Antarctica: The Future

Appropriate for a New Year's Eve is yesterday's frontpager, "Countries Rush for Upper Hand in Antarctica," by spooky Simon Romero, the Gray Lady's Brazil bureau chief and scold of any and all Latin American movement for social justice. As one would expect from Romero, he paints a word picture of a Cold Waresque land grab underway for the resource rich territory at the bottom of the world:

More than a century has passed since explorers raced to plant their flags at the bottom of the world, and for decades to come this continent is supposed to be protected as a scientific preserve, shielded from intrusions like military activities and mining.

But an array of countries are rushing to assert greater influence here, with an eye not just toward the day those protective treaties expire, but also for the strategic and commercial opportunities that exist right now.

“The newer players are stepping into what they view as a treasure house of resources,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a scholar at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury who specializes in Antarctic politics.

Some of the ventures focus on the Antarctic resources that are already up for grabs, like abundant sea life. China and South Korea, both of which operate state-of-the-art bases here, are ramping up their fishing of krill, the shrimplike crustaceans found in abundance in the Southern Ocean, while Russia recently thwarted efforts to create one of the world’s largest ocean sanctuaries here.

Some scientists are examining the potential for harvesting icebergs from Antarctica, which is estimated to have the biggest reserves of fresh water on the planet. Nations are also pressing ahead with space research and satellite projects to expand their global navigation abilities.

Building on a Soviet-era foothold, Russia is expanding its monitoring stations for Glonass, its version of the Global Positioning System. At least three Russian stations are already operating in Antarctica, part of its effort to challenge the dominance of the American GPS, and new stations are planned for sites like the Russian base, in the shadow of the Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity.

Elsewhere in Antarctica, Russian researchers boast of their recent discovery of a freshwater reserve the size of Lake Ontario after drilling through miles of solid ice.

“You can see that we’re here to stay,” said Vladimir Cheberdak, 57, chief of the Bellingshausen Station, as he sipped tea under a portrait of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, an officer and later admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy who explored the Antarctic coast in 1820.

It goes on like that -- you know, the ruthless and acquisitive Russians and Chinese -- before the reader nears the end of the piece to discover -- lo and behold! -- that the gentle U.S. giant is actually by far the largest squatter on Antarctica:

As some countries expand operations in Antarctica, the United States maintains three year-round stations on the continent with more than 1,000 people during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, including those at the Amundsen-Scott station, built in 1956 at an elevation of 9,301 feet on a plateau at the South Pole. But American researchers quietly grumble about budget restraints and having far fewer icebreakers than Russia, limiting the reach of the United States in Antarctica.

This incessant good-guy-vs.-bad-guy division makes reading the daily news tiresome; it is part of my motivation for posting occasionally on comic books. The point I want to make is that there is not that much difference between the media; in fact, I would argue that depictions of good vs. evil are on average much richer and more complex in comic books than in the prestige press.

The reason why Romero's feature on Antarctica is appropriate for New Year's Eve is because it is about the future -- future mineral wealth, fish stocks, fresh water, energy resources. The continent is governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, the part of which banning mining comes up for review in 2048:

Antarctica’s mineral, oil and gas wealth are a longer-term prize. The treaty banning mining here, shielding coveted reserves of iron ore, coal and chromium, is expected to come up for review by 2048 and could be challenged before then. Researchers recently found kimberlite deposits hinting at the existence of diamonds. And while assessments vary widely, geologists estimate that Antarctica holds at least 36 billion barrels of oil and natural gas.

I have been accumulating a stockpile of books on Antarctica since I was in my twenties when I read Edgar Allan Poe's tremendous novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), which speculates that Antarctica (the book was written prior to the exploration of the South Pole) was populated by black people. At the end of the book Pym confronts a godlike white figure before disappearing in a rent in fabric of the Earth.

Another great novel where Antarctica plays a role is Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach (1992), a fictional retelling of Donald Crowhurst's doomed and falsified single-hand, round-the-world yacht race. Antarctica is about the unknown and the unknowable, and so too is the future.

Hippies vs. Punks: Shilpa Ray's Last Year's Savage (2015)

Shilpa Ray's Last Year's Savage, released this year, is filled with one great song after another. Of all of them I believe my favorite is "Moksha."

