Counterforce

It’s Friday. I’m tired. I can’t brain today cause I have the dumb, sorry. So, I’m just going to share some gems from the internet with you and then we’ll call it that, okay?

It starts like this:

from here.

Then it comes to this, with how Willy Wonka should’ve ended:

from here.

I actually kind of smiled and laughed as I watched that video. I don’t know. It’s just hilarious to me.

And then it ends like this:

from here.

Play it in a never ending loop. It’s oddly hypnotic.

President Barack Obama at the Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, from here.

Or is it? I ask you: Is “the future” that we talk about and theorize and plan for and fear and hope and lust after, is it just another piece of art that we’re creating? Or destroying?

Are you afraid of tomorrow? Or looking forward to where the humans go? Or is it just too far off to accurately discuss?

Beyond the pilot, I’ve yet to catch an episode of the Battlestar Galactica spinoff, Caprica, but I’m desperate to before – and let’s face it – they cancel it:

The music video for “In Repair,” a song by a band I used to like quite a bit, Our Lady Peace, from their album, Spiritual Machines, which features the thoughts and ideas and voice of the futurist Ray Kurzweil quite a bit:

And here’s the trailer for The Transcendent Man, a documentary about Kurzweil. Interesting stuff. Especially, and I hate myself or saying this, the celebrity cameos. See:

You can see Kurzweil on Glenn Beck here.

Or, you can see Kurzweil explaining the coming singularity here.

He also made an old resting list of ours, which you can find here.

You can flash back to Maria and I talking about related things (and Megan Fox and the robots who will fuck you) here.

And while I enjoyed the pilot to Caprica, which is on the still ridiculously named “SyFy” channel, part of me is sad that it’s associated with Galactica. I would’ve enjoyed it a bit more if it was it’s own thing. Hopefully it’s still on Hulu, because I need to catch up. Also, I think I’m in love with “the first cylon,” played wonderfully by Alessandra Torresani.

Other craziness:

FLASHBACK! Why the internet will fail (from 1995).

Old people, lifecasting, and the future of the internet.

Other great Our Lady Peace songs include: “Clumsy,” as well as “Superman’s Dead,” I guess, and “Is Anybody Home?” and the epic and immortal “Starseed.” And a song called “Will The Future Blame Us,” which is okay, I guess, but the title is hilarious to me. The answer is yes. Time travel will be created in the future mainly due to posterity’s desire for revenge.

Ray Bradbury on predicting what the future will look like:

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”

from 1979′s Beyond 1984: The People Machines.

Oh well. The future’s an interesting place that I want to live in someday. And who doesn’t want to be on the team of architects who designs it? But there’s a massive gaping difference between desire and talking and just doing and building. And talking about the future tends to be elegant masturbation.

And a last thought:

“The very people who believe that everything has already been discovered and everything said, will greet your work as something new, and will close the door behind you, repeating once more that nothing remains to be said.”

“Newness is in the mind of the artist who creates, and not in the object he portrays.”

“What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”

-Eugène Delacroix, via here and here.

The lovely Liberty Leading The People, 1830, by Eugène Delacroix, which, sadly, you last song on the cover of the last fucking Coldplay album.

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

-William James

from here.

“Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.”

-Jiddu Krishnamurti

“No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”

-Henry Miller

“Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”

-Bertrand Russell

“I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.”

-Immanuel Kant

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.”

-Richard Bach

from here.

It’s finally here, people. 2010. Pronounced “Twenty Ten.”

I remember first watching the movie version of 2010, the sequel to Arthur C. Clarke/Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when I was a kid and thinking about how far off that was, how ridiculously deep into the future that was. Oh, science fiction. How you captured and enraptured my stupid little brain even back then. How you can give me such enticing glimpses of a far off tomorrow (not that 2010, the movie, was all that enticing), and through it all, I don’t stop to actually notice how similar tomorrow is to today.

It really hits me now, especially, since tomorrow is now today.

This is our science fictional future? I want more. And who knows, maybe more is right around the corner. This is “the year we make contact,” after all. Right? And if it’s not, then why can’t it be? Why can’t it be the year that we make contact?

And I think we will somewhere in the vicinity of the next 365 days. We’ve been hovering around a vein, I think, us humans, us earthlings, and I think we’ll tap into it in some way. Maybe not with aliens, but with something. With science. With space. Maybe, and this is more importantly, maybe with something within ourselves, something beautiful and precious. Or maybe something deep and dark.

from here.

