Normal by Warren Ellis: a review

Normal

This is a Warren (Transmetropolitan, The Authority, Planetary, Iron Man) Ellis novel about two groups of people who are professional futurists: that is, they are paid to extrapolate where events and technology are headed. They share one difficulty: it’s a business that can make gazing into the abyss feel like it is indeed gazing back at you! And what IS gazing at us? This is the heart of the locked-door mystery that cradles the compact plot, set at a retreat where organizations that appraise the future send their smart people when they become unsettled enough to need a special medical vacation, not unlike rehab. Through the eyes of Adam Dearden, we quickly get familiar with a deep variety of information that makes up the Futurist profession. By the end, we’re unsettled to see what could make a person in that job pretty nervous. There’s something to be said for the detail put into this entertainingly-told, if disquieting, look over the shoulders of those who won’t ignore Tomorrow.

There’s two camps of people at Normal Head, the Oregon facility where we follow new occupant Adam. AS per the back cover:

Foresight strategists: civil futurists who engage in geoengineering, smart cities, avert impending doom
Strategic forecasters: spook futurists who think about geopolitical upheaval and drone warfare and ways to prepare clients for Impending Doom.

Then, you have a man who’s worked both sides of the aisle, but recently broke down after a mysteriously-referenced incident during a peaceful protest in Windhoek, Namibia.
Adam Dearden first has all his technological definitions of himself taken away:
quant band to monitor his EF field activity, respiration- a dozen stats
No Twitter NO Instagram
no phone with 8 different messaging apps
no laptop
And while he learns about Staging, where Normal residents have their choice of books, use of Internet, and more freedom, he’s presently a new resident of the facility, where he finally experiences...quiet.

He soon learns (nothing) about the mystery of Mr. Mansfield, and then stumbles into one centered around a heaving mass of insect life left in Mansfield’s locked room.

Dr. Murgu sympathetically treats Adam and makes prescriptions.
He’s guided physically by Dickson “a great galleon of a man sailing between the archipelago of plastic things in between them.”
He’s befriended by an economist named Clough, then a civil engineer, Lela Charron.
The Director has almost had enough of his job pacifying these intellectuals. His reaction to the disappeared inmate and the freak outs that follow betray his own need for some pills and quiet!

In the Futurist occupation, people theorize about Firechat and blockchain after talking at conferences.
Adam turns out to be reputable for a very dark idea, called Stoop Model. Can you guess why?
it’s almost certainly tied to whatever made him crack up after Windhoek, Namibia. Is he crazy...or just depressed? How delusional is Adam? Or has he simply seen something that went a bridge too far?

One aspect Adam observes: how little quiet, how little hermitage, can be found in the world anymore.
You “can probably get 3G service in chunks of Antarctica.”
But while he’s here at Normal, trying to appreciate nature and some good meds, he has the scary prospect of who is trying to become his new friends. They deal with heavy shit, after all.

Lela’s had to think about 13 million gallons pumped out of New York everyday so the subway can run- overwhelmed by a mere Category One Hurricane Sandy. Considering the way New York’s State of Emergency in its outmoded subways made the news this week, you can see one real problem in Futurism is seeing problems coming that you can’t get anyone to realistically deal with!

How do we manage?
After a post-bug-pile-reveal check-up, Adam somehow gets hijacked gently by a seemingly creepy guy Asher, who takes him to long-time resident Colegrave’s micro-home in Staging. For Colegrave, the future is medieval feudalism. That’s the only panacea to the reckless consequences of democracy, increasingly adrift in the algorithimically-aided lurid gazes of its divided, thoughtless people. He’s a foresight strategist, and this is his conclusion. He wills Adam to get busy solving the locked-room mystery of vanished Mansfield, and report back to him.

“After so long trapped in the micro-home with Colegrave, leaving the capsule felt like being ejected into space.” This is the nicely-worded set up as Dearden walks himself back to the facility.

