sunday reading
it is sunday. it is beautiful here in new york. so many things to do, so many clashing impulses, so many projects awaiting attention… i am having a hard time focusing and a harder time finding anything interesting to share with you, so i have decided to offer up a big heaping pile of writings for you to peruse. i don’t know how many sci-fi readers we have among us here, but i have been enjoying the genre thoroughly of late, coalescent, illium, giles goat-boy… so with that bias in mind here is great big bunch of sunday reading for you in all shapes and sizes.
dradin, in love & in the hours after death by jeff vandermeer
being an account of the life and death of the emperor heliogabolus by neil gaiman
the private life of genghis khan by douglas adams
jury service by charles stross & cory doctorow
the principa discordia by robert anton wilson
breakfast in the ruins by michael moorcock
the braille encyclopedia by grant morrison
the seventh voyage & automathew’s friend by stanislaw lem
the scabs progress by paul di filippo and bruce sterling
under hill by gene wolfe
brave new world by aldous huxley
consider her ways by john wyndham
the horla by guy de maupassant
how beautiful with banners by james blish
good news & the gravity mine by stephen baxter
creatures that once were by maxim gorky
a history of the twentieth century with illustrations by kim stanley robinson
the pope of the chimps by robert silverberg
the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde
high weir & corona by samuel delaney
diaspora by robert egan
the seasons of ansarac by ursula k. le guin
the other world or the society and government of the moon by cyrano de bergerac
down and out in the magic kingdom & eastern standard tribe full novels, or 0wnz0red novella, by cory doctorow
breathmoss by ian r. macleod
he built a crooked house by robert a. heinlein
so there you are. enough to keep me off the entertaining hook for a good long while i’d think. i haven’t read all of these by any stretch of the imagination, but what the hell. enjoy.
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the cat with hands
a short, strange movie for your viewing pleasure.
miss whitey in little africa
was checking out millionare playboy today and came across their posting of a comic from nineteen seventy, called superman’s girlfriend lois lane. this particular issue… well, no sense in explaining, just see for yourself.
urban archeology
walking the streets in new york its sometimes hard to believe there are any spaces not crammed full of sweaty people, but there are. in amongst the endlessly growing, shifting, towering structures of any city are hidden places. places boarded over, places burnt out, places sold and locked up for 50 years. there are abandoned hospitals, sanitariums, factories, ship yards, hotels… a quick search of the internet turns up the web sites of folks devoted to finding, exploring, and documenting these forgotten places. here are some.
these range from curious, thrill seeking photographers, to extreme urban explorer groups. many are new york or tri-state area specific and anyone who lives in new york will be sure to find some fascinating stuff here (the amount of off limits spaces in the city is staggering). at very least there are some really cool images to peruse. take your time, enjoy.
1) jinx magazine for urban explorers.
2) infiltration. offers not only lots of historical info on sites but also tips and tricks on how to join the ranks.
3) ltv squad. agro group of urban explorers in action since the 70’s. (full list of inspected locations)
4) dark passage. “a new york based organization providing blind archeologists with quality flashlights.”
5) urban lens. “unbounded enthusiasm for abandonment.”
6) modern ruins.
7) the urban exploration resource. thousands of images and resources for the urban explorers community.
8) under new york.com.
9) under city.org. “a guerilla historian in gotham.”
10) x-nyc.
11) expedition nyc.
if you find yourself inspired and want to go out there and get dirty, here is a good place to scope out possible territory:
national registry of historic places which are vacant or not in use.
and just for good measure check out this japanese page with some fantastic photos kobayashi, or the beautiful industrial shots at this dutch site. enjoy.
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reminder to you numbskulls out there
IT’S ONLY A FUCKING MOVIE! ok? the passion is a MOVIE, directed by the guy who starred in mad max. alright? yesterday the coming onslaught of “the passion” was front page news in both the post and the daily news. today, opening day, it’s news still. people are all worked up, pro, opposed, too violent, beautiful, “it made me cry, i’ll never be the same” blah blah blah. i’ll say it one last time for those of you whose heads are so far up your asses you didn’t hear: IT’S A MOVIE. maybe a decent one, maybe not, but one day it will be relegated to the same sorry fate as all others. one day it will be a $9 super saver dvd filed somewhere between paint your wagon and pee wee’s big adventure. one day it will be edited to fit into a u.p.n. time slot and crammed unceremoniously between commercials for tampons, jock-itch cream, and fried chicken. you may not see the possible folly in naming another human as your god, or rigidly following and worshiping a book, but surely you know what a movie is. right?
quasars, black holes, and telescopic clouds of dust, oh my!
crazy article at astrobiology magazine about using a cloud of space gas as a lens for what amounts to a natural telescope fifty light-years long, and using that telescope to peer into a black hole four billion light-years from earth. oh yeah, and there is a quasar mixed up in it all for good measure. evidently it will be the most powerful telescope ever gazed through. to quote: “the new technique promises researchers the ability to resolve details about 10 microarcseconds across - equivalent to seeing a sugar cube on the moon, from earth. neat-o.
