Hermenautic Circle blog

Although those Jimmy Wales personal appeal banners have disappeared from the top of Wikipedia pages in the last day or two, it’s not too late to respond to another beleaguered Wikiman’s cry for help. Tim Maly, Quiet Babylon blogger and cyborg provocateur, has crafted an ask for Wikileaks in the same style as the Wales appeals. Only our favorite silver-maned information liberter(ror)ian isn’t asking for money—he wants your information.

Wikileaks, he reminds us, is “written by unsuspecting volunteers failing to secure one confidential document at a time.” With just a few thousand leaks, he pleads, you could help ensure the survival of the “5th most terrifying web site in the world.”

Go read the whole appeal. It’s a witty take on the Wiki of the moment. And it prompts speculative fancies about other campaigns Wikileaks could ape. Like Old Spice: “Look at your wiki. Now look at me. Now back to your wiki; now back to me.” With the Wikileaks founder all but transparent in a towel, standing in a leaky shower! It won’t be long before no one has any secrets—no one except Julian Assange, that is.

Email makes an excellent soporific. Perhaps you thought it was about communication? It’s better at preventing it. Try this: when I have insomnia I write emails in my head. Long complex ones, with dependencies and parenthetical asides. I edit them and polish them and extend them and rework them, then go back to the beginning and edit and polish again, so that everything has exactly the correct tone and weight. And discard large parts as extraneous and then edit and polish again. I get them almost perfect; never quite perfect, as that’s when I fall asleep, just before the perfection point. I never write them down because I know it would be easy enough to do in the morning.

And in the morning? Of course I remember. They make no sense at all; none.

The most anticipated science fiction movie of December, for some of us, might actually be Space Battleship Yamato, aka Star Blazers. The classic anime's long-awaited live-action adaptation opens tomorrow. Watch an hour-long making-of feature, and read snippets from early reviews.

TBS did a lengthy documentary all about the making of this live-action movie, and the whole thing is on YouTube, including tons of new footage (via Ani-Culture):

So how is the movie being received so far?

The otakus at ScifiJapan were pretty excited:

The main elements of the original story are all in the movie. The filmmakers were very respectful of the elements, characters and designs that made YAMATO a favorite to fans of Japanese animation worldwide. The Yamato itself has not changed a bit. The images of the huge space battleship flying through star fields, past planets and out of clouds are impressive. And when strains of the original score creep in during crucial scenes, the result is a nostalgic joyride and one that brings a tingle up the spine of any fan of the original animation.

Otaku US's Tim Eldred says you'll be pretty happy with it if you're not expecting a "pure" copy of the anime:

Space-warping from anime to live action can be either traumatic or revelatory, depending on your resistance to compromise. Being a 30-year consumer of all things Yamato could have made me a candidate for trauma, but I managed to escape that fate. When the movie's teaser trailer emerged on January 1 it had me hooked in under 30 seconds, and the two subsequent trailers that followed in the spring and summer proved to me that we didn't need this to be 100% accurate. We just need it to remind us what it felt like to see Yamato for the first time.

It's difficult to describe the plot without unleashing a chain of spoilers, since the film rockets by without a single wasted frame. All I can confirm is that everyone who speculated it might fuse the Iscandar story together with the Comet Empire was absolutely right.

Eldred also says that the film-makers clearly were out to copy Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica reboot, a comment that's echoed by Daily Yomiuri's Cristoph Mark, who doesn't feel like the BSG homage worked that great:

Everything from the dirty, worn-down look to filming methods and scenes is lifted from what British newspaper the Guardian once referred to as perhaps the best TV show ever made. (That's BSG, not Yamato.) Visually, Yamato is a success. Though it does not look as good as BSG, it is often impressive, capturing the right mood with realistic imagery. In fact, it is the best-looking special-effects-heavy film I've ever seen come out of a Japanese movie studio But, the producers of this Takuya Kimura vehicle zigged when they should have zagged, skimming the surface of what made BSG great—its atmosphere and aesthetics—but not fully understanding its deeper successes, specifically its characters (which had been altered from the BSG of the 1970s), its attention to realistic detail and its high-caliber acting.

Finally, the Japan Times' Mark Schilling gives it a lukewarm review:

Quite often, the pressure of pleasing the various constituencies of a project like this, from fans to corporate sponsors, results in an overblown mess. But Yamazaki, working with scriptwriter Shimako Sato (a director in her own right who also happens to be Yamazaki's wife), has made a film that is good, uncomplicated fun for kids, and with plenty of CG spectacle and thrills (if not in the ever-more common 3-D).

All in all, it still sounds like an amazing film, including great visuals — cannot wait to see this! Let's hope it gets a U.S. run soon.

How can you write about gods and still keep your story relatable? It's one of the biggest challenges for fantasy writers. The great wonder of N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Kingdoms is that she makes it look easy. Spoilers ahead...

The Broken Kingdoms is the second book in Jemisin's trilogy that began with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The first book was the wonderful, but occasionally frustrating, story of a woman who's caught up in court intrigues among the ruling family of a vast empire, and launches a daring affair with an imprisoned god of darkness. (You can read our review of the first book here.) In the second book, all the world-building (and empire building) that Jemisin did the first time around starts to pay off, big-time, and the story is that much richer.

On the surface, Jemisin's story follows much the same trajectory in the second book as in the first, but there are differences that become important as the story goes along. Once again, we meet a new protagonist, a young woman who gets swept up in huge events far beyond anything she's experienced so far. And there are hints that the young protagonist is more powerful, and more important, than she realizes, and that she's connected to the gods in a more vital way than she knows. The second time around, though, the story works even better than it did in the first book, and not just because Jemisin is a more experienced storyteller.

Everything is just cooler this time around — the setting, the characters, and the storytelling. Instead of spending the whole book trapped inside the somewhat sterile confines of the Arameri court, like we did in the first book, we get out into the city formerly known as Sky (now called Shadow, because it's in the shadow of a great magical tree.) The city is a fascinating place, full of merchants, soldiers... and mischievous godlings, demigods who are underfoot everywhere due to the events in the first book. Shadow feels like a place you'd want to spend a lot of time — except that you'd probably fall afoul of some of the town's more mischievous, or outright predatory, inhabitants.

Our main character, this time around, is Oree Shoth, a blind craftswoman who has a special gift — she can see magic. (Eventually, her gift turns out to be a bit more all-encompassing than that, though.) As the book begins, Oree has already been the lover of one godling, and she's not at all surprised when another god turns up in a rubbish bin. Because she's used to taking in strays, she thinks nothing of letting this lone god stay at her house for a while, but he turns out to be more than he seems. Oree is a great protagonist: fearless, clever, and not at all awed by the pantheons and leaders she meets throughout the course of the series.

Having a blind hero — who can see stuff that other people can't see, as a result of her magic sight — is a daring idea, but it also winds up being a brilliant one. It leads to a really different style of storytelling, in which Oree is often caught by surprise by stuff happening around her, but she also knows important things long before everybody else.

My biggest problem with the first book was that, in spite of her manifest courage, the protagonist Yeine was a bit too passive, and too much of a pawn in the larger schemes of gods and kings. So I was really thrilled to see Oree being more active, and much more of a player, this time around. There were a few moments where it seemed like Oree was about to put herself under the protection of a powerful male who would sort out her problems for her, but thank goodness that ends up not happening. Instead, Oree not only has to look after herself, but she's often the one who winds up saving the gods and mortals around her.

I don't want to give away too much of this novel's storyline, but suffice to say it's ten years after the first book, and a lot has changed in that time. Not only are there gods everywhere, but magic is a lot more common than it used to be. And this society's rigid monotheism, and the sense of total comformity that went with it, have gone by the wayside. In this world in transition, there are lots of people seeking to gain power or to take revenge, and the cracks in society are everywhere, still subtle but easy to spot for anybody who looks the right way.

(By the way, you don't have to have read the first book to enjoy this one, but it definitely doesn't hurt, and you'll probably wind up getting way more out of the second book if you read the first one.)

Sometime after Oree "adopts" the god she finds in a rubbish bin — who has a nasty habit of dying, over and over again — one of the local godlings turns up dead. And this is just the first of several — someone has found a way to kill gods, and unless Oree discovers the truth, the gods and this new god-slaying serial killer will tear the city apart between them. It's the set up for a really great mystery, but Jemisin manages to turn it into a thought-provoking, haunting story about the difference between loving gods as a worshipper and loving them as an actual lover, and whether you can ever really understand the gods.

You can read the first chapter here, and if that's not enough to hook you in, then I'll be amazed. Here's a particularly brilliant section:

I am, you see, a woman plagued by gods.

