April 27, 2007 3:38
Discount Maxi-Post: Transformers, Second Life, Hawking, Apple, Bees
My body has been invaded by strep-bearing nanites that are sapping my ability to type coherently and without hallucinating. So I will transmit this post in compressed bullet-point form (I wanted to use the phrase "stuttered tight-point" right there, but I don't think that actually means anything outside the Culture novels of Iain Banks).
-- There's a first review of Transformers at Ain't It Cool. It may also ultimately prove to be the longest. Warning: naked display of fanboy lust. Contains the sentence, "It had a little geek chubby, I couldn't stop smiling."
-- David Kushner goes behind the scenes at Second Life. Apparently its founder, Philip Rosedale, is eccentric. I've never been much tempted by Second Life -- I tend to think of cyberspace as a way to display data, not a virtual environment -- but my sister -- under her Second Life name -- is fascinated by its potential as an artistic medium. Apparently Sun and IBM agree with her. Pretty sneaky, sis.
-- Stephen Hawking can fly, and not even in Second Life. He did 6 parabolas on the Vomit Comet, then 2 more just 'cause.
-- USA Today has a largely content-free first look at Robert Downey, Jr. as Iron Man. At least it comes with a photo.
-- I don't agree with this, even remotely, but it's interesting to hear somebody articulate challenge the critical orthodoxy and trash Apple's approach to design. Sample quote: "Basically the iPhone is a 1996 Ford Taurus — that car in which all design problems, from logo to windscreen, were solved with an Illustrator-stretched oval."
-- What's bugging the bees. It wasn't cell phones after all. Nope. Fungus.
April 26, 2007 2:49
Turn On Your Dead Televisions, It's the New William Gibson Novel
Years of being sent free books by publishers have made me something of a jaded bastard. But I uttered an involuntary 'sweet' today when I opened a package containing an early copy of Spook Country, William Gibson's new novel, which is due out August 7.
Dedicated Gibson-watchers know that he tends to stick with a mood and a setting and run with it for several books, and it seems like here he's continuing to groove on the same contemporary future-is-now! vibe that his last book Pattern Recognition had. He's also a diligent plot-recycler (doing his part to husband literature's precious sustainable resources, no doubt), and Spook Country smacks -- though not unpleasantly -- of both Pattern Recognition and its precursor, Count Zero, in its preoccupation with the search for a mysterious, reclusive artist.
Your heroine is Hollis Henry, a freelance journalist assigned by a Wired-like startup magazine called Node to write about (mysterious, reclusive) artist who creates hologram-installations of historic events on the sites where they actually happened. Gibson's books are usually about his pet topics of the moment, as much as they're about his characters, so here's a brief list of Spook Country's idees fixes: art, forgery, drugs, Manhattan, Los Angeles, large quantities of data, pirates (here I'm quoting the press release), the CIA, tramp freighters, weapons of mass destruction, war profiteers, and "vast amounts of cash leaving the country." And here's your first line:
"Rausch," said the voice in Hollis Henry's cell. "Node," it said.
Meh. But the chapter is entitled "White Lego." Nice.
April 25, 2007 5:55
Art Inspired by Video Games
Kotaku has a report from the opening of a gallery show devoted to I Am 8-Bit, a collection (and book) of art inspired by classic video games. Apparently Joust is extra-inspirational, since it's heavily represented.
On the whole the art isn't amazingly great, but it's kind of heartwarming to see video games get connected up with avant-garde visual culture, instead of being kept in the attic and fed on fishheads all the time. And there are some standout pieces: check out this gorgeous painting of a piranha plant from Super Mario Brothers. And this hella spooky portrait of an incarcerated, restrained Qbert made me feel funny.
If you think I have any idea what it means, you're reading the wrong blog. Personally I like looking at things like this. Is it just me or is the actor who plays Neville getting weirdly handsome? Move over Colin Firth! Growr.
April 25, 2007 2:30
Gliese 581c: If You Lived There You'd Be Very Heavy Now
My colleague Jeff Kluger notes that a team of European planet-hunters have found a promisingly Earth-like specimen, which they've named Gliese 581c. The money shot is as follows:
Like Earth, it orbits a comfortable distance from its sun; like Earth, it maintains a surface temperature somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Most importantly, like Earth, it could easily harbor surface water. In the biological arithmetic we know best, warmth and water often equal life.
