To the stock-holders, staff, and concerned loved-ones:
Well, it has been quite a year for the global economy, and for Acquired Immunity Group Incorporated. Sometimes I have to smash myself in the face, just to see if I’ve lapsed into some kind of sobbing, fear-induced coma. But no, I’m very much awake. You will be pleased to hear that our firm has had another astonishing quarter, generating record levels of Negative Growth (NG) and amassing spectacular pools of Inverse Revenue (IR) on behalf of shareholders. In addition, our Investor Panic Index (IPI) has broken all previous marks, leading to a Fiscal Credibility Deficit Margin (FCDM) of 280 percent. Creditor anger levels have never been as healthy, nor has the acrid cloud of doom ever wafted so near. And yet some of you are not happy. I know this, because you are camped outside my house. You are a long way away, behind the electrified fence, but I know you are there because when you shout you frighten my game-hens
My Leadership: Decisive? Yes.
I like to think I have been a strong, decisive CEO. I have been compared to Captain James Cook, (and not just because I got beaten up on a trip to Hawaii.) Yet sheer brilliance is sometimes not enough. It is true that many experts failed to foresee the impact of speculation in mortgage-backed derivatives and its effect on the banking system. I was one who did, and as proof I’d like to point you towards my 2003 white-paper: Speculation in Mortgage-backed Derivatives: How It Will Make Us Rich As Popes.
Obviously, many of you are worried about your future, and you look to me, your superior, for guidance. Let me tell you what I see right now. At this very moment I’m sitting in my den, in my Japanese memory-foam chair. The financial district burns like a sun in the distance, turning night into unquenchable daylight. Traders, naked save for crude loincloths stapled together from charred office supplies, dance on the roofs of skyscrapers while holding signs written in their own blood, or perhaps the blood of a co-worker. “Send brie!” That was one of them. The authorities are paralysed. They have cordoned off the entire district and left it as a kind of abode of anarchy. The whole scene casts my office in a lovely warm glow. The point is: even when things up close seem dire, if you sit far enough away, everything seems fine.
The World Economy: WTF?
The state of the world economy has left our company vulnerable, moody, and a little needy. A chart of the global economy presented by the World Trade Federation (WTF) shows how monetary gravity has caused world stocks to fall below their 90-day moving average. The “head-and-shoulders” pattern shows the market shrugging—as if to say, ‘Whaaaaa ..? I don’t know. Why don’t you put your money in a ban … Oh no wait! Don’t do that!’ The real question is: who is to blame? Greed-engorged traders? The leaders of the financial institutions who built speculative investments on frangible mortgages? You? The answer may surprise you.
Your Concerns: Important?
I have received many letters outlining your concerns about our future. Many of them were hilarious and cheered me up a great deal. 12-year-old Chrissie Walkin writes:
Dear Sir
My Daddy lost his job in the bank and I was very sad. Daddy took me on a birthday trip to imagination Disneyland. It was fun. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, neo-liberal economists have preached the merits of an unfettered market. Ironically, this free-market experiment has left us on the brink of both economic and environmental collapse, and forced us to consider a program of state intervention much closer to Marxism. Perhaps it is time to find a sustainable balance between market freedom and state involvement. Your thoughts?
Chrissie
To that I say ‘Shut up little girl’. Also, if you’re so smart, why are you only 12?
The bare fact is that a million economists working for a million years on a million stock-screens could not have predicted the terrifying chain-reaction that would result from granting an Appalachian racoon farmer a loan to buy his first relaxin’-shack.
Getting Through One Day at a Time Towards a New Tomorrow
And that’s just one of my ideas. I still expect the road ahead to be rough and paved with the skulls and pelvises of the less fortunate. But things will get better, of that I’m confident. ‘How?’ you ask, as you take another limp pucker on your corncob pipe and adjust the strap on your banjo. Oh, I don’t know, maybe because of a little thing called Inversed Gravity. Inversed Gravity Theorem states that whatever goes down eventually has to come back up again. Planes, submarines, even whales, all use IGT. It’s just good science. Economics is a precise forecasting discipline and just as with meteorology, astrology, or political contests, it is possible to tell the exact future by using a few precise measurements.
