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This is a junk E-mail I received. It is either a weirdly clever attempt to disguise junk mail as experimental literature, and thus evade my filter (it didn’t)… or it really is concrete poetry and is just what the doctor ordered: Hello, do you need to But there is no hope for him in that! she cried. Oh, don't spend Less on your druggs?
Save over 70% ships were at anchor in mid-channel. The Admiral's Encarnacion,with PharrmHow often have I not seen you staring out over the sea, your soulacyByMail Shop <http://www.fltd.undermicredibi.com>
VlAGof plain homespun; and if the former sat so well upon him it wasRA VAAwake, eh? said he in Spanish.LlUM ClALlthe wealth of the city.S Lpiraguas astern.EVlTRA and many other.
With each purchase seems to have been accurate enough. Alas! you get:
Top avoided her when it was possible, and was frigidly civil when it quality BEST PRlCEMy superior officer! You! Lord of the World! Why, you are justS Total confidleave to ask your lordship (his brogue became more marked than ever)entiaIity Home deIcarefully recruited. In Pitt's hut, which he shared with five otherivery
O.K., it must be some program at work that attempts to disguise the pharmaceutical ad by randomly picking passages out of an old fashioned 19th century novel and interlacing the ad copy — and inserting the link, of course. It produces a William Burroughs-like cut-up effect, a Jane Austen character offering a deal on Viagra.
[3.06: Link to UK Guardian article on "Spoetry"]
A photo from the BBC news site of a U.S. soldier interrogating a detainee in Iraq. A horrified woman looks on. 
Of course, what the caption tells you and what you see and feel from this image are completely opposite. What you “read” in this picture, what your visual sense tells you, is that the American is bestowing some sort of divine gift, and the man is kneeling out of respect, adoration and thankfulness. The light of God floods down. Like an image of Jesus offering alms or sustenance to a beggar, for example. I doubt if anything at all like that is going on here — in this way the photo contradicts its own caption… something I see quite a lot of. What we read and feel from the image gives us a completely different interpretation of the scene from its written description. But which do we “feel” is more “true”? I would guess in the cases of these loaded images, images that resonate strongly, we believe what we see over and above what we are told.
I thought this photo mimics a Caravaggio, but didn't have a specific painting in mind.
I sent it to Lawrence Weschler who has in the past contributed a series of “convergences” to various issues of McSweeney’s, and he pointed out the two images below:
A woman in Malawi who was forced to have ritual “cleansing” sex with a relative after her husband died
And Velázquez’s painting of Aesop 
The African woman and Aesop painting are awfully close. Makes you think there are art directors out there staging documentary photographs with art history books in hand. The real world is made in the image of powerful works of art. Could this be?
Do I think that these journalistic photographers and their editors at least harbor unconscious or conscious archives of "art" imagery that they strive to imitate? Sometimes, but in addition I think that there's the fact that a lot of "art" imagery originally drew on iconic symbols and relationships which are deeply imbedded in the brain, and the paintings that manifest these archetypes in turn draw their resonant power from those... so photojournalists are simply doing the same thing as the brain does — gravitating towards iconic resonant images that everyone harbors, not necessarily imitating paintings... and it almost appears as if the choices of these images are limited, because similar imagery pops up again and again.
It’s a Jungian idea — that we harbor archetypes that are the visual and psychological equivalent of molecular receptors, like those for drugs and hormones lying in wait in different areas of the brain. The idea also reminds me of Plato’s proposal that the world is a shadow version of these archetypical images.
It’s a little hard to believe that the choice of images could be that limited and that it would explain why these bizarre correspondences across time and space, that there are a finite set of moving images that we gravitate towards — but these congruencies are awfully close. Too close to be entirely accidental, I think.Lawrence Weschler will have a whole book on this phenomenon out early next year called Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.
Riding to DC on the Metroliner for an open house on the occasion of my sister’s twins' birthday.
The Acela, the train that was supposed so be the East Coast version of the European and Japanese high speed inter-urban trains, is no longer. It never reached true high speed, was a year late getting off the ground, and now has been shut down indefinitely.