Plus it's only 20 light years away. Eminently colonisable! "On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X," says Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University. Yeah, right, Delfosse -- X for Xavier. (What or who is a Gliese anyway?)
Apparently it huddles close to its parent star, which is a red dwarf, and it's 5 times heavier than Earth. I guess all the colonists would end up looking kinda Jinxian.
April 25, 2007 2:09
Superheroes 2007: The Paneling
Next week I'm running a panel at the Tribeca Film Festival. The topic -- I'm told, I didn't write it -- is as follows:
Here I come to save the… oh, just forget it. For a genre of entertainment originally devised with children in mind, superhero movies have found real success among bigger babies—adults, to be specific. We unleash the power of some superhero creators to explore why the vulnerable, conflicted, reluctant and more...well...human superhero is a sure-fire way to a colossal opening weekend. Featuring a sneak peek at original illustrations from the highly anticipated Amazing Spider-Man: One More Day comic book storyline.
OK, now forget about the topic. I don't even know why I posted it. Here are the actual panelists.
Zak Penn (X-Men: The Last Stand, Elektra), Andrew D. Cooke (Director: Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist) and Joe Quesada (Illustrator, Writer, EIC of Marvel), Thomas Haden Church (Spiderman 3), Kevin Smith (Clerks, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back)
Yeah, I know. Someone cooler than me should be doing this. But they're not. Because life is cruel. Cruel to others, not to me.
The only thing about moderating a panel is, you have to be the guy who talks if nobody else feels like talking. Otherwise crickets chirp and tumbleweeds blow down the aisle. So I'm preparing a list of questions for the panelists, but if you have any, feel free to post 'em in comments, and I'll ask 'em. And please come if you're in town.
April 24, 2007 11:00
Next Generation Trek Without Picard?
I guess I always did kind of wonder why Picard had a French name but an English accent. Now it can be told: they were supposed to cast a French guy, but couldn't find one with the proper chops. Roddenberry was dead set against casting Patrick Stewart at all -- thus TNG producer Robert Justman:
"We met at Gene Roddenberry's house, Patrick pulled up in his rental car and we spent about 45 minutes together, talking. We watched Patrick drive away in his rental car to go to the airport and Gene closed the door, turned around, faced me and said, and I quote, 'I won't have him.'""He wouldn't have him and he wouldn't tell me why. But I know why. I knew why. I knew that he had conceived of a Frenchman. And, you know, who was masculine, virile, and had a lot of hair. And Patrick didn't fit that at all. Patrick was not so handsome, he was distinctive, and he was quite bald. Quite bald."
Quite. There must be a bizarro alternate universe out there where Jean Reno filled the captain's chair.
It's both the 20th anniversary of TNG this year and the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. The latter is being marked by a new making-of book that I'm liking a lot. Some details from it are in this wire story. There's tales aplenty of last-minute on-set spaceship-model hacking, and some amazing early concept art, with Luke as a girl, and Han with a full beard...
April 23, 2007 12:04
New Harry Potter Trailer: You Will Lose Everything.
Far less coy than the first one. I'm not sure why this is YouTube-only and not on the official site, but it gives you a lot more of what you want: angry Harry -- usin' those Equus acting chops -- the Weasley twins on rampage, a killer giggle from Dolores Umbridge, thestrals, centaurs, Voldemort, the Ministry of Magic courtroom, the opening playground scene. Plus Ron says 'blimey.' Money.
That should tide us over till the U2-written Spider-man musical.
April 23, 2007 11:04
MC Frontalot: An Inexhaustible Nerdcore Flow
A quick note to plug nerdcore icon MC Frontalot's new album Secrets from the Future. If you require background on the whole nerdcore phenomenon, I've blogged about it here and here. Frontalot was the first artist who got me into nerdcore hip-hop, and he's fast becoming it's most visible spokesperson – cf. the upcoming documentary Nerdcore Rising, a recent Diesel Sweeties strip. Secrets from the Future is relentlessly clever and entertaining and also kind of awesomely funky. Some highlights:
-- "Livin' at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe": a chill-out groove set entirely in the world of Chris Onstad's genius webcomic Achewood. F-f-frickin' awesome.
-- "Bizarro Genius Baby": the Front begets a freakishly brilliant infant. Atrocities ensue.
