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We're discussing nuclear explosions in Japanese animation here and Richard Box's latter day "lightning field" of bulbs fluorescing around a giant electric pylon here. Regarding American consumption of the former, in videos with apocalyptic themes and spectacular battles, Sally says "culturally it's a disturbing kind of acquisitiveness--buying products of catharsis from the culture that we inflicted with the suffering that we feared." Regarding Box's work, where the array of light bulbs on the ground mysteriously glows in response to powerline flux, I suggest the artist is hitching a p.r. ride on electricity-related health fears just as others say his piece hitches a free ride on the power lines: "The piece looks lovely but it owes a big debt to someone else's work [Walter De Maria's], and the science around it appears to be more unsettled than unsettling."
"Daddy, tell me about Powell's meltdown again."
This story has been much repeated, but I just love rereading it, so here it is again. The subject is a recent public flip-out by soon-to-be-ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who as you recall went before the UN last year and lied and lied and lied about the pressing need to go to war. This is from James Ridgeway in the Village Voice:
Last week, Powell tried hard to regain the righteous high road with testimony in Congress, but when Ohio congressman Sherrod Brown mentioned Bush's AWOL problems as an aside in one question, Powell sprang into a generalissimo pose, ordering Brown, "Don't go there," as if the congressman were some dumb enlisted peon.
Then, as Powell was ruminating about how hard he tried to understand the pre-war intelligence—"I went to live at the CIA for four days"—he broke off and stared at a committee staff person sitting behind the congresspeople. "Are you shaking your head for something, young man, back there?" Powell intoned. "Are you part of these proceedings?"
Sherrod Brown, who has been in Congress 12 years, jumped to the staffer's defense: "Mr. Chairman, I've never heard a witness reprimand a staff person in the middle of a question."
Powell snapped, "I seldom come to a meeting where I am talking to a congressman and I have people aligned behind you giving editorial comment by head shakes."
Powell just doesn't seem to get it. He's not in some army camp. This is the people's house, and any member of Congress can ask whatever he or she pleases.
Who does Powell think he is? Douglas MacArthur?
A new, old review--written in 1982--has been added to the Doris Piserchia Website:
Mister Justice, 1973.My exhaustive, spoiler-ridden explication of the novel is here. Thanks to Joanna for finding the Trombetta review.Crammed into half an Ace double and never reprinted, Mister Justice remains in a class by itself: hardboiled America, sci-fi style. Here the 2030s appear as a mutated 1930s, complete with an economic catastrophe that threatens evolution itself. The Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Untouchables - they never had what Mr. Justice has going for him. Sprung from humanity's threatened altruistic genes, this masked vigilante has the ability to travel into the past, where he can witness, but not prevent, murders.
He then returns to the present, where he arranges an "eye for an eye" treatment for the slayers, including full-scale gangland rub-outs. But he can't easily dispose of one Arthur Bingle, global crime archon who has the same powers as Mr. J. and then some. Bingle feels about the human race in general what Mr. Justice feels about criminals, and he plans to thin us out and "empty the world." With the help of his powers, his syndicates of henchmen and corrupt cops, and his dreadful lady friend Godiva - she of the constrictor thighs - Bingle gets the drop on humanity. But justice is just a matter of time. Piserchia relates this furious folktale with Chandler soul, Hammett snap, and not a trace of camp.
Jim Trombetta, "The Coolest Sci-Fi," from The Catalog of Cool (1982), edited by Gene Sculatti, p. 87.
"If there's any better definition of high crimes and misdemeanors in our Constitution, than misleading or fabricating the basis for going to war, as the press has documented ad infinitum, I don't know any cause of impeachment that's worse." Who said that--John Kerry? Tom Daschle? Don't make me laugh. No, it was Ralph Nader, the man conservative Democrats love to hate (on Meet the Press). Look, you don't have to vote for him, but shouldn't we all be happy if his candidacy gives him a platform to say what mainstream pols are too gutless to say?