"The new American dream is to build a really (cool) personal brand, and the result of all that tap dancing on all those individual platforms is a pervasive kind of narrative decadence. We race to consume and regurgitate the hour's large and small events for each other like patricians in a postmodern vomitorium -- to know them first, translate them into bitter capsule form fastest, and be shocked or stirred or perceived as in any way less than totally savvy about these things the least. Even within our self-contained realities we become dulled to what's real and what's not, and further desensitized to what lies behind our fellow performers' virtual scrims."
---Michelle Orange.
The way of the future: 24/7; a blank, block of time, broken down into bits but with each moment blurring into the other. We move through time (or it moves through us); it is there as a constraint ("time is money"), something to be overcome, never integrated into anything deeper in our lives than shopping, consumption or staging ourselves.
Average number of hours slept by an American:
1900: 10.5 hours
1950: 8 hours
2000: 6.5 hours.
We are supposed to be "all there"...even when asleep we're floating just under the radar..the slick movement of the hand following the eye in a friction-less world. "The sleep of reason brings forth..."
The ancient alignment of the body with the rhythms of our Earth. The seasons, replaced by dry-as-dust abstractions, pleasures that offer no repose or replenishment.
Bertie:
'Whatever we may think, we are creatures of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, the rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more to than the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter....
Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of this contact with the Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what....
The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
---Michelle Orange.
The way of the future: 24/7; a blank, block of time, broken down into bits but with each moment blurring into the other. We move through time (or it moves through us); it is there as a constraint ("time is money"), something to be overcome, never integrated into anything deeper in our lives than shopping, consumption or staging ourselves.
Average number of hours slept by an American:
1900: 10.5 hours
1950: 8 hours
2000: 6.5 hours.
We are supposed to be "all there"...even when asleep we're floating just under the radar..the slick movement of the hand following the eye in a friction-less world. "The sleep of reason brings forth..."
The ancient alignment of the body with the rhythms of our Earth. The seasons, replaced by dry-as-dust abstractions, pleasures that offer no repose or replenishment.
Bertie:
'Whatever we may think, we are creatures of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, the rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more to than the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter....
Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of this contact with the Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what....
The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
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