http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Tue, 21 Oct 2003 00:12:36 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/21/001236.php Kate SherrodOK, television is/was good for something after all. Speaking from my vast experience of a whopping five days as a substitute teacher in good old Carbon County School District No. 2, I see one glaring deficit in the way this next generation of children is being raised. OK, generation check here. Do you know the preamble of the United States Constitution by heart, but only if you're allowed to hum it first? Does your ass shake in the chair whenever you count by fives? Are the Louisiana Purchase and the phrase "elbow room" inextricably linked in your mind? Have you been to Conjunction Junction, and do you know its function? (Hookin' up words and phrases and clauses) Sure, it's a deeply weird way of knowing things, but honestly, how much worse is it than when George Orwell was made to remember the phrase "A black negress was my aunt: there's her house behind the barn" as a mnemonic device for recalling, in chronological order, the names of all of the battles in the War of the Roses? At least our way has rhythm. And it's freakin' easy. And if one has a modicum of self-control, our way can be employed fairly surreptitiously, a whisper, a hiss, a hum-along in the head... Who needs to know that through one's head is running Let's go up to the mountains/OR down to the sea/You should always say thank you/OR at least say pleeeeeease So imagine my empathetic agony as I'm filling in for the (also, mysteriously, Gen X) guy who is trying to teach a small passel of fourth graders how to do long division, and these poor kids are actually struggling to remember what three times seven is without the benefit of bell-bottomed cartoon groovesters shuckin' and jivin' and saying "21"! My friends and relatives out there in DVD-infested civilization tell me that all of Schoolhouse Rock is available on that most cherished of new entertainment formats, and even in my college days it was a rare afternoon indeed when one could pass by the ivy-covered dorms at Beaudacious Bard College without hearing the faint but compelling strains of "Hey Little Twelve-Toes" or "Interplanet Janet" or "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here" to say nothing of perhaps the one SR that everyone knows (thanks to the Simpsons) "I'm Just a Bill" blasting from some pothead's overpriced stereo system - the songs, minus the cartoons, have been available on good old cassette and CD since at least the late 1980s. So there's really no excuse for the fact that my little niece-analog, who is a deeply and intuitively intelligent little girl, still has to use her fingers to figure out what the product of five times eight is. I mean, she could at least be shaking her booty instead. Really, you readers of mine out there with kids, or grandkids, or niece-analogues or whatever, do them a favor that will save us all a lot of agony down the road. Kiddie crap-buying season is nearly here (indeed, does it ever really leave us?). At least get the "Multiplication Rock" cassette for their walkmen or something, if you can't just invest in the whole DVD library of Schoolhouse Rock. Oh, and good lord, how the hell are these kids ever going to read properly without Sesame Street and the Electric Company? But that's maybe a topic for another column. Video9353@blogcritics.org Tue, 21 Oct 2003 00:12:36 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/08/06/114645.php Kate SherrodA clerk at a comic books store in Dallas has been fined $4000 and sentenced to a term on probation for selling an adult comic to an adult "undercover agent" (what exactly was he trying to uncover?) from the adult section of a big comic book store.The U.S. Supreme Court denied the man's appeal (effort funded by the wholly laudable Comic Book Legal Defense Fund), so he's stuck.Full story here.Because everyone knows that all comic books are actually intended for kids.Yeah, right. Maus, in which a Holocaust survivor tells his gruesome story to his grandson, was certainly meant for little kids, as was, say, Safe Area Gorazde which details Joe Sacco's real life adventures in the middle of all of the ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.And yes, I know, the above referenced titles are not examples of what is commonly meant by one who expresses concern about the availability of "adult" material.But still and all, I'd much rather explain why that cartoon lady is naked than why that cartoon mouse got machine gunned for being Jewish or Serbian.You know, I still really want to know what that undercover agent was trying to uncover.That's going to bug me for a while.I'll be over in the corner slapping myself with a fish for a while. Books7420@blogcritics.org Wed, 6 Aug 2003 11:46:45 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/27/205131.php Kate SherrodA half hour ago, I made a pre-emptive strike against the legion of telemarketers who are doubtless just waiting to pounce on me (I say waiting because it's only as of Tuesday that I've had an honest-to-dog land line to the Unabomber Cabin. Ted K. got along a lot better without regular 'net access than I did). I surfed on over to The Federal Government's Do Not Call List and said, well Shazaam! Sign me up! Actually, there was no space on the registration page for text comments, so they didn't get the Shazaam! part. And I was all set, here and on Blogcritics, to praise the hell out of this effort for being so easy and breezy and beautiful and an actually legitimate use of the fedgov's interstate commerce regulatory powers. But then... The web site requires that one enter "a valid e-mail address" along with his or her telephone number(s) (nice that it's plural - you can zap your home, business and cell all with one entry!) (interestingly enough, it nowhere says the e-mail address has to be one's own, just that it be "valid"). Your entry will not be processed without this information. So I guess it's sort of like registering to get the New York Times' headlines by e-mail (best in a fortnight - today's! #1 "Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100" #2 "Gays Celebrate, And Plan Campaign for Broader Rights" Yes, I know the gays were celebrating the Supreme Court's sodomy decision yesterday. It's the juxtaposition that's funny, guys!); it doesn't really happen until one receives a "confirming" e-mail, the equivalent of "Is that your final answer?" and responds to it as directed. The Do Not Callee is then informed that if the site doesn't receive a reply to the confirmation mail within 72 hours, he or she will not be added to the list. Furthermore, it will take "about seven minutes" for that confirmation mail to reach one's e-mail box. Well, it's been considerably more than seven minutes since I finished following the instructions, and the e-mail has yet to reach me. So now I wonder if it will. Or if I've been tricked somehow into giving away my e-mail address to the new FDS (Federal Department of Spam). Kate Sherrod, enlarge your penis and get a tax credit!. Unbelievable mortgage rates and complimentary phone tap! Smallest digital camera ever free with every completed IRS audit! Oh, the possibilities! I think I have to lie down now... Glad I used one of my junk addresses. Politics6571@blogcritics.org Fri, 27 Jun 2003 20:51:31 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/06/03/155355.php Kate SherrodWinterkill is, quite simply, the novel I have been waiting for Wyoming mystery novelist C.J. Box to write.His first two, Open Season and Savage Run, established his potential and garnered him critical acclaim and bestseller status - for good reason. Box has pretty much created a whole new sub-genre of murder mystery, with a Wyoming game warden as the detective and plots that turned on the American West's land, resource and environmental issues that seldom get such balanced or sympathetic treatment as Box gives them.Open Season, in addition to introducing us to game warden and reluctant detective Joe Pickett, explored the implications and unintended complications of the Endangered Species Act as its hero - and his family - became embroiled in a complicated set of plots and plans centering on concealing the survival of a species thought long extinct. Savage Run continued Pickett's story with a tale of environmental extremists, asshole hobby ranchers, and an unhinged stock detective.Both books are cracking good page-turners, the characters vivid and interesting, the plot lines refreshingly unhackneyed and inventive, the ruggedness and beauty of the Wyoming terrain Pickett patrols well evoked, though at times Box strays into what I can only describe as scenery porn.*What makes them, and Box's brand-new Winterkill truly memorable, though, is the texture, the background of the conflicts Box so skillfully sets up and executes and intensifies to the point of unbearability - a background handled, for the most part, with fairness and sensitivity, especially in the first two books. Ecoterrorists and Tom Horn wannabes both get their say and both get to be fully human even as they perform inhuman acts (environmental extremist and Saddlestring, Wyo. native Stewie Woods routinely spikes trees knowing he is creating the potential for working men he may have known since childhood to be maimed, even die on the job; stock detective Charlie Tibbs' unhinged and single minded pursuit of Woods and Pickett through the eponymous canyon is like something out of a Hitchcock movie); concerns about unscrupulous timber harvesting practices and about the true nature of "magical and beautiful" wolves get equal play. Some minor characters, most notably Savage Run's Britney Earthshare, do threaten to become caricatures, but even they get sympathetic treatment and are allowed, to a degree, to evolve.These trends in Box's fiction continue in Winterkill, which introduces yet another seemingly fanciful but all-too-plausible element to the ongoing saga of Joe Pickett and Saddlestring, Wyo. As winter sets in, the mountains above Saddlestring are invaded by a caravan of refugees from every "extremist" showdown with the federal government over the last 15 years, survivors of Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Montana Freemen, you name it.And coincidentally, a ranking Forest Service Bureaucrat has just lost his mind, been caught poaching, and gotten himself murdered almost right under poor Joe's nose!But is it just a coincidence? USFS hotshot Melinda Strickland doesn't think so.And this is where the novel really gets interesting. While Open Season and Savage Run both feature somewhat sympathetic, or at least well-rounded villains with understandable flaws and comprehensible agendas, with Strickland Box has let his melodramatic instincts run away with him; she might as well be wearing a black hat and twirling a mustache. Box, though, goes her one better, making her a modern day White Witch straight out of C.S. Lewis, wrapped in blankets in the back of a sledge (OK, a snowcat), an annoying dog cuddled to her breast, viciously driving her dwarf minions (OK, other USFS bureaucrats) through the blinding snow and the towering drifts on her way to exact revenge!!A scene of note: as plans to "go get" those outlaws on the mountain are laid, Strickland calls a press conference/public forum to justify her plans and her planned actions to anyone who cares to know. The scene rings as true as any I've ever read in modern literature, and is almost painfully funny as Saddlestring residents complain about having no say in forest policy, local rangers tapdance around the issue, audience members share their pained ironic takes in sotto voce and everyone is told, finally, to just shut up because it's going to be Strickland's Way or nothing. Medicine Bow National Forest's draft management plan, anyone?Political/resource issues aside, this is also another chapter in the story of the life of Joe Pickett's family, which has already faced its share of tragedy - an unborn son killed when his wife is shot in the first book, the loss of a beloved horse in the second - and in Winterkill must deal with more as the Pickett's foster daughter April (Box also has a wonderful gift for writing child characters) is kidnapped and put directly in harm's way by her deranged mother, holed up on the mountain with the "federal government-hating outlaws."An intriguing new character is introduced, too, in the person of Nate Romanowski, a falconer and true individualist who undergoes a surprising metamorphosis - not in himself, but in the perceptions of him induced in the reader. It's high time Joe had a sidekick - and what a sidekick - and I would enthusiastically nominate Romanowski for this role. More, please.And so I wait, along with the rest of Box's growing readership, to see what he's going to come up with next. There are many other intriguing issues in which Joe could find himself entangled. Hint: our favorite saying around southern Wyoming and the town that is one of the three** on which Box based his fictitious Saddlestring: "Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting."* Probably an occupational hazard: I would expect no less from a guy who still makes his actual living marketing trips to Wyoming to European Tourists. Box is the founder and CEO of Rocky Mountain International. Scenery porn is an indispensable tool of that trade.** I'm only sure of two of the three: Sheridan, Wyoming and my hometown, Saratoga (mentioned as an aside in Winterkill for its annual ice fishing derby, which Box once ran when he was the chamber of commerce director here. Thanks for the plug, buddy!). Books5858@blogcritics.org Tue, 3 Jun 2003 15:53:55 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/05/19/155503.php Kate SherrodTHE MATRIX: RELOADEDThere are several films I've been eagerly awaiting of late. A drooling comic book fan from way back, I was delighted to learn that Ang Lee was taking on the Incredible Hulk. A sequel to the excellent X-Men movie would be welcome. Of course I look forward to watching them crown Viggo Mortensen king this coming Christmas.And then there's these two Matrix sequels.I have approached these with trepidation. I loved The Matrix, but for different reasons than most. A long-time devotee of Christian and Jewish apocrypha and heresies, I loved The Matrix's blatantly Gnostic/Manichaean theme, its hip updating of an old belief that our world is a creation of malignant forces who have trapped the divine spark of humanity in a million tiny cells to be tortured and enslaved, bound by laws of physics, confined by fear and death and base animal instinct, and only a few enlightened individuals who awakened to the truth could ever set it all free. Instead of Archons and the Demiurge we have Agents and the vast and complex machine society that grows humans as crops and turns them into batteries. Etc.Plus, the soundtrack kicked ass, and even Keanu Reeves, one of the most enjoyably mockable creatures ever to pretend he's an actor, wasn't too irritating even if I did think of Bill and Ted a little too often.The messianic plot was also great fun, and I'm enough of a fan of, e.g., John Woo and his Hong Kong predescessors to have also enjoyed all of the silly wire-work kung fu and all of the other special effects, too.But, since they'd pretty much already used up the entire "Hero With a Thousand Faces" plot in this first film, I wasn't sure the Wachowski brothers could really make two more set in this milieu, at least not without betraying their original achievement.So I almost didn't go see this film.I'm glad, though, that I did, because the brothers had lots of other goodies up their sleeves.OK, I'm going to try not to completely spoil this movie for those of you who haven't seen it but plan to, but I can't meaningfully discuss this movie - or persuade a few of you who might not otherwise bother with it to go see it - without giving away a little bit. If you're a complete anti-spoiler fanatic (which I am; I deliberately avoided reading any criticism of TM:R so my initial experience would have as clean an impact as possible), you might want to stop here, but for most people a little foreknowledge can't hurt.At the end of the first film, Neo the demigod has finally been revealed as such in a dazzling sequence of light and cascading source code that conveyed better than just about anything I've ever seen how absolutely everything can change whe the apple cart is well and truly upset. He has stopped speeding bullets that were flying toward him, he has come back from the dead, he has apparently destroyed his nemesis, Agent Smith by turning Smith's own great tactic against him (i.e., diving into the same "space" occupied by Smith's "body" and basically overwriting him). And he can fly.Unstoppable Neo! Obviously he's gonna save us all, as he says in his final phone call to the Artificial Intelligence gestalt who built and run the Matrix.And herein lay my misgivings about sequels. How much fun would it really be to watch Neo just kick more ass and take more names? Maybe if he gets bored and turns evil, yeah, that might be fun - omnipotence and its attendant boredom always carries with it the threat of corruption.But the Wachowskis had other plans, and they were undeniably cool ones. Neo's neutralization of Agent Smith by overwriting him meant a lot more than just the end of a fight scene; not only did Smith survive the overwriting, but there was a co-mingling of what I can only think of as Neo's and Smith's digital DNA. As we quickly learn in TM:R, Smith derived frightening new abilities (that lead to one of the most ass-kickingly cool fight scenes ever, and made a simple, two-word sentence, "Me, too" into one of my favorite movie lines, maybe ever) that make him a greater threat than ever. Neo, too, would appear to have benefitted from the exchange, having forged a whole new connection with the machines he will fight, as he demonstrates in a climactic scene when those giant mechanical squid, the sentinals, menace his actual, physical self in the non-Matrix, non-virtual "real world."That alone would be a pretty cool basis for a sequel, but that's not all the film had to offer to satisfy my hunger for more noodle baking, more loud industrial music, more stylistic pyrotechnics and more Hugo Weaving (so much more Hugo Weaving!).Another powerful hunger of mine was satisfied in our getting to see Zion, the last human city, deep underground and still utterly dependent on the very technology that got us where we were - machines purifying the recycled water and air, machines providing heat and light, machines refining and working metal to build and maintain the last, vast human habitat - and this irony does not escape comment.And yet more to satisfy me: the civilization dwelling in Zion is a visual feast of utterly gorgeous and achingly real humanity of every race, hue, style of dress and body art, like the last human city should be. It's a 21st century young person's dream, everybody's just people (though it's perhaps a little disappointing that the black guys have black girlfriends and the white guys have white ones, but oh well, one battle at a time, I guess), united in common cause and, in