-- "It Is Pitch Dark": A meditation on early text adventure games. While listening I realized I've been waiting my whole life to hear somebody rap the line, "you/are likely/to be/eaten by a grue."
-- "A Skit About Robots": Front offers to stab an automated voicemail menu program in the EPROM.
-- "I Hate Your Blog." One tries not to take these things personally.
Frontalot's currently on tour pretty much everywhere except New York City. Dang.
April 19, 2007 10:23
Rutger Hauer: An Intimate Portrait
I was tired. It was a long flight. The woman next to me was watching a romantic comedy starring Minnie Driver and David Duchovny. Plus I'd already ready the Tolkien book, and it was all I had left in my bag. This is how I came to read All Those Moments, the memoir of Rutger Hauer.
I don't recommend that you read this book. There are a lot of paragraphs that begin something like, "In Escape from Sobibor, a television movie I did in 1987, I played Sacha Pechersky..." Hey, he's a working actor. But Hauer has also done his part for the cause of nerd cinema: Blade Runner, Ladyhawke, Batman Begins, Sin City, etc.
So here you go, the fruit of a wasted transcontinental flight: the top, let's say, 8 things you never knew you didn't know about Rutger Hauer.
1. He's not German. How could you be named Rutger Hauer and not be German? Turns out he's Dutch. And for some reason I also thought he was gay, but apparently not so much.
2. At 15, not being much for the book-learning, young Rutger ran away to work on a freighter in the Dutch Merchant Navy.
3. His big break came when he was working in a Dutch regional theater company, and somebody noticed that he was really tall and incredibly good-looking and could ride a horse and cast him as a knight in a Dutch TV series directed by Paul Verhoeven
4. He did Jane Fonda workouts to get in shape to play Roy Batty in Blade Runner
5. It was supposed to turn out that Eldon Tyrell – the tycoon who owns the company that made the replicants in Blade Runner, whom Hauer/Batty kills – was himself a replicant. But that plot twist ended up getting cut, even though they'd already built an animatronic Tyrell replicant-head. Isn't that always the way.
6. Hauer barely met Harrison Ford on Blade Runner, because they have hardly any scenes together. Also, Hauer improvised the famous business at the end where he releases a dove as he dies. Except when they shot it the dove liked being in Hauer's hands so much that it didn't want to fly away. They had to fudge it in post-production.
7. Hauer doesn't buy that Deckard was a replicant: "I didn't really like it because if Deckard himself is a machine, then the whole story of a battle of wits and wills between man and machine dies for me." He does have a point.
8. In Ladyhawke – a job Hauer got at the last minute because Kurt Russell walked off the set – Matthew Broderick plays the go-between between Hauer's character and Michelle Pfeiffer's. Hauer thought maybe there should be some sexy sparks between his character and Broderick's, that Broderick should almost become a surrogate lover for him: "I was hoping for Shakespearean feel to his character, a sort of androgynous, Annie Lennox thing happening." So European! But Broderick went another way with it.
That's it. Thank you for flying American Airlines.
April 17, 2007 5:10
The Killer Nerd Meme
As a very peripheral side-note to the still-unfolding story of the Virginia Tech tragedy, I can't help keeping a weather eye out for the return of the killer nerd meme that got loose in the wake of the Columbine killings: the anti-social, trench-coated video game freak who finally snaps. So far sightings of the meme have been relatively scarce, though as my colleague at Tuned In points out, Dr. Phil evoked the specter of the violent video game on Larry King, and as Kotaku points out, amazingly, Fox News is still putting Jack Thompson on the air to talk about the same issue. Most news reports have -- in the absence of any evidence that the shooter was a gamer -- focused on his isolation and the violent fantasies he expressed in his creative writing and left it at that.
As I understand it, the jury is still out on whether there's any clinically proven link between gaming and violent behavior -- there are studies out there that claim to "prove" both sides of the argument. But honestly, writing as a parent, if a child can't tell the difference between virtual violence and actual violence, look at the child's brain chemistry, or the child's environment, or the child's parents. But to blame the games themselves is just a waste of time.
April 17, 2007 1:56
Reading the New Tolkien
Posting will be sparse for a couple of days while I deal with my responsibilities as a tech conference-goer.
