Post-apocalyptic Friday funnies

At AMC's Sci-Fi Dept, a very funny short video on post-apocalyptic cinema, including interviews with members of the Brooklyn-based Freebird Books post-apocalyptic book club, who have found the perfect industrial wasteland in which to convene their meetings. If you've read The Road, you have to watch this all the way through to the end.



Also, note the prominent inclusion in the video of the New York Review of Books Classics' beautiful new printing of John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, with an excellent introduction by Christopher Priest. No on my shelf, half-read and highly recommended. See also their recent reprint of Priest's mind-blowing The Inverted World, with afterword by John Clute. How nice to see our best literate intellectual press putting out quality sf side by side with the rest of the 21st century canon! Go encourage them by buying one!

Previously at this space:

If this is the post-apocalyptic wasteland, where is Mel Gibson?

The politics of apocalypse.

Millenium Glider

That US Airways jet made quite a splash in the Hudson River, both literally and figuratively. On the editorial pages of the January 17 New York Times, one letter-writer celebrated the outcome but wondered what it says that the feel-good story of the week was a plane crash.

Oh, but consider the week. It was a full of bad news about the economy, homes and jobs lost, retirement plans fizzling. And that was just the news that didn't involve literal death and destruction. It was a bloody week in the Gaza strip,in a world in which the seeds of war can spread as easily as exotic viruses. It was also the last week of the presidency of George W. Bush. A letter to the editors of the Houston Chronicle on January 19 summarized the faults and crimes of eight years of the Bush administration. Succinct as the letter was, mostly consisting of barbed sentence fragments, it ran to eleven column inches in the newspaper's Letters section.

Last week, we citizens and residents in the United States were trapped aboard a disaster in progress, like the passengers on US Airways Flight 1549.

Flight 1549 crashed but all 155 people aboard survived. Kudos to Captain Sullenberger, who did a remarkable job, in part owing to his proficiency in gliders. He was an Air Force Academy Cadet glider pilot; he is a Certified Flight Instructor in gliders; and a pilot like him knows from training, intelligence and sheer instinct just what do to if an airplane becomes a glider on short notice. But the happy ending owes much to a larger cast of characters. The pilots and flight attendants all did their jobs superbly well. The people who instructed and trained them did their unsung jobs equally well. Likewise the air traffic controllers. Ditto for the ferry captains and crew, who had trained for water rescue all the way down to practicing how to make a ferry keep pace with objects adrift in strong currents. Captain Sullenberger bore in mind that it's a good idea to ditch an airplane in the vicinity of boats who can help. The ferry personnel expedited to the crash site and did what they had trained to do. Enough of the passengers managed to keep their wits about them to get the doors open and the rafts and babies out, ride herd on the panicky or uncooperative people, and fish out the individuals who fell into the icy water. Everybody together made a miracle.

Now comes this week and President Obama. On Inauguration morning, one of the people being interviewed on NPR had a most interesting remark. He said that now feels more like the start of the new millennium than 2000 did. So it does. And how. The millennium began in 2000, but that was the year Bush got elected, more or less. If you peg the new millennium at 2001, well, that was the year his father's Supreme Court and his brother's Florida officials resolved the election issues to hand him the Oval Office. 2003? The misbegotten invasion of Iraq. And on and on. But January of 2009 sees a new President who didn't ride dynastic coattails into the job. His inauguration speech explicitly steered clear of the Bush administration's doings.

President Obama painted the current situation of the USA in grim colors. He may be right. Maybe our crash landing lies immediately ahead. One financial planner I know thinks the worst by far is yet to come, with massive foreclosures encroaching into the prime mortgages. In the end the United States may no longer be the most powerful, king-of-the-world nation. Nor is that the most important thing in the world. What is utterly important is that we all work well and hard on the right things, help each other, make sacrifices, and hang onto hope.

That's what saved the people on Flight 1549, why all of them made it to shore alive. Granted their travel plans and their luggage got ruined. Evidently, everybody felt that being alive was enough of a plus that they could leave the luggage behind.

