the past is another country
Sunday, June 24, 2001
"Chairman" Bruce Sterling, science fiction writer and Texan, has been on something of a crusade lately. He is attempting -- in a half-serious way -- to build an artistic movement from scratch; the Viridian Design movement will have as its central theme the pressing aesthetic issue of...carbon emissions. His notion, as expressed in this speech and on his many, many Viridian Notes, is that by creating better, fancier, more attractive, cooler tchotkes that just happen to fight greenhouse emissions, one needn't convince the Western world to do the environmental equivelant of eating ones vegetables. The rabid forces of consumerism, honed over the past fifty years, will do the job for you. If it suddenly becomes sexy to drive a well-designed electric car rather than a lumpish SUV, you don't need to make the environmental case. I have lingering doubts about whether Sterling is willing and able to start guruing some designers into getting products to market, but now he's started talking to furniture designers. (more...)
9:06 pm 
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
The thing that is so great about literature of the paranoid -- the Time out of Joints and Crying of Lot 49s of the world -- is the way that things can assume a sense of weight and meaning totally out of character with their surface value. A misspelled postage cancellation or scrap of Life magazine showing Marilyn Monroe can become something of world-shattering relevance. Paul DiFilippo's best story, I think, concerns communications through subway sign and Police song, and you can't get less important than that. On the way home, I was overcome by a sense of portent (aided, no doubt, by the tape of the Clint Mansell soundtrack to Requiem for a Dream on my car stereo). There was a train halted on an overpass, and the word "Uniglory" stood out as if spotlit. I have no idea if Uniglory is this Asian shipping company, but the railcar seemed to bear an secretive and slightly ominous message. As I continued on my way, the Kronos Quartet faded out. The red Jag behind me passed me, only to pull all the way off the road; its driver sat there, head tipped back and looking for all the world like he was waiting for an impromptu meeting or for the bomb in his trunk to detonate. Signs and portents are everywhere. I turned off the highway and headed home, thinking about how much I like music that makes me feel like I'm in a movie.
11:56 pm
Sunday, June 17, 2001
Do your children know that God has put us here to do a job? "That job is to tell others about Jesus and how he died for our sins." The Supreme Court recently ruled that a school in upstate New York can't prevent the Good News Club, a Bible group for children aged 6 to 12, from holding after-school meetings. Despite the fact that it puts me on the same side as George Will, I agree with this decision. (more...)
12:49 am
Tuesday, June 12, 2001
(To be read in a tone of breathless exuberance.) So I told a joke on a bulletin board I frequent. And for some reason known only to him, Anil Dash put it on his weblog. And Jessamyn -- who recently mentioned an athenaeum in Vermont that I shall have to visit someday -- thought that she was the only one who knew that joke, and she emailed me. But I stole it off a whiteboard at work and not from Jessamyn, so we're copacetic. And we traded awful jokes! And because the Eel, beloved host of snarkout, likes truly awful jokes, here it is, my present to him.
Q: Why does a chicken coop have two doors?
A: Because if it had four doors, it'd be a chicken sedan!
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. Take my wife, please!
8:13 pm
Monday, June 11, 2001
It's now June, and clearly November will never die. There was something very, very odd about hearing Abigail Thernstrom sparring with Mary Frances Berry over the Voting Rights Commission's report on Florida. I'm no fan of Berry -- whose botched handling of the KPFA situation a few years ago pretty much solidified my opinion of her as a vindictive, tin-eared authoritarian, but Thernstrom is one of the principal academic opponents of the current interpretation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I'm not a social scientist, thank goodness, or terribly well-informed about the world of sociology, but I get the impression that her work is taken fairly seriously, this scathing article notwithstanding. (Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve gets hit much harder, as his reductionist argument deserves.) (more...)
12:03 am
Saturday, June 9, 2001
Last Thursday, we went to the Black Cat to see Smog play. Smog's "Be Hit" is perhaps #2 on the list of songs that invariably get stuck in my head at work and yet are wholly inappropriate to sing, even under one's breath. (Also on the list: Quintaine Americana's "And They Were Drinking..." and Shellac's "Prayer to God") That song is off the utterly brilliant Wild Love -- the only Smog album I owned -- and as Smog doesn't have a tuba player with them any more, I was doomed to not recognize a single song from their (quite good) set. Singer/songwriter Bill Callahan sure does make funny faces when he sings. After the show, I picked up Red Apple Falls, and I've found it disappointing so far -- it lacks the manic calliope vibe the best songs off Wild Love had, and it (mostly) lacks the country-fried energy Smog generated live, so it's just Bill singing minor-key songs about minor-key lives. Maybe it will grow on me; a Pitchfork Media review has me longing to buy Dongs of Sevotion. (I feel compelled to mention Callahan's ex-girlfriend's band, the excellent and thematically-somewhat-similar Cat Power; Smog's Knock Knock is apparently about the decline and fall of their relationship. Happy music is for suckers.)
11:23 pm
Friday, June 8, 2001
I've been thinking a lot about the meaning of "art" and "literature" over the past week or so, prompted by a post over at Hobbsblog and the article it linked to, a rather interesting summary of the academy's view towards J.R.R. Tolkien. (I'll get my biases on the table right now: I don't think Tolkien's books are stupendous, although I enjoyed them a lot when I was younger; I'm unabashedly pro-English-professors; and I read a fair amount of science fiction.) There are three separate questions, and I think they each need to be addressed separately. Is Lord of the Rings an enjoyable read? Is it of literary merit? Is it a work worth studying? (more...)
2:07 am
Monday, June 4, 2001
This is fascinating -- a writer for the Iranian Times is complaining about the praise Iranian film gets from Western critics: "I find the uncritical attention given to Iranian cinema by the Western press patronizing and the adoration showered upon it by Iranians living outside of Iran uncritically patriotic." This when Hollywood is cranking out movies so bad that reviewers must be invented to provide quotes for some movies -- as if Jeff Craig of "60 Second Preview" wasn't good enough. A backlash to Iranian film I could understand, but a backlash to praise of Iranian film? (more...)
2:06 am
Friday, June 1, 2001
Plans for the evening:
- Go to the Black Cat.
- Watch the Dismemberment Plan kick out the jams.
- Boogie.
- Return to home, sweaty and tired.
- Refresh myself with a delicious glass of Pocari Sweat.
- Sleep peacefully, comforted by the knowledge that I've replenished body fluid through perspiration, thanks to the Far East's #1 isotonic-neutraceutical beverage.
9:47 pm
