“I am directly below enemy scrotum.” – A review “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”

Written by: Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman

Directed by: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Peter Cullen, Hugo Weaving, Josh Duhamel, Tyrse Gibbson

About half-way through this movie (thought I can’t be entirely sure, more on that later) there’s an exchange between our hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and an aging Decepticon-cum-Autobot named Jetfire, which pretty much sums up the whole experience. They’ve just been teleported from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum to, literally, bumfuck Egypt and the humans are very confused:

JETFIRE: I told you, taking the Space Bridge is the quickest way to get to Egypt.

SAM: What? Space Bridge? You didn’t tell us anything!

JETFIRE: Harrumph…You were given due warning.

No we weren’t! What’s a Space Bridge? Why hasn’t it been mentioned before? Why doesn’t it ever come up again? What just happened? It doesn’t matter because cool, exciting things continue to occur and the characters are left very little time to reflect on the nonsense. Such is the audience’s relationship with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

The movie succeeds in it’s stated objective, which is to show off giant robots fighting and looking awesome with the latest in digital F/X technology. There are no nits to be picked in this regard. Like the first movie, this is a visual triumph that probably spent the gross national products of a few central Asian states to bring us a full-scale Autobot vs. Decepticon war on Earth.  And it even manages to have a few genuinely good moments of humor and character for it’s cast, digital and meaty alike. Michael Bay’s signature frat-boy manchild humor comes into play more often than I like (the astronomy class scene? John Tarturro’s jockstrap? Leg humping not once, but twice? Yeah, I could have done without), but it still managed to make me laugh. The Twins though…eeegh. Racist caricatures will lose you big points every time, Mikey. Gotta put that shit away. They probably would have been a lot more enjoyable without the weird high-pitched “urban” accents and gold buckteeth.

Usually I would avoid spoilers in the main body of a review, like revealing that fan-favorite Transformer Jetfire shows up and does stuff, but RotF really doesn’t need the protection. The plot isn’t just ancillary, it’s incomprehensible. The movie goes on for about 150 minutes and by the third leg of it I had completely lost all sense of place and time. Events were just happening seemingly at random, in completely different locales, with different tones of character. There were about five McGuffins throughout the movie, none of them explained much beyond “we need to go there/get them because it’s/they’re awesome!” It kind of felt like I had watched about two or three different movies by the time we reach the non-climax of the film, none of which made a lot of sense.

It’s a non-climax because while being an enormous action scene where the titular Fallen, Megatron (really, you thought he was gonna stay dead? C’mon) and their Decepticon horde tear through the US Military, Autobots and the Great Pyramid of Giza to get at a Transformer superweapon that will turn the sun into Energon which they can use to revive their homeworld or build new Transformers or something, and…How do you feel after reading that sentence? Now extrapolate that into the visual exhaustion and apathy you’d get from watching it play out on a giant screen. It’s the climax only by virtue of being the last battle in what has been a disjointed string of battles.

And yet, for all that, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. The sheer spectacle of the thing combined with characters that were pretty funny and engaging when they had a few moments where everything in the world was not exploding kept me from checking out. I don’t know why exactly we need to find Energon, or why the Fallen was never mentioned before now, or why exactly there’s a Decepticon disguised as a human (traditionally a big no-no in the mythos), and what’s the Matrix of Leadership exactly? We’re going to Giza! No wait, Petra! Now Giza again! Holy crap, look at them tear up that pyramid*! This is awesome! It’s kinda like a rickety old zipper ride at the carnival: if you get tense and resist, you’ll be jostled around and get bruised up and probably vomit. But just relax, be loose, and go along with the motions, and you’re treated to a pretty but confusing display of sounds and colors at all sorts of crazy angles. You’ll probably still vomit though if you eat before hand.

