lafinjack has found vogueing vinyl ninja gangsta Michael Jackson clones. It’s bad because it’s good.
Bloody tar pit apartment. I don’t even much like it here, but yesterday I couldn’t bring myself to go. Ryan came home and that bit the edge off. Vagabond blue jello today for breakfast in a clear glass bowl. I don’t know where the rabbit is, but occasionally I hear things fall down in the living-room, so I’m taking that as a pulse positive sign. I am clearly awaiting a mental cohesion I’m not currently capable of, because the thought of a fashion photography bunny rabbit pin-up set continues to pass over me like a fast moving cloud. Place rabbit in life, begin to use as prop. It all sounds worse than it is. On the back of the motorcycle, my mother gunned us up to 120 and I let go. Leaned back against the wind and slowly raised my arms backward behind me. My wings for flying, it’s the same for everyone. I thought of taxidermy, a white winged mouse holding out its dried heart with tiny paws, the cavity in its chest apparent and stuffed with small rosebuds. The tiniest smudge of red on its hands and fur. I would hang it from a piece of ribbon, thin and shining satin. Black, because I thought of who I would send it to.
The Aristocrats (movie) Today at 8. Meet in Tinseltown up by the box office @ 7:30.
My humble pen in head has been thinking a lot about the texture of L.A. lately. I don’t know why. Something about futurism, about how Los Angeles got trapped in the bright promise of the shiny sixties, when optimism was still allowed, in a way that I’ve never encountered in Canada. I don’t know if I want to go back yet, but I consider it every time I think of getting a driver’s license. Ray sent me a film clip this week, General Motors’ view of what the world was going to be like. A woman dancing through a dream of glittering cars and enviably automatic kitchens. It ends with her and her masked man driving down a model of a freeway surrounded by rolling parks and well spaced tall buildings. All very Norman Geddes, the industrial designer who unveiled ideas of Tomorrow back in the American 30s. All very comfortable and lovely. The Future was something to look forward to.
Of course the allure of Futurama was polished with the wishful spit of GM to sell new cars to a depression laden country, but I think we’re more cynical now. It’s difficult to write any positive forecasts, which is important, in its own way, as people are entirely in love with soothsaying the Next Big Thing. Nostradamus had a surge of popularity back with September 11th, we’ve obviously not lost the bug. We still like looking backward to trace our way forward. We trail over whatever paths that look the most reasonable, metamorphing pattern recognition into a full blown precog bit of back-patting hindsight fiction.
That AIDS is a crises, (check this though), wars are blossoming anywhere on the globe where there’s oil, and that terrible news of any sort is available in a way that it never has been before, creates an open glimpse into 1984 bad dreams. Try to create something hopeful and the result seems slightly too soggy to be taken seriously. Social optimism is cyclical, and we are a very low swing of the pendulum. Our architecture has finally reached out into shining glass towers and we’ve found they all look the same. Expression of emotion through stone is all but a lost art form. Scenarios of happy thronging places seem wrong, out-dated and moded. Apocalypse ideas seem educated, smart and fact driven, less theoretical.
However, just because our predictions are darker than they used to be, don’t mean they will be any more accurate. Orwell gave us a place where security cameras covered our every move, yet never dreamed that we would be broadcasting from our bedrooms every day to a limitless audience of strangers. When my ex-roommate and I had a webcam in our living-room, we had upward to a thousand hits a day, and really we had no content. There’s the forever complaint of older writers, too, that there was no way to predict the cellular telephone, dating their work of the future with the stamp of Before The Technology.