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| | Issue #20.20 :: 05/16/2007 - 05/22/2007 | New Novel Envisions Bleak American Landscape (And it's Fiction)
Also: BBC Reporter Goes Ape sh#!t on Scientologists
| BY DAN COOK
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There’s just something about post-apocalyptic scenarios that keeps filmmakers and authors humming … maybe it’s called cash. Anyway, the latest author to take the plunge into a brave new world is Jim Crace, whose novel The Pesthouse envisions a bleak American landscape in which society has completely collapsed and those still living must revert to desperate survival-mode tactics. Though the basic idea sounds pretty plain, “[Crace] manages to give depth and complexity to characters in a post-literate society who are practically nonverbal,” writes Jim Coan in Library Journal. “The Pesthouse is never funny, but Crace’s mordant humor shines darkly, making it both provocative and winsome,” adds Emily Barton for the Los Angeles Times. Not everyone agrees: “One always admires a novelist who is prepared to subvert his own as well as a reader’s preconceptions; yet here one feels that the novel loses shape in the process,” writes Caroline Moore for the Daily Telegraph. Overall, Metacritic.com’s critics rate the book at 71 out of 100.
Brit Reporter Goes Nuts: Log onto YouTube and you’ll find several videos of BBC reporter John Sweeney losing his cool while working on a documentary about the “religion” of Scientology, known for both its controversial beliefs and famous adherents (Tom Cruise and John Travolta among them). During the filming, the Church of Scientology turned the tables on the BBC investigative crew and launched a counter-documentary of its own. In the YouTube clip, Sweeney bursts into a tirade after Scientologist Tom Davis accuses him of going easy in an interview with a Scientology critic. According to The Observer (U.K.), the church has distributed 100,000 copies of its counter-documentary to political, religious and business leaders in the United Kingdom. Sweeney says he is embarrassed by his outburst but that it came in reaction to great provocation. “I felt I was being brainwashed and if people see the full clip I think they will have more sympathy with me,” Sweeney told The Observer. He adds, “I can’t wait to get back to Zimbabwe: hiding in the backs of cars from Robert Mugabe’s goons is a damn sight easier.”
Boingboing.net is consistently one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, appealing to those with a voracious appetite for quirky cultural tidbits, savvy tech talk and inspired missives on Internet freedom. For some people, though, the tech talk and Internet politics can get to be a bit much. Enter www.neatorama.com, a blog with all the quirky cultural stuff and none of the arcane computer or political talk. Recent postings include a discussion of how important Mother’s Day is to gangsters (very), a link to a site featuring vintage Coke ads (cocacolaoldads.blogspot.com), a link to a YouTube video of an amazing goal scored in a Swedish soccer match, a blurb about an artist who makes stuffed monsters out of recycled clothes and last, but not least, a link to videos in which amateur filmmakers have remade old anti-drug and other public service ads using Star Wars characters (search “Star Wars PSA” on YouTube).
Odds are if you spend much time on the Internet, you’re constantly stumbling upon new and interesting sites such as the one mentioned above. Here’s one more: www.stumbleupon.com, which formalizes your stumbling process by giving you an easy way to consistently find new web sites and share them with others. Stumbleupon.com gives you a couple of ways to do this. One is to download a toolbar that is embedded into your browser and directs you to thousands of user-recommended web sites, as well as enabling you to recommend sites to others. The other way is to go to stumbleupon.com and search through lists of sites grouped under various categories. Which way is best? Installing the toolbar, by far: It allows you to search a much wider array of sites and avoid distracting user profiles posted at stumbleupon.com.
Media Madness is a column exploring web sites, TV, video games, blogs, books, media industry news and anything else in the media universe that strikes our fancy. | |
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