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.
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.
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?"
See you at the pahty, Richter!
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.
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.
"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!
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.