Art Means Never Having to Think Things Through

Art

It turns out if you put a bunch of contradictory signs up by a road, drivers will become confused.

>The art installation – part of a series of outdoor shows which pocketed a £50,000 grant from the Arts Council – has been slammed as “ridiculous” and “dangerous” by drivers and transport chiefs.

>The artwork, which includes signs such as one-way, mini-roundabout, no entry and 30mph, was erected on a busy ring-road in Ashford, Kent this week.

It’s part of a big art project called “Lost O”, parts of which, from the available reports, appear to have been designed to annoy anyone who happens across them.

>Many of the works are likely to confuse and surprise the public by playing on the level of attention they pay to their street environment – and disrupting it.

>This is precisely how US artist Brad Downey operates, by subverting the familiar system of signs and systems people use to navigate the city. His installation involves a pedestrian crossing control box that can only be reached by standing on someone’s shoulders.

New Adventures Reviews: The Highest Science

Books, Doctor Who

(Another Doctor Who book. Continue bearing with me.)

I’m just getting back to rereading the New Adventures, and I find I don’t have much to say about The Highest Science—in fact, I couldn’t even summon up the enthusiasm to read it properly, though I skimmed bits of it. I don’t know why. There’s nothing wrong with it, and I have nothing against Gareth Roberts in general. It just didn’t grab me. (I’m actually more interested in rereading The Pit, just to see if it’s as bad as I recall.) So this is a much shorter and less careful review than some of my others.

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Short Trips to Bland Places

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction,

Fair warning: I’m about to post a couple things that will be of no interest unless you follow Doctor Who. Bear with me.

There’s a small company called Big Finish that has a license to publish Doctor Who audio dramas and short story collections. The latter are published under the series name Short Trips.

Not long ago I discovered a couple of recent “Short Trips” volumes going for ten dollars each on Amazon. I haven’t been following the range, because they’re a bit pricey. Ten dollars is a bit less pricey. So I thought what the hell, and ordered Short Trips: Farewells and Short Trips: The Centenarian.

I am glad I did not pay twenty-five dollars each for these books.

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Cluelessness is the Yeast in the Bread of Evil

Movies, News and Politics

Jim Emerson demonstrates everything that’s wrong with the world in two examples:

I think it all comes down to that common quality of cluelessness — either obliviousness to the consequences words and actions or reckless disregard for them. Woody Allen (who, by the way, made a great movie about cluelessness, “Another Woman”) divided the world into the “horrible and the miserable.” For the sake of this essay, I would like to propose that we divide rampant worldwide insanity into Two Kinds of Cluelessness: 1) Literalism: Those who are certain they know something, but don’t know that they don’t understand it; and 2) Ãœber-Solipsism: Those who are certain they understand something, but but don’t know — and don’t care — that they don’t, because everything is only about them anyway.

Not Really a Review of Spin Control

Books, Speculative Fiction

Sometimes I think I should update this more… so I’m going to try to review some of what I’ve been reading lately. Obviously I’ll have to try harder in future as in this case I did not end up with a review.

For some reason I’ve been reading a lot of Hardass Space Mercenary books. First there was Richard Morgan’s Broken Angels. Then Spin Control. Now I’m reading Morgan’s Woken Furies and pretty soon I’m going to reread the Doctor Who: New Adventures novel Deceit, in which Ace returned to the series. As a hardass space mercenary. I have no idea why I am doing this.

The main thing I learned from Spin Control is that series books really, really need to include plot summaries of previous books. Really. I read the preceding book (Spin State) a couple of years ago. At this point I remember nothing except that (A) I mildly enjoyed it, even though (B) it was fifty to a hundred pages over its natural length. Spin Control’s plot is independent of the earlier book, but kept referencing people and places and bits of future tech that I felt I should have recognized, but didn’t.

Beyond that… well, this one is fifty to a hundred pages too long again, but I get that feeling from a lot of science fiction these days. Meanwhile, fantasy is getting shorter. Charles Stross has had to chop his Merchant Princes books in half, and I get the impression that Paul Park’s Roumania tetralogy was originally supposed to be a trilogy. (Just the way the natural stopping point for the first volume occurs about a third of the way into the second. You know. Little things.)

This is why I could never work in publishing: the forces that shape the industry are as mysterious to me as quantum mechanics.

Ribbon-Related Confusion

News and Politics

I buy groceries on Saturday mornings. Usually a lot of the cars in the parking lot have those yellow ribbon magnets. Sometimes they have a bit of text on them. Something like “Support the Troops.”

There’s this one particular ribbon magnet I see sometimes. Not every week, but often enough. It looks like all the other magnets—yellow ribbon, black text—but it doesn’t say “Support the Troops.” It says “Go Hawks.” The Hawks being the local college football team.

I guess you can tell I don’t follow sports much. I hadn’t even heard they’d been playing in Iraq.

The Man Who Calls Himself Hamilton Cleek

Books, Mysteries,

“‘Cleek!’ he said, in a voice that shook with nervous catches and the emotion of a soul deeply stirred, ‘Cleek to take the case? The great, the amazing, the undeceivable Cleek!’”
—T. W. Hanshew, Cleek: The Man of the Forty Faces

For old-school detective fans, times must come when Lord Peter Wimsey irritates; when Hercule Poirot comes off as an anal retentive with a weird moustache; when they even wish Sherlock Holmes would stop self-medicating his manic depression and get professional help. At moments like this I turn to Cleek. Hamilton Cleek. The Man of the Forty Faces.

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