But even taking IGT into consideration the time ahead will be tough. I cannot lie to you. Not any more. Many of you wonder how you will even feed your family. The news there, I can tell you, is good. For although the prices of many food items have soared dramatically during the past few quarters, the price of cake has remained relatively stable.
So let us all eat cake and look forward to brighter times.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
“Dear Jesus did not come”… and other days the world was meant to end.
2009 is going to be a very big year. There’ll be famine, zombie hordes, nuclear hellfire, all-singing-all-dancing tween-legions, Necro-Mutants, an outbreak of weaponised smallpox—and that’s just what’s happening in the cinemas. Of course there’ll be non-fictional challenges too: The global economy is poised delicately on the edge of the abyss, mother earth palavers in agony, and the price of cheese is outrageous. But gather, children, and I will tell you a story: a story about all the other days the world was supposed to end. This tale starts 2000 years ago, and ends 5 billion years in the future, so bring snacks.
1.1 In ancient Israel there lived a man named Jesus who said many things, “Love one another,” “Get lots of fibre.” One of the things he said was that the world would end soon. “I say unto you,” he said, “there be some standing here who shall not taste of death ‘til they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” It was the worst best-man speech ever, and the bride was livid.
1.2 There were people even before Jesus who foresaw the end: the wailing, the gnashing, the soiling. Archaeologists found an Assyrian tablet on which was engraved a warning: “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common. I for one will be voting conservative.” But Jesus was the main one.
1.3 Jesus was the inspiration for a man called Montanus. Montanus was a charismatic preacher, wont to speak in tongues—but knowledgably— and he travelled the land with two women, Priscilla, and Maximilla. In 155 AD he formed his own group—they called themselves the Montanists—and despite the failure of all his prophecies, and despite being denounced by the church and cast into the mountains, his group endured for centuries beyond his death and formed the template for modern Pentecostalism.
1.4 Christians had high hopes for the end of the first Millennium. This would be the time when it all came together. The predictions of Book of Revelations, the last book of the Old Testament, had long held them in rapture. They described in detail the end days: the epochs of the church; the judgments; the one-thousand-year reign of Messiah; the last test of Mankind’s sinful nature by the loosing of Satan; the destruction of the current heavens and the earth, to be recreated as a “New Heaven and New Earth.” Then, the final, triumphal return of “Classic Earth”. It’s all in there.
2.1 But the thousandth year came and went. Nothing. In 1284 Pope Innocent III predicted the Second Coming. He based his prediction on the date of the birth of Islam, then added 666. Then he took the afternoon off.
2.1 In 1524 a group of London astrologers convinced some 20,000 people to abandon their homes for high ground in anticipation of a second Great Flood that would start from the Thames. The flood never came. In 1648 the Turkish rabbi Sabbatai Zevi, having studied the Kabbalah, predicted that the Messiah would make a triumphant return in 1648, and, astonishingly, that his name would be Sabbatai Zevi. With 1648 having come and gone Sabbatai revised his estimate to …
2.2 … 1666. This would be the year. Definitely. It’s easy to look back on the hysteria of the time with a sense of smug superiority, but I would like you to imagine yourself opening the front door of your small flat in Shoreditch to find plague victims piled high in the streets, streets that are literally on fire, all during a year containing the figures commonly accepted as the biblical Number of the Beast, and then to say to yourself: “Probably nothing to worry about.” 1666 is an object lesson in not believing bollocks about the end of the world.
2.3 William Miller, an American Baptist preacher, prophesied that Jesus Christ would return to the earth during the year 1844. Jesus did not make his appointment, and October 22, 1844, became known as “The Great Disappointment.” Henry Emmons, a Millerite, wrote, “I waited all Tuesday and dear Jesus did not come. I waited all the forenoon of Wednesday, and was well in body as I ever was, but after 12 o’clock I began to feel faint, and before dark I needed someone to help me up to my chamber, as my natural strength was leaving me very fast, and I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain–sick with disappointment.”
3.1 And so came the 20th Century, an age that would bring more disappointment than we could reasonably handle. The First World War was known as “The war to end all wars that specifically involve a Kaiser,” but the end bit is often truncated. When the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, some scientists on the Manhattan Project worried that it might superheat the atmosphere and incinerate all life on Earth. Shows what they knew.
