July 30th, 2009 by Hoopleton

The first time I meet Tommy he’s standing under the elevated train smoking a pack of Lucky Strikes. Even though the temperatures are hovering near the boiling point he has a scarf over a dark blazer. He stands motionless, the only movement being the occasional flicker of his hand as he moves the cigarette away from his mouth to exhale. He’s standoffish. Intimidating. His eyes dart over everything, constantly scanning, ordering, cataloguing. His gaze is predatory.

Tommy later tells me that he regularly watches people. It’s a ritual he prepares for hours in advance. Everything is planned, nothing is left to chance beyond that which may happen on the street. It’s a sort of meditation. What it is he watches for not even he can say, but, he assures me, there’s always something to see.

“The sun’ll come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun!”

Tommy knows to look before I do and as I turn I see a large woman covered in cat hair roaring like a tuba as she tries, unsuccessfully, to skip along the concrete. No one seems to notice but us and later Tommy tells me that people tend to try and not notice anything. Although, he assures me, people notice everything around them. It’s polite society. Don’t stare! He laughs and tells me that all people want is to be noticed.

He lights one Lucky off another, the smoke rising off of him like steam. I ask him who he is, where he’s from, what he does for money, what his plans are. Tommy deflects every question and tells me that he’s nobody, he’s from nowhere, does nothing and never makes plans beyond his one daily ritual. Then suddenly I catch him staring at me and I feel as though I’m being dissected. After a moment I catch a glint in his eye, as though he’s decided something, and he turns his attention back toward the street.

The sky is a metallic grey by the time Tommy decides that he’s stood in the same spot long enough. As we start making our way elsewhere heavy drops of rain start descending on the city. Heat rises off the buildings. People run for cover as though they’re afraid to drown. I imagine in that moment the rain never stopping and the roads flooding over into great filthy rivers of news ink, sewage and plastic bags. Survivors paddling for higher ground as they balance themselves on wooden planks and refrigerator doors. Starving, wet-soaked assemblies dancing on rooftops as prayers to a vengeful God.

Tommy later tells me that the floods will indeed come one day, but it won’t be water that levels cities or washes away farms or counties, it’ll be pure white fire rolling in like tidal waves. The flames will wipe clean the foundations, devour every artifact of our construction and decades later, when the ash settles and the survivors climb out of their caves, they will find new green plants rising out of the darkness, animals foraging in the mud and learn what it is to be human once more. It’s all this, he says as he flicks away his cigarette, gesturing to the buildings glistening of rain, that’s made us all so afraid to notice what we see.

July 30th, 2009 by Hoopleton

For today’s inspiration something different, a photograph taken in Den Helder in the Netherlands of a replica of the 17th century Dutch East India Company flagship Prins Willim, which caught fire earlier today. As of yet the cause of the blaze remains unknown. Photo courtesy of the AFP.

July 28th, 2009 by Hoopleton

I feel today as though I have no past, as though I was born into the world this morning. It is the sensation of dreaming, as everything I see is already a faint memory. Time is inconstant, the solidity of matter in question. The feeling has been with me for weeks, which is perhaps why my writing has been scattered lately. I feel a transition coming, the possibility of leaving Chicago fast approaching. It’s not an uncommon feeling, but what does it mean?

One of the few deities not assimilated from another culture and certainly one of the most ancient gods within the Roman pantheon was Janus, the god of doorways, beginnings and ends. Depicted most often as having two faces, one looking forward and one looking back, Janus, for whom January is named, was the patron of concrete and abstract beginnings, such as religion, of the world, human existence and of new historical ages.

He was the god of transition such as the progression of past to future, of one condition to another, of one vision to another, and of one universe to another. Janus was the constant in reality, the line between barbarism and civilization, in fact he was said to have brought civilization to the Etruscans. He was able to see the future and the past always and never really existed in the present, but anchored it within the context of infinity. The belief in Janus was the belief in predetermination, in fate and destiny. All that ever was and all there ever will be, it was believed is forever present. To see into the reaches of time was to cross the barriers that separate one existence from another. It was the gift bestowed onto the Oracles, a gift greedily controlled by the ruling class.

