LISS/STEPVR Apple Ad

[gary webb]

I didn't end up going to see Dylan last year. I did end up going to Ann
Arbor for the Holidays. The place I stayed had the best Clam Chowder I
think I've ever had

On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 2:21 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> gary webb wrote:
>
> and for no particular reason, I'm going to stick my thumb out, though will
> need to go more Claudette Colbert, to hitch a ride to this wagon... I'm
> kidding of course... Is it just me, or does it feel oddly necessary to
> watch the Apple 1984 commercial?
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA
> Â
> It's hard to say the PC world was anymore enlivening than the televisual
> world it purported to replace, and the same could be said of the mobile
> transformation 20 years later...Â
> About that televisual culture,
>
> https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/imagine-all-the-people
>
> "That, of course, is not what happened. Modern technology has indeed
> consummated the televisual era, but with results quite opposite those the
> imagineers expected. Instead, a curious form of Hobbes’s war of all
> against all was unleashed. Online, each “netizen†produced more and more
> opinions, fantasies, dreams, interpretations, and criticism. Marshall
> McLuhan forecast the situation in his concept of the “global village
> <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226672980/?tag=thenewatl-20>†— not a
> boundaryless and harmonious Eden sought by the imaginative social engineers
> of the world elite, but rather a hot, crowded, fragmented, and fractious
> realm, one much like the “world†that social media, to the shock of the
> elite, became."Â
>
>
> In the MIT press version of McLuhan's Understanding Media the introduction
> coyly gives a post-60s update on the work's reputation (the MIT version was
> published in 1994):Â
>
> "The alarms and excursions associated with Understanding Media didn't
> survive McLuhan's death  (on New Year's Eve 1980, at the age of 69), and
> perhaps was to be expected from artisans still working in a medium that the
> decedent had pronounced obsolete, the obituary notices were less than
> worshipful. Informed opinion had moved on to other things, and McLuhan's
> name and reputation were sent to the attic with the rest of the sensibility
> (go-go boots, Sgt. Pepper, Woodstock, the Vietnam War) that embodied the
> failed hopes of a discredited decade."Â
>
> Let's take it from the man himself (pg.16):Â
>
> "Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of
> industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with the semiliterate and the
> postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result
> of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns
> of information."Â
>
> Televisual culture is ubiquitous for Zoyd & C., so much so that he is an
> active participant. And like Bigfoot, to whom he is compared, are staged TV
> moments, not real life random acts.
>
>
> -------------a) Tom Wolfe, I think, did a sendup of McLuhan as English
> professor living the dream of having people actually listen to him. Still
> think McLuhan made some good points!
>
> b) That net community in the quote, it is like Van Meter's commune behind
> the Cucumber Lounge: "bickering raised to the level of ceremony"
>
> c) thanks for hopping in - 1984 ad was topical for VL, with the lady ninja
> throwing that projectile and stickin' it to The Man!
>
> wow, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable!
> like Prairie "when she couldn't get her hands on a car, she'd hitch a ride
> and try to talk the driver into letting her take the wheel. She could get
> anywhere in Southern California as fast as wheels could move."
>
> That's the beauty of the LISS/STEPVR - the president is also a member, the
> rider can be the driver, the topics are out there!
>
> d) ish mailian made the good point that the new-car smell is still fresh
> on the radio play. I'm going to break out some 50 year old German skills to
> try to appreciate it. It's beyond funny how slow this will be.
>
> peterhooper promised a new take after the 1st of 2021, suggesting LISVR as
> the new title: Love is Strange Vineland Read.
> ("Love is patient" as St Paul wrote)
> Seems right amount of elision: epizootic/pandemic by then should have
> abated, and most people can self-police the size and/or salinity of their
> topics.
>
> e) did you ever get to the Bob Dylan concert in Ann Arbor last fall?
> Love to hear about it if you did!
>
>
>
>