3.2 In 1955, a Chicago housewife, Mrs. Marion Keech, was sent a message from alien beings on the planet Clarion. They revealed that the world would end in a great flood before dawn on December 21. Keech and her followers left their jobs, schools, spouses, gave away money and possessions, and waited for their departure on the flying saucer. Her progress was closely watched by a group of social philosophers who used the events as an example of what they termed “Cognitive Dissonance”. Leon Festinger and his colleagues correctly predicted that when the arrival of the aliens failed to materialise, Mrs. Keech and her friends would rationalize the events and minimise the ego-damage of failure by mounting an enthusiastic effort at proselytising, an attempt to regain some social standing and lessen the pain of disconfirmation.
3.3 To understand the power of cognitive dissonance in our age, just exchange the words “arrival of the aliens” with “success in Iraq,” and “Mrs. Keech and her friends” with “Bush and Blair,” in the last sentence of the paragraph above.
3.4 In February, 1962, a close grouping of the visible planets during a total eclipse of the Sun was thought to be a portent of the birth of Sheryl Crow.
3.5 On November 2, 1983, NATO began Operation Able Archer 83, a ten-day exercise that spanned Western Europe. It simulated a period of conflict escalation, culminating in a coordinated nuclear release. The realistic nature of the exercise led some in the USSR to believe that the exercise was a clever ruse, obscuring preparations for an actual first strike, so the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and placed air units in East Germany and Poland on alert. This relatively obscure incident is considered by many historians to be the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which we kind of forgot to mention.
3.6 The Heaven's Gate group achieved notoriety in 1997 when one of its founders convinced 38 followers to commit mass suicide. The chosen ones believed that their souls would be transported onto a spaceship, which they said was hiding behind a comet.
4.1 The new millennium would usher in an era of scientific enlightenment that would have scant tolerance for the hysteria of ages past. In the year 2000 there would be no fire or brimstone, no apocalyptic equestrians, and no spacecraft. We simply believed that when the new-year ticked over, aircraft would fall from the sky and our dishwasher would try to eat us.
4.2 High School Musical is an American television franchise charting the highs and lows of two juniors from rival cliques – Troy Bolton (Zac Efron), captain of the basketball team, and Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens), a beautiful and shy transfer student who excels in math and science. Although not often cited as a portent of the coming apocalypse, the tortured smiles and loose-limbed spasmings of this tribe of wailing acne-zombies is seen by some to be the most obvious sign yet of the impending end times.
4.3 The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest particle accelerator. It is 27 Kilometres long and is loosely based on a design conceived by Stephen Hawking while lying in a darkened room and listening to Afrika Bambaata’s Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light. The launch of the LHC sparked fears among the public that it would cause the world to be sucked into a black hole. This prospect was so frightening to some that protests were held, court injunctions were filed, and a girl in India took her own life rather than face the grim prospect of a black hole death. They haven’t even started the real experiments yet.
5.1 Now we race toward a future full of chaos and uncertainty, of that I am certain. The economy has imploded, food riots are sweeping the developing world, Al Qaeda is rumoured to be filming a TV movie called High School Jihad. The folks at 2007rapture.com have bought a new domain: 2009-rapture.com. ‘THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH COULD HAPPEN, THIS YEAR, 2009,’ the site announces. There are flocks of animated doves and a photo of Jesus embracing another man under the headline ‘YES, I AM COMING QUICKLY!’ proving that, though Armageddon is painful, it can still provide big laughs.
2012 is held by apocalypticists to be a particularly big year. The Mayan calendar completes its thirteenth b'ak'tun cycle, and 433 Eros, the second-largest Near Earth Object on record, will pass Earth at 0.1790 astronomical units (26,778,019 km). The last transit of Venus will occur, and the sun will reverse its polarity after reaching the end of the current 11-year sunspot cycle. In the book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck proposes a global psychic awakening in the year 2012, and the creation of a noosphere—which is an atmosphere consisting entirely of flatulence. Plus, the numbers in 2012 add up to 5, which is a number.