Of course, there were somthings that just can’t be ignored. Can we please, please end the trend of heroes with awesome lives trying to be “normal”?  Sam has a bottomless government account, friendship with giant talking robots who think he’s awesome, and a girlfriend who is absolutely stunning in leather pants. Why does he want to leave? Writer Robert Orci says it’s because “[m]ost of us go off to school, don’t we, and leave home[...]Didn’t that happen to you? Why’d you do that?” Because my life sucked when I was 18. Maybe if I had the robots and the bank account I would have stuck the hell around. And if I can go the rest of my life without hearing another song by Linkin Park I will be a better man for it.

Some people are just not gonna loosen up enough to watch this movie. Even some of my most diehard geeky friends can’t bring themselves to enjoy it. There’s too much…stuff. I mean, really, that’s all it is. It’s stuff. Sound and fury signifying…well, that depends on who you ask. Ask them, it’s signifying nothing. Ask me? It’s signifying oh my god he just ripped that robot-tiger-thing’s spine out! Fuck yeah! And sometimes, when it’s done well, that’s all it needs to be.

*Note: It’s not a gripe really, but as the fiance of an archaeologist and a lover of antiquity myself, I gotta say that movies where historical stuff gets destroyed are painful to watch sometimes. Literally the entire time that Devastator was demolishing the capstones of the Great Pyramid I was clutching my chest like it was my first goddamn heart attack. And the scene in the library at Unnamed University? Holy freakin’ god.

Traditional Media Flails Madly In Death Throes, Doesn’t Know How YouTube Works

So! Newspapers are dying. Have you heard? Yeah, it’s getting pretty scary out there for print media, in the wake of easy-to-access information streams from the internet and other computer networks. So the Associated Press, one of the 800-pound gorillas of the news world, is trying to model itself as the internet’s content sheriff, so that all the young digi-kids will get the hell off their lawn.

Might help if they knew how the internet fucking works:

“The other day I get an email from our Regional Radio Representative with the AP in Chicago saying the following…

I noticed you are posting our video content with out a license and have to ask you to remove the AP video content from the site ASAP. If you would like to know more about our web services please contact me.

Not exactly a cease and desist letter, but the point is the same.

I was stunned.”

Indeed. The AP apparently did not just simply misunderstand the terms of use for YouTube, but didn’t even know they had a YouTube channel. They actually thought they could get away with threatening somebody for using content that they were freely distributing. Fucking dinosaurs.

Because I’m immature and mean, I’m going to embed a shit-ton of AP videos regarding the latest incident of Somalian piracy, in which an American-owned freighter was hijacked. Somalian pirates! Remember them? Have fun squandering all that folk hero goodwill you guys built up! A more detailed post to follow.

To the AP: Come and get me, motherfuckers…

Oh, and here’s one more, from when the Somali Pirate Kings hijacked and stole a fucking super-tanker:

The Themes, They Are A-Changin’

Sorry, I’ve still got Watchmen on the brain.

Anywho, I’ve decided to play around a bit with the themes and set up of the page now that I’m back and still left with huge amounts of free unemployed time. Hopefully get a nice custom header image at some point, fix some font issues. Things’ll be a bit in flux for the next couple of days.

Coming soon: a review of Futurama: Into The Wild Green Yonder! Maybe! If I feel like it!

“Would It Make You Smile If I Told You I Was Wrong?’” – A Review of “Watchmen”

Written By: David Hayter and Alex Tse (Screenplay), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Comic book)

Directed By: Zack Snyder

Starring: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino

Watchmen needs little introduction at this point, especially if you’re reading a review of it here, but I’ll give it a go. The movie and graphic novel it’s based on are set in an alternate 1985 where superheroes are real and have drastically affected the course of history; being instrumental in the conquering of Vietnam and the election of Richard Nixon for multiple terms, as one example. It tells the story of a now-defunct supergroup as the last active member, a mentally unhinged crimefighter named Rorschach, rouses his old comrades to solve a mystery: who killed the Comedian, one of their own, and why?

The most positive press coming from most papers and trade publications describe the adaptation of writer Alan Moore’s seminal work as being okay but listless. A visually stunning film but, too caught up in homage to be relevant. The New Yorker went so far as to describe Watchmen as “embalmed.”

