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| photo: Midweek Post |
It will be interesting to see what life is like in New York 5000 years from now. The Pyramids and Petra have lasted. What will be the fate of Grand Central and the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt that greets you as you scoot up the ramp of the Viaduct? What about the cavern of seemingly immortal stone that comprises Park Avenue? BTW will “pre-war” have any meaning? By then there are going to be lots of wars and not so long ago—during the pandemic—midtown registered the desolate landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. Actually with teleportation the chosen means of travel, there’s unlikely to be much touring about in real space/time. However, you do have to live on a day to day basis and one option is always virtual reality where all your wants and desires are taken care of. Even as far back as 1635 Pedro Calderon de la Barca wrote a classic play Life is a Dream—which essentially deals with what to do when the carpet's pulled out from under you.
The "esthetic," the "ethical" and the "religious" were three stages of existence Kierkegaard proposed. Dark energy and matter and the cosmological constant emanate from the annals of cosmology. Conspicuous consumption and ostentation a la Veblen and raw ambition aka romanticism are materializations of agency. If you find this abstract, consider the advent of paper currency—transcendentalism employed in the service of coinage. Is inflation inspired by otherworldliness? Piaget identified the stages of development as "sensorimotor," "pre operational," "concrete operational" and "formal operational." Elizabeth Kubler-Ross also identified the stages of dying as "denial," "anger," "bargaining," "depression" and "acceptance."
At night the semis and car trailers fill the highways, it’s not unusual to spot oil deliveries. When it’s raining, curtains of water blind windshields. The drivers of lesser vehicles may find themselves snubbed like the person at the tony gathering who is short on social capital. These large juggernauts fill freeways with a reptilian civilization whose only threat is the coming ice age. If you listen to the horns occasionally blaring in the darkness, you think you’re watching Wild Kingdom.
Is Richard Linklater making a documentary about the making of Breathless (1960) or a documentary in the style of Breathless or a fiction film in a documentary style? Of course Godard was, in fact, making an American style gangster film with Seberg, a star whose last film, Bonjour Tristesse (1958), was shot by Otto Preminger, as the moll. One of the truly Godardian aspects of the film is the use of language and particularly aphorism. Godard famously said "cinema is truth 24 frames a second." The dialogue is punctuated with a series of Brechtian declamations about the nature art and reality and life ("I don't know if I'm unhappy, because I'm not free or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy") and cinematic citations (the poster for Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall, Plus dura sera la chute appears in both films). Where Nouvelle Vague is disconcerting is in the portrayal of the supernumeraries, Truffaut, Chabrol and Melville who come off as parodies (the title of the film is misleading--it's not about the "new wave, but a single film) and its attempt to translate Breathless which quite simply falls short. Linklater is an original himself. Nouvelle Vague is his film and not simply a homage to Godard--and that's ultimately the problem. (Edit note: BTW see Breathless whose greatness lies in its imperfection).
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| Descartes |
Reading comprehension starts to be measured in grammar school. Of course, who knows what the dreaded future will hold! Forget AI! Chance is exponential. Moore’s Law about chips can be applied to anything and there is a cost for everything. Technology in sedentary. Suddenly you don't have to think. Who woulda thought? And how do you know what you’re reading is not the product of a Nvidia chip. Romantic love will really be romantic when it’s computer generated and lives eternally in cyberspace. No more Tristans or Juliets. Advanced systems can’t imbibe poisons though they can get viruses. One computer will request the bitcoin to pay off the hijacker. No need for any human hands to get dirty. Is ChatGBT responsible for the decline of reason?
Say you want to eat the world. The problem is you've become a cockroach, genus Gregor Samsa and there is only so much space in your gut. Your eyes are bigger than your tummy. Mice and rats are your dinosaurs. It is almost unfair that you have to be satisfied with crumbs while all the other rodents get to dine on you. What could be worse? If only it were possible to talk to one's confreres scratching in the walls. See that water bug scurrying away. It's one thing to sense danger and another to talk about it. Everyone knows that the only cockroaches that have words are the ones who went through their life-changing metamorphoses from man to bug.
Is this Dresden after the fire bombing? Politically democracy has been mortally wounded. One cannot turn back the socio-economic structure of the country to the Enlightenment ideals on which it was based. On an individual basis it’s similar to a relationship in which trust had been lost. Once the fabric is torn, it’s nigh impossible to mend. Who would have thought the the basic foundations created by the Constitution and The Bill of Rights were as fragile as the East Wing which fell so easily to the wreckers ball? 9/11 was prescient. The United States protected in both sides by oceans never seemed vulnerable to attack and it wasn’t even a foreign government, rather a small guerrilla force. Who would have predicted that Putin would have gone "nuclear?"
