Elsewhere

Johnny Ramone succumbs to cancer, age 55.

Now only Tommy, the drummer, is left.

Even rock ‘n roll legends are only around for a short while.

—

So much of what we revere as “legendary” in pop culture was
created within only the last 100 years (50 for most of it). There’s
already so much stuff out there that you could only listen to legendary
music or legendary movies or classic literature and it would be a long,
long time before you ran out of material. And in the meantime, you
wouldn’t have any time to check out the new stuff that’s coming out.
Not to mention all the thought cycles spent on processing the content:
storing it, remembering it, thinking about it, evaluating it, during
which time you might have been thinking of other things in your life.
(Just how much time do you spend processing media? Are you comfortable with that?)

Since the advent of recorded media, and now with the ubiquity of tools for
creation, distribution, and access, the piles of content we produce as
a society are growing exponentially (especially with chumps like me
spewing out drivel in weblogs 24/7). There’s no practical way a single
human could be familiar with any more than an increasingly small sliver
of pop culture; soon, we will have collectively forgotten more than any
one person can ever know.

It’s quite conceivable that some time in the near future, more people will have never known about The Ramones than ever knew about them to begin with. OK, maybe not the best example, that’s probably true already, but it goes for anything else that you may hold dear to your media-saturated heart. Say, Michael
Jackson. Imagine a world, years from now, where so many pop stars have come and gone, and so many public figures have led freakish lives, that Michael Jackson is no more than a footnote.

What will that mean for pop culture, society, and our lives as we know it? What will this
be like for future generations — how will they deal with this
cradle-to-grave ocean and mountainous back catalogs of content? Will
media cease to hold any long-term meaning? Will our culture become
nothing more than a cash machine for whatever we’re supposed to be
buying at the moment, with little to no comprehension of the
perspectives of previous generations (oh wait, that’s already
happened)? Will there be a backlash against the disposable mindlessness
of it all, a movement to return to what’s “real”, a cry out for some
semblance of continuity (the seeds are already planted and growing, I
think)?

What does this mean for those who consider themselves
artists? Will art be redefined as a strictly temporal subject, not
meant to have meaning beyond the time of its creation? Has it already
been redefined thusly? If art is disposable, can we expect our
individual lives to hold any meaning beyond the immediate moment?

Is it all just a big crazy cycle that we are doomed to repeat ad infinitum?

[Insert "Get me off this crazy thing!" quote of choice here -- Hmm, how about "Stop the boat!" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (if that reference is not already lost on you).]

On a related note, I’m looking forward to the re-release of George Lucas’s THX 1138.

rn5009: $ ssh dh^H^H
ssh: dh\010\010: host/servname not known
rn5009: $ sstty ersae
ksh: sstty: not found
rn5009: $ stty eras ^He
unknown mode: eras
rn5009: $ stty ersae ^H
unknown mode: ersae
rn5009: $ stty erse
unknown mode: erse
rn5009: $ stty erase ^H
rn5009: $ jesus
ksh: jesus: not found
rn5009: $

A few weeks ago I was
enjoying a leisurely dinner at a favorite local pub. At one point I
realized that someone had just popped a CD into the sound system and it
was really, really good. A mellow funk/rock vibe with a very skillful
and soulful vocalist, perfect for relaxing and noddin’ your head to it.

As we paid, I asked the bartender about it. Turns out it was a local Seattle band called Maktub. I picked up the CD and I
must say I’m not disappointed. I was afraid it had been the pint of
amber going to my head and making things sound better than they
actually were, but no, this is good stuff. Found some reviews online
that call this band “Seattle’s best kept secret” and wonder why they
haven’t made it bigger than they have — I suspect it’s because they’ve
got a bit of an indie philosophy.

In any case, check it out. Really, you can’t go wrong when the lead singer blogs
about playing Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer with the band on the
tour bus, even though the music leads you to think that they are rock
‘n roll pimps rather than role players. Love that.

… is the most precious resource in
the world. And it’s getting harder and harder to come by as we all
become more paranoid. It’s difficult to even maintain long-term
one-on-one relationships anymore, much less communities of mutual
respect and support.

Everyone’s looking for an angle, looking
for the next best thing. They’ll turn on you as soon as it seems
advantageous for them to do so. “It’s just business” works in business,
but that attitude is creeping into everyday life. Corporations and governments
are digging ever deeper into our lives; even when it seems to benefit
us, it always requires that we slip an inch farther into submission, to
the point where we don’t even know how to be responsible for ourselves
anymore, so how could we trust anyone else?

Trust means an
assumption of loyalty. Loyalty means the willingness and readiness to
sacrifice something of yourself rather than compromise an implicit
contract of trust — for the sake of maintaining that trust, or at
least your reputation as a trustworthy individual, a trait which can
inspire loyalty to you in others, and hence their willingness to
sacrifice for your good.

Trust is currency. Trust is fragile. Trust is precious.