Hauntology…

That was the word. Or you might call the consistency of the poster design Fontology. Bad jokes aside, I have wondered if Laika knew she wasn’t coming home. Silly maybe, but it nags at me now and again. The word volunteer strikes me as funny when I think of situations in which I’ve volunteered for this or that. It almost didn’t feel like a choice, vital rewards of validation being what they are. Not that there was usually any great sacrifice but to be fair to the muses of truth and honesty it never felt like a choice.

All asides aside, this Sovietwave vibe still pulls at me. It can create a space, no pun intended, where my own past converges with the present and future, in an emotional sense of course. My entire sense of myself can be mapped in that space, and to paraphrase Mr. Bowie, it feels like floating in a most familiar way. It’s melancholic in a not so traditional sense of the word. It feels like something is lost in that space, just out of reach. Just out of sight.

It’s funny in a sense that we used to look out at jet trails and see the future with people zooming across the sky at the speed of sound. Now we see jet trails and see pollution, or if you’re my generation maybe it’s two images superimposed over each other. (Of course there are those few special tinfoil helmet sorts that see chemtrails and insidious government plots). it’s my old vision of the future that would elevate us all along with the vision of the toxic future that will probably end us. Dark thoughts for the morning, no? It’s the truth, though. It is.

There are so many echoes of that past. Like, I can’t be the only person of my generation who did a double-take at the first images of Elon Musk’s cybertruck. It was a visual echo of a future that didn’t turn out quite like we envisioned it, but it was so familiar. It’s a piece of what the future looked like in the Sixties. It wouldn’t have been out of place in any of the Sovietwave era art.

It still seems to me that it was a dare. Musk dared us to envision a future. It’s been his raison d’etre all along. He was willing to take the ridicule and memes, like, if not this, then what? Open up your mind and tell us what you see! It was a hauntological hand grenade. Imagine a future. Reawaken dormant dreams of the future.

Auyway, this is the soundtrack to these silly musings.