LA Weekly Detour Music Festival Saturday October 4 2008

http://detour.laweekly.com/

3 Women

I watched Robert Altman's 3 Women last night; it is my favorite Altman film...Fantastic movie.

I love Sissy Spacek (Carrie) and Shelley Duvall (The Shining).

For a full review see:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=1069

Interview: Dr. Carl Djerassi

Oh Dr. Djerassi you ruminator you...I'm very excited about this 'science in fiction' genre; it really is a great way to spoon feed the general population its daily dose of science.

Dr. Carl Djerassi spent 50 years revolutionizing the world through chemistry — from developing the first oral contraceptive pill to producing a harmless method for insect control. In recent years, however, this National Medal of Science winner has traded test tubes for pen and paper as a fiction writer. Now the author of five novels and seven plays (one of which, Taboos, opens in New York this fall), Djerassi deals with the elusive role of science in fiction, as well as the moral dilemmas inherent in the discipline. Boldtype's Chelsea Bauch recently spoke to Djerassi about cross-disciplinary prejudice, professional rivalry, and the benefits of intellectual smuggling.

Boldtype: How has your experience as a chemist affected your work as a writer, and vice versa?

Carl Djerassi: I decided to turn to literary writing only in my mid 60s — at the same time as I decided to start slowly closing my laboratory. My writing had no effect on my chemistry. But the reverse is quite another matter, especially if you broaden "chemistry" to encompass "science." Initially, I was very motivated to bridge the ever widening gulf between the natural sciences and the rest of society by turning into an intellectual smuggler — to smuggle important information about scientific culture, scientific behavior, and scientific concepts into the minds of individuals who are afraid or even unwilling to learn about them on their own — and to do all that in the guise of fiction and, more recently, also through the theatre. Hence, being a scientific insider in a very tribal culture obviously helped me in picking themes and plots, as well as being able to present them in a realistic and plausible manner.

BT: How do your colleagues in each field perceive your crossover work?

CD: That's a very mixed bag, because for each of them I am an outsider. In chemistry, there are several groups. The majority — consisting of people whose last book of fiction was probably the obligatory Austen or Dickens novel in high school — think that I am wasting my time rather than still doing chemistry. The rest consist of those who really like it for telling the facts as they are; people who are jealous that I achieved some modest success in an area as different as my preceding 50 years of chemistry; and people who worry that I am washing dirty lab coats in public.

Among the literati, and especially theatre people, there is some admiration, but more frequently a concern that scientists, who already seem to be taking over the world in their eyes, are now even trespassing on their turf. It has led to a fair number of ad hominem critiques that had nothing to do with the actual quality of my writing. To them, in spite of five published novels ands seven plays, I am still a chemist who does some writing, rather than a writer who once was a chemist.

BT: Can you explain the "science-in-fiction" genre and tell us how it came about?

CD: The gulf between the sciences and the other cultural worlds of the humanities and social sciences is increasingly widening, yet scientists themselves spend preciously little time attempting to communicate with these other cultures. To a large extent, this is due to our obsession with peer approval and the recognition that our own tribe offers few incentives to communicate with a broader public that will do nothing for our professional reputation. Rather late in life, I decided to do something about illuminating the scientist's culture to a broader audience, and to do it through the rarely practiced genre of "science-in-fiction" — not to be confused with science fiction. For me, a novel can only be anointed as "science-in-fiction" if all the science or idiosyncratic behavior of scientists described in it is plausible, if not actually factual. None of these restrictions applies to science fiction. By no means am I suggesting that the scientific flights of fantasy in science fiction are inappropriate. But if one actually wants to use fiction to smuggle scientific facts into the consciousness of a scientifically illiterate public — and I do think that such smuggling is intellectually and socially beneficial — then it is crucial that the facts behind that science be described correctly.

BT: Has it achieved what you intended, and where do you see the genre going from here?

CD: It has definitely achieved my aim, and I see more and more books of this nature starting to appear. But from a personal standpoint, it has been crucially important, because it has become a form of autopsychoanalysis — writing about the tribal behavior of scientists and realizing that I am describing myself.

BT: Are there any current scientific discoveries you think are ripe for novelization?

CD: There always will be. Every question answered and every field explored simply leads to others, which makes prophesy useless. Listing some specific examples simply displays the respondent's personal bias.