5.2 The fact is that no one knows when the end is coming. But we should prepare, get our Rapture kit together: water holifier, shotgun, flame-retardent undergarments, Kevorkian machine, a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. “No way am I abandoning another bloody house!” you’ll say, and I take your point. But my prediction is that the world will definitely, absolutely end in the year 1,148,782,431. Then, our Sun will increase its output by 10%, broiling away the oceans, destroying all life. In 5 billion years our Sun will spend its remaining fuel and die, leaving the black cinder of our planet floating in the cold infinity of space. Around this time, an advanced being a billion light-years away will suddenly leap from his chair and shout: “F***! I was supposed to pick up those humans in that commune in Nebraska!”
1.1 In ancient Israel there lived a man named Jesus who said many things, “Love one another,” “Get lots of fibre.” One of the things he said was that the world would end soon. “I say unto you,” he said, “there be some standing here who shall not taste of death ‘til they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” It was the worst best-man speech ever, and the bride was livid.
1.2 There were people even before Jesus who foresaw the end: the wailing, the gnashing, the soiling. Archaeologists found an Assyrian tablet on which was engraved a warning: “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common. I for one will be voting conservative.” But Jesus was the main one.
1.3 Jesus was the inspiration for a man called Montanus. Montanus was a charismatic preacher, wont to speak in tongues—but knowledgably— and he travelled the land with two women, Priscilla, and Maximilla. In 155 AD he formed his own group—they called themselves the Montanists—and despite the failure of all his prophecies, and despite being denounced by the church and cast into the mountains, his group endured for centuries beyond his death and formed the template for modern Pentecostalism.
1.4 Christians had high hopes for the end of the first Millennium. This would be the time when it all came together. The predictions of Book of Revelations, the last book of the Old Testament, had long held them in rapture. They described in detail the end days: the epochs of the church; the judgments; the one-thousand-year reign of Messiah; the last test of Mankind’s sinful nature by the loosing of Satan; the destruction of the current heavens and the earth, to be recreated as a “New Heaven and New Earth.” Then, the final, triumphal return of “Classic Earth”. It’s all in there.
2.1 But the thousandth year came and went. Nothing. In 1284 Pope Innocent III predicted the Second Coming. He based his prediction on the date of the birth of Islam, then added 666. Then he took the afternoon off.
2.1 In 1524 a group of London astrologers convinced some 20,000 people to abandon their homes for high ground in anticipation of a second Great Flood that would start from the Thames. The flood never came. In 1648 the Turkish rabbi Sabbatai Zevi, having studied the Kabbalah, predicted that the Messiah would make a triumphant return in 1648, and, astonishingly, that his name would be Sabbatai Zevi. With 1648 having come and gone Sabbatai revised his estimate to …
2.2 … 1666. This would be the year. Definitely. It’s easy to look back on the hysteria of the time with a sense of smug superiority, but I would like you to imagine yourself opening the front door of your small flat in Shoreditch to find plague victims piled high in the streets, streets that are literally on fire, all during a year containing the figures commonly accepted as the biblical Number of the Beast, and then to say to yourself: “Probably nothing to worry about.” 1666 is an object lesson in not believing bollocks about the end of the world.
2.3 William Miller, an American Baptist preacher, prophesied that Jesus Christ would return to the earth during the year 1844. Jesus did not make his appointment, and October 22, 1844, became known as “The Great Disappointment.” Henry Emmons, a Millerite, wrote, “I waited all Tuesday and dear Jesus did not come. I waited all the forenoon of Wednesday, and was well in body as I ever was, but after 12 o’clock I began to feel faint, and before dark I needed someone to help me up to my chamber, as my natural strength was leaving me very fast, and I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain–sick with disappointment.”
3.1 And so came the 20th Century, an age that would bring more disappointment than we could reasonably handle. The First World War was known as “The war to end all wars that specifically involve a Kaiser,” but the end bit is often truncated. When the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, some scientists on the Manhattan Project worried that it might superheat the atmosphere and incinerate all life on Earth. Shows what they knew.
3.2 In 1955, a Chicago housewife, Mrs. Marion Keech, was sent a message from alien beings on the planet Clarion. They revealed that the world would end in a great flood before dawn on December 21. Keech and her followers left their jobs, schools, spouses, gave away money and possessions, and waited for their departure on the flying saucer. Her progress was closely watched by a group of social philosophers who used the events as an example of what they termed “Cognitive Dissonance”. Leon Festinger and his colleagues correctly predicted that when the arrival of the aliens failed to materialise, Mrs. Keech and her friends would rationalize the events and minimise the ego-damage of failure by mounting an enthusiastic effort at proselytising, an attempt to regain some social standing and lessen the pain of disconfirmation.
