"China is known for its fake Apple stores, fake Starbucks, and fake practically everything else."

"In this instance, it would seem that Mayor Wang is determined to make his English castle town a consummate fake."

Beijing's suburban Miyun County is going to build a large European-style town within five years and no one will be allowed to speak Chinese there, said the county mayor.

Wang Haichen said a local village would be turned into a 67-hectare English castle with 16 courtyards of unique houses. It will offer visitors souvenir passports and ban Chinese speaking to create the illusion of being abroad....

Is this absurd fakery or the wave of the future? Why do we subject ourselves to the rigors of travel to faraway places? Perhaps the real question is: Why even build the fake village? It's nearly possible...



There's also the idea of not having the experience at all, just getting a false memory of a vacation injected into your brain. That was Philip K. Dick's idea in "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale":

I will go, he said to himself. Before I die I’ll see Mars.

It was, of course, impossible, and he knew this even as he dreamed. But the daylight, the mundane noise of his wife now brushing her hair before the bedroom mirror – everything conspired to remind him of what he was. A miserable little salaried employee, he said to himself with bitterness.

The story is only 17-pages long — read it in this book — so it's a lot faster than that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but perhaps, in the future, we'll have Arnold Schwarzenegger movies injected directly into our brains....

We can't let him run around. He knows too much.

Roses are much friendlier than poison ivy.

I walk in Augusta, Kentucky, down by the Ohio River.

ADDED: The hymn playing in the second half of the video is "Faith of Our Fathers." That's also the name of a Philip K. Dick story. Wikipedia has an article on the Dick story, but not the hymn. That says something, doesn't it?

IN THE COMMENTS: Traditionalguy writes:

Memorial day is for a remembrance of the real heroes who really died for us. This is the one day we don't push marketing myths and science fiction tales from the wide world of commerce and politics. So it is fitting to see poison ivy, roses, Faith of Our Fathers, and the Ohio River all just being themselves.

Dreaming about blogging.

Though blogging consumes many of my waking hours, I don't normally dream about blogging. But last night, in a dream I got extremely excited about blogging an idea I had about the election.

I never found a way to sit in front of a computer and type out the words. Maybe it's impossible to type in a dream:

The thing that snapped me into realizing I was dreaming was, uh-- was my digital clock. I couldn't really read it. It was like the circuitry was all screwed up or something.

Yeah, that's real common. And small printed material is pretty tough too. Very unstable....

Anyway, I read this essay by Philip K. Dick.

What, you read it in your dream?

No, no. I read it before the dream.

Dialogue from the film "Waking Life."



Not that I believe everything I hear in the movies — even in cartoon movies — but I think you can't read in dreams and, so, you can't write. So you can't blog. But you can get very excited about an idea you want to blog.

What was the idea? I thought I could make a vigorous, influential argument that the Republican Party could avoid nominating John McCain — that there is still time to step off what it knows is the path to almost certain defeat in November.

"The more power Drudge has attained, the more reclusive he has become. Drudge seems to despise his own fame with a Kurt Cobain–like intensity."

Did you see this huge article in New York Magazine about Matt Drudge?

On radio he speaks of himself as a nobody and has referred to his fans as “psychic vampires.” He has utterly compartmentalized his life, separating the personal and the public. Acquaintances describe very brief, formal encounters, and even friends of Drudge’s, if there is such a category, generally communicate with him by IM....

Drudge enjoys the changing fashions in news, the plot shifts that he has a hand in engineering. As he’s entered middle age, something noir and futuristic has entered his sensibility, more Philip K. Dick (on his show, he often invokes Blade Runner) than Walter Winchell. The site is obsessed with global warming, with the dangers of cell phones and cloning, with all manner of tabloid horrors. He’s a storyteller, and the stories are dark....

The left hates Drudge for good reason; he has helped kill one Democratic presidential aspirant after another and has started in on John Edwards this season....

Republicans can’t count on Drudge. He praises Rosie O’Donnell and Michael Moore for their independence and fight, and seems to despise Giuliani and McCain....

Drudge has a sneaker for the woman he calls “the Senatress.” When Clinton started wheezing and coughing in a speech in New Orleans in May, Drudge expressed genuine concern for her. “Hillary, dear, take care of yourself. We need you. I need you personally … Take a few days off, what’s this frenetic pace?” He added admiringly, “She was professional. She kept going. She finished the speech.” After a left-wing listener IM’d Drudge to say he wanted Hillary to drop dead onstage, Drudge said, “I need Hillary Clinton. You don’t get it. I need to be part of her world. That’s my bank. Like Leo DiCaprio has the environment and Al Gore has the environment and Jimmy Carter has anti-Americanism … I have Hillary.”

Much more at the link -- including plenty of speculation about Drudge's sexuality.

"A Scanner Darkly."

I hadn't gone out to a movie theater, I think, since last December January. (The movie was "Capote.") I'd been considering various movies but never quite got sufficiently motivated until today. It's not just that I wanted to see "A Scanner Darkly." It's that it was also disgustingly hot out, and that pushed me over the edge.

