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From: [email protected] (Sourcerer)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: From Sourcerer In His Convalescence
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 95 19:52:32 GMT
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In article <[email protected]>,
[email protected] (Kevin O' Gorman) wrote:

>I have returned! The cider was expensive, and the bands were good, so I
>am a happy bunny. On with the reply.

Yes. It's a wonderful day in the neighborhood.

>Sourcerer writes:
>
>>Case, is a fine role-model, I think, it's important not to
>>retrogressively get a loving death-grip of the romanticism of the
>>street and revolution like the old 70's punks you note above.
>
>Well, if they had such a "loving death grip", they must be bloody lucky
>to have survived this long.

Touche. Much like the "nettle-grubbing hippies" I noted in my last
followup, survival isn't a birthright of the best and brightest...part of
that "utter, positivistic, empirical" fantasy about what constitutes
'fitness', it is. We can only hope (if we dare) that we are successful
mutations rather than only more bits of compost for the biomass.

>>Personally, I'd rather loll about in byzantine luxury than live in a
>>dumpster...
>
>And if you didn't have a choice...

Well, I'd call it home and make do...most of those years in Santa Rosa I
lived on back porches and in garages. Was grateful to the goddess for
that kindness considering the Press Democrat had front page stories about
the folks living in the hills (recognized some of my customers at the
liquor store) or living in the tent city on the beach in Rio Nido
(correcting a memory-packet error in a followup to motley in which I wrote
Guerneville instead of Rio Nido). Reagan Year One was hard on the poor
and went downhill from there.

>>>while portrayed as so hip'n'streetwise. On an important level,
therefore, they
>>>were faceless, caricatures. New stereotypes built to old
specifications.
>
>>And I immediately recognized everybody...but then, like Gibson, I'm an
>>old hippie...
>
>Oh dear God(dess), what does that make me?

Part of the continuity.

>>Did you know that Chandler was from Santa Rosa (via the UK)? I find
>>Chandler rather gothic.
>
>Oh, go on, throw me a bone. You're still a hippy.
>{Please Sourcerer, it was a joke! Come in off the ledge...}

Tsk. I wrote gothic not goth. Chandler wrote Gothic Horror, especially
when his subject (as it often was) was Hollywood. Marlowe's bleak,
despairing grimwitted commentary on the story, it's protagonists and their
corruptions, perversions and addictions is as much gothic as Conan Doyle's
and his bud Bram Stoker's were.

>>I think Hammett, though, is more obviously
>>present in Gibson's style. The Chandleresque voiceover in BR muffles
>>what cp sensibility there is in that film...why the director's cut seems
>>more gibsonesquely cyberpunk, too.
>
>Yes, that was an interesting point, one of the few on alt.cp (for me,
anyway)
>lately, about the ol' writer as godlike narrator thing stifled cyberpunk
>agendas. T'was yourself that made it, indeed.

In some variant of the The City As... meta-thread I dipped into the
history of pulp fiction, the penny dreadfuls, and their relationship to
science fiction and cyberpunk...

Bladerunner fascinates me and I watch it often. It's a hommage to pulp
and gothic horror, to the original incarnations of Dick Tracy, Batman, The
Shadow, Sax Rohmer, Tod Browning and German Expressionist cinema, in
aesthetic, at least -- no less a hommage than Raiders of the Lost Ark was
a hommage to the Republic serial, Doc Savage and Professor Challenger.

And it influenced Gibson and Neuromancer, but he did not buy the
Chandleresque commentary, instead taking Hammett, I think, as a model.
That's a colder, tougher style, not given to explanatory and critical
ongoing commentary.

And Bladerunner was influenced by Gibson's influence, and so we have the
Director's Cut.

>{Now, slide back to the window...don't look down!}

Then where's the thrill?

>>Youth, y'know has a much harder time with change than someone my age --
>>they've seen so little of it, and when it happens it's like the world
has
>>ended or something.
>
>Excellent reversal! But I think the "dystopics" aren't merely your
>average disaffected youth. They might very well be a symptom of a
>greater social malady, and it bears consideration.

Yes. Millennial Hysteria, I calls it. I expect it to be fully installed
in the US in a year or two. Americans are generally very angry and
disaffected. Older people especially (older even than me). Very selfish
and unconcerned about anything except holding onto their stuff, especially
their entitlements. The Gen X'ers (back when there were Gen X'ers) had a
point about that (The Gen X'ers never appreciated how very much they were
like the people they castigated, though).

They continue the process (begun in the Reagan Era) of delinking
themselves as best they can from the fate of others. Unwise of them.

>But seriously, even thirty years in adulthood doesn't totally disconnect
you
>from the world. It might make it difficult for you to recognise real
change,
>having lived through so many petty-in-hindsight upheavals. No-one now is
>singing "The times they are a-changing", as the future isn't something
>to sing about - unless you count songs like "Everything's Cool", by PWEI,
>or various hardcorer efforts on the same theme. So, in addition to the
>clouded vision of your advanced years, it may be that's what's now
>happening is happening to a great extent without warning or fanfare.

Very true (I've got all this legacy code, and a need for backward
compatibility). I can understand the old(er) folks mentioned above, their
sense of exposure and helplessness, the daily exhibition of their personal
disintegration to themselves in the mirror and in bed.



To the young, the past may only be a few months, or perhaps a few years,
and the future a limitless ungraspable expanse full of dread. To the old,
the past is measured in decades and resonates with nuance, while the
future is a small finite thing whose end is seen "all too concise and too
clear".

Here are the young men,
a weight on their shoulders
Here are the young men,
well where have they been?
We knocked on doors
of hell's darker chambers
Pushed to the limits,
we dragged ourselves in
Watched from the wings as
the scenes were replaying
We saw ourselves now as
we never had seen
Portrayal of the traumas and degeneration
The sorrows we suffered
and never were freed

Weary inside, now our hearts
lost forever
Can't replace the fear
or the thrill of the chase
These rituals showed up the door
for our wanderings
Opened and shut, then slammed
in our face

Where have they been?
Where have they been?
Where have they been?
Where have they been?

--Decades
-----Joy Division

>>And what's wrong with masochism?

>Recreationally, it's alright, but is it a way of life?

May I recommend re-creation as a way of life?


(__) Sourcerer
/(<>)\ O|O|O|O||O||O "The vale of human suffering is basically a dump"
\../ |OO|||O|||O|O --Sterling
|| OO|||OO||O||O

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