Data mining. Loyalty cards. Manipulation. Statistics. It all sounds kind of sinister, doesn’t it? But as Baxter demonstrates in this engaging little book, there’s an up-side to all of these trends as well. We can trade privacy for first-class health-monitoring technology in the home, a magic carpet that gauges our neurological health via its measurement of our footsteps, nanites that read our blood chemistry and report it to our physicians, etc. And we’ll never miss a deal on our favorite flavor of humus at the supermarket again, if we scan our loyalty cards into the reader on our “smart” cart, or even just have it in our pockets when we enter the store.

Yes, Baxter says, it is a little creepy that so much about us can and will be known. But really, why all the secrecy anyway?

Kidding, of course. This book also scared me a little. But it also demonstrated a certain inevitability to it all and suggested that it won’t all be so bad. After all, several of the “Numerati” he profiles have become themselves stellar privacy advocates, and who better to concern themselves with abuses of technology and knowledge than those who are best at developing and manipulating it?

In another one of those weird juxtapositions, I had just gotten into the Rumania chapters of Robert D. Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts when this film arrived in my mailbox courtesy of Netflix. Rumania, Rumania, Rumania! Look at my birthmark!

This film is a blast, very quirky and amusing and at times just a little poignant with shades of City of Lost Children as well as all those wild German expressionist silent films it draws on as inspiration.

I would LOVE to have gone to one of the live performances and seen the floor show, as it were. The DVD gives a flavor in the extras, but I’m sure the live stuff was beyond compare.

As it is, this is a good time on DVD!

It’s not TOO too often that I just hear a song on the radio and fixate on a band like I’ve done with these guys. My local public radio station was giving away a few of these CDs as thank you gifts for the pledge drive and played a song or two as enticements and I remember thinking, crap, too bad I pledged already, this would be way cooler than a tote bag…

Then, fatefully, I thought hey, iTunes.

A day or two later (I’m still on dial-up) and it’s funny but I no longer know which songs they played on the radio that morning! I love them all and can’t stop playing them… skip past songs I’ve loved deeply all my life on the old Shuffle while I’m out and about chasing a Fleet fix.

The harmonies, the lovely, simple arrangements, the spare and elegant poetry of the lyrics, I like it all. They could fit in easily onto the soundtrack for “O Brother Where Art Thou” in that at times they have a very southern-hymn sound and at other times I think my mother, a 60s folkie of the first water, needs to hear them, too.

OK, in all honesty I’m neither an Oliver Stone fan nor a fan of our current administration, so I approached this movie with some trepidation but still some hope because, well, I wanted to be pleased, was willing to be pleased.

About 2/3 of the way through, though, I gave up and just waited for the end (I don’t walk out of movies unless they’re truly horrible, like Boxing Helena horrible). Oliver Stone is another director who’s bought into his own hype and dragged a lot of quality talent into the muck with him. Nothing but caricature (why bother getting an actress to play Condoleeza when the role as written and realized could have been played by a trained bird?) and slapdash and stock footage edited in to beef up poor storytelling (though possibly it’s suffering, this film, from contrast with the near-genius editing of Religulous, which I took in last Monday).

This is a horrible story of a bad and embarrassing period in our history that isn’t quite over yet, but it’s still an important story that needs better treatment.

I work as a public safety dispatcher in a region of the country often cited in this book and so reading it was a singular experience. I expected to be a choir member being preached to - in my workplace the worst insult one co-worker can throw at another is to call her a “motorist” - and this expectation was met, but only sort of.

I really kind of want everyone who drives to read this book just to remind him of how limited our understanding of what’s going on around us from minute to minute is in general, as well as when driving a car. We have blind spots both objectively in terms of visual obstructions and the built-in limitations of these wet gooey cameras we call our eyes AND in terms of how we perceive ourselves, as “above average drivers” and “not as drunk as that guy down the bar” and “duty-bound to report that truck driver who flipped us off when we cut in front of him on an icy two-lane”...