It was worse once. Sometimes it felt as if they were everywhere: underfoot, overhead, peering around corners and lurking under bushes. They left glowing footprints on the sidewalks. (I could see that they had their own favorite paths for sightseeing.) They urinated on the white walls. They didn't have to do that, urinate I mean, they just found it amusing to imitate us. I found their names written in splattery light, usually in sacred places. I learned to read in this way.

Sometimes they followed me home and made me breakfast. Sometimes they tried to kill me. Occasionally they bought my trinkets and statues, though for what purpose I can't fathom. And yes, sometimes I loved them.

I even found one in a muckbin once. Sounds mad, doesn't it? But it's true. If I had known this would become my life when I left home for that beautiful, ridiculous city, I would have thought twice. Though I would still have done it.

The one in the muckbin, then. I should tell you more about him.

It's a bit of a lighter tone, I think, than the first book, befitting the fact that unlike the barbarian queen Yeine who's stuck in a palace with stuck-up people who want to kill her, Oree is out and about in the marketplace, selling her crafts and dealing with tourists and the local authorities. The somewhat lighter tone comes in handy later, when Oree does get into some pretty deep water with people who have some very bad plans for her.

Even as Oree is discovering the truth about the god-killing conspiracy, she's also discovering her true magical powers and learning what it really means to be in love with a god. Because Oree is a painter (despite being blind — she uses magic) the two things wind up being intimately connected with creation. Oree accesses her magical powers by creating things, and she also must use all of her imagination and creativity to find ways to communicate with the gods in her life. The gods are immortal and far-seeing, yet petty and often selfish as well, and their feuds and drama can span millennia.

The endless drama of the gods is simmering in the backdrop of this book, and it's very much the meta-story of Jemisin's trilogy. (She explains here how this can be a trilogy, and yet also a collection of three separate novels with separate protagonists. Short version: It's the story of the gods, not the mortals who get caught up in their world, and the individual narrator/protagonists in each book are just part of the larger story.) As anyone who read the first book will know, the three "original gods" had a complicated history, in which the god of day, Itempas, the god of night, Nahadoth, and the god of dawn and sunset, Enefa, were siblings and lovers — until Itempas became jealous and killed Enefa. This trinity is still very much working out their issues in the second book, and their near-eternal grief and sorrow are the towering rocks against which all of the mortals' schemes and fancies are raised and dashed.

So how do you write about gods and still keep your story relatable? If Jemisin's work is any guide, the key is to have an engaging protagonist/viewpoint character, plus a collection of gods who are full of both raw emotion and vast, unknowable history. And to show us just how mortals can become swept up in the world of the gods in an intimate way, and yet still have no real understanding of what it is that the gods see. Most of all, the key is just to tell a great, exciting, engaging story that keeps you turning pages long past your bedtime. And Jemisin has definitely done that here.

It all comes to a head in Thursday's new episode of Fringe. Watch the episode's exciting fake-movie trailer — approved for audiences in both universes — below. This is going to be intense.

[via EW]

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Technically this isn’t an “Inkdrop”, but we have more important things to focus on. As just announced over at Coilhouse, I have a piece in Travis Louie’s epic collaborative art show, The Ghost of Delilah and Other Stories. Here is a super-secret previous of mine and Travis’ collaboration, titled “Cosmic Dreams”. Travis is on a plane right now and can’t punish me for showing it to you. Yet.

Other collaborations include work by Craola, Chet Zar, Lola, Fred Harper, my dawgg Molly Crabapple, Dave Chung, Ewelina Ferruso, John Park and Lisa Gloria.

If you’re in or near Los Angeles this Thursday, be sure to check out the reception for this unprecedented show!

GALLERY 1988 LOS ANGELES

“THE GHOST OF DELILAH AND OTHER STORIES”
Travis Louie

Opening Reception December 2, 7-10PM

7020 Melrose Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90038
At the SE corner of Melrose and La Brea

Always,

Jaak Kilmi - "Disco and Atomic War"
Anas Qtiesh - "Why is Facebook Banned in Syria?"
Gail Levin - "Edward Hopper and Reality"
Frances Stonor Saunders - "The CIA and Abstract Expressionism (I)"
Your Host - "Hating on Abstraction"
Frances Stonor Saunders - "The CIA and Abstract Expressionism (II)"
Your Host - "Operation Real World"

http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/38255

December isn't just a month for gifts and vacations. It's also Tron Legacy month. But that's not all — there are holiday specials from Doctor Who, Warehouse 13 and Eureka. Plus conventions and more Vampire Academy and Zombie Star Wars.

As always, you can download the io9 calendar as a printable PDF here. And if you have any cool events for November's calendar, drop us a line at calendar@io9.com.

Amazing design and layout by Stephanie Fox, and research/reporting by Michael Ann Dobbs.

Friends today have been linking to a spare & elegant post by Carnegie Mellon statistician Cosma Shalizi (on a blog hosted by University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems) arguing that the Singularity—that technological apotheosis towards which many futurists like to think our tools are pointing us—already took place.

In 1918.

Shalizi enumerates some of the major symptoms of the Singularity, locating them in the early twentieth century:

An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. (“Drive” is the best I can do; words like “agenda” or “purpose” are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)

The post ends with a flourish: a flutter of owl’s wings, an evocation of Hegel, to the effect that we’re always transposing history’s discordant notes into the key of the future. It reminded me of the scene from F. W. Murnau’s 1926 Faust (above), which contains one of the most stunning and remarkable visual effects in the history of film. (I don’t think that either progress or the past are Murnau’s pestilential demon—except whenever we make them so.)

Shalizi’s post also reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Concept of History,” which ends by noting that past and future share certain qualities:

Surely the time of the soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty. Whoever keeps this in mind will perhaps have an idea of how past time was experienced as remembrance: namely, just the same way.

The past and the future share this: ultimately, each one is the sum of unintended consequences.

[Faust via Robin Sloan]

by Chris Randle

Until now, Canada was spared from the worst consequences of global economic chaos; the elimination of our federal deficit in the 1990s is being touted as a model for other budget-gutters. But similar medicine awaits us too. And that raises an overlooked question: What will happen to urban architecture when “austerity” becomes involuntary?

Few polemics come recommended by both the Daily Worker and the Daily Telegraph, but Owen Hatherley’s Guide is about Britain’s built environment, and perhaps that least abstract of media allows for wider common ground. When Tony Blair won a landslide there in 1997 after two decades of Tory misrule, he asked the delirious nation: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” His vacillation would prove telling. Blair deluded himself into believing that an advanced economy could thrive on property, finance, tourism and the “creative industries” alone, all entwined in a blurry loop of speculative greed.

Before the economic crash ended that particular fantasy, Blair and Gordon Brown promised to regenerate the cities devastated by Thatcherism. Dilapidated housing blocks or post-war concrete landmarks were razed and replaced by privately financed edifices, flashy but often built on the cheap, typically containing many more luxury apartments and many fewer spaces for the poor. Back in power and fixated on slashing spending, the Tories have no money left to alter this landscape; they want to finally cleanse the proles from inner cities instead. The “pseudomodernist Blairboxes” that Hatherley documents are the visible legacy of New Labour’s Third Way, and his architectural critique doubles as a savage, despairing political verdict.

Hatherley was born in Southampton, and the book begins there too. The city became Britain’s major passenger port in the early twentieth century, but unlike its predecessor Liverpool, there was little civic identity to draw on when the human visitors drained off to Heathrow. Surveying this blankness, the author writes: “I used to be annoyed by the way that whenever my home town was mentioned in a work of art – from Lennon’s ‘Ballad of John and Yoko’ to Wyndham Lewis’ travelogue Snooty Baronet – they never said anything about the town itself. It was only as a place to pass through.” For one famous ship that passage was terminal, so the city council is building a new Titanic Museum. Most of its doomed crewmen were local slum-dwellers whose families never got a penny of compensation.

Park Hill council estate, Sheffield, England

The relatively prosperous south isn’t Hatherley’s focus, or his true object of affection. Only one of the eleven travelogues happens in London. It’s dwarfed by his “unrequited love letters” to the former industrial cities of northern England, places where Old Labour socialists made ambitious and impassioned plans for a New Jerusalem. That trail of detritus leads to such remarkable buildings as Sheffield’s Park Hill, a huge council estate (British for public housing project) whose communal “streets in the sky” were meant to check modernism’s alienating dark side. The Human-League-quoting property developer Urban Splash is turning it into mixed-use flats. One of their employees proudly tells Hatherley what a longtime resident said: “People think we live in a slum. They don’t realize that I live in a penthouse looking out over the city.” But he can’t recall where the council has moved her now.

