Robyn – We Dance To The Beat
The lyrics are fucking pretentious, but the beat is allright and so is the rest of the track; great sound effects.
Archive for October 14th, 2010
The Elevator Only Goes Down
Besides the changing colours of the leaves, one of the tell-tale signs of the on-set of fall in Canada is the coming of the Massey Lectures. The Lectures are an annual event wherein a noted Canadian or international scholar or cultural figure gives a week-long series of lectures across the vast country on a political, cultural or philosophical topic of their choosing. Past lecturers have included several Nobel laureates, including Martin Luther King, Jr., George Wald, Willy Brandt and Doris Lessing as well as a host of other prominent folks like Noam Chomsky, J. K. Galbraith, Jane Jacobs, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Margaret Atwood.
This year’s lecture is by prominent Canadian novelist, artist and zeitgeist-ist Douglas Coupland. Coupland’s lectures are titled Player One – What Is to Become of Us?: A Novel in Five Hours. According to Coupland, the novel “…presents a wide array of modes to view the mind, the soul, the body, the future, eternity, technology, and media” and is set “In a B-list Toronto airport hotel’s cocktail lounge in August of 2010.”
To prep folks for the lecture (and its following publication as a book), Coupland recently published an article in the Globe and Mail entitled “A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years”. The article offers “45 tips for survival and a matching glossary of the new words you’ll need to talk about your messed-up future“. Some highlights:
1) It’s going to get worse
No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.
2) The future isn’t going to feel futuristic
It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
6) The middle class is over. It’s not coming back
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?
That’s where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going – to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return. However, this won’t stop people from self-identifying as middle-class, and as the years pass we’ll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back. Enjoy the new monoclass!
15) Make sure you’ve got someone to change your diaper
Sponsor a Class of 2112 med student. Adopt up a storm around the age of 50.
16) “You” will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze
While it’s already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances – it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize.
27) Hooking up will become ever more mechanical and binary
29) You will have more say in how long or short you wish your life to feelTime perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.
34) You’re going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought
35) Stupid people will be in charge, only to be replaced by ever-stupider people. You will live in a world without kings, only princes in whom our faith is shattered
The number of tribal categories one can belong to will become infinite. To use a high-school analogy, 40 years ago you had jocks and nerds. Nowadays, there are Goths, emos, punks, metal-heads, geeks and so forth.
41) The future of politics is the careful and effective implanting into the minds of voters images that can never be removed
42) You’ll spend a lot of time shopping online from your jail cell
Over-criminalization of the populace, paired with the triumph of shopping as a dominant cultural activity, will create a world where the two poles of society are shopping and jail.
The full list is here. I am not convinced about no. 45.
Koningin op foto met bejaardenhuis (plus begeleiders)
Bruin-I, horrorcoalitie, Dino-I, rollatorkabinet, kabinet-Wilders, wat voor naam je er ook maar aan wilt geven… Here they are. Yay.
