Puck

review by Brian Charles Clark

Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker
by Stan Brakhage
Publisher: Documentext, 2003

Stan Brakhage died of cancer induced, he says in an interview on the Criterion Collection’s DVD anthology of 26 of his films, By Brakhage, by the dyes he used to hand-paint many of his avant-garde films. He left a body of work that includes nearly 400 films ranging in length from nine seconds to four hours, as well as numerous lectures, essays and books. The present collection of “Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker” (as the editor, Bruce McPherson, has subtitled the book), are all but two of his contributions to the quarterly Toronto magazine Musicworks, written between 1989 and 1999. As a child, Brakhage was a musical prodigy, grew up aspiring to be a poet, and was influenced by Abstract Expressionism as a young man in New York before turning to filmmaking. These depths of influence and aspiration are all represented among the essays in Telling Time. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Confusion: The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2
by Neal Stephenson
HarperCollins, 2004

Neal Stephenson has, from his first novel, displayed a couple of highly sought-after writerly talents: a yarn-spinning ability that is almost divinely Irish, as if his mother had given birth to him atop the Blarney Stone; and a knack for language that makes his books tower above those of other science fiction and adventure-thriller writers. Zodiac (usually listed as his first novel, but in fact his second, after The Big U) told the story of a group of all-but-in-name Earth First! direct-activists. This was followed by his break-out novel, the mind-boggling Snow Crash, which revealed a fascination that has held Stephenson’s gaze ever since: cryptography. From the peak of Snow Crash there was a bit of a downhill slide, to The Diamond Age, and then Cryptonomicon. The latter of these two was a disappointment: Stephenson’s prose had dipped into the merely workmanlike (though still head-and-shoulders above the other “cyberpunks” his was classed with after Snow Crash), and the story was, while full of twists and turns and surprises, that of a fairly straightforward thriller. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad
by Minister Faust
Publisher: Rayo, 2005

“Kot-TAM!” The Coyote Kings are here—or at least they’re in Edmonton, Canada. Minister Faust’s (AKA Malcolm Azania) debut novel is a page-turning metaphysical-cum-science fiction thriller. Or it would be a page-turner if it didn’t have its feet stuck in cold-day molasses. If The Coyote Kings were about a third shorter it would be a page-turner; as it stands, it reads like some strange (“post-modern”) exercise in linguistic ethnography. Read the rest of this entry »