3.3 To understand the power of cognitive dissonance in our age, just exchange the words “arrival of the aliens” with “success in Iraq,” and “Mrs. Keech and her friends” with “Bush and Blair,” in the last sentence of the paragraph above.
3.4 In February, 1962, a close grouping of the visible planets during a total eclipse of the Sun was thought to be a portent of the birth of Sheryl Crow.
3.5 On November 2, 1983, NATO began Operation Able Archer 83, a ten-day exercise that spanned Western Europe. It simulated a period of conflict escalation, culminating in a coordinated nuclear release. The realistic nature of the exercise led some in the USSR to believe that the exercise was a clever ruse, obscuring preparations for an actual first strike, so the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and placed air units in East Germany and Poland on alert. This relatively obscure incident is considered by many historians to be the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which we kind of forgot to mention.
3.6 The Heaven's Gate group achieved notoriety in 1997 when one of its founders convinced 38 followers to commit mass suicide. The chosen ones believed that their souls would be transported onto a spaceship, which they said was hiding behind a comet.
4.1 The new millennium would usher in an era of scientific enlightenment that would have scant tolerance for the hysteria of ages past. In the year 2000 there would be no fire or brimstone, no apocalyptic equestrians, and no spacecraft. We simply believed that when the new-year ticked over, aircraft would fall from the sky and our dishwasher would try to eat us.
4.2 High School Musical is an American television franchise charting the highs and lows of two juniors from rival cliques – Troy Bolton (Zac Efron), captain of the basketball team, and Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens), a beautiful and shy transfer student who excels in math and science. Although not often cited as a portent of the coming apocalypse, the tortured smiles and loose-limbed spasmings of this tribe of wailing acne-zombies is seen by some to be the most obvious sign yet of the impending end times.
4.3 The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest particle accelerator. It is 27 Kilometres long and is loosely based on a design conceived by Stephen Hawking while lying in a darkened room and listening to Afrika Bambaata’s Dark Matter Moving at the Speed of Light. The launch of the LHC sparked fears among the public that it would cause the world to be sucked into a black hole. This prospect was so frightening to some that protests were held, court injunctions were filed, and a girl in India took her own life rather than face the grim prospect of a black hole death. They haven’t even started the real experiments yet.
5.1 Now we race toward a future full of chaos and uncertainty, of that I am certain. The economy has imploded, food riots are sweeping the developing world, Al Qaeda is rumoured to be filming a TV movie called High School Jihad. The folks at 2007rapture.com have bought a new domain: 2009-rapture.com. ‘THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH COULD HAPPEN, THIS YEAR, 2009,’ the site announces. There are flocks of animated doves and a photo of Jesus embracing another man under the headline ‘YES, I AM COMING QUICKLY!’ proving that, though Armageddon is painful, it can still provide big laughs.
2012 is held by apocalypticists to be a particularly big year. The Mayan calendar completes its thirteenth b'ak'tun cycle, and 433 Eros, the second-largest Near Earth Object on record, will pass Earth at 0.1790 astronomical units (26,778,019 km). The last transit of Venus will occur, and the sun will reverse its polarity after reaching the end of the current 11-year sunspot cycle. In the book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck proposes a global psychic awakening in the year 2012, and the creation of a noosphere—which is an atmosphere consisting entirely of flatulence. Plus, the numbers in 2012 add up to 5, which is a number.
5.2 The fact is that no one knows when the end is coming. But we should prepare, get our Rapture kit together: water holifier, shotgun, flame-retardent undergarments, Kevorkian machine, a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. “No way am I abandoning another bloody house!” you’ll say, and I take your point. But my prediction is that the world will definitely, absolutely end in the year 1,148,782,431. Then, our Sun will increase its output by 10%, broiling away the oceans, destroying all life. In 5 billion years our Sun will spend its remaining fuel and die, leaving the black cinder of our planet floating in the cold infinity of space. Around this time, an advanced being a billion light-years away will suddenly leap from his chair and shout: “F***! I was supposed to pick up those humans in that commune in Nebraska!”
