Charles Mudede begins―
We must begin this brief line of thought on Chris Tucker’s electric performance in Luc Besson’s 1997 The Fifth Element with a little background on what I call the black elegance movement in black popular music.
―and only gets more awesome from there.
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Mudede, Charles. “Prince in Space”. The Stranger. 17 June 2015.
Many of us were raised in a time that looked forward to the future, to the age of angels, to the days of miracles and wonder, to the time when most of our economical problems would be solved by new and amazing technologies. Many of us actually arrived in the future. Here it is. We find ourselves in it. And it is disappointing. We no longer cure anything, as the money is in lifelong treatment. Corporations have abandoned R&D and spend their surpluses on generating more surpluses from stock buybacks. Only billionaires travel to space. And a whole generation of brilliant mathematical minds has not been spent on filling the remaining gaps in the Standard Model, our deepest understanding of the universe and its history, but in constructing models for Wall Street traders. And we do not have robots. We have instead machines that make us do the work at supermarkets.
It is always a matter of priorities.
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Image note: “Fellow Citizens: Now is the time to consume. Why skimp when you deserve more?” Detail of frame from Ergo Proxy episode 1, “Pulse of the Awakening”.)
Mudede, Charles. “MIT Graduate Develops a Program that Will End Theft at Self-Checkout Machines”. Slog. 26 February 2015.
‘Tis a grim headline, to be certain: “11 People Arrested for Supplying Dead Unmarried Men with Dead Brides”. To the other, there is always a little more to a story than we might glean from such a brief statement. Charles Mudede does, in fact, offer some fine insight into the custom of ghost brides—
Though the practice is very old and maintained mostly by people who live in rural China, it is by no means barbaric. Indeed, because civilization only begins when the living live with their dead—meaning, when the living are settled rather than nomadic, we can see in the ghost marriage something like the deep and wonderfully twisted roots of the modern urban consciousness.
The city is about a very close relationship between inhabitants who are made of matter and those made from the faintest stuff of memories—ghosts. Inhabited and uninhabited buildings, rooms, hallways, staircases are all haunted by those lost in the past of those buildings, rooms, hallways, and staircases. You can only remove ghosts by demolishing a building. This is why it is utterly ridiculous to fear ghosts in the forests. What is there to haunt? Trees? Moose? Mud? What nonsense. Humans are the haunted animal. Humans live in houses, apartments, castles, and the cities of their dead.
—except it is unclear that general perceptions of diverse death cults are so problematic insofar as it’s one thing for families to get together and marry a dead daughter to a dead son, as such, but quite another to go stealing corpses in order to facilitate the custom.
Which, in turn, raises a perverse question about human rights after death.
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Mudede, Charles. “11 People Arrested for Supplying Dead Unmarried Men with Dead Brides”. Slog. 31 October 2014.
This Is 