Shilpa Ray is a Brooklyn chanteuse who plays a harmonium; she is a mid-tempo Punk rocker who absolutely blows her better known Brooklyn peer, Sharon Van Etten, right off the Williamsburg block. Ray's lyrics are super-smart and edgy. I don't usually pay that close attention to words, but it is hard not to when they are in lines like "My dick’s bigger, my breasts are thicker, whatever power means" from the song "Johnny Thunders Fantasy Space Camp" or the following first verse from my favorite, "Moksha":

There’s no entry for the foreigners
I’m your native girl with my
Tail between my bleeding ass
And I’m off to the gates of heaven
I’ve been fakin’ my drunken stupor
And my absence from your real world
I’m just better than prostrating bitches
Who make believe they’re misunderstood

In the end, I'm a sound guy. And what is powerful in "Moksha," and throughout Last Year's Savage, is the droning pump organ, the walloping drums -- like a burlesque strip tease, or a rug on a clothes line being beaten with a kitchen broom -- and Ray's voice.

Yesterday walking home up the hill I tried to remember why I was thinking about the time my ex-wife's mother's live-in boyfriend, Chris was his name, horrified me with a tale about how he had stopped reading. At the time, I was a university undergraduate, probably 20 or 21. 

Chris was a nurse who worked in the same hospital as my mother-in-law. His story of how he had stopped reading went something like this: During college and for the first few years after he got out into the workaday world, he read fulsomely -- history, philosophy, the weighty fiction of the masters. But gradually his passion for the text diminished, and Chris found himself moving away from serious prose to lighter fare like pulp paperbacks. Eventually, as the years sped by, he even stopped reading Michael Crichton and Stephen King, settling for the local small-town evening paper. Finally, at the time of his confession to me in the mid-1980s, he had even stopped reading the evening paper. Capping off his narrative, he said something like, "Now all I can manage is reading a Time article while I am on the toilet."

This hit me like a thunderbolt. I lived to read; reading was my life. I was studying philosophy at the university, reading Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, et al. The idea that there would be a time when I no longer read struck me as a kind of living death, life as a zombie where I would go, like Chris the nurse did, to work every day and then come home and smoke a joint and maybe go out for a run. The thing of it is, what made me panic at the time and seared the moment in my memory to recall this past week 30 years later, is that I knew right then and there that Chris was telling me the truth.

And sure enough, I, basically, like Chris thirty years ago, don't read anymore. Certainly, I try to read the newspaper every day, and a few comic books on Saturday. But the days of sitting down for hours with my snout in The Critique of Pure Reason or Beyond Good and Evil are long gone.

And then I remembered why I remembered Chris' story -- because all that reading of the Western philosophers I did while in college has never left me. I think about it all the time; it informs how I look at the world.

And one of those ideas, gleaned from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, is that we can never completely know the future. The system is always open, must remain open. Any attempt to close the system and declare the end of history or the achievement of perfection is doomed to failure.

What the artist does is nibble at the outer edge of the timeline, the place where the present intersects with the future, where the atmosphere meets the void of space; she brings the future back to us (we, the consumers, the witnesses) and regurgitates it; we then consume it.

This is why it is essential to keep listening to new music. It is how rationality works. Shilpa Ray's Last Year's Savage, like Future's DS2, is pure ambrosia.

Hippies vs. Punks: Future's DS2

The fact is that Hippies and Punks have long been absent from the cultural vanguard. Hippies represented the last hurrah of post-WWII prosperity and social democracy. Their contributions to the avant-garde ended in the early 1970s, even prior to the time that the Punks arrived on the scene. When the Punks showed up in a big way in 1976 it was to herald the arrival of the "No Future" paradigm of neoliberalism.

Punk quickly went Post- and splintered; it happened at a time when Hip Hop first appeared. So Hip Hop can make a claim as well to be present at the creation of our current neoliberal paradigm. As the decades have looped by Hip Hop has only grown in stature and relevance, while Punk and Hippie music are merely marginal curiosities.

Future's third studio album, DS2 (Dirty Sprite 2) debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 charts this summer. If there is a pop cultural avant-garde in the United States now I have absolutely no doubt that its manifesto is Future's DS2.

I have been immersed it all week. All I can say is that it says it all about late-stage neoliberalism: a vacant, joyless celebration of money, drugs, pussy and violence. It's End Times. No doubt about it. Fucking 'em two at a time, dodging bullets, pissing codeine and gobbling Percocet -- "They got blood on their money, and I still count it." Boy, does it sound good. It's Nietzsche after rejecting Schopenhauer's pessimism but somehow fast-forwarded to the doped-up care of his sister Frau Förster.

