Once there was a family of acrobats. There was a father, a mother, their son and two daughters. The entire family worked for a circus, performing on a high-wire. Night after night they leapt and balanced far above the ground. They loved their art, and they were very happy.
Then something terrible happened. One night at [...]
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
I must admit, I was somewhat disappointed by this book. It failed to blow my head off quite as much as it seems to have done for other readers. It is not that this is a bad book; in fact, I am duly impressed by the energy, depth [...]
In my younger years, I consumed a lot of science fiction. I read Clarke, Asimov, Card, Herbert, all the classic masters and a lot of the lesser lights besides. Somewhere in the late nineties I discovered Iain M. Banks, first stumbling into the epic Against A Dark Background. Being used to rigorously researched treatises that [...]
I’d never read Rushdie before. I can see why he has a Jihad against him — even in this book which only incidentally addresses religion, he is not shy about saying he sees no place for it. But that is beside the point. Rushdie is, truly, a brilliant writer.
The story is something about two kids [...]
I have just read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Minority Report and Other Classic Stories. This is my first exposure to the infamous Phillip K.Dick, and I must say he makes me uneasy. Not much literature does, but these stories had me feeling strangely paranoid and disturbed in many places. For that I [...]
Enter YouTube. Enter MySpace, Facebook, and all the others. Enter blogs, cheap DV cameras, cheap professional-grade software, cheap everything. If the point of Web 2.0 is to blur the distinction between information producer and consumer, then surely that shift applies also to art. Just as the journalism establishment has been forced to rethink itself after the advent of blogs, the Art Establishment may very soon find itself forced to reconsider all aspects of not only the creation and distribution of art, but what it means to be an artist.
But sometimes she’s on stage with torn fishnets. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playing and she’s dancing in the living room at 9:00PM on a Saturday night, waiting for her posse to arrive. They’re drunk already and loud, probably British, stepping into her apartment supporting one another and screaming over the tops of their cleavage. That’s the night out to come, a rage, a raw euphoria blind and sloppy. It’s screaming sex when you just don’t care anymore what the neighbors hear. If there’s a cost for this much life, so be it, but dear god she’ll think about it tomorrow; and the fishnets will never be mended because that’s the girl she is.
