Posts from — March 2009

Money saving tips are very useful these days, so take a word from the pros:  when your beard gets too weird know how to mow it! This and other great advice is currently available in a series of 50 scans of Basil Wolverton’s “Culture Corner,” which appeared in Whiz Comics between 1945 - 1952.

Thanks Dinosaur Gardens, for posting this incredible series!

Also thanks to Drawn! twitter feed.

One of the great satirical classics of Science Fiction is surely “Space Merchants,” by Fred Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, which skewers the American traditions of corporate greed, deceptive advertising, and the treatment of consumers as stooges, suckers, retarded fools, and miserable cattle. The story accomplishes this in a slick, almost effortless Science Fiction setting, which is fast-paced and chock full of sadistic irony.   It’s important to remember the context of American society at the time of publication — 1953 –  when the Cold War was in full swing, and the complete subservience to the Capitalist credo was not only the mood of the times, but was enforced by psychological warfare, not the least of which were accusations, blacklists, and finally the foaming-mouthed lunacy of McCarthyism.

[Read more →]

Reading Clay Shirky’s latest thought-piece on the demise of newspapers poses for all of us the interesting question:  what sort of social / professional / technological model will we develop to replace print newspapers when they all go belly up? Shirky makes a pretty solid demonstration of the facts regarding the transition from those inky presses (thrashing out miles of newsprint every morning) to a new paradigm, but he is careful not to speculate too precisely about what form that future paradigm will take.  Indeed, the whole point he is making is that we are now living through a revolution in which print media is being overthrown.

During these last five hundred years, the cost of print production and the profits made on the distribution of printed objects was tightly bound up with dissemination of knowledge, art, technology, and of information of all kinds.  Now, with the advent of the Internet and the speedy exchange of digital objects of all kinds, the flawless reproduction of information-laden media objects is no longer bound to the burdens of physical products that must be moved through space.  The near-frictionless pathways that our digital infrastructure provides, has creatively destroyed the entire centuries-old paradigm of manufacturing, selling, and regulating the rights for commerce for media such as books, recordings, images, at least in the material manifestions that we have come to know and love.

[Read more →]

Although the armatures and servo-controlled eyeballs beneath the skin may be fascinating, Beware the Ides of March, and robot teachers with scary rubber lips!

With all the press surrounding the schoolteacher robot named Saya (developed by Hiroshi Kobayashi), you would think that the Singularity is upon us, but upon closer examination it looks like we will be loping along in the Uncanny Valley for a long time to come.    In the photo series that appeared in the Boston Globe recently, it was apparent to me that loose rubber lips do not a rose make.

[Read more →]

Sophia and I were lucky last night because our friend, MaryAnn, scored some great tickets to the Preview show  of  “Two Men of Florence,” the first play by Richard Goodwin.   We ended up in the first row center orchestra seats, actually, right in front of the author.  Thanks, MaryAnn!

It’s an intriguing play, which pits the scientific passion of Galileo against the vainglorious pursuits of Pope Urban VIII, who attempts at first to bring a “dialog” of ideas into the Church — owing to his magnanimous benificence — but later realizes that he has accidentally opened the gates of Reason which threaten the very foundations of a Church built on absolutist devotion.   The sets of the play are remarkable, including a latticework of walls full of candles, and circular center stage upon which revolve the desks, chairs, and armatures of Galileo’s inventions.  A semi-transparent curtain is occasionally whisked around this center of action, sometimes serving as a projection screen, or an effective scene changing device.  The staging and movements are delightfully paced, with nary a figure making absurd entries and exits on wires or wheeled pavilions.

The performances were excellent as well,  not only the two lead actors, but also the supporting cast.  The Pope’s friend and confident , and Galileo’s daughter, were especially standouts, in particular the moments when the daughter sings in Latin.  Jay Sanders’ Galileo is fiery and sensitive, managing to convey his love of philosophy and the natural order of things without sounding snobbish or boorish.  The rich language provided by Goodwin really shines through here, giving Sanders a line like this:

‘The moon. Full-bottomed Eve. Crafted by God as comfort to the fugitive earth. Let me see if I can peek beneath the hem of your borrowed radiance.’

[Read more →]

Despite the corny Nazi theme, I couldn’t resist this Fred Gaurdineer panel of Fraulein Halunke, the clever German Amazon!   Sort of sums up the heartless femme fatale, along with the usual dialog.  You have to wonder if there are not a few of these sadistic blonde madchen hanging around in underground bunkers out in Wyoming.

From Smash Comics, number 48, November 1943.

Another great temple visited on my first trip to Kunming, was the famous Bamboo Temple, located in the hills due West of Kunming.  The original gate ticket is shown on the right.

This temple featues some fascinating -  if bizarre - statues of the 500 Lohan (or Buddhist adepts), shown in the photo below.  These sculptures date back to the late 19th Century, and seem to ramble up and down the walls like characters in a mad cartoon.  Some have the extended legs of storks, while others reach across the room like Plastic Man.  Most of them have absurdly long eyebrows (sign of longevity and wisdom), shaved heads, and bony figures.  And all of them have amusing details in vivid color, including robes, walking sticks, beads, sandals, and sacred relics.   In one of the smaller halls there remain a few of the lohan sculptures from an earlier incarnation of the temple (which has burned down many times during the last 1,000 years).  These older lohan are much more serene and minimalist, giving us pause to wonder about the practicioners who made the long journey to those quiet hills centuries ago.  Before the temple became a carnival of goofy caricatures, those older lohan retain a deep peacefulness in their features.  Those olden times are captured in their faces:  cold stillness of the mountain slope,  fragrance of burning incense as it drifts away into towering stands of bamboo.

Watching the Republicans flail around in psychotic convulsions at the CPAC finally seemed to have convinced some Americans of what I have observed for most of my life, namely that the GOP is the party of the criminally insane.  The recent bile-spewings of Rush Limbaugh and Alan Keyes, are nothing new.  It is rather sick to watch, though, as if we are viewing the inside workings of a really lunatic fringe cult, played out live on national t.v.

There are more than a few sociological parallels to the cult that figures in the book I just finished, Imaginary Friends (1967), by Alison Lurie.

[Read more →]

In the post-Hello Kitty Universe, the bizarre blank-faced character known as Tu Siji (Rabbit Siji) is both ubiquitous and actually making money.   Creator Wang Maomao said she couldn’t believe that her random doodles over three years turned into a marketing favorite, earning her more than 100,000 Yuan per year (US $13,000).   Not everyone can be so lucky, but it’s amusing to watch an interview with twenty year old Wang Maomao, recently featured on Zhongtian News Network.

Philip Jose Farmer, one of the great SF minds of our times, passed away in his Peoria, Illinois home.   The tributes and obits are flowing in from all corners of society.   SF Site has posted a great 1975 interview conducted in Minneaopolis by Dave Truesdale, (editor of Tangent fanzine), which primarily deals with the identity of Kilgore Trout.

[Read more →]

From a series of socially provocative cartoons by Tom Gauld, it was really hard to choose one to represent the lot.  They remind me vaguely of Ron Cobb (who was incidentally the author of the very first poltical cartoon book that I bought, Raw Sewage), except that Gauld’s cartoons  have a more distant, metaphorical humor.   I found the image above,  “evolution of the poetry receptacle,” to be irresistable.   With a few simple lines, Gauld has captured our trajectory perfectly:  tablet > scroll > bound volume > chapbook > laptop > potato viewer > potato mutant > wireframe.   Presumably when we get beyond the wireframe of the poem, we can just zap consciousness around by telepathy… either that or we will be eating termites out of dust-heaps, or both probably.