Sitting here and reading this right now, you, maybe you’ll be the one who makes contact with something. The next act of your journey. Maybe one of our readers will win the lottery or finish their novel or self portrait or get their blog-to-book deal that they’ve desperately longed for. Maybe we will, but who knows, it might be you. Maybe this is the year you find inspiration, or inspire someone else to greatness. Maybe we’ll meet the love of our life. Or, more importantly, the love of our life will meet us.

from here.

But “The Year We Make Contact” shouldn’t be about “maybe this” or “maybe that.” It’s not just about new understandings and expanding. It’s about conquering. When you’re done reading this blog, quietly minimize the internet, and go do. Go be. Become something.

Two things, and stay with me just another few paragraphs even though I know you’re hungover, but two more things and then I’ll finish my say and let you have yours. One is slightly raunchy: I have this aunt, old as shit and half crazy, I’m pretty sure, but she’s always had this ridiculous saying. She’d always say, “At some point you have to stop jacking off and start coming.” A dirty little bit of wisdom, that.

And secondly, and lastly, like the song says, this will be our year. And it took a long time to come. Make it worth it. Earn it. Go make contact.

Almost there. Not quite yet though…

But, man, what a frustrating year.

I felt like Tyler Coates‘ picture here summed up what my attitude was going into this year. And what all of our attitudes should’ve been. As it always should be.

And now Alec Baldwin sums up how I felt about this year.

Though this year has brought some things that I desperately wanted to see.

Or never thought I would see (all together in the same club).

Or things that I would be okay never seeing again.

And some things, things from my childhood, came to an end.

Some things, I think, I realized I was glad to see go.

And it really hit me in this past year that some things will not last forever.

And some of those things are through. Professionally, I mean.

Oh well. Shit happens. Things come. And things go.

And they keep going.

It’s all about perspective.

Isn’t that what they say?

This was the year of hope.

This was the year of rejections.

This was the year of saying that you wanted a revolution.

And it was also the year where you said, “Could you try not to rub your beard up against my forest of tears?”

It was about new things.

And new things to regret (in the morning)(probably)(but hopefully not).

It was, for me, the year I just accepted the often hellish, nonstop barrage of celebrity bullshit.

…Especially in the face of weird hookups that I just can’t condone.

And seeing things I loved shat upon.

But these things happen.

We hold onto the good.

And let go of the bad.

Time to dust yourself off.

Maybe you’ve learned some things. About life, the world, and yourself.

And made some decisions.

And had some fun.

But just remember…

It’s easy to ride off into the sunset.

It’s hard to still be there when the sun rises. But that’s where the true excitement and the fun lay.

Hopefully we’ll see you there.

from here.

It’s not that I’m an idiot (although, in the spirit of full disclosure, I sometimes am), it’s that I’m sometimes clueless. Or, forgetful. Or, mentally misplaced. You see, there’s a lot of shit floating around in my cranium. Some numbers, some interesting data, some bullshit ephemera about what episode of what season in what obscure TV show a character walked down the wrong hallway to go to the bathroom, tons of music, a few memorized beautiful things I’ve seen in my days, some horrors I’ve always memorized, and a collection of all the breasts I’ve come across and been mesmerized. Yeah, there’s a pun there. A bad one, at that.

This morning, I woke up and smiled that kind of smile that only happens on a day off. I got up, stretched, did the various things I do when I wake up alone, the scratching of places and releasing of certain human fluids, then went to the internet and began absorbing facts. A typical day. There’s “significant amounts” of water on the mother fucking moon!

from here.

And I was reading some stuff about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I knew I was a few days late to, but it’s still fascinating, right?

I even put on some music as I did this. Made myself a little playlist in my music player and put it on random/shuffle, and you know what song came on several times? My favorite song by the Cure, that’s what. This one:

That’s “The 13th,” and I just adore it. Not the video so much, but the song, definitely.

There was a commercial on TV for a Friday The 13th marathon. And I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Thought about 2012, the batshit crazy stupid but fun looking Roland Emmerich movie that came on today that I’ll probably see tomorrow with Conrad Noir, who tells me he’s not all that interested because he was let down by The Day After Tomorrow. Well, no shit you were let down by The Day After Tomorrow, right? Anyway, that’s most likely on tomorrow’s agenda.

Long story short, it took me until like noon or later to actually fucking realize that it was Friday the 13th. I probably shouldn’t be bragging about that.

