June 30th, 2009 by Hoopleton

It’s hard to believe what people say, that the economy is improving. Plenty of properties sit on a list still awaiting foreclosure. More layoffs hover out in the distance. Markets refuse to move. Banks, many still holding “toxic assets,” refuse to lend money. The blessed consumer isn’t spending.

And so the question rattles around: have we hit bottom or are we still free falling?

Honesty is not something we can expect from those who maintain the economy, especially if their careers depend on our general sense of ease. The Obama administration, although a welcome change from the stupidity that were the Bush years, will not, cannot, by its very nature as a government offer the American people anything resembling the truth. Despite the President’s promises of transparency, truth and government are, and always have been, mutually exclusive. And just as politicians cannot be honest about the state of the economy they can also never be honest as to the cause.

A politically entrenched corporate culture that’s been busily selling off every national asset since the Carter administration. A military-industrial complex exporting war across all four hemispheres at the cost of trillions of dollars and millions of lives. A debt society that would serve to stabilize the entire global financial market on the willingness of the American middle class to gorge itself to the point of bankruptcy.

It would take more than bailouts to lead us out of the dark. It would require a complete realignment of basic economic truth. A change in priorities and lifestyles. A paradigm shift.

Instead we get tax breaks and spending from Republicans and half-assed government intervention from Democrats. All the while those in power reassure us that everything is fine. That business should continue as always. That we should consume. That the American dream is still available by way of American Express.

The big problem with American government, as has been revealed by the current fiscal disaster, is not so much the prevalence of waste, hypocrisy, secrecy or incompetence, as much as the lack of new and radical approaches. In a two party system there is no room for new ideas. Progressives and Socialists are ignored by Democrats as they have no other party to choose as a base for their ideologies. Fiscal-conservatives and libertarians are ignored by the Republicans for exactly the same reason. The lack of choice stifles debate and so age-old establishment theory becomes the gospel truth. Dissent is not tolerated.

As it was the old paradigm that brought us into economic ruin, solutions evolving out of that same paradigm cannot be expected to provide any real, lasting change. The question then becomes, not whether or not we’ve hit bottom, but once we do, or have, whether or not we’ll ever be able to crawl back out again.

June 30th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Challenge Your World is a company that tries to “help aspiring entrepreneurs turn innovative ideas into sustainable businesses.” Each year they also host a competition which “challenges 20 video artists to get involved by creating 20 wild, whimsical, and unconventional machines that solve environmental issues. If we’re going to create a new world we have to challenge ourselves to think differently, so these videos blast beyond boundaries, explore crazy ideas, and question the status quo.” Here’s one of those videos.

June 29th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Art for now, writing tomorrow.

"Reach" by KP Dawes, 2009

June 29th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Found on Craigslist, author unknown.

I’m a ghost
I used to think that I wasn’t dead. For years. I would talk about my
life in the past tense and not even realize it.

Now I’m like those specters that realize something isn’t as it used to
be. I can affect the world of the living in fleeting ways.

There is nothing but ash and stale smoke in my heart. It is cold and barren.

The greatest shock I’ve had recently was that, even if I wanted to be
alive again, that isn’t totally up to me. I’d have to convince someone
else that I was real enough so that they would let me into their
heart.

How can I do that when there is nothing left of me but this chill bitter wind?

But I have you to thank, dear one, for finally showing me what it is
that I truly am.

June 28th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Three in the morning. The stars have all gone out. I come in and out of consciousness and sometimes I can almost see the room where my body is laid out. I can feel something pressing against my forehead and lights hovering just beyond my eyelids. Sometimes I can even hear the faint whispers of people in the room. The noise of another world. What’s happening to me?

I get up and out of bed. I cross the hardwood to the bathroom and splash handfuls of water on my face. The dream follows me into my waking life. Strange shapes break across the surface of the mirror. The ceiling collapses in on me. And then I’m standing in the middle of the street at daytime. Traffic rushes past. People stop and stare. Crowds gather. For just a moment I float on air. And the dream resets. And again I’m back in bed.

Three in the morning and only darkness outside my window. It wasn’t real, you say. It’s all going to be okay. I look at you and you smile at me. Your hand brushes the side of my face. Your skin is warm. I try and ask your name. I try and focus on your eyes but they slip away. I’m pinned to the mattress. I can still hear the faint whispers coming from the other room. The rattle of the ceiling fan. Am I really awake? Was I ever awake? Is all this just the rambling of my brain? You tell me that I don’t have to think this way. You assure me that everything is going exactly according to plan. I want to believe you. I want to imagine this life as my life. I want to see you in the glow of the sun and know that you’re real. But I can’t trust anything I see. I can’t be sure.

Three in the morning. I’m alone in my apartment. Cigarette ash spilling out over the floor. A heavy haze of smoke drifting down through the gap at the door. You’re just a fantasy. A ghost image scribbled against the wall. I take a sip out of my drink, the bitterness makes me wince. As I crush out my cigarette I let myself drift back into a distant room where I can still feel the warmth of your skin against the side of my face. It’s all the nothing I’ve created, you tell me. I want to ask you what you mean, but I too now fade away.

