Introducing Zeitgeist, a new think tank/social club for digital people to to meet, learn, play, share, solve and grow.
“We are living in a science fiction novel that we all collaborate on.” – Kim Stanley Robinson
A few months ago, I was having brunch with my ubersmart friend Freyja Gallagher, reflecting on the energy and excitement of SXSW Interactive, and talking about all things digital. Freyja and I had the same conversation I’ve had a lot with people who work in various digital places and spaces: there just doesn’t seem be very many awesome and productive opportunities to meet and learn from all the cool people in digital media community. There are networking groups, and conferences, and unconferences, and events focused on thought leaders, and the like. But many of us are looking for a different kind of group experience: one that fosters cross-pollination of interdisciplinary knowledge, one that uses the tools we apply to client projects in the service of social change or creative fun, one that gives us the chance to explore digital culture, and one that gives us opportunities to grow in interesting and meaningful ways. Building a way to cultivate that experience seemed to be a challenge too good to pass up.
We decided to build Zeitgeist. We launched it all official-like yesterday. We put our brains together and summarized our thoughts on the state of digital culture for our blog, and we’ll be featuring more think-y kinds of pieces going forward. We have a Zeitgeist Social coming up in September, and a whole series of events to follow. We’ve got our social media channels up and running, so I hope you’ll find us on Facebook and Twitter. Most importantly, I hope that you’ll come out and share your thoughts. After all, we might be building one big brain together – right now.
Digital people, come together!
"Together we float through space" by Sam Brown @ explodingdog.com
In 2007, I contributed a number of articles (on roller derby, Little Lulu, She Ra: Princess of Power, and Carrie) to Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia. Just a few weeks ago, the companion to that volume, Boy Culture: An Encyclopedia was finally released, featuring articles from me on action figures, Hot Wheels, G.I. Joe, and skateboarding.
Encyclopedias, under the watchful eyes of Bubo the Bluetooth Owl
Anyhow, I just got my copies of Boy Culture and I think it looks pretty fun all cozied up to its predecessor. These are ambitious reference volumes, really targeted to academic and public libraries. I’m pretty glad to have been involved with the project, and to continue to contribute to the dialogue about youth culture.
I also want to give a big high-five to Ehrenspace, who wrote a large bulk of the music section for Boy Culture. (Seriously… he covers The Clash, The Cure, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Nirvana, REM, Rush, The Who, and the history of reggae. That’s my fella!)
*Encyclopedia Brown reference!
Splice is some seriously awesome scifi/horror, but Sarah Polley’s mad scientist is the film’s real revelation.
Vincenzo Natali’s Splice is just about everything I was hoping for: a smart, scary, visceral, well-acted, and good-looking two hours of scifi/horror. That alone would qualify it for accolades, as it’s been kind of a depressing year for both scifi and horror so far. But what really makes me excited about the film is its odd equal opportunity nature. With Splice, we finally get a female mad scientist worth the screen time.
Let me back up for a minute and reiterate how much there is to love about the film, in general. It’s a thoughtful (not quite revolutionary, but still very smart) and provocative take on cloning and genetics. Splice is a story about a couple of hotshot supernerds (dig the Bride of Frankenstein reference with the names of our two main characters: Clive and Elsa) played by Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody, who secretly make themselves a gene-spliced, mutant test-tube baby. Bloody hijinks ensue. As a portrait of hip nerddom, it’s practically unmatched in genre film: our protagonists are self-assured, very ironic, and deeply cool young scientists. (Their car? An AMC Gremlin. I rest my case.) A big part of the fun of Splice is that it’s an alternately scary and hilarious film about new parents. (In this way, it reminds me quite a bit of Joshua, an under-appreciated little psychological horror gem about Manhattan parenting.) Splice taps into so much complicated energy about new parenting that, at times, the character drama overshadows the horror feature – which is saying an awful lot about the acting chops that Polley and Brody bring to the film, since they’re competing for attention with an amazing monster. I can’t help but mention that “Dren,” the mutant baby who starts off looking a little bit like a turkey but who ends up being an uncanny human-like (but definitely not human) creature, is played to perfection as a child by Abigail Chu and as an adult by Delphine Chanéac. Thanks in part to these performances, seamless visual effects, and some strong writing, the film blurs the line between anthropomorphic identification and compassion in ways that are very compelling, which makes the blood and mayhem (some of it fun, some of it very painful to watch) of the film that much more effective.
