Have we entered the Biopolitical Age?

We're obsessed with enhancing our bodies and tuning up our brains; already, our pop culture is full of heroic, cyborg megamutants. But what does it all mean? A seminar in Irvine, CA aims to find out, by exploring "biopolitics."

Caveat: I am a speaker at this seminar, so naturally I'm pretty excited about it. If you're in the Orange County, CA area on Friday, consider coming out to see luminaries like David Brin, Natasha Vita-More, Jess Nevins, and Jamais Cascio (and me!) discuss transhumanism and "The Biopolitics of Popular Culture." Organized by transhumanist braniac James Hughes, the conference will address our biotech future as a meme in pop culture as well as scientific development. Here's a description from the program:

"Popular culture is full of tropes and cliches that shape our debates about emerging technologies. Our most transcendent expectations for technology come from pop culture, and the most common objections to emerging technologies come from science fiction and horror, from Frankenstein and Brave New World to Gattaca and the Terminator.

Why is it that almost every person in fiction who wants to live a longer than normal life is evil or pays some terrible price? What does it say about attitudes towards posthuman possibilities when mutants in Heroes or the X-Men, or cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica or Iron Man, or vampires in True Blood or Twilight are depicted as capable of responsible citizenship?

Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?

During this day long seminar we will engage with culture critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers to explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television."

Here's a full list of speakers and a program.

Cost for the day is $150, or $100 for students, and includes lunch. For those who can't make it, the event will also be streaming live here, and a complete video record of the seminar will be posted online later.

Also, the venue for the conference is EON Reality, where engineers are researching 3D projections and other nifty virtual reality/augmented reality tech. There will be a demo!

Rupert Everett's advice to Gay Actors: "Stay In The Closet"

Rupert Everett has been openly gay since he came out 20 years ago, but he doesn't recommend that route for other actors.

"It's not that advisable to be honest. It's not very easy," he told UK's Guardian. "And, honestly, I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out."

At 50, the 'My Best Friend's Wedding' star says that homophobia in Hollywood has kept him from becoming a leading man. He says that heterosexuals are cast as gays (pointing to 'Brokeback Mountain' and 'Transamerica') but gay men are denied the plum straight roles and often reduced to drag.

"The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business," he said. "It just doesn't work and you're going to hit a brick wall at some point. You're going to manage to make it roll for a certain amount of time, but at the first sign of failure they'll cut you right off. And I'm sick of saying, 'Yes, it's probably my own fault.' Because I've always tried to make it work and when it stops working somewhere, I try to make it work somewhere else. But the fact of the matter is, and I don't care who disagrees, it doesn't work if you're gay."

Everett does admit that his openness about his sexuality has afforded him personal happiness if not professional success. He's glad he's not one of the "plenty" of gay Hollywood stars still stuck in the closet.

"I think, all in all, I'm probably much happier than they are," he said. "I may not be as rich or successful, but at least I'm vaguely free to be myself."

The outspoken actor has never been one to shy away from controversy. He previously said that President Obama has "gone black" and talked about Graydon Carter's "monster cock."

You can read the whole Guardian interview here.

Steampunk comes of age with Westerfeld's "Leviathan"

Plenty of young-adult novels feature teens reaching adulthood in a world that adults have royally buggered. And there's no shortage of books about a British Empire with improbably high technology. But Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan makes both of those themes epic.

Leviathan, out in a pretty gorgeous hardcover recently, doesn't feel like merely the latest iteration of the slew of "coming of age in dystopia" young-adult novels, even though that description pretty much fits: The book takes place at the start of an alternate-history World War I that looks to be every bit as bloody and horrifying as the real version. Nor does Leviathan feel like the umpteenth vaguely steampunk (or in this case, diesel-punk) book to come down the pike.

There are a few reasons for this. Most notably, Westerfeld leavens his dark wartime tale with a more-than-generous amount of humor and lightness — one character's catchphrase, "Barking spiders!", has already become a daily utterance among people of my acquaintance. But also, Westerfeld throws in enough odd twists to make his own peculiar alt-history seem quite unmistakable.

This seems like a good place to warn that there'll be spoilers in this review.

So as you might already have heard, Leviathan takes place in a very different version of Europe — the Germans and Austrians have fantastical machines, including Walkers (massive diesel-powered stomping machines that wouldn't be out of place among Star Wars' AT-ATs) and weird running machines. Meanwhile, though, Britain and some of its allies have developed a very different technology — in this timeline, Darwin discovered DNA, and now the British are able to recombine DNA strands to engineer new life-forms, including weaponized bats that eat and shit flechettes, and the Leviathan itself, a kind of floating whale kept aloft by the hydrogen created by the creatures in its belly.

