Archive for July 1st, 2001

The Solo Musician’s Guide to Playing with Oneself

Posted July 1, 2001 By Earl Green

Technology is an amazing thing. These days, all you need is a computer a few select software packages to make yourself sound like a professional musician. Often enough, these music-building applications are really built on samples and riffs played by actual professional musicians, and while it’s fun to muck about with that sort of thing, samples and an editing program do not a professional musician make.

However, I do have a romantic fascination with the concept of one person, in a studio, playing every instrument and singing every part of harmony without a backing band or other vocalists. It could be my own shyness at work, but I’ve always thought that’d be a very cool thing to do. I have a low-end consumer-grade home studio myself, and I do quite a bit of instrumental work myself along those lines. I’m not going to try harmonizing with my own vocals until the UN lifts that pesky Geneva Convention ban on my singing, though. They seem to think that my voice will do harm to nearby property and livestock. Really, those 1500 dead cows must have heard something else.

In the meantime, I can enjoy the works of others who have gone this route. I’ve chosen to focus on four favorites from my own library, so the usual disclaimers apply – these artists naturally fall within my own parameters of musical taste and as such, your aural mileage may vary. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media

Can’t Get There From Here

Posted July 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

Thirty-two years ago, on July 20, 1969, human beings set foot on the moon for the first time.

Today, we couldn’t go back if we wanted to.

More than anything else, that sums up the current state of spaceflight research in the United States. The US stopped building the Saturn rockets that sent the Apollo missions beyond the orbit of the Earth years ago, and never developed a successor. We cannot go to the moon. We cannot go to Mars. We cannot go any farther than the low-Earth orbit of International Space Station Alpha and the space shuttle travel. What is worse, we have no plans to go any farther, no idea of how to get there from here. NASA is still trying to decide what kind of orbital craft will succeed the space shuttle, despite the fact the current fleet of orbiters is much closer to the end of its life than the beginning. There are currently no plans to use Alpha to construct interplanetary craft. There is no vision for the future, and thus no effort to make that vision real. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

Let the Light In

Posted July 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

Have you read Not News’ privacy policy yet? I hope you have, because a) Pattie put a lot of work into it and b) I want you to understand that I take respecting people’s rights, including privacy rights, seriously. That said, there seems to me to be a good chance that we’ve been tackling this privacy issue all wrong, or at least that we haven’t been as robust in our thinking as we could be. Right now much of the privacy debate focuses on standards of encryption and laws that forbid people who have certain information from using that information in certain ways. (Check out sites like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more info.) The argument is that everyone should have access to the technological tools that can keep other people from knowing what they’re doing, that anonymity and secrecy are vital to the protection of a free society. But maybe, and paradoxically, an effective solution can be found by making it easier for us to get information about each other.

We’ve gone over this topic before, in our message forums. It was there that I first brought up David Brin’s The Transparent Society, which I’d like to discuss in a little more depth here in the essays section of the site. Brin, an astrophysicist/SF author/commentator, argues that encryption/secrecy proponents are actually working against the interests of a free society, which requires that information flow as freely as possible in as many directions as possible. In a society such as ours, in which so much power is concentrated in the hands of corporate and government entities, the emphasis on secrecy works in favor of the powerful. Not only do they have more to potentially lose if many of their doings become public, but they have a greater ability to amass the technology necessary to effective gather and process information, and avoid or minimize the penalties for misusing that information. Think of how Microsoft has managed to thus far mitigate the damage from its unfair business practices. Or of how the control of surveillance and observation cameras seems to rest in one set of hands.

Transparency, or information flow, on the other hand, works to the benefit of everyone in society. One of the reasons the American financial markets are so popular with global investors is that for all its faults, our Securities and Exchange Commission requires American companies to disclose far more details of their operation, in a timely and accessible manner, than just about any other country. There are accounting scandals and problems in America, to be sure, but they are minimized because anyone can head over to a site like FreeEDGAR and peruse a company’s recent 10-K report. As long as privacy is the weapon of choice, large entities with more to hide will always do a better job of hiding it. But if everyone knows everyone else’s business, then we can rely on each other to watch out for each other. One reason why people do things that work against society’s interests is that they believe there is little chance they will be discovered. Transparency works against that, and helps keep people on their best behavior.

