Briefly touching back on the topic of "Whitey is Funny", I just saw a middle aged white dude in a Jetta rolling down Myrtle Ave blaring Run-DMC's cover of "Walk This Way". Two things struck me simultaneously. The first being how much a street that runs through some of the toughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn and used to sport the nickname "Murder Ave" has changed. The second was, that's probably the only rap song that guy knows and I might lay money down that he had it on repeat. It's another classic way of how us white folks invite ridicule: the louder you proclaim you are "down with the hood" or whatever, the more obvious it becomes that you are absolutely not and in fact quite close to peeing your pants.
Also, what I said yesterday about apropriating other culture's style? Yeah that's really a two way street. For your consideration, Lenny Kravitz:
Seeing as how a picture is worth a thousand words, I will refrain from comment and let you be alone with your thoughts. Following that logic, my post yesterday was a staggering 11,500 word treatise, by far my largest and most verbose work on any single topic to date. Yay, me.
What I really want to talk about (type about? Rant impotently about?) today is a sentiment that I have heard drunkenly espoused at least five times this week. We are living in the future. Yes, this is going to be one of those "Did you ever stop and think that _____" type of posts, the kind that make readers wonder just how baked I might be as I write. Fact is I haven't gotten to that part of my day because NYC weed generally sucks, both in terms of quantity and and as a descriptor of what it does to the money in my wallet, so much that I have actually gotten to the point where I drag my feet at the thought of sparking up. Lucky for me I no longer have to wonder if I'm getting ripped off thanks in part to living in the future which has brought us this.
Yes. That is in fact a website tracking the average price of weed throughout the US and Canada. All prices are voluntarily posted by anonymous users and curated by the website to remove any outrageously high or low claims. My first reaction to this info was that I really want to move to Canada now. Also, when looking at the recent entries for NYC, it seems that as of the 24th, and oz. goes for either $65 or $600, depending on how much you like getting ripped off and/or how many guns your are currently wielding. My guess for the dude that got that $65 oz. is eight guns. This was made possible by the fact that he is clearly tripping on something and his hands are fucking HUGE right now, bro!
Aside from that, this map gives a very clear picture to anyone curious as to where pot comes from. West of the Rockies seems to be a safe bet, as well as Canada and the parts of Mexico that don't butt up to the parts of America that are absolutely filthy with Minutemen.
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| Or, as evidenced by the price drop in Florida, anywhere Don Johnson isn't. |
But back to the future (ha-HA!), we are living in a techno-dream world the likes of which Gene Roddenberry and Arthur C. Clarke could only dream of. I'm not talking space stations and commercial space shuttle flights or anything like that. I'm talking about the fact that things if you took and iPhone back to that most future-celebrating of times, the 80's, there's a good chance you might have been burned at the stake for being a communist witch. The the advances in simple everyday consumer tech over the last ten years is, to put it mildly, shocking. Just to put the exponential tech growth into perspective, here's a quick rundown of what has been considered cutting edge in consumer products for the last 60 years:
1950's:
This is a great place to start because, much like their brother-in-neon, the 80's, these neanderthals thought they were living in the future. It's also played witness to the birth of much of the components that would make up the nuts and bolts of modern technology. Microchips, fiber optics, bar codes, modems and integrated circuits were all invented in this decade. To their credit as well as their detriment, their imaginations were a wee bit ahead of their capabilities. For example, atomic cars. Because putting the most destructive force known to man in the hands of methadrine-addled housewives and their Pinko-Commie hatin' husbands was considered progress at the time. Thankfully, someone somewhere bitch-slapped the progenitor of this idea back into his own decade and the idea was scrapped. On the down side, synthesizers were also invented, paving the way for geeky asshats the world over to have an outlet for their terrible taste in music. Contraceptive pills were introduced a decade too late to prevent hippies from existing. Fact is, most of the tech that was invented round this time wasn't nearly as impressive as what people yearned for.