But lest I rant, lest I rant… this is a fine and entertaining read even for a professional traffic crank like me. Vanderbilt does a great job of conveying his counter-intuitive surprises, that roundabouts are safer than grid-based intersections, that it really is better to “steer with the pedals” when you’re in a skid, that bicycle riders really aren’t safer using the sidewalk instead of the street. I’m guilty of that last one, just last night. Oops!

We’re hearing a lot about moral hazards lately in terms of loans and finance. But there are worse ones out there, like the illusion of safety in a car: safety technology, safer cars, airbags, traffic lights, all subtly seem to urge us to take MORE risks.

Arm yourselves against all that and read this book!!!!!

So.

I am obviously in mid-plunge into Gene Wolfe’s astonishing “Solar Cycle” a dodecology (thank goodness there are 12 books; I’m having trouble coming up with the proper term for a series of 11) of mind-boggling proportions not just in terms of length but also in terms of wealth of ideas, breadth of narrative scope, variety of characters and everything else one reads good fiction for. It’s staggering. If you and I were having a conversation about it in a diner, that scene would be just like the scene in the Linklater film of “A Scanner Darkly” in which Robert Downey Jr. as Barris tries but fails to verbalize his feelings about Substance D and finally just starts making gestures and noises. “It’s awe-inspiring stuff.”

It’s also really, really hard to talk about without engaging in spoilage. But I will try.

Where New Sun had a vaguely menacing but still magnetic protagonist (I’m talking about Severian—there’s lots of theories out there, though, that maintain he’s not the real protagonist but I’m not going to engage in that level of theorizing here) here we have a much more conventionally engaging one in the person of Silk, a humbler and more conventionally good person who spends most of the Long Sun’s four books very earnestly questioning his motives and his mission, engaging in a constant self-audit that some may find tiresome but is there for very good reasons as he is flung into a cesspool of crime and politics that perfectly mirrors the state of things on Urth at the time the self-contained world that is the Whorl broke off from its parent culture. See, I’m already being annoyingly circumspect trying to avoid spoilers…

...Which brings me to what is most troublesome and yet also amazing about this whole project of Wolfe’s: new heights of reader annoyance are in store. While the vocabulary is nowhere near as complex and allusive as New Sun’s, the narrative is still quite Byzantine, with all of Wolfe’s usual tricks of misdirection, narrative lacunae and this time an unreliable narrator whose identity is not even revealed unless and until the reader decides to move on the the three-volume Book of the Short Sun! And even then… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Is this whole cycle worth reading? Having finished the four volumes of Long Sun and just getting started on Short Sun I’m obviously going to say yes, else I wouldn’t still be slogging through it (really, no matter what kind of completist compulsion you suffer, this will defeat it if you’re not already enjoying it). The attentive reader is completely immersed in not just one but a whole variety of invented worlds and cultures, engaged by the stories and stakes of a vast number of believable and fascinating characters. There is a lot that will play mercelessly on the emotions even as one desperately pages back wondering if you managed somehow to skip an important action scene (Wolfe is famous for leaving stuff like that out—he’s more interested in consequences than in descriptions of fights or flights). A lot of big ideas. A lot of longing.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when I get to the end of Short Sun. But it will probably be time for NaNoWriMo by then. And I’ll be even more intimidated than usual after experiencing this example of what novels can still do.

(Obviously this review should stand as one of all four books: Nightside of the Long Sun, Lake of the Long Sun, Calde of the Long Sun and Exodus from the Long Sun)

Just finished the first issue and I’m digging it. Radical Comics in general are producing some high-quality books and this is no exception. This is a nice, Blade-Runner-flavored blend with a dash of 1984/Orwell and maybe a little Luc Besson a la Fifth Element. A promising start!

This one gets a worth consuming for reasons that have nothing to do with the narrative or acting. You’ve seen the story played out a million times with more or less appealing actors and its inherent cliches abound (there’s even a random person on the subway randomly giving flowers to the pretty sad girl) and it’s all pretty dull…

But…but…but….!!!