one of the film's greatest scenes, partying like it's the end of the world because it just might be.I live in an overwhelmingly white and monolingual state: Zion's appeal to me is very real. I didn't realize how I have been missing the sight of other faces, other races, until I was vicariously drawn into the ultimate multi-culti rave party. We are still here, the prophet-like Morpheus has reminded us, and it is our duty to celebrate that, celebrate our animal nature that makes us different from the machines, shake our groove things and get it on. Yeah!I am also howlingly entertained by this film's journey deeper into the territory of mythology and archetype. A new character emerges, the Merovingian, and he is delightfully arrogant and French like the conspiracy theorist/heretic's ultimate idol, the monarchial descendent of Jesus Christ (the Merovingians were kings of France and some theories maintained that their origins lay in Jesus' having impregnated Mary Magdeline, and in Joseph of Arimethea's having brought her to France to give birth to and raise their semidivine progency after the crucifixion), ought to be. At first he seems meant to be a helper in Neo's quest to find his way to the core and find a way to prevent the machine's imminent attack on Zion, but he is quickly revealed as having his own agenda and no concern for what aren't, after all, his fellow humans. Like his mythological original, this Merovingian isn't really one of us, and it takes the oldest trick in the book, betrayal by a wronged woman, to get past him and out of his empire. I would have liked to have seen more of him, but maybe he'll have more to do in the last film. I'm crossing my fingers.One last spin TM:R puts on the Matrix milieu: as mentioned briefly in the first film, what Neo et al are fighting against is not the first Matrix... and Neo isn't the first Neo! A great effort is made to convince Neo, and by extension us, that he isn't, in fact, anybody's savior, that he isn't, in fact, doing anything of his own free will; he is an inherent anomaly in the program that crops up at regular iterations and while he is something of an annoying bug in the works, the Matrix has accommodated that bug and harnessed it.This of course raises lots of tasty issues for the final film, due out in November. Is Neo part of the solution or part of the problem? Is this just another run-through of an age-old scenario, the endless cycle of Ragnarok that is the Norse cosmology, or is this a Christian-style ultimate ending and apocalypse that's coming?I for one think that Agent Smith, with his new abilities and his new freedom of thought and action, is what's really going to make the difference this time. I eagerly await seeing if I'm right.A final note: Yay for the action scenes, whatever. The kung fu was amusing in the first film, but there's just too damned much of it this time, and while I knew I was supposed to be mighty thrilled by, e.g., the extensive car chase on the freeway and the battle with the monk/guardian program, for me the only fight scene that was actually fun was the Smithalicious first one. Me too.Sometimes it's just awesome to be wrong! Video5422@blogcritics.org Mon, 19 May 2003 15:55:03 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/29/175049.php Kate SherrodBefore the opening credits on the Discovery Channel's* latest attempt at repackaging the hackneyed and the obvious as new and starting, "Who Killed Julius Caesar?" even started to roll, my father asked the best question of all:Who the hell cares about a murder that happened 2000 years ago?Well, unfortunately, I do. And so do lots of other people, apparently, or Discovery Networks and all of its ilk would not continue making this kind of dubious crap and calling it documentaries, nor would its tame stable of so-called critics keep praising it in tidy, blurb-ready sound bites.As the tone of the above might indicate, I was not, perhaps, in the most receptive of moods to take in such fare late of a Sunday night, but I am a sucker for all things ancient, and hadn't the Discovery-owned History Channel done a pretty good two-parter on the Spartans a while back (superior to the PBS show on the Greeks several years ago that never even mentioned the battle of Thermopylae! To put this in perspective for non-classics nerds, this would be like doing an in-depth series on America during World War II without mentioning Pearl Harbor or the Battle of Midway, or one on the space program without discussing the Apollo 11 mission, a hilarious, glaring oversight upon which not enough derision could ever be heaped in 300 lifetimes - one for each of the Spartans who fell there)?Plus, well, like pretty much everyone else in North America, I'm also a fan of CSI, and get off ever so slightly on watching high tech gadgets employed to tease out the tiniest clues.Such was the promise of "Who Killed Julius Caesar?," the opening act of which strongly suggested that the version of this famous death we all cherished from paging through our Plutarch, leafing through our Livy, shuffling through our Shakespeare, was going to be proven wholly wrong, or at least inaccurate or incomplete, using modern methods and models unavailable to previous investigators.Such was the promise, but the delivery, while entertaining, fell quite a bit short.What unfolded before viewers through an otherwise perfectly good hour was an Italian law enforcement bureaucrat who figured he knew better than Suetonius, et all, and was damned well going to prove it, even though the scene of the crime had been obliterated, the body was 2000 years gone to dust and ashes, the culprits beyond the reach of the law, even the language of the drama largely dead. Said bureaucrat spends a lot of time riding around in the backseat of an official car (and we complain about our tax dollars at work! But then again, we've never knowingly had a porn star making policy either. Trade offs, trade offs...), shuttling around modern Rome, reenacting the murder to determine how many people could have actually accounted for the documented 23 stab wounds, and interviewing a neuroscientist with either a strange pan-European accent or a daunting, Sister Wendy-caliber speech impediment or both about exactly what kind of epilepsy poor old Julius actually did have.The conclusion, after an hour of this nonsense, would do any postmodern pseudo-researcher infesting modern American academia