The Romans, just as many ancients, believed that one could transition between time and space, that although humans were trapped in the mortal world they could catch glimpses of all things along the full stream of infinity. This idea is not at all without some basis in science. Neurologists have observed that the brain is often ahead of the conscious mind in both action and reaction. Quantum mechanics has revealed many links between observation and the behavior of particles. Einstein himself postulated the constancy of space-time. But what does this mean in any real sense for us, right here and now? Are we active participants in the form and function, the manifestation of our reality? Or are we passive beings, the atom’s way of admiring itself? Do we have free will or is the future already written out?

I am not a seer. I cannot tell what will happen three years from now or three hours from now. I can’t directly glimpse into the future or the past. I cannot ride the waves of time and space. But I’ve always been somewhat empathic. I have experienced events and connections I cannot readily explain. And I have felt something approaching.

A follower of Janus might say that a new beginning looms on the horizon. That in the loop of time there are often intersecting paths. As everything is predestined all that can be done is to give oneself freely to the next progression of events. For now I wrestle with the feeling of being reborn with every new day, unable to prove that I had ever existed before the now that I inhabit. And in this, perhaps there is peace.

July 28th, 2009 by Hoopleton

“Lullaby” by W. H. Auden.

July 26th, 2009 by Hoopleton

I awoke this morning alone, my eyes fixed on the waves, the surf as white as snow. The trees were silver in the light, red bulbs extending out along slender branches. Clouds swirled high in the sky, birds darting between them. I knew none of it was real. Pure red and a fading tapestry of old memories spliced into a thirty minute film. That’s all you get, I was told over and over again, my eyes still on the water. Still, the quality wasn’t bad.

In the pre-programming days the reflection off cloth was muted. Smells were sharp, full of stingers. Moving images seemed clumsy and overly massive. Few things had better range than a straight line and most often they would tear, skip or flash out like a lightbulb. It was hard to accept anything as authentic. Even a hardcore data junkie could tell where it was that the pixels broke apart. Now the art of illusion has been greatly improved. Not the addicts nor the beings designed for their entertainment have any notion of what’s really going on. Entire worlds built on false memory. Eons of history patched in from liner notes.

I was at the crossing the other day. Men rode horses against the dust storm that blew the entire desert into town. It was the sound of the future coming. Thundering and inevitable. Fury crashing against the hard stone floor. The oxygen bleached right out of the air. I was alone then too, holding the only two possessions I still owned in the world. One was the book my grandfather gave me, an inscription on the inside flap in pure black ink.

“Do you remember the name of the hotel we stayed in when we drove up to the northern end of the lake?”

I looked at her and said that I didn’t remember ever having gone there with her.

“I’ve always been with you, even then,” she said as though it were the most obvious thing.

I rested my chin on my hand and smiled. I told her it was a pleasant idea.

“I’m with you now too,” she added.

The night is cold at the crossing. The last of the sand has settled back to the ground. A man in a hat leans against his horse, a cigarette burning off his lower lip. He gestures to where the town once stood. All I see is the river turned to mud. Broken branches and the stumps of trees. For a moment I go back to my grandfather’s book, flipping the stiff pages between my index finger and thumb.

It’s all for sale now. Packaged fantasies at basement bottom prices. A person can spend eternity in the stream. Out of body and detached from everything but the impulses running to their brain. Murder is as easy as a key function. Reproduction just as quick. In the infinite spaces between the nodes people say they can see angels and hear the voice of God. I assume they mean the programmers and the occasional hacker surfing the binary foam. All I ever see is static, but I’ve never been the religious type.

And the waves fade away. The trees turn black. I can’t see the sky anymore. I’m alone again just as when I first awoke. So it is as it always has been. Not that it really matters much, none of it is real anyway. There’s just the echo of what once was.

July 26th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Save the Children has launched an interesting advert campaign in an attempt to build awareness for their various causes.

July 24th, 2009 by Hoopleton

“Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

–J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945.