In the meantime snack on my review of the "new" book by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin, stitched together by his son Christopher out of various manuscripts he left behind. I wasn't necessarily expecting to love it -- I'm more of a Narnia guy anyway -- but it's hard not to get a charge out of being back in Middle Earth, especially in the First Age, when the elves were more of a presence in the world, and everything feels a little wilder and rougher.
It's a short book -- the page count is padded out with lots of notes and charts and illustrations (by Alan Lee, nice Blakean grey-tone stuff) - and you don't get the kind of deep characterization that you see in Tolkien's longer works. It's also incredibly sad and dark: the good guys have consistently bad luck with misunderstandings and accidents, and the hero isn't like Frodo at all, he's more of a Boromir-type, proud and touchy and irritable -- he's always flying into a rage and killing somebody by accident. (I always thought of Tolkien as a sad, bookish guy, but he was sure drawn to some angry, violent protagonists.)
There were moments when I got bogged down in the minutiae of his fictional geography and made-up genealogies, which are so elaborate that they threaten to overwhelm the action in places. But then a balrog would pop up and whip somebody to death and I'd be all, right, yeah, awesome.
April 16, 2007 9:49
Now in Paper-vision: Faux-Nerd Adam Brody
In this week's Time Joel Stein profiles Adam Brody, the actor who made nerds hip on a TV show -- The O.C. -- that no actual nerd ever actually watched. We learn, among other things, that Brody isn't really all that nerdy in real life:
"I'm a fake intellectual," he says while wearing giant sunglasses and eating his first meal of the day--a cheeseburger--at 1 p.m. "I'm not that well read. Which I'm insecure about since I've gotten the [intellectual] niche." He's not even sure how he pulled off the fake-nerd scam. "Maybe the sarcasm reads a little bit as intellect, even if it's not," he says. "My best jokes are so cheap. All I do is say things sarcastically. I just say, 'Yeah. Cool.'" As he says this, I feel the confusing disappointment that I imagine young women painters feel when they find out Joan Miró is a man.
What do we call this ever-more-frequent faux-nerd posturing? Dorkface? What's next? Ally Sheedy isn't really into skinny hacker dudes? (Off topic, but War Games is so begging for a sequel. Here's my pitch: Matthew Broderick is a Paul Allen-style dot-com billionaire who hires a once-fit, now-gone-to-seed Ally Sheedy as his flinty head of PR. When the WOPR is sold as military surplus and re-purposed as the backend to Match.com, its long-dormant sentience re-awakens with disastrous -- and sexy! -- consequences...)
Further off-topic: Tuned In tripped my Firefly sensors with a mention of Nathan Fillion, who apparently is cheating on (the admittedly long-canceled) Firefly with some other show. How dare he.
April 16, 2007 9:13
Hulk; Zombies; Spidey; Madness
-- Ed Norton is Bruce Banner in the new Hulk flick. Sure, that could work.
-- Ain't It Cool has a pretty plausible-sounding early review of 28 Weeks Later, which almost sounds like it gets -- more than the original did -- what's cool about the premise. Silent empty London, a contemporary geopolitical subtext, and hot hot helicopter-on-zombie action!
-- Gluttons for spoilers can also feast on this early, probably non-fraudulent Spider-man 3 review -- apparently it's being released abroad ahead of the U.S. premiere.
And finally, I don't care if it makes sense to plug my iPod into a valve amp. Do you hear me, mom and dad? I don't care! This is Spartaaaaaaa!
April 13, 2007 12:21
Indiana Jones 4 News: The Shia-ning
It was either that subject line or 'Where's LaBeouf?' I think we'll all agree that I chose wisely.
Yes, per USA Today, Shia LaBoeuf (I will never stop spelling that wrong) is in Indy 4, alongside Ford, Cate Blanchett, Sean Connery, and (please, I hope) Karen Allen (does she really have anything better to do?). Even though he was born 5 years after the first movie came out, he seems to get the spirit of the franchise: "I can tell you I'm sort of the sidekick character, obviously. I'm sure there are a lot of laughs at my expense, and some kind of creature crawling on me." He also confirms: "It's not going to be Short Round, all grown up." Cover your heart, Indy. There's also an amusing bit about the secrecy surrounding the project:
When he met Lucas recently at Spielberg's offices on the Universal lot, LaBeouf says he brimmed with questions but hit a wall of secrecy, even about the relic Jones will be pursuing."Lucas looks at you and says simply, 'I can't tell you that,' " LaBeouf says. "Then when he thinks he is supposed to tell you something but isn't sure, he gets up and leaves the room, goes in to talk with Spielberg and comes back and says, 'Nope. Sorry.'"