For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the professional reviewers are talking about when it comes to Watchmen.

Though reverent, the movie is anything but stagnant. The opening, which is comprised of a fight between an unknown assassin and the Comedian in his apartment and a title sequence that catches us up on a new timeline rife with costumed heroes is a microcosm of the film’s triumphs. The duel which sets off the events of the story virtually recreates the graphic novel frame-for-frame, but the title sequence is an invention of director Zack Snyder that adds tremendously to the tale.

I think it’s mostly a failure of imagination on the part of the reviewers. To suggest that Cold War-era paranoia of nuclear attacks that could come at any moment without warning and the looming fear of a world that is being rent asunder by our actions are dated and not relatable for a modern audience is laughable. Where have these people been living for the last eight years? I’d love to buy an apartment there.

There are also varying opinions that the characters are dull and uncaring (for instance Patrick Wilson’s Night Owl) or disturbing and unsympathetic (leveraged mainly at Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorschach), suggesting that many people have missed the point. We aren’t supposed to feel unambiguous support for Rorschach because he is very clearly a broken individual with a sense of absolutism that is unsettling to our modern sensibilities. Likewise Night Owl is supposed to feel wishy-washy and impotent (literally) because he’s ceded what little power he had to affect his world, and even when he does seize the reigns again it may not be enough. Watchmen, both the source material and it’s adaptation, are meant to make the viewer uncomfortable throughout, and this doesn’t jibe with what people who aren’t used to comic books expect from the medium and it’s mythologies. Even the previously most somber superhero movie, The Dark Knight, reassures us very firmly that Batman, despite doubts about his methods or choices at the end of the day is just, noble and necessary. Watchmen on the other hand demands we ask if the idea of superheroics is worth it at all. Every time we see and hear a gruesomely accurate act of violence, every time we witness how much worse off the world seems for it’s bevy of heroes, and every time we glimpse the mind of the kind of person who would wear a costume and fight “evil”, we have to ask if this parallel 1985 would be better off without them.

As you can guess, I liked the movie and highly recommend it. There are few adaptations that can walk the fine line between faithfulness to source material and the need to be an independent work of art without falling, and Watchmen strides it confidently. There’s more than enough of the novel’s set pieces and overall spirit there to bear the title, but it takes liberties with interpretations of characters, intent and content that in many ways I find it a superior work. Alan Moore, especially he’s writing a superhero story, has a bad tendency towards condescension and pessimism about his characters. While everyone’s still flawed and all-too-human in the movie, you don’t feel that they’re laughable or pathetic; you take them seriously.

For people who aren’t familiar with the novel, I can still recommend it whole-heatedly. There is a complete story here that unfolds with few loose ends and missteps. There are a few things that don’t get enough fleshing out (for instance how Nixon was able to stay in office so damn long, or the Keene Act which out-lawed superheroes), but you pick up enough that the main body of the story makes sense and is fulfilling.

Now we come to the spoilertastic portion of the review where I talk about the ending and things that got changed/deleted. So if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t read beyond this point.

Seriously, I’m warning you.

Go get a sandwich or something.

Still here? Alright.

First off, there’s little remnant of the many background characters that lent a lot of heart to the novel. Bernard and Bernie only make two appearances for instance, the biggest at the end. But oh, what an appearance it is. That little moment where Bernard embraces Bernie, in a desperate attempt to shield him from a blast of radiation? It’s a powerful moment of two normal people reacting to the overpowering and horrific that resonates deep, even though we don’t know them by name. They stand for for every one of the 18 million(!) dead by Ozymandias’ hand.

The ending is the thing that’s most going to annoy purists. No squid = no good, in a lot of fans’ eyes. I was pretty cheesed at the framing of Dr. Manhattan myself, until my girlfriend broke it down for me. Unlike the alien threat of Ozymandias’ original plan, everyone on Earth is absolutely certain that Dr. Manhattan exists, and they know he’s capable of repeating “his” actions. Unlike the alien invasion, there’s not a lot of reason to question it. Sure, there’s the somewhat uncomfortable extrapolation, that now we’ll have a society that has every reason to believe god is real and vengeful, and that will have weird effects, but so would a society that believes it’s hunting an alien menace across the stars. Ozymandias’ plan is never meant to be sane, just have a certain result.

