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We don’t live
in the United States, we live...
By the early '80s, we thought it would be more like something out of Blade Runner. But THIS is the New York of the future. Instead of a dark arcology of corruption and fascism, we have cleaner streets and lower crime than at any time in decades. People don't wear saran wrap and tinfoil. In fact, in mid-town, people dress much the same as a half century ago. And the blue jeans, khakis, and t-shirts of informal dress are likewise timeless. The biggest difference is that no one wears hats anymore. The car models have changed a little, but if anything, they are less extravagant than the tail fins of the '50s or the deco racing lines of the '30s. Sadly, we aren't riding hovercraft and helicopters to work. Of course, in the East Village, you can find a wax museum assortment of college campus fashion trends from the past three decades: hippies, disco freaks, and punks. Young co-eds with purple mohawks certainly look futuristic, but they are actually a retro style hearkening back to the late '70s. The real changes are inside our buildings. There are more personal computers in this country than there are people. The Pentiums I, II, and III have so far outstripped the wheezingly slow 386s and 486s of yesteryear that you can't give them away. Only a handful of years ago we marveled at their speed and memory. Now we regretfully shelve them with our 8-tracks, Lear cassettes, Beta VCRs, and Commodore 64s. And then there is cable. Somewhere along the line we stopped talking about the big three networks. We have dozens of networks, hundreds of channels, and the island is being retooled for fiber optics, which will bring even more capability. I am convinced there is a link between the increase in indoor extravagance and the decrease in outdoor psychodrama. Get this--I firmly believe that there is an inverse relationship! As the possibilities for indoor entertainment have increased, the out-of-doors has become more sedate. People don't feel the need to act out. Despite the rhetoric of the era to the contrary, most kids of the '70s jumped on the counter-culture bandwagon because it looked like fun. Sex and drugs were a lot more interesting than watching Kojak and Barnaby Jones. Nowadays, given a choice between getting cross-eyed stoned and watching Quality Television (e.g. NYPD Blue, ER, Law and Order) and surfing the Web, the balance tips the other way. There's no need for guerilla theater on the streets when you can enter into much more sophisticated fantasies online. A run of the mill TV show has computer graphics that make the first Star Wars flick seem pedestrian. Way back B.P.C (Before PCs), we were so starved for entertainment that we voraciously gobbled down what little hip pop culture there was. Rock, foreign films, comic books, genre fiction, and experimental fiction were all that we had. Fortunately for us, those were thriving art forms then. Since, they've been co-opted and commercialized. I knew rock was sterile when Bruce Springsteen was declared the next Dylan. And when mainstream America embraced him and good old boys with confederate flags on their pickup trucks boogied to Aerosmith, it was all over but the shouting. Now there is no rock genre but "alternative music." It's all alternative, but alternative to what? The film genius of Bergman and Fellini petered out and the New Wave films were increasingly shown in cineplexes. American films stopped being about quests for identity and instead focussed on special effects and shoot-outs. Ah, but while these genres and mediums have reached the end of their life cycle, others have blossomed in their place. Television has become home to the auteur. Film directors like Barry Levinson, Francis Ford Coppola, and David Lynch have left film for video. TV has reached the end of its adolescence and is settling into complacent maturity, but there are still a few years left in the medium. Increasingly, TV shows are tied to companion Websites and these, along with millions of other sites, are a fresh and exciting creative venue. Pop music isn't completely dead, either. It's just American pop that is senescent. World music is alive and well. African, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese artists are all doing exciting new things with the song format. The Asian underground movement in London is particularly interesting. Traditional Indian sitars and tablas are integrated into electric and electronic Western sounds. The resulting synthesis is something neither derivative nor familiar. The experimental fiction of the past tended toward Joycean word stews and magic realism. Today's avante novels are metafictions, which are curious approaches where the narrative voice steps outside the reality of the fiction. This works well for the modern audience that has difficulty finding the naivete to suspend disbelief and fall into the hypnotic trance that makes fiction work. When the work is as aware of its artifice as you are, your bullshit detectors aren't constantly going off. And all this is available at the touch of the fingertips. Online marketing lets us order a wider variety of books, CDs, and videos than ever before, all without having to go to stores with much smaller inventories. So think about it. As the number of cable channels goes up, street crime goes down. The faster the baud rate, the lower the level of violence. In other words, all that trashy pop culture is good for us. It keeps me out of trouble, at any rate. But then, that's what I do for a living. Link Yaco has written comic books for several publishers. He is currently working on a couple comics-related paperbacks. He has been a copywriter, technical writer, newspaper journalist, and magazine entertainment writer. He has a Masters' degree in Telecommunications and was a technical manager at MIT for five years. Link lives in West Greenwich Village with his wife, Susannah, a Senior Vice President at an independent film company. Check out his web page here Read last week's column Visit Link Yaco Home Page COPYRIGHT 1999 LINK YACO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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richard e. schiff,
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t looks like we're
going to make it safe and sound to the millennium. In the '60s,
this is what we thought of as the future. This is when we're all
supposed to be zipping around in jet-packs, popping food-pills,
and reading skywriting about the moon colony.