A lot of people in the United States may end up doing the same thing: losing a lot of stuff. Many heretofore sheltered citizens may soon realize how inhospitable and soul-chilling cold this world can be for those who aren't so lucky. On the other hand, the United States is full of the descendants of people who contended with adversity. Inaugural Poet Elizabeth Alexander evoked their shades in "Praise Song for the Day." "Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here..." Our ancestors, and plenty of our relatives still living, went through immigration from far ends of the world, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II, and poverty in various circumstances. Our peoples experienced anti-immigrant prejudice, backlash against women's suffrage, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, violence against the Civil Rights movement, Stonewall. Also the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco Earthquake, epidemics of influenza, polio, and AIDS, and many other disasters. In our elders' wisdom and in the marrow of our own bones, we know how to be rich in what matters: courage and curiosity, compassion and honesty, hard work, faith, hope and love.

If we are incredibly lucky, the President will be a good enough pilot to turn the damaged ship of state toward the safest place to crash. And if all the rest of us, his administration, his political opponents, and ordinary Americans, rise to the occasion, we'll all come through OK. So USA Flight 1549 is as hopeful parable as I can imagine for our nation.

There are no endings

It's all one long national narrative, and you know the rules: he's going to be back for the sequel.

No doubt it will start out something like George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.



And if Obama is our 21st century F.D.R., does that mean the grim Zeitgeist of the past eight years has just been the warm-up for some upcoming World War III, involving a next generation military-industrial complex in which the government owns all the financial institutions and privatizes the military forces? Is that when the cyborg will be called out of retirement, in the ultimate bipartisan Marvel Team-Up, like Reed Richards and Dr. Doom?

Because, you know the rule, the hero always needs to be initiated into the adult world of the dark father. Campbell's atonement as at-one-ment.

May you live in interesting times.

Deconstructing Gaza (and other lessons in covert geography)

Last weekend, NYT had an interesting article about next generation urban warfare tactics being utilized by the combatants in their ongoing conflict in the "feral city." From Sunday's "A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery," a description of a real-world conflict that sounds like it has borrowed heavily from the interactive virtual dungeon master pages of video games:

Hamas, with training from Iran and Hezbollah, has used the last two years to turn Gaza into a deadly maze of tunnels, booby traps and sophisticated roadside bombs. Weapons are hidden in mosques, schoolyards and civilian houses, and the leadership’s war room is a bunker beneath Gaza’s largest hospital, Israeli intelligence officials say.

Unwilling to take Israel’s bait and come into the open, Hamas militants are fighting in civilian clothes; even the police have been ordered to take off their uniforms. The militants emerge from tunnels to shoot automatic weapons or antitank missiles, then disappear back inside, hoping to lure the Israeli soldiers with their fire.

In one apartment building in Zeitoun, in northern Gaza, Hamas set an inventive, deadly trap. According to an Israeli journalist embedded with Israeli troops, the militants placed a mannequin in a hallway off the building’s main entrance. They hoped to draw fire from Israeli soldiers who might, through the blur of night vision goggles and split-second decisions, mistake the figure for a fighter. The mannequin was rigged to explode and bring down the building...

To avoid booby traps, the Israelis say, they enter buildings by breaking through side walls, rather than going in the front. Once inside, they move from room to room, battering holes in interior walls to avoid exposure to snipers and suicide bombers dressed as civilians, with explosive belts hidden beneath winter coats.



What the Times neglects to mention is that these new Israeli tactics were in large part derived from application of the urban spatial theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Lacanian psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. As recounted by Adam Elkus at Rethinking Security, to hack the urban warfare challenges of a densely populated, continuously improvised, structurally complex three-dimensional urban labyrinth defended by non-state combatants, the Israel Defense Forces under Shimon Naveh developed a very 21st century military arm: the Operational Theory Research Institute, dedicated to applying poststructuralist theory to the domination of Palestine. How to turn the city into a weapon against its inhabitants? Break down your tactics to the squadron level, use helicopters as weapons platforms in a three-dimensional wargame, turn tunnels into "sources of fractal maneuver," and train your troops to walk through walls, as reported by Eyal Weizman a couple of years ago in a piece that was distributed on Nettime, and later incorporated into the amazing book Hollow Land cited below:

The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as 'inverse geometry', which he explained as 'the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions'. During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of 'overground tunnels' carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so 'saturated' into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city's streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as 'infestation', seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF's strategy of 'walking through walls' involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare — a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

