Links/fiction/graphic novels
Signal boost: New York’s Museum of the Moving Image is hosting a special exhibit, Cut Up, which "celebrates the practice of re-editing popular media to create new work, presenting contemporary videos by self-taught editors and emerging artists alongside landmarks of historic and genre-defining reappropriation." They’re showing, among other things, 
laurashapiro’s I Put You There, along with Kandy Fong's Both Sides Now and Vogue!
The criminal NSA: why this pervasive surveillance is illegal and unconstitutional.
Wi-vi: use a cellphone to see through walls. At least it creates fic possibilities?
Free to good fannish home: 20-year anniversary edition of Heathers. Let me know in comments.
Stephen King, Joyland: Dumped by his girlfriend, 1970s college student Devin Jones starts his summer of working at a small southern carnival moping. But he’s young, and eventually he starts to notice the rest of the world again-including the ghost story of the haunted house, where a young woman was murdered years back. King writes nostalgically as a mature man recalling his somewhat callow youth, and evokes the heat and haze of the carnival in the years before entertainment was digitized. For all that the final confrontation with the killer is literally a high-stakes carnival ride, I found the mood more elegaic than creepy.
Elissa Wald, The Secret Lives of Married Women: Twin sisters, a high-powered New York lawyer and a former actress whose quick marriage to a Russian emigre younger than herself has taken her across the country, navigate the complexities of erotic power and desire within (and outside of) marriage. Both derive pleasure from risky situations-explicit submissiveness in one case, the fear of what she doesn’t know about her husband in the other-that relight the sparks of attraction for them. While I thought the book had some sharp observations to make about power, marriage, and some kinds of lust, I didn’t feel the frisson that the characters felt, though others might. (The former actress once starred in soft porn; a creepy guy takes that as extra license to harass her, but it is very clear that he is entirely in the wrong. The book portrays desire under patriarchy but basically seemed nonjudgmental of women’s desires, though individual characters are judgmental, including of themselves.) If anyone’s interested in my copy, drop me a note.
Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross, The Rapture of the Nerds: A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations: Also a tale of how the remaining Americans after the singularity are right-wing religious nuts trying to kill the protagonist, who is the unwilling host of a posthuman entity trying to communicate with those left behind. In combination the authors have all their tics and none of their charm. I’ll wait for more Atrocity Archives from Stross, I think.
David Wojnarowicz, 7 Miles a Second: A graphic novel memoir of Wojnarowicz’s experiences as an underage hustler on the streets of New York and later his experiences living with, and slowly dying of, AIDS in a culture that wished for his destruction. Mixes the realistic and the hallucinatory with abandon-bodies dissolve and rot and grow flowers, sometimes all at once-and why not when we live in a world in which people can do horrible things to one another and it’s not shocking or even noteworthy?
Robert Kirkman et al., The Walking Dead, Book One: Small town law enforcement officer wakes from a coma, somehow still alive, and walks out into the zombie apocalypse. His wife and son are missing-spoiler, he finds them very quickly, and his partner is there putting the moves on his wife. I bailed early on, when it became clear that I was uninterested in the art, which while suited to the subject matter was too messy to engage me, and deeply uninterested in the story, which was clearly going to involve a lot of gender dynamics I didn’t like.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
laurashapiro’s I Put You There, along with Kandy Fong's Both Sides Now and Vogue!
The criminal NSA: why this pervasive surveillance is illegal and unconstitutional.
Wi-vi: use a cellphone to see through walls. At least it creates fic possibilities?
Free to good fannish home: 20-year anniversary edition of Heathers. Let me know in comments.
Stephen King, Joyland: Dumped by his girlfriend, 1970s college student Devin Jones starts his summer of working at a small southern carnival moping. But he’s young, and eventually he starts to notice the rest of the world again-including the ghost story of the haunted house, where a young woman was murdered years back. King writes nostalgically as a mature man recalling his somewhat callow youth, and evokes the heat and haze of the carnival in the years before entertainment was digitized. For all that the final confrontation with the killer is literally a high-stakes carnival ride, I found the mood more elegaic than creepy.
Elissa Wald, The Secret Lives of Married Women: Twin sisters, a high-powered New York lawyer and a former actress whose quick marriage to a Russian emigre younger than herself has taken her across the country, navigate the complexities of erotic power and desire within (and outside of) marriage. Both derive pleasure from risky situations-explicit submissiveness in one case, the fear of what she doesn’t know about her husband in the other-that relight the sparks of attraction for them. While I thought the book had some sharp observations to make about power, marriage, and some kinds of lust, I didn’t feel the frisson that the characters felt, though others might. (The former actress once starred in soft porn; a creepy guy takes that as extra license to harass her, but it is very clear that he is entirely in the wrong. The book portrays desire under patriarchy but basically seemed nonjudgmental of women’s desires, though individual characters are judgmental, including of themselves.) If anyone’s interested in my copy, drop me a note.
Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross, The Rapture of the Nerds: A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations: Also a tale of how the remaining Americans after the singularity are right-wing religious nuts trying to kill the protagonist, who is the unwilling host of a posthuman entity trying to communicate with those left behind. In combination the authors have all their tics and none of their charm. I’ll wait for more Atrocity Archives from Stross, I think.
David Wojnarowicz, 7 Miles a Second: A graphic novel memoir of Wojnarowicz’s experiences as an underage hustler on the streets of New York and later his experiences living with, and slowly dying of, AIDS in a culture that wished for his destruction. Mixes the realistic and the hallucinatory with abandon-bodies dissolve and rot and grow flowers, sometimes all at once-and why not when we live in a world in which people can do horrible things to one another and it’s not shocking or even noteworthy?
Robert Kirkman et al., The Walking Dead, Book One: Small town law enforcement officer wakes from a coma, somehow still alive, and walks out into the zombie apocalypse. His wife and son are missing-spoiler, he finds them very quickly, and his partner is there putting the moves on his wife. I bailed early on, when it became clear that I was uninterested in the art, which while suited to the subject matter was too messy to engage me, and deeply uninterested in the story, which was clearly going to involve a lot of gender dynamics I didn’t like.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.