Smart Energy

I just found this review of my 1999 novel, Splitting. Remarkably (or sadly, depending on your point of view), the book is still in print. I found this review on Good Reads, but I think this reviewer, Tami Montano, must have gotten her copy of Splitting from me via LibraryThing.

I received this book as an Early Reviewer winner and I found it to be a lexicon filled expedition into the world of millennians. The vernacular was infused with rhythm, lyric and sardonic repartee. But more importantly its a tale of a ethereal quest where gender and gender-bending become trivial. I recommend this book to millennia lovers as well as fellow logophiles.

For centuries we have collectively marveled at plant diversity and form—from Charles Darwin’s early fascination with stems to Seymour Krelborn’s distorted doting in Little Shop of Horrors. But now, in What a Plant Knows, the renowned biologist Daniel Chamovitz presents an intriguing and scrupulous look at how plants themselves experience the world—from the colors they see to the schedules they keep. Highlighting the latest research in genetics and more, he takes us into the inner lives of plants and draws parallels with the human senses to reveal that we have much more in common with sunflowers and oak trees than we may realize. Chamovitz shows how plants know up from down, how they know when a neighbor has been infested by a group of hungry beetles, and whether they appreciate the Led Zeppelin you’ve been playing for them or if they’re more partial to the melodic riffs of Bach. Covering touch, sound, smell, sight, and even memory, Chamovitz encourages us all to consider whether plants might even be aware of their surroundings.

via What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz | Scientific American and FSG Books.

The Sun Came Out. Highly recommended by Smart Energy.

The Sun Came Out: 7 Worlds Collide Again

How do 20 musicians who’ve never worked together before record an album of original material in three weeks? First, you get Neil Finn to invite you to the wild west coast of New Zealand. Make it for right around Christmas time, the heart of southern hemisphere summer, and have Finn invite not just you, but your whole family.

Ask everyone to bring a song. “We need songs,” Finn would’ve pointed out. “We’re recording an album.”

But no one does, of course, because artists are more human than humans, and thus are more easily distracted, are lazier, are more prone to procrastination. But it doesn’t matter because there is a deadline. Record the album, then play the shows.

Don’t want to let your mates down, so write something good and then learn to play it.

Because we’re not doing this for fun, nor for a nice subtropical vacation, but for Oxfam. So we want it to be good, so people will buy the album and come to the shows so we can make some money and give it all away. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a cool rap video urging you to stop using all that plastic. This is in keeping with Plastic Planet, a documentary I reviewed here a while back. This video also puts me in mind of another film I reviewed, Gas Hole — which so totally missed the point about fossil fuels that I didn’t bother posting it here on Smart Energy (but you can read the review on Curled Up with a Good DVD).

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo on DVD. The beetle may have conquered Japan, but the film conquers nothing.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Grade: C-
reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
directed by Jessica Oreck

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo promises much more than it delivers. Directed by Jessica Oreck, a contributor to PBS’s Nature, the PR for the film alludes to science and a probing of the Japanese fascination with insects. Although Beetle Queen is a good-looking film with some interesting facets, it on the whole disappoints for its lack of narrative drive and its insistent but meandering obsession with tying together bits of Japanese poetry with shots of landscapes and bugs.

If we expected an in-depth look at Japanese culture and its people’s fascination with insects, I suppose we must be satisfied with the filmmaker’s visual anthropology. There are many arty shots in the film, that’s for sure, but they do not synergize into a narrative, nor do they create lyric intensity. With the emphasis on quoting snippets of Japanese literature, I suspect the latter, lyric mode was Oreck’s intention. I don’t think it works. The film is dry, full of lush (and creepy, no doubt, to the insectophobe) close-ups that ground us in nothing and leave us nowhere, offering nothing more than a macro shot of one bug after another. Read the rest of this entry »

Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels
review by Brian Charles Clark
4 out of 5 stars
Countryman Press, Paperback, 160 pages, September 2010

Forest Forensics

What snapped that tree? Everybody is asking this and similar questions, obsessed as we are as a culture with forensic investigation. Was it weevils gnawing from within? Was it wind or snow load that toppled it? Or did it die for some other reason and snap due to lack of internal structural integrity?

Read Tom Wessels’ wonderful little book and learn. Better, pop it in your backpack and learn as you hike. Although written for forests of the northeastern part of the U.S., the principles involved are pretty much the same in all forest. (The particulars surely do vary by bioregion, though.)