I rode it a few times. It did eventually overtake the Metroliner in speed, but not by very much. Many times it actually arrived later than the cheaper train. It was a bit more sleek and designed, though unfortunately the café car was designed to discourage lingering or even sitting down. It had a few high stools and counters where one could balance, but no real tables. Guess that was an effort to eliminate crowding and bunching in that car, but instead you ended up with a wasted almost empty car. Maybe that was a Homeland security directive — no getting to know other passengers! The Metroliner at least has tables, which is where I am sitting now, plugged in, with a coffee and an egg sandwich beside me.
I ask myself what it is in the structure and financing of a railroad (or any business) that seems to encourage such incompetence? My dad would say that they need to be subsidized more than they are, which wouldn’t do much to discourage incompetence, but would at least eliminate the problems of track and engine maintenance and the availability of regularly scheduled trains to lesser-visited towns.
Others would say that like all “socialized” industries, the railroad, like the post office, eliminates any incentive to do better. That may also be true. One recognizes the same brand of lethargy in parts of Russian society — the part that hasn’t robbed the other part.
My dad would also say that the great network of highways in this country, and others, are largely subsidized — a funding no doubt lobbied for by the defense deptartment (Hitler and Rome built roads) and the oil industries. This goes a long way towards undermining the railroads and any other public transportation except buses and taxis. Does the gas tax pay for all these roads and road maintenance? I doubt it covers very much of it. Tax dollars do, and they thereby subvert the railroads and all public transportation, by making it cheaper and more convenient to ship goods by truck, which use up lots more gas per mile. Roads, the asphalt equivalent of rails, are mostly provided free of charge.
Likewise, airlines are subsidized. Recently United has managed to dump their pension debts that they can’t pay onto the taxpayer.
Bush and Co. want to cut Amtrak funds further, as a kind of punishment for the incompetence and un-profitability that their policies and those of their predecessors have encouraged. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy, I guess.
It can work, though. In France, Spain, Germany and Japan the trains run on time, they’re not too expensive, and they go everywhere quickly. The TGV is almost as fast as flying from Paris to Geneva, for example, and the recent linking of the French and Spanish systems means the whole EC will be networked soon. So the socialized system does not seem to be the whole answer to what’s wrong in the U.S., as these foreign systems are I believe government run.
Despite the recent train crash the Japanese system is legendary, for speed and punctuality — in fact it is the obsessive need to be exactly on time that was partly the cause of the crash, according to some reports.
The view of the Jersey meadows — sun shining on slimy water with a few egrets and ducks along the edges — now we are passing acres of brownlands, workers' housing, refineries. The rails are a kind of causeway — there is no access to this land we are riding over. The scrub that borders the tracks is overgrown with kudzu, an imported plant that strangles the natives. Now we’re paralleling the turnpike, a large lake is on the other side — the turnpike and the tracks segregate the communities nearby from the waterfront. There are a few limited access points to the water, I’m sure, but for the most part the two are separated as if by a wall.
As if fulfilling the above prophesy the return train to N.Y. from DC has broken down just north of Philadelphia. It just stopped. I can see row houses and bushes over the embankment. The early evening light is golden and beautiful. Scraggly weeds lit brightly against shadowy dirty backgrounds. The man on the intercom says the engineers are going to “recycle” the engine. Recycle?
A few minutes later he says we might back up to Philadelphia. Then a few more minutes and he says they might send a new engine out. Soon. Then finally he says we’re going to hop on the next train that comes by, which will stop across the track. It will “most likely” make all our stops. We all laugh at the phrase most likely.
God forbid anyone here might be trying to connect to another train, or worse, a night flight to Europe. Guess I won’t be home for dinner. Do people here know that trains run better than this in dirty old Eastern Europe, in Mexico, in Malaysia?
