movement amongst American blacks embodied by the work of Otto Huiswoud and Claude McKay, who advocated a "politics of grievance," that the U.S. Government should feel morally obligated to assuage. This unfortunately put the project of healing from slavery into the hands of the politicians who had every incentive to turn black social dysfunction into an industry enabled by political policy. He or she who pays the piper, calls the tune.

Here's the micro. Speaking primarily to my experience of the creative industries, I am concerned that much of the political messaging is in fact motivated by a sort of narcissistic aggrandizement; actors, directors, studio execs using "hot-button" social issues and "awareness raising" to virtue signal or raise their public profile. Like those very same politicians, they have no incentive to actually solve social problems they call attention to–their profits are dependent on perpetuating those problems. It's an industry and all industries need PR. I find it rather cynical if not outright insulting–I will not be a prop for the aggrandizement of others, I am a human being.

Was it peaceful in Cambodia? The Soviet Union? Countless other places? Why do people obey the law? Officials with guns will show up if you don't. In the case of most types of personal crime - robbery, murder, rape, hostage taking - officials showing up with guns isn’t an unreasonable response. Imagine officials with guns showing up in response to any of the following: Failure to meet diversity hiring quotas. Posting a mean-tweet that hurt someone’s feelings. You get the picture; it’s using a bazooka to swat a housefly. It’s also outsourcing the violence which makes it incredibly seductive to use. Imagine a room that’s entirely empty except for a table and a loaded gun. Introduce a bunch of people who’ve been told beforehand they have legitimate reasons to distrust anyone else they encounter in the room. They grow increasingly uncomfortable at the presence of gun, each suspecting the other of intending to use it. They start arguing over the gun, who gets to use it and whom it should be pointed at. That’s the current political climate in a nutshell.

Running to government to solve your problems is just boring, unimaginative; get creative and get your hands dirty making positive change for the people around you. That's how you begin to make things better, not by voting for change – at least not anymore, all the major human rights have been won, at least in The West, and that didn't solve all our problems. People on the ground helping other people, that's the next step.

Is BLM a grassroots organization? I think what we see them do with the donations will be the final verdict. My hunch? It's a contrived Potemkin alternative to the Al Sharpton school of grievance and grift. I can understand the desire to advocate for a better standard of life in those communities, but until the root causes are addressed––unprocessed trauma, self-limiting beliefs, addiction, broken families, Progressive graft and an externalised locus of control, conditions won't improve. If you look outside yourself for "salvation" you place yourself at the mercy of other's whims.

I am! Deal with it! [laughs.] There are legitimate issues facing blacks in America–there’s no doubt about that. Black cities in flames is not the answer, nor is killing cops, advocating neo-segregationism or browbeating whites and dissenters of all ethnic backgrounds. Black lives Matter is not political activism, it’s bullying; it's useful idiocy for the grievance industry. If the consequences for not agreeing with a political group with a particular ideology is the destruction of personal property, means of living, and even personal harm, I don't think that’s a group worth associating with.

I do think most people mean well, but American culture is profoundly passive and conformist; most tend to go along to get along. Where I live, I see many Black Lives Matter signs in people’s front gardens and they think they're on "the right side of history," to use that ominous turn of phrase. There is no multicultural block party in Portland. Self-described progressive, open-minded people, live in their exclusive neighbourhoods–The West Hills, Overlook, Irvington and others–commute everyday to their majority white tech startups, or creative agencies; the rare persons of colour I see these same people associating with are only there to deliver food, driving for Uber or lyft. The social Justice mindset there only extends from ludicrous to platitude. They can feel good about themselves, without actually having to live those values they profess to care so much about. They don't have to be uncomfortable. That’s some cushy activism!