proud. It wasn't "really" Brutus and Cassius who bear responsibility for Caesar's death, they were just the tools Caesar employed in committing suicide. His epilepsy was getting really annoying and embarrassing, see, and he wanted to be put out of his misery. Or was it that he foresaw (curst, curst cleverness!) that the only way his dynasty could continue was if he was (wink wink) "murdered" and then his "murderers" and friends squared off in a civil war that his nephew-cum-adopted son Octavian (whom we know as Augustus Caesar, he who "found Rome in clay and left her in marble" according to Robert Graves) could "win" and then "not be crowned" Caesar? Oh, it doesn't really matter which one, does it? We've established that he might have had a motive for cleverly, devilishly manipulating his friend and his enemy into assassinating him, right? And that's enough.Wink, wink, WINK.Oh, well. It wasn't a total waste of an hour. I came out of it with an important lesson: Don't get murdered in Rome if you want your killer found and brought to justice.Or something.Who killed Julius Caesar? Who didn't?*Another "Sci-Fi Channel" caliber misnomer in the making? Video4954@blogcritics.org Tue, 29 Apr 2003 17:50:49 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/15/134505.php Kate SherrodPATTERN RECOGNITIONPattern Recognition by William Gibson (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003)Science fiction is usually an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar, to bring us ordinary car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching humans into worlds where cars fly, Guiness comes in pill form, paper is strictly rationed and TV is fully interactive. Outer space. Alternate histories where the Nazis won or where the computer was invented in the 19th century. Time travel.But now, when, as David Foster Wallace observes "we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall - i.e. when damn near everything presents itself as familiar" the real challenge is making the familiar strange.Which brings me to William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition.Pattern Recognition is a serious departure from the "high tech/low life" scenarios he developed for his Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and his other stuff (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties). It is set very much in our aforementioned car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching present, specifically about a year after the September 11 attacks; its milieu is the very internet in which you, my reader, and I, Your Humble Blogger am now engaged, a perfectly evoked subculture of fanatical followers of a mass of film snippets that surface online from time to time dubbed "the Footage," and the very 21st century "post-geographic" life of a 33 year old woman whose overwhelming sensitivity to media blitz, to corporate logos and branding, would be a crippling mental illness if she hadn't found a way to make it pay, and pay well.Cayce Pollard is a human divining rod for marketing success, able to tune her hilarious and completely understandable allergy to bad media figures like the Michelin Man and Tommy Hilfiger to evaluate new logos and marketing strategies on a deeply intuitive level, only occasionally resorting to slyly funny criteria as is detailed early in Pattern Recognition when she is asked to give a yay or nay to a redesigned sneaker logo which resembles, to Cayce, a "syncopated sperm":Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?The story of Cayce's career as a "cool hunter", who keeps track of street fashion, noting trends almost before they emerge, who engages in early pattern recognition and then helps corporations "point commodifiers at it" would make a pretty interesting novel all by itself, but as usual Gibson has more on his mind than just the teasing out of cultural data like this.Cayce is also a "Footagehead", one of the aforementioned fanatical devotees of the spookily compelling fragments of what may or not be a complete film that surface from time to time on the internet (the debate over whether or not these fragments are meant to stand alone or are part of an emerging narrative is one of the many interesting items of contention on the "Fetish:Footage:Forum" internet site that is hands-down the best ever evocation of online community I have yet encountered in literature). She is captured by the seemingly effortless timelessness of it, the way the man and woman featured could be interacting in any decade of the last 100 years; others are fascinated with the "are they or aren't they lovers" aspect, still others with the question of authorship. Footageheads are consumed, like addicts; like early Christians or Masons they subtly recognize each other without recognizing each other.The Footage is the one new marketing phenomenon of the 21st century, Cayce's boss says, and he must have the secret. She can have anything she wants or needs if she'll just find the author, find the story behind it, the how and why. Of course, she goes for it.Other critics have seemed troubled by the idea that people can become obsessed with such a small and incohate thing (missing, it would appear, Gibson's own well-known fascination with Cornell boxes*, and its similar surfacing in the plot of Count Zero when a woman tracks down the mysterious author of a weird new range of Cornell boxes to an artificial intelligence housed in an orbital community), but I myself have developed perhaps a comparable obsession, though with a finished product. About two years ago, back when I still had cable, I got hooked on a show on the Sci-Fi Channel called Exposure, a showcase for short films.I've seen a lot of cool stuff there, and have become a devotee of Atom Films as a result. Cool stuff, disturbing stuff, stuff I remember and think about...But Chel White's Dirt (clock on the highlighted text to check it out; you can watch it in RealMedia or Windows Media at that site) is something else altogether. Watch it and maybe some of you will see what I mean. Now, Dirt's similarities to Gibson's Footage are small, but the grip it exerts on a certain type of imagination is not; were Cayce a real person, I'm sure she'd be as into this real film as I am, fascinated by its stateliness, its weirdness, the arrestingly Byronic beauty of its main character, the perfect diction and compelling voice of its narrator (an