Entries Tagged 'future' ↓

The OWS protests aren’t so much about evil bankers but depersonalization and the loss of control that brings.

With corporate influence into government you receive faceless unaccountable decision making. Corporatization of healthcare, mortgage lending, and 19^thcentury energy resources take advantage of individuals rather than aid them. The person is buried for profits.

There is nothing more aggravating than having to talk to some third party corporate broker (who only gives you their first name) to determine how much your sickness is going to cost.

There is nothing more disgusting in borrowing money from some abstract corporate bank who then slice and dice your debt and then change the fine print behind your back. There is no one to talk to in the end except an automated phone system.

There is nothing more disturbing than corporations that make billions of dollars who then barely put it back into the environment and whose profits are based on waste. Try rationalizing and breaking down your electric bill.

-XF Pine

This letter was originally mailed to Paul Auster in about 2000 when he was collecting stories on his NPR radio show Other True Tales.

Some of these stories were made into the book True Tales of American Life (First published under the title I Thought My Father Was God, and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project 2001)

The story was originally accepted and then cut at the last minute from the book due to space.

———————————————————————————————————–

Paul Auster,

This is a great Experiment. I heard about it on the radio and decided to get this down and send it out.

This is all absolutely true. The pictures included are part of my story.

A while back when I was going through my things and preparing for a move, I came across a drawing that looked as though it had been done when I was four or five years old. The drawing is not dated.

The drawing illustrates a red three story building at an intersection with sidewalks. The building is surrounded by defunct cars, tires, and machine parts. A fence surrounds the lots around the building. There is a traffic light, and a neighboring building across the street where the angle of the intersection is slightly obtuse.

What has intrigued me endlessly about this particular drawing is that it accurately depicts an apartment in Brooklyn in which I would eventually live nearly 16 years later.

The similar real world location is at 14 Bayard Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. It is directly across from McCarren Park on the south side, and has not changed a great deal since I lived there a decade ago. The building is a lonely three story building with red asbestos tile. There is a chimney on the right side of the roof exactly like the drawing. The building is surrounded by junked cars, tires and garbage, just as in the drawing. A fence surrounds the lots like the drawing. There is a traffic light out on the corner with sidewalks like the drawing. The angle of the intersection is very similar, and there is another apartment building placed exactly as it is in the drawing. If you take the elements apart they are almost too accurate to be inconsequential.

The only difference I can find is that the door on the building is in the center, while the real 14 Bayard Street, has its doorway on the left side. Interestingly, if you look at the drawing even closer it seems as though I started to draw a structure on the left side, similar to the stoop overhang and which the real building currently has.

It’s so close however, that when I first came across it I recognized the drawing immediately as where I was living. It was also the first apartment I ever had in Brooklyn and was really my first introduction to an “urban” environment.

Now this could have been only a coincidence of course, and a bizarre stretch of the imagination, only it happened a few years later with another place in which I lived.

This time I clearly made the drawing in the late 1980’s while I was actually living on Bayard Street.

The second drawing depicts a suspension bridge stretching away into the distance over a river. The structure of the bridge looks as though it is built in many latticed levels. The aspect ratio of the drawing is easily 2:1, so it almost looks like it is in Cinemascope.

In 1995 I moved  into a unique sublet on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. One dominant feature of the apartment was its marvelous view of the river and the Willaimsburg Bridge. Again, I again came across this drawing after I lived in the space.

One curious aspect of the bridge drawing is that it seems to depict a huge fire, or plume of smoke, emanating out of Brooklyn. I haven’t been able to identify this smoke with any real occurrence. There was a train crash on the bridge one summer close to the spot in the drawing, and once one of the towers caught on fire, but nothing that large and on the distant horizon. The frame of the window is similarly rectangular, although not 2:1, and the element of the latticework of the bridge, makes it resemble the Williamsburg closely. I’ve often thought that this smoke in the picture might illustrate a calamity to come, but fortunately for everyone, I will be moving from this location in less than a month.

I find it very curious that I seem to consistently be making a record of the places I have lived before I have lived in them.

