Whatever happened to the scenes from the future?

This is a new blog. Over the past few years I've had a handful of blogs, and my general rule of thumb is that when the earliest entries stop making sense to me its time to start a new one. So here we are. This one will be slightly different though, in that it will be less centered on personal insight and observations, and more about my perceptions of the world around me, as manifested in books, music, film, art, etc.



We'll begin with the title. "Scenes from the Future" is the second track on the Ivory Coast's "The Rush of Oncoming Traffic." The Ivory Coast was a band from, as far as I can determine, the Boston area. Though the record was recorded 10 years ago at this point, "the Rush of Oncoming Traffic" sounds to my ears like a record that could have come out yesterday, today, or tomorrow. The jangly guitars, hyperactive drumming, and vocals that hover around the correct pitch but never quite hit it all belie a certain maturity and sense of musical self-awareness that runs through the record.

"Scenes from the Future" is one of the standout tracks. The lyrics express a specific feeling of disappointment that at some time we all share when we discover that "progress" as its commonly recognized has nothing to do with monorails, spaceships, and giant glass towers but instead is characterized by changes in infrastructure, the value of the dollar, and other considerably more abstract factors. So in the end we hold up individuals such as Jules Verne, Gene Roddenbery, and George Lucas not only for their creativity, but because they carry on in the face of this universal truth.