View current page
...more recent posts
Sometime in the '80s it became the mantra that capitalism wasn't the evil thing hippies said it was, that it was the best bad system we had, and so on. I never really bought the program, though. While to some extent it mediates supply and demand, greed and altruism, too much of it is still predicated on waste, and a bogus sense of competition.
Take science fiction books, just as an example. (Or CDs, clothes, art sold in galleries...) Every year there is a crop of "new, hot" titles. Publicists tout the authors as geniuses, young turks who rock our world like it's never been rocked. Yet a book has one shot at prime rack space. If it doesn't sell, it's yanked and becomes landfill, and the hot author joins the thousands of has-beens who had their moment and failed. But what if the book had a crappy cover? What if an idea that didn't resonate this year rang like a gong the next? Too bad, the system must have winners and losers.
Two authors I'm interested in, Doris Piserchia and A. A. Attanasio, both had multi-book contracts with major houses. Piserchia never really rose above the B list of genre writers, her quirky brilliance notwithstanding, but Attanasio was hailed by the LA Times in the '80s as a "towering talent" and he got the full panoply of hype for his ambitious first book, Radix. (Which I am re-reading with rubber-jawed amazement. What a writer, what language, what a sustained high pitch of inventiveness.)
Try finding either on bookstore shelves now. They've been "dropped," the way artists get dropped from galleries and musicians from labels. The shelves are full of newer, presumably more towering talents, and to find the parapets of a few years ago you have to wade into, if not actual landfills, the moldy scrap heap of used booksellers.
You could say, "Ah, that's the way of the world," or as a Republican would say, "Life's tough." I say our way of doing things is suspect. The internet is the first thing that's given me hope that eventually all these novelty-obsessed distributors and gatekeepers will themselves soon be out of jobs, and that independent systems will emerge (such as small, print-on-demand publishers) that allow all titles to be continuously "in print" and all good authors to be found, vetted, and nurtured by their true audiences.
A higher-res version of this GIF is here.
And Thor Johnson takes the molecular blossoming further into hyperspace here.
I'm thinking this piece is in the endgame phase but who knows, I could get mad and attack it again. My plan was to keep filling up the page but I'm kind of liking this double inverted tornado thing. Just saw the movie Twister again (one of my favorites) and I really like the shots at the end where they finally get data from Dorothy going up the F-5 funnel.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
go Paul go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, November 12, 2005A Kid's Review
I loved Paul Mccartney since 2004.
I love this cd my forite songs are: Too much rain, How kind of you, English tea and Jenny Wren
Was this review helpful to you?
Chris Ashley, Untitled, 2005, HTML, 420 x 360 pixels
Another nice one from Ashley, whose abstract html paintings make browsers all over the world burn with a hard, gem-like flame.
Interview with Sam Hamm, who wrote the screenplay for Homecoming, Joe Dante's Showtime antiwar zombie movie. Hamm was a year ahead of me at the University of Virginia, making waves even then as a student film critic and festival organizer. His program of Sam Fuller and Don Siegel films, called Shit Fest, had a flyer that got censored by the University--they made him black in the capital "I" so it read SHOT FEST. He got famous with the script for the Tim Burton Batman, and I'm a fan of his Monkeybone (directed by Burton protege Henry Selick), an amusing sleeper* film that happened to be a big critical and box office flop. I don't have Showtime so missed Homecoming, with its dead Iraq war vets rising from the grave to vote against the Republicans, but it's great to hear films like that can get made and distributed in this age of pro-authoritarian media. I like this comment of Hamm's from the interview:
The moment you attempt to address right-wing punditry, you are in a realm beyond parody. How do you top the vaudeville duo of Falwell & Robertson, announcing that 9/11 was God’s retribution for rampant homosexuality? How do you top that necrotic turd Bill O’Reilly, offering Coit Tower in San Francisco to Al Qaeda? A couple of decades ago you would’ve paid fifty cents to see these circus freaks in a tent, with the bearded lady and the dog-faced boy and the India rubber man. Now they’re part of our national political discourse.*heh heh--it's about a cartoonist plagued with sleep disorders.