More dispiriting still is the chapter on Newcastle. It’s the largest city in Northumbria, or northeast England. My dad is from the next town over; his childhood home was built by the great Aneurin Bevan’s Housing Ministry. Bevan’s local counterpart T. Dan Smith, an ex-communist miner’s son, took control of the Newcastle Labour Party and then Newcastle City Council in 1958, on a platform of “massive rehousing programs.” He tragicomically declared that his town would become a “Brasilia of the North.” Smith didn’t fail half-heartedly. Hatherley notes that he almost got Le Corbusier to design the master’s only British building, and gave Newcastle the first planning department of any English council. Much of Tyneside’s physical shape today is his doing. The problem was that Smith couldn’t realize these grand dreams with the budgets and architects at hand, let alone his visionary scheme to reorganize political power in Britain and end the absurd dominance of men in ermine.

The other problem is that Smith served a six-year prison sentence for corruption. After leaving politics for private business in the late 1960s he founded a company run by the crooked architect John Paulson, later fictionalized as a capitalist monster in David Peace’s Red Riding series. Paulson’s eventual downfall ensnared Smith as well, and Hatherley makes a virtuosic attempt to reconcile the early idealism with the unconvincingly justified business links. He concludes that “T. Dan Smith appears here as the ultimate political curate’s egg: fascinating and charismatic, creator of an impressive but often despised landscape…a corrupt mandarin who intended to create a decentralized socialist Britain.” It almost sounds logical that way, though equally depressing. You could call the human contradiction of utopian socialist/dodgy accounts-fiddler a classic Northumbrian type. I’ve met a few of them.

I’m much less conflicted about A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain itself. Hatherley can get verbose – he has a weakness for double adverbs – and the production values are, well, about what you’d expect from a fiercely independent lefty publisher. But his self-deprecating wit and incongruous pop-music subplot make up for any number of small, crap photo illustrations. I just wish the residents of these places were more visible here. In a recent interview, Hatherley mentions the TV show Demolition, which features Prince Charles-damaged citizens voting on the evil modernist eyesores they want to annihilate forever. He notes that one of their punching bags, the elderly brutalist architect Owen Luder, actually turned up for argument’s sake and managed to sway several panelists. Why not make such a dialogue (or dialectic) part of his own project?

If there’s any hope to be found in Hatherley’s bleak denouement, it might be the possibility of rage giving way to greater political engagement – not just with the inane noise of horserace coverage, and not only with those who love your own monuments. That seems especially urgent in Canada right now, where our own city-loathing Tory government is preparing another austerity budget. Toronto’s new mayor is a conservative defined by his robotic repetition of talking points and his desire to run municipal government like a Kinko’s outlet. He needs to be resisted. But after finishing Hatherley’s book, I felt ashamed by how little I know about the people who influence this city’s architecture – or the lower-class suburbanites who decided to shift its politics rightward. You can always vote out a Rob Ford, after all. How do we get rid of Richard Florida?

Basement 5’s “Last White Christmas” single came out December 1, 1980.

All Kindle, all the time: Steve Hamilton's The Lock Artist and Peter Dickinson's Tears of the Salamander (both excellent - Hamilton and Dickinson are consistently very good, these books are no exception), four highly implausible but fairly literately written thrillers by Michelle Gagnon, Sherwood Smith's Coronets and Steel, Holly Black's White Cat (I particularly enjoyed this one - the world it's set in is quite reminiscent of Robin McKinley's Sunshine, a book I love), Liza Marklund's The Bomber (interesting and appealing if not up to the standard of Indridason, Nesbo and a couple other of my recent favorites).

[Image: Wallpaper by Studio Carnovsky, via Creative Review].

This wallpaper, designed by Studio Carnovsky, changes images depending on what color light you view it under. As such, it could be an incredibly interesting thing to experiment with in other contexts—including outdoor urban lighting, public signage, and even film animation.

[Image: Wallpaper by Studio Carnovsky, via Creative Review].

In the latter case, imagine a hallway whose wallpaper is printed with six or seven closely related scenes from an animated clip; each "scene" is printed in a different color. A light programmed to move through the appropriate sequence of color changes is then installed in the same corridor; as it flashes from color to color, changing perhaps every half-second, you see what appears to be a moving image on the walls around you.

It would be a kind of unmoving zoetrope—a stationary cinema in printed form (or a stationary cinema in stationery form?).

[Images: Wallpaper by Studio Carnovsky, via Creative Review].

Even if only used for interior decoration, however, the effect is well worth exploring further.

(Thanks to a tip from Tim Maly).

 
Today’s image presents the fanciful prospect of great iron spheres afloat in the heavens. It was posted to the Wonderful Gallery of Science tumblr by artist and writer Peggy Nelson, who presents it as a reminder of latter-day fancies:

Magdeburg Spheres, experiment by Otto von Guericke, 1654. Engraving by Gaspasr Schott, 1657. To demonstrate the effectiveness of his vacuum pump, Otto von Guericke created two metal hemispheres designed to fit together without gaps. The hemispheres were simply placed together, not welded or affixed. The internal area was then drained of air through a valve, creating a vacuum. To demonstrate both the existence of the vacuum, and its force, two teams of horses were hitched up to each hemisphere; they were unable to pull them apart. This engraving by Gaspar Schott illustrates not only the experiment itself, but the aesthetic considerations inherent in all scientific imagery. These are easier to see in older images, where the parallax renders them more jarring to contemporary eyes. The carefully rendered landscape? To us, extraneous. The redrawn and labelled spheres in the sky? To us, ridiculous. Which raises the significant question: what aspects of our current scientific imagery will be deemed extraneous or ridiculous to the eyes of tomorrow?

Peggy Nelson is a new media artist whose work involves fractured narratives in film, augmented reality, Twitter, and even objects on occasion. She blogs about art and the virtual life at HiLobrow.com.

And remember to submit your own favorite scientific imagery to the Wonderful Gallery. This space could be yours!

This book cover draws your eye, with its curving dark lines and its stark red-black-and-off-white color scheme. To illustrate the cover of Catherynne M. Valente's retelling of the legend of Koschei the Deathless, Beth White used actual black paper cut-outs.

Here's the synopsis of Valente's Deathless, which comes out in March from Tor Books:

Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what giants or wicked witches are to European fairy tales: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on for generations through and storybooks and verbal lore. But Koschei has never looked quite as he does through the eyes of Catherynne M. Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to our recent past, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history.

Deathless, however, is no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya Morevna transforms from a clever peasant girl, to Koschei's beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and games of lust and power. All told,Deathless is a collision of magical history and actual history, of mythology and revolution, of love and death, that will bring Russian myth to life in a stunning new incarnation.

Beth White's portfolio is full of similarly beautiful storybook art. You can view alternate versions of the cover, and read more about the process of creating it, over at the link. [Tor.com via Literary Musings]

Very relieved to be back in one place (Cayman).

The lung ailment is finally on the wane - my mother handed me last Wednesday in Philadelphia a bottle of the disgustingly titled and disgustingly effective Mucinex, and I am continuing to pop the tabs twice daily in hopes of banishing the last of the EVIL PHLEGM from my airways. I might even go for a short easy swim later, though really I will wait for tomorrow to return to exercise (I'm still coughing quite a bit) - it has been a horrible three-week exercise deprivation, with high costs for my morale and mental health as well as for my physical fitness...

Miscellaneous linkage:

At the Washington Post, Monica Hesse on Laura Hillenbrand's ongoing battle with chronic fatigue syndrome (read this piece if you are, like me, a writer feeling unduly sorry for yourself and full of self-dislike at not having written enough recently!).

How Charlie Williams' insanely good Royston Blake novels came to see the light of day.

The maraschino cherry bee crisis!

More Invisible Things reviews: ReaderGirls; The Hiding Spot; Book Chic. And another reader starts (sensibly!) with The Explosionist (alas, something that I could do nothing about is that the cover of Invisible Things pretty much completely omits the fact that it is a sequel - I made sure to do what I could do make the novel a free-standing self-sufficient narrative, but I think it is a pity not to read the earlier book first, in fact really they are probably best thought of as one long continuous narrative).

As this post has unduly elongated itself, I think I will put the light reading catch-up in a separate post. I've also just spent an hour looking through this year's blog for a "my year in reading" post for a literary blog I admire - interesting to contemplate, though counterintuitive to write it in November, as I will hope to have a good month of reading still to come...

Best career advice I can give you - Pretend to be the boss even if you are not.

“Don’t touch my junk!” a hectoring Barack Obama chants in this catchy remix. Unfortunately for us all, the TSA’s answer is, “Yes We Can.”

[via BoingBoing]

Just came across this, from my old REU buddy Sarah-Marie Belcastro.  I’m old enough to remember when Hampshire, Ross’s program at OSU, and (to some extent) Math Olympiad training were the only places a high school kid could get formal training in really advanced math.  Hampshire has done a lot of good for a lot of kids over the years, especially countercultural kids who love math but not regimentation, contests, and grades.  (I myself was a super-compliant establishment type who loved contests and grades, so I did MOP.)   It’s a shame to hear they’re having management problems.

