Sublime. (image via mosnews)
In: Stanislav Lem. Let's face it, most Science Fiction is astonishingly shitty writing masking vast sexual repression. It is, further, divorced from any literary lineage or pedigree and essentially exists to offer naught else but shallow escapism to socially inept freaks and geeks. (Averted Gaze) This is, of course, when it's done badly. But when it is done well -- as in the case, dear reader, of the cerebral and elegant Stanislav Lem -- Science Fiction offers a context to our fast-moving digital era, a literary Ground-of-Being of you will, not unlike what Dickens gave voice to the London labor, London poor or what the all-but-forgotten Edith Wharton gave to that virtually extinct social specimen The Knickerbockers (We live in the United States of Amnesia, no?). According to TheGuardian:
"His secretary, Wojciech Zemek, told the Associated Press that the cause was heart failure, citing his advanced age.
"A giant of 20th-century science fiction, Lem was best-known for his novel Solaris, first published in 1961, which was adapted for film first by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and later by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. In it he examines questions of time, identity and memory as he tells the story of an encounter with a mysterious alien intelligence, and of the strange dreams which afflict the astronauts.
"... Lem was born in 1921 in the then Polish town of Lviv. He trained first as a doctor and fought with the resistance against the German occupation during the second world war.
"He was always critical of most science fiction, describing it as ill thought-out, poorly written and more interested in adventure than ideas or new literary forms. This attitude provoked the removal of his honorary membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1976. He subsequently declined the offer of a full, voting membership."
From the sublime .. to the ridiculous. (image via zap2it)
Out: Amanda Scheer Demme. Charges of bigotry and anti-semitism have hovered about Amanda Scheer Demme not unlike her unruly nimbus of slatterly hair. (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment) Those intrepid Page Sixxies chronicle the calamitous demise of Demme (yay!), adding the who's and the how's of her Fall. Our blog colleague Perez Hilton, a recent inductee into the Paper Magazine Beautiful issue, speaks for us all when he posts, acidly:
"Patiently, we have waited for the downfall of Amanda Scheer Demme, and it seems that now that blessed day is upon us!
"People always get what's coming to them, and comeuppance is overdue for party promoter and alleged racist Demme.
"A shitstorm is about to spew hot poo all over Demme's fro now that word has gotten out that Rolling Stone is set to unleash a damaging profile of Amanda, written by famed New York scribe Vanessa Grigoriadis, who penned the infamous PoweR Girls piece, amongst many.
"According to our pals at Page Six, the owners of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which house Demme's Tropicana and Teddy's, are fed up with her cunty ways and have told her they're dissolving her contract.
"Hallelujah!!!!"
Thanks be to God.
(image via logofan)
In: Fox Television. As if it isn't enough that Fox dominates network television with the most intense drama's perhaps ever aired on the small screen (for further reference: "Prison Break," "24"). FX has, of late, inundated the cable cosmos with a cornucopia of well-written -- and impossibly intense -- dramatic hits giving HBO a run for their mountains of money (What is going on with Showtime? Are they even in the gladiatorial fundament?).
Last Sunday's season's brutal finale of "The Shield," one of the two or three best written shows on television today, ended with the obsessed-corrupt Forest Whitaker, and the obsesseder-corrupter Michael Chicklis engaged in a smack-down that was building -- via twisty handheld cameras -- for the entire season.
The Corsair needed to smoke a post-coital cigarette after that psychological release.
Now, "Thief;" of which, says Medialifemagazine:
"'Thief,' FX�s excellent new drama premiering tonight at 10 p.m., seems to defy dramatic gravity.
"...Every time you think �Thief� has maxed, the tension ratchets up with another surprising, often sorrowful twist. It does it all cleanly through strong, disciplined acting and writing, entirely free of the dramatic clich�s one might find on another network.
"In that, 'Thief' shares much with FX�s 'The Shield' and 'Rescue Me.' Though they�re often lauded for their edgy, violent subject matter, it�s the deft plotting that makes these programs so good. They work by focusing on one main character and his various layers, and they are driven by how that character reacts to often tragic, sometimes comical circumstances."
Intensity, thy name is Fox. More here.
Out: Students Are Apolitical. Ultimately students dont give a flying fuck if Leo or Affleck or Diddy assault them with vapid slogans; ultimately students will act politically when an issue comes close enough to home. A million students are protesting in France because the Elitist government didn't feel the need to thoroughly explain -- on television, on radio, at colleges -- the necessity of cutbacks. Just as with the ill-conceived and bloated European Union (whose nebulous borders, had things worked out, would have absurdly extended to both navel of The Russian Federation and nape of Iran), the French Government thought, stupidly, that they could subvert the Social Contract and pass this change through by Fiat.
Quite the contrary.
Similarly, Tony Blair -- fatally -- moved against public opinion and fought a War without curbing the fickle winds of public opinion in his ideological direction. Blair lectured Great Britain in the tone of a Religious scold when he ought to have channelled his inner Churchill to persuade (or, better yet, represented the commonweal and stayed out of War altogether). As skilled a debater as Tony Blair is, The Myseries of Communication eluded him entirely in the feverish onrush to salvage "The Special Relationship," which, for all we know, maybe essentially obsolete in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The leaked Bush-Blair memo should finally dislodge the Labor Prime Minister from office, inaugurating a Brown era.
And the students -- and the elderly -- aren't happy on The Continent. Nor should they be.
In the United States, particularly among the Southwestern border, colleges and universities are protesting the draconian -- and thoroughly unChristian -- Immigration firstorm which this blog has been predicting for over a year. (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment)
And not a single "Vote or Die" button was exchanged in the process. Charmed, I'm sure.
(image via patriciafield)
In: Patricia Field. We have kidded Pat Field in the past (That Socrates t-shirt, we still maintain, is a daffy idea), but that comes from not a small amount of affection we have for the designer. And, as astrological Gemini's, we are not entirely immune to the Methuselan allures of a prospective "Sugar Mommy." According to Kim Hasteriter of PaperBlog:
"Patricia Field is BACK!!! Downtowners will be thrilled to know that Pat Fields new shop will be open for biz next week on the Bowery (between Bleecker and Houston). Fields, who was kicked out of her Eighth Street shop a few years ago (by NYU asshole landlords) took matters into her own hands and bought a building on the Bowery with friends and has spent the past three years renovating it. Thank God for forces like Fields whose contribution to downtown fashion and style are enormous and in these days of impossibly high rents, its takes fortitude and Herculean persistance to keep a small business alive in this city."
More here
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