10 years gone
10 years ago this week, the 26th to be exact, bill hicks, secular saint, verbal destroyer of the devil’s minions here on earth, died of pancreatic cancer. a bunch of articles are popping up, looking into the man’s legacy and questioning why he has grown more and more popular each passing year. i for one wish he were still around. he would have been able to make the current state of affairs in this country funny. in any case here are two decent articles: the guardian and the bbc. to enjoy some of his material check these two previous posts: 1, and 2.
hopeless or hopeful?
should we be optimistic about americas chances for a regime change in the coming election. good article at alternet about just that question.
poor man’s time travel
there is a new show currently on view at the museum of the city of new york. it offers views from the many different permutations of new york now lost to us. the new york we’ve heard about but missed by decades and the new york we just barely caught a glimpse of before it disappeared. some great work here from the magnum photographers. one of my favorites is bruce davidson who’s series subway rocks me like a hurricane. his east 100th street work aint too shabby either. if you can’t make it to the show at least check out these 17 pages from the accompanying book. enjoy.
hey, you never know
a short history of the biggest carrot at the end of the longest stick. with shiny pictures here and here.
piiiigs iiiin spaaaace
when bush announced his grand plans for the future of the space program many people took it with an implied nudge-nudge wink-wink. after all the plans were impossibly expensive, and on the whole (moon-base-this and men-on-mars-that) bordered on downright wrongheaded, especially when the plans came at the cost of losing important scientific programs, like hubble for example. savvy onlookers saw a transparent campaign ploy to bolster gwb’s heavily tarnished image. even more savvy onlookers, looking at the money involved, wondered what the real agenda would be.
well now with the release of the “u.s. air force transformation flight plan” we no longer have to wonder. aside from the obviously misguided attempt to regain some of the rhetorical “uniter not divider” steam that bush snuck into the white house on, it’s clear that the administrations interest in space is not just smoke an mirrors, it’s also earth and enemy satellite targeting lasers. in short, and who can possibly even feign surprise, it’s about the militarizing of space.
what strikes me about this commanders of the sky / rulers of the stars ambition is how it reflects on humanity in general. we are so bamboozled by our own vision of ourselves, about our great progress and our enlightenment. we look backward at history, and sideways at cultures that seem torn from history with incredible smugness. we look and we spit out our list of adjectives: ignorant, foolish, savage, uncivilized, superstitious, intolerant, barbaric. we look at ourselves and all our great advancements, our medicine, our technology, our science, our higher standard of living, our longer life spans and we feel impossibly superior to those who came before. we look backward as if looking at an extinct species who we can’t even begin relate with. “how could they? can you believe it? it’s incredible! what were they thinking? what horrors!” and yet what is the militarizing of space? it is a continuation of the sharpened stones, the spears, the long boats, the castles, the catapults, the battlements, the trenches, the ovens, the napalm. we think we have come so far, that we have somehow raised ourselves above our brutal, petty, posturing, dogmatic, short sighted, power crazed predecessors. it seems to me we have not changed all that much.
i wonder whether we will ever get to the next phase? the next step? whether humanity will ever really get somewhere or whether we will always be the same, just with new gadgets, new dogmas, and new disputes? i wonder whether we will ever find a purpose as a species? i wonder whether we will evolve into something different and better or whether every generation will have the same exact experience until the end, when the sun grows to engulf us, or the whatever unknown cataclysm hits? i wonder whether we will ever get off this planet for a reason other than profit or supremacy? i hope so, but it might be a bit harder to traverse an exosphere already crowded with death rays.
anyhow, enough space opera. while we wait for the battlestars to become fully operational let’s tap our toes to the beautiful music that is the sound of progress! so catchy!