Australian town names (NSW):
Burleigh Heads
Tumbulgum
Mooball
Tweed Heads
Guardian U.K. — In a U.S. senate report it seems most of the illegal food for Oil money was actually being handled by the U.S., with government approval and sometimes even backing. So, criticisms of Kofi Anan and the Europeans will now seem awfully hypocritical, with 52 percent of the illegal arrangements being with the U.S. (This is virtually unreported in the U.S. press.)
U.S. military ask the people yet again to fund a star wars plan — lasers and rockets in space. In trial after trial since Reagan it has proved both unworkable, expensive, and impractical. But that’s in a “reality based” world, I forget. Looks like Baudrillard was right — a fictional reality trumps the evidence every time.
And then there’s the fact that it would completely upset any perceived balance of power — it’s about American Empire — complete and total hegemony. The world won’t be very happy about that.
Of maybe they know it will never work, and it’s all about pork barrel voter stuff — creating massive contracts for GE, GM, Westinghouse, Martin Marietta, etc.
And now there’s the Newsweek Koran flushing article that sparked riots and angry demonstrations across 10 cities in Afghanistan and others in Pakistan last week. (A former Guantanamo detainee described in Newsweek how U.S. military flushed the holy book down the toilet in an effort to humiliate prisoners.)
Interesting that this act, an act that wasn’t about physical or overt mental cruelty, should be the one that triggers the latent anger. I suspect this act — I have no doubt that it happened — is viewed as confirmation that the infidel Americans have no respect for Islamic thought, religion or peoples. That fairness, freedom, democracy and human rights are all lip service – and this proves it. More so than physical torture — which is expected and almost natural in wartime — this is like spitting on the deepest and most cherished beliefs of a whole segment of humanity. It proves, to them, that the Americans in their midst really are devils.
The fact that the Bush administration's reaction is to deny it, then to pressure Newsweek for a retraction, rather than to instantly apologize, shows how much they think it is possible to control the media and twist public perception away from “reality based” to pure fiction. That by saying something didn’t happen will make it go away. Didn’t Stalin used to try this? Will the images of U.S. politicians and businessmen embracing Saddam taken years ago be erased, as Stalin did?
I suspect the genie is out of the bottle. That as prisoners are released they will all confirm tales like this one, and that the rioting and anti-American fever will spread and increase in Indonesia, Syria, Turkey, Algeria, Malaysia… no one will believe the U.S. denials, the behavior is too consistent with other American stuff. Yikes.
Cassette copy dream — jotted down in April?:
A vision of a precious audio cassette that has to be listened to VERY carefully, with dedicated ears — and is very rewarding as a result. A second cassette tape, a copy of the first one, is slightly less delicate, though still somewhat fragile, but not quite as rich or deep and experience, and doesn’t require exclusive attention.
Went to a Nine Inch Nails concert at the Hammerstein ballroom. Musically the songs seemed a cross between The Stooges and early rock pioneer Eddie Cochran. Maybe a bit of Suicide and Throbbing Gristle too, but those may share the same roots as well. Lyrically, of course, they are new and different, and texturally miles apart as well, but the underlying songs, if you stripped away all the massive artifice, are garage rock at its finest. The lighting was spectacular — probably because it was so completely appropriate and in synch with the musical aesthetic. Nüremberg meets Nietzsche meets tortured teenage angst. Very clean and industrial — tasteful in its own way. Precise, clean, detailed, rigorous.
I thought to myself (as I’ve been reading the For Dummies version) that Trent Reznor could do Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a musical — a meaty truly scary pop opera.
The whole band is in black, as are all the instruments and stands. Something I tried to do on the Stop Making Sense tour — use paint to make the gear go away visually and as a result the musicians might pop out more. I had noticed that in too many shows the brightest thing on stage was the drum hardware, for example. Nice for the drum company, but how could I redirect attention to the musicians? By painting everything black. I had the musicians and myself in medium grays — here they are in matte black, so only their faces loom among the darkness, smoke and strobes. A photo from a fan website:
The guitar player would occasionally bound across the stage, careening off risers and cymbal stands, as if possessed by a sudden surplus of energy that had to be used up, vented. A stage tech would appear surreptitiously in his wake, putting toppled stands back in place, reconnecting cables and sorting out whatever havoc the guitarist left in his wake.
