Retro-Futurism, Nostalgia... and Mindlessness

Is it nostalgia or retro-futurism?

I can’t really imagine young guys like James Packer or Stephen Hung – two of the mega casino owners in Macau today – actually pining for some actual remembered beautiful past.

A 'new' casino in Osaka

It’s basically architects designing for clients who have no imagination...

But then, is the case that the money spending public have no imagination either and simply want to surround themselves with tacky fictions they don’t need to take intellectual responsibility for?

The water level, however, is dropping in the lake. Sure the dinosaurs are still chewing up all the plant life everywhere, but the mud at the lake floor is starting to rise up to the senses where once the crystal waters glowed with life and action.

You couldn’t get a more obvious sign than the current disastrous ticket sales at the general box office; ‘they’ have totally vandalized the Bond franchise, filled up casino gambling halls with electrical machines – hardly electronic, that would unduly dignify them – and destroyed the stock market with fake buying via fake money.

There is no excitement pulse in the veins of the public.

 

Plaza casino, Macau, quite nice, really

small, old-fashioned...

Ethanol will just anaesthetize people until they are literally a dead, a zombie generation. How much of modern alcohol is actually ‘made’ the way it once was, instead, isn’t it just contrived with ethanol and flavour additives in the form of ‘high tech molecules?’

You can drug and anaesthetize the bored public and convince yourself that all is well.

This is all about laziness and lazy-mindedness on the part of the wealthy and the political elite – and it goes on only as long as there is no opposition in evidence.  The real opposition, of course, is not Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or any one of a dozen other possible high-focus but trumped-up villains; the real opposition is the power inside those who not only authentically remember a richer past, but have learned its lessons and can understand what is humanly valuable and how to go about possessing it.

Wouldn’t a Howard Hughes, for example, were he alive today, look upon what is going on as simply the most amazing opportunity? I mean to say, the next time you watch a ‘red carpet’ show on tv, just remember that this was all originally from one single Hughes event, when he decided that a red carpet all the way round two blocks leading into his theatre where the epic ‘Hell’s Angels’ was premiere-ing, might be a good idea.

 

Monteverdi 375 - a bit of nostalgia...

Thing is, it was his idea, and not some stupid copycat version of fifty other people’s past history and otherwise rolling committee decisions on what could be a good idea to foist onto the public to convince them something glamourous or exciting or new, is still going on once the main show is already over.

Take away Fed interference and there would be no stock market right now. Take away Fed fiddling and there would be no gold left in the US. Leave things as they are and the mud, at the bottom of the lake, will mire the heavy swamp monsters into their virtual graveyards. The mud is the turgidity of tax receipt flows. And it is a fact and it is real and it has force.