I keep thinking about the Robert Crumb end of this spectrum how similar yet even darker it is to the streets of LA in Blade Runner. How Crumb never shows us this slick future fantasy because he. like many of us, never saw it with an entry sign for him, preferring to get behind the scenes at the more accessible peep shows in whatever neighborhood he found himself . I admire Crumb's art but mostly from a distance. Too willing to stare into the darkness in so many eyes. The ads for a bright future continue to roll out of NPR, magazine land, the New Yorker, Forbes the internet,.... even while the pandemic kills, towns flood and fires burn. They have to report it but somehow seem to barely notice the pattern. R Crumb hangs out in a village in France making radio shows from his collection of old records, illustrating the Old Testament and his dreams. I work in my large garden, talk and eat with my partner, teach kids to make things with their hands, paint and fire glass, but cannot keep from the too frequent stare into the future. It isn't dreamy at all, though sativa can sometimes make it seem weirdly funny.
A good and grim summation of the challenges of dreaming the future at this point. I know what you mean about maintaining distance from Crumb, but I think that is part of the alchemy: his confessional side just shows you too much to handle, the weird pervyness and the misanthropy, the gritty side of things. For me it's all about the power and telephone lines, they hang so heavy in his cityscapes, everything already committed to entropy (a force the glossy futures forget often has the upper hand). Nobody can draw a seedy gutter like Crumb. What a perfect name!
I was going to write something about his telephone and power lines. For awhile I had dreams of flying that were interrupted by power lines, so they make for a visceral reaction. The lines of power even get into dreams.
In one of my more PhilDickean dreams, a series of which I had back in college when I was first writing about Dick, a small statue of old woman began to speak to me, describing the long suffering of humans and mothers in this world, the voice of ancient woes...until I went, Hold on, and tugged at the statue and realized it was a little speaker powered by a hidden electrical cable. I then tugged on the cable and it began to crack open and pull down the wall, the whole structure. I listened to the statue again, a male voice now: "Stop. Do not proceed any further. This is unauthorized."
As soon as you mentioned Ubik and walking into a diner… David Lynch came to mind and I still have no idea why, aside from maybe some Mulholland Drive vibes that I’d unconsciously picked up on. That was spooky, tbh.
No bitter judgment directed your way. We all got to put food on the table! But I bet you can imagine a version of your gig and your company that was less intoxicated on the VC BS fumes. This weekend I had a demoralizing conversation with a bunch of folks in the psychedelic healing space who are on the healing side -- that is, actually dealing with clients. They described the disjunct they had experienced even with psychedelic-friendly crypto investors and related VCs, all of whom talk the "scaling up" game (capitalism can turn on the world!) but are pursuing a lot of the usual domination and maximal profiteering moves despite their already existent wealth. This was not how capitalism was in the middle of the 20th century, or at least a larger percentage of it had a solid element of public good in its missions, accepted much higher corporate taxes than we have, much less disparity between CEO salaries, etc....you know the drill monkey man!
Yes, everything is double-tripling, down in surreal-absurd fashion.
Another vortex of disturbingly weird is the world of pharma TV ads. I have not had cable TV for over a decade, but I have a friend that literally could not live without cable and a TV powered on at all times. Occasionally I am at his house and see back to back to back pharma commercials. Talk about some trippy SF dystopia horror comedy...
It's like our only strategy in the face of the consequential social and environmental feedback is to what we've always done but do it MORE. God forbid we stop anything we've started. Better to turn the knob to 11 and let the distortion loop drown out all other thought.
Remember back when the most existential media got was "is it real or Memorex?"
I know! Those pharma ads are nuts, and now we are starting to see them about psychedelic therapies. This is particularly bizarre for me since I know some crazy kids who made fake pharma drug ads 15 years ago as a form of satire and they pretty much exactly resemble the weird cheery tone of the real ads today! I should dig them up, not sure where they are.
"an exponential cascade of WTF"...ordinary umbrellas will not do...
See you at the pahty, Richter!
Go go go!