Lately I’ve been tortured by the seeming putridity of American culture. Why is it that we’ve become so selfish? So egotistical? So self-absorbed? So hateful? Whether speaking of politics, business, religion or the common interactions of everyday life, we exist in a society increasingly devoid of courtesy, decency and humility. Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff, the sub-prime mess, every case representing the sacred belief that it’s every man for himself. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, reality TV. We are obsessed with instant fame, with self-worship. Fuck what you have to say, read my comments, look at my pictures. Me, me, me. Forty years ago things were hardly perfect, women lacked rights, segregation reigned, but most people knew their neighbors. All service was full service. The customer was always right. Now we have self-checkout lanes at the supermarket and gated communities to keep the rabble out. The streets are drowning in tension and violence. Makeshift mass murderers slaughter entire schoolhouses, office buildings, churches and community centers. Our political leaders auction off their integrity to the highest bidder in a frenzy never before seen while our religious leaders rage for the blood of gays, Muslims and Jews. We all seem to suffer from the symptoms of some undiagnosed disease. Anxiety runs high. Small gestures seem absent. People practically bowl eachother over when walking down the street. A billion hands clawing at the walls and all there is to do is climb the bodies higher and higher pushing down anyone brazen enough to get in the way.

But why? What is the cause of this malady? Why do things seem to be getting worse?

America has always been a whore. We’re cheap. Walking billboards with price tags sown in. Since the founding of this great nation we have committed unspeakable acts of genocide and destruction. We took a land of vibrant beauty and paved a wall-to-wall strip mall in its place. We’ve commodified everything from our most sacred belief systems to the air we breathe. Whereas once we built great public works and exported idealism now we stand an indebted shill, arms broker to the world, an empire on the brink of collapse. Our turn in fortune is of our own making, a natural and expected result of our greed. As the ship sinks we scramble for the life rafts, women and children be damned. And yet it’s not as simple as all that. Our social morality began to collapse long before our dominance on the world stage.

In the 1950’s the generation that would elect Kennedy and usher in an era of social upheaval came into adulthood. Writers like Ginsberg, Kerouac and Mailer, comics like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, musicians like Miles Davis all rose out of the fires of global destruction to deconstruct a social order they saw as rigid and false. Academics like Alfred Kinsey and Marshall McLuhan challenged basic perceptions of human relationships and our trajectory as a species. Feminism, civil rights, revolutionary politics, concepts of decency, social order and basic rights. In film, music, literature, journalism and art. On every front everything was reexamined. Everything was taken apart. The world as it was didn’t make sense anymore. The old order had to be usurped. In every case these luminaries, these revolutionaries, were reacting to one and the same thing: an America brimming with unlimited prosperity while standing on the precipice of complete annihilation.

The generation that gave us the Beats and modern Jazz was the first to come into maturity under the shadow of the nuclear bomb. Cities melting into the ground, billions torn from flesh and bone, the eradication of civilization, the apocalypse alive in stark reality, one act of madness away from fruition. And so every generation since has come into the world with a gun cocked and pointed to the head. Aware, whether consciously or not, that the end of all things is omnipresent and inevitable. The social transformation of the 1950’s and 60’s was necessary, vital. The lessons learned over those decades invaluable, but unfortunately incomplete.

Today there are some 20,000 active nuclear weapons in the world, of which about 7,000 are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched within fifteen minutes of an order to do so. The largest of these weapons have a yield of some 50 megatons (which equates to a single warhead having the destructive power of 50 million tons of TNT). The system is called deterrence. The idea is that under the threat of complete global destruction no country would ever risk unleashing their nuclear arsenal. Yet conventional wisdom states that if you build a thing you must use it. And so we live with a knife at the throat, waiting, ready, expectantly for the final blow. This insane system, peace at the barrel of a gun, is, as it has been for fifty years, defended as the only way to avoid large scale conflict. When this stark raving mad concept in global diplomacy is understood and compounded further by the looming specter of climate change, the stifling problems of overpopulation and imperial collapse, is it really that hard to see where our society is headed?