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| Or their bitchin concept art. |
1960's:
Getting better. This decade was a little more grounded in their futuristic hubris although they saw far greater advances in technology. This is where tech really started to enter the consumer market with such advances as permanent press fabric, astroturf and breast implants. Not particularly futuristic, but many found the thought of women with breast implants, wearing permanent press clothing while posing on astroturf to be appealing at the time. At the end of the decade someone remembered that credit cards and barcodes had been invented, so they made ATMs and barcode scanners. Better late than never. The 60's also saw the creation of a few things that wouldn't be used to their full potential until much later, such as tape cassettes, RAM, and the first version of the internet, which was developed on the other side of the continent from where Al Gore was going to university. The moon landing gave America one more reason to rest our balls on the rest of the world's collective chin and it was generally accepted that we would be living there, for some inexplicable reason, in the near future. Why we wanted to do this at the time is a mystery to me, here in the future, where it's starting to look like that might become a sad necessity.
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| The idea of intelligent, walking buildings, however, makes Blade Runner look like Little House on the Prairie. |
1970's:
Now we're talking. The computer age gets a real jumpstart with with introduction of microprocessors and word processors. The dot matrix printer was invented and then rapidly made obsolete by the laser and ink-jet printers in the space of four years. By the end of the decade, typical Americans were rocking their Walkmans and the VCR was almost affordable enough to buy. People were not nearly as obsessed with the future at this point in time, although one can't really say why, what with the near utter implosion of the Executive Branch and a gnarly recession and disco and shit. I would imagine this was probably due to heavy quaalude, cocaine, and disco consumption. Concept artists finally figured out the the future was going to look less like a souped up present and more like, well, the fucking future:
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1980's:
It's easy to see why these folks thought the future was now. Computers, which had required warehouse sized rooms up until this point, had finally reached desktop proportions. Microsoft and Apple were squaring off by 1984, thereby marking the first time in the history of that term that it could be taken to be meant literally. Nintendo and Sega would later follow suit, all the while pointing and giggling at Colecovision. The overall style of the 80's was sharp and angular, perhaps replicating the fact that all of their computer graphics were a bunch of comically huge pixels. There were also comically huge cell phones, comically huge laserdiscs and comically huge bangs. Portability was somewhat irrelevant due to the fact that the oil crisis was "over" and we all had money to burn. While the tech boom was officially on, it was still quite nascent, insomuch as it took people quite a while to realize that other colors besides green could provide a more fulfilling visual experience whilst perusing their DOS files. From the music to the clothes to the movies, every man, woman and child in the country was convinced that this was the future their parents had been dreaming of.
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| The whole Future-as-Ancient-Past fad was really big too. |
1990's:
The decade I remember best in that it was the last time alcohol didn't feature heavily in my lifestyle. Nintendo got super, the internet got user friendly and the president got a hummer. Miniaturization had now caught on as the wave of the future. Through the miracle of science you had your choice of playing video games on a handheld device that replicated the look and feel of the last decade (GameBoy) or you could play them in color while setting a land speed record for depleting AA batteries (GameGear). Cell phones were now small enough to fit in a pants pocket, a trend that skyrocketed with the introduction of the vibrate function. The nation, as a whole, turned it's back on synthesizer music. We were truly standing at doorway to a brave new world.
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| Our idea of the what the future looked like took a pretty bad hit, though. |
2000's:
Still not sure what we're referring to this last decade as yet. The Aughts? Fuck that. This is arguably when the future started, especially at the end. Everything went digital and I do mean everything. The flip-phone made the old Star Trek communicator a reality and then Smartphones made them look as silly as Star Trek. We've crossed that barrier where the past's imagination had sputtered out and died for lack of information. We are living in ways that would seem nearly unfathomable to those poor bastards in the 50's. Only people in the 80's and 90's had anything close to an accurate guess of where we'd be right now. I mean tell me this doesn't look like a prop from Back to the Future 2:
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Computers on bikes? Oh, yeah. We've made it.
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