Signal Reads: 2001 - A Space Odyssey

Because as a kid I liked SPACE, the old man took me to whatever movies were out that featured people slipping free of the bonds of Earth's gravity.  And so it came to pass that he said "We can go see 2010, but I don't think you'll like it.  I've seen the first movie, and this isn't going to be The Last Starfighter."

"Ok," I said.  "I still want to go."

And so it passed that I saw 2010 in the theater and had to have The Admiral explain 2001 to me on the way home.  No, it did not have the visceral thrill of the sci-fi adventures I adored, but I had already seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so slow moving sci-fi epics were not outside my scope.  

Perhaps tellingly, very few kids in my grade saw 2010, but all of us in the special nerd math class I was in during 4th grade had seen it and thought it keen.  We also all agreed that Star Trek wasn't properly appreciated, so, you know, there was precedent.  In short - kid nerds of the 1980's.

About two years after 2010, The Admiral and Jason rented 2001 and watched it while I was out of the house.  A bit peeved I'd been left out, I sat down the next day and watched the first half of 2001 by myself until Jason wandered back into the house and finished watching it with me.  

So, yeah, its been a long time in coming that I finally decided to get a bit more of my nerd bonafides and purchased the audiobook of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  

According to Clarke's forward to the audiobook, done in 2000 as we neared the actual year 2001, the book was written basically for Stanley Kubrick so he'd have something to use when he made a sci-fi movie that wasn't, in the filmmaker's estimation, a whole lot of hoo-ha.  And it is interesting to compare and contrast Kubrick's film with the novel, which is written in the very literal terms of mid-20th Century Sci-Fi, and does not contain the ethereal feel or the explanation-by-implication that can leave some viewers feeling stranded in the film's last 20-30 minutes.  

Despite the fact that script and novel were co-developed, there are some differences, including Discovery's destination (Saturn in the novel) and an explicit explanation of HAL's malfunctioning.  

Frankly, I very much enjoyed the book and I'm glad I "read" it after all this time.   The themes of the novel and film reflect very much upon how I personally consider what it means for human beings to continue to look at space as a possibility, which is either because of Kubrick's influence or because I watched too much Trek as a kid.  

The audiobook, by the way, is extremely brief, running under 7 hours.  There's something to how long something like Stranger in a Strange Land runs, and how much information was shared, or how much story was necessary (that audiobook ran about 22 hours, I think), and the impact possible on the reader.  

In comparison to the Barsoom novels I'm also currently reading, well, its more or less two different ends of the spectrum from this genre we call "science fiction".  And with Clarke's scientific high mindedness, even the mystery of the cosmos that Kubrick puts forth gets a near unlimited omniscient narrator's explanation we'd never get from just the visuals of the film, draining away some of the mystery (or confirming what you thought Kubrick was suggesting).  

Its a wonderful novel, and if you can deal with some of the dated concepts and the deadpan characterization of David Bowman, Heywood Floyd and Frank Poole, there's a lot to like if you've never read the book.  Particularly HAL's characterization.  

I should mention, the HAL-related stuff is far less important to the book than the movie, and acts more as a fulcrum toward making a point about men, machines and the perils of both (especially a billion miles from home).

Anyone else read the book?  Thoughts?

Noir Watch: The Killers (1946)

Back in January in San Francisco I watched 1960's version of The Killers starring the lovely Angie Dickinson.

It had been a long time since I'd seen the 1946 version of The Killers, and maybe even longer since I read (and re-read and re-re-read) the Hemingway short story upon which both films are ostensibly based.

I bought the DVD of the film probably around 2004, and I've seen it a couple of times.  I still think large parts of it are phenomenal, even if watching it now, I realize how many amazing coincidences occur to help along Edmond O'Brien's good-natured insurance company gumshoe, Riordan, as he tries to find out what happened to Ole "Swede" Andreson (played by Burt Lancaster).

Sacred Teenage Mutant Ninja Cows

Its been interesting to age out of being the target group for big budget treatment of nostalgia projects and watch the same approach now being taken to the folks who were in elementary school when I was in high school or college.

The first (and BEST) Transformers cartoon aired when I was in elementary school, and we've been through three feature films worth billions.  We've exploited the exploitable franchises by relaunching Thundercats (I guess it airs on Cartoon Network?), DC and Marvel superheroes, we're getting our second GI Joe movie this year (you disappoint me, America), and for some god forsaken reason My Little Pony is a thing right now.

Not to mention the relaunch of Star Trek and the last three Star Wars movies.

I'll go ahead and pat myself on the back.  I was reading Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a comic way back in middle school during the initial run after it had created the black & white indie comics explosion.  I didn't see the cartoon until it had been airing for a while, but I did shock the 9th grade basketball team by relating way, way more about the TMNT than they ever wanted to know prior to the schlocky 1989 feature film's release.