This sense of borderline chaos was, I imagine, very considered, intentional, important. It mirrors the emotional state of Trent's persona, and it makes riveting spectacle from an audience members point of view. Simulated chaos is what people are here to see and experience — the music is the soundtrack.
A young man sat next to me to watch the opening act, Dresden Dolls. He was a vision in black — a Mohawk ponytail, high leather boots with buckles at the top, back shorts, and a black vest, also with buckles. He watched in rapt polite attention, not moving. I felt underdressed next to him. Not that I should have sported similar attire, but, in his own way, his outfit was extremely formal, neat, precise, even tasteful. Much more so than my own. His outfit is an anti-military military aesthetic — a dark mirror image of its opposite — the West Point formal parade outfit, the Buckingham palace guards. His is a dark interior army, fighting a war raging inside.
Went upstate yesterday with Yale to a recording studio where Susana Baca is recording a new CD produced by Craig Street. It will be a more intimate record than her last couple, which might be good — it can be done for less money, so she might see some royalty money someday, and it allows Yale/Luaka some financial room to move… and it seems to be turning out to be a beautiful record as well. Less strictly Afro-Peruvian — more a collection of ballads she’s collected over the years. During the dinner break we all sit around a huge table. Sergio, Susana’s guitarist, and Kevin, a guitarist and multi-instrumentalist from Toronto who is guesting on the CD, begin chatting about Guinga, the composer I had seen a couple of weeks ago. It turns out he’s a dentist! Or so Sergio claims — he may have retired his drills by now. Sergio said it is rumored that he would mix the two vocations so completely that on some days, when he had a break between dental surgery, he’d pick up his guitar and play or write for a while — then go back to drilling and filling. Both Sergio and Kevin expressed awe at this guy's playing and composing, which made me feel good, that my perception of this little-known guy was not a freak sensation or an aberration. If one is alone in liking something one can sometimes wonder if maybe there might be a reason why no one else is getting on this bus. Maybe they know something you don’t? Sat. eve, my birthday dinner is winding down. Mauro is tinkling the piano keys while something completely inappropriate plays on the stereo. I quietly put on Charlie Parker, commenting that his music somewhat baffles me, it seems to be in a bunch of keys all at once, hence almost any note you tinkle on the piano seems to “fit”.
Graham says he grew up listening to that music around the house. It’s almost predictable to him, it’s that familiar. I sit processing the idea that things that I find inscrutable, unpredictable, can be predictable and formulaic to someone else.
Graham offers a description of the role jazz played at its peak. That you could go to gig with 2 friends and one friend could be sitting, nursing a drink, enraptured, totally involved emotionally and intellectually, while your other friend would be tearing it up on the dance floor. That the music could simultaneously fulfill both these needs, and well, was the ideal to strive for.
I imagine that’s a good description of what a lot of popular composed and sometimes improvised music, not only jazz, sometimes strives for — to be able to work simultaneously on different levels. To be visceral and physical and at the same time moving and filled with ideas. Maybe all popular arts sometimes strive for that mixture — movies, theater, cooking, drawing.
I left my bicycle by a movie theater overnight, locked to a No Parking sign, as it was raining when the movie let out. Today when I went to fetch it the seat had been stolen. Everything else was intact. To remove my seat required Allen wrenches, but I guess the thieves carry those. It was a good seat — cushy, with a hydraulic support, nice for those bumpy New York streets. Damn.
Riding home standing was no fun. On the way home I got a call on my mobile, so I hopped off and chatted, walking the bike. When I hung up, there on the sidewalk by a trash can was a bike frame, wheelless, rusty, but with a leather seat on it. The seat had a quick release, so I flipped it and yes! it fit my post (badly) and though I couldn’t tighten it — it was low and swiveled around — I at least could sit down. I felt like a truly lucky guy. A little miracle.
