[Book] via io9’s 20 Best Science Fiction Books of the Decade, The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia:
With a face made of porcelain, a wind-up heart, and a talent for alchemy, Mattie is hardly a typical science fictional robot. While most novels about robots focus on how these humanoid machines are stronger and smarter than humans, Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone explores the vulnerability of mechanical beings who depend on humans for repairs and survival.
I love mechanical robots – automatons – and have done ever since reading Tom Standage’s excellent book on the Mechanical Turk. It’s the basis of the story in my magnificent octopus never-quite-finished novel, The Persistence of Vision.
The i09 list is entertaining reading, too – they given the benefit of the doubt to the so-so Pattern Recognition, but Perdido Street Station certainly deserves its mention.
Categories: Books and reading
Tagged: robots, sci fi
Since I’ve got family nearby, I’ve visited Wakehurst Place in West Sussex a couple of times this year. It’s lovely; it combines an Elizabethan country house with extensive gardens and the Millennium Seedbank, the world’s largest seed conservation project. Earlier in the Autumn, the gardens featured an exhibition of photos from the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition. It runs until February, and it features some terrific work, especially the macros of seeds and flowers. The 2010 competition has come up, and I decided to enter two categories: garden views and plant portraits. You could enter four images in each category, so here’s a selection of the ones I went with:
Plant portraits
Stalk of Fire. An old photo that I rescued from a dusty folder on the hard disk to brighten up a dull winter day. Taken an August ago, in the gardens of one of South East London’s best days out, Eltham Palace.
Keep reading →
Categories: In My Life · Photography
Tagged: china, nature, peleliu
No, this is not a spam post1. Throughout December, you can grab an iPhone app (all games so far) for free, from the wincingly named Appvent Calendar site.
Update: Fixed a wrong link. Thanks, Richard!
1 Although arguably it is Google-bait. Perhaps I should have used an obscure song lyric or pun that Google can’t understand as the headline?
Categories: Games · iPhone
Tagged: apps, free
“Eliot’s description of himself as ‘within measurable distance of the end of my tether’ combines distress with elegance,” says a review of the new volume of the poet’s letters. Had Eliot had the chance to use Facebook or Twitter, that kind of remark would make a perfect update.
[via terrific book blog, The Second Pass]
Categories: Books and reading · Ephemera and links
Tagged: facebook, letters, poetry, ts eliot
Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs is now available as a podcast1. The show is shorter than the radio version as it only includes samples of the chosen songs. Still, it’s often the case that the interview is as interesting as the music so this isn’t too much of a hardship. In fact, in the case of the inaugural podcast, the interview is actually much more interesting than the music.
The guest is Morrissey, who’s introduced by host KirstyYoung as “the outsider’s outsider”, beloved because of his “harsh romanticism.” It’s not a tough set of questions, but all the better for it – relaxed, a little indulgent, but an excellent back-and-forth. I particularly liked Morrissey’s description of his younger self as “constantly waiting for a bus that never came.” Musically, it’s less engaging, being a bunch of 70s art-punk stuff with doomy gothicky overtones:
1) New York Dolls – (There’s Gonna Be Be A) Showdown
2) Marianne Faithful – Come and Stay with Me
3) Ramones – Loudmouth
4) Velvet Underground – The Black Angel’s Death Song
5) Klaus Nomi – Der Nussbaum
6) Nico – I’m Not Saying
7) Iggy and the Stooges – Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell
Mott the Hoople – Sea Diver
I’ve made a Spotify playlist of Morrissey’s picks; it’s missing numbers 5 and 6.
1 The page design is excellent, making it obvious you can subscribe to the program using a wide variety of software. The BBC even includes a link to a Zune subscription, despite the fact it’s only on sale in the USA.
Categories: Music
Tagged: radio 4
November 23, 2009 · 1 Comment
[Book] A Crisis of Brilliance
, by David Haycock, courtesy of a review in the Guardian:
“The particular cauldron of intensity into which Haycock plunges is the Slade School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture… and the students who experience this ‘crisis of brilliance’ – a phrase coined by their bristly, austere professor of drawing, Henry Tonks – are Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash and Dora Carrington. All studied at the Slade between 1908 and 1912. Their fate was also decreed by a trial of fire, the first world war, that would define their art for the rest of their lives.
“As their names became known, so the artists were swept into the orbit of avant-garde movements such as Wyndham Lewis’s vorticists, the craft work of Fry’s Omega Gallery, and the ‘Georgian painters’ patronised by the stylish, monocled civil servant and collector Eddie Marsh.
“The war smashed into their lives as well as the old order. Haycock follows the hostilities with powerful economy, while tracing the artists’ own splintered trajectories… Haycock’s narrative of this entangled, war-defined group is so strong that it often has the force of a novel, hard to put down.”