A Skull Filled With Joy
Imagine you’re sitting down to brainstorm a brand identity for the entire human species. What images would make your list? Bleeding Heart? Flaming sword? Chimp with an Uzi? Those are all excellent suggestions, but if you want an icon that captures the hopeless thrill of existence, the fact that we rise from dust, return to dust, and do a lot of dusting in between, you’d struggle to find a better insignia than the human skull (or possibly the chimp.)
The skull icon holds a unique place in human culture. Other symbols evoke “Power,” or “Glory,” but few can capture the terrifying duality of human life. “Behold!” it says, “I drink mead from the skull of my enemy whilst riding in my boat—which is also made entirely from skulls—am I not a total bad-ass?” But it also says: “Is life not fleeting? I am so depressed. More mead!” The skull anchors us within the mortal realm, reminds us that life is but a blink, yet consoles us with the fact that while we’re here we can wreak havoc.
History knows this. The Aztecs respected the skull’s raw power, its ability to inspire undying loyalty among friends, enemies, (and even frenemies.) They invented the skull rack, a wooden framework designed to display the skewered heads of sacrificial victims, ($89.95—from Ikea.) At the Great Temple of the Aztecs archaeologists uncovered a skull rack with at least 240 carved skulls, most of whom looked surprised. The Aztecs are also rumoured to have carved 13 crystal skulls which they scattered around the earth. Legend has it that if you manage to find and gather all 13 skulls a god-like figure will appear and inform you that you’ve wasted your life.
On a bottle, a skull and crossbones might signify “Don’t drink!” but on a flag on a ship it signifies “Let’s drink, then see where the night takes us.” The pirates turned the skull into the world’s first rebel insignia. The Dutch Vanitas artists turned it into another kind of warning, using unconventional still-life imagery to remind us of the rush and violence of life: a skull, a watch, an overturned wineglasses, a snuffed candle, a used condom, the spare key to a lover’s apartment, a stack of CDs. "Lo, the wine of life runs out, the spirit is snuffed, oh Man, for all your learning, time yet runs on: Vanity!" the picture seems to say, reminding us that death comes to us all, and also that we need to pick up wine. One of the best-known examples of the skull in art is in Shakespeare's Hamlet, where the title character sees a skull he can’t place, until he suddenly realises: "I knew him, Horatio; he was alright—in small doses.”
The skull arrives in our century caked in blood, history, half-baked mysticism, gothic pretentiousness, and fascist chic. Now you can find the skull withering like old newsprint on the arms of elderly bikers, dribbling from the lobes of slack witted hotel heiresses, or smeared on the K-mart sweatshirts of a million teenagers. (It’s a great irony that the modern teenager, the most skull-adorned since Black Pete initiated a “Bring your son to work” day, is perhaps the least ‘bad-ass’ figure in history. Sedentary, self-obsessed, lubed in pessimism, he has never fought a war or gone to work up a chimney, and his idea of an outlaw act is to continue skate-boarding on the museum fountain when the elderly security guard told him not to.) The skull, once the mainstay of kings and empires, has now been reduced to an empty logo—Satan’s smiley-face. Everywhere we look, we see skulls, fierce and unblinking, on shirts, ties, sneakers, dresses, phones, bikinis, torches, umbrellas. You can buy a screaming 3D skull cover for your PS3, a Terminator skull DVD player, a Sex Pistols-inspired skull headset from Nokia, skull-wear for your child, your dog, a million billion skull-branded products all designed to put you on the burning edge of fashion with the minimum of effort. The movies and console games that feature the skull are too numerous to list. Is the effect of all these skulls to remind us of death, of the impermanence of life? Or is it to show us—as Andy Warhol did in his prints of soup cans, and starlets, and, yes, human skulls—how the relentless repetition of an image can render it meaningless? British artist Damien Hirst also feels that the skull carries a certain mythic power. Once famous for his pickled animal carcasses, he is now most well known for creating a stunning diamond-encrusted platinum cast of the skull of an impoverished 18th Century European male. Hirst is a rich and powerful 21st Century European male and “For the Love of God”, the most expensive piece of modern art ever created, places him firmly at the head of the modern art pantheon. Not since Warhol has an artist’s work stirred so much debate.