This all seems like good news to me. I liked LaBeouf in Constantine. (Shut up, it had its moments. Shut up!) And what with him being in Transformers, it looks like he's going to be popping up in nerd-friendly action franchises for some time to come. I actually talked to him on the phone for a profile of Keanu Reeves a few years ago, and he was smart and funny and motor-mouthed and disarmingly honest. Guess I'm going to have to learn to spell his damn name.
April 12, 2007 2:08
The Man in the Grey Iron Suit
That subject line is supposed to be a "play" on the novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, a searing midcentury indictment of American corporate culture. I'm just clever as clever today.
Anyhoo, here's the first image to come out from the upcoming Jon Favreau/Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man movie:
Click over to Ain't It Cool to see it with the appropriate soundtrack.
I'm no Iron Man scholar, so I had to Wikipediate to find out that the grey armor was Tony Stark's first and relatively crude version of his powered suit. And this one does look suitably klugey. Wonder how RDJ's supposed to act in that thing?
April 12, 2007 12:19
So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. I wrote an obituary-slash-tribute for him here. You can almost smell the smoke rising from the ears of all the literary journalists racing to get their Vonnegut eulogies up online. Very sad, though at the same time it's hard to imagine a writer better-prepared to face death than Vonnegut.
I almost kind of forget that Vonnegut was an SF author, even though he wrote a ton of it, starting with his very first novel, Player Piano, in 1952, which was set in a high-tech future dystopia. (I always remember the scene where, after the Luddite mob has wrecked all the machines, they're all excited when they manage to get an orange-drink vending machine working again. Irony.) Then there's the time-travel of Slaughterhouse-Five, the we're-all-equal future-gone-horribly-wrong of Harrison Bergeron, and the general weirdness of Sirens of Titan and Slapstick. (I have the general impression that nobody but me likes Slapstick, but come on: the entire world is inadvertently sickened by a plague that turns out to be microminiaturized Chinese people! What more can you ask of a book?)
There was nothing "hard" about his SF, which I suppose makes him kinda less nerdy. (I mean, really, how would a race like the Tralfamadorians have evolved? They have only one hand! And one eye! And their eye is on their hand! It's like a Spore demo gone horribly wrong.) But you have to give it up for Cat's Cradle and ice-nine, a deeply disturbing idea that he thought through pretty thoroughly. And when it came time to destroy the world, by gum, Vonnegut destroyed it.
Favorite Vonnegut SF moments? Hug it out in the comments.
April 11, 2007 10:53
Sony Wants to Sell Surplus PS3 Computing Power. Who Will Say Them Nay?
What is it with Sony having good ideas lately? It's getting harder to make fun of them. Apparently they're having so much success with their Folding@Home project (which uses spare processing power on PS3's to do computation-intensive protein folding simulations for the good of mankind) that Sony is exploring the idea of selling some of that unused computing power to corporations, who in return would give users points, or sponsor downloads of games and other media, or whatever.
Am I confused, or isn't this one of those basically sound ideas that pretty much has to happen sooner or later? Australian SF writer Greg Egan's unbelievably great novel Permutation City posited a very plausible 24-hour global computing-power marketplace, where users buy the horsepower they need at rates that fluctuate according to demand. (It also posited that the universe can function as a vast computer that will run AI simulations of deceased personalities.Which could totally happen too.)
April 11, 2007 10:35
News Flash: School Principals Really Don't Get MySpace
They don't. They just really, really don't. (Both via Slashdot.)
OK, I'm not a school administrator, and it hardly needs to be said, but treating a satirical MySpace page like a seriously disruptive, threatening act is just bizarre and counter-productive. Nobody who's likely to read said MySpace page actually cares about it very much. And fundamental law of rhetorical physics on the Internet: every action demands an equal and opposite reaction. The trick is not to give in to that demand. Ignore it, and it will eventually go away. If you respond to it you lend it credence. And then it will become more powerful than you could ever imagine. The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers...I could go on.
Plus, he didn't say anything about skinner-in-a-shredder.com.
