January 2011

From a Roger Ebert interview with John Waters (hat tip TH):

The other thing [Russ Meyer] did was attack the critics. If they said one bad thing, he would write the most hateful letters to them, which is, I believe, the exact opposite of a pro. But he was in my apartment looking through my bookshelf and I saw him lunge for this one volume and pull it out and it was The Mellons. But it was the Mellon family and he thought it was a tit book. And that summed it up. He was obsessed; he was an outsider pornographer, only soft-core. He couldn't help it.

Am a huge admirer of Bruce Sterling's writing up through about Heavy Weather, but as a commentator he says less and less every year. If you strip away all its nuances-on-nuances, this essay appears to be saying (a) exposure of state secrets interferes with the operations of good government, (b) we tolerate a surveillance state but a countervailing regime of dissent will be dealt with harshly and (c) the techno phreaks and cyber geeks Sterling hangs out with are mostly excitable idiots. Not saying much in an era of massive unchecked snooping is understandable, but better not to write at all than support the status quo in the language of the rebellious free-thinker. Or to profess ennui on all sides of the issue to disguise the general conservative drift of your thinking.
(hat tip jb)

PS The Economist and Atlantic are much harder on Sterling than the above (links via Tomorrow Museum).