So instead of merely being a conflict between two power blocs in Europe, World War I becomes the conflict between Britain's genetically-engineering Darwinists and Austria/Germany's mechanistic Clankers.

Into this odd (and somewhat implausible) alternate timeline, Westerfeld throws in two different young protagonists who are coming of age on opposite sides. Alek is the son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination sets off the war in the first place, and because Alek could be next in line for the Archduke's throne (if his mother's commoner blood can be overcome) the Germans and Austrians will stop at nothing to destroy him. So his teachers take to the road in a walking machine, trying to stay one step ahead of the assassins who are trying to finish the job with the last family member.

Meanwhile, our other protagonist, Deryn Sharp, is a girl who pretends to be a boy so she can join the armed forces and fly through the skies on one of those dashing genetically engineered creatures. The plucky Deryn, now renamed Dylan, gets swept off to sea on a "Huxley," (a sort of floating jellyfish, I think), and winds up getting rescued by the Leviathan, becoming the newest member of her crew. Despite the constant risk of exposure, Deryn/Dylan never hesitates to throw herself into the midst of danger, scaling the heights of the Leviathan's rigging in the midst of peril at sea, and braving storms and enemy aircraft to do her duty and prove herself the best midshipman aboard. (She's the one who exclaims "Barking spiders!" at opportune moments.)

So both protagonists are guarding secrets with their lives, and they're both on the cusp of discovering first-hand just how ruinous the war the older generation has engineered will become. It's a good recipe for both protagonists to figure out who they really are, aside from the expectations that people have placed on them. Alek and Deryn figure out how to work the machines and organic creatures that they ride inside of, but at the same time we see them learning (by trial and error) to navigate the weird world of adult society, which is bumpier and more fault-prone than a thousand diesel-powered walking machines.

And the machines-vs-monsters war seems to hint at becoming a framework for a larger debate about which is preferable: to surround ourselves with raw technology, or to adapt nature to serve our purposes. The book (which is just the first volume in a new series) hints that the only real answer is a fusion between the two elements.

Leviathan is worth reading just for the larger-than-life adventures against a fascinatingly rendered backdrop of weird machines and weirder creatures — and Keith Thompson's illustrations, some of which we've featured before, add an extra layer of awesomeness to the mix as well. But as a new spin on the theme of young people discovering their place in an insane world, it's a genuinely memorable story. - Charlie Jane @ io9

"Panic Attack!" filmmaker inks deal with Ghost House

Fede Alvarez, the Uraguayan filmmaker behind the YouTube sensation short "Panic Attack!," has signed a holding deal with Ghost House Pictures to develop and direct an original genre project.

 

The deal, in the six- against seven-figure range, will see Ghost House hire a writer for the project, which is based on an idea by Alvarez.  


Alvarez made "Attack!," about giant robots attacking Montevideo, for several hundred dollars. The same day he posted, Hollywood, impressed by what he was able to do imaginatively accomplish for such a small budget, came calling. A week later he arrived in town to face a full court press of agents, managers, execs and producers. 

Alvarez ended up signing with CAA, Anonymous Content and attorney Karl Austen the week before Thanksgiving and entered immediate talks with Ghost House after bonding with its principals, which include director Sam Raimi.

The only "Team Edward" Shirt you'll ever need.

Twilight fans can keep their shirts emblazoned with Robert Pattinson's face. The rest of us know that the only Team Edward worth belonging to is Team Edward James Olmos. And know you can wear your affiliation proudly.

Joel Watson drew this strip for HijiNKS Ensue, his thrice weekly webcomic about technology and geek culture:

Naturally, this spurred an immediate demand for an actual Team Edward James Olmos shirt, and Watson has not disappointed. The Team EJO shirt is available for $20 at the HijiNKS Ensue store.

What "Iron Man" script?

Iron Man may have seemed as polished as fresh power-armor, but the movie actually had no screenplay at all, says Jeff Bridges. The chaos freaked him out, until he decided to think of it as a $200 million student film.
In an interview with InContention, Bridges explained that the Marvel superhero movie rushed into production to make its release date, with the director and star making up scenes as they went along:

"They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn't know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, 'You got any ideas?' Meanwhile the crew is tapping their foot on the stage waiting for us to come on."

