my favorite things (online) – a series. (#1)

The Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator, and it just generally makes me happy. Music blogs are just great – artists getting exposure, music fans getting excited, and untold musical riches for visitors. The Hype Machine collects them and allows for easy search and download. While there’s some debate over whether this actually allows for dialog or is just a p2p download clone, as a music fan and an ex-owner of an mp3 blog, I think it’s a beautiful thing. It’s easy to both see what’s hyped at the moment and discover new things, plus it encourages community and enthusiasm. Yay for music!

viewfinder

blown-out in the fog

The 1980s Disney Future

Remember Horizons, the Epcot ride? Despite being closed in 1999, the entire trip into the 21st century is on Youtube. Welcome to a world where no one is concerned about the ethics of irrigating the desert and kelp is a viable energy resource.

But naivety aside, the ride was damn cool. I remember riding it when I was around six years old and absolutely loving it. Some of the set designs look straight out of 2001 or Solaris, and you can still get some sense of the scale of the ride from this video.

25 years on from the 1984 opening of the ride, there’s an utter lack of the kitschy naive future in pop culture. Take Wall-E, for instance – incidentally tied with The Dark Knight for my favorite film of last year. While it functions like classic science fiction in a form of cultural commentary, like a Blade Runner-lite, the vision of the future is very bleak. The film does end on hope for the future, but in order to hit this point the human race must first soil their planet and completely retreat into the comfortable technological blanket. It’s incredibly anti-consumerist and incredibly anti-corporate – basically against all the things Horizons (originally sponsored by General Electric) stands for. How different is the transporter in Wall-E from the space station at the end of this clip?

Yet both come out of Disney – one from the thick of the 1980s and one from the end of the Bush presidency.

instructions for use:

always listen to static & never forget to breathe.