John A. Williams’ Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is another book I found out about from Kali Tal’s list of Militant Black Science Fiction. It’s a strange and bleak book, published in 1969, and set in a near-future 1973. An official of a “moderate” civil rights organization, frustrated at entrenched racism, goes to the Mafia to order a hit on a white cop who has killed a black teenager. From this act of revenge, things escalate into a full-scaled race war in the cities of America. The book is powerful, as a cry of frustration with no easy answers. Along the way, we get a nuanced, insightful sense of race relations and racial history in America–including a look at the position of Jews and Italians, who have only been admitted into whiteness on sufferance. Not a perfect book by any means, but a disturbing and thought-provoking one. Cops still kill black men with considerable frequency today, and nearly always get away with it. It’s happened three times in Seattle alone, in as many years. I’m not favoring an-eye-for-an-eye retribution, and the paths such vigilante action might lead us down; but after reading Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, I can’t help wondering about it just a little.
John A. Williams’ Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is another book I found out about from Kali Tal’s list of Militant Black Science Fiction. It’s a strange and bleak book, published in 1969, and set in a near-future 1973. An official of a “moderate” civil rights organization, frustrated at entrenched racism, goes to the Mafia to order a hit on a white cop who has killed a black teenager. From this act of revenge, things escalate into a full-scaled race war in the cities of America. The book is powerful, as a cry of frustration with no easy answers. Along the way, we get a nuanced, insightful sense of race relations and racial history in America–including a look at the position of Jews and Italians, who have only been admitted into whiteness on sufferance. Not a perfect book by any means, but a disturbing and thought-provoking one. Cops still kill black men with considerable frequency today, and nearly always get away with it. It’s happened three times in Seattle alone, in as many years. I’m not favoring an-eye-for-an-eye retribution, and the paths such vigilante action might lead us down; but after reading Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, I can’t help wondering about it just a little.
Mark Buchanan’s Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks is an excellent piece of science writing; it’s the best introduction I have found so far to the recent developments in network theory: discoveries about how networks are structured to permit no more than “six degrees of separation” between any point and any other point, and how “tipping points” develop, at which small changes have very large consequences. These theories are extending our understanding of how patterns work: how the same forms of emergent order can be found in ecosystems, in economies, in neural structures in the brain, and so on. The material is different in each case, but the mathematics is the same. I find these developments exciting, while at the same time I remain a bit skeptical, feeling that such results can easily be oversold….
Mark Buchanan’s Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks is an excellent piece of science writing; it’s the best introduction I have found so far to the recent developments in network theory: discoveries about how networks are structured to permit no more than “six degrees of separation” between any point and any other point, and how “tipping points” develop, at which small changes have very large consequences. These theories are extending our understanding of how patterns work: how the same forms of emergent order can be found in ecosystems, in economies, in neural structures in the brain, and so on. The material is different in each case, but the mathematics is the same. I find these developments exciting, while at the same time I remain a bit skeptical, feeling that such results can easily be oversold….
Continue reading “Nexus”
King Rat was China Mieville‘s first novel. Though it doesn’t have the scope and ambition of his subsequent books Perdido Street Station and The Scar, it’s still quite a wonderful book…
King Rat was China Mieville‘s first novel. Though it doesn’t have the scope and ambition of his subsequent books Perdido Street Station and The Scar, it’s still quite a wonderful book…
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David Cronenberg’s Spider is a strong and disturbing film. In terms of its stark emotional power, it is one of the director’s best; even though, ultimately, it is not what I have really hoped for from Cronenberg….
David Cronenberg’s Spider is a strong and disturbing film. In terms of its stark emotional power, it is one of the director’s best; even though, ultimately, it is not what I have really hoped for from Cronenberg….
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William Burroughs, from Ah Pook Is Here:
“Here lived a stupid vulgar son of a bitch who thought he could hire DEATH as a company cop.”
It would be an appropriate epigraph for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Walkowitz, or Perle, when their time comes.
William Burroughs, from Ah Pook Is Here:
“Here lived a stupid vulgar son of a bitch who thought he could hire DEATH as a company cop.”
This epigraph would make an appropriate epitaph for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Walkowitz, or Perle, when their time comes.
