Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth
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Saturday, November 1, 2008
grist: Magnetic portals connect sun and Earth
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grist: The birth of an ocean
Birth of a new ocean
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My Friend: Erin Lonergan of Lonergan Designs
For anyone interested in redecorating their home with fine plaster artistry check out my very talented and beautiful friend Erin Lonergan and her website http://www.lonergandesigns.com/
The woman's love for life and and art is contagious!
L
The woman's love for life and and art is contagious!
L
Journal: Tinker Toy Thoughts From a Buble Gum Mind
Journal: Tinker toy thoughts from a bubble gum mind couple of things: I just finished a new review about a book called Threshing the Cosmic Chaff, it is a short book about Christianity that...well, let me put it this way, think about the title and when the review is up I'll supply a link. The annoying thing is that book had completely slipped my mind and I had to scramble like mad to write the review. I had to refresh myself with parts of the New and Old Testament, familiarize myself with agricultural techniques and bone up on the Socratic Method, Dante, Barth and Aliens. Yes, it was a challenge. I also went a bit over my allotted 500 words (hopefully my editor will overlook that). I have another book review due today, fiction this time...I'll get started on it in a minute. And, I was sent a couple of graphic novels to review from Dark Asylum Press, Warlash: Dark Noir by Frank Forte and The Bomb by Steve Mannion. I'm going to combine the reviews with my opinion about The Victorian, another graphic novel, perhaps write and extended article for ForeWord. Keep your eyes open for an article by me about Web Comics in the soon to be up Web mag, Graphoscope. I sent a query to the editor and it will probably only be a matter of time before it is up and kicking. One page left of my Avatar sub sample and a tiny bit of tweaking. I'm on twitter now, so look for me if you want to know what tinker toy thoughts go through my bubble gum mind. My poetry muse has bitten me very hard. I'm not ready to share any yet. I must write a Three Bears parody for Apt. My play When the Angels Fall has been put on the back burner for a while. I'm still working on Grave Tales sub, Mid-night Snack. Short story, Until My Darkness Goes has morphed into a novel. Dabbling with a novel titled My Home Town. My novel Uncertainty of Knowing needs more work. I applied for a comic book reviewing job @ popmatters. There's more, but it all slips my mind. My roof appears to be leak free this week. In two weeks I'm having book shelves built (much needed) in my office. Wife is good, kids are great and now I must go back to work. L |
Morrsion on All Star Superman
Both Meltzer and Morrison are are fantastic. Meltzer's novels, The Book of Secrets and the Recent Book of Lies kicks ass as well as his runs on JLA. Grant Morrison needs no introduction, his work on stuff like We 3, his JLA run and X-men run, his graphic novel Arkham Asylum...literally beyond words.
L
Grant Morrison And All Star Superman
This is why All Star Superman was the best superhero book of the past few years. And why Grant Morrison is as relevant as ever.
From today at Newsarama
Grant Morrison:
A key text in all of this is Pico's 'Oration On The Dignity of Man' (15c), generally regarded as the 'manifesto' of Renaissance thought, in which Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola laid out the fundamentals of what we tend to refer to as 'Humanist' thinking.
(The 'Oratorio' also turns up in my British superhero series Zenith from 1987, which may indicate how long I've been working towards a Pico/Superman team-up!)
At its most basic, the 'Oratorio' is telling us that human beings have the unique ability, even the responsibility, to live up to their 'ideals'. It would be unusual for a dog to aspire to be a horse, a bird to bark like a dog, or a horse to want to wear a diving suit and explore the Barrier Reef, but people have a particular gift for and inclination towards imitation, mimicry and self-transformation. We fly by watching birds and then making metal carriers that can outdo birds, we travel underwater by imitating fish, we constantly look to role models and behavioral templates for guidance, even when those role models are fictional TV or, comic, novel or movie heroes, just like the soft, quick, shapeshifty little things we are. We can alter the clothes we wear, the temperature around us, and change even our own bodies, in order to colonize or occupy previously hostile environments. We are, in short, a distinctively malleable and adaptable bunch.