I love Richard Linklater -- the director -- mostly from "Slacker," which will always be one of my very favorite movies. And I'm interested in Philip K. Dick enough to care. I also like flat animation a lot, even thought Linklater's watery, flow-y rotoscoped style, which I'd seen in "Waking Life," is not my favorite thing. But that was enough. I finally went to the movies.

I took some folded up notebook paper in case I wanted to write down quotes for a blog post. Here, let me put this through my scanner (darkly):



The word "bigs" is supposed to be "bugs." I wrote that during the first scene, which was harrowing... and involved bugs. I forgot I'd already written on that side of the fold when I wrote down a sentence from a long conversation three hopeless Substance D addicts had about a guy who wanted to be an imposter -- like the guy Leonardo DiCaprio played in "Catch Me If You Can" -- but he figured out he could just be an imposter imposter: "You could just pose as an imposter, it would be a lot easier."

Despite the seeming charm of that, this is not a film that finds drug use cute. It's very hallucinatory, so it's most likely to draw in an audience that is interested in drugs, but it is devastatingly antidrug, to the point where it made me feel guilty for writing that post last week about psilocybin. Just say no, kids, or you will be scrounging around in the dirt of an endless cornfield trying to pick the little blue flowers of death.

The film was quite brilliant, and if you think about it hard you can figure out what happened. Presumably, it helps to have read the book, which I haven't. It would probably be more enjoyable the second time for me, to notice all the details now that I understand the story.

While I've got the scanner fired up and receiving my handwritten notes, here are the (extensive!) notes I made for podcast #55:



They seem hallucinatory in the afterglow of "A Scanner Darkly."

The Philip K. Dick robot has escaped!

He's been gone for weeks!



UPDATE: A reader emails to charge that the disappearance is a hoax: "The whole disappeared while flying on a plane thing is lifted directly out of Dick's masterpiece We Can Build You, where an android Edwin M. Stanton gets in a plane and flies to see the protagonist's enemies." True?

Listening. You can listen to 9 Beet Stretch on line here. (See yesterday's posts if you don't know what I'm talking about.) It takes a while to make any audible sound at all, so don't give up. The ordinary speed first movement has a mysteriously slow intro, so when you slow that way the hell down, it might make you think the MP3 isn't working. I think it's nearly silent until the second minute! Well, if you're the impatient sort maybe this isn't your thing, but you might want to speed ahead to minute 2. The first audible note is very Ninth Symphony. If you get easily bored, you could simultaneously play, in slow motion, with the sound off, your DVD of Clockwork Orange. Or just read--read Philip K. Dick, like this guy, who made 9 Beet Stretch his Philip K. Dick reading soundtrack, noting that that it "is somewhat reminiscent of Blade Runner's soundtrack. It's got just the right mixture of desolation and transcendence, and is my favorite online audio find since SpamRadio."



I found the 9 Beet Stretch website through this nice review in The Village Voice. Here's an excerpt from that:

Electronic-sound jockeys must have fantasized about this idea ages ago, and it's a wonder that it waited for [9 Beet Stretch composer Lief] Inge to get around to it. Early composers who worked with audiotape agonized over their inability to change the speed of a sound without raising or lowering the pitch as well. In the '60s (according to genius sound engineer Robert Bielecki, my source for such data), there was some success in doing this with vocal samples, but music-quality time compression and expansion waited for the digital age. Today, many audio programs like ProTools contain pitch-shifting algorithms, because that's what you need: Changing the pitch without changing the speed is the same problem. Slowing down a sound is especially difficult, since the computer needs to interpolate identical wave forms in between the ones already there, but without causing glitches....



The second and third movements are remarkably lovely, eight hours of ethereal ambient music between them. The isolated violin notes of the scherzo's fugue turn into gossamer lines, while the slow movement's dissonances and suspensions take forever to melt, holding the ear rapt like the slowest Furtwängler recording of a Mahler adagio, only much slower. I find this 330-minute version of the Adagio a considerable improvement over the original. Who would have thought that Beethoven could have been a great ambient composer, if he had only divided his metronome markings by a couple dozen?

Looking back over my photos from yesterday, I realize that a glaring question is: Where is everybody? It looks completely empty! I was avoiding including people, in part because I wanted to be able to put the pictures up here and in part because I thought most people didn't add to the somber glory of the abandoned factory (visitors to my office know that when my iMac is unused for a couple minutes it starts to play pictures of abandoned buildings, which I got from a website I've now forgotten and would love to be able to find again (Inge used an iMac, by the way)). There was one woman I wanted to photograph--I would have asked her first, though. She was dressed like the people in this book. Oh, how I would love for this style of dressing to take hold in Madison!



I wonder if the audience grew as the 8pm end time approached. Perhaps it seemed to be an evening thing to do, or people just assumed the Ode to Joy part of the symphony would be best, the way I thought I'd prefer to hear something other than the Third Movement, which seems least interesting in normal time.