Hench!

I more or less like the future.

For instance, probably my favorite artistic movement (I guess that’s what you’d call it) were the Futurists. Based in Italy and led by F.T. Marinetti, the Futurists were a bunch of demi-fascist schmucks who, by ignoring all reason and plunging headfirst into a very vague idea (”the future”) created some pretty amazing stuff. I’ve been trying to find an English edition of Marinetti’s Futurist writings—which are incredible—but no luck. Here is an exerpt from the Futurist Manifesto:

We stand upon the extreme promontory of the centuries!…Why should we look behing us, when we have to break in the mysterious portals of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have already created speed, eternal and ever-present.

I love that kind of thing, especially since it was penned nearly a century ago. In fact, I love it so much that I will present anyone who can find me an english copy of Marinetti’s writings with a Secret Hench Bonus Prize.

The future though . . . it never really gets boring. My mother claims to have a small amount of psychic ability, transferred to her through a female relative who was born with a caul, or a membrane covering a baby’s face. In Italian-American families, this means that the child has the second sight, and the caul is kept in a jar of formaldahyde. Although my mother kind of keeps this to herself, she did make one very strange prediction recently which came true in exactly the way she said it would.

Then you have writers like J.G. Ballard, who write almost extensively about how the future will be, above all else, boring; a place where people will be more attatched to automobile instrument panels and high rise buildings than each other. This sort of thing is echoed in movies like Alien, where the future is presented as a ship that looks like a Greyhound bus station locker room full of blue collar space workers who hate space travel.

Then there’s that Leonard Cohen album The Future which, frankly, sucks.

But I’ve been thinking more and more about the future. In fact, there will be more about the tomorrow, in the future, because now I have to go see a movie.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.