Gertrude: Good Hamlet, cast thy nightly colour off […] Hamlet: […] ‘Tis not alone my inky coat, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show-
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
William Shakespeare: “Hamlet” (~1602).
I wear Black on the outside
'Cause Black is how I feel on the inside
And if I seem a little strange
Well that’s because I am
When you cut that dude with just a little mania
You did it so .. ah
When the blood comma’ down his neck
Don’t you know it was better than sex, now, now, now
It was way better than getting mean
‘Cause it was the final thing to do, now
Get somebody to come on to you
And then you just get somebody to ..
To now, now, come on to you
And then you kill them
Oh, Katy Dear, go ask your father
If you might be a bride of mine
If he says yes then come and tell me
If he says no, we’ll run away.
I cannot go and ask my father
For he is on his bed of rest
And by his side there’s a golden dagger
To pierce the heart I love the best.
Oh Katy Dear, go ask your mother
If you might be a bride of mine
If she says yes then come and tell me
If she says no, we’ll run away.
I cannot go and ask my mother
For she is on her bed of rest
And by her side there’s a silver dagger
To pierce the heart I love the best.
He picked up a silver dagger
He pierced it through his wounded breast
Farewell Katy, farewell darling
I’ll die for the one I love the best.
She picked up the bloody weapon
She pierced it through her snow-white breast
Farewell Momma Farewell Poppa
I’ll go with the one I love the best.
- Ian & Sylvia: “Katy Dear” (1964)
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide.
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick, weary bark.
Here’s to my love! (drinks the poison) O true apothecary,
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
Romeo dies
- William Shakespeare: “Romeo and Juliet” (1591-1595).
History progresses at the speed of its weapons systems
- Paul Virilio: “Speed and Politics” (1968)
Like other tools—electricity, for instance—A.I. will likely go through many iterations until, one day, we barely notice its presence. And so, too, will it be used for good and, just as likely, for not-so-good. “I don’t know of any tool that has evolved that hasn’t been used as a weapon,” Haseltine said.
- Patrick House in the New Yorker: “AlphaGo, Lee Sedol, and the Reassuring Future of Humans and Machines.”
I left my home
With a pain in my heart
Not a word of goodbye
To the ones that I loved
I’m taking a train
Away from the rain
To the lights and the smoke
I’ve got to find my own way now
Fun City
To the London Experience
Soft Cell: “Fun City” (1981)
Smoke lingers ‘round your fingers
Train, heave on to Euston
Do you think you’ve made the right decision this time?
You left your tired family grieving
And you think they’re sad because you’re leaving
But didn’t you see the jealousy in the eyes
Of the ones who had to stay behind?
And do you think you’ve made the right decision this time?
Thous wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generation tread thee down;
The voice I heard this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown […]
This diagnosis is to my mind confirmed by the great reflective glass skin of the Buenaventura […] Now one would want
rather to stress the way in which the glass skin repels the city outside;
a repulsion for which we have analogies in those reflector sunglasses
which make it impossible for your interlocutor to see your own eyes
and thereby achieve a certain aggressivity towards and power over the
Other. In a similar way, the glass skin achieves a peculiar and placeless
dissociation of the Bonaventura from its neighbourhood: it is not even an
exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls
you cannot see the hotel itself, but only the distorted images of
everything that surrounds it.
- Fredric Jameson: “Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism” (1991)
- National Security Agency headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland (1986). Wikimedia.
If you are outside of the intelligence community, if you are the ordinary person and you start seeing a bunch of headlines saying, U.S., Big Brother, looking down on you, collecting telephone records, et cetera, well, understandably people would be concerned. I would be too if I wasn’t inside the government.
In September 1986, the Operations 2A and 2B buildings, both copper-shielded to prevent eavesdropping, opened with a dedication by President Ronald Reagan.
Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crows is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were crowds to be a crowd.
- Don DeLillo: “White noise”, 1-15.
The flâneur seeks refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city is transformed for the flâneur into phantasmagoria.
[…]
he is also the explorer of the crowd. within the man who abandons himself to it, the crows inspires a sort of drunkenness, one accompanied by very specific illusions: the man flatters himself that, on seeing a passersby swept along by the crowd, he has accurately classified him, seen straight through to the innermost recesses of his soul -all on the basis of his external appearance. […] But the nightmare that corresponds to the illusory perspicacity of the aforementioned physiognomist consists in seeing those distinctive traits -traits peculiar to the person- revealed to be nothing more than the elements of a new type; so that in the final analysis a person of the greatest individuality would turn out to be the exemplar of a type. This points to an agonizing phantasmagoria at the heart of the flânerie. Baudelaire develops it with great vigor in “Les Sept Vieillards”, a poem that deals with the seven-fold apparition of a repulsive-looking old man. This individual, presented as always the same in this multiplicity, testifies to the anguish of the city dweller who is unable to break the magic circle of the type even though he cultivates the most eccentric peculiarities.
- Walter Benjamin: “Exposé of 1939”, D. Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris I, II.
Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides – pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.
A long silence followed.
“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.“
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”
Another silence ensued.
“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.
I quote this at such length not only because it’s too good to edit but also to draw your attention to two relevant features. One is the Dobynsesque message here about the metastasis of watching. For not only are people watching a barn whose only claim to fame is being an object of watching, but the pop-culture scholar Murray is watching people watch a barn, and his friend Jack is watching Murray watch the watching, and we readers are pretty obviously watching Jack the narrator watch Murray watching, etc. […] But most of the writing’s parodic force is directed at Murray, the would-be transcender of spectation. Murray, by watching and analyzing, would try to figure out the how and whys of giving in to collective visions of mass images that have themselves become mass images only because they’ve been made the objects of collective vision. […] since to speak out loud in the scene would render the narrator a part of the farce (instead of a detached, transcendent “observer and recorder”) […] With his silence, DeLillo’s alter ego Jack eloquently diagnoses the very disease from which he, Murray, barn-watchers, and readers, all suffer.
- David Foster Wallace: “E Unibus Pluram. Television and U.S. Fiction” (quote from Don DeLillo, “White Noise” 1-3)