I can’t speak to Black America, that has no meaning. You can't speak to collectives, only individuals. What I would say to those who are experiencing hardships and may buy into the narrative of black victimhood, consider the following:

Look in the Mirror. Take responsibility for healing your own trauma. Clean-up your act. Pull your pants up. Speak English properly. Present yourself well. Be intentional. Educate yourself. Read. Learn to use your words, not your fists. Get therapy. Stop blaming others for your lot in life. Learn a trade. Work hard and bring others up with you. Build businesses. Don't be blindly loyal to the "community" and demand authority in exchange for your responsibility, because the alternative is slavery. Don’t have kids out of wedlock and when you do have them don’t turn hitting them into a virtue. Don’t steal from others through social programs that should really be reserved for the unfortunate. Make building a great life on your own steam a virtue. Start businesses and buy from each other. Don't blow your profits on basketball shoes and overpriced cars, make investments. Make your money make more money. Leave the "community" if you have to because you are respected and desired in places around the world and staying in the "community" is to stay in an abusive environment where you cannot thrive. Heed this feedback or don’t. Do not blame others for the results of your choices.

I could be entrely wrong because I didn't grow up there. Being on the outside looking in does give me the advatange of not having emotional ties that skew my perspective on the dynamics that play out. Emotion can be like a singularity in physics, it lenses reality around its own mass. There are people in power who parasetise dysfunction; don't feed the Vampires.

There’s an old analogy that often applies to this topic, called “crabs in a bucket.” Say a fisherman has caught a few crabs. One crab is trying to escape the bucket and gain his freedom. The other crabs keep pulling him back in. Often when Blacks see another black person who is apparently very successful they, in a fit of insecurity or acceptance of the false notion that success and achievement are inauthentic to the construct of “Blackness,” put that more successful person down. I cannot tell you the insults and hostility I receive from blacks just on the basis of how I present myself to the world, and I’m not even black - I’m biracial. I get called a race-traitor for walking my dog down the street in a motorcycle jacket and pompadour because I’m not presenting the way some people think I should present. They don’t appreciate my individuality. They don’t say, “That guy’s doing his own thing, cool.” They say, “nigga think he better than me!” They say I “talk white.” in 34 years, I’ve had one black friend. I exist between the cracks of black and white, so to speak. I draw from my Jewish heritage, my White Heritage, my exposure to Philosophy and ideas and engage with the world as an individual; It's all a part of me. like Ponyboy said: “So, I loan it.”

I want you to hit me in the arm. Right now, go ahead don’t be shy. [Editor’s Note: I did oblige him with a jab to the arm.] Great! Who made you do that?

No, I didn’t. I told you to do it. You made the choice to listen to me and comply with my suggestion. You could have chosen not to comply, there was no coercion. Did you hit me with someone else’s arm? Jeff, over there on the mixer, did you hit me with his arm? No. My point is that you own your body and therefore you own the effects of your body’s actions. That is agency. With Agency, as Spidey says, comes great responsibility. So, when you tell a group of people that they are oppressed, have no capacity to choose another outcome and must appeal to other for better outcomes, you’re stripping that group of their personal agency. That’s a terrible thing to do to your fellow human beings - tell them they have no power to change their situation or pursue better outcomes on their own. Not to far away from slavery, in theory.

Now, I am not denying that trauma plays a role––if people are traumatised they can't bypass the effects of that trauma so easily, there are biological injuries arising from that trauma that effect behaviour. That beaing said, this is. the information age. Even then materially poorest person on the planet is information rich, so if we make modalities for processing and healing trauma known and make them accessible, and encourage it culturally––making self-actualisation through working on your own trauma as desirable as Air Jordans, or whatever the fuck kids are wearing now, then no one has an excuse to remain traumatised for life.

People talk about personal responsibility like it's a privilege. That's absurd! In a state of nature, if you didn't have a sense of personal responsibility you were dead. Self-work is not a luxury, it is a basic-human duty. I'm not going to tell a poor person, or a brown person, or a black person they are absolved of that responsiblity because that renders them incapable of achieveing the same standards of personal excellence as other people––it renders them as something other than human. That is racism, In my view. We're either held to the same standard, or we can have no standards.

