Joy Addition
I am veering way out of my lane here, and I hope that it is just a tiny jolt of awakening and not a reason to tell me to get lost. Although, I have been lost in the woods, and not just once. Notably, Belvedere mountain -- bikes, a disappearing road, no map, no phone, bushwhacking a beaver pond lined with bungee stakes... What are your favorite lost stories? That's not rhetorical.
In 1919, if you wanted to travel from New York to London, you might book travel on a lighter than air ship, a zeppelin. This was the most modern way to traverse the Atlantic. Fifty years later, we were standing on the moon. Fifty years.
As a teenager I saw a lot of rock concerts including the band Yes. They performed at a Civic Center in West Virginia with a stage set of lighted-up fiberglass shapes based on the artwork of Roger Dean. (Look him up). For the finale, red laser beams shot out of the front of the three heads of the blobular sea monster static contraption dangling above the band. Very trippy and bizarre. Last year I saw a show at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Jump on over to YouTube and type in "Dead and Company, Sphere". The concert venue in Las Vegas cost 2.3 billion dollars and required a crane from Belgium to erect. The exterior is covered in a 580,000 square foot LED array that is the largest ever. The interior boasts a 160,000 square foot video screen with the highest resolution display on the planet with over 2.5 million pixels that happens to be acoustically transparent so the 157,000 speakers mounted behind can work their magic. The amplifiers and processors and drivers and cables weigh over 395,000 pounds. Suspended overhead. There are no pillars holding up the roof of the 10" thick concrete skin over a geodesic tension structure. Wave field synthesis is achieved using the beam forming capabilities of HOLOPLOT X1 arrays for the creation of virtual origin points utilizing pulse-width modulation, power factor correction and subwoofers. Sound comes out of the floor too. Yep, fifty years. Blinking lights and fiberglass to this. It requires a run-on sentence to explain.
In Beijing last year, a half marathon was opened to robots. They ran in a separate lane from the human competitors with the fastest finishing in 2 hours and forty minutes. The world record for people is 57 minutes and 20 seconds, set by the Ugandan, Jacob Kiplimo a month ago. Last Sunday, a 5 1/2 foot tall robot named Lightning won the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That took a year. So, how fast is technology advancing? Netflix took 18 years to accumulate 100 million users. Twitter took five years. ChatGPT took 10 weeks. Meta's Threads took 2 days.
Drone warfare? Boston Dynamics and their synthetic humanoid that can turn backflips? Chinese dance troupes of robots? A 7,598 drone aerial display of a dragon flying... This is the image to carry us forward -- a flying dragon -- the absolute bleeding edge of technology used to create something that is mythological that we don't need. Cool, yeah but, whoop de do...
What do you need? What would make your day or month better? I am not going to throw out suggestions and possibly skew your thinking. Just make a short list in your noggin or write it down somewhere, like the fridge or tattooed on your left hand. Now, let's band together and speak up. How to make things better seems like a stance worth reviewing daily.
Let's do it.
And of course, buy art right now. That makes things better for you AND me and your heirs. If you don't have any, museums take donations every day.
Peace and love y'all.
B mac
P.S. Can't resist: sunshine, sweat, concert tickets, sunshine, fresh water out of that well right there. Art openings. A bike tune up. Cheese. That guitar tone in "Le Serviette Noir." The moon when you can see the whole disc and it's a new moon. Need more of that bass line bounce in "Queen of California " live. The debate between northern harrier and sharp-shinned. A quiet knee. Maple syrup. More coffee. The stranger asking what I think is so funny. Open doors. Waterfalls. Did I mention sunshine? A rainbow, even a small one. Twilight light.
P.P.S. By 1970 the number of nesting pairs of bald eagles in the U.S. was around 450. In 2020, the bald eagle population stood around 320,000 birds. Fifty years. Let's do this.
P.P.S.S. Fifty years ago we got Joni Mitchel, Jackson Brown, Stevie Wonder, Return to Forever, Zeppelin, Bob Marley, Eagles, Rush, Boston, the Ramones, the Centre Pompidou, the CN tower, Anselm Keifer, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Mapplethorpe, Christo's Running Fence (all 24 miles of it stretching to the coast in California), Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, Matta-Clark...
What does Led Zeppelin have to do with robots? Art persists. 500 years ago (10x50) was the era of Michaelangelo and the High Renaissance -- Dürer, Pontormo, Da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Bramante... Science progresses and technology leaps, constantly eclipsing itself. Art endures as the vision of an era, a time, a moment of humanity transfixed, a permanent monument of culture.
OK, I'm way out of my lane and can't stop. Structure be damned. What do we need? What do we want? Cancer cured. No bombing. Solar panels on every house even if the state has to buy them. (Why not? We are the richest nation in the history of civilization). Bigger national parks. Free education and teachers' salaries doubled. Brotherhood/sisterhood. Global women's rights. Tolerance. Neighborliness. Free healthcare for everyone. (Yep, all babies need attention regardless of their tan). Elder care. Organic food. Exercise as a prescription. Clean air. Term limits. Sanity. Constitutional amendments to guarantee democracy for this nation. Alliances. Handshakes and hugs. Peace. And love. Mostly that last thing. Do that. Now.
Whew. If we can bring back a bunch of birds, we can sort this. Don't try to prove me wrong. It won't work.