When they became ubiquitous enough to get mentioned in a David Byrne song*, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had become a fad along the lines of, well, Tranformers or GI Joe for a generation of kids.  Like those franchises, the shows/stories and toys had been the productized and infinitely accessible mythology which could be considered a shibboleth for the generation, just as the name Optimus Prime or Roadblock might have been for my own.

It seems that over the weekend Transformers director Michael Bay, the man who makes movies everybody hates but everybody still plays to go see, announced that he's producing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles big budget picture.  And then informed the audience that his turtles aren't mutants, but aliens (because, that's better, I guess).

And some folks aren't very happy about it.

We're aliens, 'cause, sure, why not?

TL; DR: On DC, Superman, Didio and Reboots

• Infinite Crisis
• One Year Later
• Bart Allen as The Flash
• Superman's Silver Age reboot
• Wally West as The Flash
• Final Crisis
• Barry Allen as The Flash
• Wonder Woman's soft reboot with pants
• Flashpoint
• New 52
• Five Years Later

I would love to have heard the conversations that occurred between Dan Didio and Paul Levitz in the years before Levitz was shown the door and Didio and Lee became co-publishers.

At some point, I have to think Levitz was beginning to detect a pattern in Didio's planning and plotting.

What I'm getting at is that beginning in 2005, Dan Didio has more or less been playing the same card, over and over and over.  The one trick he has had up his sleeve has been the reboot (and I've guessed he was going to "reboot" Watchmen as well with prequels for a couple of years before they actually went ahead and did it).

Under Didio's supervision, DC was never particularly tied to continuity.  That was when we saw the rise of editors like Eddie Berganza who weren't even trying to maintain continuity in the Superman line of books, and were, instead, focusing on 6 issue arcs with new creative teams brought on every few issues, many of whom seemed baffled by their assignment in Newsarama interviews.  The interviews always read basically the same:  I'm a semi-hot writer, DC is offering me money, I don't know anything about Superman, but I am told he's the first and greatest.  And:  For Tomorrow.

At one point around 2005, it seemed the Superman books suffered from a near constant state of soft reboot as each creative team came and left.  All of that left the Superman books a mess, with the number of Superman titles tumbling from 4 to 2 on the stands.  And so it was that Infinite Crisis felt very welcome as it came along beginning in 2005 and ending in 2006.

The weekend was utterly uneventful

I am travelling this week for work, and as I was a little concerned about how much  money I've spent of late, this weekend, Jamie and I really didn't do anything.  It was...  what is the word?

Ah, yes:  relaxing.

Friday was uneventful.  I wound up staying up way, way past my bedtime watching about 1/3rd of Boogie Nights on HBO (then had to hit the hay).  I had forgotten what an amazing movie that was when it hit.  Its not for everyone, but from a scripting and technical standpoint, and from a performance standpoint (I'm looking at you, the fantastic Julianne Moore), there was a reason the movie received so many accolades when it hit theaters.

I still can't believe it played at just the plain 'ol Highland 10 back in the day.  America's movie-going habits have most certainly changed in a short amount of time.  Of course, that particular megaplex always had an interesting mix of Weinstein-branded stuff and then, say, The Pokemon Movie.*

Saturday I visited my "stylist" (she's not a barber, as she isn't a 56 year old guy in a white smock, but "stylist" makes it sound like I'm like Travolta dealing with his hair in Saturday Night Fever), and I am now freshly shorn. I tidied the house some, and later the Admiral and KareBear came over as The Admiral and I embarked on a minor home improvement project that led to some seriously iffy decision making and creation of a dozen drill holes in my garage wall.  The good news is that we have now hung hooks upon which our various mops and brooms can be stowed.

Today, for some reason we slept in very, very late.  And I really didn't get much done other than re-hanging some pictures in the house and watching part of the Cubs/ Rangers game on TV.

found the right spot for the Wonder Woman print.  yes, that is my office.

I also started re-watching The Killers (1946), but didn't finish.

I've been trying to do some writing outside the blog this weekend (I finished a chapter - No. 15.  Everybody celebrate.), so that accounts for some of the time, I suppose.

Hope your Monday is going swimmingly.



*which Jamie and I saw on a particularly goofy evening when there was nothing else playing we hadn't seen.  We used to see a LOT of movies.  I also saw the first Power Rangers movie in the theater as I'd seen literally everything else.

Is this possibly the best book cover ever?

Not enough of you will see this if I bury it as a reblog on tumblr.  And I could not bear the thought that you would not see this, as it's the most amazing book cover we've seen since Carmen Miranda's Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three.  Because it is absolutely the one time we shall judge a book by its cover.

From tumblr.

One More on St. Patrick's Day, before we go

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Happy St. Patty's Day from me, Jamie, The KareBear and The Admiral.

