Roger Waters was in fine form last night — nonstop passion and fury, with a side of spacey weirdness, just as I like it. A lot of the concert was a nostalgia ride, though: he opened with “Breathe”, and then “One of these days” and “Time”, all with a phenomenal light and video show. He hooked us good. Then he followed up with subversion. “Pigs (three different ones)” was shaped to focus entirely on Donald Trump, and it fit him perfectly despite having been written in 1976. I think Roger Waters is officially my grim prophet of anomie.

He also performed songs from his new album. I noticed that some in the audience were there only for the 30 year old songs and chose those moments to annoy the rest of us by getting up and going to the lobby for a $10 can of ‘cheap’ beer, but those were some of the most intense moments. Sure, the old songs still fit our current situation, but in the new ones he’s howling about the modern specifics; leaders with no fucking brains at all, war, refugees, indifference, accompanied by images of horror blown up into psychedelic abstractions.

The whole evening was beautiful and unsettling. It was art.

It’s going to be good. Later!

The day after tomorrow I’ll be sitting in the nosebleed seats for Roger Waters Us + Them tour. I love the guy’s music, and he’s got the right sensibility for the era, as reported for his Chicago event.

It’s also very political, and that’s something that should surprise absolutely nobody. Waters has never been a stranger to controversy, and his recent political views (especially those involving the Israel-Palestine conflict), have certainly been turning all the right and wrong heads across the world. But he sounds revitalized again, and if you couldn’t tell from all the rage and angst that radiates from his latest record, Is This the Life We Really Want?, then he makes that pretty clear with the Us + Them Tour. Unlike his recent reprisal of The Wall, which toured the world for the better part of the early 2010s, Waters sounds less like he’s dusting off older material and more like he’s rewriting them for a new era. And in a world that’s as savage and dour as ours right now, we’re also singing louder than ever.

Anyone else going?

You ever have that feeling that you’ve totally screwed up the planet for your kids? Or worse, that your kids are going to finish the job for you? Check out Things I’m afraid my daughter will be doing in 2026. There are a few items there I worry about.

I’m kinda concerned that she might end up an executive at Amazoogle and send the machines out to get me, too.

And it’s got pirates learning biology in it! Sorta. Somehow, it reminds me of teaching first-year biology.

Hint for naifs: if you bring a shovel into the bedroom, you’re probably doing it wrong. Probably.

I watched the much-promoted Okja last night, the new Netflix movie by Bong Joon-ho. It’s mostly harmless, but not very good. It has problems.

• The story goes nowhere. Girl raises super-pig on her farm in South Korea for Evil Agri-Corp, Evil Agri-Corp takes it away, girl goes on quest to recover her super-pig. I won’t say how it ends, but let’s just say there are no surprises.

• The super-pig, Okja, is a CGI pig/hippo hybrid carefully designed for maximum cuteness. It does not make any sense ecologically or physiologically. It’s a huge herbivore, but it only rarely eats. It’s touted as ecologicaly super-efficient, but how that would work isn’t explained.

• The Animal Liberation Front are the good guys. No. ALF may have admirable goals, but their tactics are dishonest and destructive. They are terrorists and vandals. They are portrayed here as gentle people dedicated to not harming people or animals.

• The message is incoherent. Don’t kill super-pigs, they’re adorable and intelligent! GMOs are bad! But Okja is a GMO, even though Evil Agri-Corp is trying hard to hide that fact, and the South Korean family has no problem eating fish and chicken. They show how horrible it is to slaughter super-pigs, but hey, that’s not a chicken — it’s a bowl of chicken stew.

• There are a few scenes in a super-pig slaughterhouse. It is the cleanest, most humane slaughterhouse I’ve ever seen; almost no blood, and the super-pigs just roll over dead when hit with a bolt-gun. It’s so antiseptic and swift, and the animals are sliced apart into bits so neatly, it had me thinking butchery was far tidier than I expected. I don’t think that’s the intended message. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle this ain’t.
  Maybe the slaughter of CGI animals is just nicer.

• Tilda Swinton, as the CEO of Evil Agri-Corp, was too ridiculously over-the-top. I think it’s a good idea to restrain and regulate agri-business’s excesses, but it doesn’t help to portray them as cartoons. Although, if the NRA is any example, maybe they are all villainous psychopaths.

• The economics make no sense. Evil Agri-Corp has engineered these meat animals to save their business, and first is going to put everything on hiatus for ten years while 26 super-piglets are individually raised on small farms scattered around the world. Why? This is PR? And then that PR collapses abruptly (thanks to ALF), but there are hundreds and hundreds of super-pigs at a slaughterhouse in New Jersey. I really don’t get it.

• There are several chase scenes. Apparently, little girls and 6-ton animals can barrel through city streets, subways, and crowded stores and no one gets hurt. It’s always a kind of fortuitous chaos where girl and beast conveniently find each other in New York and Seoul, and then harmlessly charge through pedestrians and cars.

• At the end, I’m just left with questions. Are GMOs bad, or do they create cute animals? Is eating animals bad, or only the ones that are cute? Agri-business is bad, or just the ones run by ineffectual psychotic twins? I think I wasn’t supposed to think, but instead to just enjoy adorable friendly CGI hippo-pig frolicking with tween girl.

Maybe you’ll enjoy it if you like sanitized videos of fake animals. I think it dodged all the issues.