This past weekend, I was asked by a friend to moderate a discussion panel for “The Doomsday Film Festival” in Brooklyn, a day-long event of 1980s apocalypse movies and guest speakers.  The theater space fit about 30 people on foldout chairs.  The panel I moderated followed a screening of the movie Hardware (1990), which depicts the scavenging survivors of nuclear war menaced by self-regenerating robot killing machines. The movie provokes ideas about technology, Man, art and the future of the species, while providing an artful dose of psychedelic sex and gore.

The panel was an invigorated foursome of writers and academics, including Paul Schrader, a highly respected filmmaker and film scholar. I am a devoted fan of Paul Schrader’s movies and film writing, so to get a chance to be part of a discussion with the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and to have Sake and edamame beans with him before the talk, was something of a milestone. The other panelists, Steve Jones, Heather Urbanski, and Evan Calder-Williams, were highly-charged and imaginatively critical voices.  The talk moved swiftly from disaster movies to Luddites to the New Human. Schrader told an anecdote about a conversation with George Lucas in the 1970s about the future of movies and digital technology: “Soon we won’t need costume designers, make-up people, lighting…”   Between the panel discussion, and the bus tours I gave that day – where I moderated a panel of frantic tourists stuck in midtown holiday traffic and fearful of missing their train, Broadway show, etc. – it was a good day for the art of the public schpiel.

… To protest the villainization of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a computer hackers consortia called Anonymous hacked the websites of MasterCard and Paypal, where I have accounts. Maybe they will erase my balance as part of the sabotage. I would be psyched. But this act of Anonymous would be to destroy information in support of the freedom of information. The group calls itself Anonymous the way you call a fat guy Tiny.  Julian Assange was taken into custody over a sex crime charge, and the sensitive nature of the accusation correlates the insensitivity of questioning it as a conspiracy against Assange. There is precedent, and the U.S. is a vengeful personality. To bandy about the Espionage Act, as have some politicoes, is to resonate the old FBI, which calls to mind J. Edgar Hoover, another paranoid archivist of private files, and who often accused his enemies (interlopers of information) of sexually deviant behavior.

As Baby Boomers age, new proof is discovered to support the endurance of youth, as suggested in the following quote from tech theorist Nicholas Carr :

“The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. ‘The brain,’ according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.’”

The signs are not so promising for the enlightened treatment of the digestive system. Sure, smoking is bad for you, but it is not a habit which fulfills a primitive appetite. The connection between drugs and brain response is complex, even though the idea that “smoking is bad” is quite simple. If anything, as the electric stimulation of society increases with the advents of technology, nicotine itself is a synapse inducer. It is just that smoking is not healthy – as is sometimes technology.

Eating is a primal habit. More than just appetite, you eat to live. So to conceive this new crop of “foodies” (a derivative of the Online Age) is really just to recognize a bunch of food snobs, who take something that everyone does and self-inaugurate a vacuous superiority. So when you see that the new trend is to put Bacon in everything, like Bacon Marmalade or Bacon ice cream, and it is accepted and devoured and purveyed through the discourse by urban bourgeois intelligentsia, it is not to witness the rudiments of the New Human, but to be reminded of some of the more depressing remnants of the Old.

Sex, too, is an appetite. You either have sex, or you auto-eroticize. People love to speculate upon the ambiguous sexuality of certain people, and say with a smarmy tone, “O, did he come out of the closet yet?” And so they mistake their ghostly”gaydar” for deep psychological insight. Sex drive is akin to hunger.  The stomach wants to get filled, as the balls want to empty. That is why priests are celibate, and monks fast, in belief that the inanely mystical abstention of the body will bring them closer to the baneful God which they have created for themselves so as to comprehend the absurdities of the human condition.  If you are horny and starved, you will have ecstatic visions of what Is the Void. “So is he gay or what?” Try to grab his wang and note the reaction.