Music of choice to go with the article is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl8mpAvTm_Y&p=82AD05A6991D4AC0&playnext=1&index=39. Please click or Cut & Paste.
When I was young and the subterranean world unknown to me, buddhistically inspired hippies were trying to revolutionise human experience by introducing the concept of Now in western society. Now was the only thing that mattered. Now was everywhere all the time. There was in fact only Now, and consequently only Here.
To be able to fully focus on the joys of Now, one had to embrace each breath of air as his potentially last. Yesterday was dead, the past with its horrors of inequality had no place in every day Now.
Of course, the new belief went down better with the young and the suffering. People who had previously known glory - or a happy childhood, forbid - were not so easily won over. See for a reminder of Now what guitarist Mick Ronson had to say about his days as a Spider from Mars, from 7:00 minutes on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8raYr-48h0.
When the hippies grew bald and their world not as gay as they once believed it to be, they readily passed on the idea of Now to the next generation, who merrily coined the phrase no future. But that didn’t last either: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_Q4uu_ag4.
New fashions tried to capture their own brand of Now, but never with the same conviction or impact. Now, it seemed, had become part of time again. People of all ages were consuming their days as a chain of flashing Christmas bulbs, on off on off, without much hope or pride. Early twenty-first century man was desperately waiting for a distraction from the endless horrors of war; the war on drugs, the war on art, the wars on food and nature and the one on people in general: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsqPeqhKJ7Q
And then God invented Now Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_nbgUbXU64&feature=related.
The most exciting change Now Tube has brought to our lives must be the complete loss of chronology. Everything which has ever been taped - and what has not? - is made available for anyone curious enough to go looking beyond what a personalised search engine is willing to put on show. Everything you vaguely knew had sort of happened can now be traced and viewed and consequently added to your personal set of historic events. All your vivid memories of what you actually experienced - you are quite sure you really were present, aren’t you? - can now be put to the test. Was it as bright and beautiful as you had always thought it were, as dark and dirty perhaps? Is that you in the audience or are you just dreaming it might be yours truly? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVik0YD_8og.
Now Tube offers the opportunity to create a whole new personality, a rubber life’s experience, changeable at will. You no longer need an avatar to be someone else, you have already become one yourself. It doesn’t really matter when or where it happened, it’s all part now of the forever experience. Now has become up till now, the past a matter of: wow, where did you find that one? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK4GrUd4xJw&feature=related. And the future? Who cares about the future? It’s bleak, anyway.
My home town celebrated her festival of metro curts, short movies shown in the metro system and announced by the name of subtravelling. A subterranean traveller myself, I felt naturally drawn to report on the phenomenon and so I lowered myself underground for a tube adventure. The fancy new trains with their built-in monitors for three weeks showed the twenty odd movies that had entered the competition, but not continuously and without sound anyway. Stations equipped with video screens had sound, but the wait time for the next train was never nearly enough to sit out a randomly started clip. I skipped a few trains to make it to two movies, but the best way to watch the full programme, and this was what the set up of the festival wanted to persuade viewers to do, was to sit behind one’s pc, wherever that be, and enter the subway by way of the screen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hjj5C-M-3M&feature=related.
In Barcelona Venezia, by David Muñoz, a business man is making his way past the tourists on Passeig de Gràcia while busily talking to a certain Frederico, when all of a sudden from one camera angle to the next he stumbles into Venice, Italy. He is lucky enough to meet this guy from Albacete who knows how to step back through one of the loopholes that are apparently built in. http://subtravellingfestival.tmb.cat/ca/microcurts/fitxa/97.
From István Madarász comes the story of a man who finds a very special digital camera when he is strolling through a sunlit park in Budapest. He starts shooting images at random, but in stead of taping pictures he rather records the actual sequence, so when he winds back everything around him steps backwards. He freezes the motion and when the world comes to a halt, he the only thing that moves, he gets the brilliant idea to free his camera’s memory. http://subtravellingfestival.tmb.cat/ca/microcurts/fitxa/77.
That’s all for now.
