Opinions

I’m sorry, but I can’t stop thinking about self-driving cars. This is more than just another bit of technology. I’m going to declare that The Future, at long last, IS HERE.

Cars without drivers will change things a LOT, and they’re already here. It started when those ads for self-parallel-parking cars showed up. Wait, cars can DO THAT? Most PEOPLE can’t even do that. Then came the cars that apply the brakes when you’re too slow or stupid or careless to notice the kid on the tricycle. Then Nevada LICENSED a driverless car. That did it. Game on. Or game over, depending on your point of view. The tally: they’re here, they work, they’re legal, and they’re BETTER than you. The rest of the story writes itself. And will shortly do so.

The amazing thing is how in this car-crazed country, so little is being said about this. It won’t just be no more parallel parking. It will be no more parking AT ALL. Get out at curb, just like a movie star in a limo, and send your car off to find a space on it’s own! If it’s even your car. The world may just be a lot of driverless taxis! Who knows? But we’re about to find out. Unless...wait. Maybe the reason this is a non-story is that all time is now spent doing what we are currently doing. Sitting indoors living life online!

I think the only hope now is that shame disappears altogether.

It’s pretty clear that privacy of any sort is on it’s way out. Anything you do anywhere at anytime will available for public viewing. Anything you ever write or say to anyone will be in the permanent and unerasable public archives. This would call for a standard of behavior I suspect I can’t meet. How about you? You perfect yet? I used to place my hope in the idea that there would be simply so MUCH private behavior in the public realm that my occasional intemperate remark or gesture would disappear into the morass. But then I realized it would all be searchable, by name. Throw in the unblinking eye of coming-soon Google Glasses’ cameras and computer face-recognition technology, why don’t we? Surely they will record our spoken words as well!

So I’m sunk. Unless public standards of acceptable behavior sink right along with me, under the weight of seven billion people’s daily misbehavior all out there for salacious consumption and delectation. The privacy battle appears to be lost. Other things will need to go too.

I imagine everything that can be said about Graceland has been said, or sung, but it was new to me.

In what I think was an unintentional way, the place was fairly perfect at capturing the Elvis story. When he purchased the house, which by contemporary standards doesn’t really seem all that mansiony anymore, it was already called Graceland. The name works for Elvis’s career, which began with a an off-the-charts natural talent (the Grace), but soon enough became processed into the crasser and tackier aspects of mainstream American culture, and became “Graceland”, a sprawling commercial enterprise like “Hollywoodland’ or “Disneyland”. Perfect.

The house, like Elvis, has been swallowed by a immense array of support services, buildings and staff and an unctuous audio guide that describes Elvis’s life as all fun and family meals and go-carts and a beautiful house, while you’re looking at rooms that might possibly strike an observer as garish even if you leave your sunglasses on. But the whole successfully congeals into an appropriate monument to corrupted genius, though you won’t get much sense of the actual music part of the genius buried under the mountain of schlock. He sure had a couple of long wallfuls of gold records, though.

But if in the area, visit the Stax Museum if you want to feel something about American music other than vague dismay.