Contemporary military theorists are now busy re-conceptualizing the urban domain. At stake are the underlying concepts, assumptions and principles that determine military strategies and tactics. The vast intellectual field that geographer Stephen Graham has called an international 'shadow world' of military urban research institutes and training centres that have been established to rethink military operations in cities could be understood as somewhat similar to the international matrix of élite architectural academies. However, according to urban theorist Simon Marvin, the military-architectural 'shadow world' is currently generating more intense and well-funded urban research programmes than all these university programmes put together, and is certainly aware of the avant-garde urban research conducted in architectural institutions, especially as regards Third World and African cities. There is a considerable overlap among the theoretical texts considered essential by military academies and architectural schools. Indeed, the reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory. If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to flourish in the military.



I conducted an interview with Kokhavi, commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, who at 42 is considered one of the most promising young officers of the IDF (and was the commander of the operation for the evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip). Like many career officers, he had taken time out from the military to earn a university degree; although he originally intended to study architecture, he ended up with a degree in philosophy from the Hebrew University. When he explained to me the principle that guided the battle in Nablus, what was interesting for me was not so much the description of the action itself as the way he conceived its articulation. He said: 'this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. The question is how do you interpret the alley? We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win. This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls...Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. I said to my troops, "Friends! If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!"' Kokhavi's intention in the battle was to enter the city in order to kill members of the Palestinian resistance and then get out. The horrific frankness of these objectives, as recounted to me by Shimon Naveh, Kokhavi's instructor, is part of a general Israeli policy that seeks to disrupt Palestinian resistance on political as well as military levels through targeted assassinations from both air and ground.

If you still believe, as the IDF would like you to, that moving through walls is a relatively gentle form of warfare, the following description of the sequence of events might change your mind. To begin with, soldiers assemble behind the wall and then, using explosives, drills or hammers, they break a hole large enough to pass through. Stun grenades are then sometimes thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is usually a private living-room occupied by unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of the rooms, where they are made to remain — sometimes for several days — until the operation is concluded, often without water, toilet, food or medicine.



Smoothing space, they call it. Eliminating boundaries to their freedom of operation. A kind of tactical situationism, dérives by special operators viewing the world through the green luminescence of a night vision scope. Task Force DeBord: magic soldiers, applying lush abstractions as post-structuralist siege engines, conjured from the Cartesian ether and somehow threaded into the fabric of architectural reality. Theory that kills.

The grand tactical detournement in which a dense urban settlement of structures with common walls containing a labyrinth of rooms and halls and tunnels is turned into a video game playscape is partly enabled by visualization tools, like the handheld Camero device, which combines thermal imaging with ultra-wideband radar to generate a kind of terminator ultrasound that allows soldiers to see human bodies as fuzzy ghosts in a digital frame that has melted away all the walls and furniture and things. From the manufacturer's website:

Xaver™ 800

The Xaver 800 provides 'Through-Wall Vision' to change the dynamics of your urban operation. With the Xaver 800 you can rapidly and reliably observe one or more people in a room and continuously monitor their activities while positioned outside the room's walls.



The Xaver 800 was developed in close co-operation with leading individuals and agencies from the Military, Law Enforcement and Fire & Rescue communities. Whether protecting the lives of operatives entering unknown or potentially hostile situations, or playing a vital role in rescue operations, Xaver puts you in control of the situation and allows you to 'Step into the known'.

Weizman documents the immense influence of OTRI's theories on the U.S. armed forces, who have tried to implement them in urban warfare in Iraq. While it's easy to imagine forward thinkers among the Army and Marine brass riffing on the John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt theories of "swarm intelligence" and netwar incubated at RAND in the 1990s, theories that were foundational components of OTRI's work, it's hard to imagine some buzzcut Brigadier name-dropping Deleuze. (Though the Pentagon and the French crits sometimes seem to share similar syntactical roots.)

But perhaps the Americans don't need theory to rethink urban space as being as malleable as a digital rendering of that space, because they already experience their personal and tactical reality through a televisual prism — the Narnian wardrobe into cyberspace that we carry in our heads. The smart bomb webcam view of "The Gulf War Did Not Occur" has evolved into the green gamespace of night vision goggles and the real-life flight simulator screenshots beamed from the avionics pod of the Predator drone to a trailer in Florida. And the grunts have all been weaned on HALO and Grand Theft Auto, pre-programmed first-person shooters with better point and shoot kill rates and combat reflexes than any marksmanship course could ever teach.