NPR "radio personality" in real life), and the surprising, strangely inspiring twist its brief plot takes. We have a man, perhaps a bit younger than myself, confessing that ever since he was a child he has had a fetish for dirt, for soil. At first it was enough to feel it with his fingers, but soon he was burying himself in it, sleeping in it, finally eating it at the dinner table, until he "had to have it cooked into all the meals I ate... small bits of earth in my steak, in my chicken... dirt gravy, and dirt sprinkled onto everything."Eventually, vegetable plants begin to sprout in his flesh, "so that I became self-sustaining... I could eat my own vegetables and rely on no one but myself for my survival... I became my own ecosystem and this, this is what empowered me."Everything about this little film thrills me, chills me, sucks me into its weird little world. The only way I could be more intrigued with it would probably be if it had been released in bits and pieces, out of order, and left as clues all over the internet.So the Footage fetish makes perfect sense to me!There are many other tweaky and satisfying elements to the story - post Cold War spookdom, a brilliant evocation of post-Soviet Russia that I could suspect might owe a great deal to the equally brilliant work of the eXile, that fabulously bitchy alternative newspaper started by two genius expatriate assholes in Moscow, the bizarre characters that staff and run boss Hubertus Bigend's cutting-edge marketing firm, gorgeous throwaway prose describing Tokyo's "virtual-looking" skyline, train rides through England, Russian hotel life...One standout for me: an excursis on the Curta calculator, an entirely mechanical device invented and perfected by an inmate of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I have long hailed Gibson as the ultimate pornographer of machines and materiel, a man who can create fetishes for plastic, whose treatment of the material composition of objects puts them sensuously in the reader's hands:"The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five millimeter camera"... Large fingers moving surely, gently, clicking the black tabs into a different configuration. He grasps the knurled cylinder in his left, gives the knob at the top a twirl. Smoothly ratcheting a sum from its interior. He raises it to see the resulting figure in a tiny window.I must give thanks by night and day that William Gibson became a novelist, because he would be a force for evil as an advertising copy editor. Since I read the above passage, about a device I had not before known existed, I have slavered after a Curta calculator (they really exist; they are sought by collectors, they fetch fabulous sums in mint condition, they will work forever without battery or electricity) and there is no conceivable reason I should ever want or need one. Where would I put it? On my eclectic mantle shelf, there to sit looking like an elegant, fetishistic hand grenade?Still my hands twitch, my eyes shine at the thought of possessing a Curta.All in all, Gibson's best novel since Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition is the first of his works to even come close to matching his initial achievement, and may actually exceed it, for it adds to Gibson's always haunting prose a lighter heart, a buoyancy, even when the narrative bogs down in excruciating descriptions of jet lag ("soul delay" in Gibson parlance - the idea being that when one takes long, transoceanic flights the soul doesn't travel at the same pace as the body, gets left behind attached by a long tether, and reels in only gradually once one reaches his destination). It is science fiction only in its slight extension of what is possible with current digital technology, and that will annoy some purist Gibson fans, but if it wins Gibson a Hugo or Nebula Award, I, for one, will not mind a bit.Even those of you who think they hate science fiction will find something to love in this book.* Cornell Boxes being the creation of artist Jospeh Cornell, who assembled various small objects like ticket stubs and dried flowers and champaign corks into little dioramas evoking various experiences. They're exquisite things. You can see photographs of a few of them at this web site. Sci/Tech4624@blogcritics.org Tue, 15 Apr 2003 13:45:05 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/02/113127.php Kate Sherrod"Some days it's a good day to die, some days it's a good day to play basketball" - Victor Joseph in Chris Eyre's "Smoke Signals"The University of Wyoming almost never even makes it to basketball's "Sweet Sixteen," and wipes out spectacularly on those rare occasions when we do.It may, then, seem strange to those who aren't in the know to say that Wyoming is one of the great basketball capitals of the known world. It may seem strange, but it isn't.It's just that Wyoming's basketball gods very rarely make it to college, and when they do, they don't usually make it through college. And never, ever, do these gods manifest themselves at the University of Wyoming or any other Division I school.That's because these gods live "on the rez," as budding filmmaker Daniel Junge shows us in his documentary "Chiefs."Junge spent two years filming the lives of several members of the 2000 and 2001 Wyoming Indian High School boys basketball teams, on and off the court, then heroically edited down all of that footage into a taut, often moving, and definitely illuminating 90 minute film, which aired nationwide last night on PBS's "Independent Lens" program.There's a lot to love, to be astonished by, and to be saddened by as Junge's images roll on with very little commentary from the filmmaker. These boys carry the hopes of an entire nation with them onto the basketball court, and are expected to live up to a proud legacy - 20 straight trips to the state tournament, numerous state championships, undefeated seasons - ever under the watchful eyes of their ancestors (many of whom were directly involved in establishing that legacy, those record seasons, those statistical marvels, those packed gymnasiums all over Wyoming). Every team in the state, even those from schools in Casper and Nebraska and Lander whose benches hold triple the number of players as the Chiefs because their schools hold ten times as many students as Wyoming Indian, wants a piece of them, making the Chiefs' entire season into an endless repeat of the plot of "Hoosiers."Except those Indiana boys never had to deal with the social conditions and the occasional racism that were and are a fact of life for young men like Brian Sounding Sides, Ben and Al C'Bearing, and Tom Robinson.Wisely, Junge does not dwell on these in the maudlin muckraking way of so many documentarians observing the tragedies of indigenous peoples. Junge also wisely does not dwell on the obviously "Indian" elements of these players' lives. A quick shot of a team session in a sweat lodge, a glimpse of a drum circle, are enough, as are quick looks around the Wind River Indian Reservation in central Wyoming - an area hard to make look picturesque, and Junge didn't try.He didn't need to.The realities of these players' lives come through simply and elegantly on their own. They are very aware of themselves as Indians, but they also have to learn trigonometry like any other high school students, also play video games... Marijuana use is a big issue, as is the deceptive easiness of life when every tribe member gets a "cap check" representing his or her equal share of the tribe's mineral royalties, removing a lot of the urgency behind the need to plan for the future or find lasting employment after the glory days of high school basketball are gone and the player has joined the many who went before him, playing "independent" basketball in year-long intramural reservation basketball leagues.It's almost as if these players' lives are shortened and intensified when they are Chiefs; at age 16 they may not even be six feet tall yet, but their vertical leaps of 20 inches or more and their stunning prowess at slam dunks, steals and flying alley oops that no other Wyoming high school players ever seem to reach, combined with the closeness of small town school life and the even greater closeness of tribal life make these boys living gods at their schools, with small fry clamoring for their autographs after games and everyone noting their every moves in practice, in school, and on the boards. Then they graduate.A few each year go off to college, after a fashion. As the film progresses, we see Brian Sounding Sides boarding a plane to fly off to attend a united tribal college in North Dakota. It will be his first time flying, but more importantly, it will be his first time living a life removed from his own people, what's left of their ways, and the equally insular world of high school basketball, which brings these boys out amongst the predominantly white populace of Wyoming but tightly restricts and controls their interactions there. Play basketball. Brief visit to Target (to buy eyedrops to hide the pot-smoking). Sit in motel room. Ride bus.Within three weeks, Sounding Sides decides he "doesn't like" college and is back on the rez. As the film's epilog shares, he now lives at home, and plays independent basketball.A question "Chiefs" inspires but does not address is, is it possible to keep all of the qualities that make Indian basketball great but ditch the insularity, the lack of preparedness for the rest of the world that sends all but a rare few of these hoop gods back to the reservation before they've even finished a year outside? There are always a few glimmers of hope; one of the C'Bearings is a student now at Chadron State in Nebraska, we are told in the epilog, and Tom Robinson won a rodeo scholarship to a community college in Wyoming. There's two... out of how many?God help me, I recognized some of the independent league players from the days when I was a high school student at conference rival Saratoga, and those guys were playing ball lo these... 14 years or so ago?Can this change?I don't know the answer to that.But I do know the happiness that is nonetheless there in these young men's stories. A Saratoga girl who grew up watching our own Panthers take on the Chiefs in several sports, I have a lifetime of memories of watching the Indians' families pack even our gymnasium, hundreds of miles away from the reservation. Often there would be more Chief than Panther fans in our little gym, and even I, not the world's greatest basketball fan, hated to miss a game just for the raw excitement of being part of such a passionate gathering. These games were my first experiences of the "good" side of being part of a mob - for even though both sides really, really wanted to win, the rivalry was friendly, the action kept on the court (I understand that some of this sportsmanship has declined since my years as a student here, but that is just hearsay. I haven't been to a game since I stopped making my living covering them, but the last time I saw the Chiefs play anyone - the very state championship game that is the climax of this film - I saw sportsmanship and fair play, on the court and in the stands, that would make Gary Medicine Cloud, the team's groovy old bus driver, very proud). And the cheering was all for them! Ten or 12 of the tribe's finest players (who've grown up in a land where every single household sports a basketball hoop outdoors). Gods indeed.A lot of people would give up a lot to experience even one game of that kind of support, of that kind of adulation, let alone a whole season, a whole four-year career. How about you?I'm very excited that more people are going to get to see this as a result of Junge's film. But there are some things I would have liked to see more of in it, most especially the team's assistant coach, whose name I missed (it was only mentioned once, at the very beginning), an uncle of one of the star players and himself a former Chief who made good and came back to the rez to coach. I have a personal, slightly selfish interest in the stories of other people my age who have chosen to come back here and tackle leadership roles in a state that, let's face it, is not an easy place for a young person to have a life and make a living, and this guy seemed to be carrying his responsibilities well.The other thing that's missing is the Lady Chiefs, Wyoming Indian's girls basketball team. During the years covered by this film, the girls team was not as successful as the boys, but they did make it to state at least one of those years and I have to say, I've always admired them even more than the boys, and not just for how well they play (always, always tough, my jock sister, who faced them often, informs me).See, I spent the 2001 Wyoming State Basketball Tournament chaperoning Saratoga's middle and high school pep band, hauled