“There was a forest. There was so much silence. The quiet felt like a huge new country he could wander around within for years without ever meeting its coastlines. A silence the size of the sky.”

Now, he encounters an even higher-ranking resident of staging, Jasmin Bulat- barefoot, wandering, considers herself a dual consciousness with her gut bacteria. She considers herself more respected than Colgrave by organizations out in the world, different ones of which still rely on data they ponder.

A wonderful use of science as metaphor can be found in Jasmin’s passage describing the Cordyceps mushroom that grows in the brains of ants. We learn her views on how our bacterial biome urges us on to exploration and greatness in the stars, where unfortunately we have no way to sustain them.

When Adam crosses the lunch table line, he begins uniting disparate people in conversation. He also inadvertently uncovers the vital missing piece of information everyone needs to really understand Normal.

If the evidence to this short book’s fascinating appeal hasn’t reached you yet, I can only say it’s got black humor, a skimming of deep practical reading framed as intelligent conversations, and a gentle humanity that belies its creator’s blistering use of cursing between its clearly-described, carefully-worded scenes.

Here are some favorite passages in the book’s last third, without giving away a plot you could better enjoy unspoilered:

“Money is the dark unknown god driving us all towards certain bloody doom. A giant formless thing from beyond space with a million genitals. It’s the thing in horror films that you should not directly look at lest you go mad….It’s crushed the world into new shapes and all we want to do is drink its dark, horrible milk because that is the nature of its fucking magic.” (Ellis, 106)

“He knew, from long website essays, that sleeve notes (like from a rare vinyl album) had pretty much gone away by the end of the eighties. Adam searched for a word to describe nostalgia for things you never knew. He was sure there was one...Nostalgia for a word you once knew.

...Sleeve notes were an incredibly important thing, he decided. They came from a time when music had something to say, and was supposed to mean something...It was an intensely civilized thing, the provision of sleeve notes. What was wrong with him, that he’d thought it was okay to live in a world without sleeve notes?”

Sehnsucht. That was the word, wasn’t it? Nostalgia for a distant country to which we have never been, but which nonetheless may be home. An intense yearing for a comforting alien perfection. Lipstick traces with no owner. Adam turned the word over in his head...Another sad futurist, he thought, trying to summon an ideal world from its island moorings in tomorrow. Ridiculous way to live.” (ibid, 126-128)

“Government is barely the tip of the iceberg now. Non-state actors, asymmetrical warfighters, skunkworks, security multi-nationals, who the hell knows. We lost the battle for our streets a long time ago. WE gave them up. Worse: we gave up the ideas and data freely to the people who used them to take our streets from us….It tells us that we quite literally have no idea what is loose in the world and looking at and talking to us, and who it is looking and listening for.” (ibid, 145)

I could certainly go on. If anything, Normal uncovers a few intelligent topics worth further exploration, in characters reflecting the author’s real-life friends and their acquaintances. But I won’t.
Semiautonomous listening devices may be waiting to take my reflections and give the f#%&in' novel away!

-C Lue Disharoon, 6/ 30/ 17

P.s. if that doesn't sound crazy enough, the audio book's read by comedian John Hodgman!

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Lindsay White's trying to get you through this

TRACKS by Lindsay White

As soon as I read somewhere some of the true story behind “25 Million People” I realized knowing these actual details shouldn’t be necessary to developing an affection for this album, Tracks. Let’s face it, a meet-and-greet with all the people necessary to build even a modicum of financial comfort as a musician isn’t happening. It’s fortunate, then, Lindsay has had her say in a series of songs that seems like their playing was the only relief in living through their inspiration.

Each listener’s experience creates a third piece of art, crafted by its understanding. In the sound department, the album delivers variety (between and within songs) from lounge to roots to blues rock to lullaby, but if you are a lyrics person you will be rewarded.

