Clockwork Lime

Yesterday I finished this painting, Time Loop, whose inspiration and digital sketch was posted last month in this blog.
The time loop is an idea that is bandied about occasionally, but perhaps I should clarify my idea of it. Rather than being a literal loop, (such as a bit of spliced-in film, which repeats itself unchangingly), the time loops I'm thinking of are perhaps more like orbits of planets. Though conditions are largely the same now, when the cycle is entering a phase of concurrence, the universe is nonetheless altered slightly. Events have deja vu, but they are not precise reenactments of history. History doesn't repeat itself to the letter. Rather than Clockwork Orange, now it's Clockwork Lime.
The era is again dystopian, with violence, disposession and revolution flaring up in ways that lead pundits grasping at straws. Yet in this iteration the protagonists are not Burgess' charismatic hoodlums, but rather hooded rioters, seeking anonymity.
Arab Spring... UK Riots...Occupy Wall Street... What will the next chapter be?

Time Loop

'Been listening to archived broadcasts of CBS Mystery Theatre, the last great radio play program in the US, running through the '70s.   The show was broadcast late in the evening, and I remember originally listening to it with my grandparents in their camper on the Wyoming prairie, in places that felt very far from civilization--so far, not one light made by man could be seen, only the millions of stars from galaxies very close overhead in the high desert sky.

Many of the archived episodes were taped with the commercials and news issued by various affiliate stations, so you get a real time capsule of what was happening in the early to mid 1970s. The program is often eerie, but perhaps eerier is the feeling that I am in a time loop, many of the events mirroring what the world is feeling now. High oil prices, political scandals, wars, economic hardship, record prices for gold--even a debt ceiling debate.

A few years later, in high school, most nerd or geek kids had read Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. We may have even tried out some of the Russian-Cockney slang that Burgess had constructed for the future. The book was a  horrorshow introduction to dystopia.

The future has come. Rather than cod pieces and bowlers, the protagonists sport hoodies, or burka-like hankies. In this data-sketch I superimposed the iconic image of Stanley Kubrick's sauntering thugs over a backdrop of London burning and hooded rioters. The lettering of the title is inspired by the film's opening  milk bar scene, which featured fluid signage of the same feel.