The real star of this film is Los Angeles and its architecture. I didn’t care that the lead characters bored me to tears or that their story was slightly nauseating because it unfolded on the hoof, as it were, all their conversations and dumb little revelations and self pity unfolding in front of some really great shots of every style of skyscraper, apartment complex, government building, plaza and hotel from almost every period, all beautifully shot in black and white by a cinematographer with a real eye for that sort of thing—halfway through the film and I completely forgave him for the hideous b&w bacon frying shot (gross!) and all the pore-inspecting close-ups of the two lead actors. Zoom back camera, that city has never looked so glorious!

When I first heard there was a spinoff of the modern Doctor Who that would deal totally with the earthside efforts of Torchwood I was kind of thrilled. It had a whiff of romance, an organization founded by Queen Victoria for the purpose of keeping the Doctor and his ilk out of Britain’s hair. They had grown, it appeared, into a huge clandestine THING that had developed weapons capable of blowing alien invasion forces completely out of the sky… and I dug the idea of an agency that was keeping itself secret but not trying, really, to keep the existence of aliens or time travel or any of that lot secret because in the Whoniverse of these new series, that cat is pretty well out of the bag and it’s a big, big kitty. OK, I said, bring it on!

Then I found out it’s basically a vehicle, this show, for the ridiculous John Barrowman and the ridiculous Captain Jack. And a lot of my enthusiasm went away.

I understand the BBC operates basically on shoestring budgets and extremely limited resources—that’s part of what made the original Doctor Who, wobbly sets and all, so glorious, that they still thought big and did their best to span galaxies and tell big, big stories on a few sound stages and thinly disguised English locations. But in this show they’ve let that narrow their field down way too much. No shadowy history of Torchwood through time (we still have its founding by Queen Victoria on Doctor Who and then its sudden modern appearance as a colossus with nothing in between as its sole backstory) or stories about how maybe they’ve helped or hindered the Doctor in his past efforts on eath’s behalf… just this secret base in Cardiff that is just a high tech clubhouse for some pretty dull characters.

I don’t find much in the storylines to shout about either. Sex monster, check. Wistful time travel storylines, check. Devil-slaying climax at season’s end, check. Yawn, check.

Really, the only thing it’s shown me to spark any interest in renting the second season from Netflix is the villain-figure Bilis, whom they defeated but made a point of not killing and he’s kind of cool in a Lovecraft sort of way… so I’ll at least give an evening or two to the second season via Netflix.

But really, if you have anything better to do (I should have cleaned my kitchen and gotten my first batch of vegetable stock made for the fall soup season) you should do it.

Had to get that little South Parkism out of my system. It emerged unbidden from my lips right after the scene when the Chinese monk tells the mandarin not to buy that particular slave because of what the monk could see in their future…

But really, that’s the only laugh in a pretty grim and glorious picture. The soundtrack alone - full of fantastic throat-singing and that steppes-version of a proto-guitar whose name I forget but is something like the igyl (maybe I’ll look it up later and edit this but it’s past my bedtime) - kept me very excited and involved in the action and the story.

My film companion complained of some lacunae that he ascribed to continuity problems but they seemed to me to pretty much correspond to holes in the actual received history/legend and didn’t bother me at all. In fact, it added greatly to that larger than life feel NOT to have seen how Temujin escaped from the slave collar as a boy or escaped the ice hole; gave it a nice, mysterious, quasi-mystical quality that I quite liked, and prefer to some halfwit’s version of how it might have happened.

And Borte needs a place in any canon of ass-kicking heroines. The actress who played her did it exactly right: she didn’t ever shriek or in any way act “fierce”, just placidly presented her husband with the necessary faits accompli: the rapist with the slit throat, the key to the jail, whatever was needed, with no carping about how she did it or what she endured. Wow.

The battle scenes, too, were pretty fantastic, on a Bondarchukian scale, realistic without being overly gory (you may complain that they liked their blood spatter effect a whole lot, but they did resist almost always the temptation to linger on the actual slashes and impalings that made the blood spatter the way certain other crews [300, anyone?] did).

All in all, I think I’ll have to get this on DVD to go alongside the Branagh Henry V and the Bondarchuk War and Peace and yes, 300 as great war films with that something extra.