Really. I shall be introducing the incredible, spectacular, momentous, staggering, and just plain jaw-breakingly awesome film, It Came From Outer Space, on Friday, March 5th, at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC. Come one, come all, for 50s American SF at its most 50s and American. (My first choice was that classic of British cinema, The Quatermass Experiment, where my 8th grade English teacher plays the scientist/sidekick, but the musem couldn’t get a copy, so that was that.)
This actually fell right in the middle between Likes-Some-Things and Likes-Nothing. Being such a positive guy, I decided to give Stew the benefit of the doubt. After all, I love his discs.
The last four songs of the show were what I really liked. Stew is a great singer, larger than life personality, and very funny. All this came through in the last four songs. The first two-thirds of the show, however, were a bit too overwrought for my taste. Stew drinking, Stew crawling across the floor into a mini-fridge. And the video show playing on three screens was ho-hum at best. There is a reason I’ve never been part of the art crowd, where the banal can be worshiped every bit as much as Beethoven’s 5th. And the songs seemed overproduced, which is the musical sin I’m least likely to forgive.
Maybe it was because this was the last night of the show and Stew and the band were either trying too hard or not trying hard enough.
But the last four songs were wonderful. Am listening to some of them right now.
An op-ed piece in the NYTimes today about why record companies are a necessary evil. As are publishing companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/opinion/20kulash.html?ref=opinion
Because she’s lazy and fast, just like me. Or at least like I used to be.
Mostly I just ate myself to death. Chinese for lunch Saturday, Afghani food for dinner that night, came back to Brooklyn with good friends Melinda Snodgrass and Ian Tregillis (make sure to buy their books when they come out in April from Tor!) for Italian dinner, then dim sum and Chinese New Year on Monday.
Burp.
I think there was a con in there somewhere.
There’s been a lot of ranting back and forth lately about the Amazon/Macmillan fiasco of a couple of weeks back, and I thought I’d take a moment to make clear what I thought (and what I believe a lot of other authors thought) about the whole thing.
First of all, it wasn’t about the pricing. Personally, I don’t think either pricing model being proposed is the right one. I think ebooks should be priced like mass market paperbacks, mostly because I think mass market paperbacks are what ebooks are going to ultimately replace. So I don’t really care one way or the other about Amazon’s or Macmillan’s pricing models. (Not that Amazon or Macmillan care what I think about book pricing. I have even less input on that than I do on the cover art.)
What it was about for me was bullying. I don’t like bullies. I have no idea what was happening at the negotiating table – maybe Macmillan said something to Amazon that left Amazon no recourse but to pull the buy buttons from Macmillan’s books. But I doubt it. Mostly Amazon’s tactics struck me as those of the kid in the pickup basketball game who, not liking the fact that the gang doesn’t want to play by his rules, takes his ball and goes home. It’s his ball, so he can do what he wants. But that doesn’t mean I can’t think he’s a jerk for doing it.
And, because there was a personal element involved, ie my books being affected (I probably lost only two or three sales, but still), my reaction was a bit more virulent than it might otherwise have been. But, even if I hadn’t been involved, I think the substance of my reaction would have remained the same.
I don’t like bullies.
Chicks in chainmail and soubrettes with swords just don’t do it for me any more. I’ll take a 19th c. spinster who can do sums any time. She takes on her tradesman father, marries one of his workingmen, and gets her sisters settled into the bargain. If you can get past Charles Laughton hamming it up as a drunk, this is a very funny flick.
Boskone this weekend. In Boston, of course. I’m still trying to think of any bad books I love, since mostly I don’t ike good books either.
Friday 9pm More on the Business of Writing
S. C. Butler (M)
Elaine Isaak
Melinda Snodgrass
Ian Tregillis
Last year we did this program item, and people enjoyed it so much
that we’re doing it again! Find out what the writer needs to know
and do to become (financially) successful (or, at least
responsible). It’s not all creativity or perspiration, no matter
what you’ve heard before!
Friday 10pm Bad Books I Love
S. C. Butler
Kathryn Cramer
Theodora Goss
Paul Levinson (M)
Feorag NicBhride
Choose your favorite piece of mindless mush, and persuade us to look
at it a second time. Admit those guilty pleasures! (C’mon, you know
you want to!)
Saturday2pm The City and Science Fiction
S. C. Butler
Alexander Jablokov (M)
James Patrick Kelly
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Steven H. Silver
From the planet-spanning urbs of Trantor or Coruscant to the
steamfunkier precincts of New Crobuzon to the vastly vertical
Spearpoint of Alastair Reynolds forthcoming Terminal World what s
your favorite skiffy megalopolis? Would you move there tomorrow?
Would it actually work as a technological/societal/economic
artifact? In an advanced, post-scarcity society, would people even
want to pig-pile together? What will cities be like in the future?
(And what would you prefer them to be?)
Saturday5pm Autographing
Sunday 11am Reading (0.5 hrs)
Boy, do I. Best book I’ve read in a long time, fiction or non-fiction. Throes of Democracy is the second book in Walter A. McDougall’s projected multivolume history of the US. The first, Freedon Just Around the Corner, took us from the European arrival in North America to Jackson’s election in 1828. The current volume continues the narrative to Rutherford B. Hayes’s disputed election in 1876. (And you thought 2000 was bad.)
The books are smetimes glib to a fault. They are surveys of their times, not in-depth analyses. McDougall’s tone is ironic and conservative, with a touch of the gleeful cynic as well. But the conservatism is not the false conservatism of the current day, which wishes to conserve nothing but ts own power. It is an older conservatism that does not believe in the perfectability of humanity, and views all such attempts as vainglorious, dictatorial, and more than a little self-serving. In short, it is a scholarly point of view that is very much out of step with mainstream progressive American scholarship (the NY Times savaged the book), or the conservative backlash that currently represents the other side of the debate.
Whatever you think of the theme, it is a great read. McDougall has no sacred cows (except maybe Lincoln), and savages everyone from the Transcendentalists to the Know-Nothings. (Having been forced to worship Emerson and the Transcendentalists at my New England college I enjoyed their skewering very much.) He views the Civil War as a disaster for all parties, with the freeing of the slaves barely making up for the century of Black American sufferng that followed. His main thesis, that the US has always been a nation of self-interested hucksters draping ourselves in moral hypocrisy in order to justify our ambition and greed is, in my opinion, completely accurate. And very appropriate, given our current natonal condition.
It’s a beutifully written and very interesting book. If you like the bashing of sacred cows, do yourself a favor and take a look.
MacMillan’s books are still not up at Amazon.