And what are we to make of Ghostbusters star Dan Akroyd’s web-infomercial presentations for Crystal Head Vodka:
“Thousands of years ago, thirteen crystal heads were scattered across the earth – and they are greater and more powerful than anything we have the ability to manufacture today … “
Crystal Head Vodka is a unique liquor, made from pure ingredients and filtered by diamonds. Most importantly, it comes in a bottle shaped like a freakin’ skull. “But why vodka?” you ask. I’ll let Dan field this one.
“Such a symbol that speaks to our own common universality should have joy associated with it, shouldn’t it? … We have this mystic symbol in which we have chosen to enclose joy in the form of a very pure alcoholic beverage.”
So, the skull is ancient, timeless, non-denominational, flexible, luminous, wonderful, an ideal vessel to hold your precious liquor, a perfect home bedazzling project. The real question, I suppose, is: out of the two products, Akroyd’s Crystal Head Vodka, and Hirst’s diamond skull monument, which is the most cynical, most banal, most derivative, most unintentionally hilarious, and—and I mean this ironically—most empty-headed? Which one reveals the most about our species in our age? I visited Sotheby’s auction house last year for Beautiful Inside My Head, a collection of Hirst’s latest work. Part of me now suspects him of being cynical beyond any measure the makers of a brand of skull-themed vodka could ever achieve. His exhibition featured bulls with golden hoofs, pickled sharks, a flayed angel, winged piglets, stained-glass mosaics made from butterfly wings, giant, spinning psychedelic skulls, Roger Taylor from Duran Duran, (not part of the exhibit, but magnificent none the less,) all beautiful but all completely empty. Every single piece reeks of its own frail concept. In every gallery, gaggles of posh young women swoon before pictures which they probably imagine gracing the dining-room feature wall of their new Kensington apartment, while groups of art students in scarfs and skull-emblazoned clothing huddle in corners and dream of possessing just a sliver of Hirst’s great power. So this is how far we’ve come? After countless millennia of human art and culture I find myself looking at Hirst’s skull as, at best, an artistic nod to Paris Hilton: an empty head encrusted with diamonds that smiles a crooked smile from the covers of magazines in a way that once might have said “All life is vanity,” but today just seems to say “Look at me. Am I not beautiful? And ever so thin.”
The skull icon holds a unique place in human culture. Other symbols evoke “Power,” or “Glory,” but few can capture the terrifying duality of human life. “Behold!” it says, “I drink mead from the skull of my enemy whilst riding in my boat—which is also made entirely from skulls—am I not a total bad-ass?” But it also says: “Is life not fleeting? I am so depressed. More mead!” The skull anchors us within the mortal realm, reminds us that life is but a blink, yet consoles us with the fact that while we’re here we can wreak havoc.
History knows this. The Aztecs respected the skull’s raw power, its ability to inspire undying loyalty among friends, enemies, (and even frenemies.) They invented the skull rack, a wooden framework designed to display the skewered heads of sacrificial victims, ($89.95—from Ikea.) At the Great Temple of the Aztecs archaeologists uncovered a skull rack with at least 240 carved skulls, most of whom looked surprised. The Aztecs are also rumoured to have carved 13 crystal skulls which they scattered around the earth. Legend has it that if you manage to find and gather all 13 skulls a god-like figure will appear and inform you that you’ve wasted your life.
On a bottle, a skull and crossbones might signify “Don’t drink!” but on a flag on a ship it signifies “Let’s drink, then see where the night takes us.” The pirates turned the skull into the world’s first rebel insignia. The Dutch Vanitas artists turned it into another kind of warning, using unconventional still-life imagery to remind us of the rush and violence of life: a skull, a watch, an overturned wineglasses, a snuffed candle, a used condom, the spare key to a lover’s apartment, a stack of CDs. "Lo, the wine of life runs out, the spirit is snuffed, oh Man, for all your learning, time yet runs on: Vanity!" the picture seems to say, reminding us that death comes to us all, and also that we need to pick up wine. One of the best-known examples of the skull in art is in Shakespeare's Hamlet, where the title character sees a skull he can’t place, until he suddenly realises: "I knew him, Horatio; he was alright—in small doses.”
