20091221

Me and Woody and the Russians and Evil English Children

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.


I try, but fail, to imagine what Woody Guthrie
would think to see me here, now, laptop on the desk
jammed in front of the PC, where I'm looking at
a spectral analysis of him singing "Miss Pavlichenko"
in 1946, a celebratory song of his that's been
buried by the Cold War. Too many levels of irony
and improbability here; too much oscillating
temporal dilation and contraction, making me nauseous,
so soon I'm gonna get up and go tranquilize my mind. I'll
get up and go slap in my latest DVD acquisition:
John Carpenter's 1995 remake of
Village of the Damned.

Boy, I'll tell yuh: this ol' world is just
well beyond weird.

2 comments:

  1. Haha, I wonder if I'll ever get to feel like that. I have a theory that the modern generation is so hi-fi and techno-oriented that all further scientific advances will only seem a natural and understandable evolution of the former. On the other hand, technology is growing so fast I'm actually astounded by some thing or other every year. Interesting times indeed.

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  2. sometimes i get these whiplash moments. well, i guess i spend a good deal of time writing indirectly about this temporal compression. i spent about 30 years, give or take, in the presence of my grandparents, and they grew up as on-site eye witnesses to the great depression and the dust bowl, so thinking this way is not so remote for me. furthermore, time is compressing exponentially, so that if you brought time travellers forward from anytime after say the 1500s into more recent times they would be shocked but i think they could cope and still recognize familiar values, until more or less the time of wwii. but nowadays. . . .imagine, just some joe blow looking at a graphical representation of woody guthrie's voice on a computer screen in his own home. . . .so far beyond inconceivable at the point in time when the original recording was made, and we think nothing of it!

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