That change also effects the whole tone of the movie. Now instead of focusing purely on the nuclear threat, we’re dealing with the overall destructive nature of man. This is why Dr. Manhattan doesn’t intervene and simply destroy all the nukes on Earth, why Ozymandias is trying to solve the problem of infinite renewable energy, and more broadly why the Comedian is right at the first meeting of the Watchmen: our problems and our flaws are larger, deeper than an arms race, and much harder to solve. Even if that threat was removed, something else would come up in it’s place. As evidenced by the world we are living in right here, right now.

“Hey, I know that robot!” – a review of WALL-E

WALL-E

2008

Directed by: Andrew Stanton

Story by: Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Jim Reardon

Starring: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin

The latest offering from the Disney/Pixar team is yet another triumph of digitally animated movies. No surprise there, really. Since Toy Story in 1995, Brad Bird’s studio has rarely missed a beat. Some of the pictures are better than others, of course, but with the exception of Cars (which I’ve never seen) I can’t think of a single Disney/Pixar film I haven’t enjoyed, and once again WALL-E does not disappoint.

Having tackled subjects such as family bonding (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles), life-long friendship (Toy Story, Monsters, Inc.) and finding your purpose (Ratatouille), the House That Bird Built have set their iMacs to an even more time honored story focus: true love. WALL-E follows the adventures of the last eponymous robot on Earth, who for 700 years has been cleaning up garbage. The planet’s become a toxic wasteland incapable of supporting all life, save cockroaches. Or so it seems until WALL-E finds the last plant in the universe and a probe robot from human survivors named EVE comes to retrieve it. WALL-E falls desperately in love with the sleek, smart and deadly EVE, following her back to space and setting off the events that save humanity.

The story is fun, a little predictable but engaging for all ages. I especially liked the subtle reversal of usual male/female roles. WALL-E is scruffy, bumbling and significantly weaker than his lady love, and she takes on the protector role. Strange that a strong, smart and unpatronizing female lead has to come in the form of a robot. But anyway…as with previous Pixar endeavors, the real draw here is the technical stuff, the new advancements in animation and digital movie making that Pixar always sets the bar for. This time around they’ve worked not only on amazing new texturing and lighting techniques, creating scenes on Earth and in space that at times appear photo realistic, but have done great new things with sound. There is very little real dialogue in WALL-E, most of the robots being vocalized by cleverly designed mechanical and digital sounds. WALL-E himself was “voiced” by Ben Burtt, storied sound designer of Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Rather than being grating and unrelatable, the machine characters of WALL-E come alive through their distinct and expressive audio. The titular character is all the more endearing for his unworded R2-D2 like coos.

And we can’t forget the short films, a long-standing tradition of the Pixar franchise. Gods bless DVDs for making them available anytime we please. For WALL-E we get a double feature, with the theatrical short Presto! about a haphazard stage magician and his hungry rabbit who makes some new additions to the act, and a new original short BURN-E, telling the tale of a robot aboard the human ship that runs parallel to WALL-E. Both are cute, clever and greatly entertaining, again keeping with Pixar’s tradition of quality. The DVD also has a great documentary feature on the sound engineering behind WALL-E which I found enlightening. Great purchase all around, you won’t be sorry to add it to the collection.

“Let this remind you why you once feared the dark.” – a review of Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

2008

Directed by: Guillermo Del Toro

Story by: Guillermo Del Toro and Mike Mignola

Starring: Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, Selma Blair, Seth MacFarlane

It’s usually kind of hard for me to review comic book movies. On the one hand I consider myself a real critic, having to turn an analytical eye to art and not let preconceptions or prejudices overly color my reports. On the other hand, I’m a huuuge geek, and that can at times blind me to the faults of what is on some levels fan service. Christ, it took me six months to admit that Spider-Man 3 was a bad movie. So I’m almost always torn between my academic rigorousness and my fanboy prostelyization.