The skull arrives in our century caked in blood, history, half-baked mysticism, gothic pretentiousness, and fascist chic. Now you can find the skull withering like old newsprint on the arms of elderly bikers, dribbling from the lobes of slack witted hotel heiresses, or smeared on the K-mart sweatshirts of a million teenagers. (It’s a great irony that the modern teenager, the most skull-adorned since Black Pete initiated a “Bring your son to work” day, is perhaps the least ‘bad-ass’ figure in history. Sedentary, self-obsessed, lubed in pessimism, he has never fought a war or gone to work up a chimney, and his idea of an outlaw act is to continue skate-boarding on the museum fountain when the elderly security guard told him not to.) The skull, once the mainstay of kings and empires, has now been reduced to an empty logo—Satan’s smiley-face. Everywhere we look, we see skulls, fierce and unblinking, on shirts, ties, sneakers, dresses, phones, bikinis, torches, umbrellas. You can buy a screaming 3D skull cover for your PS3, a Terminator skull DVD player, a Sex Pistols-inspired skull headset from Nokia, skull-wear for your child, your dog, a million billion skull-branded products all designed to put you on the burning edge of fashion with the minimum of effort. The movies and console games that feature the skull are too numerous to list. Is the effect of all these skulls to remind us of death, of the impermanence of life? Or is it to show us—as Andy Warhol did in his prints of soup cans, and starlets, and, yes, human skulls—how the relentless repetition of an image can render it meaningless? British artist Damien Hirst also feels that the skull carries a certain mythic power. Once famous for his pickled animal carcasses, he is now most well known for creating a stunning diamond-encrusted platinum cast of the skull of an impoverished 18th Century European male. Hirst is a rich and powerful 21st Century European male and “For the Love of God”, the most expensive piece of modern art ever created, places him firmly at the head of the modern art pantheon. Not since Warhol has an artist’s work stirred so much debate.
And what are we to make of Ghostbusters star Dan Akroyd’s web-infomercial presentations for Crystal Head Vodka:
“Thousands of years ago, thirteen crystal heads were scattered across the earth – and they are greater and more powerful than anything we have the ability to manufacture today … “
Crystal Head Vodka is a unique liquor, made from pure ingredients and filtered by diamonds. Most importantly, it comes in a bottle shaped like a freakin’ skull. “But why vodka?” you ask. I’ll let Dan field this one.
“Such a symbol that speaks to our own common universality should have joy associated with it, shouldn’t it? … We have this mystic symbol in which we have chosen to enclose joy in the form of a very pure alcoholic beverage.”
So, the skull is ancient, timeless, non-denominational, flexible, luminous, wonderful, an ideal vessel to hold your precious liquor, a perfect home bedazzling project. The real question, I suppose, is: out of the two products, Akroyd’s Crystal Head Vodka, and Hirst’s diamond skull monument, which is the most cynical, most banal, most derivative, most unintentionally hilarious, and—and I mean this ironically—most empty-headed? Which one reveals the most about our species in our age? I visited Sotheby’s auction house last year for Beautiful Inside My Head, a collection of Hirst’s latest work. Part of me now suspects him of being cynical beyond any measure the makers of a brand of skull-themed vodka could ever achieve. His exhibition featured bulls with golden hoofs, pickled sharks, a flayed angel, winged piglets, stained-glass mosaics made from butterfly wings, giant, spinning psychedelic skulls, Roger Taylor from Duran Duran, (not part of the exhibit, but magnificent none the less,) all beautiful but all completely empty. Every single piece reeks of its own frail concept. In every gallery, gaggles of posh young women swoon before pictures which they probably imagine gracing the dining-room feature wall of their new Kensington apartment, while groups of art students in scarfs and skull-emblazoned clothing huddle in corners and dream of possessing just a sliver of Hirst’s great power. So this is how far we’ve come? After countless millennia of human art and culture I find myself looking at Hirst’s skull as, at best, an artistic nod to Paris Hilton: an empty head encrusted with diamonds that smiles a crooked smile from the covers of magazines in a way that once might have said “All life is vanity,” but today just seems to say “Look at me. Am I not beautiful? And ever so thin.”
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