Tag: futurism

I dont’ know where I’m going with this, how embarassing


lift
Originally uploaded by davenyc.

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.

buckwheat hair, I hide it well

Oxygen gasps, skin taut. That’s what I’m thinking of. I landed on the surface homeless and running. Check your balance, I thought, check your stride. It was a pun. Before this hundred pace book begins, I need to smile hard and develop a quick will. It might take an entire month to write this all out in human paper. Thirty days and a trip around the moon. A hot air example of summertime blues.

My stylus is scratching sound from a round disc of specially pressed memory, those old black things, before your time, I’m sure, but brought back into being by the trendy Ibiza boys, those Edinburgh saints of groove. Voice replies, back and forth. I wonder if I’ll ever get a telephone call, a crunched machine echo of a warm lovely taste synthesized as pleasure. Sixty cycles deep electric, an instrument of more than torture.

There’s an ease to this I missed. A glitter burst of putting words down. They don’t have to mean anything except to me. I fill my time with love letters, tiny particles of bits and bytes dreaming of a future where I can touch the sky and the stars are known to have planets it’s possible to visit. Recording everything would be impossible, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to try. Stand on the lip of a seascape breeze and teach you all the meaning of that particular colour blue to the first people to have ever told a story about it. Photographs and moving pictures, add sound and protect the world by showing it off. Explaining why Barrakka beauty should be seen by more than art degrees. Spell out the memes of historical creation and cultural division.

Imagine a downloadable scrap of earth. A television history-scape of depth and vision with an insertable tactile interface. Install the ability to blink and hear the local traffic, the crowd sounds of a multitude of conversation. Even this little office would be of interest to somebody. A man in a net cafe somewhere over a tiny street, it’s late at night and he misses the lights that streetlights used to bring before someone went through with a gun and shot them all down, he might want to see me typing this. He might like to look out the window to my right and see an entirely new kind of tree or to my left and examine a production facility. The lack of pollution erosion is fascinating. The pink of the ice-cream shop is too garish, however, and so he flips to a woman making dinner in an outdoor market, somewhere arabic where he doesn’t speak the language. It could be a spelled end to destruction. In a optimistic view, the phrases in language would change. The media would drop it’s fear propaganda, unable to explain anymore that difference means danger. We would all be press students, members in an underground club that might even have it’s own secret handshake.

This is what obsesses me, but very very quietly. I think I’m going to start talking about it.

I want an infusion of technology. I want my hair to have LEDs wired in. I want to snap my fingers and watch sparks fly free and blue. Tonight I’m going to go dancing. I’m going to twist and try not to break my ankle again. My shoes have snapped again, back to wandering barefoot with cardboard sandals in my pocket for that just in case and the bus-driver rules. I want a networked media pool, I want everyone in and swimming. Science fiction reaches into immortality in a way that I don’t think most other fiction does. The promise to invent the future, to weave articulation into the joints of your fingers, to preserve the other and outline the reactions required to outlive our own societal deadline. We need drama, we’re humans, we make stories out of everything. That’s what you do when you meet someone, it’s all teasing anecdotes. Reactions of instinct. Tell you what I’m like, explain my reactions through making you laugh. It’s striking. I want to dramatize the future, project a thought forward, try to give an idea to anybody who could make it real. I want my flying car and all the metaphor stands for. Could you imagine if we were the last generation to grow old? The conservative reaction wants to tie us more to the past than we need to be. The bit that’s certain isn’t that technology will progress to a point where we break that servile reaction, but that it will happen without us if we aren’t paying attention.

there’s steel

So this is the future. It’s a self replicating virus, everything is going to be better just over the horizon. This is the future, my hands here, on yours, and my eyes lucent from crying. I remember this, every day it wore at me, every day it caught my throat, pacing back and forth, counting the minutes in between until I could find my flying car.

My fingers are longer now, I can feel it. I’m changing every day, cells replicating something with a slightly different chemical balance. This web of veins and neurons, cycling through a thousand things we said to each other.

This is the future, this is learning. It’s bitter like the coffee in the morning that you required before you put your clothes on. Red pants or the open front house-coat I gave you for the last Valentines we ever had, our first. I remember tomorrow already, I know it backward, every minute flowing from me. This time it’s a prison, because I can feel when my smile’s going to crack.

As I grow older, the concept of meaning something has been pressed to me more and over, little sticky pieces of paper that scream at me that I don’t mean anything yet, that there must be something more, that these people with fire in their eyes, they know the plan, they can see, and I am not one of them. I have no creative soul to touch, I can only support these angels above me who fly with visions, who know how to put objects together and create. This is the future, they make it, not me.

Then this happens. I wake up and want to take my clothes off. I want to walk down every crowded street and silently shout a misery wider than a sky can hold. I want to let the sun touch my skin to flame and tell people to make something, to stop playing house and try to find out what they need. I want electricity to crackle off of me to spark wonder in the worlds jaded eyes, because if this can happen to me, it can happen to you.

snippets

Last week I had to journey down to kits as conveyance for a late video. It urged me faster, though I was caught waiting for transit. The warm cream fog on fourth street tasted of fried tomatoes with a hint of curry. It wet my lips and drew my eyes upward to it’s silent slow dancing with the streetlamps light. Silly thing didn’t realize I was seduced already. It’s touch, form and grace had swept me out of myself. I wanted to be a listener. I’ve always wanted to be a listener. Wired to the world, able to record any moment in sight and touch and sound. Splattering impressions like paint across the continents. It kills me somewhere to know I may never see the reality of what I’ve always wanted to be when I grew up. I will be old, and perhaps even more useless than now when the technology becomes available. When the flesh becomes malleable, like cybernetic clay.