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this months champion award
goes to: kazuma kamura. his story begins like this, “as a 14-year-old boy he left his parents and seven brothers and sisters to live with his aunt, but he lost his bearings in the mountains of rural japan. instead of returning home, however, he decided to stay on in the forest, living there for 43 years.” i love this story. how many times have i wished i could just walk off and live in the forest for 43 years? icing on the cake which makes this story perfect? after being arrested, taken in, and given a job, what did the mountain man do with his first paycheck? why buy a television of course.
beating severe drug addiction with, what else? a hallucinogen
to be filed under the vast category of things humanity once knew but, for lack of profit margin, has forgotten comes ibogaine, a mild hallucinogen derived from the root of a shrub found in west africa, used for centuries by the people of gabon for medicinal purposes and in tribal initiation ceremonies of the bwiti religion. because of it’s origins it could be alternately filed under, naturally occurring drugs, not synthesized by the pharmaceutical industry, and thus highly illegal. according to one story it was “popular on the streets of new york and san francisco” before it was classified as having no medical benefit in 1970. i’m no terence mckenna, but i’ve never heard of it. anyhow it is touted by at least one doctor and a whole slew of addicts as miraculous, so if your sweating, freezing, wracked with spasms, and feel like your “spine is being crushed by a vise”, you might want to check out this site.
the real world
an italian photojournalist by the name of A. Raffaele Ciriello, who had covered just about every major conflict of the last ten years was killed in 2002. this site collects nearly his entire body of work, including photos and video. powerful, though some of it is not for the faint of heart.
big this and big that
if the number “w” is valued at below -1 then the phantom force of dark energy will result in the tearing apart of galaxies and the dissolution of atoms, meaning, of course, the extremely violent destruction of the entire universe. sound like science fiction? well, technically it’s not, even though it is science, and is most certainly not fact. it is yet another theory with the comically insufficient word BIG in it. the big rip.
Searching 3,307,998,701 web pages
libraries, google, the web as information wasteland, intelligent agents, semantics, the future. interesting article about all of the above.
addicted to love serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and endogenous opioids
ah love. the poets and philosophers have wrestled with its shape and effects for time immemorial. emerson, ovid, shakespeare, st. augustine, byron, tennyson, wilde, danielle steele… all have looked deeply within themselves and lucidly at those beside them, coming forth with apt metaphors and pentameter framed pearls of wisdom, but alas, they did not have magnetic resonance scanners and gene therapy so their conclusions must be moot. right?
well, as has been the case for years now, the scientists who poke about in the brain and the dna of small furry creatures have collected data which is supposed to add the the sum of human self knowledge, and help us grasp the mysterious nature of our emotions. in this case playing lab coated god with voles, rats, and monkeys (who tremble before their great power) has supposedly shed some clean clinical light on the mechanisms of love, romance, lust, etc. the good news: these emotions do evidently exist. (thank you scientists!) the bad news: they are the addictions in drug crazed brains forever seeking to keep appropriate receptors awash in a tide of the chemical “good shit”. ok, maybe i overstate a touch. granted.
the comparisons these folks come up with are decidedly less enchanting than those of the non-scientists who tread this ground before them. for example: “parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. so the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke.” hmmm, charming, just rolls off the tongue. or this beautiful passage: “the data suggests that the actual behavioral patterns of those in love, such as attempting to evoke reciprocal responses in one’s loved one, resemble obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).” ahhh, so touching.
as interesting as the findings are, as helpful as they may be for those with debilitating disorders, as ugly as the implications for a new slew of pharmaceuticals down the line, i would almost rather not know the specifics. knowing that these are the mechanisms of love and lust does not change the reality of the experience, or help me in my dealings with them. the last thing i need is to look at my girlfriend when i’m kissing her and think about the chemicals that are responsible for my feelings, i’d rather go on thinking she alone is responsible, and that love is something more than chemistry, even if i know it’s just bull headed romanticism or bull shit. it’s like reading existentialism, your life may have no meaning or purpose other than the one you define for yourself, but does knowing that actually help you define the meaning and purpose? or does that knowledge just discourage you? make it even easier to just say, “aw fuck it.” guess it depends on what kind of person you are. in any case, i think i prefer the inexact, shadowy, nuanced examinations of love and desire that art offers. they are way more fun. you can already get your hard-ons and babies through the miracle of science, let me keep my joys and heartbreaks mysterious.
anyhow here is the article which lays it all out for you, you freakish, sweaty palmed, chemically dependent, beady-eyed addict. it’s pretty interesting.
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