Circular Reasoning: Darwin To Purrington And Back Again
I admit to a certain amount of Internet vanity. While Google alerts for “Hal Stern” most frequently turn up the Cal professor of statistics or the Arizona real estate agent who share my legal name, Google Analytics tells the colder, bolder truth about my public persona: about 300 people a week pay attention. Discounting for [...]
Doctorow’s “Homeland” Hits The NY Times Bestseller List
Cory Docotorow’s newest YA novel, “Homeland”, hits the NY Times YA bestseller list in week one. Called it. It’s a superb followup to “Little Brother,” and Cory’s found a good balance between technical exposition and moving the story along, with decidedly less snogging and more insight into the root causes of greed and corruption. It [...]
Right To Art: Cory Doctorow’s “Pirate Cinema”
“I sampled your voice, you was usin’ it wrong” – Jay-Z, “Takeover”, from 2001′s “The Blueprint”, which itself contains samples of The Doors “Five to One” (which contains the lyric “no one here gets out alive” which became the title of a Jim Morrison biography, so either I’ve proved the point I want to make [...]
Doctorow Short Stories (And A Long One)
In anticipaion of today’s mail drop, I re-read “Another Time, Another Place”, the short story contributed by Cory Doctorow to the Chronicles of Harris Burdick anthology. Without spoiling it too much, it’s a great story about hope and possibility. As much as I’m a fanboy at MAXINT volume for all of Doctorow’s work, I tend [...]
Review: “Life on Mars: The New Frontier”
Unrelated to the TV series, other books with similar titles or even the Governator in Total Recall, Jonathan Strahan’s collection of short stories is a superb glimpse into what life might be like on the red planet. What sets it apart is that all of the stories are related through the eyes of its intended [...]
Peoplehood II: Alliteration
Anglicization does strange things to non-English alphabets. My father’s family name (in the Ukraine) was “Shtechter”, probably with a hard “ch” in the middle (like Bach), but it turned into both “Stern” and “Shtier” when the two halves of the family arrived on Ellis Island. Hailing from a rural town – a “mudhole”, in the [...]
Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Ant King and Other Stories”
Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories is flat-out weird. And this comes from a reader who has a very high dynamic range for values of “weird.” However, the magnitude of the weird vector also indicates its value to you a a reader. Buy it, digest it, ponder it. Strange and varied as the [...]
Music Discovery and Distribution
I’ve had a number of conversations over the past few weeks with established and emergent talent in the music management business. Most of them started with thinking about how people discover new bands or new types of music, and how those processes relate to the more abstract notions of brand. All of this was made [...]
Unboxing Cory Doctorow’s “With A Little Help”
I have just experienced the anticipation, excitement and fascination equivalence of a few Christmas mornings, a major birthday, and discovering the VIctoria’s Secret catalog, all rolled into one. If you’ve never believed “book lingerie” could be used in a sentence, read on about my experience unboxing a hand-bound, hand-finished copy of Cory Doctorow’s With A [...]
Songs Through Darwin’s Radio
What do deception, love, redemption, mutation and perhaps a bit of science fiction have in common? It’s either Coheed and Cambria’s Year of the Black Rainbow or Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Children, or both. What if evolution breeds xenophobia, and subsequently fear and hate? What if evolution is forced, and therefore somewhat dangerous, grounding the fear? [...]