After putting the book down a while ago, I just completed reading sci-fi author Bruce Sterling’s quite excellent Tomorrow Now : Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. It’s a very smart read about how the future could look for all of us. Alternating between a dystopia where governments are consistently challenged by terror and crime and the planet wastes away under its noxious gasses and a utopia in which medicine provides strange life-changing elixirs to the common man, Sterling hits many great futurist notes.
Interestingly as well, within its pages, Sterling praises doctors, lawyers, scientists, writers, industrial designers, corporate technocrats, government policy wonks, and political activists. But the book gives pretty short shrift to art, makers of culture, and the visionary potential of aesthetics. I don’t want to agree with him but I can’t help but wonder if his ellision is all too true. Perhaps art (e.g. film, painting, music, etc.), in the most traditional Western and Eastern senses of the word, can only envision a future of one (viewer, participant, extremist) at this point — it can no longer participate in true social patterns or partake in the biggest issues of our days. I don’t think Sterling is explicitly saying this. But I do wonder if this is what the book, by its omissions, implies.

I generally don’t dig horror films a lot anymore, but I am very curious about this little wonder called Dawn of the Dead.
It seems to me that the film’s premise, in which the “dead walk the earth” and destroy the living in modern day America, is really just an awkward, video-taped wish fantasy on the part of Hollywood and our collective conscious. I wouldn’t go so far as others to say that we wish our own demise, but I do believe that within all of our desires for life and continuity there are kernals of death wishes and that our current fears of plague, terror, and mayhem inhere tenaciously within.

Netflix has been calling, unconsciously, for some time now as the DVD rental company represents itself as having nearly very film title that you’d ever want to see. There are so many films I’d like to have the opportunity to see and re-see, including many from the American Avant Garde, who I used to dote over. In a search of works by Maya Deren on Netflix, they do have one title that would satisfy my urges. But if you look up someone like Kenneth Anger, probably my most favorite film auteur of the genre, you get zilch.
A search for him on Amazon shows why — Anger’s work, though prime candidates for the supposed lushness of DVD, are still on VHS. Which brings up the question: Are film aesthetes a dying breed? Or do they prefer tape the way some audiophiles still prefer vinyl over CD?

It’s gotten little coverage, but a few days ago the Israeli ambassador to Sweden literally pulled the plug on a piece of artwork called “Snow White and The Madness of Truth.” The piece was shown in Stockholm and featured an oddly rendered image of a female suicide-bomber floating on a white boat in a sea of blood.
The work almost sounds kind of powerful but the context of the work, as provided by the artist, mockingly glorifies innocent death. It was wrong of the ambassador to deface the artwork, despite its pretenses. But it’s also a sad commentary of contemporary art that this is all we get anymore. Needless to say, I’m pretty down on art this year.
(In writing this, I realize critics may point out that my last post makes comparisons between films and the Holocaust. But in “The Women,” or in “The Wizard of Oz,” the texts of the films were not subject-specific and each devised its own language to speak about the world’s complexities, including issues of race and violence. In the “Snow White” piece, artist Dror Feller does the opposite.)

The 1939 comedy, The Women, whose tagline is “It’s all about men!” was on last night on PBS. I watched almost all of it with a feeling of morosity throughout. Before knowing the date of the film, I recognized that the black and white film, with its stylish color footage of a fashion show, was much like The Wizard of Oz, in that it also showed a fictional world utterly at peace while the world was preparing for self-immolation.
The film was achingly well-acted by Joan Crawford and Norman Shearer, who played women in the world of supreme wealth and huge class and race transitions. But what I felt while watching the film was not the American social politics behind it but the weight of Europe, a few thousand miles away, preparing for the deaths of millions. The fine clothes, the light switches, the telephones, the sense of privilege throughout, were not unlike what much of Europe had experienced before they were wrenched under war’s grip and when some were thrown in gas chambers. Some of the folks who watched that movie in 1939 died only a few years later despite its charms, or perhaps, because of them.
Tomorrow, on MLK day, The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (TARA) at Keele University, England, will be releasing hundreds of aerial photos on the Web that were taken during World War II, including those of Auschwitz, in which smoke can be seen flying up from the chimneys.

