"Beyond the Palace hemipowered drones
scream down the boulevard
The girls comb their hair in rear view mirrors
and the boys try to look so hard"
~ Bruce Springsteen,
from the song "Born to Run"
You know the look. When Joe Torre, famous baseball team manager, looked out behind the field, he had it: A glum stare. No expression. The poker face. It was as if he didn't like baseball at all. Dark sunglasses were needed for that look. Stoic. Rocky. Pitiless and hard.
The other day I was in this coffee house, which I won't tell you the name of, and there was this old
guy in there who had the look. An older gent, who looked at me blankly as if he hated me from behind these dark sunglasses. It was kinda creepy. The only way I can describe it is it reminded me of what the Joe Torre stare.
Then I noticed the person I was looking at was merely a reflection of myself. I was staring at myself. I had the Joe Torre stare.
People stare from behind dark sunglasses a lot lately, and one supposes it might be because they are
unhappy. Or it could just be a fashion thing. Nobody smiles in public anymore, or so it seems. That's
most likely because the times are so hard, and perhaps many people who stare blankly with the Joe
Torre stare because they didn't like baseball, or, simply don't have jobs, just lost their homes in some
financial, climate-related disaster or all of the above.
But most of all, staring is rude. It's a kind of surveillance. A really, really crude kind of surveillance,
but surveillance nonetheless. It needs to be turned into something more productive. People need jobs.
Cuts down on staring time. But staring skills could be better employed. You could, for example, right
now (operators are standing by) apply for training as a remote flyer of drones. That's staring on
steroids.
Since the best and brightest lunatics and social-political defectives (world leaders) of our generation
have determined surveillance society is good for the economy, and the encouragement of drone
technology is all of the wave, let us consider where the jobs are ... staring at a screen for drone
technology.
First and foremost: It's the best short-cut there is in the motion picture industry. I know this because of my own experience in film and television and motion pictures. For example, I spent a considerable amount of bartering trade with a cameraman to produce a film about myself.
However, his camera fell off a cliff and the document was lost. Long story. The short side of the story is it broke into pieces, since video-making devices are fragile. This is something we need to remember. Careers as famous people are fragile things and can come and go quite quickly.
Fortunately, even as I write this, my life story is pieced together as some odd duck shot on the public
patois of surveillance society for posterity's sake. We are all pieced together this way. Or, we can we
reconstructed that way. We all have a legacy in film to be pieced together. To produce a full movie,
all you need are the necessary security clearances to obtain this productivity en masse.
For example, I have appeared in such films as "My Left Foot by the Laundromat," "Photo Radar," "Coffee and Cigarettes by the Convenience Store," a very Jim Jarmusch-style series of daily
sequences, and "Leaving Las Vegas Bank with Less Money in My Pocket Than When I First
Arrived."
Numerous bank, library and national monument documentaries. I have been a star walking down the
street and driving up and down what seems like every road in America. You get the picture.
All of these films about myself are in pre-production since nothing bad happened in them. Unfortunately, great stories need conflict. I went to the Twin Towers a few years before 9/11, but that
film, "What the Bleep Do I Know About the Location of the Restroom," also is lost to the dustbin of
history. Another short film,"Cleanup on Aisle Three" has some comedic value, but short films don't
appear as fodder for theater matinees anymore.
Anyhow, I lack much conflict in film. Terrorists get all of the play these days and I'm not a big fan of
the genre. News media outlets, purveyors of such films, with tight controls on the hype, distribution,
serializations and so forth, like them. They get big repeat business. Horror films and fear-based stuff
is big business. Bigger than sex, in terms of theme, I suspect. However, as a long-time film critic, I
find this trend most unfortunate.
Still, it's a booming field, especially if we consider the future prospects of drones. Oh sure, the
blessings of such technological miracles come at the expense of the sanity of many individuals, but
look at the bright side. If every inch of the earth, every town, city square, park or, hell, blade of grass, were under drone surveillance, it would force job creators to hire millions, perhaps even billions of
people to process the information.
It's good for lawyers, too. A whole new field of privacy law would need to be considered: personal air space. Could take a century to adjudicate. After all, the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't even been able to update the 1872 mining law allowing individuals and corporations to plunder federal property for
valuable minerals, despite the ecological damage to such lands beneath our feet.
I'll bet personal air space isn't even being considered.
I have my own mind on a film called "Bang the Drum Slowly in Personal Air Space." It combines
baseball and horror into one big basket. It starts out when one of these airborne, dragonfly-esque,
nanotech devices comes toward me and I swat it with a baseball bat.
Like I say, these surveillance drones are pretty fragile. Especially if you just keep an eye on the ball.