If anything else it encourages me to keep drawing.

Regards,

X. F. Pine

P.S. On a side note (you should hold onto your hat if you are wearing one), one of the very first exterior shots in the movie Smoke shows the Willamsburg Bridge from the Brooklyn side. If you look closely in the back, beyond the bridge, I believe you can see the apartment window where I am currently writing this letter. The building is definitely visible.

So there!

Best,

- XFP

I think about technology all the time. I think about how much it has taken over every facet of my life in a short period of time and I now try to spend weekends offline away from screens. I think about how I am part of the first digital test generation who grew up with computers in their home.

When I was about twelve I convinced my Mother to get the first Atari 400. My Father thought it was a fad. Perhaps he was right after thirty years, as technology has finally become a fashion accessory.

My friends all got them too and before long we were obsessed with gaming and programming. We would spend hours, even days locked away in suburban basements and rec-rooms staring at screens. We would trade the latest software. Some kids became experts at piracy in their curtain closed bedrooms. All piracy was offline. This was at the advent of 300 baud modems with acoustic couplers that you attached to your phone. This got you to an online bulletin board that was only text. The computers had no drives built into them. There were clunky tape drives or disc drives for storage.

I look back at this time and think about how seduced we all were. I also realize how patient we were. I’ve gone back to these computers and games and discovered how incredibly tedious they were; so brutally un-adaptive compared to now.

I wonder if there is now a certain saturation point or a distinctive timeframe where you eventually become exhausted of a screen. Is this point part of your advancing age or is it finite. Perhaps after 10,0000 hours of staring at a screen in your life, it becomes confining. If you conservatively looked a screen for an average of 4 hours a day over thirty years, it would be something approaching 5 years of your life.

When you are twelve you do not think about the future. You do not think about results and implications. You don’t think about reality all that much. Recently I cannot get my head around the idea of how commonplace digital technology has become over security. How kids have no sense of their own privacy and enjoy putting their lives online for the sake of marketers and corporations. They don’t see the corporations because they are so influenced by their peers. Their comfort zone is the screen.

The dark side of pervasive computing is that you don’t see where your data is going. You don’t think about it like when you were twelve. It’s perfect collectivism. Facebook is an awesome conformist tool. Any Fascist regime or Dictatorship from history would have loved Facebook as long as they had the keys to the backdoor.

Cracks in the walls of cyber-security mostly stem from social engineering or humans who give out information recklessly. If you are twenty-five and working for a major corporation or a bank is your default to share everything or do you have to be reminded to not give out secret knowledge? A curious problem is coming to a head. We have lost all respect for information. It’s our downfall. We are all eternally twelve.

- X.F. Pine

We decide to get off the train before it gets to the city. The station is in a suburban atmosphere. There is a hill that descends down from the station. My friends and I walk down to the street and the world goes dark in thirty seconds. The scene is eerie. We all realize that a planned artificial eclipse has commenced. The darkening of the earth to cool it down is necessary and we must walk the rest of the way to our destination in the dark. The planned eclipses sometimes last for hours. We feel a need to explain it to the young kids in the group but they understand already. It is normal for them.

As I’m on the treadmill at night I notice the moon edging over a building on the horizon. It’s a huge timeless full moon. I am covered in moonbeams through the window as I run. I become witness to an Indian runner from hundreds of years ago who runs across the desert sands under that same moon. The night is cool and travel this way is easier. The young Indian is barefoot and must be careful to step on soft sand. Sharp objects and shrubs are easily visible in the moonlight. He runs towards the flat horizon. He runs some twenty miles in a night. He imagines rhythms and chants and sings them to keep his pace.

Before I can complete the novel locked in a room I must confer with my Soviet counterpart who is near Moscow on an open line dedicated phone. It is not a red hotline, but a black shiny phone. The connection buzzes and cracks but Vasiliy (The King) is at the other end. He is overjoyed and enthusiastic about my recent decisions in the narrative. He urges and inspires me to press on. I look out the window at the sunlit garden below my window, but I cannot go outside.

X.F. Pine