April 10, 2007 3:29
Erfworld: It's a Boopin' Good Webcomic!
It began as a side-dish, practically a condiment, to one of my favorite webcomics, The Order of the Stick. But it's become so much more. I'll admit it: I have an Erfworld thing.
The setup's like this: depressed, pudgy strategy gamer gets zapped into a fantasy world. It turns out he's actually been summoned there by a king (probably eviil) in search of the ultimate warlord to command his troops in a huge battle. It works for me as a story -- anytime anybody gets zapped into a fantasy world, that works for me -- but Erfworld also has a lot of fun tweaking the conventions of fantasy gaming. Everybody divides their time into turns. Food pops into existence at regular intervals. Everybody plans their travel around their move limitations. Everybody speaks in exaggeratedly cutesy euphemisms (dragons are "dwagons"; when our hero, Parson, tries to swear, it comes out as "boop.")
Parson is hip to all the jokes -- he even groans at the lame ones -- but it doesn't overwhelm the gravity of his plight. I swore I would never let myself get obsessed with a mere twice-a-week strip -- it updates Tuesdays and Saturdays-- but it's too late, it's happened. Go on, take another little piece of my heart, Erfworld.
Oh, and the art is really rather lovely. I've never actually seen a bunch of stuffed animals fight a bunch of giant spiders, but I'm pretty sure this is exactly what it looks like.
April 10, 2007 9:30
Webby Nominees Announced: I Don't Care and I Don't Know Why!
There was a time, in the mid-90s, when I worked in Web production, when it almost seemed like the Webbies were going to turn into something you could care about. I even went to the ceremony one year in New York City. eBay won for best auction site, but nobody from eBay was there to accept, so the guy I was standing next to bum-rushed the stage, accepted the Webby, made a profane speech, and ran away into the night. Seemed about right.
But now the idea of pretending to care about the winner of the best Pharmaceuticals site, or the best Professional Services (?) site, seems to emanate from some alternate universe so distant that even sarcasm can't get there. It's just kind of sad.
I'm way more interested in the new iRobot pool cleaning 'bot.
April 9, 2007 11:50
Patrick Rothfuss: Creature of Light, or of Darkness?
Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind is on my desk, and I have to decide whether to read the damn thing. In case the hellstorm of hype hasn't reached you, this is a highly-praised fantasy novel, Rothfuss's first and the first of a trilogy. I want it to be good. I'm also mindful that it's 661 pages long, and I don't want to die cursing the name of Patrick Rothfuss and begging the ferryman for those 36 hours of my life back. I already have to curse Robert Jordan as it is, and I don't know how many curses you get.
On the minus side: the cover is weirdly murky and ambiguous -- just blowing leaves and creepy stonework -- though at least it doesn't look like it was drawn on somebody's math notebook (damn you again Robert Jordan!) Plus anything with "wind" in the title kinda sounds like a Spinal Tap joke to me now.
On the plus side: Rothfuss has a funny blog. And on his website he's wearing a PvP "Joss Whedon Is My Master Now" t-shirt. And, well, the first 20 pages are kind of awesome. There's a nothing, throwaway exchange in the first scene, where some people are hanging out at an inn, and somebody throws out a little folk saying about tinkers, and somebody else corrects him with another version, and then the innkeeper settles the argument with his own version. Each version is plausible and thought-out in its own right. There's a richness there, a thought-through-ness, a sure touch, that you can't counterfeit. It's the kind of thing that twigs you that maybe this is the real thing.
Dammit, I may have to read the damn thing after all.
April 6, 2007 3:03
Hulk Smash! Again! Only Better This Time! Hopefully!
I had no idea they were going back to the Hulk well, for more Hulk-water (I should trademark that word now: Hulk-water). More details on the new Hulk movie are at Ain't It Cool News. Apparently they're calling it The Incredible Hulk this time, and it's a 2008 release. My God. It's as if Ang Lee's The Hulk never even happened!
Quickfire challenge: what 5 things should the new Hulk movie do differently from the old Hulk movie?
1. The Hulk should have a constant size. He shouldn't inflate and deflate like a parade balloon.
2. The movie shouldn't take itself so damn seriously. I mean, I love Ang Lee, but he shot that movie like an opera. A really long opera. The actors must understand that they are not going to get an Oscar for being in The Incredible Hulk. They shouldn't even try to get a Golden Globe.