With last night's episode, the main theme of The Event became clear: Some people just should not be in charge of anything. Spoilers ahead!

Seriously, have there ever been worse leaders, in the history of the universe, than either President Martinez or Sophia?

Take President Martinez. Last night, he continued his strategy of charging around, interrogating everybody himself, and writing checks his presidency can't cash. How can you tell when President Martinez is bluffing? His mouth opens and closes.

First of all, he confronts the Vice President, who's stonewalling about the whole "assassination plot" thing, and even though the Veep is A) injured and B) utterly feeble even on his best day, the Veep still manages to shrug off Martinez's threats and counter with an impressive reverse-blackmail-somersault maneuver. Then it turns out that some teeny fictional country has a missile that could reach the U.S., ready to launch, and Martinez charges around trying to find someone he can make unconvincing threats to.

At this point, it really seems like Martinez should get better at delegating, and the point that Blake Sterling (the guy from Heroes) made back in the first episode is looking truer and truer — the president shouldn't know about all the terrible things that his underlings are doing on his behalf. Because if the president does know, he'll insist on micromanaging them and turning them into a collossal bluff.

Then there's Sophia — so how did the "making people shoot themselves in the leg" leadership strategy work out? Apparently not that great, which is too bad: I was about to get a book deal for a management textbook called Don't Fire Them, Make Them Shoot Themselves In The Leg!. There were going to be quizzes and charts showing just how much loyalty you can engender by having people shoot themselves in the left leg, versus the right leg. And when to go the whole hog and get people to wear wooden peg legs, for that pirate glamor. Actually, I'm not sure what Sophia's plan was — she found out that her son Thomas and his girlfriend Isabel were betraying her, but instead of bringing the hammer down on them, she decided to maim Isabel and then make them drink tea with her reeeeeeeally slowly. Is it surprising that Thomas and Isabel go on the run soon after (when it's clear Sophia knows about their secret bank accounts) and initiate a plan to launch that missile? (The one the president is busy making blustery threats about?) Oh, and she let them take the Key Module, too.

Actually, my favorite Sophia moment is when Simon Lee asks her whether they should confront Thomas and Isabel about their secret accounts, and she says "They'd only deny it." And? If people have already betrayed you and you have reason to believe they're betraying you again, you probably shouldn't let them run around (well, hobble around, in Isabel's case) while you assemble proof.

And then there's the third study in crappy leadership, Dempsey (Hal Holbrook!) who really should be tearing his hair and shouting at the camera, "Why am I surrounded by imbeciles?" Or words to that effect.

Dempsey's no-account underlings include 1) Leila's dad, who already spilled his guts. 2) Vicky, who let that kid live, shot a cop for no reason, let Leila escape, let the Veep live, and probably botched a dozen other things. 3) The Veep, who's only been kept from spilling his guts by the fact that the Prez is the Bluffmaster. 4) Bald enforcer dude, who got injected with his own rapid-aging serum. And 5) Evil Nurse, who cleared out the hospital full of kidnapped little girls, but made sure to leave a BILLION CLUES laying around, including a huge pile of barely singed manila folders that scream "IMPORTANT SEEKRIT DOKUMENTS." When every single person you delegate to turns out to be incapable of getting anything right, maybe it's time to start looking in the mirror.

So we learned a few more pieces of the plot puzzle last night, which left us even more baffled. Or as random Crazy Lady would put it:

So what did we learn?

Well, the rapid aging exhibited by those little girls does appear to be caused by that injection — and just one dose is enough to turn Incompetent Henchman #7 into David Tennant at the end of "The Sound of Drums." Does this have something to do with how Hal Holbrook is staying young? Except that the injection is going into the girls, not taking some kind of youthiness out. (Unlike in that Fringe episode a while back.) And Samantha is responding "better than expected" to the treatment, which means there's a standard against which the treatment is judged.

Meanwhile, at least two of the girls' dads haven't aged since the late 1940s — including Leila's dad, Michael. So are these dads some of the alien sleeper agents? Or are they hooked on some kind of eternal-youth drug? As Leila says:

The question was so pressing, she even tweeted it in block caps, in a giant font.

The Key Module is needed to construct "the interface," which is something like the portal that zapped the airplane that was about to crash into Sophia in the first episode.

Thomas and Isabel have squirreled away loads of secret money, and their missile turns out to be a satellite — and it's aimed (duh duh duh!) out into space. Apparently, it's sending a message to their own people, who do indeed seem to come from space, rather than the future or whatnot. (Of course, the satellite's message could be going into a wormhole — in fact, it pretty much has to be, since otherwise the message won't reach anybody for millenia.) And whatever they're up to, it'll cause a lot of people to die. Oh, and when the message is played over the speakers in the White House Situation Room, it makes everybody clutch their heads, except Blake Sterling, who looks sort of bored.

We also learned that Crazy Lady thinks testicular cancer would be a bummer.

All in all, this was a solid enough episode, but a bit choppy — the jumps between the different storylines were sort of weirdly paced. For example, we saw Incompetent Henchman #7 get injected with the rapid-aging serum, then went to commercial, and it was about 10 minutes before we got back to him. The major characters still aren't much more than ciphers — and in the case of Thomas and Isabel, their dynamic was the opposite of what it was last week, with Thomas suddenly being the one who's sure about his plans. And given that this was the last episode until late February, it felt weirdly leisurely, and the final cliffhanger felt just like another episode ending, not a dramatic raising of the stakes.

At the same time, I liked some stuff — Sean and Leila were making a fun team, and the mental hospital infiltration was both tense and creepy, with the weird unexpected bits of humor in the mix. Leila's freak-out over Samantha slipping through her fingers felt realer than most character bits on this show. The "OMG they're going to nuke the U.S." fake-out did give us a few moments of awesome tension. (Although wouldn't a nuclear missile look rather different than a satellite-launching rocket?) And the layers upon layers of conspiracies and mysteries are continuing to be sort of fun.

But it's still all a bit baffling rather than mystifying. You're left sort of dazed and scratching your head. We'll let Crazy Lady have the last word:

The latest document dump from Julian Assange and associates has cued the same revue that played in previous episodes: mainstream newsrooms initiate a flurry of post-hoc reportage, while opinion pages bristle with moral logic-chopping and a zealous (and jealous) professional disregard. Lost in the blizzard are two implicit assertions behind the project. One is a new journalistic paradigm; the other is a model for society in a technological age.

First, the new journalism: Revenue models, iPad apps, and the high price of shoe leather are hot topics; but with Wikileaks, we glimpse a whole new understanding of journalistic information. What is a “story”? What is the nature of reporting? These are the questions Wikileaks poses with its databases and masses of undigested documents, offering the image of a journalism that is cumulative, statistical, non-narrative, and open.

With previous info-dumps on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former embedded reporters and hard-boiled war correspondents looked at the Wikileaks troves and asked, “where are the stories?” They sought out official reports of actions to which they were witness, ruefully noting discrepancies between approved accounts and events as they reported them. The argument in such cases was, “you need a reporter to get to the truth.” But in fact, discrepancy was the story: the revelation of an ineluctable gap between official and journalistic accounts, between what could be known in the moment and what only retrospect can furnish, between storytelling’s sympathetic atomism and the cumulative, existential dilemma of data. The discrepancies lead to an inescapable conclusion: no single account of events as complicated as those which make up a war can ever prove sufficient. Against the anemic context and lack of narrative in the Wikileaks troves, we have the manifest insufficiency of traditional reporting, which since approximately 9/12/2001 has proven inadequate to the task of rendering an account of the wars of our era.

As to the other, more comprehensive assumption behind Wikileaks, the one about the nature of government: the idea that a truly open society would govern itself without secrets is the sort of thing we might be tempted to call a modest proposal; there’s something bracing about it, an insouciant and programmatic naivete. On the other hand, it might be the job of civil society to freely choose a government the business of which involves managing a certain amount of secrecy; answerability and openness are not perfectly synonymous. It’s worth asking as well just how far a healthy transparency should reach. Many after all feel that some of the secrets we want a government to protect include our own.

Julian Assange (who is now Interpol’s most wanted suspect) has forcibly articulated both a vision of a radically transparent society and a new model for journalism. While perfectly pellucid government will likely remain a thought experiment, it’s clear that the next journalism—data-driven, statistical, polyfocal, and non-narrative—is already at work in the world.

With its fortunes (and its retrosocial styling) perpetually in doubt, Myspace today announced a new mobile web site and a forthcoming iPhone app.

Although the pioneering social network continues to diminish in the shadow of Facebook and Twitter, its focus on media creators would seem to lend it a lingering value. Myspace continues to prove itself useful to would-be up-and-coming musicians and other creatives, and its role as a music provider and source of entertainment news makes it a natural candidate for a thriving mobile presence.

