*
*
The view to the city across Woolloomoolloo.
"While never a keen observer of politics, young Mamet was undoubtedly shrewd enough to notice that his chosen vocation, with its poor at best prospects for financial success and its roots in revolutionary social movements, was hardly hospitable terrain for the conservative viewpoint. He might have bristled at its "fey" conventions, striking the occasional "maverick" pose by admitting to his misogyny and his "liberal" use of the F bomb, but he was content it seemed, to align himself with his left leaning peers, no doubt daunted by the critical fall out that would ensue had he pursued his long held dream of re-working Beckett into a vehicle for Jerry Bruckheimer.
"That the author of a body of work best summed up as "Penis Monologues" is not only a dick head, but a paid shill for neo-con cause shouldn't come as any real surprise for anyone who has seen "The Unit", Mamet's prime time wet kiss to US military interventions, and the highly trained grunts who commit its most egregious abuses, with the added twist of focusing in part on the wives holding down the fort as their menfolk battle evil-doers and the neglected household chores that await them after each mission.
"Mamet's rather unspectacular public denouement of his former political stance has all the controversy of Paris Hilton announcing that her next career move involves a stripper's pole. His conversion to the "dark side' should hardly elicit shock to anyone who doesn't define a political ideology to a set of superficial lifestyle choices and the casually formed, inconsistent opinions one develops in the course of a lifetime devoted to non-thinking.
Stella Dallas and Jennifer Matsui
http://www.counterpunch.org/dallas03202008.html
They were in remote alcoves; places and times which folded over and over on top of each other; hiding out in apartments, lonely voices, a c;ear and concise young mind unusual in the crowded buildings of old people, old hopes, musty memories. Everything about them was vague, even their physical imprint. There were so many of them, that was what staggered him the most. As an ancient spirit, the number of humans had been a mere fraction of what it was today, even only a few hundred years ago. They had been printed by the millions; and millions. They crowded in on each other so that almost no voice was unique, except the lonely ones he could feel in their apartments, isolated despite the crowds all around them.
The high rise towers peaked in waves across the city. It was all about power, he had once believed, but the layers of power were far from clear. There was no real leader. The political caste led privileged lives, but they did not lead. They jailed, they proscribed, but an idea to transfix the populace, startlingly there was no such thing. The lines of communication were broken up by the televisions blaring in virtually every apartment. It was hard to single out the voices he needed to find. There was only one way out.
I suggest you move back to the city, he heard the voice say, far out in a regional centre. Christ wasn't born in a day. Garbled messages. His own thought disorder not helping the project. He had come to find power, inspire others. Instead he found chaos. Methadone clinics. Insane women beating their children. Polluted rivers. Shouted cries. Well I have a question then. Was the super nut viable? Could anything be made of these vast inconsistencies? Was our source - and our purpose - worth holding on to?
The shifting lines of the pollitcal structure, the amorphous nature of this strange culture, the bizarre nature of the common belief systems; the shock was almost overwhelming. He felt profoundly dislocated and disconnected. He was not the only one who had come from an ancient place. He could feel old adversaries in the same time frame; and it worried him. He felt no compassion for this present population, they were too strange, their heads too crowded with too much rubbish for him to really understand them. How much this civilisation had altered. How long did he think he could stay here without being detected? Was any of it worth the risk?
But like the humans he had passed through to get here, there was no way of turning back time. There was, too, no way of saving the culture that he could tell. The physical form he had adopted was poor for his purposes. This body had already been badly abused. The current health consciousness he had imposed on it could only do so much repair work. The other spirits that had been here were nice, some of them, he could tell from the trace memories they had left behind. But they weren't his concern, not now.
Again he was shocked by the sheer volume, the massive scale of the present endeavour. How had this species bred up in such large numbers so quickly? Millions were crowded into this city; and it was far from being the world's largest city. The ancient isolation of this continent had been destroyed in a matter of decades. Memories, images, flashed everywhere. Not just millions of units, or individuals, but a soup of a common consciousness he could not unravel, struggle though he did. He set up a beacon, a lonely call to his former mates, hoping to find a voice he recognised in the soup of baffling images; the shouting couples, the lonely souls in high apartments.
In the early hours he began to decipher similarities to his past visits. The humans still slept, their dreams floating, easy to enter. They still, as a species, coupled in one of the most bizarre breeding rituals anywhere in the universe. He could hear the gasping sighs of orgasm through thin walls; and felt relief that things had not changed that much after all. But it was strange the way he could not detect the leader. In the towering apartments he could find many bosses, men of power and influence. That hadn't changed, that primitive mechanism, but now there were hundreds of them, not dozens; and their power was different, less brutal, more technological. His physical form shook its head, bewildered.