I keep thinking about the Robert Crumb end of this spectrum how similar yet even darker it is to the streets of LA in Blade Runner. How Crumb never shows us this slick future fantasy because he. like many of us, never saw it with an entry sign for him, preferring to get behind the scenes at the more accessible peep shows in whatever neighborhood he found himself . I admire Crumb's art but mostly from a distance. Too willing to stare into the darkness in so many eyes. The ads for a bright future continue to roll out of NPR, magazine land, the New Yorker, Forbes the internet,.... even while the pandemic kills, towns flood and fires burn. They have to report it but somehow seem to barely notice the pattern. R Crumb hangs out in a village in France making radio shows from his collection of old records, illustrating the Old Testament and his dreams. I work in my large garden, talk and eat with my partner, teach kids to make things with their hands, paint and fire glass, but cannot keep from the too frequent stare into the future. It isn't dreamy at all, though sativa can sometimes make it seem weirdly funny.
A good and grim summation of the challenges of dreaming the future at this point. I know what you mean about maintaining distance from Crumb, but I think that is part of the alchemy: his confessional side just shows you too much to handle, the weird pervyness and the misanthropy, the gritty side of things. For me it's all about the power and telephone lines, they hang so heavy in his cityscapes, everything already committed to entropy (a force the glossy futures forget often has the upper hand). Nobody can draw a seedy gutter like Crumb. What a perfect name!
I was going to write something about his telephone and power lines. For awhile I had dreams of flying that were interrupted by power lines, so they make for a visceral reaction. The lines of power even get into dreams.
In one of my more PhilDickean dreams, a series of which I had back in college when I was first writing about Dick, a small statue of old woman began to speak to me, describing the long suffering of humans and mothers in this world, the voice of ancient woes...until I went, Hold on, and tugged at the statue and realized it was a little speaker powered by a hidden electrical cable. I then tugged on the cable and it began to crack open and pull down the wall, the whole structure. I listened to the statue again, a male voice now: "Stop. Do not proceed any further. This is unauthorized."
As soon as you mentioned Ubik and walking into a diner… David Lynch came to mind and I still have no idea why, aside from maybe some Mulholland Drive vibes that I’d unconsciously picked up on. That was spooky, tbh.
Wow that is a bit of weirdness there. I definitely feel like there is more to say and explore about the Lynchian realms.
"Perhaps history will come to see our modern MBAs as equivalently irrational dupes of a totalizing ideology: the cosmic reign of capital."
As someone who resistantly zips up a capitalist monkey suit on Monday mornings to work for a Westcoast tech startup, I smugly enjoyed this line!
No bitter judgment directed your way. We all got to put food on the table! But I bet you can imagine a version of your gig and your company that was less intoxicated on the VC BS fumes. This weekend I had a demoralizing conversation with a bunch of folks in the psychedelic healing space who are on the healing side -- that is, actually dealing with clients. They described the disjunct they had experienced even with psychedelic-friendly crypto investors and related VCs, all of whom talk the "scaling up" game (capitalism can turn on the world!) but are pursuing a lot of the usual domination and maximal profiteering moves despite their already existent wealth. This was not how capitalism was in the middle of the 20th century, or at least a larger percentage of it had a solid element of public good in its missions, accepted much higher corporate taxes than we have, much less disparity between CEO salaries, etc....you know the drill monkey man!
We really must hang out...
Dinging the bell as always, Erik.
Yes, everything is double-tripling, down in surreal-absurd fashion.
Another vortex of disturbingly weird is the world of pharma TV ads. I have not had cable TV for over a decade, but I have a friend that literally could not live without cable and a TV powered on at all times. Occasionally I am at his house and see back to back to back pharma commercials. Talk about some trippy SF dystopia horror comedy...
It's like our only strategy in the face of the consequential social and environmental feedback is to what we've always done but do it MORE. God forbid we stop anything we've started. Better to turn the knob to 11 and let the distortion loop drown out all other thought.
Remember back when the most existential media got was "is it real or Memorex?"
This decade is a exponential cascade of WTF.
I know! Those pharma ads are nuts, and now we are starting to see them about psychedelic therapies. This is particularly bizarre for me since I know some crazy kids who made fake pharma drug ads 15 years ago as a form of satire and they pretty much exactly resemble the weird cheery tone of the real ads today! I should dig them up, not sure where they are.
"an exponential cascade of WTF"...ordinary umbrellas will not do...
Oh god. Already? I haven't seen any pharma psychedelics ads yet.
Future historian: "And this is when things got really weird."