The new novel by Jonathan Lethem takes place in a modern Manhattan slightly askew from our own. It’s the same Epcot for aesthetes that the borough has become in the years since Mayor Rudolph Giuliani bleached Times Square and tamed crime, but there are differences, like a giant, and likely mechanical, tiger raging through midtown, [...]
Over at the artsjournal.com/gap of Molly Sheridan, a bunch of us are this week talking about (well, writing about) the recent book The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt, and the book from which it draws its title and inspiration, the science fiction novel Down and [...]
Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:
● What Pop Music Tells Us About JG Ballard (bbc.co.uk): As is often the case on the web, this solid overview (of JG Ballard references in pop music, on the occasion of his recent death) is expanded by readers in the comments section. Joy Division, Comsat Angels, Radiohead, Trevor [...]
Star Trek’s Spock, reminiscing in a short comic published in the May 2009 issue of Wired:
By the time I joined Starfleet years later, I had become quite proficient at the harp.
However, I noticed an interesting effect of the music on the human mind. For Vulcans the music was a means of purging emotions by giving [...]
Science fiction writer and general cyberpunk Renaissance geek Richard Kadrey has been spewing his own takes on Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies via his Twitter account. Here are some samples:
Consider ambiguity. Or not. What do I care?
Mix forms, but don’t forget to change your underwear.
Emphasize the itchy parts
In Kadrey’s Twitter timeline, the first [...]
The top 10 posts for the last 31 days are as follows, grouped here for the sake of comparison:
As always, free music (i.e., free MP3s) is a major draw, though it’s rewarding, personally, that just three of this month’s top entries come from the site’s daily Downstream section: (1) Serial, asynchronous collaboration with street sounds [...]
Two characters speak early on in Aetheric Mechanics, a new graphic novella by writer Warren Ellis and illustrator Gianluca Pagliarani:
Q: What’s it like in space?
A: It sings. The vibrations from the spin of the drive arms, sir, and the motion of the heat through the casements to space, which is very cold. The whole ship [...]