What Do You Know About The Future:

You're Not a Genius

Kofi Fosu Forson

If I knew beforehand that this was going to be the future I would have been a little disappointed. Essentially not much has changed along the lines of the human condition. We feel and we love. We hate and we long for. Although what has emanated from this nature of reality television and what Andy Warhol envisioned as 15 Minutes of fame is a means of entitlement.

This sea of wannabes and potential nothings feel they deserve something, an entity I fail to understand. Much of this upsurge stems from the younger generation raised on post MTV, technology and the internet. Circumstantially they have everything they could ever want.

What is missing I feel is the literary and pronouncedly hot sadomasochistic notion of art and sex. I honestly felt the 90's were a decided uplift from the death of sex. With every death comes a new understanding and what the 90's became was a mirroring of the Beatnic 50's where language was seduced and massacred. Writers like Kuruoac and Burroughs extraordinarily took language to so many different levels.

The essence of the massacre is outrightly sadistic. The nature of Burrough's work stems from the sexual psyche. This is what made writers like Henry Miller. The essence of the brain as muscular breaking down the barriers of love, sex, fate. The 90's was a continuation of this and how heroin and sex, the introduction of The Barely Legal into popular culture, the post feminist authors like Camille Paglia and Naomi Wolf, novels like The Poisonwood Bible made language essential to life.

Once we surrendered to the BUSH philosophy much of this was replaced by government action which permeated everything we did some would say even the water we drank. Where we are now is a world where anybody can be somebody.

What is the literary model now. How is morality upheld. None of this is apparent as we live in a world with no intellectual approach. What I had always envisioned the modern man to be is a person of intellect and sex. F Scott Fitzgerald established this with such excellence later enhanced in the novels by McInerny and Easton Ellis.

So the idea of modernity was always envisioned with sophistication. This was evident in music, art and sexuality. I think back to Donald Fagen's Nightfly. An album steeped in 50's perception of the future. In it artists would be adjoined internationally in thought. That is what the world has become a virtual place. Social networks like facebook allows for such a condition. Many fail to see the possibility in this as much of this world becomes a place for meaningless fun.

It can then be said referring back to my original thought that not much has changed. We therefore depend on those who continue to encourage thought and advancement of language.

The internet has certainly become the place for that. The programmable thought thus then becomes a virtual thought as fantasy has been made equivalent with the real.

Hence the virtual is real. In a hyper David Lynch surreal sense of the world the imagined Blue Velvet is a real world.

To live within the notion of giving life to a thought and envisioning a world for oneself is where we are in life. But this is only pertinent to those with an exceptional imagination.

It can then be said this modern world was made for the gifted, the extraordinary, those with a gift for envisioning a unique world, a world they manifest from, exist in. And much as those who inhabited the Kafka- esque psychological trap and circled philosophy and lived a literarily modern life, the future belongs belongs to the genius.

The genius benefits from this modern world. Cultural thrashing and circumstances surrounding symptomatic madness in politics and sexuality is a source of inspiration for those who think for those who transform themselves. That is what we did with AIDS. The 90's became a rebirth.

This virtual landscape of internet porn and dismissal of intellectualizing will and has resulted in a backlash. Those who emerge from this are geniuses.

Hence the genius is not a fat woman who dances to New Kids on The Block on Youtube.

The genius is cult.