Someone at the conference took a jab at TRANSCENDENCE, a film I had never heard of and thus decided to watch despite its horrendous ratings.
I quite enjoyed it! It does falter terribly in the third act, but its first half is pretty darn good. It is almost certainly every delusional techno-optimist's wet dream; It isn't hard to picture our feudal tech overlords frothing at the mouth through most of it (it's even got a 2-second cameo of Musk). But, there is something there.
In other news, Xi Jinping landed in Egypt yesterday, a visit that was much publicized and can likely be taken as a clue of what's to come. Interesting times.
#radar #film
One of the great things about attending scholarly conferences—aside from all the really smart people you meet—is the treasure trove of book recommendations you get. Now adding to my tbr pile:
- GOLIATH — by Tochi Onyebuchi
- GRACE — by Barbara Boswell
- MUTE COMPULSION: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital — by Soren Mau
- MORE AND MORE AND MORE: An All-Consuming History of Energy — by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
That last one, I cannot even count the number of times it was mentioned or cited.
#radar #reads
Mark Millar interviewing Traves Charest is so great.
Downloaded Ian M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS on kindle for my travel reading, which I have embarrassingly yet to read. Even more embarrassing is that I haven't read any of The Culture novels, but they've been coming up enough in conversations for the past few years that it is high time.
Been a minute since I busted out the kindle, after having amassed a number of Arab-language paper books at the Cairo Book Fair earlier in the year. Last thing I read on the kindle was Walter Mosley's ARCHIBALD LAWLESS: ANARCHIST AT LARGE, which I really really loved.
#radar #reads
Koshary's kittens have all scurried off to explore the world, save for Tiger, who has decided to make the garden his domain. Curious, because he was the most avoidant of the lot. Now all of a sudden he's become an immensely affectionate little slut.
Amsterdam-based graphic designer Hans Gremmen has created over 400 books. While making these books, a miscellaneous pile kept growing in his studio: notes, sketches, photos, printed matter, screenshots, ephemera, and other breadcrumbs. ‘In Between’ is an attempt to deconstruct and re-organise this pile. The publication is a scrapbook about a hybrid design practice, but also a plea to consider failure as an option.
I would absolutely love to do something similar. I have an unruly amount of scraps, sketches, notes, process stuff, and photographs that I can absolutely see packaged and preserved in a similar way. Perhaps not in one big phonebook of a publication, but maybe an ongoing zine of sorts. A strange and regular rag that collects this stuff would absolutely work, given that such typically discarded material is likely to continue being a byproduct of the kind of work I do. Problem with that format is that it wouldn't sit on the shelf very well. But if each unit was in the hundred-page-range, you can give it a spine and make it work. A print-on-demand model might be a good option for this sort of thing.
Still, just the time it would take to gather this stuff and package it into a coherent and decent-enough design sounds like enough of a daunting sinkhole that I'm not sure I have the time for.
#journal #radar
There's a bit in Robert Rodriguez's interview with Quentin Tarantino where Tarantino admits to being affected by how much of a commercial flop GRINDHOUSE turned out to be, and goes on to laugh about how Rodriguez doubled down and proceeded to come out with MACHETE and MACHETE KILLS.
Despite publication difficulties faced by THE SOLAR GRID, there's a part of me that would love to follow the Rodriquez method and double down and go on to make a series of short graphic novellas set in the world of THE SOLAR GRID anyway. Because you gotta admit, that would be kinda badass.
And if that doesn't shake away the whole “street-artist of the Egyptian revolution” thing that's become so intertwined with my reputation, I'm not exactly sure what else would.
#radar #journal
The world's first digital nomad: One Planet Journey interviews Steven K. Roberts.
Why Do Tech Bros Always Learn The Wrong Thing From Sci-fi? – Demonitzed on Youtube.
Music is a weapon – Chords and Discords on Youtube.
“Your eyes keep the world at a distance. You can look away from a horror film, you can step back from a painting, you can put down the book, or just close your eyes. But your ears can't do any of that. There's no such thing as earlids.” — Knrad, Chords and Discords.
#radar
Dresden presentation in the can. Accounting taken care of. Laundry done. Inbox 0, RSS 0.
I can now spend the next couple of days tending to house things before boarding my flight with little worry.
From Ahmed Naji's latest:
“There is a legend about Abu Nuwas. He went to a master and asked to be taught. The master told him to go and memorize a thousand lines of poetry. He spent a year doing it, then returned. The master said: 'Good. Now forget them. If you can, you will be a poet.'”
#journal #radar
“I left Egypt alone. A writer with no affiliation to any political organization, wandered astray from my religious and national groups. However, once I arrived in America, this lost all value and meaning, for no sooner had I presented myself at the terminal gates did I not only receive the official government stamp, but left the airport branded with a whorish array of labels that I never got to have a say in choosing nor could make sense of.
“Soon, however, the minutiae of daily life in exile compels one, especially in the field of writing and cultural work, to gradually adapt to those labels invisibly branded on one’s backside. I recall that it was during my first few months in the country that someone asked me a question in which they referred to me as a brown writer —a term I was unfamiliar with at the time — and it was only after I asked for further explanation during which the same person stammered and fumbled to present me with an adequate answer that I finally understood it to be a term directed at writers who did not belong to the white or black race.”
From TAMING THE IMMIGRANT by Ahmed Naji.
“I have found that obedience and conformity in the United States are not strictly enforced or heavily guarded by armed soldiers or prisons, instead they present as a whisper, a sound vibration that crashes into your consciousness where they transform into ants that proceed to slowly and gradually eat away at your insides until they ultimately deform you after which they proceed to build you back up and mold you into what the system determines what you should become.”
#radar
Random thought: The whole simulation theory thing that seems to be increasingly trendy these days actually isn't at all at odds with any of the traditional religious beliefs of old, the ones that imagined god as an anthropomorphized king on a throne in the clouds. Because simulation theory by definition implies the entire universe being created by someone somewhere. The anthropomorphized king in this case being a computer programmer. The throne: an ergonomic chair. Which, if you think about it, just so happens to be this decade's flavor of king.
#radar #journal