The Only Truly Alien Planet Is Earth.

It Seems To Me That What Most Of Us Have To Fear For The Future Is Not That Something Terrible Is Going To Happen, But Rather That Nothing Is Going To Happen... I Could Sum Up The Future In One Word, And That Word Is Boring. The Future Is Going To Be Boring.

Hell Is Out Of Fashion - Institutional Hells At Any Rate. The Populated Infernos Of The 20th Century Are More Private Affairs, The Gaps Between The Bars Are The Sutures Of One's Own Skull. A Valid Hell Is One From Which There Is A Possibility Of Redemption, Even If This Is Never Achieved, The Dungeons Of An Architecture Of Grace Whose Spires Point To Some Kind Of Heaven. The Institutional Hells Of The Present Century Are Reached With One-way Tickets, Marked Nagasaki And Buchenwald, Worlds Of Terminal Horror Even More Final Than The Grave.

Science And Technology Multiply Around Us. To An Increasing Extent They Dictate The Languages In Which We Speak And Think. Either We Use Those Languages, Or We Remain Mute.

The Marriage Of Reason And Nightmare Which Has Dominated The 20th Century Has Given Birth To An Ever More Ambiguous World. Across The Communications Landscape Move The Specters Of Sinister Technologies And The Dreams That Money Can Buy. Thermonuclear Weapons Systems And Soft Drink Commercials Coexist In An Overlit Realm Ruled By Advertising And Pseudoevents, Science And Pornography. Over Our Lives Preside The Great Twin Leitmotifs Of The 20th Century-sex And Paranoia.

The Surrealists, And The Modern Movement In Painting As A Whole, Seemed To Offer A Key To The Strange Postwar World With Its Threat Of Nuclear War. The Dislocations And Ambiguities, In Cubism And Abstract Art As Well As The Surrealists, Reminded Me Of My Childhood In Shanghai.