“25 Million People” evokes a shared house overrun by people who come and go at all hours, like when a home becomes a hook-up place for drugs. The house is the mind, the reaction to the personal laid beside the bustling cares of the public, and the singer feels as though the house is a bit empty of herself. It’s a place devoid of reflection, a performance without a monitor, without feedback, all the shy pain and self-doubt and the flinching in case of rejection, as though the person’s empathy is too overwhelming to bear before unreceptive people.

It’s never much to ask others to feel your pain unless you can make their own pain less lonely. It becomes an out to self-destructive, self-judgmental barbs, fights past the fighting, and soon your belief in seeing the beauty behind everything suggests an artistic therapy that requires all nerve possible to offer commercially.

But you press on.

Record snips of your music on your phone to share with people close to you. Sit through a smoky bar somewhere and contemplate the whole sorry thing, and convey it in the delivery of teary, woeful songs like “Wall of Feather,” then produce it (as does Alex Zander here) so as to raise one’s dignity with the nobility of the love fallen prey. Add fear of death and wasting one’s life to the compassionate observer in “Chasing A Lie” and find that empathy lifting the melody into a major key.

The fret board’s a haven for working out confidence issues, in addition to moving pain from your heart to your fingertips. “Once they’re there, then they’re every where” she sings of the bugabear thoughts; intentions make all the difference. The album becomes a listenable respite, lit with awareness of danger of life off the tracks, the need to lay tracks towards a destination, the desire to make tracks from a train wreck already on the books.


The ghost of common hopes have a voice, for what lovers wish and dream to understand what’s here denied. Good nature and the salvation of art are what converts this singer and songs into a welcome friend one plays over and over.


The personal therapy that serves as the grist for White’s songs is delivered in catchy tunes and hook driven styles, as though she understands it is a rare person who really wants to listen to your troubles very long. Not only will the world laugh with you, they will charge you are a crybaby! How does a feeling person reply when one’s life is reduced to melodrama? Perhaps, by hearing melodies of the life within that drama, some prayer of salvation ---to something---can be launched, as in the bluesy rocker “Get Me Through This.” Here, for all her pretty, even demure voice, she asserts a grittier side, a reminder she is no lady to be messed with. She’s turned misfortune into as many good jokes as she can, but don’t mistake her for stoic---not her musical self, at any rate.


“Disappearing Act” playfully builds up the tension for the “Poof! You were gone” and rings the legerdemain metaphor for every line, even sporting a pun (“You were a (hairy) Harry Houdini”). Alex Zander’s guitar work is a good fit, adding mood and texture throughout the record.

It is damaging to compare most anyone to the legend of predecessors like Joni Mitchell, Grace Slick, or Bob Dylan, but laid song beside song this newer work stands strong. This personal memoir doesn’t serve the topical side, but rather reminds one more of Blonde On Blonde Dylan as he passed out of his political protestor phase, writing catchy rubberneck tours about why relationships don’t survive, though these are not colored with the oblique personas that randomly populate Dylan’s songs, but follow the confessional aspect of more contemporary tunesmiths like Alanis or Jewel. White is concerned with clarity, even when dressing the lyrics smartly in metaphors to roll out the idea, such as the risky liason in “Rapunzel.” The naked, spry sylph of “My Recipe” best addresses the neurotic circumstances that defy her best efforts; yet what she’s cooking has bitter spices, balanced with the shuffle and steel guitar that brings a moment of Nashville to fill the air of the kitchen of her devising.

Made up, these stories would be good ones to tell, yet the confessional power of the delivery suggests White is aiming for realness---perhaps in response to unsettled expectations, truths and wishes and primal screams swallowed up by delusions, fakeness. “Fancy Shoes” is the most Dylan-like in its delivery---but again, we’ve run into the problem of writing about music, instead of simply listening, which I would advise here for yourself.


There’s a hint of carrying on to a better day, a knowledge that the old wisdom, however ignored, is still a fresh inspiration. One imagines these songs will be performed to help the writer work out the circumscribed issues as well to entertain. Perhaps the happy, creative moments like “Owl Song” (“happy the ‘who’ is you”) offer the respite that comes with finding similar spirits to keep the faith. If this relief seems hard to find, if your pain is similar, you may find it eloquent. It is a step towards another incarnation, made self-reliant by getting through this. Only a career full of listeners (and possibly, buyers) will tell.

