Denby really gets into it here. I liked his discussion of "Pulp Fiction".

Some of the directors may be just playing with us or, perhaps, acting out their boredom with that Hollywood script-conference menace the conventional “story arc.” But others may be trying to jolt us into a new understanding of art, or even a new understanding of life. In the past, mainstream audiences notoriously resisted being jolted. Are moviegoers bringing some new sensibility to these riddling movies? What are we getting out of the overloading, the dislocations and disruptions?

I've been thinking about these questions frequently since I saw INLAND EMPIRE, which really has me waiting in anticipation of Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop -- which should be out in another 11 days, I'm told by multiple sources. As it was written over a year ago now:

For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?

One day I will eventually sit down and write my thesis about INLAND EMPIRE. This may have to wait until the film is released on DVD, but for now I will just identify some of its themes.

"Traditional" film is like software that follows the code/data separation paradigm, whereas INLAND EMPIRE is more like self-modifying code. The thesis will also explore the computer science concept of reflection as applied to film, and Lynch's style/process will be related to programming "languages that do not make a distinction between runtime and compile-time." I might also draw comparisons between mainstream Hollywood and the comments of futurist programmers, who say that "We believe the result of the common academic approach is computer science graduates who make programs that are fat, slow, and incorrect. The present state of the art in programming discourages experimentation and formal analysis."

The New Disorder: Adventures in film narrative

The Philadelphia Inquirer raves about "a verbal acuity so playful it could only be British."

What is Un Lun Dun?

It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too -- including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.

When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

In a recent interview, Mieville talks of possible future work:

I like the universe that is invented in this world and the idea of the abcities [flipsides of places we already know] — you could write a different book for each abcity, these sort of twisted dreamland versions of our cities ...

Salon reviewed it:

"Un Lun Dun" begins as the story of two 12-year-old friends, Zanna and Deeba, who live in a London housing project. Zanna has lately become the object of strange tributes -- animals that study her worshipfully, graffiti that sings her praises, bus drivers who approach her in cafes saying, "Just very exciting to meet you!" So when the two girls spot what appears to be a broken but animated umbrella trying to climb up Zanna's window sill, they give chase. The umbrella leads them to an alternate London -- an "abcity," as the residents call it -- furnished by all the cast-off junk of the original London. (Other abcities include Lost Angeles, No York and Parisn't.) UnLondon isn't a benign junkyard -- the first thing the girls encounter is a roving gang of menacing garbage -- but it has its shabby consolations; Deeba acquires a pet milk carton (she names it Curdle) that proves to be as affectionate and devoted as any pooch.

Un Lun Dun, by China Mieville

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. ...

-- John Donne

Jonathan Lethem wrote this 'remix' in the February issue of Harper's Magazine.

He elicited a response from Larry Lessig in the April issue (which is not yet available online).

Consider a side dish of Richard Posner's The Little Book of Plagiarism, which Publishers Weekly calls "a fascinating historical tour of the subject, [in which] he dismisses the idea that good art must be totally original." Taken on its own, it seems preposterous that anyone would confine "good art" to that which is "totally" original. (What is?)

The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism | Harper's

Soft Cinema project mines the creative possibilities at the intersection of software culture, cinema, and architecture. Its manifestations include films, dynamic visualizations, computer-driven installations, architectural designs, print catalogs, and DVDs. In parallel, the project investigates how the new representational techniques of soft(ware) cinema can be deployed to address the new dimensions of our time, such as the rise of mega-cities, the "new" Europe, and the effects of information technologies on subjectivity.

At the heart of the project is custom software and media databases. The software edits movies in real time by choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules defined by the authors.

Lev Manovich: Soft Cinema

I launched this site in anticipation of the release of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

What's it all about? Here are some key passages from the book's introduction:

Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence ...

By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted ...

Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms ...

I will argue here against the idea that convergence can be understood primarily as a technological process - the bringing together of multiple media functions within the same gadgets and devices. Instead, I want to argue that convergence represents a shift in cultural logic ...

In a culture which some have described according to information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all of the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time ...

Henry Jenkins: Welcome to Convergence Culture

I was standing among a crowd of radical Serbs in front of the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade last week when it dawned on me: As a futurist, things are really going my way!

Bruce Sterling rants annually at SXSW. You can listen to it, check out some of the live-blogging, or, if you're really pressed for time, just scan the highlights:

The new third world is common space peer production: it is a new thing (not communism, not capitalism). It is not for profit conglomerate activity.

Someone is making your business into a social-based peer system where laborers are doing better work than an industry without really working.

The downside of folk culture is that is for hicks.

Blogs are a passing thing. Most interesting blogs are platforms for development.

So what are you developing?

I would present this more as, blogs will recede from being first-class entities that you visit, acknowledge, confront, etc.

What it takes to build a third kind of production system: ...

His list here is good, and so on point.

Technology Review also offers a digest, with some quotes.

Bruce Sterling Rants: My Dot-Green Future Is Finally Arriving

From a three-step analysis of online communities, a set of five heuristics emerged: interactive creativity; selection hierarchy; identity construction; rewards and costs; and, artistic forms. These heuristics were generated from concepts appearing in past research, and then tested by a content analysis with focus groups using the case examples of two well-developed Web-based communities, Facebook and MySpace. The users saw this type of social technology as a flexible form of their own expression to create their own identities, social relationships, and meanings. Overall, MySpace was seen as offering greater creativity and artistic form than Facebook. The users in this study used online communities for gaining social rewards; e.g., forming and maintaining friendships, with little concern for social costs such as time expended or privacy concerns. This study contributes to a set of heuristics that can be used to evaluate other Web-based online communities in social contexts such as gaming, communities of practice, and business.

How does MemeStreams stack up?

Five heuristics for designing and evaluating Web-based communities

The fact that our infantry units lost their bearings will hardly surprise anyone familiar with the Swiss Army.

Swiss Miss

Every weekday afternoon some 20 mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists gather in the Seattle suburbs to share tea.

Graph Theory and Teatime

Testimony presented before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8, 2007.

Many Americans believe that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration formed a multinational coalition that drove the Taliban from power. It would be more accurate, however, to say that the United States joined Russia, India, Iran, and the Northern Alliance in an existing coalition that had been fighting the Taliban for half a decade.

If there is any lesson to be drawn from the Afghan experiment with frugal nation building, it is “low input, low output.”

The RAND Corporation has conducted several studies on nation building and counterinsurgency drawing on dozens of American and non-American case studies over the past century. One conclusion reached highlights the near impossibility of putting together broken societies without the support of neighboring states, and of suppressing well established insurgencies that enjoy external support and neighboring sanctuary. The validity of this lesson is evident today both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Often one hears that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 diverted American manpower and money Afghanistan. This may be true. But a more serious charge is that the war in Iraq has diverted American attention from the real central front in this war, which neither in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in Pakistan.

Ending Afghanistan's Civil War