October 2009

The Holden Caulfield Ploy

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"Walter Hill's contribution to the Red Harvest/Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars story family is the Bruce Willis vehicle Last Man Standing. This is perhaps the most overblown, arty, and ultimately exhausted contribution to the 'lone wolf pits rival gangs against each other' form..."

"There you go again."

"What?"

"You take the most current movie of the group, very fast paced and well made and enjoyed by many and claim that you, only you can see its flaws. You align yourself with these older movies, no less exploitation cheapies in their days, and claim, like Holden Caulfield, to be the only one who can see through the current 'phonies.'"

"Yes, but Last Man Standing is a demonstrably worse film than the others."

"We've never heard anyone say that. You need to give us ten examples of someone saying Last Man Standing is 'overblown, arty, and ultimately exhausted.' I mean you come here, to the Walter Hill fan page, shooting off your mouth, trying to claim some kind of moral high ground..."

(Third voice): "Yeah, Yojimbo sucks!"

Greg Egan Self Defense

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Greg Egan critiques a pompous and off-the-mark review of his book Incandescence. He didn't need to--the writing is effectively self-negating.

A bit of a culture clash here: the critic, Adam Roberts, who teaches English literature as well as writing and reviewing science fiction, has rather conventional expectations for a novel. Science fiction writer Egan is, if not exactly poMo, then what I would call a genre experimentalist who is well known for inserting slabs of uncut scientific prose into narratives. Incandescence, his latest, is ballsy in its "notion that the theory of general relativity — widely regarded as one of the pinnacles of human intellectual achievement — could be discovered by a pre-industrial civilisation with no steam engines, no electric lights, no radio transmitters, and absolutely no tradition of astronomy" and also that readers can be walked through this premise.

In his analysis of Roberts' hatchet job for Strange Horizons, Egan contemplates the unthinkable, that readers will have a pad and pencil handy to jot notes on the physics he describes in thought experiment form in Incandescence. The book hopes you will draw conclusions by thinking across the gap between its two narratives--those of the pre-industrials and the post-humans who are tracking them. That's a gap some readers consider unbridged--I have my own theory of the ending but since so many reviewers are avoiding spoilers my universe for comparison has been tiny.

As Egan states, Roberts obviously just hates Incandescence and lobs one nitpicky dart after another hoping one will strike an artery. He complains about Egan not using compass directions when the whole point of the book is describing physics in a world without compass directions. Roberts quotes a memorable description of alien sex and attempts to ridicule it by "creatively" rewriting a love scene from Henry James in supposedly similar clinical terms. This flight of fancy is wince-inducing, all right. Roberts works in plugs for his own books and then writes a mock-humble comment (after Egan blasts him) that Egan "will still be a major figure when this review, and reviewer, are forgotten." That's for sure!

Security by Obscurity

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...is the name of an exhibition by the students of artist Olia Lialina. Lialina's contribution to the show is in the center, being (ironically) needlessly covered up:

lialina - google map

Here is a full-sized version of the above photo (it should be viewed large to know what we are talking about in this post). On Lialina's website the photo's filename includes the words "crystallize and emboss," which are two of the better-known Photoshop effects filters. In an earlier post here we talked about Google's security filtering of satellite photos, which blogger Greg Allen suggested might make great landscape paintings. Lialina's piece was done several months before Allen's post; unlike Google, though, she hasn't just submitted one area of her sky-view to filtering but has "embossed" some areas and "crystallized" others so only a few parts of the photo appear not to have been tampered with. The embossing effect turns freeways into rivers of sparkly "bling," for example.

lialina - google map (detail)

In my earlier post on this topic I was trying to recreate the filter Google uses and inattentively chose "stained glass." It is in actuality "crystallize," which Lialina has reminded me of with her image. The earlier post has been updated. Below is the detail entirely crystallized, like a vista in the J.G. Ballard book:

lialina - google map - crystallized

My take on Lialina's photo (and Google's clumsy censorship) is we are living in a fake reality and might as well enjoy it for the aesthetics.
Google's program is a very strange one: on the one hand an almost 19th Century desire to map and catalog everything in the world but with pockets of 21st Century dishonesty and "spin" created for the sake of commercial and security state interests. Like all the artificial news that's proliferating, we just accept it and try to work around it.