Better living through toy robotics.
On a (vicariously) happy note, a good friend of mine won the Democratic primary today for the Georgia State House race.
I keep asking for my friends-and-family cushy state job, but have not heard anything about one yet.
Again, I am a sucker for an Adult Swim promo. Free Hockey Chicken!
And don’t forget to read his Bok-Bok-A-Blog (no RSS feed).
This one’s for Luis.
Yet another decayed building. Ah, New York!
This one, at 295 Bowery, used to be a place of ill repute called McGurk’s Suicide Hall. It’s in danger of being torn down as the neighborhood, bordering on Cooper Square, is being rezoned. Tall tales about McGurk’s (including how it got its name) first came to my attention in Luc Sante’s Low Life.
From a feature I wrote for my college paper, in typical scattershot style:
Originally it was simply McGurk?s, a notorious tavern and hotel which had stood on the spot for 12 years before capturing some of the grim attention of turn-of-the-century New York. The regular prostitute patrons would indeed occasionally commit suicide at the salon, spectacles that teased out the owner?s natural talent for promotion in a very tight market for sensationalism. McGurk made such a name for himself as to attract the ire and reproach of the progressive mayor, and, inevitably, his bar was shut down.
(I also wrote a short story set in the near future that features a renovated Suicide Hall as a kitchy tourist attraction. I’ll spare you that.)
The building is abandoned, though I remember reading a short piece in the NY Press (and god forgive me for reading the NY Press) about an ex-martial arts instructor who was squatting in one of the upper floors, along with a bunch of pigeons. This was a few years ago. I can’t even imagine what it’s like inside now, or even what it was like back then, but as you can tell, I certainly have spent a lot of time thinking about it!
[Picture taken early 2003]
This house is on Crosby Street, between Bleecker and Houston in Manhattan. I love the way that the decay and the palimpsest facade contrast with the potted plant on the second floor window ledge. Does someone actually live here? I used to make it a point to pass by it on my way to the Puck Building.
[Picture taken early 2002]
The first season of Home Movies will be released as a three-disc set on November 16th of this year. The recently cancelled show is an LTR fave and was an early staple on his beloved Adult Swim.
Look at me, I’m using del.icio.us (again)!
There’s an RSS feed too.
I did think that maybe I was immune to comment spam, since I felt like I was the only person who hadn’t gotten any. This has changed. I know how to fix it, but until then I’ve simply disabled comments.
Update: Fixed.
Believe me, oh baseball fans, I know why you hate the Yankees.
This article is called “Sheer poetry: Jeter’s talents must be celebrated in verse.” I read it about fifty times to try to detect some sarcasm in it, but alas.
This follows on the heels of a wire story last week that called the man “Captain Courageous.” I hope Roger Clemens beans him with a fastball in the All-Star Game.
Peter Esterhazy’s book Celestial Harmonies looks really, really good.
Splicing the fine-grained nostalgia of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory with the anarchic spirit of Looney Toons, Esterházy has created a vast anti-epic. The writer, whose family name holds a place in Hungarian history equivalent to that of the Churchills in British history, takes advantage of his genealogy by making numerous references to his many distinguished ancestors–the very title refers to a Haydn piece commissioned by one of the author’s forefathers. Divided into two sections, the novel circles its mark with cunning and humor, lighting on strange outcroppings of family and national lore.
Of course, maybe one of the reasons I want to read this book is because it reminds me of one of my favorite characters, Avram Davidson’s fictional Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Jurisprudence, Doctor of Medicine, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Literature, Doctor of Science, et sic cetera.” Though the name is spelled slightly differently, it was, no doubt, selected for representing Hungarian nobility.
As a response (I guess) to the movie Super Size Me (which I haven’t seen), I have decided to eat tuna fish every day for the rest of the month of July.
My weapon of choice will be BUMBLE BEE Solid White Albacore in Water. I will eat at least one six-ounce can of this per day. My default recipe consists of mixing the tuna with Hellmann’s® Light Mayonnaise. Please leave all (low-carb) recipe suggestions in the comments field below.
My friends, please bear with me if this challenge turns me into a beast, and please stand by my side if it debilitates me. If I approach death, so be it. Please be kind to my memory, and think of me always as the brave one who dared to eat tuna.