Coddled by NewsCorp, however, the social network has moved slowly; perhaps fresh activity in the mobile space is a sign of rekindled energy. Or perhaps it will prove too little, too late.

[via TechCrunch]

A November 29, 1890 item in the New York Sun titled “Whistling For the Wind”, which I discovered in href="http://www.amazon.com/Out-Sight-African-American-1889-1895/dp/160473244X/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1290921705&sr=1-5">Out
of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895
:

George H. [sic] Johnson, the whistling Negro inthe Battery scene of
“The Inspector,” is a familiar figure on the North River ferryboats,
where he whistles for pennies. Eighteen years ago he went with the
Georgia Minstrels on a tour of the Old World. In Vienna they stayed
two months. While there he fell in love with a white woman. She had
no objection to his color, and they were married. Soon afterward they
came to this country, and have lived happily together ever since. A
daughter was born to them, and she has inherited the whistling
abilities of her father.

When Dramatist Wilson approached Johnson on the subject of joining
his company the whistler stuck out for a fair salary. He said that he
could pick up over $15 on the boats, and get a regular salary from a
phonograph company for whistling in their machines. Wilson had to pay
him $25 a week.

Since his engagement he has had an offer from Mrs. William K.
Vanerbilt, who wishes him to whistle for her one night after the
theater performance. Mrs. Vanderbilt will not go to a variety
theatre, but she is anxious to see all the best performers.”

I wonder about his daughter. As the years went by, how did she use her whistling? Maybe just to amaze people while she was walking down the street.

And what about his Viennese wife? What happened after she arrived in America?

NPR’s web site has a piece on him, too.

We're utterly mesmerized by David Hochbaum's art, featuring giant women, enchanted towns and flocks of strange birds. They create mini-fantasy epics in your mind. You can vote for his artwork to win an artist's residency. (The last image is NSFW.)

Hochbaum is up for the 3rd Ward Open Call artist's residency, and his whole portfolio is totally beguiling. Check out some of our favorites here, and more at the link. And don't forget to rate his portfolio! [3rd Ward Open Call via Bioephemera]

Somnambulist
Where the Waves Go
All The Secrets
Silent Beacon
Disambiguation Through Consumption


Genisis

IN THIS UPDATE: Ben Greenman, Ben Katchor, J. Robert Lennon, Matthew Sharpe.

1) Ben Greenman published a new collection, Celebrity Chekhov (Harper Perennial), which takes the short fiction of Anton Chekhov, removes the characters, and inserts contemporary celebrities. It has been called “nothing short of brilliant,” which may or may not be true, but may be true.

***

2) Ben Katchor will participate in a roundtable discussion on “The Art of the Graphic Novel” with Lynda Barry, Hillary Chute, Christopher Couch and Francoise Mouly on Dec. 5th at 2:30 pm at The Philoctetes Center, 247 East 82nd Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10028. Katchor will also be reading at Comics Plate, a performance/screening event on Dec. 13th at The Wild Project, 195 East 3rd Street, New York, NY 10009.

***

3) J. Robert Lennon has new stories in Weird Tales and Electric Literature, due out shortly.

***

4) Matthew Sharpe will read from his relatively new novel, You Were Wrong, this Thursday and Sunday. Read an excerpt from the novel at Swink.

Thursday, December 2, 6:00 p.m.
Reading at Labyrinth Books
122 Nassau St., Princeton, NJ

Sunday, December 5, 3:00 p.m.
Reading at Sunny’s Bar
253 Conover St.
Brooklyn, NY 11231

More tour information here.

***

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming (Fall 2011) collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!

L Magazine's Mark Asch interviews curators Shelly Oria and Annie Levy about this Thursday's event!

According to the indispensable Jason Kottke, NASA has called a press conference for Thursday afternoon at 2 pm to “discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for extraterrestrial life,” according to the press release.

And that’s pretty much all it says. While the press release is tantalizingly short on specifics, it does list several participants, including Mary Voytek, director of NASA’s astrobiology program; Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; James Elser, professor, Arizona State University; Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution; and Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey.

Although their specialties are different, the last three scientists pursue evidence of life forms with biochemistry that differs markedly from what we’ve come to associate with life on Earth. While working on astrobiology projects seeking such evidence in planetary environments beyond our own, these researchers focus most intently on the search for so-called “weird life” right here on Earth. Benner and Wolfe-Simon were co-authors (with others) on a 2009 paper in the journal Astrobiology entitled “Signatures of a Shadow Biosphere.” It’s a “hypothesis article”; as such it presents no findings. But the theories it explores are extremely interesting, with every potential to “impact the search for extraterrestrial life.”

The “shadow biosphere” describes the presence of another kind of life resident on Earth with an origin and evolutionary pathway separate from that of the tree of life as we know it, commonly divided today into the Archaea, Eubacteria, and Eukarya, three great domains that cover organisms ranging from the extremophiles colonizing deep ocean vents to bacteria colonizing your gut to the fungi, plants, and animals that populate our daily lives. For all their astounding variety, all such lifeforms share basic characteristics, a suite of chemical, metabolic, and genetic factors that together signal their common origin.

But it’s possible to imagine lifeforms that differ markedly from these familiar prototypes. Science fiction has entertained wild notions of creatures that use silicon in place of carbon or subsists in solvents other than water. But more subtle variations are possible as well (such as organisms that replace phosphates in DNA with chemically analogous arsenic—a special interest of Dr. Wolfe-Simon). “Signatures of a Shadow Biosphere” explores the possibilities of such subtle variations—suggesting novel ways to search for a domain of life which may be very difficult to detect against the “background noise” of the biochemistry we all know and love.

The discovery of such a novel biosphere on Earth would have profound implications. A little-discussed problem in astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life arises from the lack of such alternative biospheres here on Earth. The silence of the observable universe (a phenomenon known as the “Fermi Paradox“) is one thing; but the lack of alternative biologies here on Earth, an environment manifestly friendly to the emergence of living systems, is far more troubling. If life only evolved once even in Earth’s ideal conditions, then it might prove exceedingly rare everywhere else. If, on the other hand, life has arisen multiple times, then the search for life beyond Earth’s clement precinct seems much less quixotic.

Researchers involved with Thursday’s announcement have also been working on astrobiology proper; they’ve researched the geochemistry of Mars and the possibilities for life on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. But if I were to place a bet on the subject of the upcoming press conference, I’d wager (only a penny ante, mind you) that it will involve the discovery of a terrestrial shadow biosphere. Indeed, discovery of such an esoteric domain of life, either in the past or the present, would be tantamount to the discovery of extraterrestrial life—right here on Earth.

According to its founder, the original Friday’s was a cool singles bar on New York’s Upper East Side.

Q: What Will Be Google TV’s Killer App?

A: “Killer app” is the kind of giddy talk that journalists use to attract eyeballs. Killer apps don’t happen in blog chatter, they happen by hacking. But I’ll bite if this is about the purpose and value of Google TV and other platforms, like web app support in Boxee, that bring open web technology to the TV.

One huge benefit is good user experience. Comcast et al lack it. Legacy remote controls, on-screen channel guides, and DVRs are not in the same league with comparable things on the open web. No skilled interaction designer or product manager would ever do work that confusing, error prone, and user hostile. For example Dish has 50,000 channels, yet the on-screen channel guide is a linear list that you scroll through from the first to the last.

TV really does need search. It also needs scrobbling, channel bookmarking, recommendations, playlists, and all the other information architecture tools that have evolved to manage the firehose of content on the open internet. The information architecture of legacy TV is oriented towards the tiny amount of content that was available before the advent of cable TV. It’s been a long time since then.

Also, content specific to the web, stuff that’s not on cable, will be a big draw. No doubt this will include porn, but also there will be the whole world of ultra niche media that powers blog traffic on the web. What’s holding back niche content on IP TV is that users can’t find or manage it. For example the other night I watched a great live set by the squawk electronica band Holy Fuck on Baeble’s Roku channel. The reason this kind of thing will have a big impact isn’t that it’s blockbuster content, like The Sopranos of Roku, but that it scales up to a very large number of niches, including political videoblogs, mommy videoblogs, etc.

In the ruins of civilization, roller-skating nuns worship a glowing smiley-face and heal each other with magic knives and the holy hot tub. For my money, Roller Blade is the most wonderful/awful post-apocalyptic movie of all time. NSFW clip below.

Director Donald G. Jackson is best remembered for Hell Comes to Frogtown — which is adored for good reason. But his greatest achievement, in my book, is 1986's Roller Blade, which spawned a few sequels. It's the future, and the world has been reduced to ashes. The only force for peace and justice is an order of roller-skating nuns, led by Mother Speed. Here's my absolute favorite bit of the entire movie, where Mother Speed gives a little speech about the end of civilization and the fact that in this dark world, "thou must either skate or die":

Oh and yes, the Mother Superior does have a pet dog, who also wears a nun's shroud thingy.

