Bladerunner 2

Not just no, but hell no.

This weekend I received an e-mail from /Film reader Tanner C. informing me that one of the screenwriters of Eagle Eye was working on a screenplay for Blade Runner 2. I spent the weekend trying to get confirmation, and thanks to my friend Frosty at Collider who was able to get in touch with a second person who was also at the event, I was able to confirm that the following was actually said. But before you throw a hissy fit. let me fill you in on all the details and assure you that nothing is being developed by the studio itself, or with the studio’s involvement.

Although I disagree with the article's author -- I don't believe Bladerunner is perfect -- it remains one of my top three all-time favorite movies in any genre. For all its faults, it remains a visionary work no matter the version, and one of the movies that had the biggest impact on me. The very thought that someone would even attempt a sequel makes me want to bellow with rage.

Finally, a Texas politician speaks the truth...

"Like the Iraq war and patriot act, this bill is fueled by fear and haste," said Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas on the Bailout Bill.

Linux/Unix Cartoons

I ran across this entertaining site with cartoons that make references to Linux and Unix. LinuxToon reprints selections from Doonesbury, Dilbert, Robotman, Foxtrot, Dr. Fun, and even some Norwegian strips!

A Dream of Vandermeers!

Vandermeers hard at work on what I can only assume is a new literary theory!

Last night, I had this long, complex dream about Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. The gist of the dream was that they took a group of diner-goers hostage in order to explain their latest literary theory. Not surprisingly, no one understood it. Frustrated, the duo planned on killing a hostage an hour until someone comprehended it.

Since I seemingly grok Jeff's books (and presumably the only one in the vicinity stupid enough to help), the cops called me in to decipher the theory. Problem was that it was complete unintelligible, When it became obvious that I had no idea what the hell they were talking about, the couple kissed and similar to the beginning of Pulp Fiction, Ann stood on the table pointing her gun at people. Before she could scream "Any of you fucking pricks move, and I'll execute every motherfucking last one of ya!", I woke up.



Some weird ass shit there.

My grandfather and Rocky Horror

In the Cleveland Plain Dealer blog, reporter John Petkovic wrote about the origins of the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Sandwiched between the seminal influences of Universal Monsters and sci-fi kitsch, Petkovic featured this tidbit:

Pinup bondage queens: In the 1950s, New York photographer Irving Klaw spawned the careers of Bettie Page and other garter-and-lingerie pinup queens by shooting them in campy scenes full of whips and spanking and high heels.

Some Palin weirdness

[UPDATE 9/18 11:20 AM: The Tech-Ex post is now available but with no explanation for the disruption. Wikileaks is still not loading.]

As I often do during my day, I checked my Google Reader to see what was going on with my favorite blogs. Tech-Ex included an entry with the heading "Hackers Break into Palin's Yahoo! Email."


In case you can't read it, the post says:

Sarah Palin, John McCain's running-mate, has come under fire for using her private Yahoo! email address for state business. The reason? As a public official she's supposed to use her official email address (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). She even has a Blackberry, so why would she even need to use Yahoo! mail?

At any rate, the hacker group Anonymous, famous for taking on the Church of Scientology, said Wednesday it had hacked into a second Palin Yahoo! account, and shipped off screenshots and emails to Wikileaks, the web site started with the intention of allowing whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents, "an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. "

Sounds like a good place to send them, if in fact Palin was hiding anything.

Here’s the announcement from Wikileaks (someone seems to be firing back at Wikileaks as it is unreachable at the time of this writing).

Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) Wikileaks’ sources loosely affiliated with the activist group ‘anonymous’ gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to avoid government transparency mechanisms. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, example emails, address book and two family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism.

That was enough to send me to Tech-Ex and read more.



Strange. The page is missing, but was yet to be deleted from Google Reader. I decided to click on the link within the Google Reader entry for the Wikileaks info.



Similar to as reported in the Tech-Ex entry, Wikileaks is still unresponsive. I got the same results after attempting to reload the page several times. I also go the same results when I tried to load the main Wikileaks page.

I'm not saying she nor the Republican Party had anything to do with this, but what the hell?

