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No, I’m not going to be oohing and aahing over the damn Olympics this year, any more than I’ll be praising the next Arafat Peace Prize winner. Billy Beck explains why:

I can’t help it: it really does strike me that the Chinese might’ve thought much better than to hire one Albert Speer as a central planner on the Olympic Games. That would be: the son of that Albert Speer.

Bonus curiosity: the Taipei Times article is written by Nina Khrushcheva. That’s Nikita Khrushchev’s grand-daughter.

Now that, right there, is what we can reasonably call diagnostic. But it’s not the quote of the day, just a plain reciting of fact.

Beck’s trade is lighting rock shows. When he sees a show, he can tell exactly what was involved in putting it on.

All over the net, I’ve seen various ravings about the Opening Ceremony. That was the biggest cued lighting production I ever saw. The scale of automated lights control was out of hand.

…

The fly-rigging was amazing, and I’d love to see the drawings. What you saw the other night was the biggest extension of rock production technology to date, and make no mistake that that’s not what it was. None of it will ever tour, but almost everything about the hardware and a great deal of the design (color saturation, for instance) can be traced directly back to San Francisco acid shows in the 1960’s, the principles and aspirations of which rock-tour crews have been dragging around ever since.

The development of that hippie technology, by the way, is the result of applied capitalism, not applied socialism, much  less communism.

From the cold eye of technique, this show was a stupendous integration of applied technology. This is what the craft can do today: show you a real-live illusion of a man running along an unfolding scroll over a hundred and fifty feet in the air along a circumference of over fifteen hundred feet.

What it cannot do is abstract the ethical purpose to which it’s put.

It was all very pretty, but I couldn’t like the look of it. If I had the fruits of over a billion peoples’ labor at my disposal, I should hope that I could paint big pretty pictures, too.

You want to know about another venue for pretty pictures?

North Korea, whose beloved leader Kim il Poofy Hair has a thing for huge flash card displays and mass dance routines. Watch the video at that link, and understand: those thousands of faceless performers are not fulfilling their own dreams, they are acting out the commands of a ruthless dictator who could order any of them to his bedroom, his torture chamber, or the firing squad, as easily as he could order these displays.

I haven’t seen the Olympic opening show. I plan not to, and I plan to spoil the enjoyment of anyone who tries to watch it in my presence.

It’s bright paint on the face of a hideous demon.

Beck has more words on the technicalities and its implications in a follow up here.

For good or ill, the International Olympic Committee’s decision to allow China to host the Olympics is going to be remembered for a very long time.

Via the Smallest Minority.