moon traveller herald

i. Kicking around our pad like many others is a paperback copy of 1984. For the heck of it in the doctor’s waiting room this week I read the Afterword there, written by Erich Fromm. Fromm was a shrink who shrunk from Freud’s more strident theories on human behavior, theorizing that ‘freedom’ was a more essential part of the human complex than Siggy said. [Truth Be Told [TBT]:I confused Erich Hoffer with Eric Fromm, as they both found a spot in the same cell in my brain… Hoffer was the author of The True Believer, a look at doctrinal Soviet-era communism, and was known as the Longshoreman Philosopher. But Google set me right, and now I put Fromm and Hoffer into different brain cells. David Hofstetter was even more helpful in this.] Fromm in Afterword places 1984 as chief among Dystopian works…tho the term he uses in 1961 is ‘negative utopia’. Utopian works beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, writes Fromm, build on a trust in Progress that arose as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaiss...

  Kevin Chang in the New York Times A lander called Odysseus resides on the Moon as of Thursday night. This is a privately financed lander, fielded by the intuitive machines of Houston.  This lander is not your lander.  It's their lander. As with a series of moon landings before, it was unclear immediately if the vehicle had landed gently enough to continue to operate. Further word was that it was on its side but that it worked.

  I was posting this to Jim Haas's Al Compas site - It is abbreviated versus version on this site . Jim had posted I'm a Little Mixed Up as part of his show.  Ode to Betty James - On a sunny Derby Day/Milwaukee/the East Side/up by the pagoda-looking gas/station around 1971 / got lost /got lost just / a few blocks from home. /And kids came out / climbing over rubble /singing "hippies in town" / singing "hippies in town" / me and dave and jim did / a sort of cold tremble / when a car engine would start /it was like a slow explosion / as we found our way / got back to the pad / and there is an old hippie / fellow traveller playing / I'm a Little Mixed Up -JV

  The day Microsoft added AutoSummarizer to Word, I stopped off at Egghead after work. There was no one else in line ahead of me. Not like John Wesley Harding. There were two other cats ahead at Soulville in Racine Wi when that was released. pic.twitter.com/A6LYhualS8 — Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) February 15, 2024

Went to a special showing of Escape from New York by John Carpenter starring Kurt Russell and Lee Van Cleef. It was part of the movie science program at the Coolidge Corner Theature.  I didn't see this movie when it came out - it was in the late 70. In the early 70s I had been in New York and formed my own vision of dystopian urban future there. For that reason perhaps, when it was released, I skipped the movie - I was probably reticent about the commercial aspects of it  - a Hollywood Hell - and probably shamed that I hadn’t finished a dystopian epic poem by then myself. Manhattan becomes one big Attica in the film…a prison surrounded by water barriers, brutalist concrete walls. It oant escape some viewers that the Manhattan map above bears resemblance to Gaza, now a scene of siege. Last night was Great to just revel in the commercial aspects of it on the large screen now many years later, and after coming to terms with my own view of the city then.  The film w...