The music video for Manorholes Highrise began a year ago, when I first heard my friend Jan Julius' demo. It was a calm evening running in Baltimore, and yet Jan's demo seized my imagination. In three minutes, Jan's song captured the attempts many of us make to spin happiness out of a capitalist tragedy.
I have leaned on the song greatly to parse through my feelings of the modern landscape for the working class. The feeling of taking out private loans, the anxiety of missing payments. In a country where property is many times valued more than the bodies that reside within buildings, the world of the song was a prescient one. The conversation continued into animation.
Over the last year, the preciousness and value inherent to our bodies has calcified into an unmovable object in my heart. It is clear how we must protect ourselves and each other from the forces that seek to break us-- and this sentiment was core to Manorholes.