The most frequent complaint against Brin’s thesis is that while transparency may be all well and good, there are certain things that people don’t want other people to know, and that the ability to see what someone else is doing is not a sufficient tradeoff for someone to see what they’re doing. Brin takes this into account by saying that certain zones of privacy would be necessary; he’s not offering a black-and-white, all-or-nothing solution. A transparent society would, he claims, again paradoxically, protect privacy by making it easier to spot those who would violate the bounds of common courtesy, rather than leaving the tools of privacy-invasion in the hands of a privileged few. But I would also like to examine the emphasis on privacy and anonymity that exists in American culture, particularly on the net. Andrew Leonard’s Bots discusses net culture (or at least net culture circa the mid-to-late 90s, when the book was written) and finds example of example of individuals using the net’s cloak of anonymity to commit antisocial behavior, disrupting discussion forums and chat rooms, crashing sites, and so on. Message board protocols often suggest that you shouldn’t post anything you wouldn’t be willing to say to someone face to face, where you would be accountable for your words. Maybe a little transparency wouldn’t be such a bad thing there.

But what about people who aren’t committing antisocial acts but still want anonymity or privacy because of an unfair social climate that might stigmatize them? What about an adolescent who’s trying to deal with the possibility that he or she might be a homosexual, or an individual who might have a socially-unacceptable disease like HIV? Here I’m not so sure. I agree with Brin’s notion of privacy zones for things like this, but I know that in some instances those will be breached. Am I willing to see that happen? I don’t know. Part of me thinks that a lot of stuff would become less socially unacceptable if we all knew how common it was, or at least how many people all had some kind of ‘guilty pleasure’ — if we all had to accept each other’s quirks in order to be sure that our own quirks were accepted, wouldn’t that contribute to a more robust society in the long run? I can’t help but think that it would . . . which leads me to believe that the growing pains of getting to such a place, while uncomfortable and unfortunate, would be worthwhile. We may not quite be totally ready for transparency yet — we may have a generation or two of greater tolerance and open-mindedness to teach before we get there — but I can’t help but think of it as a worthy goal.

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Young Guns for Great Comics

Posted July 1, 2001 By Dave Thomer

If Larry Young’s only contribution to comics were the Astronauts in Trouble series, he’d be a darned important figure in American comics. Not only does this SF series combine great fun and action with nifty characterization, Young’s decision to publish AiT in the form of original graphic novels (OGNs) rather than single-issue mini-series is a reminder that comics shouldn’t be limited to a single format. But Young is much more than the writer of AiT and the upcoming Planet of the Capes — he runs AiT/Planet Lar, a company that publishes OGNs and trade paperback collections (TPBs) in a number of genres, including the terrific Channel Zero by Brian Wood. He’s a relentless “comics evangelist,” writer of the completed TRUE FACTS series on self-publishing in Savant magazine and the ongoing LOOSE CANNON column at Comic Book Resources. He’s a frequent poster at a number of comics message boards, including his own Delphi Forum and the Warren Ellis Forum. Flat out, he’s one of the smartest guys in comics, a guy who knows what he wants and is willing to put in the work to get it.

As the name “Astronauts in Trouble” implies, Young is also a space fan of the highest order; indeed, he has been known to argue that there is no film or story that can’t be made better by sticking in a guy in a spacesuit.

“Astronauts are modern-day knights-in-shining-armor,” he says. “Putting on their specialized suits to go into such an unforgiving environment . . . I mean, if a reader doesn’t see the inherent romance in space exploration, I can’t help them.”