Xiaoshuai Wang’s Beijing Bicycle recalls in certain ways VIttorio De Sica’s neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief; but Wang’s film leaves behind the humanist pieties of the Italian film, painting a harsher picture of poverty and wealth in post-Communist China…
Xiaoshuai Wang’s Beijing Bicycle recalls in certain ways VIttorio De Sica’s neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief; but Wang’s film leaves behind the humanist pieties of the Italian film, painting a harsher picture of poverty and wealth in post-Communist China…
Continue reading “Beijing Bicycle”
What this war is really about is George W. Bush showing the world that he is the biggest, baddest gangsta of them all. The war is a message, sent to everyone on the planet, and written in Iraqui blood: “I can do whatever the fuck I want, and you are powerless to stop me”…
What this war is really about is George W. Bush showing the world that he is the biggest, baddest gangsta of them all. The war is a message, sent to everyone on the planet, and written in Iraqi blood: “I can do whatever the fuck I want, and you are powerless to stop me”…
Continue reading “The Biggest Gangsta”
Last night, I caught Da Ali G. Show on HBO. Brilliant and funny. Ali G. is the alter ego of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen; he’s the quintessential white suburban gangsta/hiphop wannabe, and he conducts talk-show interviews and performs various stunts. Mostly he does the talk-show thing, asking his guests the most inane, stupid, and off-the-wall irrelevant questions, This is comedy as real-time performance art, in the manner of Andy Kaufman; the guests are “real” people, i.e. celebrities or authorites, and their encounters with Ali G. are unscripted. I was pretty much hysterical with laughter when Ali G. interviewed C. Everett Koop, asking him importunate questions about various body parts–questions about whether the heart could be reprogrammed to have a drum ‘n’ bass beat instead of its usual one-two; or about the growth of the bones and skeletal system, which turned out to be really about having a “boner”; and as a followup to that, Ali asked Koop (doubtless thinking of lots of chintzy horror films): “I know this is something of a generalization, but why are skeletons evil?” Koop struggled throughout to maintain his dignity, though his puzzlement was obvious, as well as his increasing conviction that Ali G. was an idiot. All in all, pop culture post-ironic performance at its finest.
Last night, I caught Da Ali G. Show on HBO. Brilliant and funny. Ali G. is the alter ego of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen; he’s the quintessential white suburban gangsta/hiphop wannabe, and he conducts talk-show interviews and performs various stunts. Mostly he does the talk-show thing, asking his guests the most inane, stupid, and off-the-wall irrelevant questions, This is comedy as real-time performance art, in the manner of Andy Kaufman; the guests are “real” people, i.e. celebrities or authorites, and their encounters with Ali G. are unscripted. I was pretty much hysterical with laughter when Ali G. interviewed C. Everett Koop, asking him importunate questions about various body parts–questions about whether the heart could be reprogrammed to have a drum ‘n’ bass beat instead of its usual one-two; or about the growth of the bones and skeletal system, which turned out to be really about having a “boner”; and as a followup to that, Ali asked Koop (doubtless thinking of lots of chintzy horror films): “I know this is something of a generalization, but why are skeletons evil?” Koop struggled throughout to maintain his dignity, though his puzzlement was obvious, as well as his increasing conviction that Ali G. was an idiot. All in all, pop culture post-ironic performance at its finest.
I haven’t been watching much of it–I find it hard to take–(whereas Jacalyn has had it on all evening)–but the war coverage on CNN and the other news channels is quite bizarre…
I haven’t been watching much of it–I find it hard to take–(whereas Jacalyn has had it on all evening)–but the war coverage on CNN and the other news channels is quite bizarre. Endless shots taken from, and showing, tanks rolling across the utterly empty desert, nothing happening, nothing to see except for the occasional white flag of surrendering Iraqi soldiers (who look like they haven’t gotten a square meal, or a bath or a change of clothes, in weeks). Inane, repetitious voiceovers by the news anchors and reporters, reminding me of nothing so much as the “color commentary” in football games. This is quite different from the war-as-videogame metaphor that dominated media coverage of the first Gulf War. This time, it’s war as reality television. Only it’s not edited down the way Survivor or Anna Nicole are, where each day is compressed into seven minutes or so. Screen time equals real time in the Gulf War Show, which gives it an oddly avant-garde quality. Boredom is the sole redeeming quality of this war coverage. But I wonder what will happen when they get to the actual carnage–will it be the reality show version of Saving Private Ryan, or will it simply not be shown at all?
Josh Kornbluth‘s film (with his brother Jacob) Haiku Tunnel (2001) is basically a shaggy-dog story about the horrors of office work, told with self-reflexive wit and self-deprecating Jewish humor…
Josh Kornbluth‘s film (with his brother Jacob) Haiku Tunnel (2001) is basically a shaggy-dog story about the horrors of office work, told with self-reflexive wit and self-deprecating Jewish humor. It started out, in fact, as a comic monologue, but its translation into a movie went quite well. You have all these absurd situations, both those imposed by the nature of the workplace (a law firm) and those that result from Josh’s own out-of-control (but endearing) neuroses. (I refer to the fictional “Josh Kornbluth,” of course, not to the person of the same name who wrote, directed, and starred in the film). It’s always nice to see a low-budget, independent film like this, unpretentious but smart and on the money with what it is trying to do. Not to mention that it’s shot in San Francisco, and my old friend (from elementary school!) Joshua Raoul Brody has a small role. Extra points for including, briefly, stuff about heterosexual Jewish men’s lusting after WASP women (on the one hand) and black women (on the other). (A double subject that was treated much more extensively, but also much less interestingly, in Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights).