Archive for May, 2005
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
May 15th, 2005
I am, by no definition of the word, a “Trekkie”–I’ve never sat through an entire episode of either Voyager or Enterprise, and I lost interest in Deep Space Nine after its first season. I’ve often found the original Star Trek with Captain Kirk and Mister Spock to be completely ludicrous most of the time, and often an insult to a true sci-fi fan’s intelligence. But Star Trek: The Next Generation has always had a very dear place in my heart, because ST:TNG was so often beautifully written, highly intelligent, and comprised an ensemble cast featuring some of my favorite actors of all time: Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Whoopie Goldberg, Brent Spiner, and so forth. Of all the Trek series, The Next Generation is the only one that consistently delivered great stories that dealt with serious topics such as, for instance, communication difficulties between human and nonhuman cultures, in a very intelligent and often enlightening fashion.
The greatest example of this is one of the bestknown TNG episodes ever: “Darmok.” Never before and never since has televised sci-fi ever dealt with communication difficulties better. To read my analysis of the episode, scoot on over to Page Numba 2….
Nerdular Nerdence!
May 13th, 2005
The other day, I picked up a new general book to learn PHP, which will vastly contribute to this here blog as well as a number of other web projects I’m currently working on (restructuring of HPL Labs and all its artists’ pages, a portfolio site demonstrating my general web fu for use with resumes etc.), and also discovered that there are a number of really good CSS/HTML manuals Out There as well: books that do not deal with XHTML or CSS construction only, but clearly show the relationship between them in such as way as to illustrate precisely how each system interlocks to create styled content. Friggin’ awesome. Soon as I get some extra cash, I’ll be picking them up as well, and then my dynamic web fu should be pretty damned smoking.
I’ve discovered I really like programming dynamic pages. Now, there’s always a time and a place for good ol’ static XHTML, but even using a bare minimum of PHP or JavaScript to enhance a page has proven to be extremely useful in cutting down on the amount of work I have to do to prepare individual pages and whatnot for websites. I really should’ve learned this stuff ages ago.
Now. So much for software news. In hardware news, it seems that my laptop’s DVD-ROM drive really, really does not like the new version of iTunes (4.8). There’s some kind of strange device driver conflict between the drive and iTunes that results in a BSOD every time I insert a new disk to, say, rip some music. This is the only time I’ve ever experienced a BSOD on this laptop, and I guess I’ll have to check this little problem out in more detail and figure out what’s going on there, because I really want to keep using iTunes, since it’s a great jukebox/music-management program.
OK. Enough nerdery for today. Remember folks: coming soon…Oneirophrenia.net!
Oneirophrenia
May 12th, 2005
I’m currently in the process of establishing Oneirophrenia.net, another “blog” powered by WordPress 1.5 that will basically host my freeform novel Oneirophrenia–a window into the mind of a pseudo-omniscient “narrator” who rattles about life in a constant dreamlike state. There’s really no other way I can describe it: there isn’t going to be any particular “plot,” at least not one that is particularly recognizable considering how often things shift and mutate at the drop of a fuckin’ dime, but everything will make a peculiar kind of sense–this ain’t Samuel Beckett we’re talking about here, though Beckett is an obvious influence, as are William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, and various other “surrealist” or imagistic writers.
OK, I admit it, Oneirophrenia is mostly going to be an excuse for me to kick out the crazy-ass English-major word games. I’m a huge fan of creative stylistics, and I try to work with interesting styles of writing in everything I do…but, obviously, in a work like NONFICTION! or any other form of “popular” writing you can’t get away with a lot of wiggidy-wiggidy-whack word games and avant-garde stylistics for fear of swamping an otherwise engaging narrative beneath sheer orthographic craziness. When you’re writing from the point of view of a possibly-schizophrenic narrator, however, all bets are off and you can really let your hair down and just execute all manner of bizarre, innovative, or just plain entertaining linguistic acrobatics a la Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, but obviously not so dense and mutated and impossible-to-figure out that only the author himself could ever understand what’s going on. I want people to read this thing, and enjoy it. Enjoy something in which I can kick out the jams without having to worry about the confinement of conventional narrative, but at the same time not get so convoluted or esoteric that I render the “story” as such completely invisible.
So, there you have it. My aesthetic statement concerning Oneirophrenia. I’ll obviously let everyone know once it’s ready to kick off, so you can RSS it or bookmark it as it develops!
Livewerk
May 10th, 2005
I recently acquired an advanced copy of Kraftwerk’s new double-CD live album Minimum Maximum. As far as live albums go, it’s frickin’ amazing. I’m not a connosieur of live albums, because too often either A) the recording quality completely blows, or–more often–B) the performance captured on the live disk is just horrible. You’d be surprised how many bands sound great on CD but completely stink live. Nonetheless, I’ve found a number of great live albums over the year (Frampton Comes Alive, of course, but also Banco de Gaia’s Live at Glastonbury and Barenaked Ladies’ Rock Spectacle)…but I must say, Kraftwerk’s new live collection is the best of them all.
First of all, the recording quality is superb. Let me say that again: superb. One more time: superb. There are 22 tracks, representing performances in a wide variety of European locales, and all of them are crystal clear and so beautifully mixed that you’d swear you’re standing there in the audience while the robots themselves kick out the machine-jams.
But. Good recording quality only does so much. Best of all are the songs themselves–the performances and the arrangements. “The Man Machine,” for example, has been redone slightly and remixed so that it’s a little cleaner-sounding and a bit more interesting, with some neat reverb on the drums, for instance. “Tour de France” sounds as though it’s taken from an unknown remix CD. And, in fact, the album does not sound like a live album so much as an updated remix CD.
It’s completely awesome. Check it out, as it comes highly recommended.
The Amityville Freak-Out
May 8th, 2005
So. I finally saw the new remake of The Amityville Horror tonight. In a nutshell: a fairly-decent remake of a classic haunted house tale that gets a LOT of things right that the original clearly missed-out on, but still fails a good bit as well thanks to an overabundance of gratuitous, hackneyed plot devices and concepts that the film could’ve easily done without.
Before you go on to the review itself, let me warn yo’ ass: spoilers abound from here on…because there’s no real way for me to talk about what both made the film and wrecked it for me without mentioning specifics, many of which concern the climax. If you’ve already seen the film or don’t care about me “ruining the plot for you” - which should be impossible because, c’mon, who hasn’t either seen the original or doesn’t know something about the archetypal tale, anyway? - then proceed on by clickin’ the little number 2 below….
