Blogcoven

I’ve been enjoying a faster-than-dial-up net connection in my hotel during this trip back – and its trying to make my head twist off with the cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, there’s all the peak oil stuff. On the other hand, there’s the Pussycat Dolls.

I’m a big Bruce Sterling fan, down to the point that I *know* there’s a conspiracy to supress his work – have you tried to buy a Sterling novel recently? They’re not to be had anywhere – despite the fact that theres about a half dozen of us that I know of that look – sure theres Amazon, but fuck sake, why isn’t it on shelves?

Anyway – my point being, Bruce’s S.’s big trope is that your/our reality is being messed with on a near continuous basis and almost no vector is as heavily engineered to be a harpoon through your brain into your wallet than the girl-band super-group of which the Spicegirls were a paramount example and the Pussycat Dolls are the latest incarnation of easy-on-the-eye earth-stalking devourers. As you can see, the memetic attack vector has evolved.

If you listen to the lyrics its the same ultra-consumer stuff that’s been cropping up ever since the A&R men started pushing it back a few years ago (I think it was My Humps that they first put numbers to the ‘value to the brand of a top X song mention’) when they realised that getting the flavur of the moment to say ‘my baby buys me Grey Goose’ was worth $20,000 in sales. The big underlying thing to the PCD stuff is motorshow stuff – cars, speed, high-tempo, high amp stuff – subtle things like ‘zoom, zoom, zoom’…

So, really, is it any wonder that people aren’t so up with the ‘your world is about to get smaller’ stuff thats the probable case? The Committee for the Apocalypse has apparently revised things recently …

… actually, piecing things together, the kind of ‘money no object’ sorts that were ever going to be in that party set in the first place are probably going to shrug off fuel at quadruple the price. Ach, what the hell, it’ll be grand.