This is definitely an intermission-tastic poem day, due to the pace of the work week. Bob Dylan's birthday was this Tuesday, and WNCW marked the occasion by playing covers of his work. Like Leonard Cohen, Dylan's poetic style has proved wonderfully infectious, with some of the covers exceeding the originals.
The one below, "With god on our side," by the Neville Brothers, is one of the best Dylan covers I've heard. The video is mediocre, the song superb. Happy Friday, everyone.
There are jetpacks, naturally. Art by Fred Freeman, 1966
Today's poem didn't strike me as a poem, at first. This piece by Mark Wallace is really more of a manifesto-style rant formed into epigrams.
But it's too perfect, and too damn quotable, to pass up. Here's a brilliant stab into future-loves' jet-pack adoring heart:
In the future, we’ll plan the future better.
In the future, you can just become your TV.
In the future, your sexual partners will meet all the qualities on your checklist.
And this anxiety you’re feeling now? In the future you won’t feel it.
In the future, technology will always work, and there won’t even be weekend downtime for systems repair.
In the future, Friday night parties will never be boring.
In the future there will be less deadlines and they’ll be easier to meet.
In the future, all pollution will contain its own self-cleaning element.
In the future, if your house burns down, you’ll have another house by the time you get home.
In the future, your insurance policy will actually pay.
In the future, your friends won’t talk so constantly about everything they think they should already have.
In the future, no good deed will go unrewarded.
In the future people will like you just for who you are.
In the future, everyone will have their own sky marshal.
Continue reading "Poems for Friday: Prediction (The Future)" »
One eminent bastard, illustration by Jean-Claude Floch
One Nov. 30 Jacques Barzun — famed critic, scholar and all-around intellectual juggernaut — turned 103. He is, apparently, still in good enough health to enjoy the occasional cocktail and I wish him the best.
This is a good moment to say that Barzun's work, especially his 2000 masterpiece From Dawn to Decadence, played a major role in the thinking about history and the future that led to this blog. If I had to make a Breaking Time reading list, he'd probably be in the top pantheon. For more on the exact nature of his critiques, read the Coilhouse piece I wrote on Barzun's work two years ago.
In an age that both wants to resort to nothing but recycled ideas and pretend history never happened, Barzun admirably chose to defy both, advocating instead for a balance of both intellectual discipline and passionate ardor. To read Dawn was to see how our own era exploded out from attempts to answer the utter breakdown of the old medieval order. It placed human struggles in uncertain times in a greater context, and gave both reassurance (times of turmoil have led to better days) and warning (sometimes you get a dark age). Add to that an ingenious structure (one possibly as close to hyperlinks as you can get on the printed page) along with a downright prophetic use of urban cross-sections to exemplify eras and you have required reading for understanding how the world got to its current state.
Barzun's genius has always been to see the strings of ideas pulling many things (technology, economics) that we view as inexorable forces. Those ideas can change — and will — because they've changed before, and our world will change along with them. Whenever I emphasize the way culture often drives technology, this blog owes a debt to Barzun.
“Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.”
His other major influence was something I call militant eclecticism. While Barzun views the current age as decadent (in the sense of old ideas running out of steam), he's no ideologue and in his rigorous study of the past there's also reassurance: today may be drastically different, but we have beaten this before, and we can do so again. The previous medieval collapse birthed the Renaissance through a whole array of new ideas, often at odds with each other. Why is today any different?
“Reading history, one finds that there have been periods, say toward the end of the Middle Ages, the late fifteenth century, when everything looked very much as it looks now. And even though we may say their difficulties were lesser, their powers were less too. The interesting question is whether our greater powers and our greater knowledge — and by that I don’t mean our deeper knowledge, I mean our more extensive awareness of what’s going on everywhere at once — are going to be helpful or harmful. The possible harm of knowing too much is that it excludes possibilities that might work. You say: ‘Oh, we can’t do that! Look that the statistics!”
Happy Belated Birthday, Mr. Barzun, and here's to a plural future, statistics be damned.
Full moon over Los Angeles, by Marcio Watanabe
Hello there, readers. I know we've been on hiatus here for some time, as I was first writing every waking moment and then romping around the Los Angeles area for a long-awaited break. Contrary to popular reports, I was not engaged in journalistic derring-do or running gun battles in the Bradbury Building. Really.
However, Along with some much-needed de-stressing time, I got to geek out on art deco era civic architecture and the irreplaceable thrill of exploring a new area. I got to meet Zoetica and the famed Vivacious G in person, finally see an old friend and push my own boundaries a bit. Of course, by the end I wanted more time and there were things I wanted to do that I didn't get to, but at its core, except for a bout with nasty illness at the very end, it was everything I could have asked for and more. Thank you to everyone for your amazing hospitality and general awesomeness.
