From the left: Adrian’s Friend, At First, No One Listened, Bitter Days and Old Corral at New River
Wounded Worlds: Nihil Novum
by Ryan J. Hodge
Wounded Worlds: Nihil Novum is an excellent sci-fi novel. I highly recommend giving this book a try if you don’t usually read sci-fi. I am sure you will enjoy it as much as I have. I would personally like to see this made into a movie or television series. In Wounded Worlds, the alien Heleans try to overtake the earth and a battle ensues. Meanwhile, on Talvares the humans are trying to integrate human culture with the alien culture. The story flows with non-stop suspense. The readers will be kept on the edge of their seats and will not want to put the book down until the very last page.
I very highly recommend Wounded Worlds: Nihil Novum. I enjoyed this book very much. Hodge’s Wounded Worlds: Nihil Novum is most definitely my cup of tea!
Forget Me Not: A Love Story of the East
by G.X. Chen
It was She, my mother, who gave me the keys to Imaginationland,
With all those fabulous art museums
She took me to, in Minneapolis—
How vividly I recall the eerie lighting;
The multiple levels & lack of clocks;
The videos & dioramas & unique-smelling plastic gift shop figurines
(Which we could always afford, when I wanted them badly enough);
The long Jurassic curve of the thunder lizard’s neck;
A pterodactyl swooping so low its wings tousled my snow-white locks;
A glitter-eyed saber-toothed tiger, trapped in the tar pit of its demise;
All those taxidermied stranger-than-fiction fragments of Mesozoic reality;
And how I wanted to never, ever leave.
—Tony Longshanks LeTigre +11+
We swim in oceans of information
And try not to drown
But would drowning not be preferable to beaching ourselves
Like a moribund whale?
We need to tell Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act and amend it to make it even stronger.
Dial (202) 999-3996 to be connected to your legislators. If you are not from the U.S. contact your own legislators and encourage them to pressure the United States to support these protections.
According to Josh Levy of Free Press:
“Since the first revelations last summer, hundreds of thousands of Internet users have come together online and offline to protest the NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance programs. These programs attack our basic rights to connect and communicate in private, and strike at the foundations of democracy itself. Only a broad movement of activists, organizations and companies can convince Washington to restore these rights.”
Media Advisory for January 10th, 2014
Mobilization, dubbed “The Day We Fight Back” to Honor Swartz & Celebrate Anniversary of SOPA Blackout
Contact: Blair FitzGibbon, 202-503-6141
Washington, DC – A broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms will hold a worldwide day of activism in opposition to the NSA’s mass spying regime on February 11th. Dubbed “The Day We Fight Back”, the day of activism was announced on the eve of the anniversary of the tragic passing of activist and technologist Aaron Swartz. The protest is both in his honor and in celebration of the victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act two years ago this month, which he helped spur.
Participants including Access, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, BoingBoing, Reddit, Mozilla, ThoughtWorks, and more to come, will join potentially millions of Internet users to pressure lawmakers to end mass surveillance — of both Americans and the citizens of the whole world.
On January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz took his own life. Aaron had a brilliant, inquisitive mind that he employed towards the ends of technology, writing, research, art, and so much more. Near the end of his life, his focus was political activism, in support of civil liberties, democracy, and economic justice.
According to Shakespeare, in his comedy of manners and disguises As You Like It, all the world’s a stage. Everyone’s just a temporary player, with a certain role and time to enter and exit this existence.
Yet, even when someone’s not taking center stage, they, or their memory, can still play an important role. In life, as in a dramatic production, a lot can happen behind the scenes.
This month, our contributors pull back the curtain and peer at how nature and society function underneath the surface.
Returning poet Dave Douglas illustrates his speaker’s journey through wild country on a Greyhound bus. He reflects on his Christian faith’s ideals of perseverance, courage and sacrifice while passing through rough terrain.
Writer G.K. Brannen also explores the psychological and emotional implications of a physical journey, that of organ transplantation. He looks at what it means to live through another person’s death, with part of his or her body inside oneself. Also drawing upon Biblical and creation imagery, he considers this topic through poetry and prose.
Bea Garth incorporates rich and specific detail about the natural world into her work, making the riverbeds, stones, seaweed and milfoil as lush and sensual as her romantic couples. Elements of the scene that would likely be in the background of a photograph or painting come to the forefront in Garth’s work, where all of life holds value and beauty.
Science journalist Cristina Deptula reviews a talk on the early development of the universe by San Francisco State University professor Dr. Mary Barsony, at the Chabot Space and Science Center (Oakland, CA). Dr. Barsony outlines the expanding and cooling of matter into light and heavier elements after the Big Bang, and then personalizes the grandiose topic, tracing the origin of the body parts of a hypothetical, average person. At a basic level, the abstract universe has to do with us, and each of us, as a living being, is part of it.