Good question. I used to think it hardly had any affect at all - I wanted so badly to operate under the belief that my market and skills would speak for themselves. I’m in the out-group. First off I don’t have a community or a tribe to network with. People who grow up in one place a part of one homogenous community often have a network of mentors and investors. I didn’t have that out of the gate. Also our industry is so exclusively left-leaning that a person with my particular background and worldview is rather inconvenient to the prevailing ideological milieu of the industry.

I think my individuality has cost me some jobs. I’m not quick to jump on the political bandwagon or virtue-signal my allegiance to either side of the dialectic. In the past there was Sturm und Drang internally around how open I felt I could be about my thoughts - especially my dissention. I'm deeply concerned that the only way to not be blackballed by my own industry is to keep silent, self-erase. It's rather like an abused person must be in order to survive the abuse.

By the same token I can't sit idly by and watch these things I've described herein continue to play out as they have. If I do, I'm just as complicit. I used to self censor, but I felt sick to my stomach. I knew it wasn’t healthy, so I pushed past the fear and now I speak my mind. It’s cost me dearly in some ways, I’ve lost what I used to think were friendships. The phone rings less than it did, but I feel authentic to myself again. Integrity matters. I could kow-tow to the Social-Justice talking points and probably live very comfortably, but my soul would be impoverished. I wouldn’t be whole. I do rather feel caught between two worlds professionaly every bit as much as I am ethnically. I am damned lonely professionaly; It's profoundly alienating.

Mindfulness of the soul. I grew up religiously ambivalent, yet as I’ve grown older and felt increasingly closed out due to the dubious identity politics taking over so many industries, I’ve re-affirmed that I don’t fit neatly into any contrived category or group, and part of that required a reconnection with my spiritual heritage; some awareness of myself as a spiritual being. I have long considered myself an Aetheist, but one of the problems with Atheism is the lack of a universal system of ethics. Aethists adopt a relativistic and nihilistic view of ethics that I could never accept.

I spent considerable time reflecting on my values, morals and ethics. One conceptual nuggets that I get from my Jewish roots is the concept of NaRaN: Nefesh, Ruach, Neshamah. The three interconnected levels of my individual soul and how they interact. Nefesh is related to my personal expression, how I show up in the world and tangentially to that lizard-brain, animal instinct towards self-preservation Yetzer-Hara. Ruach relates to my consciousness and my drive to be more than I am, the Yetzer-Hatov that tempers the animal instinct and also has moral agency. Neshamah relates to that spiritual connection with something transcendental. If I’m operating solely out of the desire for self-preservation, which our society largely manipulates through that totalitarian Imperial Ethos I was talking about before, then I’m willfully holding myself back from potential transcendence. That’d be a waste.

We in the entertainment industry have a duty to be honest; first and foremost. Everyone gets a platform. Everyone gets a chance to speak. No censorship. No de-platforming. We fight the battle of arguments and ideas now, so we don’t have to fight the battle of sticks, stones, guns, and bombs later. That’s the deal called "civilisation." I don’t think the industry is up to the job right now because we’ve made activism into a fashion trend where you get points for shouting-down any critique of the status quo from the comfort of your living room. It’s become potentially career-destroying to make any case that runs counter to the oppression meta-narrative that so many people in government, and the [entertainment] industry have built their careers on––which is to say, if you don't toe the increasingly far-left party-line, you're unpersoned 1984-style. What people often don’t see is that the very people advocating to solve social problems through activism are the ones who benefit the most from the very social problems they claim to be trying to solve. It’s conflict of interest on a grand scale.

The social Justice crowd doesn’t speak for me, but I also don’t want them shut out of the conversation. We have to dialogue honestly about these issues - that means hearing all the arguments. It’s my hope that people who find what I’ve said confronting reach out and, in the spirit of peace, understanding and cooperation find common ground to move forward on together. Let there be differences and have the strength of will to coexist with those who are different. Ideally we need to push past politics, and get back to quality storytelling. We need to honour those who have the skills and merit to do great work, even if we disagree with them ideologically.

Howard the Duck.

You’re very welcome! Thanks for being a good-sport!