broadcast utopia

I should say that if you plan on reading the book, don’t read this post. I won’t necessarily spoil anything, but I also don’t want this post to be superficial.

As I mentioned, I want to follow Patrick’s book summaries with my own attempt, in the Ryan-style, and see if they’re valuable. I already do this somewhat on goodreads, but they’re very brief usually.

I read Pattern Recognition in an afternoon during college almost a decade ago. With that, Gibson had brought his language into the near-present day, intermixing already-real and about-to-be-real which for me made me read it as if he had pulled back a thin veneer of coating on the reality that I know, explaining some inner clockworks of society and people mixing that I take for granted. It was around the same time that I learned about the Pantone color projections and the like, understanding the notion of design and marketing and aesthetics all being connected intrinsically and out of necessity when planning multimillion dollar budgets.

Theories about the Illuminati, only applied to every day modern consumer culture.

Zero History closes out the Bigend trilogy, wrapping it all up nicely. It read very well as a sequel, but I don’t know that I’d recommend it to you unless you’ve read the first two. The main thread (pun not intended) for the book was the relationship between men’s streetwear and military uniform fashion. When the connection is made, it clicks – I can see it clearly in non-dressy wear immediately.

It was entertaining, and again, felt more revealing than prescient, into areas of our society that I wouldn’t otherwise think much about.

At some point, Bigend was explaining that there’s a large demographic that finds the idea that they might be mistaken for being [ex-]soldiers on the street, and that being embedded in their consciousness, and something clicked in my own head.

The book was a fantastic conclusion to the trilogy, starting with familiar characters, and building from there.

There was a time when I wrote a program for my life, akin to:

if (I can work and be productive): work
else if(blah blah): and so on
else: sleep.

I have an in-flight / traveling ritual that is similar. Flights are some of my most productive time. I hated my first couple of flights with seat-back entertainment screens (JetBlue and similar), because it’s so easy to be distracted by the neighbors, or the seats ahead.

It’s another story when you’re burning out on fumes, like I was this trip. Preparing ahead, I had some videos and books ready to rock: an iTunes rental of Urbanized, and the latest Funday Monday of Day9′s. In the end, I turned to the in-flight entertainment system, to accompany the profuse offering of Air France’s baguettes.

I used to love the SIFF in Seattle — for several weeks, our social schedule would be planned around it. And if you know me, I don’t often watch movies, unless I personally am super excited for one, and especially not outside the comfort of my home television / computer. With my friend back home, we’ve been steadily going through our back catalogue: either watching things we both have been meaning to watch, or sharing movies that we each personally really rather like. But a lot of that is selected from the compendium of history, and mainly Amero-centric.

So on international flights (especially on the A380 ) I like to peruse the selection of foreign films. Really, I could do the same on Netflix, and still pull up a wealth of offerings, but I think it’s the state of in-flight displacement, the transitory trajectory that lets me relax the need to constantly work and enjoy a movie. I caught Princess Toyotomi on the way here. Delightful!