BT: Much of your work features an ethical or moral dilemma — what do you see as being the biggest philosophical quandaries of the future?

CD: "Philosophical quandaries" is too pretentious a term for someone like myself, who really has no formal training in philosophy and thus would simply sound ponderous if I attempted to answer it. An intellectual quandary which does concern me as an educator and as a thinking and curious person is the ever increasing tendency in higher education — and hence in subsequent life — toward intellectual monogamy (learning more and more about ever narrower fields), rather than intellectual polygamy (showing at least some competence in more and more diverse fields). My innate curiosity has always caused me to aspire toward the latter.

Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution

When, in Freaks (1932), the legless Johnny Eck lifts up onto his hands and walks around on them, it's not just a display of grace and perseverance. In Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution, Mark S. Blumberg suggests that Eck also reminds us that there's nothing "natural" about normal behavior. We each develop and adapt to the world in the body that we've been given — the culmination of eons of evolution, as Neil Shubin describes in Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.

These different perspectives on embodiment in time — we learn to inhabit our bodies as we grow and develop; our bodies are, in some sense, quite ancient — both arise from a recent turn in evolutionary biology whereby scientists increasingly argue for more integrative views on genetics and epigenetics (the study of how genes are expressed). Paleontologists have found startling new tales to tell about the implications for human evolution of ancient fossilized structures. The reason the muscle around men's intestinal walls is like so much wet Kleenex, for example, has to do with our fishy ancestors — fish gonads are close to their heart and the long journey from the heart to the pelvis weakened the surrounding muscles. Meanwhile, developmental perspectives remind us that not all behavior is predetermined, but that variation in structure is affected by the legacy of evolution.

In a September interview, Blumberg said that one of the best reasons to write popular science books is that the process forces him to think more clearly about the assumptions in his research: "The challenge is how to tell the story as narrative...without losing the details of the science or altering the underlying conceptual information." He claims that working in this mode "has created a nice feedback loop" by forcing him to first articulate his principles. Blumberg further notes that having scientists — even scientists of quite different theoretical interests — state their cases plainly in public invites the very disagreement that makes evolution a science, rather than a shibboleth such as intelligent design or creationism. Blumberg is a developmental psychobiologist, and thus advocates for a more supple understanding of the interplay between development, behavior, and evolution than has usually been accepted. He eloquently defends the view that "development is the story of adaptation within one lifetime," and that thinking seriously about anomalies helps us see "how much adaptability there is in the developing organism."

In contrast to Blumberg's somewhat polemical goals, Shubin, a paleontologist attached to the Field Museum and the University of Chicago's medical school, is eager to explain the recent convergent threads in evolutionary sciences, as genetics, molecular biology, paleontology, and numerous other disciplines feed into one another. In a nod to Darwin's conclusion of The Origin of Species, he relates a story about going to a museum with his son, and being overwhelmed with emotion at seeing the Apollo 8 command module. Shubin describes being awestruck by the glory of nature and at science's extraordinary ability to make sense of it.

Shubin writes with clarity, but also maintains a humane sense of limits. Natural selection is ingenious, but it must always be remembered that our bodies are profound kludges — one hacked-together solution after another. Sometimes these are elegant, but the solutions always involve a compromise between a structure's current needs and its evolutionary heritage. Shubin's story is not only one of scientific explanation, but also an account of his own training as a scientist. He is, at all times, both funny and evocative, making Your Inner Fish worthwhile reading for any interest level.

Of course, these two books can't undo a debased understanding of evolution all alone. But by engaging us in stories about the most enigmatic aspects of our bodies, Blumberg and Shubin remind us why we should care, while also offering a visceral kick of new knowledge. -Jason B. Jones

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

“American Earth is both a crash course in ecology and a monument to the American environmental movement.”

Review:

Amid claims of environmental calamity and an imminent apocalypse, there are those who might want a quiet book to restore some sanity and hope to their minds. American Earth, a recent installment of the Library of America, can do just that.