It happened at some local coffee shop that I went to, and, well, it was embarassing, but interesting. I live in a small town, the kind where it’s hard to not get to know everyone and their quaint little stories. And all the Southern gothic ghost stories that goes along with it. So I do my best to avoid people as best I can, but today I felt like getting out of the domecile for a bit and going for a run and experimenting with various Pandora stations on my smart brilliant phone.

The search for the perfect Pandora station is man’s constant crawl towards enlightenment, nirvana, and the fingerbanging of God. The pleasure is in the quest, not the capturing because the goal is unreachable, but we still try. That’s the beauty of the humans, or something. Regardless, I’ve been bouncing back and forth, trying to find a good station while running/walking, and I took a chance on an 80s station.

Not bad, but you know what? As great as they can be, Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hollywood and “The Safety Dance” just felt a little too gay for this job. I needed something less festive, so I figured I’d shift a decade forward and did a search for an appropriate 90s station. Came up mostly zero, no joke, except for a fascinating station that played 80s music stars trying to make a comeback in the 90s:

Okay, that’s the lovely Bryan Adams song from the Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves soundtrack, which is fantastic all on it’s own (except when it’s used for a Dawson’s Creek fanvid, sorry), but in actuality, the first song that came on that station was Adams’ “Run To You,” which isn’t bad. And following that was some Tom Petty, which is always good in my book, and some Bon Jovi, which is atrocious (though old Bon Jobi works appropiately in some bar settings, I’m loathe to admit), and a whole fucking lot of Guns N’ Roses. It was weird, but I guess it did the trick, workout-wise.

Then I got to the coffee shop, got something to eat, something to drink, and meant to hide myself in the corner with some headphones and devour my meal and some more internet on my phone. Also with me were some printouts of various things I needed to revise and a copy of Warren Ellis’ new POD book, Shivering Sands, which had just come in the mail today. I feel like I’ve read most of it previously (it’s a collection of various writings of his from the internet of the past few years), but still, I was excited.

But as it sometimes can be when interesting people are in the vicinity, and frightfully true when there’s less than interesting people buzzing around you, I got sucked into some conversation. Found out it was 13th day of the month coinciding with the fact that it was also a Friday. Also absorbed some recent gossip. And, because of the recent anniversary, got involved with a conversation about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

You see, the conversation got even more interesting when it turned out that one of the women there was German, a former resident of East Berlin, who had been 18 when the wall came down, and moved to America shortly after. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with Germans in the past (and no, I’m not referring to World War II, though that was no picnic either, ha ha!), but every once in a while, I have a good experience with their women.

The woman and I talked for some time about the Berlin Wall, and primarily what it was like for her growing up in East Berlin. Essentially, it was bleak, but fascinating. And we had one of those conversations that always pop where she mentions that she was feeling uneasy today because she had left her cell phone at home and she just feels like she’s naked and out of touch, but growing up poor in Germany, they didn’t even have a phone in their house til she was 16. “How did we live in that ancient, strange world?” she asked with a laugh.

She had just seen The Lives Of Others a few weeks ago, she told me, and we talked about the movie, which is really quite good if you haven’t seen it yet, and about the Stasi in general. She told me that the movie scares her because back then, when she was growing up, you just always knew you were being watched, being monitored. You always suspected who was a Stasi man, but you never really knew for sure. And it didn’t hit you until later that it wasn’t so much agents of the Stasi you had to worry about, but those around you because everyone was informing on each other to get ahead.

Could’ve been worse. He could’ve thrown up in her lap.

From there we went into little aspects of German history, talking about “The Iron Chancellor” and how the Prussians united the country a hundred years before the Wall fell, and we even talked a little about Merkel, or “Angie,” as she called her, and told me what a fan she is, being that they’re both East German girls. She told me how it was so weird for her to come to America in her twenties and get a more full view of her own little world up til then and to compare it to growing up in communist Germany, where history was repainted with a propaganda slant. She mentioned that as a teen they were never allowed to refer to the Wall as just “the Wall,” it was always as the “tool for anti-fascist defense” or something like that.

She told me how when she was in school, it was a mandatory field trip for the kids to be taken to the concentration camps and shown all the gross details, the rooms with human remains permanently staining the walls, with the empty shoes of little babies that were turned to dust, the lampshades made out of flayed skin featuring Jewish tattoos. She told me how the physical evidence of the darkest corners of history would never leave her mind and part of her was glad that she was forced to see that shameful part of her country’s past, but that it’s something she knows kids don’t go to see anymore.