We know that tactical mapping is being reinvented along these lines. Austin's Zebra Imaging, a Wired magazine poster child founded by three Media Lab wonder boys during the boom, found the most reliable application of its next generation holography technologies after 9/11, when DARPA and others realized it was the ideal mapping medium for urban netwar. Zebra takes the same kind of information used by a street view on Google Maps to generate digital holograms that can be reproduced on a hardy two-dimensional film and viewed in the field with a single-source LED. In time, no doubt, available information about enemy soldiers, bombs and booby traps will be embedded in the three dimensional images. And given that Zebra's technology already supports animated holography, how long before live imaging technologies like Camero are integrated into real-time holographic displays of the urban environment complete with fuzzy ghost soldiers moving through the lethal simulacrum like combat fetuses on the screen of an ultrasound?



The escape route for the next Black Hawk Down will be identified by a squadron huddled in the darkness holding a single flashlight over a three-dimensional near-real-time replication of the environs unrolled out onto the seat of a Humvee, a video game cheat code that cracks the key to the city. The current tactical holos are even rendered in translucent green, the perfect palette to reinvent the consensus reality through which soldiers move as the liquid data structures Neo discovers at the climax of The Matrix.

In the future, squadron-level combat will include critical new specializations. The combat video game designer, the ghost-busting operator of the live imaging technologies, and the tactical architect. I can't wait for those action figures.


For an amazing in-depth exploration of these topics, see Eyal Weizman's Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (Verso 2007). In particular, Chapter 7 on "Urban Warfare: Walking Through Walls."

MEMORY: 31

First
Previous

Flavius eased onto his side, Memory’s scabbard uncomfortably hard beneath him. The room spun in perfect time with the pounding of his head. Barely daring to breathe, he gripped the side of the bed and pushed himself up. An involuntary groan caught in his throat, and he winced.

“Ready for another go, Flavius?” Anacaona popped up beside him, entirely too perky and enthusiastic for such an ungodly hour. She cocked her head and pressed her three pair of copper-red breasts against his bare back, leaving new smudges of glittering dust to join the others covering his body. She buried her face against the nape of his neck and inhaled deeply. “Huna! You have the most erotic scent.”

“It’s called sweat, lass,” Flavius muttered, rubbing a bleary eye.

Anacaona laughed, reaching around the swordbelt into his lap. “Whatever it is, I’ll have some more.”

“Easy there.” Flavius gave an involuntary start as she grabbed him, her over-jointed fingers far more stimulating than should be possible. “Lassie, I dinnae want ya to think I’m nae having fun, because yer a blessed wild ride. But four bouts in only...”

“About two hours,” she offered helpfully.

“Only two hours? Christ. Give us a bit of a rest, eh? My poor head’s pounding and my mouth’s gone all cottony,” he said, lifting her hand away. “Besides, my dobber’s all shagged out. Nae to worry, though,” he reassured her with a quick kiss. “Good as new in the morning.”

Anacaona raised her eyebrows. “Doesn’t look all that ‘shagged out’ to me. Quite the opposite, actually.”

“That’s nae natural.” Flavius stared at his urgent erection in disbelief. “It’s that witch’s brew of foodstuffs at work, innae it?”

“I know a way to make it go away.”

“I’ll bet you do.” Flavius smiled in spite of himself, then stood. “Lassie, as much as I’d love to cater to yer every depraved desire, I’ve nae had any sleep going on... well, seems like days. I’ll be getting me a drink of water to wash away this cotton mouth. Then I’m away to me bed there and going to sleep, and nae even the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse themselves could wake me. Do with me as ya will, but dinnae expect any effort on my part.”

Anacaona’s skin nearly sparkled in the faint light from the window as her lips curled into a sly smile. “I’ll try not to break anything.”

“Ya are a wicked little thing.” Flavius shuffled to the bath and took a long drink of water from the basin. “Makes me wish Parric and I dinnae have to leave tomorrow. Have at ya when I’m fully rested and fed, then see how saucy ya are.”

Her face fell as if Flavius’d just told her a hawk’d just taken her kitten. “You’re... you’re leaving? Tomorrow?”