off to Casper to cheer on our boys team, through games and restaurants and malls (always malls. There are only three in the whole state of Wyoming, and woe to the team sponsor who keeps a busload of teenagers away from one of them whenever one is near) and our motel.Which we shared with Wyoming Indian's boys and girls teams.And a few screaming, bratty little children... babies, toddlers, the odd pre-schooler.You see, more than one of those girls basketball players were mothers. Some had more than one child. And they were still going to high school and playing basketball, and playing it damned well, with the kids in tow even on away trips. No, they weren't state champions, and I'm not saying it's a great thing they got pregnant while still in their teens, but I'm still going to say bully for them for keeping the kids, trying to raise them, and still trying to finish their own educations.And play boobs to the wall, tough, physical basketball.I hope someday, someone notices them, too. Hail to the Chiefs... and also the Lady Chiefs. And the little Chiefs they're already raising and teaching to play.And hail to Daniel Junge for showing them to us without sentiment, without a relentless agenda, without a smothering weight of interpretation and explanation.More, please. Video4298@blogcritics.org Wed, 2 Apr 2003 11:31:27 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/03/25/212835.php Kate SherrodNow this is just mean.I was just taking a peek at my own blog to see who's sponsoring me lately - to my amusement recently, it was for quite some time a resort in Jackson Hole, the town that is ultimately to blame for my entire blogging career and much else (it is my birthplace), but I see today that it has changed.Some really dumb antiwar protesters (and bear in mind, I do not think those two terms together are inherently redundant; I have just chosen to write mostly about the protesters who are dumb because they are more amusing, and I blog to amuse much more than to enlighten or irritate) are supporting me. But what they're advocating is even meaner than puking on the steps for someone to clean up or beating the hell out of some gal's SUV.Pretzels for Peace.Send pretzels to the White House.I get it, I get it. I remember when GWB choked on a pretzel a while back, and yes, I guess I see where it's funny. But I still file this under unconstructive and dumb, as well as mean, on the order (though of course not the magnitude) of sending a fifth of Jack Daniels to someone who was diagnosised with cirhossis or something.Wonder if the Secret Service knows?Well, well... they certainly didn't hear it from me! Honest! Politics4086@blogcritics.org Tue, 25 Mar 2003 21:28:35 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/03/25/154852.php Kate SherrodI hereby declare a totally unofficial but no less necessary open call to all and sundry to come up with a new name for the channel formerly known as SCI FI.Having eschewed its excellent track record of amazingly good (good in my book meaning: worth asking My Own Dear Personal Mom to videotape for me because I have chosen to buy a case of shiraz every month rather than shell out good money on cable just so I can watch three or four shows a week) (much like a good movie is also known as an 80-mile movie because that's the round trip necessary to get to a movie theater) original dramatic programming bit by bit, the channel's claim to its name is now tenuously held by its airing of the admittedly still-good Stargate SG-1 (a Showtime import, begging the question) and the occasional half-decent adaptation of some great books as a movie or mini-series.Where once I hounded mercilessly each week to get my videotape with the week's episodes of Farscape, the Invisible Man and Lexx plus tasty reruns of great stuff like Babylon 5 and Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica, now all that is left after a pretty crappy finale for Farscape (cheap shot central, though I've heard that the cheap shot ending was originally somehow to be resolved in the "next season" opener that is now never going to happen because one of the partners in the shows production - yes, the Sci Fi Channel - pulled the plug) is the aforementioned Stargate SG-1.Well, at least they've brought back Daniel Jackson, pleasing the distaff fans.And now where once there was a feast of great writing, top quality special effects and great ensemble casts acting out science fiction story lines, first we were given... a medieval carnival confidence trick updated as a talk show called "Crossing Over" in which some pseudo-psychic out-Oprah's Oprah with messages from the dead "Your husband wants you to get on with your life" "Your girlfriend is remembering that one time you had sex and the condom broke" "Bobby always liked you in that color you're wearing." Maybe John Edwards' crew refrains from stealing audience members' wallets to look for clues to these people's lives, but I wouldn't put it past 'em.Then there was "The Dream Team" with two people who used to do that silly "Dinner and a Movie" thing on some other channel (I forget which) and are suddenly experts on the interpretation of dreams. Fastest. Psychology Degrees. Ever.And now we have "Scare Tactics" to which to look forward, with even less of a claim towards being even remotely related to science fiction than its predecessors. Pass.There is, at least, a silly looking attempt at making the ultimate Bonehead Bacon (as in Kevin) movie into a TV series, but I decided to pass on it the second the promo quoted a woman as observing "we go through this every day." There's suspension of disbelief, and then there's being told that suddenly the notion that townsfolk under attack by leftover CGI from the admittedly laudable "Dune" fillms are dumb enough to stay put is supposed to replace honest speculation about what it might be like to live on a living spaceship or to deal with political crises among alien races.I quibble, I know, but I really do think that, just as The Learning Channel long ago forfeited its claim to its name the day it shelved its collection of James "Connections" Burke's and Desmond Morris' and Philip Morrison's oeuvres in favor of hour-long Home Depot commercials featuring maniacs putting straw and sod on each other's living room walls.So, as I said: the Sci Fi Channel needs a new name. Anyone? Bueller? Anyone? Video4075@blogcritics.org Tue, 25 Mar 2003 15:48:52 EST