"Bruce Sterling - My Rihla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

tramp the street talking, very likely up to no good. A
beggar-woman nurses a baby, with an older kid taking
alms in the gutter. Who is the father? Ibn Battuta?
Some working-stiff and his wife push a monster
wheelbarrow up the hill, putting their backs into it.
Dogs piss and tussle, and loungers bowl ninepins in
the public square.
F. van Mieris (1635-1681) clearly spent a lot of
time in bars. Here, taken from low-life, is a wasted
blonde barmaid in a white dress, pouring wine for a
redheaded captain-at-arms. In the doorway, a red dog
fucks a white bitch, a symbol as stone-obvious as
being hit in the head with a bung-starter.
A block away from the Mauritshuis is a shopping
district, the streets bent and skinny and pre-
automotive, an open-air mall. MEGA WORLD
COMPUTERWINKELS, reads the sign outside the software
shop. Soon all Europe will be mega world
computerwinkels, cool nets of data, a cybernetic
Mecca. Our Mecca will be electronic, and you'll be a
nobody 'till you've made that sacred pilgrimage.
We look to the future. Extrapolation is
powerful, but so is analogy, and history's lessons
must be repeated helplessly, until they are seen and
understood and deliberately broken. In 54 Javastraat,


the Ambassade van Iran has telecameras trained on its
entrances. A wounded Islam is alive and convulsing in
fevered spasms.
65 Zeestraat contains the Panorama Mesdag, the
nineteenth century's answer to cyberspace. Tricks of
light are harnessed to present a vast expanse of
intricately painted, cunningly curved canvas, 360
degrees in the round. It presents, to the stunned eye,
the seaside resort of Scheveningen, 1881 A.D. You
stand on the center on a round wooden platform, a kind
of faux-beachhouse, fenced in by railings; at your
feet stretches an expanse of 100% real sand, studded
with torn nets, rusting anchors, washed-up wooden
shoes, fading cunningly into the canvas. This must
surely be Reality--there's trash in it, it has to be
real. The Panorama's false horizon will not sit still
for the eye, warping in and out like a mescaline trip.
Coal smoke hangs black and static from a dozen painted
stacks, the bold ancestry of our current crimes
against the atmosphere.
There used to be dozens of these monster
Panoramas, in Paris, Hamburg, London. The Panorama is
a dead medium, as dead as the stereograph, whose