Although Apple is advertising its new iLife media package as “Microsoft Office for the rest of your life,” thus both giving the nod to the importance of Microsoft and marketing its own non-office-like products, I’m very excited about the new iLife package called GarageBand.
For years, SoundEdit 16, named after its 16-bit audio, was a great and inexpensive application for creating complex audio. It allowed for multiple tracks and effects and it had a great interface but Macromedia dropped support of it years ago. I wrote about 12 songs on it about 5 years ago and, sadly, I can no longer find them.
GarageBand looks even better as Apple figured out a way to allow Joe Schmoes like me to make original music from sampled tracks, microphone input, and other audio recordings. I have both the app and a new microphone on order. Apple’s mind-reading capabilities have become very sharp.
P.S. I like the metaphor of the Garage, where music and software are mythically developed, though a garage is mostly where its alliterative cousin garbage sits.

I did not realize that Jake at Gothamist posted a better-written piece about Cushman on the last day of the year 2003.
I still hold that Spondizo “found” this site “first” as he emailed me about it in early December. The real question is how do memes truly work such that cultural knowledge is transferred over semi-hidden pathways?
I’m a strong believer in ethnic memory, for instance, which, according to me, states that the as a descendent of Eastern European Jewry, my ability to speak Yiddish fluently is more innate than, say, a native Cambodian’s. It’s not Lamarckian theory here — rather, I believe that the context and syntax of language passed down from my grandparents to my parents to me was consistent with the way my great-grandparents spoke in the old country. I thus have a kind of proclivity to speak Yiddish, which I daresay I don’t really. Is this akin to memes? Probably.
Oh, this is cool: Deckchairs made blog of the day today.

I was introduced recently to a phenomenal historical collection of photographs by Charles W. Cushman (thanks to the upcoming Spondizo blog). Hours could easily be spent perusing this site, which contains the diverse, difficult, and romantic imagery of a man who witnessed what the website describes as “a dying landscape” — America before the technology years, before the suburban residential expansions and before the mass integration of commercial life into our daily habits. Strangely, or not so strangely perhaps, his work is mainly in COLOR, a rich color that is separate from our digitally rendered world yet looks oddly good rendered by it.
Cushman is apparently up there with the likes of other great photographers like Walker Evans, and his vision, sensibility, and techniques are truly unique. Cushman traveled this country shooting small towns and large cities. But because of the color (o, the color!), the inhabitants in these photographs look as if they still walking among us, dressed in their workclothes and Sunday finest and ready to go to work. And the landscapes sing.
Look at this one of a woman and child, this one of Fulton Market in 1941, this one on the Lower East Side of New York in 1941, this photo of the Rockies melts my heart.

I watched the first part of the movie-musical Chicago last night. After reading so many reviews of how wonderful, smart, and sexy this film was, I was ready to be pleased.
Instead, Chicago was turgid, simple, silly and dull. It was hard to project Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger onto characters that sexily sing and dance — and the music was full of adolescent Disneyesque features. I wanted to like Queen Latifah playing Mama but she seemed old and cute. The collaged scenes and the extravagent lighting was ridiculous and was better suited for the stage production. I fell asleep watching it while reading Utne (albeit, this says little good about Utne as well).
Full disclosure: I detest musicals but I thought I’d give this piece a chance.

14 to 42: New York City Signs features about five dozen photos of those beautiful, hand-painted and now decaying commercial signs that used to be found throughout Manhattan. These ads for hotels, clothing, restaurants and warehouses are symbols of an era gone but they continue to peek out from beneath their blankets of grime and worn paint and remind us of our pre-lapsarian past.
While the signs speak for themselves, the author, Walter Grutchfield, has researched many of these fading images, providing commentary and context to this visual archive. I especially like the the all-over signage on the Endicott Express building at 555 W. 33rd Street.