June 28th, 2009 by Hoopleton

For a relaxing Sunday, I give you Fiona Apple, with her cover of “Across the Universe.”

June 27th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Never is our absolute obsession with the cult of celebrity more apparent than when one of them drops dead. Suddenly people who were otherwise quite normal and discerning start speaking in hushed tones about how strange and surreal their lives have become. How the world seems a bit darker. A little more meaningless.

It gets even worse when the more famous ones kick the bucket. The word “icon” gets thrown around a lot. The media covers the aftermath with an intensity normally reserved for the assassination of a president or a nuclear attack. Television news takes on an eerily religious fervor. You can’t go more than five minutes into a conversation without someone mentioning how Billy Jean forever changed their life.

At a time when Iranian students are being jailed en masse for protesting tyranny, as several nuclear powers are crumbling at the foundations, all I see, all I hear, is Michael Jackson. A pop star who not that long ago was being accused of child abuse, being celebrated as though he were the messiah. Flashes of old women standing in Red Square with photographs of Stalin fill the mind. Not to say that the “king of pop” (not that I ever remember a coronation by the way) ever murdered anyone, but the similarities in cultism are all too clear.

Michael Jackson wasn’t the greatest artist of our time. He wasn’t a great pillar of virtue. He wasn’t a role model. He was a sideshow freak that we helped construct. A living, breathing manifestation of our consumption. His appearance, his lifestyle, his apparent misconduct, all the inevitable consequence of man who lived entirely in the twisted, ugly light of stardom. A rag doll with illusions of divinity.

Now that he’s passed, instead of realizing how in so many ways this flesh and blood human being was the reflection of our decadence, we continue the worship. We construct memories that never existed. We buy out his albums. We lament his end as though he were a close friend or family member. Sure, he may have had a troubled history, we say, but he was an icon.

If Michael Jackson did indeed define an era, then he exemplifies much of what’s wrong in America. We are a collection of whores who would gladly sell ourselves at any price. A mob of fame obsessed gossip junkies. Empty vessels devoid of substance or meaning desperate to find an identity within the bargain bin. In the full light of the day we are brash, loud and gaudy. Walking, talking billboards ready to fetishize or destroy whoever it is that sells himself for the highest price.

Michael Jackson was a man, and in that I will mourn his passing as I would for any other person that may fade away, but as to Michael Jackson the king of pop, about his death, I have no kind words to say.

June 26th, 2009 by Hoopleton

A 2008, L’Illa Diagonal (a commercial centre in Barcelona) advert.

June 25th, 2009 by Hoopleton

It began with the use of natural obstacles, mountains, rivers, then it passed over to building walls, first of wood then stone. Sometimes a moat or a chasm. Eventually wire replaced wood. Concrete and steel replaced stone. The barriers got bigger, longer. Then they became electronic. Digital. Infinite. Walls built out of binary code that stretched across the full span of the metaverse.

It began with rival tribes. Cities warring for resources of food and water. Walls were built to keep the barbarians at bay. To guard against the onslaught of Alexander, Hannibal, Attila. A hundred other conquerors bent on immortality. As the technology of war improved increasingly walls were built to keep people in, not out. And to guard against invasions not by armies but by the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. With digital walls came digital enemies. Viruses. Bots. Spammers. Trojan horses. An array of binary conquerors obsessed not with immortality, but the chaos of anarchy, the beauty of annihilation, the desperate desires of consumption.

Globalism reverts to tribalism. Instant information and instant revelation connecting human consciousness as not since the days of tiny fishing hamlets, and disparate city-states. A vast planetary town square, a billion voices raised.

We gather round the nodes. Drunk off the information overload. A million frames per second. Soundless flashes of light. Bebop fantasia without the prerequisite of muscle mass. All of infinity jammed within a single terabyte of near indistinguishable computer code. Light replaces flesh. The residual static a new language for a new species.

Whereas the universe arrived in an explosion of electrical energy, so we return, evolving, devolving back into a stream of dancing electrical strings. God is absent. We have become the new Creator. Molding bodies, landscapes, entire worlds out of cybernetic clay.

It began with walls and it’ll end the same way. Constricted. Marginalized. The limits of life itself determined not by intelligence, ideals or the brute force of strength, but by the terrifying perfection of bandwidth. Our obsessive desires for freedom replaced by a desperation for peace. Self-imposed purgatory. Even the anarchists will be begging for the reassurances of mortar and brick against the onslaught of data seeping through their binary walls. And in the end we will render worlds like those we left behind, back to a time when we had blood and skin and we worked with our hands to lay stone along the ground. And those virtual worlds will become real worlds. And in time the barriers will again become electric. And the loop will start over again.

June 25th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Finishing off our photochoms, here’s another featuring a fantastical old European scene.