Update: You can download the preface and first chapter [PDF] from the author’s website.
Categories: Books and reading · Creativity
Tagged: art, painting, wishlist, ww1
The Rolling Stones have released several live albums, and the recording from their peak period, 1970’s Get Yer Ya-Yas Out!, has recently undergone a deluxe re-release. In the original review for Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs said that “I have no doubt that it’s the best rock concert ever put on record.” He might have been right at the time, but just a few years later, the Stones went one better with the release now known as The Brussels Affair. For some reason, it’s only available as a bootleg, but it’s absolutely worth downloading.
It was recorded in 1973, following Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St, so the setlist is terrific. You get Brown Sugar, Angie, Honky Tonk Woman, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Street Fighting Man and Tumbling Dice. It’s the version of You Can’t Always Get What You Want which stands out though; it’s 10 minutes long, so, yes, it’s indulgent, but then melancholy is. It features guitar-work that puts the studio version in the shade, backing the verses with sad-but-bright descending notes. If you’re a guitarist, or just a fan of rock guitar playing, the whole gig is packed with highlights, and listening to it, I can almost convince myself that that evening Keith Richards and Mick Taylor played practically every sound you’d ever want to hear an electric guitar make.
The Brussels Affair is convincingly involving and completely silly. It’s all summed up in the second track, Happy, which Jagger introduces with a ludicrous lawks-a-lummee cocker-nee accent:
Mick: Keith’s gonna sing a song for yer called ‘Appy…
Keith then proceeds to start singing with a voice that sounds like the Cookie Monster singing the blues having gargled TCP, while the music rolls along brilliantly; despite seeming to contain a hundred guitar solos and campfire chorsuses, the song is over in at just over three minutes.
Afterwards Jagger says, sounding camp and drunk:
“Merci Keef, that was a good one. Woo hoo. Shake-amonay. God a mama.”
It’s rock n’ roll.
Categories: Music
Tagged: bootleg, mp3, the rolling stones
When it comes to books, games and music I’m often happiest away from the bright lights of the charts, exploring dark, dusty corners of the catalogue. Film, though… I never seem to enjoy going beyond big budget megahits. I’ve fallen asleep in every single one of Pedro Almodovar’s films.
These three threads (one, two, three) on the always excellent Ask Metafilter feature people recommending their favourite DVD commentaries, and sound like they might inspire me to be a more considerate and appreciative student of film. The posts are worth reading in their entirety, but the following were consistently recommended:
- Spinal Tap ( “This Is Spinal Tap is pretty excellent- the cast does their commentary in character, complaining about how the movie was a hatchet job. It’s sort of like having a whole new Spinal Tap movie” – COBRA!)
- Ghostbusters
- Roger Ebert’s commentaries on Citizen Kane and Dark City
- Various seasons of The Simpsons and Futurama
- John Carpenter and Kurt Russell on both Escape From New York and Big Trouble in Little China
I can’t stand Wes Anderson’s films – tedium that mistakes faux-depressed self-regard for genuine self-revelation – but I liked thirteen’s description of how to listen/watch a film with commentary:
“I find the commentary tracks on the Criterion Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaum DVD’s to be very relaxing. I know the movies backwards and forwards, and Wes Anderson’s voice is good company when I am drawing late at night. Plus his observations are often things perpendicular to the movie so it feels more like what you would talk about at a party than what he is trying to do in a scene.”
Categories: TV and Film
Tagged: commentary, dvd, metafilter
A Flat White is an excellent coffee to start the day with – and just as you can identify a typography geek if they can tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, it’s the real coffee geeks who know the difference between a Flat White and the more common Caffe Latte. Lokesh Dhakar put together a nice, simple graphic that demystifies these and many other coffee drinks.
Categories: Ephemera and links
Tagged: coffee
The best DVD commentaries
November 9, 2009 · Leave a Comment
When it comes to books, games and music I’m often happiest away from the bright lights of the charts, exploring dark, dusty corners of the catalogue. Film, though… I never seem to enjoy going beyond big budget megahits. I’ve fallen asleep in every single one of Pedro Almodovar’s films.
These three threads (one, two, three) on the always excellent Ask Metafilter feature people recommending their favourite DVD commentaries, and sound like they might inspire me to be a more considerate and appreciative student of film. The posts are worth reading in their entirety, but the following were consistently recommended:
I can’t stand Wes Anderson’s films – tedium that mistakes faux-depressed self-regard for genuine self-revelation – but I liked thirteen’s description of how to listen/watch a film with commentary:
→ Leave a CommentCategories: TV and Film
Tagged: commentary, dvd, metafilter