“25 million people” can’t be wrong.


http://www.reverbnation.com/#!/main/global_search?q=Lindsay%20White&commit=GO

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Iron Man 2 : A No-Spoiler's Opinion

From grimy setting of the opening, to the spectacular dive with AC/DC blaring that leads to Tony Stark's Techno Caesar entrance on stage at the massive Expo, those first ten minutes really took me into IRON MAN 2, which stimulated many curiosities that will follow my free time studies in days to come.
I loved the strong women characters, whose roles were written as credible possibilities for brilliant human beings. While a suggestion that Scarlett Jo's Natasha Romanova might have an intellect for evaluation, hacking knowledge, take-down style martial arts and a head for languages fits the superficiality of the action plot, they do glamorize capabilities that real women achieve. Her role fit smoothly into much of the rest of the action with Stark, Potts, even Fury. It was very hard to spotlight what makes her unique and capable with War Machine also requiring development; this was a difficult story editing decision, to pack in so many things.

The best moments of Paltrow's Potts role take your mind off the modern-minded gender switch to reflect a competent woman effectively running "behind the scenes" actualities, albeit with Tony's renegade penchant there to make a difficult job almost impossible!

The villain side is a really fun pastiche of believable elements in classic Iron Man stories, while generating new characters in place of fragmented analogues of these best ideas. The Whiplash (an ex-con) accoutrement to the Crimson Dynamo's mythos by way of a central film theme, legacy, gave him a hook. Mickey Rourke's intelligence-fueled climb from the neglect heap through the terrors of prison life and his father's exile and poverty makes him sympathetic and motivated while never sacrificing his scarring and ethical perversion. The military/ industrial complex's dark side is played up for its incompetence and greed, reprising the classical antagonistic Senator role from Stan Lee's 60s comic. The weaponeer entrepenuer played with condescending and ignorant relish, Justin Hammer, from Layton/ Micheleine's 1980s run. Rourke's main villain was greatly inspired by the actor's study of a much-maligned and infamous Butyrka Prison (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butyrka_prison)


Don Cheedle's Rhodey character delivered most of the lines my wife quoted on the way home, too. If you could just swap four minutes of Hammer's smarmy condescension for a couple more moments to get to know Rhodey as more than a Stark auxilliary or soldier...still, his sense of duty is present to contrast his good friend in his weakness, and his humor under adversity shines without pandering. The issues lending to that adversity could've been just a tad more intense...

The levity provides a humorous emotional release that keeps the intensity from straining credibility, without breaking character. All around, terrific acting with the kind of climax you only saw before in comics; a sleek plot that re=invented many beloved parts of Iron Man comics lore.

It's really an individualist parable about a genius striving for a more egalitarian world. Build your own super powers!

· I say this in light of the fact that I used to really dream and play Iron Man, and his title is one of the very few series where I assembled maybe a hundred-issue plus collection, as well as the first six years I later attained in black and white, along with about six years' of AVENGERS appearances in that same reprint format.


Tony had a mustache like my Dad, and I always enjoyed the peeks into the adult, corporate, political and technological worlds that could only be afforded through this unique hero. Tony is not so different, though glamorized, for all his troubles, than the kinds of rebellious innovators who have ever made an actual difference in real life!

The subtle set-up for the upcoming AVENGERS and the "don't leave the theater!" cameo brought it all home, because you're not left with the feeling this fictional world is OVER.

Much more to add in the morning.

Might I say, we LOVED the trailers for A-TEAM and Air Walker (cartoon fans know as Avatar).


Don't miss our art spot light on Marc Kane and an edgy indie project from the co-creator (with Keith Giffen) of hard knockin' Lobo, Roger Slifer, on http://integr8dfix.blogspot.com/