I was aware of Future at first because living in Seahawks country the news of the off-season was Russell Wilson hooking up with Future's ex-fiance Ciara (and mother of one of his children). There was some social-media kerfuffle when a picture of Seattle's QB pushing Future's son in a perambulator with Ciara at his side went viral. Then I read an excellent piece by Jon Caramanica, "In Atlanta’s Ever-Shifting Hip-Hop Scene, Future and Migos Keep Innovating," and I was intrigued. It seemed to me that what we were dealing with here is a moment when the Owl of Minerva takes flight not at dusk but midday. The Zeitgeist is being revealed in real time. According to Caramanica:

Future is digging into his weird. “DS2” (A1/Freebandz/Epic), his third major-label album, is full of psychedelic angst, girded by Future’s uncanny gift for melody. He’s as singular as ever here, and also more accessible; “DS2” topped the Billboard album chart last week.

Future has already made his concessionary album — “Honest,” released last year, which was widely maligned but wrongly so. Few rappers are as well suited for pop’s melodic tenderness as he is — the album showcased that gift.

That was one version of Future retreating into his feelings. But since then, and especially after his split from the R&B singer Ciara, with whom he has a son, he’s tried another way. Now when he turns inward, his lyrics emerge as a catalog of savage boasts and self-destruction, his sadness made manifest in the severe desiccation in his voice and the digital fog that obscures it. This approach has made for some of the most bracing music of his career, as heard on the three largely outstanding mixtapes he has released in the past nine months: “Monster,” “Beast Mode” and “56 Nights.” (Future has released as many impressive full-length projects as any artist in the 2010s.)

“DS2” isn’t quite as consistent, but it’s exceptional at its peaks. The album’s cold tone is established early, on “Thought It Was a Drought.” “Bitch, I’ma choose the dirty over you/ You know I ain’t scared to lose you,” he raps, later sinking deeper into narcotic haze: “Have these meds on me, I’ma do ’em/ I take these pills and I’m having a thrill.” Much of the album is produced by Metro Boomin, who knows how to make low rumbles feel epic, like on “I Serve the Base,” with its terrifying scrape; the surprisingly warm computer melodies of “Blow a Bag”; the milky “Rotation,” which showcases Future’s phenomenal mumble.

Future’s vocal approach is impressionistic, which means that when it’s ineffective it can feel faint. But it’s also absorptive and affectingly tragic. So much of this album is devoted to drug consumption — “Take me a Xan and I levitate,” “Ain’t no fabrication, I’m on medication/ Cough syrup, I’m infatuated” — that it begins to take on an air of trauma. Even though the album closes with the mayhem-inducing song whose abbreviated title is “Commas,” Future mostly sounds as if he’s gasping for air, and that dangerous place is where his creativity thrives.

My best friend of the last several years has been a young woman, a coworker. She is a black woman, part Latina, part African-American, who has two boys, one in middle school and the other in elementary. She went through a divorce while we worked together. And even though she had a lot of the other women in the office gunning for her because she is attractive and was being rapidly promoted following a change in leadership at the local, she kept it together, showed up to the job everyday and consistently worked hard.

We share a history of being raised in the debris of broken families; that, and we are both fervent Levellers. We did Occupy Seattle stuff together, PAC for our union local, Labor Neighbor, etc. It is rare to meet a person who doesn't harbor tacit attachment to notions of a divine chain of being, who believes that privilege --all types: skin, money, cronyism -- needs to be scrapped. She has the spark.

When I left the local where we worked together to take my present job, she was very generous. As a thank you for her generosity, I bought her a copy of Future's DS2. Before giving it to her yesterday, I had peeled off the cellophane, opened the CD jewel case and loaded it into my iTunes. That's what I have been listening to all week.

When I saw her yesterday, she said that she had been on the road for three-weeks straight and was burnt out; she hadn't seen her sons in almost a month.

My relationship with this young woman -- never sexualized, always supportive and real, never phony -- is one of the only things that I can point to in my recent life and say that it is an unqualified success.

Future's DS2 capture of the Zeitgeist is proof to me that we're coming to an end here.

Time is Always Open

I believe that one can never know the future; like Kant, I think that it is always open and not predetermined.