#scott bourne

Everything there is beautiful, made with human hands, and has value and meaning. Hand-woven wallpaper, marble stairs and mantle pieces. Elaborately carved chairs, tables and banisters. Do you realise that two-hundred years from now nothing we have done will be considered an antique? Nothing will last that long, nor will it have meaning. Erased again! Will anyone want a disposable Ikea coffee table two-hundred years from now?

if having a clean hair cut, putting on a tie from time to time and enjoying the use of manners makes me a Conservative… then I’m a Conservative. If sharing my experiences makes me a Preacher… so be it. If I am an Elitist because I do not have time to waste ‘hanging out’ with people who do not stimulate me, then fine, I’m an Elitist. If someone wants to call me a Snob or a Yuppie because I have developed a taste for finer things… be it food, wine, or theatre, then yes, I am a Yuppie. I have paid dearly for all these privileges that I now enjoy, and yes, I do consider them privileges, privileges well paid for. I have been very fortunate in my life. What experiences I have had I have taken the most I could possibly get from them. These experiences have made me a ‘man’, and that is the group that I would like to be a part of now… humanity. Much of the common man’s perspective is born of jealousy, and lack of experience or education. I don’t go for it anymore. I don’t care what they call me. I have friends in very, very high circles; I also have friends in the lowest of low. When I use the term friend I do not use it lightly. There are many wonderful and different people in my life, and I take whatever opportunities to learn from them that they present. I have learned much from skateboarders, but skateboarding is just a small sub-culture of mankind that does not want to have contact with the outside world. I am trying to make contact… real contact. Are you out there?

In France I did not know the language so it was easy to not be disappointed in my fellow man. As I have said before, I do not hate the Americans, I am one of them. I spent thirty wonderful years in America and I hope to get thirty years out of France or Europe but the truth is at the moment it’s no better here. Now France has Sarkozy, and my French is good enough to know that the common people are common wherever you go. People talk about nothing, people pour great concern into nothing, their powers and strengths are greatly misdirected. They are kept hypnotised by the media and the Internet. They walk these beautiful streets locked into a cell phone conversation about nothing at all… and all the while these beautiful buildings look down on them in laughter. Our generations have become invisible and we are leaving nothing of value behind. When I walk the streets of this city I am forced to admire the beauty of what our forefathers left behind, and, to tell you the truth, I have also become embarrassed by what our generation will leave behind. But then I realised that we would leave nothing behind. Nothing that is digital is stable. All that bad music in the iTunes Store will one day disappear. All this goofy digital photography and art will one day too. That photo you carry of your child in your cell phone will vanish. One day you may not have a single picture of your infant son. In 2008 paper is still the longest lasting way to store data. Vinyl is second. Bob Dylan will outlast us all. We are systematically erasing our history via e-mail and digital file! I recently saw Carolyn Burke speak about the biography she did on Lee Miller. At the end of the question and answer she urged everyone to write letters. She said as of recent there is a real threat that in the future biographers will not be able to find any information regarding their subjects. She said almost all of what she found out about Lee came from letters that Lee wrote to her editor at Vogue. The same will be true of photography. We are disappearing! Your parents sent love letters, you send text and e-mails. Which means that one day your daughter will never stumble through a box and find the long-lost letters where you confess your love to her mother. She may never know of that love or the story of her parents. She may never know what she looked like as an infant! This is the world our generation is up against. Tic, toc, tic, toc, tic, toc! The backlash will be catastrophic. Because of the Internet we don’t even need education any more. All one needs is the ability to use an iPhone and navigate the web. Education ‘as we know it’ may one day become extinct. Universities abandoned like old factories or simply a luxury for the super elite. It’s already started to happen. You have derelicts like myself running large companies. The plus is that anyone with a curious mind can find the information, but do they retain it? You can find something on the Internet in seconds that it took me hours, sometimes days to find in a library, but as a result I retain most of what I search for and much I did not search for. We value things we have to work for. With the Internet we do not have to exercise our minds so we no longer retain the information. It has no value. We are becoming inhuman by design. Technology erases memory. You don’t even know a single number in your cell phone, but if you are from my generation I am sure you still remember your very first telephone number. A number you probably have not used in years.