“Aye, we have to. Yer Emperor made that clear as day during dinner. Ah, do nae look like that!” He came over and cupped her face in his hands. “Just a little sleep, eh? I promise I’ll give ya a good send-off to remember me by.”

“But, but... it’s only one night!”

“Ah, but I have it on good authority one night with Flavius is enough for any woman.”

“Do you pay attention to anything but the sound of your own voice?” She gave him a withering look. “Were you a greater sentient of the Eternal Dominion, we’d currently be inextricably cojoined for the next month.”

“Ya mean...” Flavius frowned, mulling her words over, “when ya said there was a ‘physical bond’ between yer men and women, that werenae just a figure of speech?”

“Our men don’t have the luxury of going up and down like you,” she said, prodding his penis for emphasis.

Flavius stared at her, dumbfounded. “So... So then the night so far--”

“Barely taken the edge off.” Anacaona stood with a sense of purpose, and wrapped herself around Flavius. “I’d thought to have you to myself for a week. I’ll just have to make do with the hours that remain.”

“Damn. Yer serious.”

By way of answer, she pushed him back onto the bed and sidled atop him.

“Oh, I’m going to hurt in the morn--”

A knock at the door interrupted him.

Flavius lifted Anacaona off him and sat back up. The sudden movement set his head back to throbbing. “Who the hell is it?” he bellowed, ignoring Anacaona’s frantic motions for silence.

“Her Imperial Majesty, Empress Malinche, requires an audience with Flavius MacDuff of Clan MacDuff,” a muffled voice answered. Anacaona threw up her hands in frustration, glaring at Flavius.

“Well, what was I supposed to do?” he whispered angrily.

“How about shut up so she thinks you’re not here and goes away?” Anacaona whispered back. “That’s Papantzin’s voice. She’s here to bring you back to Her Imperial Majesty.”

“Nae, nae. Ya said at dinner ya’d shelter me from the Empress’ attentions if I’d shag ya,” he said accusingly. “Now, ya may argue with me regarding the quantity, but ya got nae grounds to complain about the quality. So start yer sheltering.”

“I meant,” she said through clenched teeth, “I’d shelter you in my suite, where she wouldn’t think to look for you. Not in your room, which, unless I’m completely divested from reality, is the first place she’d look!”

“Then why are we here?”

Papantzin knocked on the door again, more insistent this time

“Because you said you’d have me ‘on your terms.’ Your words, remember? You didn’t leave me much room for interpretation.”

“Bugger me. What’s to do, lass?”

“I’m hiding in until you’ve gone,” she said, opening the wardrobe door. “You’re going with Papantzin to your audience with Her Imperial Majesty, and protecting my honor by keeping our private affairs to yourself.”

“Oh, nae ya don’t.” Flavius bodily pulled her back out of the wardrobe. “I’ve nae desire to have nuse--whatever that may be--steep itself in my blood.”

“Damnit, let me go you idiot lesser-sentient!” Anacaona said in a panic, ramming her elbow into Flavius’s hair chest. “Do you have any idea what’ll happen to me if the Empress caught me with you?”

“No,” a clear, honeyed voice cut in. “Please, tell us what will happen?”

Flavius and Anacaona froze, then looked in horror to the now-open doorway, where the Empress Malinche stood with the handmaiden Papantzin before her.

Continued

Fodderland

If you are in New York, be sure to head to the new location of Feature Inc. on Bowery just south of Houston (west side of the street, by the tree) for the show of new work by painter Alex Brown, opening Thursday, January 15, 6-8 p.m. Digital photos don't do the paintings justice, partly because of the post-Monet scale of the works. Think Gerhardt Richter meets Chuck Close, but with a deconstruction beyond pixellation that finds a weird transcendence in the mundane everyday of the negative space of your city. Here's an interview with the artist that Feature just posted over the weekend (the tour of Japan referenced in the first question is the recent tour of NYC hardcore band Gorilla Biscuits, in which the artist plays guitar):

.how was ur tour of japan? is the creativity of being in a band n e thing like the creativity in making paintings?

