banapple gas

bibliocafe at UVic. I'm eating an apple raspberry cinammon bun that was bought only because it was the cheapest thing on the menu and it had a lime neon sticker that just so happened to alert me to that fact. Nevermind the fact that I'm stting in a fluorescently lit cafe attached to the main floor lobby of a library within which you can walk around in forever and never feel like you went anywhere. I've already asked the reference librarian for directions to the bathrooms, inter-library loan office, and most essentially the wireless internet.

But what I'm wondering most of all is why are we so infatuated with mashups. What is so desperate about the need to create new out of old. Architecture, design, performance art, it is all about appropriating the old and infusing it with the new.

I've recently read about cities with pronatalist policies, design shifts to anticipate shrinking urban areas in Western Europe with fertility rates approaching what is so aptly named the "lowest-low" fertility rate. In the face of this uncertainty about the future why are we preoccupied with regurgitating the past. Are we bored? Are we such a culture of neophiles? what is this dread of the future leading us to consume the past? Is this simply a mechanism of cultural memory?

Perhaps it is a product of our growing awareness and ability to preserve, replicate, and imagine the past like never before.

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