Went to an art opening and dinner for Sophie Calle, the French artist and writer. She has an art show here that details her break up with a lover — abandonment is more like it — followed by a kind of self therapy — in which others tell her their stories of pain — as a way for her to get over him.
At the dinner she introduced me to a detective friend of hers. whom she claims is a fascinating wonderful person, as the guy from Talking Heads. A little later she took me aside and apologized, saying “I apologize — you must get that all the time, your life condensed to something you did years ago, it happens to me too — I’m the girl who follows people. We will never escape these things.”
Gee, I guess I am just used to it — I didn’t much notice, it happens all the time — I realize it has become a kind of shorthand even though I do squirm a bit whenever it happens, but I also accept it. At least it’s something I’m proud of. Sophie mentioned a friend of hers who has been kidnapped and another who was kidnapped some years ago — one is a well known and respected journalist, but from now on will inevitably only be known as “the kidnapped journalist.” So at least some of us are known for something we ourselves did and not just something that happened to us — the poor journalist, if she survives, will have to deal with being known less for her writing and courageous work than for a nasty bit of circumstance.
Went to an opening of a photo exposition by my friend Phyllis Galembo last night. I hadn’t seen her new work for a few years, so this was a chance to catch up. Wow. I was knocked out. The show was in a relatively out of the way gallery (Sepia International), that is not on street level, so there won’t be the walk-in traffic of the Chelsea galleries. Worth checking out, as I think it puts a lot of contemporary “fictional” photo work to shame. Hell, it puts a lot of stuff in other mediums outside photography to shame too. I was familiar with her photos from Brazil, Cuba and Africa — many of which are formal portraits of practitioners of Candomblé, Santeria and the African roots of these religions. We were introduced at least 15 years ago by Robert Farris Thompson, the Yale professor and author. Her newer Haitian stuff of course touches on Voudoun, but there are lot of Jacmel carnival participant portraits too — these are astounding. And there are new African images that connect the dots between a lot of the New World cultures. Most of all, the work is, in my opinion, not romantic — some of the stuff is hard, emotional, serious as death and as a result the beauty has depth. I’ve seen Phyllis work (in Brazil) and she affects a slightly ditzy casual demeanor — that disguises the fact that she knows exactly what she wants and how to get it. It helps her get these kids to stand against this wall while carnival rages all around them. 
Or this man, comfortable in his housedress, holding a mirror and a paintbrush! 
Or this participant in that Atam Masquerade in Nigeria? 
There’s probably a debt to Irving Penn’s famous series of portraits of “exotic” peoples here — his pix of Peruvian Indians and Mudmen — taken in a portable formal “studio”. But somehow those seemed like an extension of the live Indian or the Venus Hottentot in the sideshow or in the Natural History Museums compared to this.
Besides, these subjects are in costume. They have intentionally transformed themselves into something exotic, charged, even frightening. Here is combined a long deep legacy of dress-up for masquerade, for carnival, for possession by the Gods combined with personal creativity and ingenuity. These are not people in their ordinary dress — they are intentionally fantastic, shocking, wild. After that I caught a Brazilian composer at Joe’s. Guinga. I’d heard only a little about him and had only heard a bit of a suite he’d written about a train station as an allegory for Rio. I didn‘t much care for it when I heard it. So, I didn’t know what to expect, though I did expect that since his shows here are rare the Brazilian ex-pat community would as usual be out in force, and tickets would be scarce. I was wrong, the club was far from full, and many were simply curious, like me. The music turned out to be a cross between chamber jazz and intricate beautiful compositions that echoed — to me — Gershwin, Villa Lobos, Charlie Parker, Stravinsky, Nina Rota and of course forro, choro and other Brazilian roots and folk styles. Apparently lots of Brazilian artists have covered his stuff, but the public doesn’t recognize the name of the composer, hence the sparse turnout.
