We’re doomed
by Tom Sullivan
So what if 2001 arrived 20 years late? Take a stress pill.
Techie Re-Animators are reviving dead musical acts via hologram. “Part concert, part technology-driven spectacle,” reports Mark Binelli for New York Times Magazine.
Peter Shapiro, 47, owns the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., an hour north of Manhattan. He produced the five concerts of the Grateful Dead’s 50th-anniversary “Fare Thee Well” tour. The show grossed over $50 million in 2015. Last April, the start-up Eyellusion brought a holographic Frank Zappa show to Shapiro’s venue. Zappa died in 1993:
“But here’s the headline,” Shapiro went on. “Look at who’s gone, just in the last couple of years: Bowie, Prince, Petty. Now look who’s still going but who’s not going to be here in 10 years, probably, at least not touring: the Stones, the Who, the Eagles, Aerosmith, Billy Joel, Elton John, McCartney, Springsteen. That is the base not just of classic rock but of the live-music touring business. Yes, there’s Taylor Swift, there’s Ariana Grande. But the base is these guys.”
The Zappa-rition itself had a kind of Weekend at Bernie’s aspect, Binelli writes, “making me hyperaware of the sunglasses covering the lifeless eyes of the corpse propped up between living people (in this case, a hot backing band composed predominantly of musicians who had toured with Zappa over the years).” The projection was a shade brighter and less substantial than the live musicians, “like a ghost struggling to fully materialize.”
Farther west this morning, the FAA still has not answered who or what is in control of swarms of drones spotted flying night formations over Colorado and Nebraska since late December.
The Denver Post reports:
A newly formed task force is on the hunt for a “command vehicle” that might be controlling the mysterious clusters of drones that witnesses say have been flying grid patterns in northeast Colorado and western Nebraska most nights for several weeks.
The command vehicle could be a “closed box trailer with antennas or a large van,” the Phillips County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Monday, hours after about 75 people from a variety of state, local and federal agencies met in Brush to discuss the ongoing situation.
[…]
Representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the U.S. Army, the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and a wide variety of local law enforcement agencies stretching from Nebraska to Colorado Springs attended Monday’s meeting, Yowell said.
Estimated to have 6-foot wingspans, the drones are spooking not just local residents. Authorities in attendance at the meeting spilled out into the hallway.
An assortment of private and federal agencies denies the drones are theirs. Then again, governments lie in times of war, except, perhaps, when it comes to assassinating foreigners remotely via computer.
If these stories echo 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is not as if humans had not already handed control of our ship of state to a soulless, homicidal animatronic. Before that, they’d handed their personal information to soulless computers in private hands. They’d allowed governments to track their movements with cute phone apps and identify them on the streets with ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition software.
Perhaps not even swarms of voters under 45 can save us now and this is just “A Taste of Armageddon.”