The Dead Weather are happy to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their first album Horehound today (Alison dressed in a full buffalo costume for the occasion). pic.twitter.com/1VAYHPhj6r— Third Man Records (@thirdmanrecords) July 15, 2019
Monday, July 15, 2019
The Dead Weather's Horehound is ten years old
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Human tributaries to the Big South American River
One of the things I learned on our long road trip to see the solar eclipse in 2017 is that way outside of towns that are themselves in the middle of the wilderness, there are Walmarts. And Targets and similar giant stores.
We learned to rely on them, because they encourage RVs to stay overnight in their parking lots, as long as the travelers do not cause problems for the shoppers. It seemed odd at first, a sort of camaraderie of the road, except not between two motorcyclists but between a motorhome and a gigantic warehouse packed with every material thing anyone could ever want, from stone fountains to emu jerky, from wardrobes to surgical trusses.
Embed from Getty Images
And today I learned there's a caste of nomads that live off these stores much as a tribe might live off a herd of migratory buffalo.
It's in The Verge's article, ROAD-TRIPPING WITH THE AMAZON NOMADS.
They drive from town to town - or from middle of nowhere to middle of other nowhere - hitting the Walmarts for clearance items that they sell to Amazon. They are the "fulfilled by Amazon" people, who fill the Amazon warehouses with...things...that have lodged in the wrong cranny to ever be dislodged by local forces. Only the travelers, armed with apps that tell them what's hot and what's not, can ever pry them out of their Walmarts and shift them back into interstate commerce.
There's something almost transcendentally American about this existence. America has lots of stories that burst with romance and tragedy, for example champion hot dog eating competitions, or tiny tot beauty pageants. Circus geeks. Chautauquas. Or traveling hellfire preachers. This peculiarly modern variant on the road lifestyle, living in an RV and servicing Amazon - which may as well be God, being as it is all-encompassing and not located in any given point in space, but rather in our hearts and psyches - cries out for more coverage. Perhaps a novel.
We learned to rely on them, because they encourage RVs to stay overnight in their parking lots, as long as the travelers do not cause problems for the shoppers. It seemed odd at first, a sort of camaraderie of the road, except not between two motorcyclists but between a motorhome and a gigantic warehouse packed with every material thing anyone could ever want, from stone fountains to emu jerky, from wardrobes to surgical trusses.
Embed from Getty Images
And today I learned there's a caste of nomads that live off these stores much as a tribe might live off a herd of migratory buffalo.
It's in The Verge's article, ROAD-TRIPPING WITH THE AMAZON NOMADS.
They drive from town to town - or from middle of nowhere to middle of other nowhere - hitting the Walmarts for clearance items that they sell to Amazon. They are the "fulfilled by Amazon" people, who fill the Amazon warehouses with...things...that have lodged in the wrong cranny to ever be dislodged by local forces. Only the travelers, armed with apps that tell them what's hot and what's not, can ever pry them out of their Walmarts and shift them back into interstate commerce.
There's something almost transcendentally American about this existence. America has lots of stories that burst with romance and tragedy, for example champion hot dog eating competitions, or tiny tot beauty pageants. Circus geeks. Chautauquas. Or traveling hellfire preachers. This peculiarly modern variant on the road lifestyle, living in an RV and servicing Amazon - which may as well be God, being as it is all-encompassing and not located in any given point in space, but rather in our hearts and psyches - cries out for more coverage. Perhaps a novel.
Friday, July 05, 2019
Tomorrow Calling (video 1993) Review
Did you know that there is an extant film of William Gibson's Gernsback Continuum, one of his standout early stories?
It's Tomorrow Calling, directed by Tim Leandro, from 1993.
It's a bit literal-minded, except for the completely unexpected Blackpool, UK location. The short is about the past's conception of the future - Hugo Gernsback-era airships and food pills. A quarter century after the shoot, and forty years after the story was published, I found myself tied up with yesterday's ideas about last week's ideas about their future which is now our past and never happened, instead of yesterday's ideas about their future which is now our present.
For example, the use today's (1993) technology of nowadays almost unavailably outmoded VHS tapes to cure yourself of the future - and their contents, pornography, which now has much more feminist sociology attached now than it did then - overshadows whatever the hell it was supposed to say about the future back in those days.
The Guardian looks at yesterday's futures here: Yesterday’s tomorrow today: what we can learn from past urban visions
The movie is only 11 minutes long and definitely worth a watch.
It's Tomorrow Calling, directed by Tim Leandro, from 1993.
It's a bit literal-minded, except for the completely unexpected Blackpool, UK location. The short is about the past's conception of the future - Hugo Gernsback-era airships and food pills. A quarter century after the shoot, and forty years after the story was published, I found myself tied up with yesterday's ideas about last week's ideas about their future which is now our past and never happened, instead of yesterday's ideas about their future which is now our present.
For example, the use today's (1993) technology of nowadays almost unavailably outmoded VHS tapes to cure yourself of the future - and their contents, pornography, which now has much more feminist sociology attached now than it did then - overshadows whatever the hell it was supposed to say about the future back in those days.
The Guardian looks at yesterday's futures here: Yesterday’s tomorrow today: what we can learn from past urban visions
The movie is only 11 minutes long and definitely worth a watch.
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