And for those who can't read the final bit of small type at the end of the first image, here's what else Tech-Ex had to say:

While, of course, it would be easy to fake an email address like this, the quantity of emails, the contacts list, and the fact that Wired got a response confirming at least one email leads me to believe it's not a fake.

Amy McCorkell, whom Palin appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in 2007, confirmed to Wired that one of the emails was legitimate.

The e-mail, a message of support to Palin, tells her not to let negative press get to her and asks Palin to pray for McCorkell, who writes that "I need strength to 1. keep employment, 2. not have to choose."

Be sure to check out the Wired article while you still can!

The Quiller Memorandum

Today's New York Times had a little article on the 1966 film of Adam Hall's novel The Quiller Memorandum, interestingly looking at the film as an artifact of a 60's Berlin digging itself out of the rubble of World War II.

I'm basically mentioning this as a heads up to Derek, who I know likes the Quiller books as much as I do. They fall almost exactly in between Fleming and Le Carre, also reminiscent of Deighton's Harry Palmer books---action-packed spy novels, but with a smartly introspective protagonist. One of Hall's quirks that catches me up each time I read one of his novels is his tendency to cut away in the middle of a scene, usually to reflect damage to Quiller--if I remember right there is one book in which he is in a hotel room about to open a door, next sentence he's in a hospital bed, and only slowly do you get that there was a bomb behind the hotel room door.

Anyway, the movie looks pretty cool, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and an international cast of stars. George Segal as Quiller is a little off putting, but Segal was a pretty good actor back then--I think I'll have to put this one on my Netflix list and check it out.

The End?

It's sad when what you know-to-be-true is painfully documented in an lengthy, well-written article from a prestigious magazine.

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.

Since my Mojo Press days in the mid-1990s, I've argued that the entire dinosaur-like publishing industry needed to change or be eaten alive by the newer mammalian media. I'm not saying that books will disappear, just the major publishers with their archaic methods.

I've long been concerned that Amazon will simultaneously save the industry and destroy it. Now others agree.

The ultimate fear is that the Kindle could be a Trojan horse. Right now, Amazon is making little or nothing on Kindle books. Lay down your $359 and you can get most books for $9.99. Publishers list that same Kindle version for about $17.99, though, and—as with all retailers—charge Amazon roughly half that price for it. Which means that Amazon keeps only a dollar on each book, while the publishers make $9.

But Amazon may be offering a sweet deal now in order to undercut publishers later. If their low, low prices succeed in making e-books the dominant medium, they can pay publishers whatever they want. “The concern is they want to corner the market,” explains one books executive, and then force publishers to accept a genuine 50 percent discount. “If they took over as little as 10 to 20 percent of the market,” says an agent, “publishers simply would not be able to exist.”

This anonymous quote near the end of the article sums up my long-running feelings over publisher reactions to the changing world.

“We’re an industry more willing to watch the boat sink than rock it a wee bit.” —ONE FRUSTRATED PUBLISHER

It does seem to be an industry bent on suicide. Possible solutions exist out there, but will only happen if the authors, publishers, and booksellers work together and stop pointing fingers of blame. I'm tired of hearing how things use to be and how bad they are now. The "good old days" of publishing are gone and ain't coming back. It's time to re-invent the wheel, to figure the new publishing dynamic.

With "The End," New York writer Boris Kachka produced an excellent eulogy to the way things use to be.


(Thanks to Mark London Williams for the link.)

Burn After Reading review

My review of the latest Coen Bros film, Burn After Reading, appears at Moving Pictures.

Similar in tone to the Danny DeVito/Bette Midler vehicle Ruthless People (1986), except with a superior cast and script, Burn After Reading relies on the humor inherent in stupid, unlikable people in untenable situations behaving badly. The characters engage in one moronic action after another, often inducing groans and eye-rolling in the helpless viewer.

Continued...

Robert Downey Jr Quote

“I'm crazy about movies. It's why I became an actor. I could cry watching C.H.U.D. (Cannibal Humanoid Underground Dwellers). I buy into movies. I love it." -- Robert Downey, Jr., "I Am Iron Man", a behind-the-scenes documentary from the Iron Man DVD.