The "skate or die" thing is spray-painted here and there around the ruins as well. I don't know why you can't ride a bicycle, or skateboard, or hang-glide. But for whatever reason, the only viable mode of transportation that remains in this world is skating. One character, a lawman named Marshall Goodman, has a young son who doesn't yet know how to skate — and the son isn't supposed to go outside where his lack of skating will lead to (wait for it) death. But the son disregards the Marshall's instructions and ventures out, only to be captured by the evil Doctor Sattacroy, who's basically a hand puppet that barks shrilly at the camera.

I bought Roller Blade on VHS for a dollar, and have watched it way too many times to count. I can't possibly summarize all of the goodness in this movie in one short post. There are post-apocalyptic punks whose acting has to be seen to be believed. There are Sattacroy's heavy-metal henchmen, who try to force some of the roller-skating nuns to fight each other at one point. There's a whole subplot where instead of money, in this post-apocalyptic future, they use Walkman batteries. It's all just too amazing.

But here's the NSFW clip, where three nuns who have been gravely injured by Doctor Sattacroy's men (one of them is bleeding profusely from the throat, but doesn't seem bothered by it) get into the holy hot tub while Mother Speed watches. And then two of the nuns (one of whom is secretly a spy trying to steal the source of the smiley-face power) discuss the nuns' philosophy:

Truly a masterpiece for the ages.

The name of this blog, almost featured in the New York Times.  (Thanks to Terry for pointing this out.)

We've been sort of excited to see Project Gutenberg putting up so many classic science fiction stories that have gone into the public domain. But at least one writer isn't thrilled about it — Greg Bear has been involved in a battle with Project Gutenberg over whether stories by Poul Anderson and other authors are in the public domain just because the magazines which published them originally failed to renew the copyright on the stories. Says Bear:

Why is a work that appeared in a magazine that did not file proper copyright paperwork protected by copyright law? The opinion in a major case in the US 2nd Circuit Court, Goodis v. United Artists Television, explains: ". . . "We unanimously conclude that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine's name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor." The opinion goes on at length regarding the creation of copyright at the time of publication.

Update: Originally, I got the wrong end of the stick — the article I'm linking to over at Digital Reader says it's Bear's own stories that he's concerned about. But actually, it's stories by his father in law, Poul Anderson, as well as some other authors. All of Bear's own work is covered by modern copyright law. According to Bear and his wife, Astrid Anderson Bear, some of the works that have been improperly declared public domain are on the list we linked to a while back, including Fritz Leiber's The Big Time and E.E. "Doc" Smith's Triplanetary.

Tons more details at the link. [Digital Reader]

We've been wondering for a long time which author could replace Philip K. Dick as Hollywood's idea spigot. But now a strong candidate has emerged: Haruki Murakami, the Japanese master of weirdness who's already spawned two movies.

If you're looking for a Dickian storyteller who's got the pedigree to spawn some thought-provokingly weird movies, you don't have to look much further than Murakami, whose novels often include mysterious conspiracies, fantastical plot devices and alternate universes. Just like in many Dick's best books, Murakami's stories never entirely make sense, but they haunt you all the more for that. In particular, books like Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase feel particularly Dickian in a literary way.

Two different movies based on Murakami's work are coming soon, although neither of them is overtly fantastical. Norwegian Wood, based on Murakami's novel about a love triangle in the 1960s, is a movie from director Tran Anh Hung, coming out in Japan soon — but there's no release date in the U.S. yet. Meanwhile, there's also a short film, The Second Bakery Attack, starring Kirsten Dunst and Brian Geraghty, based on this short story. In the case of "Bakery," it seems like there's a weird sort of curse that causes an insatiable hunger that leads to extreme, bakery-robbing behavior that changes people's lives. But as with many of Murakami's fantastical devices, the hunger curse is kept extremely vague. Here's a clip from the short film:

Could this be the beginning of a wave of Murakami films, including some of his more surreal, fantastical works? Let's hope so, although there's one bad sign — Hung said it took him four years to convince Murakami to let him adapt Norwegian Wood.

Warner Bros. had half the right idea with their Buffy the Vampire Slayer remake. It's about time somebody picked up the baton Joss Whedon dropped seven freaking years ago. But we don't need more Buffy, just more heroes like her.

After I heard about the plans for a new Buffy movie without Whedon's involvement, I had profoundly mixed feelings, which it's taken me a while to sort through. I mean, I had the same feeling of "a disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out of terror yadda yadda" that everybody else had. I mean, Buffy is one of the great stories of our time, and a lackluster remake without the creator involved just obviously seems like bad news.

But after more consideration, I had a more nuanced feeling about this remake. First of all, the absence of Whedon's involvement is a symptom, not the cause, of the likely suckitude. Second of all, we need more heroes like Buffy — but more than that, I desperately want to see what the next thing after Buffy is. And third of all, there hasn't just been a shortage of strong female heroines since Buffy went away — there's been a shortage of strong heroes and stories about heroism, period. We're in a weirdly cynical era where we have tons of heroes but not much heroism.

So taking those one by one:

The absence of Joss is just a symptom.

You could make a great Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie without Joss Whedon's involvement — it's not likely, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility. It's not as if there's a secret Buffy formula that only Whedon knows — plenty of other writers have handled the character well, and there's much about her that's a tad generic, including the "there can be only one" thing.

Imagine, for a second, that Warners had hired writer extraordinaire Jane Espenson to write a Buffy movie script, instead of novice screenwriter Whit Anderson. Would you be as upset? I know I wouldn't.

And sweet muppety Odin knows, some of the recent Buffy season eight comics have had me wondering if Whedon himself still has any idea what to do with the character who made him famous.

But at the same time, we live in an era of cynical, dumbed-down remakes. Studios are constantly digging through the scrapheap of old stories, looking for pieces of IP that they can break down and sell for parts. They don't see anything unique about Buffy, any more than they do about Total Recall or any of the tons of other remakes they're pushing through. They're just brands that haven't been drained dry yet. They have some name recognition and a smidge of nostalgia value, which can be turned into money before they're tossed back on the heap. In other words, to the studios, Buffy is Mr. Peanut.

Where remakes have worked, it's been because the creators were willing to go back to the source material and really engage with it. Like in the case of the surprisingly good Let Me In — Matt Reeves was determined to go back to the original novel by John Ajvide, to create a fresh take on the novel's themes and ideas, instead of just doing a bad copy of the Swedish film. But that just brings us back to the fact that the source material of Buffy is in Whedon's head, if it's anywhere.

And looked at in that light, the decision to shut out Whedon feels cynical. How hard would have been to rope him in, in some kind of producer role? The absence of the character's creator, combined with the decision to hire a novice writer, just sounds suspiciously like a quick and dirty assembly-line remake, to mine the last bit of value out of the old girl.

And Anderson's comments to the L.A. Times also didn't fill me with confidence — they sounded like a summary of the movie and TV show by someone who'd seen a few episodes, but didn't really get the themes of sacrifice and strength of character that Whedon instilled into Buffy Summers. In particular there was a lot of talk about "duty and destiny" and the conflict between Buffy's responsibility to save the world and her reluctance to do it — which seems like a charcoal sketch of the character's conflict, not the rich character study that Whedon created.

So yeah, a Buffy movie without Whedon could be okay — but it probably won't.

We're still waiting for what comes after Buffy

Jeez, Hollywood. Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air in 2003. And we're still waiting for someone to take it to the next level.

Buffy made a bold statement in the context of 1990s pop culture: What if this tiny blonde girl, who looks like the victim in every horror movie ever, is actually the monster-killer? What if she's badder and tougher than everyone else? What if she's secretly grappling with the weight of the world because she's the only one who can save us all?

Whedon often talks about the idea for the original Buffy movie coming from the image of a girl running from a monster, like in every other horror film — but then it turns out she's actually hunting the monster, and she catches it by surprise. Because she's not just your typical sacrificial cheerleader.

That was a radical idea in 1992, and even in 1997. I would be very sad to think it would still be radical in 2012, or whenever this film comes out.

A lot of the themes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ought to feel dated, even if they don't. The whole idea that even though she just looks like a regular cheerleader doesn't mean she's not something special, for example — we got another dose of that from Heroes, except it was stripped of all its humor and, well, heroism. The novelty of "a young girl who's not just a victim" definitely ought to have worn off by now.

Mind you, the theme of being torn between duty and your personal desires is fairly timeless and intrinsic to the "hero" thing — but Buffy did bring something special to it. Especially after the first season and a half, Buffy learns the value of sacrifice, and gains strength of character from making tough choices. She's not just permanently struggling against her destiny, and heroism doesn't just drag her down, it also enriches her life — it's complicated. And it's that complication that I'd love to see taken to the next level.