After all these years, I finally had a green beer on St. Patrick's Day.  It tasted like beer.

This picture was actually taken to tell Jason the family was really enjoying celebrating his B-Day without him.  Because that's how we roll in the Steans Clan.

Wow, you can really see the Nike logo on my shoe down there.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

It's not just Jason's B-Day, its also St. Patrick's Day!

Let's put on some green, shall we?

And why not Batman and Superman?

Try not to throw up all the Guinness, corned beef and cabbage, and we'll talk to you next week.

Happy B-Day to My Brother

Today is Jason's 39th Birthday.  Holy cow, we are getting old.  It seems like just yesterday 13-year-old Jason was beating the crap out of me for eating his Easter candy.

Time marches on.  We resolve our differences these days with far less pummeling, carefully laid traps, and mutually assured destruction.

This year Jason is spending his B-Day with AmyD, seeing some touristy stuff and catching up with some old pals in Houston.  I think his 39th year will likely be one of the best yet.

And, yes, I did get Jason a couple of presents and bought him a lovely dinner, so there.

our birthday boy

The boy has been cursed with a Leprechaun Day birthday, so his actual B-Day is often quite compromised, as it ALSO always falls during SXSW.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't go out and enjoy some St. Patrick's Day fun.  You know, if you can find a Bennigan's that's open or whatever.

Signal Watch Watches: Transcendent Man (2009)

I really wish I had seen this movie when it came out, but it was just recommended to me by Co-Worker Ladd this morning.

As much as I like a good, Thunderdomish Dystopian look at the future, from a technology and academic standpoint, I fall much more in the camp of pointing at the shinier spacecraft and rocket pack visions of the future.  Prepping for a time of Robot Shock Troopers tends to make you start stocking ammunition and buying property in Queen Creek, Arizona, and I'm just not ready to cut the sleeves off all my camo jackets yet, and I look terrible in a crazy-man beard.

In fact, I like my job partially because its all about the future where we get flying cars and can download dissertations directly into our noggins.  Digital libraries!  Hoorary!

It seems that technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil showed up as SXSWi 2012, and Co-Worker Ladd (yes, his name is Ladd) managed to see him speak.  Kurzweil is one of those names I've heard on and off for two decades, not quite the way you hear of Tim Berners-Lee, but he pops up on BoingBoing and is a name that technology hipsters tend to throw around.

Frankly, I should pay a lot more attention to these sorts of figures, because Kurzweil's personal innovations are incredible, even if that's not really the topic of the documentary, Transcendent Man (2009).  Instead, the doc follows Kurzweil as he moves around the planet as a bit of a Conference Personality, but as he also meets with figures from Colin Powell to William Shatner to an arena full of Church of Christ Conference attendees discussing the concept of The Singularity.*

As we all know, technology is advancing from all angles in ways predicted clumsily by Moore's Law.  What Kurzweil is looking at and discussing is that its not just processing power, but other technologies, falling into three areas of interest:  Genetics (bioinformatics), Nantotechnology and Robotics (or AI).  The Singularity is a point at which those things hit a point on the graph where the nature of humanity will be forced to change by the technologies so profoundly that it will rewrite our definitions of everything from technology to humanity to consciousness.

Basically, we're in a mad race to see if we create a race of super artificial intelligences, if we can rewrite our DNA to beat disease and aging while recreating the human body, or if nanotechnology will be merging us into machines while it has the ability to connect us to the super robot brains while rewriting our bodies into all looking like Fabio in 1994.  Or will we upload our consciousness to Facebook?

Here's the thing:  I think I know just enough about technology and SCIENCE to know I don't know anything, but I also tend to think that Kurzweil, while maybe jumping the gun on the timing, is probably right.

I intended to watch part of the show this evening and then return to it, but instead I watched the entire thing, slack jawed and in awe.  The movie manages to find genius after genius, players at the tops of their fields who all have different reasons to agree or disagree with Kurzweil in whole or in part, and its an absolutely gripping 80 minutes or so.  Especially as the director humanizes and builds a portrait of Kurzweil (a seemingly approachable gentleman, certainly) and digs into the basis for his quest and to see what drives him.

There are a tremendous number of questions occurring in the film, the sorts of things that have the longterm effects of global change, all without the pressure cooker or drive of a Manhattan Project.  Its happening now, and the minds pushing toward the future seem aware of the pitfalls and risks of the world they're creating, and seem to be sure that somebody else is going to deny the dinosaurs their Lysine.  Its absolutely riveting stuff.  And, again, this is a documentary.

The crowd that drifts into this blog is pretty smart and tech savvy, and I'd love to see what you guys have to say, if you've seen it or you get a chance to stream it from Netflix.

Highly, highly recommended.


*see my hilariously uninformed argument with my brother about the concept at his blog post from about a year ago.