Compulsory reading for young Mike, but did it help?

Mike's Pith & Wind
The Curator
If I thought about it at all, my youthful perception of a curator was of somebody who was, first, elderly, second, academically very well qualified and third, in the employ of a museum, or perhaps an art institution. Definitely a stuffy type, wearing a pin-stripe suit and perhaps even sporting a monocle. There’s another curatorial trope - the portly dude with coke-bottle glasses, wearing a safari suit and a pith helmet. Or maybe that's an Archaeologist. Or an Anthropologist. Oh well. Did I mention curators were almost invariably male?
Anyway, it turns out there are curators in nearly every field of human endeavour, fields themselves being one of them - cricket, tennis and footy fields spring to mind - not to mention fields of plants, flowers and trees. A bit of thought and you can see the list is potentially endless.
The present day proliferation of curators (have you noticed that there is also an alarming number of suspiciously young professors these days?) has led to there being a schism between the traditional high falutin’ curators and the more recent variant of rootin’ tootin’ curators.
The definition of a curator has obviously evolved over the years and has been now devalued to the point that merely choosing one can of beans over another at the supermarket qualifies you as a curator - and doing a damn fine job of it.
In reality, you’re not even qualified for that simple task, but it appears that yer actual qualified curator as we once knew him/her has simply been overwhelmed by the daily avalanche of vomit we’re confronted with on social media, where everybody’s a self-proclaimed expert and anything goes.
I used not to read newspapers, (or watch TV), but in middle age (or was it the Middle Ages?) I started to read them regularly- and I enjoyed reading them too. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I implicitly trusted that well-educated and even morally upright writers/editors/sub-editors were giving me the best that mankind had to offer on the news-front, whether that be locally or internationally. If I had an opinion aching to be shaped, this trustworthy band of news’ curators could be relied upon to provide me with untarnished facts, backed with sensible and occasionally scholarly research, that I could confidently quote and discuss around a notional or actual water dispenser.
Social media proclaims that opinion and discussion has been ‘democratised’ on their platforms, whereas it’s plainly been hi-jacked by loonies from far left and right of the far left and right, paranoid conspiracy theorists, Trump proselytisers and other uninformed riff-raff who have suddenly discovered there’s a massive network of idiots just like themselves out there.
I still have the occasional impulse to join in, but I have long-since forbidden myself from becoming involved with any political debates on social media, as you never know when somebody you respect might chime into the argument with some radical comment that changes your view of them forever. I shudder when I think of The Voice fiasco and some of the jaw-dropping views expressed then.
I had blithely assumed musicians to be, like myself, advocates for reason and repositories of socially aware sentiment, that is until sometime last century I read in Rolling Stone (when Rolling Stone was a thing) about Ted Nugent and his extreme right views. I wasn’t that fond of Nugent’s music, so I recalibrated my definition of a musician and assumed it was a one-off aberration. During the pandemic I discovered, amongst many other distasteful things, that the musical world is simply a reflection of the outside world as far as political sentiment goes.
It's not necessarily earth shattering when you discover that somebody you like is Labor or Liberal, Democrat or Republican - the nature of politics here and in the West generally has been that both left and right parties cluster around the middle ground to attract the bulk of the voters, so you were safe to assume that either way there were only arguable details separating your overall views.
You could also argue that the involvement of now defunct Cambridge Analytica firm in the Brexit referendum irrevocably changed all that. By locating and harvesting the personal information of a small minority of uninformed and disenfranchised voters (via Facebook), the Brexiteers, represented by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, targeted and exploited this group of misfits with a combination of disinformation and jingoism, which turned out to be enough to unexpectedly tip the balance in favour of the UK leaving the EU.
But, here I go flying right into the very political trap that I was so anxious to avoid. Sigh!

Perhaps this is an opportune time for me to reveal that when I was very young, maybe round eleven years of age, I was questioned by my grandfather as to what I might like to tackle as a career.
At that stage I was embarking on a four-year stint as a chorister in the Christchurch Cathedral Boys Choir, which coincided with my reading a book my mother had given to me for my birthday - to whit, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, probably one of the earliest self-help books on the market - that is if you’re allowed to include the invisible presence of Jesus Christ in the self-help description.
All this religion in my life undoubtedly influenced my response to my grandfather’s inquiry as to my future career path.
‘I think I’d like to be a priest’, I posited uncertainly. ‘Hmmm’, said my grandfather approvingly. That brightened me up considerably. No further discourse on the subject, no promises to stick to the path etc.
Richard and I were aware of some ongoing tension between our grandfather and our father but were far too young to understand the full implications of this impasse. In any case, I hoped that this hypothetical career path of mine (the only one I’ve ever owned up to) might forestall any similar irritation coming my way. Our grandfather was not a man to be trifled with.
Priests and vicars were once referred to as curates i.e. curators of our souls, which brings the Tale of the Curate’s Egg to mind. There are many versions of this tale, but it can be summed up thus.
The bishop could see his breakfast guest, a novice curate, was having trouble with his egg.
‘It looks like you’ve got a bad egg there, Vicar’.
‘Oh no, my Lord Bishop. I can assure you that parts of it are really quite excellent!’
That’s me all over - being polite to the point of being misconstrued as sarcastic. (A bad egg is a bad egg is a bad egg, mutter, mutter). So, rather than becoming a cleric, I tend to think that I’ve become more of a a stoic, although that could be simply because I have a very low pleasure threshold. At my great age (for a rock muso) things may not be as good as they used to be, but living is still better than the alternative.