Baker's Dozen with Patrice Sarath

For my 13th Baker's Dozen interview, Gordath Wood novelist Patrice Sarath and I discussed first novels, horses, day jobs, and why it's okay to suck.

As an active member of the Slug Tribe, an Austin writers group, and a workshop teacher, what advice do you offer for newer writers attempting their first novel? Do you find that teaching and working with other writers helps you with your own writing?

Just write. Writing is hard, but it gets easier.

Be consistent. Write every night or on a schedule you can live with. You don't need eight hours of empty time to write. You'll just end up wasting about seven hours of that.

Know the difference between rituals that get you in the right frame of reference to write, and mere procrastination.

Dare to suck. Everyone does, and everyone gets better.

Something I have seen novices do over the years (and have done myself) is they write below their ability. If you think that a particular market will be "easy" to break into, you'll waste your time writing down to that market. You won't sell anything that you think is dreck, so why write it and submit to a market you hold in contempt? Write up instead. Stretch yourself and your abilities.

I love teaching because it's a way to pay it forward. I know that people say, "you can't teach writing," and I think that's true, that writing can't be taught. However, writing can be learned, and workshops are a great way to learn. I like the camaraderie of workshops too, the sense that you're all in it together. And everyone learns how to critique their own work by critiquing others, so I highly recommend getting into a writer's group or workshop to learn that skill.

Forthcoming books

At our previous meeting (and shame on you for not being there), we determined the selections for the remainder of the year.

Our schedule through the end of the year:

• September 10 Elric: The Stealer of Souls by Michael Moorcock (Del Rey edition)
• October 8 The Prestige by Christopher Priest

• November 12 The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
  
• December 10 The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

As always, we meet at 7 PM at the Flightpath. Visit the Dark Forces home page for more details.



(September's meeting is the group's 8th anniversary and January's selection will be our 100th book! Visit the Dark Forces home page for a complete listing of previous selections.)

East Bound and Down

Sad news that Jerry Reed has died. I thought about him just the other day. I was watching Hurricane Gustav coverage and somebody mentioned that the storm was heading over Thibodaux, Louisiana and I spent the next couple of minutes trying to figure out why I knew that town's name. The answer, I finally remembered, was Reed's great song Amos Moses ("about 45 minutes southeast of Thibodaux, Louisiana/lived a man named Doc Milsap and his pretty wife Hannah").

I'm not a huge country music fan, but Jerry Reed is some of the good stuff---one of those good natured artists that transcends genre. Besides having an incredibly distinctive voice, when I was growing up, Reed was one of the kings of the novelty song--Amos Moses, When You're Hot You're Hot, She Got the Goldmine (I Got The Shaft). Not to mention starring in Smokey and The Bandit (and stealing The Survivors out from under Robin Williams and Walter Matthau if you remember that obscure movie constantly shown on HBO in the 80s) .

Star Trek: The Original Series - The Complete Second Season

Brandy and I were lucky enough to review the remastered second season.

Initially, their efforts centered primarily on digitally remastering the original show's negatives. As worked progressed, they re-recorded the scores in 5.1 surround stereo. Perhaps most dramatically, the production team re-imagined and re-shot all the special effects. Despite these changes, the episodes retain every story element and piece of dialogue from the originally-aired viewings, staying faithful to the intent of the creators. This is no Star Wars, where Lucas added additional scenes, reinterpreted, and often changed the intent of the original stories. These new versions are both vintage and fresh.

The fundamental element of Star Trek's success, the relationship between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, fully blossoms during the second season. So when the alternate reality events of the fourth episode ("Mirror, Mirror") unfold, we respond with proper shock at the mirror world incarnations of the established characters. When Kirk and McCoy convince the bearded, alternate Spock of the logic of allowing them to return to their own dimension -- much like the behavior of the established Spock, we are also unsurprised.

If you haven't had the chance to see these re-mastered gems, I recommend it highly.

Short soundless preview of the remastered "Mirror, Mirror" from TrekMovie.com