Things to Come

Let's see--one stone from Bosnia, another from Baghdad, that polished one in the middle is from the foundation of the White House , the little charred one in the corner comes from the WTC mall, and that big rounded one is from Andrea Dworkin's stomach--she needed it to digest her food. It's just a crazy-quilt of cold and hard come-downers!

Ed Pahnjorndice here; there's nothing more depressing for us than surfing through the other blogs in this virtual Land-of-Nod.

Take a gander at this one: http://theurbancontemplative.blogspot.com/

It's even in the same stock format as the Panopticon. Plough around a bit and it gets worse (or at least that's how we feel).

Honestly, with all this blogging and MySpacing and emailing--does anybody actually pay any attention to it all or is it just going-through-the-motions--like buying the big economy pack of Christmas cards and working through a printed-out list? MySpace for example--once the MySpacecadet has "set up shop," creatively decorated the page (with all the panache of a person with way too many family photos and refrigerator magnets), and written the all-too-predictable bio (Sex and the City a favorite TV show--imagine that!) then it's the hollow game of adding "Friends" like game pieces, or getting hip-yet-Hallmark comments from them. It's as if all these electronic social interactions consist of nothing more than metaphorically shouting arabesqued-yet-impersonal halloos at each other from distant corners of a darkened cave. Nothing of any real significance actually transpires. ("Coooool--good to hear from ya! Thanks for addin' me as a Friend!) But then again, we have coffee shops on Erde that are hotbeds of intense conversation and not creepy mixes of corporate work cubicles and caffeine "opium dens." Very different worlds.

We here at the Institute do this thing-called-a-blog largely for our own amusement; it's fun wringing the last drop of zaniness and nonsense out of a terminally banal planet. But sometimes we have to admit that we really really worry that things have gone so far that the very idea of, say, a whale touring the nation on a railway flatcar (and not to make any particular political, sociological, or environmental point) has simply lost all zany meaning to all but a handful of holdouts. Sadly, we have accepted the truisms that language-fun and word-play in your culture are largely limited to creating euphemisms and exclusionary vocabulary, and the "creative" efforts of black youths with rhyming dictionaries. Historical or non-contemporary cultural allusions?--forget it. In a history and culture illiterate society (one that--horror of horrors--actually feels smug about this ignorance!) it's like telling jokes in ancient Sumerian.

Oh well. The Tunarians are holding a big bash tomorrow night (Pilate's Jog--one of our favorite holidays) and Patty Pille--the most interesting gal in the Empire--is my date. Late in the evening there'll be a flyby by the glowing plasma-covered interplanetary spacecraft Venus Enfers and absolutely insane fireworks with live music. Imagine a world where an infinitesimal fraction of, say, your defense budget is spent by the government to just develop outrageous fireworks no private firm would ever dream of wasting R&D money on--thank the Imperial Department of Public Entertainment. Free enterprise is surely a grand and glorious thing but only if the only goal is to make money. It groans mightily and produces mouses--like the IPod, a smaller, cheaper-to-make-and-ship method of storing near infinite amounts of crappy corporate music. Wow! Did the planet just shift on its axis? Myths and PR spin aside, there's never really anything daring, outrageous, or nonlinear about "free enterprise" and that instantly leaves out a whole lot of potential fun and adventure. The equation is a simple one me buckaroos--nobody is going to invest anything in something unless it's pretty much a sure thing and nothing genuinely new is ever a sure thing.