The Institute of Engineering and Technology stands imposingly at the northern nape of Waterloo Bridge, a giant colossus rubbing shoulders with its surrounding big business compatriots, unimaginably large for an edifice sitting so central in London’s landscape.
A doorman working there tonight might be puzzled at the assortment of plain clothes dressed stragglers, understated media types and sharply dressed city people all slowly assembling and mingling at the Kelvin Bar, named after one of the great engineers to unify physics as we know it today, William Thompson. (Kelvin happens to come from his title, being as he was, 1st Baron of Kelvin. I presume the establishment didn’t want to refer to a temperature as “67 Thompson.”)
Tonight, among the busts of professors past and the dusty books of long-assimilated theories on thermodynamics, another unifier, one with no formal “qualifications” sits amongst the motley crew who have assembled to welcome him to the city which sees host to two three hour lectures back to back tomorrow. Welcome to the world, for now, of Jacque Fresco.
Fresco, an absurdly sprightly, lively 94 year old is many things. Futurist, (social) engineer, physicist, cultural explorer and sometime author of many (often co-written) books expounding the untold benefits of a society in which function, consistency and automated, the absence of money and instead a resource-driven efficient peak-performance of technology can do so much to advance all humans from poverty, war and the seemingly ever-present desolation of what we laughingly term “modern life.”
Over a beer or seven, a dozen or so listeners have the pleasure of hearing one of the few remaining men who has a living memory of the Great Depression recall events which now don’t even seem realistic enough to be portrayed in film. Accompanied by his partner and co-founder of The Venus Project Roxanne Meadows, Fresco describes his first important formative brushes with US law. “During the height of the depression, a local shoe store had closed down. And the doors were wide open. So as a young child I went inside one day, and started building houses out of the empty shoe boxes. A policeman came in and grabbed me by the ear, and told me I had criminal tendencies, and I was trespassing on private property.” (Quotation approximated.)
Fresco’s second brush with the law involved him witnessing cops shoot “niggers” for fun. It rapidly becomes quite obvious why his world-view seems so all-inclusive. Despite this one can’t help wondering why other people of his age (to say nothing of those much younger than he) are so often fully-fledged racist products of the very environment that led to Rosa Parks, segregation and ultimnately the Kent State shootings (although the latter was more informed by police brutality in general.)
I asked him how he managed to detangle himself from the cultural zeitgeist of Depression/post-depression America. He puts it firmly down to his leaving school at the age of fourteen, having spent most of the curricular time rejecting pledges of allegiance, downplaying the value of American History, and at all points pointing out the blockheadedness of asserted beliefs based on societal values rather than clear and open thinking or judgements informed by real-world observations.
It’s hard not to agree; one look at any curriculum I have ever come across screams “BS – Bad Science” as Fresco puts it, to laughter all around. When I discovered years after the fact that the Chemistry that I was taught was at best an approximation of what we thought we knew, and at worst an oversimplified set of cliches bordering on untruth,m I wonder just what kind of person I might have ultimately become if I had been taught (and allowed to discover) much more relevant, applicable and enriching areas of study.
Instead we were given algebra, with no application for it.
Amongst the crowd was filmmaker Maja Borg, a disarming, engaging “One-Year Old” (at least according to this amusing biographical page) whose own film Future For Sale has covered Fresco and Meadows’ Venus Project in parallel to Peter Joseph’s widely-publicised Zeitgeist Addendum, both which showcase as their centrepiece Fresco’s simple yet elegant ideas through interviews and visualizations of his work. I snatch a few minutes with her and ask her how she came to discover The Venus Project herself.
“It was actually through an Italian actress who I had worked with. She had been running her own project to live without money for five years, and she introduced me to the work of Jacque.” Given the vast differences in filmmaking stlyes between Borg (personal, Eurocentric, third-person and shot on location) and Joseph (dark, visually arresting and slickly produced graphics coupled with calm yet forceful voiceover), I half-seriously suggest they team up to make a film together. Maja smiles and we both try to imagine what such a film might actually end up really looking like.
One thing is sure in my mind – it, like an evening with Jacque Fresco, would certainly be a very interesting one.
Outside as I walk home, a few of the crowd are congregated, and appear to be talking about “Twenty Twelve”, The New World Order and how aliens once had sex with humans to give birth to what we are today.
And I realize how far we have yet to go.