A reality of our own making. The battle of Armageddon that a growing segment of our population would welcome with utter glee. An America in which we stand, as James Thurber once wrote, “not on the brink of war, but on the brink of was,” where basic human decency, civic duty and compassion are sacrificed on the alter of instant gratification and decadence. The me society. America has always been a whore, capitalist ideology run wild, greed as divine right, but now more than ever growing over fifty years strong there is the presumption that even if our actions have consequences we won’t be around long enough to face them. Live for today no matter the cost because tomorrow will never come.

In this same sense it’s easy to understand why so many have pinned such unrealistic hopes on Barack Obama, as they so desperately, hungrily crave, need a savior to lead them out of the dark. Ironically, despite our certainties of destruction we cling to hope. Despite our momentary lack of empathy and compassion we remain good people, or at the very least we hope to be good again. We just can’t make sense of the world right now. The end is coming soon. In our despair we become inhuman. Murderers, rapists, thieves, megalomaniacs. We embrace what is easy. We consume and allow ourselves to be consumed as our only means to cope.

July 24th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Staying with our violence in print theme, here’s an advert from the Corporate Chhattisgarh (a state in central India) news magazine challenging the connection between terrorism and religious faith.

July 22nd, 2009 by Hoopleton

Bucephalus was the horse of Alexander the Great. As the story goes, a merchant named Philonicus the Thessalian brought Bucephalus to Philip of Macedon and offered to sell him for the price of thirteen talents. But the charger, a massive black animal, could not be tamed by anyone. Until, that is, ten-year-old Alexander surprised everyone by calming the horse, jumping on top of him and riding him across the open fields. From that point on Bucephalus and Alexander became inseparable. Legend has it that Bucephalus saved the conqueror’s life on several occasions, and when he died in battle in the year 326 BC, Alexander held a lavish funeral and even named a city in his honor. In later years Bucephalus was regarded as a god.

Throughout history horses have been steeped in a sort of mysticism. These animals, which in pre-ancient times were slaughtered en masse for their meat, once domesticated became magical, even divine. Beginning around 5,000 BC there developed an aversion to the eating of horses. The act was considered taboo, a sort of cannibalism, or act of ritual murder. In some circles the horse even took on sexual symbolism, becoming a fetish item.

Horses were almost never sacrificed in history. The Romans would sacrifice one warhorse per year to the god of war, but for the most part avoided the practice. In some cultures horses were thrown into rivers to call upon the floods. The ancient Indians would send horses galloping across the country as to ensure the coming of the rains. In twelfth century Ireland kings would marry a white mare, which would then be boiled in a giant pot, after which the king would bathe in the stew as to guarantee a good harvest.

Even in times of famine the eating of horseflesh was considered a desecration. Despite some ancient writers noting the nutritional value of the meat, the idea was so repulsive that even Napoleon’s troops, starving as they retreated from out of Russia in the dead of winter, almost allowed themselves to die rather than cook up the cavalry stock.

Of course food aversion has always been with us. The people of the Hellenistic world tended to avoid beef even at their most lavish banquets, while they gorged themselves on stuffed dormice baked in honey and calves’ testicles dipped in broth.

Why do we eat the flesh of certain animals while avoiding that of others? Religions are filled with dietary restrictions, as was the first ever legal code as written by the Babylonian king Hammurabi. Were these cultural adaptations to disease or scarcity? Were taboos written into our collective consciousness because some animals, such as the dog, were simply more useful than others?

Why was the horse spared but the ox, an animal worshiped as a god by the Egyptians, Chinese, Assyrians, Babylonians, Gauls, Persians, Greeks and countless others butchered so often that some species of oxen have actually gone extinct? As our methods of war and transportation have taken on purely mechanical facilities, will the mysticism of the horse begin to collapse? Is the eating of horse meat in our future? Or is the legacy of Bucephalus so deeply entrenched in the Western mind, is it so heavy a cultural relic, that it will remain with us for all time?

July 22nd, 2009 by Hoopleton

In what is perhaps one of the most disturbing ad campaigns of the last few years, Mattel is promoting their toy helicopters, jets and tanks with adverts showing children behind the controls.