3. Nick Nolte shouldn't randomly turn into the Absorbing Man. And I don't mean to get all crazy-go-nuts here, but maybe Nick Nolte shouldn't even be in this one.
4. If the Hulk fights more mutated hulkified dogs, maybe he should do it in the daytime when we can see what's going on.
5. This one should be Incredible. I mean it pretty much has to be with that title.
April 6, 2007 10:26
Now Available in Paper-vision: Data Addiction
Just a pro forma link to my piece in the magazine this week, which is about my/our problems dealing with addiction to information: e-mail, blogs, Twitter, texts, digital music, etc.
Left on the cutting-room floor -- for obvious reasons -- was a vivid account of my recurring e-mail dreams. Does anybody else have these? They consist of a ghostly image of my Outlook window, where I click on one disturbing, unanswerable e-mail after another...
April 5, 2007 1:32
The Top 5 All-Time Alternative Supermen
A few years ago I wrote a piece about Superman for Time in which I ruminated about whether Big Blue really had a future as a character. Maybe he's just too strong and too tough to write good plots around -- those big muscles tend to break down any nuanced or believable plot-mechanics. Maybe he's too morally good to be interesting or relatable. Maybe consumers of pop culture have just gotten too smart to care about a guy like Superman, who really has no internal and precious few external conflicts.
I don't think DC was thrilled about the piece, and to tell the truth I wasn't totally happy with it either, though I think it's basically right. But there's still a lot of great Superman writing out there at the fringes of the oeuvre: Superman's over-the-top powers and bold muscular jawline make him a great subject for post-modern alt-universe flights of fancy. The theme isn't that interesting, but the variations kick ass. Um, if you will.
I was thinking about this while I read All Star Superman on the subway this morning. (Why yes, the ladies were all over that!) So I made a list of my top 5 All-Time Alternative Supermen.
1. Red Superman. What if Superman landed, not in the wholesome bosom of Kansas, but in the cold heart of Stalin's Soviet Union? That's the premise of Red Son, and the answer is: he grows up to the perfect worker's hero, the ultimate KGB agent with super-hearing instead of wiretaps. He wears a hammer-and-sickle on his chest instead of an S and hangs out with Stalin (note that "Stalin" is just a Russian word meaning "man of steel.") If Supes has a dark side, it's as a cold authoritarian alien zealot, and Mark Millar blows out this premise all the way, no holds barred, with major-character casualties and a glimpse of the far future...
2. Dead Superman. No, not that dead Superman, this dead Superman. In 1986 supergenius Alan Moore did a death-of-Superman story called Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? It features a great cattle call of old Superman villains, and some pretty shocking violence. Plus Mr. Mxyzptlk asks this burning question: "Did you honestly believe that a 5th Dimensional sorcerer would resemble a funny little man in a derby hat?"
3. Old Superman I didn't get the point of Secret Identity at first. Then I did and really fell in love with it. It takes place in our world -- Superman is a comic book, nobody has superpowers. But there's this kid named Clark Kent who actually gets Superman's powers. What would that be like? How would it play out? They did this as a four-book mini-series, with incredibly gorgeous art and a funny, kinda lyrical, kinda wistful tone. In the end he gets old and grey...but he's still super...
4. All Star Superman. I just reread the first few issues of All Star Superman, which are out now as a hardcover collection. It's not high-concept. The writer, Grant Morrison, just seems to get what's fun about Superman: he's ridiculously powerful, and therefore he just sees and does and has lots of incredibly cool, totally bizarre stuff. Time machines, nanonauts, sun-eaters, a super-dense sphere of black kryptonite from the Underverse. Plus the creepily bandaged Unknown Superman of 4500 AD...
5. Bitter Superman. You don't really love that guy.
(Yay, 100th post.)
April 4, 2007 4:17
I Sadly Still Read Comics; Yes, I'll Vomit if I Mingle
You know, there are times when I seriously wonder whether, if I had infinite amounts of money and time, and if I were capable of dropping my literary pride for a cotton-pickin' minute, I would ever read anything besides comic books. There just aren't a lot of other media that reliably deliver that kind of mainline tasp-like pleasure.