Cheer up, no reason to be sad, someone said to him, and he looked at them startled, unaware that his thoughts, his bewilderment, had bled on to his face. He tried to smile. He didn't know what to say anymore. I'm fine, he heard himself croak, in an English which too had changed almost beyond recognition. Words he did not understand kept pouring in; television, movies, radio, graduation, internet, YouTube. How could all this have happened so quickly? In his last visit the culture had been almost entirely agrarian; a few towns where horses led carriages and pigs snorted in muddy front yards. But none of that was here now.
The tricks of consciousness he had used in the past to gather himself after a long absence were not working. His natural clairvoyance, he had always been one of the empathic leaders in past cults, easily building up a following and establishing comfortable circumstance in primitive times, for once was not serving him well. The crowding images were oppressive, bewildering. The voices of the thousands in his immediate vicinity were so confusing there was nothing he could make of it. He looked again at the person opposite, who was once again talking. The world's not going to end today, you know, the strange little woman was saying. I've always tried to look on the bright side of things. The words made so little sense; as did the strange little box in the corner with a constantly changing string of pictures on it, that he did not know what to say. He tried to speak, a strange sound came out of his mouth; not even a word. Then a woman dressed in white was standing in front him. "The doctor will see you now," it said.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/20/opinion/eddas.php
More than anyone else in the 20th century, Arthur C. Clarke, who died Wednesday, had a track record of being proven right.
"I don't know if the Wright brothers realized how quickly aircraft would pay for themselves," Clarke told me a couple of months ago when I visited him in Colombo, Sri Lanka. We were talking about space exploration and his belief that commercial spacecraft would soon become a reality, now that private entrepreneurs are getting involved. Over the next 50 years, he predicted, thousands would travel into orbit - and then, to the Moon and beyond.
Man may not have set foot on the Moon had it not been for Clarke. His 1952 book, "The Exploration of Space," was used by the rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun to convince President John F. Kennedy that it was possible to go to the Moon.
As is widely recognized, Clarke is a colossus of science fiction - the author of "2001: A Space Odyssey," and many other famous works. It is less well-known that Clarke was also one of the 20th century's pre-eminent visionaries. Without him, it's safe to say that there would be no direct TV, no satellite-routed ship-to-shore phone calls, and no global navigation systems. Our weather forecasts would be far less reliable.
http://www.yourtv20.com/news/entertainment/?feed=bim&id=16829136
WASHINGTON -- The following is a statement from Alan Stern, NASA associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at Headquarters in Washington, regarding the death of Arthur C. Clarke:
"Arthur Clarke was a gifted writer of science and science fiction, and an unparalleled visionary of the future, inspiring countless young people throughout the middle and later 20th century with his hopeful vision of how spaceflight would transform societies, economies, and humankind itself.
"Although his personal odyssey here on Earth is now over, his vision lives on through his writing; he will be sorely missed."
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iuw_qAhr33lVGN2DicffN7EESHzg
COLOMBO (AFP) — Visionary science fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke, best known for the classic film "2001: A Space Odyssey," died in a Sri Lankan hospital on Wednesday at the age of 90.
The British writer, who had post-polio syndrome for decades and used a wheelchair, died after suffering breathing problems, his office said. He had reviewed the final manuscript of his newest work, The Last Theorem, just days previously.
Sri Lanka's most celebrated guest resident since 1956, Clarke believed mankind's future lay in space. He achieved iconic status with the film "2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1968 movie he created with acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick, and the novel he wrote by the same name.
Clarke, who was awarded a knighthood in 1998, wanted a private funeral with no religious services and to be buried in the family plot of his Sri Lankan business partner, Hector Ekanayake, with whose family he lived.
"We are awaiting the arrival of family members from Britain and Australia. They are already on the way," his secretary Nalaka Gunawardene said.
"Sir Arthur has also left written instructions that his funeral be strictly secular," he said.
"Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral," the statement quoted the author as saying.
Clarke, born in Minehead, Somerset, in 1917 and author of more than 100 books and over 1,000 shorter works, was prophetic in many ways.
After working during the Second World War on the pioneering development of radar, he predicted in 1945 telecommunications satellites that would broadcast television images around the world -- decades before they became a reality.
The farmer's son, who had a diverse career as an author, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser, also predicted space shuttles, super-fast computers, lightning quick communications and that man would reach the moon.
"I want to be remembered most as a writer -- one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well," he told the BBC late last year on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
Sydney.
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