Human societies, and social groups, also can involve underlying feelings and interactions that build up and lead to the obvious, big-picture events we notice. Scott Archer Jones examines the thoughts and relationships among ordinary people in a small town bar. Carol Smallwood highlights the power of fragrances and photographs to bring back memories in her vignette about a woman’s home visit from a new provider of Avon cosmetics.
Ayokunle Adeleye explains the reasons behind student discontent at his Nigerian medical school, which faces financial and administrative problems. Long-term structural injustice and misery can fuel outward strikes and conflicts, as he illustrates.
Tom Reiss’ biography The Black Count, as reviewed by Bruce Roberts, tells the story of the real African-American figure who inspired the legend of the Count of Monte Cristo. The book illuminates a heritage of slavery and racial discrimination through the changing fortunes of one man.
Linda Allen’s poetry turns inward, encouraging readers to ask themselves difficult questions about who they are, how they think and treat others, and who they are becoming. Perhaps by changing inner attitudes, we can affect interpersonal behavior, and thus improve society.
Eric Franklin’s new self-development book Peanut Butter Principles, as reviewed by Elizabeth Hughes in her monthly Book Periscope column, advocates a similar attitude of self-reflection, along with discipline, patience, and hard work. Hughes also offers high praise for Deborah Hawkins’ Dance for a Dead Princess, for its suspense and writing quality.
Other contributors look to art and mythology to fuel their musings. Christopher Bernard speculates about the thoughts of the Minotaur, a half-human, half-bull creature feeding on sacrificed young people caught within his labyrinth. Bernard’s work often centers on the search for love and identity despite difficult, alienating circumstances, and this piece touches upon those themes in a unique way.
Returning poet Neil Ellman conveys the Surrealistic artistic ethos through his poetry, playing with humor and individuality in pieces echoing the spirit of paintings by Dali and Basquiat.
Journalist Martin Rushmere writes about an actual play, Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, produced and presented by Marin County’s Alter Theater and San Francisco’s ACT Costume Shop Theater. This tale focuses on deep issues and secrets, festering over the years and ruining the relationships in a family.
Finally, writer, film director and photographer Faracy Grouse shows us the majesty of the sunset, rainbows, and waves: where many elements have come together to create a striking scene.
She, and the month’s other artists and writers, invite you to take your seat and enjoy the show, appreciating the onstage performance while remembering the complex world behind the scenes.
Public-Domain-Images.net Tango Dinner Theater
Fool for Love, by Sam Shepard
Alter Theater
Through February 9 at 1344 Fourth Street, San Rafael
February 11 to 16 at A.C.T. Costume Shop Theater, 1117 Market Street, San Francisco
A riveting portrayal from Marin’s experimental theater company
Powerful, elemental and earthy portrayals suck in the audience for the 70 minutes of Sam Shepard’s lovers caught in an emotional Moebius strip. Chasing each other in an endless loop, unable to find an answer to their love-hate obsession stained by a bitter family secret, they are on the edge. Beyond that is only desolation, physically and emotionally. Even the run down motel room of their encounter is on the edge; beyond is the Mojave Desert. What makes the performances so effective is that the cast understands exactly Shepard’s theme. The raw, brutish roughness of this underbelly of society jumps out as the two vent their passions.
Matt Lai’s Eddie is a gun-toting cowboy and rodeo rider, who has returned to Jeanette Harrison‘s May for the umpteenth time. Life’s illusions and pretense were stripped from them years before, and they know that despair awaits them. Yet they still pretend to each other and themselves that everything can be different. In a rocking chair is the Old Man, Charles Dean, their long-dead equally rootless father, who tries to justify his actions and exists only in their minds. (Director Will Marchetti was the Old Man in the original production with Ed Harris). But the audience can never be sure if their memories are true and if so, if the Old Man’s interpretations are accurate.
Enter Danny Jones as Martin, a wonderfully innocent simpleton, right down to his every expression and action, who is befriending May and is the foil and channel for the lusts and hate. Everything and everyone is one step away from desolation, although only Martin is unaware of it
The Moebius ending, as Eddie’s horse trailer burns, the horses escape and his truck is wrecked, reinforces the theme of eternal desolation and hope and keeps the audience focused until the last second. Will Marchetti has put together an excellent rendering of Shepard’s emotional maelstrom. Alter Theater has chosen a great storefront location for this production, in downtown San Rafael. Like Sam Shepard’s lovers, the company has no permanent home and moves to different storefronts, which makes its mission all the more exciting. The city and Marin should count their blessings with productions like this from the county’s most daring theater company.