So, Pico is saying, if we live by imitation, does it not make sense that we might choose to imitate the angels, the gods, the very highest form of being that we can imagine ? Instead of indulging the most brutish, vicious, greedy and ignorant aspects of the human experience, we can, with a little applied effort, elevate the better part of our natures and work to express those elements through our behavior. To do so would probably make us all feel a whole lot better too. Doing good deeds and making other people happy makes you feel totally brilliant, let's face it.
So we can choose to the astronaut or the gangster. The superhero or the super villain. The angel or the devil. It's entirely up to us, particularly in the privileged West, how we choose to imagine ourselves and conduct our lives.
We live in the stories we tell ourselves. It's really simple. We can continue to tell ourselves and our children that the species we belong to is a crawling, diseased, viral cancer smear, only fit for extinction, and let's see where that leads us.
We can continue to project our self-loathing and narcissistic terror of personal mortality onto our culture, our civilization, our planet, until we wreck the promise of the world for future generations in a fit of sheer self-induced panic...
...or we can own up to the scientific fact that we are all physically connected as parts of a single giant organism, imagine better ways to live and grow...and then put them into practice. We can stop pissing about, start building starships, and get on with the business of being adults.
The 'Oratorio' is nothing less than the Shazam!, the Kimota! for Western Culture and we would do well to remember it in our currently trying times.
L
Grant Morrison And All Star Superman
This is why All Star Superman was the best superhero book of the past few years. And why Grant Morrison is as relevant as ever.
From today at Newsarama
Grant Morrison:
A key text in all of this is Pico's 'Oration On The Dignity of Man' (15c), generally regarded as the 'manifesto' of Renaissance thought, in which Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola laid out the fundamentals of what we tend to refer to as 'Humanist' thinking.
(The 'Oratorio' also turns up in my British superhero series Zenith from 1987, which may indicate how long I've been working towards a Pico/Superman team-up!)
At its most basic, the 'Oratorio' is telling us that human beings have the unique ability, even the responsibility, to live up to their 'ideals'. It would be unusual for a dog to aspire to be a horse, a bird to bark like a dog, or a horse to want to wear a diving suit and explore the Barrier Reef, but people have a particular gift for and inclination towards imitation, mimicry and self-transformation. We fly by watching birds and then making metal carriers that can outdo birds, we travel underwater by imitating fish, we constantly look to role models and behavioral templates for guidance, even when those role models are fictional TV or, comic, novel or movie heroes, just like the soft, quick, shapeshifty little things we are. We can alter the clothes we wear, the temperature around us, and change even our own bodies, in order to colonize or occupy previously hostile environments. We are, in short, a distinctively malleable and adaptable bunch.
So, Pico is saying, if we live by imitation, does it not make sense that we might choose to imitate the angels, the gods, the very highest form of being that we can imagine ? Instead of indulging the most brutish, vicious, greedy and ignorant aspects of the human experience, we can, with a little applied effort, elevate the better part of our natures and work to express those elements through our behavior. To do so would probably make us all feel a whole lot better too. Doing good deeds and making other people happy makes you feel totally brilliant, let's face it.
So we can choose to the astronaut or the gangster. The superhero or the super villain. The angel or the devil. It's entirely up to us, particularly in the privileged West, how we choose to imagine ourselves and conduct our lives.
We live in the stories we tell ourselves. It's really simple. We can continue to tell ourselves and our children that the species we belong to is a crawling, diseased, viral cancer smear, only fit for extinction, and let's see where that leads us.
We can continue to project our self-loathing and narcissistic terror of personal mortality onto our culture, our civilization, our planet, until we wreck the promise of the world for future generations in a fit of sheer self-induced panic...
...or we can own up to the scientific fact that we are all physically connected as parts of a single giant organism, imagine better ways to live and grow...and then put them into practice. We can stop pissing about, start building starships, and get on with the business of being adults.
The 'Oratorio' is nothing less than the Shazam!, the Kimota! for Western Culture and we would do well to remember it in our currently trying times.
Friday, October 24, 2008
grist, lit, scifi, women scifi authors, playwrights, wrting: Sarah Schulman
Dark Future Where Everybody
Works In Marketing
novelist and playwright Sarah Schulman is turning to science fiction
because it's the only way to capture how surreal her world has gotten.