I don’t want to use the word “fascinating” again in this post, but that’s what it was. A fascinating conversation, and a fantastic one, informative and insightful. I thanked her for her time and being so patient with my curiousity, and of course for letting me know that it was actually Friday the 13th. Then I left, since I had been there for quite some time and it was starting to look like it might rain. I wasn’t interesting in listening to sad old men with hair plugs crooning bar anthems into my ear, so I just walked in silence, my head heavy with thoughts about everything we discussed.

“Komm rüber!” Hans Conrad Schumann defects, from here.

It did start raining before I got back to my front door, of course, but my mind was elsewhere and I didn’t actually realize it until I was pulling my key out to let myself back in and realized I was shivering there as the water dripped off of me.

And how did you spend your Friday the 13th?

I’m in a mood tonight to watch The Shining. Well, tonight or tomorrow sometime. I’m a scary movie mood, I guess. Something festive. Something seasonal. And I’m open to suggestions. Conrad Noir suggested The Exorcist which, no joke, I’ve never seen. Occam Razor suggested The Wicker Man remake with Nic Cage which, unfortuanetly, I have seen. And Benjamin Light made a joke about some new movie about a reanimated zombie pop star called This Is It.

All work and no play puts Marco Sparks in a mellow Halloween mood. The Shining, it is. Martin Scorsese agrees with me. Trick or treat, you sons of bitches.

Phoenix is the sweatiest city in America.

“Stranger In Moscow.”

Sydney and the light rail.

Augmented reality in London.

The ghost in the field, and RFID chips.

What will happen when London is flooded?

“Berlin” in Paris.

Interracial couple denied marriage license in Louisiana.

Soft robots and DARPA.

Moscow’s mayor promises a winter without snow.

Paris Syndrome and Jerusalem Syndrome.

San Francisco and the 1906 earthquake.

Rebuilding New Orleans.

from here.

“City Of Blinding Lights.”

A possible glimpse at our future space cities.

America’s most expensive cities and most impoverished cities.

FOX promises to air all 13 of the already ordered Dollhouse season two episodes.

Speaking of which, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin In The Woods being held back a year to be switched over to 3D.

“Magnetricity” observed for the first time.

A map of your future mega-cities and megaopolises.

“When the lights go down in the city…”

Sensing the immaterial-material city.

Cities underground and cities tsunami-resistant.

City Of Shadows.

The ruins of Chernobyl, over 20 years later.

“Cities In Dust.”

GTA IV: Inherent Vice City.

“Silver City” and “Sad, Sad City.”

Why all cities are haunted.

The mind of a city (and how our brains are similar).

The cityscapes of François Schuiten.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem.

The city is a battlesuit for surviving the future.

Phantom City: See the city that could’ve been.

“…when we reach the city.”

“I have come to wound the autumnal city.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

“I’ll take the coral reefs as my metaphor. Though hardly so beautiful. If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory….”

-a quote from Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, a movie that I was watching the other day and just first stirred the pot on several thoughts I had locked up. Thoughts about human beings and boxes we live in.

Warren Ellis had created a comic book character years ago called Jack Hawksmoor, the “king of cities.” Jack was a normal human who had been abducted by city-empathic aliens from the future and repeatedly operated on and “upgraded” to have city-specific powers for use with fighting some unknown future threat that was coming.

Jack Hawksmoor, the King Of Cities.

Hawksmoor, who’s name was inspired by both Spring Heeled Jack and Nicholas Hawksmoor, couldn’t survive for very long outside of an urban environment, but when he was in any city, he had powers specific to that city, including things like superhuman strength and agility, but also psychometry and the ability to control and alter architecture and infrastructure. I don’t think the character was ever utlized by successive writers to his full potential, but I do remember in one story where Hawksmoor had to fight a powerful villain, he made sure that the fight took place in Mexico City, the larged city in the world, to maximize his abilities.

Quarantined in utopia.

“There’s no one to know. There’s nothing to do. The city’s been down since you’ve been gone.”

Climate change and warfare.

“Black And White Town.”

Scientists create “sexual tsunami.”

12 sexist vintage ads.

What’s left of the Roman city of Dougga.

Futurism vs. Science Fiction.

Futuristic steampunk urban recycling.

The little town that Los Angeles killed.

Speaking of which: Future Los Angeles.

Future Chicago.

Future New York.

The saddest blow job story ever.

“History Of A Boring Town.”

Russell Brand not capable of monogamy.

10 most amazing ghost towns, including Prypiat.

“Everything In It’s Right Place.”

Scientists develop “brain to brain communication.”

As time progresses, the future will literally devour the past: WW2-era statue with added cell tower.

“Last Stop: This Town.”