The band was two guitarists (one was the composer) a clarinetist and a young guy on trumpet/flügelhorn. None of them had music stands or charts in front of them — which, given the intricacy and complexity of some of this stuff, would have been unheard of if a North American group were to perform this material. These composed sections, as opposed to the improvisations, were my favorites — lyrical and complex. Like a lot of Brazilian music it admits to loving beauty, without shame, and then proceeds to make a world based on that point of view that can discuss anything — racism, politics, sadness, love and even landscape. The group would occasionally improvise but the solos were fairly brief and lyrical — the was no obvious showing off, or flashy pyrotechnics. The audience was hushed, there was almost no clinking of glasses, background conversation, or movement. It should have really been at Zankel Hall or the Rose Theater uptown, so I felt sort of privileged, as if I was hearing Gershwin play in a living room. In Brazil, there is no issue or problem referring to a songwriter as a composer, whereas here composers are in the concert halls and academia, and songwriters are often considered skillful hacks, tradesmen, adept at their craft. Naturally I prefer the Brazilian POV. In this case the Brazilian view is clearly justified, one can hear why — the “classical” tradition IS that of their nation's best songwriters…just as up north the “classical” music of the 20th century will be remembered as that of the great songwriters — Ellington, Porter, Hank Williams, Gershwin, Lennon & McCartney, etc… I’m afraid as cool as it is, a lot of academic classical music will end up being footnotes. Standards have survived Rod Stewart, Johnny Mathis, Willie Nelson and Björk — (some of whom did incredible interpretations of classic songs) so there must be something there. Am I being cruel here, unfair?
Toronto went fine, more or less.
The streetcar lightboxes where The New Sins piece were installed look good — they’re positioned along a groovy up and coming section of Queen Street running from my hotel past the mental hospital down to an area of bars, restaurants and galleries. Unknown to me, a young woman named Natalie was apparently assigned to be my minder. After my initial series of press interviews I had a drink with her at the hotel bar. I thought she was either just charming and friendly or was attracted to me, but I guess she was on salary.
The Drake Hotel is a music venue (I saw Negativland do a live radio show last night), a gourmet restaurant, a coffee shop, an art gallery and a weekend cruising spot — how they juggle all these is a wonder, but they do, and the staff were consistently cheerful. There are constant “events” — parties for the opening of a web site, a magazine launch (with hostesses all dressed in white) and stuff you wouldn’t know about unless you got an invitation. The renovation of the hotel building was funded by a youngish dot-com millionaire, and there was not much in this district like it at the time — so his decision to fix up this old building in this area puzzled some folks. More than one person commented to me how this hotel had completely changed the whole neighborhood. It opened a year or so ago and acted, so they claim, as a kind of magnet, attracting other restaurants, art galleries, boutiques and the renovation of dingy apartments into hip living spaces. If true, it’s amazing that one enterprise could do so much to change a whole district. Jane Jacobs, author of the The Death and Life of Great American Cites, pointed out how this happened in various NYC neighborhoods. I hope the 'hood doesn’t succeed too wildly, as the mix of funky delis, roti shops, diners, hardware stores and locally-owned businesses in with the galleries and trendy cafes makes it what it is — somewhat real.
After my tech check for my lecture, while the audience was filtering in, eating and drinking, I cycled on a borrowed bike to the Bruce Mau show at the Art Gallery of Ontario called Massive Change. (The museum is next to the College of Art and Design, an extraordinary building:)
I know Bruce a little, and am slightly familiar with this project, as it opened previously at a museum in Vancouver and there was press. Everyone’s got opinions on it, so I should see it before passing judgment.
It comes across as a sort of gee whiz science museum exposition, one that proposes that the solutions to many of the world's problems are not only within our grasp, but that their solution is inevitable. And Design, with a capitol D, has the answers. If only we would listen to the designers. Every room begins with an affirmative statement in huge type — We WILL do this, we will do that. That in itself might be a little off-putting to many people, as if Mau knows our destiny and is simply telling the rest of us what will happen. I also found it disturbing, the whole project, for its optimism, and especially what I took to be its utopianism. My suspicions don’t necessarily mean, I don’t think, that I am a doom-monger or cynical pessimist, but utopian thinking hasn’t led to very happy ends in the past, and don’t we all know that by now? In that sense, parts of this show seem downright dangerous — not because of the information they impart, some of which is fascinating and beautifully displayed, but because of the implied editorial tone. There are leaps of logic that are frightening — similar in ways to the kinds of proselytizing that went on during the dot-com boom — that IT technologies and the World Wide Web would revolutionize, and the implication was, liberate and free, everything from economic behavior to democracy. But this isn’t just focused on IT technologies.
