Ritu posts a good poem (by someone else, not her own) titled Say More, Speak Like Rain. Worth a link, really.
Category: REVIEWS
Remember Earth2? Dead Like Me canceled… and Rebecca Gayheart’s sorta sad story
Yes, Earth2, that ill-fated one-season SF TV show (imdb) (fansite 1 2 3 in-dept-critical-analysis-page rpg-fansite). Okay, it wasn’t as brilliant a show as it perhaps could have been, but it was at least interesting enough to grab my attention in 1994. I remember a few years later, people were still whining online about the cancelation of the show, and even several years after its cancelation, they were trying to agitate for it to go back on the air with a new season. I had desperately wanted to watch it again, and looked online. Someone who’d taped all the espisodes was …
Real Life Story?
One more thing I found on Joi Ito’s Web. Did you know that the movie Terminal was based on a real life story? Well, sort of. More here. And here. The not-real-life-story is far more interesting, if you ask me.
Peter Kreeft’s Between Heaven & Hell
One of the books I recently got from What the Book? was Between Heaven & Hell by a fellow named Peter Kreeft. The concept of the book is a dialogue between three famous men who all died within hours of one another on November 22, 1963: Aldous Huxley, John F. Kennedy, and C.S. Lewis. Well, now, it’s supposed to be a lively and informative dialogue between three men are actually figures for three positions: JFK is modern humanism, Huxley Eastern pantheism (at least, as understood by a Westerner), and C.S. Lewis stands for mainline Christian Theism. However, the book is …
Emuling TV and movies…
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on things: working on my ghost story, working on camp stuff, testing students, and marking essays. So after days full of these things, I feel like watching some shorter things than movies. Let alone Bollywood movies, even standard Hollywood or Korean movies are long for me at 2 hours. Of course, I’ve watched a few films lately; notably, the Bollywood movie Devdas, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai, and Madhuri Dixit—a great movie, though it’s really, really long, and quite miserable at the end. Why do true lovers sometimes fail so …
What The End of CDs Might Mean, In Fact
Here’s an interesting piece on copyright. If you ignore copyright laws and download content, then good content will cease to be created for you. This is the fundamental argument put forward by contributing editor Stephen Manes, in this month’s issue of PC World. Manes, a fixture of the highest level of technology journalism for the past two decades, says that “if the digital pirates win, we’ll all lose”. The article itself is probably meant to frighten moderate users of file-sharing applications and does not present any new arguments. In fact, it is full of assertions and straw man fallacies. I am …
If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.
So wrote SF author J.G. Ballard once upon a time. John Wendel recently sent me a link to a New York Times article about a collection of quotables from Ballard’s ouevre. Gotta read more Ballard, the man is one of those good old Brit SFers who’s gotten halfway to mainstream somehow, without losing the piercing criticism and edge.
Books I read this weekend
I read a couple of interesting books last weekend. The first is a hardcover novel by one of my favorite SF writers of all time, Bruce Sterling. The novel, which is titled The Zenith Angle, is even closer to the mainstream than Sterling’s previous novel, Zeitgeist, which was more of a postmodernist parable about technology and the world. (Or perhaps, though some would recoil, a kind of postmodernist magical-realist representation of the 20th Century.) This novel is more of a geek’s Tom Clancy, or at the very least a geek’s look at the world of spooks, technoespionage, and what internet …
Call Me Morbid But I Wouldn’t Mind Reading This…
Here’s the Amazon listing for Jazz and Death: Medical Profiles of Jazz Greats). I know, I know. I stumbled across the title when searching for books about piano voicings and just had to know more…
Chuck Mangione, Live
Where else but in South Korea can you see Chuck Mangione play to a pretty crowded house in a big performance venue (about the size of the usual orchestral symphony house in a smallish city)? Where else will people (not many, but even some) stand up and attempt to mount a standing ovation after Chuck plays the song “Feels So Good”? Only, only, only in South Korea. I’m so glad I talked Lime into coming. I wasn’t crazy about Chuck before, nor am I now, though I may try get my hands on some albums to give him another listen. But man, …