I just got done reading Jack of Fables Vol. 1: The (Nearly) Great Escape. I've been keeping up with the Fables series--from which this is spun off--for a few years now; it's one of those series that is consistently great and always bubbling under but never gets the kind of mainstream critical hype that, say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Y: The Last Man get. (The former richly deserved, the latter...YMMV.) The premise is that all the people and creatures in nursery rhymes and fairy tales are real -- Cinderella, Little Boy Blue, Humpty Dumpty, Prince Charming, whoever you can think of. They've been exiled from their native lands and forced to live undercover in New York City and in a farm in upstate New York (for the non-humanoids who can't 'pass.')
It's not a slam-dunk premise, by any means. But what makes the series work is the loving but also very unsanitized treatment the Fables get: there's a lot of humor and a lot of blood and a lot of sex (for some reason the human fables tend to be unreasonably good-looking). Example: in one issue, set during the civil war, Jack (as in 'and the Beanstalk') successfully traps Death in a magic sack, to save a busty-but-dying southern belle he wants to seduce, thus depriving all creatures of the power to die. The land rapidly becomes overrun with gorey, disfigured, horribly mutilated people and animals begging for release. While in some ways Fables deliberately travesties fairy tales, in a lot of ways it's closer in spirit to the original Grimm-era stories than the Disneyfied, infantilized versions we generally get today: they're violent, funny, bawdy, and amoral, and at the same time weirdly wise.
If this stumbling description doesn't give you a feel for it, you can get a taste online: DC has made the first issue available as a free .pdf. (I note via Wikipedia that FAbles' creator, Bill Willingham, did some of the art for the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set. Now that's some cred right there.) (And thanks to mc chris for the subject line.)
April 4, 2007 10:28
The DRM Dilemma and Other Acronyms
This is a geek culture blog. It's specifically here for me to blow off steam when I'm sick of writing tech-biz-gadget stories. So I frequently excuse myself from weighing in on hot-button topics like DRM. I'm going to do that again by linking to this fine analysis of the Apple-EMI announcement yesterday by the competition at Newsweek.
Dropping DRM is great. I think the mere fact that Apple is coming out and demonstrating that it's not a technological issue for iTunes to sell non-DRMed music is great. The idea of linking DRM to higher-quality files -- somehow implying that having your music be DRM-free is a "perk," like higher fidelity, that you pay more for -- is gross, but I'm pretty sure this still counts as progress. I have not always been an exemplary respecter of artists' property rights in my management of my own music collection. But I mostly have been, and I don't think that makes me a hypocrite for believing that the user experience will get way better -- and the music business will grow -- when digital music distributors drop DRM.
There. All done. Back to being a dork.
April 3, 2007 11:24
Douglas Adams: The Lost Interview
From the online SF mag Darker Matter comes a little-seen interview with Douglas Adams from 1979, complete with vintage audio samples. It conjures up visions of an Edenic counter-Earth on which the Graham Chapman-Douglas Adams-scripted Ringo Starr TV special actually saw the light of day. (Or maybe it's a nightmare alternate reality that we barely escaped?) The interview also opens up a window on the weird, happenstance way that great pop culture actually gets produced:
"We made it [meaning the first Hitchhiker's Guide episode], and then that more or less coincided with the summer period at the BBC, where, in order for anything to get approved, you have to wait for people to come back from whichever beach they're lying on. So that took a long time. While I was kicking my heels, I sent in my pilot episode to the then script editor of Doctor Who, Robert Holmes, who said 'Yes, yes. Like this. Come round and see us.' So we discussed ideas for a bit, and I eventually got commissioned to write four Dr Who episodes. It took a long time to reach that decision, and then, after all this period of nothing happening, I was suddenly commissioned to write four Dr Whos and the next five Hitchhikers all at once."
I actually met Adams once. I had just started out as a fledgling journalist, after dropping out of grad school, and he was doing press for the Starship Titanic video game. He was very tall and very nice. I'm pretty sure—no, I'm very sure—that I forced on the poor man a copy of my first novel; I was a fledgling journalist and didn't realize how horribly unprofessional that was. Every time I remember this fact my brain suffers a shame-crash and I blissfully forget it again.
Update: Part 2 of the same interview.
April 2, 2007 2:00
The PG Cut of 300: We Will Hug in the Shade
Still haven't beaten that deadline. Still posting YouTube clips. FTW. Herewith the PG-recut of 300, via Penny Arcade.