Splice doesn’t quite hit Cronenberg levels of unease, but you’ll feel plenty uneasy by the end. In fact, one of the strangest accomplishments of Splice is the parenting/psychosexual love triangle that it creates between Clive, Elsa, and Dren. (This film plays with all sorts of Freudian, gender, and family conventions, and just when the audience is about to point its collective finger at either Clive or Elsa and say, “Ok, that’s really effed up,” the other parent comes along and does something REALLY effed up.) I don’t want to say anymore, because I just don’t want to spoil a single moment of the film.
But what I found truly exciting about Splice was Elsa. She’s a driven, accomplished young scientist – and a deeply troubled woman with lots of unresolved issues about motherhood. Her relentless desire to achieve results is clearly grounded in her traumatic childhood, and her conflicting impulses about Dren are rooted in a need to control. The psychology of Elsa’s character breaks no new ground in cinema. In many ways, her profile is completely stereotypical. But here’s what’s marvelous: Elsa is a completely realized and powerful woman of science. We get a lot of Pandora’s boxes in scifi and horror, but they’re rarely made by Pandora herself. And this Pandora is brought to life by Sarah Polley, who is just a great great great actress. By the end of the film, we really see Elsa as pretty unhinged, and that’s exactly the point: she’s a mad woman scientist. And like all mad scientists, she must contend with the results of her scientific hubris. Now THAT is breaking some new ground in cinema.
Splice evokes gender in really interesting ways, too. It exploits our cultural anxiety about intersexed creatures (a long-standing horror convention is hybrid creatures, and sex/gender is a common embodiment of that hybridity) even as it raises issues about how Elsa and Clive “gender” Dren. Splice will be fodder for good feminist critique for a long time. So, yay.
(Despite the fact that I’m recommending Splice like crazy, I would totally understand if new or expecting parents would want to sit this one out. Yeah. Also, I want to give a trigger warning about the film, too.)
All of us at At Length are really proud of the fact that we’ve been online for a year now, and we’re having a celebration in Manhattan this weekend to mark the occasion…
Jonathan Farmer founded At Length in 2003 as a quarterly print publication featuring poetry and prose, and re-launched it in 2009 as an online-only, print-friendly venue with added music, photography, and art. At Length is about long creative work, which is an ambitious enterprise in an online space that privileges short content. But I don’t wring my hands about the state of our collective attention span, which everyone keeps telling me is getting shorter and shorter. I’m just glad to contribute to adding more long and meaningful work to the digital space, and cultivating the readership for it.
In honor of the occasion, I invite you, friends of tammytoes, to read or download one of our pieces, and spend a long time reading it. Enjoy and share! (And if you’re in NYC, come to the party!)
There’s just not enough time or bandwidth for me to share everything I’m excited about, but I really do want to sound my excitable yawp about Cory Doctorow, who just launched his new YA novel For the Win. Doctorow releases free downloads of all of his books, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. He’s a great champion of re-thinking the ways that we use (and abuse) copyright, and for re-imagining the way that writers and creators can operate in an evolving media landscape. I’ve only had a few subway moments to spend with For the Win, but I’d recommend that anyone interested in how/why an author would give away his books for free on the internet should download the book and read Doctorow’s introduction.
Plagiarism, copyright, borrowing, and texts: these are all topics that have fascinated me since college. I was particularly moved by an essay Kathy Acker wrote for the MMLA about copyright nearly fifteen years ago, in which she reiterates the importance of friendship and community in the work of creation. Based in part on my work on Acker (and my appreciation for her methods) I planned to write my dissertation on plagiarism/borrowing across a broad and surprising swath of American authors. Instead, a decade after I left grad school, I find myself an author as well as a reader, grappling with these issues and their intersection with technology. Needless to say, I have taken a great interest in Doctorow’s creative and business models.
Of course, you can always purchase Doctorow’s books, and he hopes that you will! If you’re content with the electronic version, but would like to still generate a sale for him, you can put the book into the hands of teachers and librarians who would like to provide the book for their kids. Donate a copy of For the Win here.
Besides all this high falutin’ copyright talk, I’m excited for this book because I simply adore good YA sci-fi. I inhaled this stuff as a kid. It opened up my brain to all kinds of creative possibilities, and it opened up my heart to books. These books turned me into a reader. And while I’ve definitely read my share of Very Important Books in my life, and I’m glad to be part of challenging book clubs as an adult, nothing can replace the singular, joyful escape of curling up with an action-packed sci-fi story. (So, yes, I am counting the days until Mockingjay, the final book of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series is released…)