What did you do this weekend?
The robot rested. The robot saw Spider-Man 2, which he found very exciting and satisfactory for a big-budget Hollywood movie. The robot watched two separate Adult Swims! The robot bought chip clips.
I also shunned the sun and made my way through Steven Erickson’s Gardens of the Moon, which was just published in the U.S. for the first time. The book is huge, and dense, and confusing, but I thought most of the action and exposition that took place in Darujhistan was very fine indeed.
Darujhistan, “born on a rumor,” is a hotly contested independent city, rife with intrigue, fighting off an imminent attack by the hungry Malazan Empire and the suspicious attentions of other forces. Darujhistan, the “City of Blue Fire,” is lit by gas lamps, and the lamps are lit by a mysterious sect of cave-dwelling people called Grayfaces!
I think fans of Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris stories and people who enjoyed the backdrop of the twin gods merrymaking throughout M. John Harrison’s In Viriconium (The Floating Gods in the U.S.) will enjoy the Darujhistan sections of the novel. It’s not a decadent, surrealist MJH landscape, and it’s not as clever as Jeff’s prose. It’s epic fantasy on a grand scale, and it excels at its type.
More importantly, I was told, Gardens of the Moon is the author’s first novel and functions as a gateway into his universe and the subsequent books, which get high marks from all sorts of people.
Each novel, then, is a chance to watch myth-creation in action, to see how choices made at the dawn of time play out across the ebb and flow of civilization and empire. Languages change, gods get bored or die, entire races vanish from the face of the planet, and the truth becomes twisted. In more than one book, races and cultures exist and evolve for thousands of years with only the haziest knowledge of their own beginnings. One nation even ends up getting its own creation myth completely wrong: a tragedy with disastrous consequences. One character, Icarium, “a mixed blood Jaghut wanderer” who pops up from time to time wreaking havoc, and who has lived for eons, suffers from his own devastating memory loss, trapped in an eternal search for the truth of his own identity. Everyone, it seems, must at one point or another struggle with the immensity of this world’s past.
Although Tor is streamlining the release of the series (five out of a planned ten have been published in the U.K. already), I’m not waiting. It’s cheaper and quicker to buy the British paperbacks used on eBay or Alibris than wait for the Tor hardovers every six months.
A a special edition treatment of The Iron Giant is coming out September 7.
Apparently Locus Magazine let Cory Doctorow leak the news that his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom won the Locus Award for Best First Novel on Boing Boing.
This is how Locus Online, the Web site associated with the magazine, announced the news.
Cory Doctorow wins Locus Award for best first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. You heard it there first.
“You heard it there first.” Mark R. Kelly, Locus Online’s editor, was not particularly happy about this. I mean, if Locus Magazine is going to let someone break news about the Award on the Web, shouldn’t they give the Web site with their own name first dibs?
On his blog, Mark expressed his frustration at some of the administrative difficulties of working with a parent publication that treats the Web site as a competitor instead of a brand extension. Unfortunately, the reasoned and heartfelt post was removed some time yesterday (before I could grab a quote).
Anyway, the Locus site still does great stuff, even if it has very little to do with the magazine. Don’t be fooled by the word “Blinks” — there’s a tiny blog crawling up the left-hand side of the site. It’s the place to go to get your head around recent and upcoming releases. It has become a bibliographic treasure, and nowhere is this more apparent than the grand LOCUS Index to Science Fiction Awards.
Sealab 2021 is now airing on Saturday nights in addition to its regular (for now) Sunday night slot. The back-to-back Saturday episodes will kick off this Saturday at 11:30 pm with perhaps the funniest episodes ever: I, Robot and I Robot, Really.
Murphy: Damn Prime Directives! I just don’t know if I wanna live a thousand years. Even as an Adrienne Barbeau-bot… with hard nipples.
Marco: Plus, self-termination? Hey, I gotta tell ya, it’s a sin in the eyes of the Robot Church.
Murphy: We don’t need Rome telling us what to do!
But don’t worry if you’ll be out watching Spider-Man 2 this Saturday; the Sealab 2021 DVD is coming out next month!