William Gibson and the movies
William Gibson had written a third of his debut novel 'Neuromancer', when he saw the landmark 1982 film 'Blade Runner'. After watching the first twenty minutes he thought that everyone would assume that he had copied his visual texture from that astonishingly fine-looking film.
‘Neuromancer’ was the first of three novels comprising the 'Sprawl' series and starts with the line ‘The sky above the port was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel.’ One knows what he means. Perhaps like a Melbourne summer. Bruce Sterling described the 'Sprawl' series as a wonderful combination of low life and high-tech.
Gibson created cyberpunk, described plug-in neural connections, brought into focus global corporatisation. He wrote about alternative marketing, transnational branding and our data centric metaverse in an appallingly prescient manner. In much the same way that NASA referred to ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ for the design of its later spacecraft, ‘Neuromancer’ created a way to see the internet and its evolution as graphic reality. The only problem is that manchildren, like Elon Musk, believe that components of the novels are an actual future for them to make real. It is not a warning, but a wonderful neo-liberal promise for his ilk to make good. Not the gliding monolith sliding on Teflon humming with omnipresent flickering technology that is inexorably crushing its way to the future. Kleptocracy via Ayn Rand.
William Gibson can be a very good writer, but he hasn’t been kindly treated when it comes to cinematic versions of his work. 'Johnny Mnemonic' with Keanu Reeves is apparently a shocker. The short story it is based on runs for a mere twenty-five pages and has decent plot, but the writing falls far short of poetry. ‘New Rose Hotel’ is apparently worse on the screen than on the page. In this short story many of the themes, places, scientific jargon and even some of the Zaibatsu, Maas Biolabs and Hosaka, that form the 'Sprawl' series are introduced. The writing is baroque on synthetic beta-endorphins bought in the marketplace at Djemaa-el-Fna from a sweating Portuguese businessman, a far remove from his later cooler more dialogue driven style.

The strong connection between cyberpunk movement and urban areas of Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong — which is now our accepted visual understanding of urban living in a dystopian future — was solidified in ‘Blade Runner.’
The one thing that 'Blade Runner' couldn’t foresee was the dominance of flat screen displays, with bulky CRT televisions still being in play, but then again it is only an alternative future, which has already happened in real world chronology, as the movie is set in 2017.  Seven years after that it still feels like a world that is inevitable.
It is the opposite of the other contender for the greatest science fiction movie ever, Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’. There the space technology is streamlined, clean and light. Interestingly both film makers thought that Pan Am with its blue globe logo, at the time an airline that epitomized the luxury and glamour of intercontinental travel, would last. It went broke in 1991, living now only in films that thought it was near eternal.
Another interesting comparison is between two moving deaths, neither of which is actually human. Firstly, the fading away of’ consciousness’ of HAL 9000 the “heuristically programmed algorithmic” omnipresent shipboard computer in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ as Dave removes more and more cards from his mainframe, and secondly that of Roy Batty, the final rogue replicant alive after Deckard has killed all his replicant companions.

Pathos
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
Dave...stop. Stop, will you?
Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?
Stop, Dave. I'm afraid.
I'm afraid,
Dave.......Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it.
I'm a...fraid....

Poetry
‘Blade Runner’
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion...
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...
Time to die

Why are we moved? In Roy Batty’s case because is at least as human as Deckard, and certainly more compassionate and better read, and in HAL’s case, even though he is a disembodied paranoid presence throughout the film, his actions are all about staying alive. And he is perhaps more human that the humans on the spacecraft, who are almost functioning automatons.
Given the not entirely wonderful fate of William Gibson’s books on film, what has happened in other media? One of Gibson’s later books ‘The Peripheral’ managed one season on Prime and was not renewed. It hadn’t even reached halfway through the story. Despite starring the wonderful Chloë Grace Moretz and her upper lip, it made the book seem almost Dostoyevskyian. As usual, too many guns, too much AI generated scenery and special effects. Too many extra bits and garnishes. Too American, even though it is his most geographically American book. Unfortunate then that we never reached the last pages of the book, where New Zealand gets some oblique references as a powerful survivor of ‘the jackpot’, a world collapse that eliminated a large portion of the world’s population. Leaving oligarchs and kleptocrats with even more power than now.
It’s not his best book, but still entertaining.
In the Sprawl books, ‘Neuromancer’, ‘Count Zero’ and ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive’, the matrix is the baseline behind the plot. The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. As Gibson wrote ‘… Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.’
Matrix might be a good name for a film or two and consensual hallucination – a wonderful phrase that describes society rather well.
In February this year, Apple TV+ announced that it had greenlit a series based on Neuromancer for 10 episodes. Given what Apple did to 'Foundation and Empire', the three-book series by Isaac Azimov, I am not entirely optimistic. Let us charitably say that Apple’s version of ‘Foundation and Empire’ was overly dramatised, featuring more guns, more violence, bigger explosions, new events and new characters. I gave up watching. I haven’t read the books for a long time, but I’m damned sure that they weren’t like what I was watching on the screen. The difference between visceral and cerebral.
Therefore, as far as ‘Neuromancer’ goes, I am not optimistic.