After that much-needed mental cleansing, I've returned looking forward to more writing and no longer quite as frustrated about a number of stalled pieces. More here, and soon. In the meantime, it is Friday, and so you lovely, patient people get a poem. Here's a classic from William Carlos Williams:
You Communists and Republicans!
all you Germans and Frenchmen!
you corpses and quickeners!
The stars are about to melt
and fall on you in tears.
Get ready! Get ready!
you Papists and Protestants!
you whores and you virtuous!
The moon will be bread
and drop presently into your baskets.
Friends and those who despise
and detest us!
Adventists and those who believe
nothing!
Get ready for the awakening.
I'm about to head out into the wilds for the holiday, but I'll leave you with these perfect parting words from Robert Penn Warren.
Hunt, hunt again. If you don't find it, you
Will die. But I tell you this much: it
Is not under the stone at the foot
Of the garden or by the wall by the fig tree
I tell you this much to save you trouble, for I
Have looked. I know. Hurry, for
The terror is, all promises are kept
Even happiness.
Cats good. Internets NOT.
Oh, Ray Bradbury. You have not mellowed with age. He had these choice remarks at a recent event marking his 90th birthday:
Ray Bradbury is mad at President Obama, but it's not about the economy, the war or the plan to a construct a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City.
“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week's worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events. “We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever."
The man who wrote "Fahrenheit 451," "Something Wicked This Way Comes," "The Martian Chronicles," "Dandelion Wine"and "The Illustrated Man" has been called one of America's great dreamers, but his imagination takes him to some dark places when it comes to contemporary politics. “I think our country is in need of a revolution."
“There is too much government today. We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.”
---
“We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.”
Bradbury wrote darkly about bookburning in "Fahrenheit 451," but he sounds ready to use a Kindle for kindling. “I was approached three times during the last year by Internet companies wanting to put my books" on an electronic reading device, he said. "I said to Yahoo, 'Prick up your ears and go to hell.' "
Yeah. Mr. Bradbury manages the amazing feat of encouraging political revolution because of a lack of a grand technological project which will make us immortal space gods, then tuns around and gives full throttle to the Luddite demons that have possessed him since way back when.
Is this hilarious? Yes. I can't help but being a little sad as well. Once upon a time, Bradbury was the ferociously cynical (yet humanistic) voice of a better sci-fi. He played a major role in igniting the medium's Deviant Age (also its Golden one, for my money) and his stories remain justly famed.
He's always been prickly, to put it kindly, but part of me always hoped that at some point he'd get past his prejudices and find some shred of the voice he once possessed in such abundance. We could certainly use it.
Nah. Chuck the machines, chuck the internet(s). The only majesty's in rocket ships. And we need to shoot the too-much-government motherfuckers who aren't getting us to Mars. STAT. Really, Mr. Bradbury?
On the other hand, perhaps he saw this:
Yes, take a moment. Then watch that again. Comedian Rachel Bloom hits one out of the park. "Fuck me, Ray Bradbury" is deliciously filthy and perfectly timed (see how she intones "you're a prolific author, Ray Bradbury"). It's unrepentant fun and, in its own strange way, a tribute to the wonder that the best of his works possessed while managing a catchy tribute to the kink side of geekdom.
Meet the future, Ray. It loves you anyway.
I meant to post more this week, I really did. But journalism is, as ever, a demanding mistress and I'm now stuck in the middle of the Bele Chere chaos. I have amazing readers and I've been happy to see the impassioned response to my previous post/rant.
It is Friday, and so the least I can give you is a poem. This tour de force is from slam genius Anis Mojgani. Enjoy, and there will be more as soon as I physically have the time to write it.
Set the warriors to sea in a ship stacked with shields, layers of swords, mountains of gold. Lay them out with their wife. With their child. Lay them out with their livestock, with the whole farm. The rain is not coming here. Not today. For today the gods welcome one of their own back home. So set the hero out on the soft waves that will carry him to the other side of the pink ether where he will float on fire until the ash consumes him like the mighty warrior he once was and like the legend he will become. The flames will dance over his possessions, his goblets and arrows, his blankets, his paintings, his passions. The flames will dance across his flesh like the soft fingers of the soft lover he left, and as he sleeps this last sleep, the fires will eat him away, the heat will write his skin across the night sky to join the constellations that will guide the sailors at storm, the herders lost in the clouds, they will all come home by facing the direction his eyes are facing. The heavens are filled with smoke. This is history this is legend this is what we once were. Where the stories come from, what we are. When you fall in battle, they will take your body with the life you made in this world and set it off to sail behind you into the next, so that you will stay a king, remain forever the golden being you breathed as on this side of the mountain. When you pass, may your life follow you like a shadow into the light. When I go, bury me with nothing but my own skin. I spent far too many days trying to outrun this thing called mine, so if I set myself into your arms would you hold me like the earth, quietly? I am yours. Give me a field, give me a big sky. A mountain. Give me your mouth. I’m just looking for a quiet place that I could die inside of.