A lot of my favorite Buffy moments, not surprisingly, are the "fuck yeah" moments where you think Buffy's finally going to give up, but then she comes back twice as strong or does something surprising and awesome. People used to talk about how empowering Buffy was, and it's really true — at its best, the show was inspiring, and there hasn't really been anything like that since then.

So what kind of female heroes have we gotten after Buffy? It hasn't been a particularly great time, at least on screen. The best you can say, for the most part, is that women have graduated from "damsel in distress" to "sidekick who sometimes needs rescuing." The distinction is a subtle one, but it does carry some weight. Look at Theresa Palmer's character in The Sorcerer's Apprentice — she's mostly the love interest, but she does get to do something to help defeat the baddie. Similarly, I feel like a lot of action/adventure movies now have a role for the female badass who's not quite as awesome as the male hero, but still gets to do some stuff — like Helen Mirren in RED or Theresa Palmer (again!) in I Am Number Four.

So actually the way to get the kind of surprise that Buffy served up in the 1990s would be to have a female character who you think is going to be the "butt-kicking sidekick," but actually turns out to be more awesome than everyone else.

Actually, what may really rule — if we're incredibly lucky — is the upcoming Hunger Games movie. If the movie version of Katniss is half as great as the book version, she could really be our next Buffy.

But yeah, Buffy the Vampire Slayer seems like a trick you can only pull once — and then you really ought to find a new trick. As Whedon himself told Entertainment Weekly a couple weeks back in its big Wonder Woman article, we shouldn't necessarily hope for a Wonder Woman movie — but we should be clamoring for more wonder women.

We're not just lacking strong female heroes, we're lacking heroes

Can you name any other popular story of the past decade that's dealt with the cost — and the glory — of heroism and saving people the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer did? I can't, not really.

I really think Heroes, deep down, wanted to tell a story about heroism, but let's not talk about how that turned out. Lost flirted with the idea of showing someone becoming a hero, but we never quite got there. Most superhero movies are all wish fulfillment and shininess, with no real heroism depicted on screen. Just as we're suffering from a villain recession, we also haven't had a hero who sacrifices, and does the right thing in spite of the cost, and saves people. Not in a while anyway.

There have been hints of these themes a few times — Avatar, for all its faults, does show us Jake Sully making hard choices to become the hero who can save the Na'vi. The Dark Knight deals a fair bit with the idea that being Batman comes with a heavy cost, and Bruce Wayne pays that cost because people need Batman. The short-lived show The Middleman was starting to say some really interesting stuff about the sacrifices that Wendy Watson makes to save the world, when it was yanked off the air by network fish zombies. (Edited to add: And people have mentioned some other great recent stories about real heroism in comments, notably Harry Potter and Supernatural.)

But mostly, we have spectacles with cookie-cutter heroes, who aren't particularly heroic, or even interesting for that matter. Our heroes either don't struggle with their responsibility at all, or they whine about how the burden of responsibility is crushing them. The themes of Buffy — like wanting a "normal life" in spite of having awesome superpowers — have degraded into a sort of dull whine of entitlement. We get the flashiness of having power, and the cost of having power — but nothing about how great it is to do the right thing.

The "refusing the call of heroism" portion of the "hero's journey" story has become the whole story — it was the entire arc (if there was one) of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and most of the arc of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, to name two random recent movies. Watching squirrely young dudes mope for an hour because they don't want to hang out with awesome giant robots or learn how to do cool magic any more may be your idea of fun, but it's not mine.

I know we live in a cynical age, and we don't feel like any one of us can make a real difference, because every war is a quagmire and every politician is bought and sold, yadda yadda. We see evil everywhere, but it's indistinct because it's systemic and we all, as grown-ups, consent to it to some degree because otherwise we'd have to go live in a hut somewhere. To some extent, our heroic power fantasies are meant to help us escape from this reality — if only we had a magic ring, we'd fix all these problems right quick! — but our heroic stories are also supposed to make us think about the real meaning of heroism. The hero's quest is not meant to be easy or always glamorous — but that makes it more heroic, not less.

With Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Whedon issued a challenge to storytellers everywhere — not just to tell better stories about heroic women, but to tell better stories about heroism, period. The challenge has not been answered. A rehash of Whedon's own vision is not an answer to his challenge — it's just more dumb profiteering. Step up, Hollywood — it's time to give us the next generation of Buffys.

The Vibrators’ “Disco in Mosco” single came out December 1, 1980.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, —

— John Keats, To Autumn

[Image: Photo by Vincent Fournier, courtesy of Wired UK].

This morning's post about a robot-city on the slopes of Mount Fuji reminded me of this thing called the CyberMotion Simulator, operated by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany (and featured in this month's issue of Wired UK).

The Simulator, Wired writes, is "a RoboCoaster industrial robotic arm adapted and programmed to simulate an F1 Ferrari F2007."

Testers are strapped into a cabin two metres above ground, and use a steering wheel, accelerator and brake to control CyberMotion. The simulator can provide accelerations of 2G and its display shows a 3D view of the circuit at Monza. The arm's six axes allow for the replication of twists and turns on the track and can even turn the subjects upside down.

But I'm curious what everyday architectural uses such a robo-arm might have. An office full of moving cubicles held aloft by black robotic arms that lift, turn, and rotate each desk based on who the worker wants to talk to; mobile bedroom furniture for a depressed ex-astronaut; avant-garde set design for a new play in East London; a vertigo-treatment facility designed by Aristide Antonas; surveillance towers for traffic police in outer Tokyo; a hawk-watching platform in Fort Washington State Park.

You show up for your first day of high school somewhere in a Chinese colonial city in central Africa and find that everyone—in room after room, holding hundreds of people—is sitting ten feet off the ground in these weird and wormy chairs, dipping and weaving and reading Shakespeare.

A musical documentary about the Beatles that fell through time from the year 3000.

I hope we don’t have to wait until then for the US to get its first cyborg Poet Laureate.

(via douglaswolk)

“Musical instruments produce sounds. Composers produce music. Musical instruments reproduce music. Tape recorders, radios, disc players, etc., reproduce sound. A device such as a wind-up music box produces sound and reproduces music. A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist who plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle as a plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not reproduced - the record player becomes a musical instrument. A sampler, in essence a recording, transforming instrument, is simultaneously a documenting device and a creative device, in effect reducing a distinction manifested by copyright.”

- John Oswald, quoted in this interview.

In this week's television, Fringe hits a turning point, SGU reaches a climax and The Walking Dead's season ends. But the most exciting thing might be Psych's Twin Peaks tribute, featuring original castmembers. Also, Kevin Sorbo learns a terrible lesson.

Today:

There's a new Johnny Test at 7:30 PM on the Cartoon Network, "Good Old Johnny Test".

And then at 8 PM, there's a new Chuck on NBC — the belated Thanksgiving episode, where Mama Bartowski drops by for some leftovers. Here's a sneak peek:

At 8 PM, there's Adventure Time on Cartoon Network ("Crystals Have Power"), followed by a new Regular Show at 8:15 ("Ello Gov'nor"), a Mad rerun at 8:30 PM and a new Robotomy at 8:45 PM.

And then there's the midseason finale of The Event at 9 PM on NBC:

President Martinez confronts the traitor in his administration, only to be met with threats of exposing the cover-up of Avias Air 514. Even after testing the loyalty of Isabel and Thomas, Sophia still suspects their subterfuge, so she sends Simon on a fact-finding mission. Her suspicions are confirmed when Thomas unveils a shocking new plan. Meanwhile, on the hunt for Samantha, Sean and Leila battle the mercenaries sent by Dempsey.

Tuesday:

At 8 PM, there's a new episode of Tower Prep, on the Cartoon Network — and it sounds like it may actually lead to some answers. Here's what happens in "Election":

Gabe decides to run for class vice-president and aware that his opponent is a much more popular student, Gabe asks his friends to help run his campaign. Everyone assumes Gabe has it in the bag because of his powers of persuasion but mysteriously Gabe's ability is not working – a problem that quickly spreads to the entire student body, causing their abilities to completely shut down. Now they have to race the clock as they try to discover why this is happening, who may be causing it and how it ties into the origin of their special abilities.

And here are some clips:

Also, there's a new episode of the season's fastest improving new show, No Ordinary Family, on ABC at 9 PM. (Note: New timeslot!) It's "No Ordinary Anniversary":

Jim and Stephanie plan a romantic evening away from the kids to celebrate their 18th wedding anniversary, but instead find themselves teaming up and using their superpowers to deal with a serial arsonist who is exhibiting some special powers of his own. Meanwhile, Daphne and JJ are left home alone and join forces to win some big money in a poker game with some fellow students.

