Going to Flagstaff tomorrow for a few days, a romantic getaway. I always make it a point to visit the Lowell Observatory while I’m there, the place where the planet Pluto was discovered….and yes I do still consider it to be a planet and realize that I may be charged with scientific heresy for stating so.
Expect a lengthy post about jackets when I return…
I know, I know, the suspense will kill you
I don’t know if I should go out tonight or not. I just can’t decide. Also, I’m trying to find a nice 60′s style black leather jacket. I’m going on a mission at Scottsdale Fashion Square mall tomorrow…or maybe Target.
I got to thinking a while back about a lot of the cool, cocky and macho dads that were around when I was a little kid, and how a lot of them are sort of ailing and decrepit now with various health problems and such. Thinking about it makes it hard for me to take someone in their hipness seriously. I mean everyone else takes them seriously of course, but they just look naively mortal to me. Like when I’m out and I see a “life of the party” type dude, and everyone’s so interested and excited, I’m thinking in twenty years that guy’s probably going to have prostate problems or develop some sort of debilitating illness. And the beautiful girl of the summer of the year, will be off the map in 5. You know, the one that all the guy’s are after right now, that all the former beautiful girls of the summers of past years envy and complain about… in a few years she may be 200 pounds and be all washed up. In a few more years she may get diagnosed with something that will change her life forever.
I started thinking of all this a few years ago while reading in the bathtub about the disco era, about how there was this huge social scene, and everyone was so cool and indestructible, but within a few short years, people that were once high up in the social hierarchy that people worshipped, and probably thought they were too cool to associate with certain people, and bragged about their sexual conquests… within just a few years many of them were humbled by various medical conditions, on their deathbeds and such.
The timeline at warholstars
is a good reference for this. Just go through it and substitute your local hipsters’ names.
So that’s what I’m thinking of when I’m out for a night on the town. And I know that one’s supposed to just have a blast and not contemplate these sorts of things while grinding on the dance floor, but I just find it bothers me that others don’t appear to have this same self-conscious awareness…even though there are times when I wished I didn’t have it and am in fact nostalgic for more innocent times when I did not yet have quite so much of it.
I think it all ties in with greek myth’s like pandora’s box, or the metaphoric story of adam and eve and the tree of knowledge, lost innocence and discovering we are naked.
I got a couple of dvds in the mail that I bought off ebay…”Riot on Sunset Strip” and “Big Wednesday,” two of my favorite films. That reminds me, I don’t ever really watch TV, like actual TV. I only watch movies, but last week Shannon and I watched that show “Celebrity Rehab” or whatever. I made the comment that Gary Busey was the only cool or remotely interesting person on the show. She was like “what? he’s crazy,” but to me he seems like the sane person on the show, someone who’s from a generation and era that I can identify with. Everyone else on there is so mushy, the type to give unsolicited advice, or self diagnose themselves on lj. Anyway, the entire time while watching these type of shows, all I can think of is how we are doomed. While today’s young Americans are sitting around eating pizza, larding up, playing playstation, popping pills, and entertaining themselves via dumbed down surreality tv shows which feature washed up celebrities psychoanalyzing each other to death over insignificant self-invented personal problems, other countries are blasting off into space and filling the void. In other words…
meanwhile, children in India are learning math
I used to live in West Hollywood, on Sunset and San Vicente in an ultra gay neighborhood. One thing you learn real fast when looking for apartments in LA is that the gay areas are by far the nice areas…and the other parts of town are seedy “mini third world country” neighborhoods where almost nobody speaks english. I can’t even count the number of times I was called “faggot” while walking down sunset, by some random car full of jock assholes or mexicans that drove up there to “cruise the strip”(something that’s been cliche for like 40 years but still goes on)…so I can empathize with gays as to why they would have a chip on their shoulder. I don’t believe that homosexuality is completely healthy or normal. Whether or not it’s genetically inherited is irrelevant in determining it’s healthiness or normalcy as there are plenty of other abnormalities and psychological disorders out there which are genetically mapped out for us prior to our being born. However, most of us so called “straight” people have tendencies or idiosyncracies that are perhaps unhealthy and bizarre(perhaps even unhealthily bizarre!) and would be quite happy to be left alone, free to indulge and pursue them to the furthest of our hearts content!
I’ve struggled with this issue, and I personally think its best to have different places where communities can set their own norms. Freedom isn’t only freedom to do whatever an individual wants, but also freedom to live in the kind of society one wants to live in.
“Anything goes” type sactuaries like Hollywood, Las Vegas or Haight Asbury are fine, but so too must people be allowed to escape these types of communities where total sexual openness is the dominant ethos to ones where their more traditional societal norms are preserved and respected. Not everyone wants all that MTV in their neighborhood. In some places homey just don’t play that, and in other places well…homey do play.
And in the future…? to quote Michael York as Logan 5 in “Logan’s Run”
“There is no sanctuary!”
Michael Crichton died. Rest in peace. I know he is remembered mostly for Jurassic Park, and his later work challenging the neoscientific community in our Brave New World…but my personal favorite of his was always the 70′s sci-fi classic “Westworld.”
My friend Steve and I still quote it from time to time when we’re out and about
“Sloppy with your drink? Get this boy a bib”
One of Crichton’s most poignant speeches was this one where he talks about environmentalism as religion, with the incorporation of religious thought processes into modern science.
Environmentalism as Religion
And if you are or have ever been in a romantic relationship with a female, this insightful essay he wrote for Playboy Magazine in 1991 is a must read:
How to Fight
I didn’t discover the “How to Fight” essay until a couple of years ago, but i wish that issue of playboy would have been available to me way back in junior high(for the articles!) . I could have had a much better record.
Oh and enough about the stupid elections for a while. Any moment now I’m expecting to be escorted off to my re-education camp so I’ll leave just leave it at this:
Eight Wasted Years by John Derbyshire
I’m not looking forward to the next 4 years. As mediocre as Bush was in his second term, there is probably a lot that we took for granted. Freedom of speech for one thing. With democrats getting free reign over government, we can expect all sorts of things we never thought possible (ie. drivers licenses for illegal aliens). More than likely they will revive the “fairness doctrine.” They will try to water down talk radio and suppress internet sites…possibly even this one. They will deem traditional conservative views as “hate speech” and attempt to restrict them through laws. They will regulate everything. Be prepared for new internet sales taxes, and more federal intrusion into your internet goings ons. As businesses continue to escape to the deep south or leave the country entirely, the jobs lost will be replaced by new “public works” type jobs “green jobs” and the like. Worst of all, get ready to say goodbye to the supreme court.
The only hope is that they will do what Bush and Clinton did, and shrewdly govern to the opposite of what their party stands for thus disappointing their own people, and leaving us largely unscathed.
“As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase…
All things considered it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined. Then, I projected it six hundred years into the future. Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. That is, if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval. Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice.” -Aldous Huxley foreword to Brave New World 1946
Well, the election is tomorrow. Sometimes I wished we lived in an aristocracy. I think that a ruling class would be preferable over a single leader able to do things on a whim… probably would rather have something like a “council of elders.” And in a system with a ruling class, there should be opportunities for moving up in class like in the middle ages either through some great deed(being made a noble) or competition in an arena, slaying a gigantic beast etc. My ideal form of government would be similar to that of the ape city in Planet of the Apes(1968 version) even though I recognize they also incorporate some heavily theocratic elements as well….
I’ll take Dr Zaius over Obama and Mccain any day.