The first AiT story is Live from the Moon, a real treat for fans of realistic science fiction. It’s the story of the news team that is selected to accompany Ishmael Hayes, North America’s leading businessman, on a self-financed voyage back to the lunar surface to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Armstrong landing. Since the real moon landing was such a pivotal event in Young’s fascination with space, it seems only natural that it would be the subject of his first space story.

“I lived in Dallas, Texas, just down the road from Houston when I was six years old, in 1969,” he says. “When Neil and Buzz first landed on the moon and said, ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here; the Eagle has landed’ they weren’t just making one small step, they were walking around on the moon and talking to ME.

“I think the concatenation of effect of being an impressionable lad with a great imagination, doting parents who made sure I had a telescope to look up at the moon during the Apollo 11 mission, and the geographic nearness to Mission Control scarred me for life.”

As I mention in my review of Live from the Moon, Young doesn’t scrimp on characterization despite the abundance of space action, especially in the interactions between anchor Dave Archer, cameraman Heck, and segment producer Annie.

“I needed an audience in to the story, and it made sense that it’d be the on-air talent. In order to short-hand to the reader that Channel Seven is the premier media outlet of the story, I had our other characters archly refer to Dave as the ‘Most Trusted Man in North America.’ He’s the Walter Cronkite of his day… but he’s a shell… a suit… a goofball. If his audience knew him as Heck and Annie do… they might not be watching Channel Seven…

“I was thinking of the famous triads in literature and in Pop Culture who represent two opposing viewpoints around the guy in the middle. What Leonard Nimoy famously described as ‘The Soliloquy Structure:’ that in Star Trek, if you took Hamlet’s soliloquy and made it Star Trek dialogue, you’d have Mr. Spock saying, ‘To be,’ Doctor McCoy would say, ‘Or NOT to be,’ with Captain Kirk in the middle saying, ‘. . . that is the question.’

“So I made Dave the central figure between the no-nonsense segment producer and the wise-cracking cameraman. If you have three main characters spanning that spectrum of reaction, the story almost writes itself.”

AiT/Planet Lar publishes a lot more than Astronauts in Trouble books, however. Young has put his muscle behind a number of independent creators to establish a line of OGNs and TPBs with a high reputation for quality. The amazingly-well-designed Channel Zero is probably the best-known of these at the moment — if you haven’t read my review of it, please do, and check out Brian Wood’s website while you’re at it. Channel Zero is the story of a near-future where the US, especially New York, have been overrun by censorship, and it stretches the existing boundaries of the comic format by incorporating a number of slogans and visuals into the pages that may be distinct from the main narrative but reinforce the message and feeling of the book.

Wood has also designed a number of covers for AiT publications, helping to craft and display AiT/Planet Lar’s identity as a forward-thinking comics publisher.

“I just like Brian Wood’s design sense,” says Young. “He’s done five of our eleven books, and it’s really quite neat to have that singular vision of an extremely strong artist and designer. He’s my guy I ask first, that’s for sure. If someone else does the book design, it’s because he doesn’t have time that month in his schedule.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Wood and Channel Zero are something of the centerpiece of the publisher’s list of upcoming projects; over the next nine months AiT will release a Channel Zero follow-up, a prequel of storts, and a design book. Next up, in October, is CousCous Express — a story about a turf war between rival New York restaurants that includes some characters from the first book.

But wait, there’s more. Transmetropolitan author Warren Ellis has two projects on tap, a military space adventure called Switchblade Honey and Available Light, a collection of short stories and photographs all written on or taken with a Handspring Visor; AiT has already published a collected edition of Ellis’ COME IN ALONE essays. Young himself will tackle the superhero genre with Planet of the Capes, and several other noted creators will release new TPBs or OGNs — the full lineup is available from the AiT website. It all fits into Young’s vision for the company.

“We publish books that I characterize as science fiction and ‘action-adventure-with-a-twist’ by quality creators on top of their games. When people see a logo that says, ‘An AiT/Planet Lar publication,’ I want them to associate that with a high quality graphic novel or trade paperback.”

He’s off to a great start.

Filed in Comics