Some sneak peeks:

And there's also the midseason finale of Stargate Universe on Syfy at 9 PM — the Destiny follows a strange energy signature to a region of space strewn with destroyed spaceships that appear to be the remnants of an ancient battle. Meanwhile, Eli struggles with how to tell his mom what really happened to him. Here's a sneak peek:

Wednesday:

Undercovers limps towards the end of its run, on NBC at 8 PM. Poor Undercovers.

Also at 8 PM, there's a new(ish) MythBusters: Buster's Cut on Discovery, followed by a new MythBusters at 9 PM. It's the "Bug Special."

There's also (I think) a new Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes at 8:30 PM on Disney XD.

In case you've never seen it, The Pixar Story is on CNBC at 9 PM. It's pretty much the definitive look at the company that brought us most of the best animated films of the past decade or so.

At 10 PM, there's a new Psych on USA, and it's something special — a Twin Peaks reunion that's also a Twin Peaks parody of sorts, called "Dual Spires." Featuring Sherilyn Fenn and Sheryl Lee, among others. Are you excited yet? Watch these trailers:

Thursday:

Kevin Sorbo plays a selfish toy company CEO who is forced to dress up as Santa to learn the error of his ways, in The Santa Suit, a TV movie premiering on the Hallmark Channel at 8 PM. Let's just pause to consider that: Dylan Hunt is forced to dress up as Santa. Somehow he ends up at a homeless shelter, where he meets a kind social worker, plus a latchkey kid who needs a father figure. And then he gets a job as a department store Santa. I'm not seeing the downside of this movie at all. Here's a clip:

At 8 PM, there's a new episode of The Vampire Diaries, on The CW, in which it sounds like we can count on our heroes to be total idiots (in an entertaining way) yet again:

JEREMY MAKES A DANGEROUS MISTAKE - Elena (Nina Dobrev) decides to take matters into her own hands and offers a tempting incentive to Rose (guest star Lauren Cohan) for her help. When things take an unexpected turn, however, Rose calls on Damon (Ian Somerhalder) to deal with the plan Elena has set in motion. Jeremy's (Steven R. McQueen) reckless attempt to help Bonnie (Katerina Graham) retrieve the moonstone lands him in a life-threatening position and forces Stefan (Paul Wesley) to put himself in danger. Bonnie and Luka (guest star Bryton James) form a closer connection. Tyler (Michael Trevino) shows Caroline (Candice Accola) the Lockwood cellar, where she makes a discovery that leaves them both terrified.

Here are a couple sneak peeks:

But there's apparently no new The Big Bang Theory this week.

And at 9 PM on Fox, there's the episode of Fringe we've been waiting on tenterhooks for two weeks to see. Actually, I've already watched it — and it's well worth the wait, despite a couple of slightly contrived plot twists. When last we saw our heroes, Walternate was preparing to do something fiendish to Olivia, while Peter was realizing the truth. It all comes to a head, for both Olivias, in this week's episode — and Peter's powers of deduction get pushed to the limit. I don't want to say any more, but it's pretty amazing stuff. And here's a sneak peek of one of the most intense scenes from the episode.

And then Burn Notice is on USA at 10 PM.

Also at 10 PM, the premiere of a new show on the History Channel, Brad Meltzer's Decoded, in which the former DC Comics writer and thriller author leads a team that looks into the secrets of American history. First up: the White House.

Yet another thing at 10 PM: National Geographic's Naked Science show has an episode called "Alien Fireballs" about just what it sounds like.

Friday:

At 6:30, the Hub is showing a special presentation of Transformers Prime, the surprisingly good new cartoon. It's "Darkness Rising Part 5."

And then there's another new Batman: The Brave and the Bold at 7:00 pm, with the promising title, "Darkseid Descending!". And that's followed by a new Ben 10: Ultimate Alien at 7:30 PM.

There's a new Smallville, on The CW at 8 PM, in which we go jumping to an alternate universe — always a good time:

JOHN GLOVER RETURNS AS LIONEL LUTHOR; EXECUTIVE PRODUCER KELLY SOUDERS MAKES HER DIRECTORIAL DEBUT - Tess (Cassidy Freeman) acquires a Kryptonian box that once belonged to Lionel Luthor (John Glover). When Clark (Tom Welling) accidentally activates the box, he's transported to a parallel universe where Lionel found Clark in the cornfields instead of the Kents. In this universe, Clark Luthor is a murderer and Lois (Erica Durance) is engaged to Oliver (Justin Hartley) and both of them hate Clark. Clark must be careful not to tip off Lionel that he's not his son while trying to figure out how to get back to Earth where the monster Clark Luthor was transported in his place.

There's also a new Medium on CBS at 8 PM.

Are you feeling the lack of treacly message films in your life? Did you feel as though Kevin Sorbo being forced to become a homeless Santa didn't do it for you? Then you'll love A Walk In My Shoes, a TV movie appearing on NBC at 8 PM, brought to you by Wal-Mart and Proctor & Gamble. Here's the blurb:

[Trish Fahey is] a stressed-out high school teacher who can't understand her students' lack of effort and why their parents don't seem to care. This is especially true of Justin (Cameron Deane Stewart), a basketball star who is underperforming in her class. All of this changes when Trish wrecks her car and wakes to find herself living in the shoes of Justin's mom (Jana Lee Hamblin), a woman she has personally judged and criticized. With the help of a mysterious stranger (Yara Martinez), Trish discovers the real reason behind her struggles, teaching her a whole new meaning of compassion. No one is left unchanged.

So it's basically Freaky Friday meets Wife Swappers. Without Kevin Sorbo.

Also at 8 PM, we get another outing of Genndy Tartakovsky's Sym-Bionic Titan on the Cartoon Network, followed by a new Generator Rex at 8:30 PM. And then at 9, there's a new Star Wars: The Clone Wars, "Pursuit of Peace." Here's a promo, on which one Youtube commenter remarked, "They need to go back to the clones."

At 9 PM, there's a new Supernatural on The CW, in which the brothers make another dangerous demonic alliance:

MEG'S BACK! - Meg (guest star Rachel Miner) kidnaps Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) and tries to force them to tell her where Crowley (guest star Mark A. Sheppard) is hiding. Sam makes her a deal – they will help her find Crowley if she promises to torture him for information about how to get Sam's soul back. Castiel (Misha Collins) joins the fight but finds it difficult to work with Meg.

Here are a couple sneak peeks:

At 10 PM, there's a new Sanctuary on Syfy, "For King & Country."

Also at 10 PM, there's the season finale of Dean Of Invention on Planet Green — your last chance to let the inventor of the Segway tell you how to change the world. Don't miss it!

Saturday:

At 10 PM, Planet Green has Colony, a two-hour special presentation about Colony Collapse Disorder and what it means to all of us when the bees are becoming more scarce.

Sunday:

There appears to be a new Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes on Disney XD at 10 AM.

As usual, there's the Fox animation bloc from 8 to 10 PM, including The Simpsons and Family Guy.

More importantly, at 8:45 PM, HBO is showing Inside Game of Thrones, a 15-minute sneak peek at the long-awaited adaptation of George R. R. Martin's bestselling series. We cannot wait!

And then at 10 PM, there's the season finale of The Walking Dead on AMC. This is the last taste of zombie armageddon you're going to have for almost a year. We get inside the Centers for Disease Control, where there are some surprising revelations. Check out a clip:

[Image: From Anti Syn Nation by Jonas Loh].

I like this tiny model of the Maunsell Towers, part of Jonas Loh's Anti Syn Nation project—"a speculative micro nation," he writes, supported by the "natural genetic engineering" of sea slugs. But I think someone should make a chess set entirely from Maunsell-tower like oil platforms and other modular microutopias at sea—or perhaps just a student thesis project presented using custom-milled chess pieces, with elaborate spatial rules governing the resulting game.

TV Smith and the Explorers’ “Tomahawk Cruise” single came out November 29, 1980.

The Nuns’ self-titled album came out November 29, 1980. Here’s “Media Control” from it. That’s a young Alejandro Escovedo on guitar.

The Yobs’ Christmas Album came out November 29, 1980. Their version of “12 Days of Christmas” is distinctly NSFW.

(from Nipper, by Doug Wright, 1963/1964)

A computer in Britain has determined that April 11, 1954 was the most boring day in 20th century history.

This Thursday (12/2) at 7:30 p.m. at Three of Cups (83 First Ave. @ 5th St.) I'll be...well, not reading, but being there while actress Joya Mia Italiano reads from Personal Days! Other performers will do dramatic readings of work by Sonya Chung, Jonathan Dixon, poet Maya Pindyck, and—hold onto your chapeaux—Amanda Filipacchi, whose Love Creeps is one of my favorite comic novels.