an insufficiently magickal life
A highlight for me this summer was arriving in Malmo—after a flight from Boston to Copenhagen—drawing a hot bath in my hotel room as soon as I checked in (the knob, at the height of European practicality and luxury, let me set the temperature before turning the water on, thus no waiting around for the cold water to warm up and trying to mix it around with boiling water to reach the right level of hot), setting my laptop up on the sink….
And watching The Sandman series straight through, all bleary eyed, until it was a reasonable CET hour bedtime. I loved it. But the conditions, I think, certainly influenced my love of it.
My memory of the comic book is pretty hazy. It’s something I enjoyed but not in a foundational, dressed-up-like-Death-for-Halloween kind of way. Magic and fantasy have never quite been my thing. Yes, I know what a sigil is and I've read and enjoyed the biography of Aleister Crowley and yes things like the history of JPL are really fascinating but ultimately I think there are two kinds of nerds.
There’s the sort who can look at an object like this and think....
Ah yes, a helm. This is something the Morpheus must absolutely have among his possessions. We can't expect the Dream King to go about his business without a) his sand b) his ruby and c) this helm and only this helm.
And others who think, okay, well, how essential can this thing actually be? Can't Morpheus refashion a replacement for it with some sunglasses lenses, pipe cleaners and old vacuum cleaner parts?
That's my problem. I bargain and concede too much, my temperament is insufficiently magickal. In many ways I wish I were the other kind of dork but I am not.
So the series. The acting is terrific, the special effects are as great as I’ve seen on television, but it’s definitely not perfect. Some of the story beats are out there obvious like exposed conduits and wires, like:
Oh, no. I have lost my helm. I must...
Try to get my helm back
Alas...I have Failed Once in my quest to get my helm. Therefore, I must Try a Second Time to get back my helm.
but, oh dear. I have Failed in this Second Attempt. I will Try a Third Time to recapture my helm.
My Third Attempt is a.....Success! My helm is back and therefore I, the Main Character, can Return to my Ultimate Adventure!
I can't remember how much this was in the comic books which I want to say were much more subtle about ratcheting up suspense. But even still, I loved the series.
Oh, yeah and Malmo. I was there for The Conference. Which was pretty great!
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Like thousands (he was really great at making friends), I counted Peter Eckersley as a friend and I’m still in shock over his passing last week. Many remembrances speak of his influence and groundbreaking work in internet privacy and security, but a testament to his character was that when you met him, he was always just a person.
I met him fifteen years ago at a time when computers were still a niche interest and a genuine interest. For a blink of an eye moment in the aughts, people's conversations about technology were about technology and not actually about money. And this was a unifying interest for artists, activists, musicians and others who might have otherwise been siloed (as they are now).
I find myself mourning my old friend and this extremely brief moment in time. In other cities, I imagine the end looked like the money rolling in. VC funding and all that once web 2.0 cracked its problems with “monetization.” In Boston, the end of it looked like Harvard people at hacker spaces. Suddenly, everywhere you looked, there were Harvard people. I guess they heard about the money (And yes, almost certainly there were Harvard students in the mix in the years before 2009-ish but no one would have known because they would have had to show up as just a person among other people rather than a *jazz hands* Harvard person there to *hip roll* demonstrate leadership and *finger snap* build a personality and personal brand out of being there.)
I wrote a little bit about it here and I’d like to write more at some point about this particular time and place and what was special about it. Because I know I’m always going to be chasing something like it: a truly engaged community of open-minded people excited by new ideas with a generosity of spirit. A scene where no one cares what your dad did for a living, where you went to school or even if you went to school. Intellectualism without the elitism, collaboration without the gatekeeping. I know I’m romanticizing it, and certainly the white dudeness of it all was a real problem. But Peter was exemplary of the parts of that moment that were truly great.
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Recently I reviewed Hanna Bervoets’s novella We Had to Remove This Post for The Nation. I also discuss the movie Kimi (which I absolutely loved), Sam Byers’ Come Join Our Disease, and the various ways for better or worse content moderators have been covered in the media.
For Filmmaker, I wrote about the incredible work Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang have done preserving Chris Marker’s Immemory project over two decades in formats both digital and analog. I also discuss Marker’s other digital projects including his whimsical experiments in Second Life.
Previously, in Filmmaker, I wrote about the excellent anthology “Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985” published by PM Press last year and the long influence of new wave authors. Something that anthology does very well is point out how much editorial visions (Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, in particular) led to this great moment in experimentation in science fiction.
Leaving you with this photo of a tree frog I happened to meet yesterday:
Thanks for reading