Her next novel, Mere Future, takes place in a future New York
where everybody works in marketing. I talked to Schulman about her
novel, which comes out next year, and asked her why satire always seems
to take place five minutes into the future.
Schulman's novels include The Child, Rat Bohemia and People In Trouble, which she accused the musical Rent of
stealing scenes and incidents from. She's the co-founder of the New
York Experimental Film Festival, now known as MIXand and in its
twentyfirst year. She's produced about 15 plays, and written
extensively about the history of the AIDS crisis.
In Mere Future, everybody works for the same giant
corporation, known as the Media Hub, and the only jobs are in
marketing. "It's the only job that's left." Different divisions within
the company compete with each other, creating the illusion of a free
market. "There's an illusion of difference," she explains. "It's like
Banana Republic and the Gap being owned by the same company, but you
think that they're competitors." And a new political messiah comes
along and becomes mayor of New York. People expect massive change from
this new leader, and they get it — but it's not what they were
expecting. There's some kind of massive twist, which Schulman won't
reveal yet, which comments on the fact that change, in our current
system, is often an illusion.
I asked Schulman if her "everyone works in marketing" plot was sort of paying homage to Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and she said no, it's just a slightly enhanced view of where we are now. She hadn't read Max Barry's Jennifer Government.
Schulman adds that Mere Future isn't satire — it's
"heightened reality. There's so much lying and pretense about who we
really are and how we're living. If you remove that, and just talk
about it truthfully, it sounds like science fiction."
Thursday, October 23, 2008
musings/journal:13
I found this on Warren Ellis' web site today. I peruse it quite a bit. He always has something that really sparks my interest. I should be finishing a review that is late (as always) but I am experiencing a similar situation with my daughters, especially my 18 year old Autumn and my 11 year old Kerr. Hope, my 4 year old daughter already wants to text and email and has set herself up in my office with a play cell-phone, broken mouse and a 'keyboard' that she says she writes 'reviews, plays and script'. Autumn tried the 500 text plan with AT&T and that was a joke. She filled that up in 3 hours. Instead , I set myself up with a tethering package/family plan that allows unlimited text for the whole fam and close to unlimited tethering for my 8525 and other cool stuff only I have for my PDA. Warren's post reminds me of the uniqueness of my daughters and how much I love them.
Read and enjoy.
L
My daughter is now 13. You can tell this by the way she presents
herself for dinner at a restaurant wearing red and black striped
fingerless gloves, a black puffball skirt and tights, a t-shirt that’s
the dilute 2008 iteration of an idea Vivienne Westwood scrawled on the
back of a fag packet in 1976, and a pair of boots that appear to have
been fashioned from the hollowed-out legs of a particularly unfortunate
black bear. Also, by the way I’ve gone from being called “daddy” to
being called “shut up, Ellis.” She bitches that she can only hold
something like 500 texts (three days’ worth of use, it would seem) on
her hideous KRZR phone, and bitches that it’s “not fair” that my Nokia
has eight gigs onboard...
Read and enjoy.
L
Post #6637 by Warren Ellis on October 23rd, 2008 in brainjuice
My daughter is now 13. You can tell this by the way she presents
herself for dinner at a restaurant wearing red and black striped
fingerless gloves, a black puffball skirt and tights, a t-shirt that’s
the dilute 2008 iteration of an idea Vivienne Westwood scrawled on the
back of a fag packet in 1976, and a pair of boots that appear to have
been fashioned from the hollowed-out legs of a particularly unfortunate
black bear. Also, by the way I’ve gone from being called “daddy” to
being called “shut up, Ellis.” She bitches that she can only hold
something like 500 texts (three days’ worth of use, it would seem) on
her hideous KRZR phone, and bitches that it’s “not fair” that my Nokia
has eight gigs onboard...
I’m loving every minute of it.
Also, due to some fluke in their protection, her school’s web
connection can access this website. (Yeah. I know, right?) So, one day
soon, Lili or her friends will find this post.
Lili, you are an annoying toad with a mutant power for belching loud enough to set off car alarms in the next street.
I love you, little angel.
Her life will be HELL when they find this…
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