The Hellboy franchise is a different kettle though. I barely knew anything about the series until it’s 2004 movie premier, and don’t to this day. Usually I’m not one for boasting about ignorance, but I feel it lends veracity to the following statement: Hellboy II: The Golden Army is pretty friggin’ awesome.

Despite the fact that Golden Army plays a little more fast and loose than the original Hellboy, I’m prepared to call it the superior movie. First off, Golden Army’s story is quite more ambitious, dispatching the Nazis and Lovecraftian tropes that are by now ubiquitous in pop culture and going for a dark gritty fairy-tale with lots of bizarre visuals, references and sounds. All the fey folk speak ancient Celtic, fairy stories and legends are given the scary old-school treatment (the Tooth Faires in particular are terrifically gruesome.) Del Toro’s work on Pan’s Labyrinth is expanded ten fold here as he builds a beautiful, alien and disturbing alternate world in the dark forgotten corners of man’s world. If the Troll Market is any indication of what we can expect from a Del Toro helmed Hobbit, I am officially on the bandwagon.

You get the sense throughout the whole picture that Del Toro was given much more leeway to play with this universe, and it pays off in full. Carrying itself a little more lightly but taking the premise none the less seriously, Golden Army is just more fun than Hellboy. I dare you, I double dog dare you, I defy you to not break into song with Abe and Red during a heart-felt rendition of Can’t Smile Without You. Can’t do it.

There are a few weak points to the picture, of course. Seth MacFarlane’s performance as the voice of Johanne Krauss, the ectoplasmic FBI agent is a little spotty, never finding a level or direction in writing or delivery, and the lack of the Meyers character was missed, at least by me. Some people also might not like that this sequel is just…not sillier, but goofier than the first, if you kennit. Me though, I applaud Del Toro and crew for going out on a limb and making a thrilling, undour, just plain fun comic book movie. Hell, a fun geek movie at all. We need more of that.

“There’s nothing to do but eat and crap” – a review of Futurama: Bender’s Game

Futurama: Bender’s Game

2008

Directed by Dwayne Carrey-Hill

Story by Matt Groening, Eric Horsted and David X. Cohen

Being a fan of all things geeky, humor both surreal and gross, and brightly colored cartoons, I instantly fell in love with Futurama way back in 1999 when the show premiered on Fox. The brainchild of Simpsons Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, the show was for super-geeks by super-geeks. There were smart-ass hard-drinking robots, hilariously disgusting aliens and math/science/pop-culture jokes a-plenty, with some of the smoothest animation ever seen on American television. The show was a triumph…and unceremoniously cancelled in 2003 after 72 episodes.

A little less than four years later, the old creative team has been reassembled to create four direct-to-DVD movies for Fox’s home entertainment division, proving along with Firefly/Serenity’s continued existence in comics and an MMO that in this age good sci-fi doesn’t die, it just shifts media.

We’re on the third of the four movies though, and I’m starting to wonder whether it’s really all worth it.

The first installment of this new deal, Bender’s Big Score, suggested that Groening & Co. had hit the ground running and not lost any of their mojo in the time since cancellation. It was a tight, witty comedy that had fun with sci-fi conventions while actually adhering to them. It was, in short, everything the series had been at its best moments. The second, The Beast With a Billion Backs, lost a little of it’s sci-fi cred and didn’t have as well put together a story, but it was funny enough that I didn’t feel slighted for having watched it. Our penultimate entry, Bender’s Game, continues the trend of slacking quality.

The story of Bender’s Game is a mish-mash of two ideas – a duel with perennial corporate villain Mom over a dark matter fuel shortage and D&D gaming causing a rift in reality – that might have been funny for a half hour seperately but never really come together over the 87 minute running time. More and more I’m getting the idea that these guys fluked with Bender’s Big Score and might not have what it takes to do features. I would have much rather had them do a real 5th season of one-off weekly stories than try to string along weak plots into full length movies that don’t have the humor to support themselves.