Edited by Bill McKibben, a veteran writer and activist, this anthology of contemporary and historical environmental writing explores our society's tragic relationship with the natural world and the ways it can be improved. Designed for both casual perusal and avid absorption, the works by 100 authors come in all forms and styles, from scientific observation to poetic meditation. Canonical figures — Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson — are joined by the obscure without any distinction of merit. Each entry offers a revelation, whether it's E.O. Wilson dropping biophilic science, Gary Snyder channeling Smokey the Bear, or Edward Abbey giving the solitary finger to a ruinous tourist industry. With McKibben's informative portraits of each author, the result is both a crash course in ecology and a monument to the American environmental movement — a movement some say has reached a crisis point, but which McKibben rightly claims is more necessary than ever. As such, this anthology isn't just a recap, but a field guide to the way ahead.

McKibben — whose classic account of global warming, The End of Nature, is excerpted here — argues that environmental writing is "America's single most distinctive contribution to the world's literature." With all due respect to comic books and Walt Whitman (both appearing here, too), a trek through this thousand-page tome leaves one nodding in inspired agreement. One can only hope that, collectively, we heed these writers' hard-earned wisdom, before we reach the final scene of a real-life Lorax.
- Michael Romano

Dry Storeroom No.1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

When I was a kid I had fantasies that, among others, included making a home of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. The mummies, the scintillating gem room...I wanted to eat, sleep and play there. As a high school student I actually gave some thought to a career in a field that would involve working at the museum; something like archeology a la Indiana Jones. Then I grew up...

“Fortey uses the precision of a scientist and the intimacy of an anthropologist to reveal the rivalries, scandals, and quirks of the museum's resident characters.”

Review:

Dry Storeroom No. 1 is a natural history of natural-history museums, as told by a native inhabitant of one of the industry's finest institutions. Richard Fortey is a former senior paleontologist at London's prestigious Natural History Museum and the acclaimed author of Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution and Life: An Unauthorized Biography. Although Fortey spent his career exploring evolution's labyrinth, Dry Storeroom is as much about the diversity of dead specimens as the living people who find, collect, and classify them.

The allure of natural-history museums lies in their exotic — and sometimes downright weird — collections. London's scientific cathedral houses plants collected by Captain Cook on his voyages, blood-red crystals that seemingly wilt if exposed to light, and more than 70 million other items of natural novelty. The museum also boasts a grand legacy of passionate geekdom and eccentricity: resident scientist Edward Heron-Allen, a turn-of-the-century expert on the single-celled foraminifera family, also spent his years as a linguist, novelist, and violin maker; Herbert Wernham, a botany curator-cum-Casanova, collected the (ahem) pubic hair of his lovers; and butterfly expert Dick Vane-Wright rivaled his tropical specimens' flamboyant colors with his own exuberant, paisley-patterned waistcoats. Fortey uses the precision of a scientist and the intimacy of an anthropologist to reveal the rivalries, scandals, and quirks of the museum's resident characters.

Fortey rummages through the institution's idiosyncratic past while reexamining his own episodic career with rambling wit. Although he celebrates technological advancements — the advent of DNA extraction techniques, for instance, which transformed an extinct bird's previously discarded bones into a revolutionary research opportunity — his book contains a subtle nostalgia. By unlocking his storeroom of memories, Fortey recaptures a sense of wide-eyed wonder for the physical and social world. - Chelsea Bauch

Unclassified: Lou Reed & Ulrich Krieger @ The Red Cat October 2 - 3 2008

Lou Reed's sunglasses suck...

Rock music icon Lou Reed and sonic experimentalist Ulrich Krieger take the stage together for the first time to improvise music and make soundscapes. The pair use guitars, saxophones and an array of electronic treatments to venture into deep acoustic space, drawing on new music, free jazz, avant-rock, noise and ambient in a set of intense conceptual pieces and intuitive improvisations. The artists first met in 2002 for the premiere of Krieger's transcription and arrangement of Metal Machine Music — Reed's seminal guitar feedback epic — for the chamber orchestra Zeitkratzer. More recently, Reed has been touring a new stage version of his 1973 rock oratorio Berlin, a work that was the subject of the stunning concert film by Julian Schnabel released this summer. Krieger, who has collaborated with artists from Reed and Lee Ranaldo to Phill Niblock and Merzbow, has been a member of CalArts' music faculty since last fall.

Thu 10.2.08 8:30 pm $35 (General Admission) $28 (students, alumni w/ affinity card) $18(Cal Arts Students, Faculty & Staff)
Thu 10.2.08 10:30 pm $35 $28 $18
Fri 10.3.08 8:30 pm $35 $28 $18

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