Amazing. Tiring. Confusing. Uncomfortable. Beautiful. Crowded. Foreign but familiar. Traveling with a band is a unique way to go. Being in that tour bubble and having people show you around and hold your hand is great but it takes some of the memorable challenges away from the experience. You never have time to really do much else than sound check, try and find something decent to eat, play, and try to get a few hours sleep. The creativity with this band takes place when we're doing anything other than playing. The challenge is to see who can make the rest laugh the hardest. Painting and music are pretty different beasts. The immediate satisfaction of playing live is exhilarating but it all seems so fleeting and over with too quickly. Not too dissimilar from an art opening. Solo vs. group. Quiet vs. loud. Full vs. hungry. Rested vs. exhausted. Crisp vs. ragged. Empty vs. crowded. Home vs. away.


.r the single person people pics portraits or chosen because they are interesting mmmmages? who are all these peeps; need we kno? this little game reminds me of the notion of think global, act local.

More than interesting images I tried to think of how they would work together as a group and how one might compliment another. Black, white, yellow, brown, geometric, organic, male, female. Those choices are much more part of my decision making process than anything else. The particulars in this case weren't the primary concern. They're paintings more than they are portraits. There's that automatic distance generated by presenting these anonymous heads without giving the viewer much more insight than the hint of a smile or a backlit ponytail in profile. Respecting local/global, yeah, I wouldn't disagree with the idea that I am both personalizing and making universal the images. That's also a nice parallel to the micro/macro world I always find myself drawn back to. Things that upon first, up close viewing seem completely abstract, full of seemingly random designs, but after stepping back from come into focus and make sense as one cohesive picture.



.what is it about pics of people? whats the fascination, esp if we don't know who they are?

Maybe it has something to do with finding imagery that I can execute and represent with the most economy. Does that make sense? It's the same reason I use landscape; when these very familiar things are broken down to their root they still maintain a certain, albeit varying, recognition and ubiquitous understanding. It remains a challenge to try and recreate something somewhat specific with varying degrees of information. Ultimately the images are simply a reason and vehicle to keep painting.

.do you think of paintings, or art, as a way to increase perception but slow down meaning? Isn't that question just as relevant if we said that art is a way to slow down perception but increase meaning?

Maybe that might be more germane to the less recognizable paintings of mine. That meaning thing is a tough one. Once we attach specifics we lose the act of looking. That's always the best experience in viewing art for me and probably the reason I shy away from producing work that might lead to a quick summary of me, my beliefs, my experience, etc. That's a bit of a bore don't you think?

.though still quietly so, do you think your recent paintings have become increasingly charged with emotions and that you accomplish this through the modulation of colors?

After the decision of what to paint and how to filter it onto the canvas, it's a rather simple matter of sitting down and doing it. They're fairly time consuming but definitely not exhausting to make. Digging ditches is exhausting. I wouldn't make them that way if I didn't like the outcome and there's something undeniable with work that bears evidence of attention to detail. Regarding emotion, I feel too close to the work to really comment on that other than to say if I am doing my job as a painter I certainly would hope that there is something other than mere labor indicated in the work. There's that myth about someone crying and overcome with emotion while looking at a Rothko. Have you ever had the reaction to a piece of art? The only time I was ever affected like that was upon seeing Michelangelo's Pieta in St. Peter's. And that was ephemeral. Music, film and literature are much more effective at drawing out a more fervent emotion.



.what are some of your pleasures with mashing and meshing images? as a viewer one could look at it as multi tasking yet also it really is a simple obvious day to day function of the thinking process.

It's fun to look at these worlds within worlds. It offers a nice balance to the ones that are done with rigid, geometric grids and vice versa. Somebody attached the word palimpsest to the paintings you're asking about. Something altered but still bearing traces of it's original form. Here's the gallery's interview with the artist about the show:

.who or what are some of the things that inspired your interest to have your work delve into the interdependent relationship of representation and abstraction? Lack of skill as a painter in a more traditional sense of the word? Unwillingness to give you a clear picture of what's really going on in my brain?

That relationship is a direct result of the manner in which I have chosen to paint. I have always been confused by abstraction. Confused because of a lack of orientation. Taking something realized and turning it into something unrecognizable makes sense to me. I try not to think in those terms so much. They're all just paintings and some look more like something that you've seen in your experience than others do. It all trickles down in varying degrees from a clear source image to finished painting. My abstractions are really just less than overly clear realizations.

.given all your years of making paintings, do you feel progress is linear, circular, spiraling? do you feel like you now know more? does motivation change?