And that’s the real cardinal sin of this movie: it’s simply not funny. Put aside the fact that it’s trying to tell two stories and doing neither particularly well; the gags in both fall flat, and that’s simply inexcusable in a comedy no matter what else happens. I spent the first half of the movie waiting for the Lord of the Rings/D&D parody that’s supposed to be the selling point to show up, and it seems the writing team was as well, throwing almost zero effort into the endeavor. All the funny comes from Bender’s decent into tabletop-gaming incited madness, and that may have more to do with vocal genius Joe DeMagio being funny no matter what he does. That guy could make cargo manifests funny.

And when we finally do get to the weird fantasy send-up portion it too is disappointing. Less Terry Pratchett and more National Lampoon, the creative team just didn’t capitalize on their premise. The jokes are all either really bad puns (Hermaphrodite? Frydo? I oughta punch you in the dick), bog standard fantasy tropes (oooh, the wizard’s a crazy old man! Funny), or nonsensical in a really bad way (Morks? What the fuck? I think I’m the only person in the target audience who even knows what Mork & Mindy is.)

By the time the movie wraps up its completely ancillary plot, leaving us with one actually funny joke (mush, you little Nibblonians! Mush!) I had a deep sense of forboding for the fourth film. It promises to be a “truly epic sci-fi adventure,” so maybe a return to the genre will herald some improvement. Here’s hoping.

A Shiny New Future For America…

At 9:36 Eastern Standard Time, on November 4^th, the year 2008 of the Common Era, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44^th President of the United States of America.

Hold on a second, I need to read that again.

…Okay. Okay, I think I’m okay.

I’m only 20 years old, and for nearly all my life I have had no hope. Or rather, I’ve had very little hope. I grew up in a world that was not on the brink of annihilation like my parents and grandparents before me, but there was still an insidious feeling underlying my culture and society. The feeling that we as a species were sloughing into a benighted dark age, that madness and mediocrity held sway and were choking to death what little light had been kindled these last 100 plus years. The world was ending, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, not with a bang, but a drawn out and pitiful whimper.

Tonight was the first time I can ever remember not having that feeling. I looked out the window of the office I had been cleaning (by the by, I’m working as a janitor at UT Knoxville. Go me!) and saw little knots of students chanting “O-BA-MA!” and celebrating the beginnings of a new age in America, and I felt the same spirit. It’s nice to actually be proud of one’s country. Perhaps it’s not a long, slow slide to the fall. Maybe there’s spirit left in the old civilization after all. Maybe the days have not gone down in the West.

Forgive me, I’m waxing poetic.

You know, a lot can still go wrong. He could wind up being a complete fuck-up of a president. He could be milquetoast. He could still, gods forbid, be killed (and if that happens, that’s it, game over. The streets will run red. Mark my words.) The long and difficult work is now ahead of us to take this golden opportunity and make it into solid positive reality.

But for right now, I am savoring the feeling, basking if you will, of this moment.

For the first time in my life I looked around me and realized, “Holy shit, this is the 21st century.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that we are now in the motherfucking future. Act accordingly.

I For One Welcome Our New Chinese Space Lords…

The Chinese say they’re building a propulsion system that could take a crew to Mars in 40 days with no fuel.

It’s called the electromagnetic drive, “emdrive” for short, and it’s the brainchild of British scientist Roger Shawyer (sorry, no link. Hmm,) who was laughed off the island and into the arms of Xi’an’s Northwestern Polytechnical Univeristy.

The theory is based off, as best I can tell, an electromagnetic wave being run through a canonical chamber to create thrust without fuel, simply electricity. I’m still trying to work it out myself, it’s all technical and therefore kind of a stretch for my layman’s understanding. Check it out for yourself.

So, cool theory, neat tech, you say. Here’s the kicker:

The possibilities are phenomenal: Instead of going out of service when they run out of fuel, satellites would have greatly extended endurance and be able to move around at will. (We wouldn’t have to shoot them down because of the risk from toxic fuel either.) Deep space probes could go further, faster –- and stop when they arrive. Shawyer calculates that a solar-powered Emdrive could take a manned mission to Mars in 41 days. Provided it works, of course.