With dozens of color photos and clear, concise writing, it’s hard to go wrong with this book if you’re interested in forested landscapes. For instance, Wessels’ chapter on how to tell if a forest has overgrown an agricultural field is full of cool details that are widely applicable. Part of this has to do with the fact that – at least in North America – farmers have cleared and abandoned fields in pretty much the same way for hundreds of years.

Read the signs like a real detective and appreciate your forest walks even more with this handy guide from ecologist and environmental biologist Wessels.

"Making Faces" is an unusual documentary about metal type.

review by Brian Charles Clark
4.5 stars out of 5
Directed by Richard Kegler

Jim Rimmer was a British Columbian printer and type designer who cast metal type using the now nearly lost pantographic technique. If that’s all Greek to you (or, if you’re a graphic designer, maybe it’s all greeking to you, too), you need to watch this film by book artist and P22 founder Richard Kegler.

Time was when type was neither virtual nor selectable from a drop-down menu but rather made of tiny bits of metal and set in mirror image, so that when it was inked and pressed against a sheet of paper it read correctly. Time was when “font” meant the whole collection of faces – for instance Times Roman – with italic and bold variations, and in all their myriad sizes.

Change is inevitable, but it’s terrible to think of losing the art of letterpress, that is, of printing with metal type. A letterpressed broadside or chapbook feels and smells very different from a page run through an offset press or a laser printer. If you’ve never experienced letterpress, seek it out: the tactile experience alone could change the way you experience the printed word. Read the rest of this entry »

Howard Zinn You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

review by Brian Charles Clark
5 out of 5 possible stars
Directed by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller; narrated by Matt Damon

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

One day — I think it was a Tuesday — about 25 years ago, someone handed me a copy of a book and said, “You’ll love this.” The book was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. At the time, I was in college and had heavy stats and logic (if P then not Q and such nonsense) homework. I made the mistake of dipping into Zinn’s book over lunch and couldn’t stop reading for three days straight.

I was too young to have taken part in the radical ’60s and then in the ’70s – well, let’s forget the ’70s existed. In any case, I’d never heard of Zinn until I read A People’s History. But I quickly discovered that he was a member of a loosely affiliated cluster of radical activist philosopher-historians, a group that includes Noam Chomsky and many others, some of whom appear in this film. These activists were fighting the good fight against that relentless tide of greed called capitalism: they educated and advocated for civil and women’s rights, unions and labor rights, and against wars big and small, hot and cold. Read the rest of this entry »

Plastic Planet - have you had your Bisphenol A today?

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4 out of 5 stars
Directed by Werner Boote

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

At the rate we’re going, we’re all going to need to isolate ourselves from the toxins we’ve dumped into our environment by diving into HazMat bubble suits. We’ll have to invent filters that keep the nano-sized particles of cancer-dealing crap out – but, hey, we’ve got the technology for that. And plastics.

On second thought, no: plastics are one of the biggest sources of toxins. Bisphenol A, for instance, is a plasticizer that makes plastic, well, plasticy, and has been a known estrogenic since the 1930s. Estrogenics are those wonderful chemicals that are the secret culprits behind the bitching and moaning of the Iron John crew. Chief among them, Robert Bly has long complained that men have become too feminized, and clearly plastics are to blame, not doting mothers. I mean, look at the amphibians: scientists have been observing them changing sex, male to female, mid-stream for years, so why not humans, too? Is there a problem? Read the rest of this entry »

Fellini's Clowns is not-to-be missed cinema.

I Clowns (The Clowns)
review by Brian Charles Clark
4 stars (out of a possible 5)
Directed by Federico Fellini

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Fellini’s I Clowns (The Clowns) is a fun and colorful way to delve into ontology, the philosophy of representations and appearances–with emphasis on the first half of the sentence. You could safely ignore the ontological cogitating burbling away in the film’s interrogative engine, but only if you were really stoned. Otherwise you’d just wonder what the hell was going on, as Fellini and crew caper about… like a bunch of clowns.

I Clowns is part documentary, part screwball comedy, part really deep thinking, and all extraordinarily well imagined and realized. This made for TV movie was released on Christmas day, 1970, around the time of Fellini’s other wonderful fantasy films, Satyricon (1969) and Juliet Of The Spirits (1965), and perhaps represents a mainstreaming of–or new-found docility in–Italian art film. Read the rest of this entry »