Ion Engine Test Firing, 2009, 3.3 MB jpeg
September 2009
Blade Runner in San Francisco
A smart, IMG MGMT style essay where the writer/curator uses existing social media to make an argument:
Blade Runner in San Francisco by dreamyshade (aka Britta Gustafson)
Other people's flickr photos of San Francisco landmarks provide the visuals for a discussion of the movie Blade Runner (which had Los Angeles locations) and the Philip K. Dick book on which it is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (set in San Francisco). The essay is "a mix of imaginary locations for the book and movie" and works in some trenchant commentary about the differences, e.g.:
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deckard and Rachael get it on at the St. Francis hotel.
Unlike the passive and scared Rachael in the movie, the book's Rachael tricks Deckard into thinking she cares about him as an attempt to defuse his pursuit of her fellow androids.
The text "defuse his pursuit of her fellow androids" links to a Google Books version of Androids (surprised that's online in full text) where Rachael and Rick have a post-conjugal discussion of Rick's future bounty hunting (he avows he won't do it anymore). The accompanying tourist-y photo of the St. Francis hotel is shot at night and all lit up like the Douglas Trumbull city exteriors in the movie. The rest of the essay makes similar, ingenious use of textual and geographic cross-cutting.
Update (forgot to write a conclusion): Using Dick's locations as a form of interrogation of the film's, Gustafson restores some of the moods and mores of the original text literally "lost to Hollywood."
Book Reports
Recent reading (as in books, paper ones):
1. Richard Stark's "Parker" novels slug you in the gut and walk away. The stories, being republished by U. of Chicago press, have new forwards by John Banville and Luc Sante in the proud tradition of explaining to dumb Americans how good their "popular" writers are. The adventures of an amoral heister who, like the author, has everybody's number. Just learned from Wikipedia that the Godard movie Made in USA was based on The Jugger. The late Donald Westlake (Richard Stark's real identity) sued to stop distribution in America. Wikipedia is silent on whether the movie's belated release stateside had anything to do with Westlake's death.
2. Donald Westlake's "Dortmunder" novels. More trifling than the Parker books but amusing for their in-depth New York locations.
3. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. 800 pages of literary scientifiction puzzlement set in a dying Earth landscape. This is considered a classic but I wonder how much appeal it has outside the hard core of genre readers. Much of the draw is figuring out which tropes (laser weapons, dimensional gates, neurological drugs) are being described by the ignorant, unreliable narrator in this post-apocalyptic medieval setting. Wolfe's visual imagination (strangely claustrophobic and inward-looking even when the vistas are soaring) and his oddball archaic language (based on historical research rather than the usual penchant for calling aliens names like "Qwarlo") keep you reading.
4. Kingsley Amis, One Fat Englishman. The friend who lent me this tells me it is Amis' self-caricature. In the mold of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One and Nabokov's books where a sophisticate from across the pond recoils in horror at American slick empty-headedness. Roger Micheldene, the narrator, offers no alternative: for all his verbal dexterity he is a consummate horse's ass. I found myself looking forward to Micheldene's sparring with a young beat-ish writer, who is also a jerk.
And Now Some Precog News
A science story from ABC News's website about deadly human-eating pythons in the Everglades:
ABC tells us we should be very afraid of a hybrid between African rock pythons, which have been found in the Everglades swamps and are homicidal, and the more gigantic Burmese pythons, also residing in the swamps but not bothering humans, even though it "remains a big question" whether the two species "could produce fertile offspring."
There's nothing scarier than the things you guess might be out there. Definitely newsworthy.