All of the above. I feel like the more you know the less you and I definitely know very little. You're making me feel old by the way. I don't think the motivation ever changes. It all goes back to trying to one-up your brother by drawing a better super hero than his. Making things that people appreciate or are drawn to always feels pretty great.

The brother the artist references in his life-long effort at one-upsmanship would be me. Alas, I cannot make it to New York for the opening, but I hope some of you will stop by and check out Alex's outstanding new work.



FEATURE INC.
276 BOWERY
NEW YORK NY 10012 USA
212.675.7772
featureinc@featureinc.com

Located on Bowery, west side of street, just below Houston St., by the tree.

Subways: 6 to Bleecker St., walk east on on Houston St.
B D F V to Broadway Lafayette, walk east on Houston St.
F V to Second Ave, walk west on Houston St.
N R to Prince St., walk north to Houston, east on Houston

Open Wednesday through Saturday 11AM - 6PM, Sunday 1 - 6 PM

Victoria Strauss honored for work with ‘Writer Beware’

A well-deserved honor for a well-deserving volunteer. Would that there were more folks like Victoria in this world, scammers would break a lot fewer hearts (and abscond with far less lucre).

CHESTERTOWN, Md. -- Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) President Russell Davis announced Jan. 6 that Victoria Strauss will be honored with 2009 SFWA Service Awards during the Nebula Awards® Weekend. The award is made at the sole discretion of the President, and has previously been called the “Service to SFWA Award.”

Strauss is receiving the award for work she had done with Writer Beware, a publishing industry watchdog group which “shines a light into the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes and pitfalls.”

“I'm thrilled and honored to receive this wonderful award (though by rights it belongs equally to Ann Crispin, Writer Beware co-founder and co-conspirator, without whom Writer Beware wouldn't exist--or be nearly so much fun). Ten years ago, when WB was just getting started, I could never have imagined how much we would accomplish and how far we'd come,” Strauss said. “Beginning as a two-person committee and a modest subsection of the SFWA website, we're now a major Internet resource that has warned thousands of writers about schemes and scams, and has helped to put literary scammers out of business and into jail.

“I'm deeply grateful to SFWA for its unflagging support, and for its commitment to the importance of educating writers about the scams, schemes, and pitfalls that make the publishing world a dangerous place,” she said. “Thank you, and here's to ten more years (at least) of scam-busting!”

Strauss has donated countless hours of her time to advising, educating and warning aspiring and established authors about dubious, questionable and outright criminal business practices on the fringes of the publishing industry. She maintains the Writer Beware website (http://www.sfwa.org/beware/) and is a major contributor to Writer Beware Blogs! (http://accrispin.blogspot.com/). Writer Beware is sponsored by SFWA.

“Victoria is one of those rare volunteers, who has been willing to give so much of her time and energy, and continues to do so,” said SFWA President Russell Davis. “Her work with Writer Beware has been invaluable to our members and the writing community at large, so I’m very pleased to offer her this recognition of her outstanding service.”

This is the ninth time that the award has been presented. Previous recipients were Chuq Von Rospach, Sheila Finch, Robin Wayne Bailey, George Zebrowski and Pamela Sargent (joint), Michael Capobianco and Ann Crispin (joint), Kevin O'Donnell, Jr., Brook West and Julia West (joint) and Melisa Michaels and Graham P. Collins (joint).

Prior to 2000, the award was a surprise announcement at the Nebula Awards banquet, but in recent years the recipients have been announced in advance.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America will descend on Los Angeles, Calif., with an all-star lineup slated for

The 2009 Nebula Awards® Weekend will be held in Los Angesles, Calif., April 24-26.

Harry Harrison will be honored as the next Damon Knight Grand Master, while M.J. Engh will be honored as Author Emerita. Singer/songwriter/author Janis Ian will be on hand to serve as toastmistress.

About SFWA

Founded in 1965 by the late Damon Knight, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America brings together the most successful and daring writers of speculative fiction throughout the world.

Since its inception, SFWA® has grown in numbers and influence until it is now widely recognized as one of the most effective non-profit writers' organizations in existence, boasting a membership of approximately 1,500 science fiction and fantasy writers as well as artists, editors and allied professionals. Each year the organization presents the prestigious Nebula Awards® for the year’s best literary and dramatic works of speculative fiction.