Puck

KJ and I are on the return leg of a week exploring the wilds of Washington and British Columbia. On the first day out, driving west along the back roads of eastern Washington, we stumbled upon this field. The truck here really is bogged down in dried mud. I’ve no idea what the story is, but the image was irresistible.

Don't Get Bogged Down with Meth

I keep meaning to mention that fact that I love Your Logo Makes Me Barf.

A logo from today’s update doesn’t make me barf, though; it makes me wonder if the pilots flying in and out of this airport really have to crash into the mountain in order to land and take off. Or is their logo just barfy?

We're all gonna die! Barfy logo for Pocatello Airport

Cindy over at the agribiz-subsidized blog Corn Commentary popped some widgets over my post about her yellow pseudo-journalistic post on the film Food, Inc. Being a corporate PR hack, she of course completely and deliberately (I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt; she might just be dumb) missed my point, the point of the film review she critiqued, and the point of Food, Inc. But let’s let bygones be begones. (Although I should point out that Corny calls me “yellow,” but it is she who has closed comments on her post. Now there’s a good way to start a conversation….)

My main point in re Corny Cindy is that she ain’t doing her job. She continues to navel-gaze and assume that her audience knows WTF she’s talking about. Rule number one in being a corporate PR hack: explain your position in short simple sentences. Instead, Corny erects strawmen and duly knocks them down: the amount of corn grown, the types of corn grown, etc. The simple case she needs to make, but can’t because it just isn’t there to be made, is that corporate ag cares about consumer and environmental health more than it does the economic bottom line.

At least Cindy looked up “yellow journalism” is Wikipedia. Now if she and the industry she flacks for would only look in the mirror.

Have some fun with Translation Party and bounce between English and Japanese. Try entering “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York highlands.“

Mel Wilder (Saffron Burrows) has one, maybe two months to live. She also has a fistful of high-limit credit cards. It’s a frail skeleton to hang a story on and, in the end, there’s not much meat on these bones. We do, however, learn an important lesson from The Guitar: when dealing with the American medical establishment, always get a second opinion.

The Guitar has been called The Bucket List for the art mob, but that ain’t it. It’s really Sex and the Single Girl writ small and particular. In Helen Gurley Brown’s classic self-help book, the “mouseburger” single female is cajoled and instructed to use men to her advantage and for her pleasure; turnabout is fair play. In The Guitar, mouseburger Mel is pricked into action by a death sentence. Implausibly, as she comes into work late the next morning, she’s fired by her overbearing boss with whom she can’t even squeeze in a 140-character tweet. A few minutes later, it’s her boyfriend who runs her over with his emotional needs; he breaks up with her.

All the while, the soundtrack is overburdened by Mel’s disease, which makes her wheeze. It’s a strange congruence, Mel being overrun by males while we hear heavy breathing as the boys speak. It adds up to a weird, unintentional, and distracting Freudian slip. Read more on Curled Up With A Good DVD…

MICROFUNDO is changing the way the world finances music by applying the principles of microfinancing to the music industry : a Kiva.org for music.

MICROFUNDO’s mission is to support the entrepreneurial activities of independent musicians from developing countries around the world – championing undiscovered musicians who would otherwise not have the means to develop their music careers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nisi Shawl’s novella, “Good Boy,” is a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. “Good Boy” appears in Nisi’s 2008 book, Filter House, which has already made a lot of folks’ best-of lists — including mine. Good luck, Nisi!

Home-loan blues won’t stand up to Grandpa Elliot and the Playing for Change band.

Check ‘em out, and here’s hoping we all hook up at the show in Seattle in November!

L. Timmel Duchamp wrote a great review of On Joanna Russ, the literary-critical anthology which I’m a part of.  The review just went up on Strange Horizons. Duchamp writes,

the realization struck me that the collection’s essays could be divided into those that, on the one hand, seek to smooth over Russ’s angry edges and those that, on the other, attend closely and carefully to all that is uncomfortable and challenging in Russ’s work. Such a division, however, would create so sharp a difference between critical approaches that I had to wonder: does recognition of the angry edges in Russ’s work matter? Ought critics to engage directly with them? Psychological experiments have shown that subjects more easily recognize anger in men’s faces than in women’s, confirming feminist observations that women’s anger is commonly treated as derisory, unnecessary, or unwarranted. What, then, is a (feminist) reader to make of a critic’s ignoring or patronizing of that anger?

I’m not sure Duchamp ever really answers that question in her review. Speaking for myself, I felt that Russ’s anger is at the core of her work, that it truly does matter, that her anger is what makes her work sing, and so I tried to honor it as well as I could. Her’s what Duchamp says about my piece:

The final piece in the book, Brian Charles Clark’s “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ” is more a paean to Russ’s fiction than an essay. It leaps and soars over the (topological) surface of Russ’s fiction at speed, sampling literary and theoretical allusions even more promiscuously than Butler’s essay does, with manic energy and delight, never lighting on the surface for more than an instant. While Butler’s essay invokes Cixous’s style, Clark’s, never burdened by the gravid weight of critical pretension, actually emulates it. Clark’s essay serves as a coda, taking the book out on an appreciative—even ecstatic—note of Russ’s still-standing challenge.

KJ and I saw McFarin do this at a show at the University of Idaho a few months ago. It was amazing to be part of the audience – but the effect is pretty cool even as a viewer of this video.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.