More than one person has written that this presentation belongs in a science museum, not in the art gallery, and despite the wonderful design elements — Mau is an innovative graphic designer after all — I agree.
Although I wasn’t there, I was somewhat reminded of the famous General Motors pavilion at the 1964 NY World's Fair called Futurama. This ride through a giant warehouse-sized diorama on car seats and the intricate animated miniature townscapes painted a rosy view of the future, partly inspired by Corbusier’s radiant city concepts — but in this case facilitated by the automobile, not by public transport. It was The Jetsons, but proposed as possible, and like Massive Change, probable, even inevitable. (GM did 2 Furturamas — one at the '39 fair and one in '64.)
It was a vision of the future that was heavily promoted — GM was the biggest industrial company in the world at that point — and given the visceral visual impact of the models it was taken to heart by the public, politicians and town planners. And we have ended up with the urban disasters that cover America today. (When the gas price rises to 10 dollars a gallon the situation will get really scary.)
Anyway, it can’t all be blamed on GM and 2 World's Fair pavilions. But just as the Drake Hotel in Toronto galvanized forces waiting for an outlet, so these shows, when they strike a nerve, make visible the hopes and dreams of a generation — dreams or a possible future partly inserted into our heads by GM, in the case of Futurama.
The future is partly limited by what we can imagine it to be. Granted, events sometimes intrude unpleasantly on our imagination, but John and Yoko might not have been too far off the mark — urging that if we could but imagine a new and better world, then, and only then, could it come into existence. They didn’t claim its inevitability, merely its possibility. That’s where Mau’s we WILL diverges with their more gentle utopianism.
To give the show more credit, and the benefit of the doubt, he and his associates do in fact imagine a solution to the world's housing problems, water shortages, transportation and a host of other looming disasters. Their bravery in the face of a lot of the pessimism prevalent today, especially on the left, is maybe naïve, but maybe also hopeful. Maybe like GM if they present a more hopeful version of the future albeit less ruthless with land and resources than GM's (Mau’s team prioritizes ecological concerns, for example) they might allow a tiny bit of optimism to leak in, an antidote to the bleak scenario of global warming coupled with willfully ignorant U.S. politicians and agencies. (Not that global warming isn’t inevitable.)
[Link to DB/Mau interview in Contemporary magazine]
Later, I did a talk to the swells who were sponsors of the Contact Photo Festival. Not the PowerPoint talk, this one is about the man-made visual environment, specifically, both improvised and designed stuff that is intentionally placed in our field of vision for us to absorb, react to, deal with — weird constructions by lunatics, massive advertising campaigns and public art — some of the latter are my own. Sounds like a big topic, and it is. I don’t provide many answers. I don’t have any. But sometimes the answer begins to emerge only once the question has been formulated. A question, by its nature, implies an answer. Not that the answer is immediately available, but often the question is way of focusing, of defining a subject, an idea, a region, and then sometimes the pieces start to fall into place, little by little. At least that’s my justification for not giving answers.
Quite a lot of my talk focused on advertising, specifically whether or not we are being sold something, and how. Imbedded ads, product placement, ads that use irony to appeal to those too sophisticated to be marketed to.
Other than a few guffaws, the audience, having just finished a rich brunch and some mimosas, sat in polite but pretty stony silence. Only a few walkouts, but I really wondered how I was doing — the PowerPoint talks I did recently got lots of laughs most of the time.
Maybe it was the Canadians — they’re a notoriously restrained audience — some say polite, others give other justifications.
But in talking to folks later, on the street or at the hotel, they seemed to enjoy it and find it stimulating.
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