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"Song 12 (Simple Waveforms)" [mp3 removed]
A few thoughts on science fiction:
I'm embarrassed to say I don't think about the future much, other than serious unease about what we're doing to the planet and what steps we could take to lower our "carbon footprints." The writing here is fixated on a relentless present, which makes it hard even to look back at the past of what's already been said. (Although no one could be as amnesiac as the hapless Kevin Drum, who claims not to remember what lefty bloggers were saying before the Iraq War started.)
I still read a lot of science fiction but I think of it as travelling laterally in time, to parallel universes where technology has had this or that effect, or as a Swiftian satire of our moment. Or pure escape into a visionary world. I'm not apologetic about the latter, as long as the "visions" aren't too much about simple, obvious adolescent wish fullfillment ("If I could fly I'd show them!")
The film critic Raymond Durgnat once talked about the "mute poetry of the commercial cinema," such as a poignant shot of items in a display window in an otherwise awful film. That's what I'm most interested in in sf--the poetic content of imagining the future, which speaks to our time as opposed to just reiterating past writing conventions (e.g., having a character using a computer in a present day novel that is otherwise 19th Century in its structural particulars).
Retail demographics.
Hadn't been in the Midtown stores I used to haunt in a while and noted some changes:
1. The sequencer/groovebox listening room at Sam Ash is gone. There are still a couple of Akai sampling workstations you can demo in the main keyboard room, and two Korg Electribes locked in a glass case there. It looks like software has been expanded but it's hard to say--the boxes are spread around the main room incoherently.
2. The bookstore at the Virgin Megastore has been cut back in floor area. The section outside the cafe formerly devoted to new releases and graphic novels is now T-shirts and I Heart NY tourist crap. Inside the bookstore, shelves have been removed to accommodate a new store area: TV shows on DVD. Science fiction books are down to about 3 shelves, mostly novelizations of movies and TV series.
3. The Loews threatre inside the Megastore, which used to be "state of the art" in the mid '90s, fell on hard times and is now closed. They are using the lobby to store DVD shelving units.
Looks like I'm not the only one spending all my time online.