To give you a bit of perspective, with current explosive fuel drives it would take humans nine months (270 days.) Of course the 41 days is probably a blue-sky figure factoring a favorable orbital proximity, but even so if he’s right that’s ridiculously short.

The implication: we could see the start of a new space race for redevelopment of this so-called Emdrive if it works. Apparently the Americans are involved at some level, according to Wired, but c’mon. Like the Chinese are really going to let us just walk in and have their blueprints.

It could be just another scientific crock, like when the Koreans said they cloned a person. Or it could be the most radical change in human travel since we started making mechanical engines. For one thing, if Shawyer can produce anything viable, even theory that could be independently reviewed and duplicated, why did the Brits let him loose long enough to get scooped by the Chinese? That’s, like, on the front page of the book Bad Things We Don’t Want To Happen. “CHAPTER ONE: Smart people – do not get to go China and sell all of our shit.” Also, our electromagnetic technology has reached a point where we can do pretty powerful shit with nanofibers…So why can’t they produce something really tiny with this theory? Like one of those Boy Scout derby cars you carve outta wood with one of these things attached to it. Fuck, even if you need an engine the size of a city to move a thimble with some buttons I’ll be dancing in the street. I know, I know, funding, whatever, but still…it’s fishy. Mighty fishy.

I’m willing to give them enough rope to hang themselves by, at least. If it’s true, I’m going to learn as much Mandarin as I can and sign up for the first colony ship. No, I don’t care that it’ll only be Chinese nationals and I’ll be 70. I’m gonna be a fucking Martian.

Vertical Farming, African Shantytowns and Social Movements

Another piece inspired by an io9 wire.

A couple of days ago I read a piece on some residents of Kibera, which is a Nairobi slum/shantytown, who took it upon themselves to clear a small dump and use the waste and garbage to start a farming project. The biological garbage was used as fertilizer, and PVC piping was used to drill seed-holes. The folks were helped out by an organization called Green Dreams, Ltd., an organic farming company in East Africa. I shared this stuff with social anthropologist Dr. Carolyn Nordstrom at a UT Knoxville lecture and she just loved the concept. Hopefully it’ll make it into a paper!

This all gave me an idea. For a while now I’ve been hearing about this new tech called Vertical Farming, which would allow hydroponic farms to be placed in dense urban environments, taking pressure off the highway-seaway supply line and lowering prices for produce.

So, my idea was this: vertical farming is a great concept, no doubt, but it needs capital to get started, capital that is not likely to be invested anytime soon. Why? Because of prevailing social and political attitudes.

One of the things I’m always struggling with in my ruminations is how to spark this kind of social change. After all, Margaret Mead once said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

I was thinking, why not try something like the Kibera farms here in America and Canada? Think of how many vacant lots there are all across those two countries, in cities and rural towns alike, that could be utilized in the same way. Obviously the major hurdle for this is the fact that in a Nairobi shantytown the peasantry have so thoroughly reclaimed the land they essentially own it – nobody can tell them to leave or how to use it. Here in North America though we have large government mechanisms to mete out and inforce the ownership of land by private interest and the state. In a place like, say, the Bronx, even the scuzziest plot of undeveloped land is owned by someone and worth millions probably.

I say: fuck’m. If you are not going to properly take care of real estate property, than it should revert to neutral ownership. Get in there, start a community farming project. The cops or whoever may come and knock it down, but dammit you’ve got to get back in there and just start it up again. And again. And again and again. Spread the word across your city, across your state, across your nation.

I can see it having one of two effects, maybe both: one is that it’ll spark a widespread move to this kind of behavior and eventual cultural adaptation – after a couple of years/decades it’ll just become normal to pitch into your neighborhood farm. The other is that it could lead to a larger push for Vertical Farming research and implimentation. Either way, it’s something to try and ween this continent off the huge supply lines that currently sustain it, at least when it comes to food.