Bridges, director Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. would literally act out sequences during primitive rehearsals, Downey taking on Bridges's role and vice versa, to find and essentially improvise their way to full scenes, the actor recounts. Bridges says that the entire production was probably saved by the improv prowess of the film's director and star.
"You've got the suits from Marvel in the trailer with us saying, 'No, you wouldn't say that,'" Bridges continued. "You would think with a $200 million movie you'd have the shit together, but it was just the opposite. And the reason for that is because they get ahead of themselves. They have a release date before the script, ‘Oh, we'll have the script before that time,' and they don't have their shit together.

"Jon dealt with it so well," Bridges continues. "It freaked me out. I was very anxious. I like to be prepared. I like to know my lines, man, that's my school. Very prepared. That was very irritating, and then I just made this adjustment. It happens in movies a lot where something's rubbing against your fur and it's not feeling right, but it's just the way it is. You can spend a lot of energy bitching about that or you can figure out how you're going to do it, how you're going to play this hand you've been dealt. What you can control is how you perceive things and your thinking about it. So I said, ‘Oh, what we're doing here, we're making a $200 million student film. We're all just fuckin' around! We're playin'. Oh, great!' That took all the pressure off. ‘Oh, just jam, man, just play.' And it turned out great!"

First off, that's amazing that he called them "suits." He really is The Dude. And second, this is just hilarious. I can't believe they let Robert Downey Jr. and Jon Favreau just run with this stuff. But, thank goodness they did, because what came out was a pretty great action flick blended with biting humor. Still I can't imagine what it must have been for everyone else on set.

The Ballad Of "Black Dynamite" And How A Film Got Lost

In October 2009, a modestly budgeted blaxploitation send-up called "Black Dynamite" launched onto screens and stayed there for about a week. After an opening weekend gross of roughly $131,000, averaging out to about $1000 per screen, the film's distributor quickly pulled it from theaters despite it gaining positive buzz in the press. Thankfully, however, the film's quick stint in theaters will be rectified by an expedited February release on DVD, and its internet buzz is growing stronger despite the studio's complete lack of effort in advertising the film. The story behind the making and release of the hilarious "Black Dynamite" is a harrowing tale of niche appeal falling flat on its face, which, oddly enough, sealed its fate towards becoming a cult classic.

More Dolemite than Shaft, "Black Dynamite" parodies the worst kind of blaxploitation by lovingly recreating it. The movie is presented as if it were a recently discovered gem uncovered out of some dusty studio basement. Kung-fu fighting, hundred-dollar suit wearing, hyper-sexualized former CIA agent Black Dynamite isn't played by modern actor Michael Jai White but by all-star running back Forante Jones. It doesn't simply spoof blaxploitation; it is blaxploitation, down to every last detail. Actors flub their lines, stunts go wrong and boom mics swing into the frame. Everything, from the dialogue to the special effects, is rooted in the 1970s. Unlike, the Tarantino/Rodriguez financial flop "Grindhouse," which used digital manipulation to age its footage, "Black Dynamite" director Scott Sanders actually used 16mm film stock to achieve the look of a film that's been rotting away in the vault of a bankrupted studio for over thirty years.

In an interview with The AV Club, White, who co-wrote the film with Sanders, railed off the scenes the movie needed to stand alongside its blaxploitation brethren: "There's the conspiracy theory. There's white people depicted poolside. There's the chase scene. There's the unusually high death count, with people shooting people in the streets with absolutely no regard for the police."

A long time fan of blaxploitation movies, White came up with the idea for "Black Dynamite" while listening to James Brown's "SuperBad," which was also the original title of the film before a certain other movie snatched the title. White contacted Sanders and the two of them cobbled together the idea of what eventually became "Black Dynamite" in the form of a $500 YouTube trailer that mixed footage of White in character interacting with scenes lifted from various 70s blaxploitation films.

The trailer allowed White and Sanders to have something to show investors, and they eventually raised enough money to write and shoot the full version of the film. The viral trailer spread unexpectedly on the internet, "It started off on a Japanese website and then all of a sudden one day in June it just spread." Sanders told CHUD in an interview, "And we were like "wow we haven't finished the movie yet." Eventually the finished film premiered at Sundance to wild praise, and the movie was sold within twelve hours. And that's when things started to go downhill.

After Sundance, the buzz around "Black Dynamite" started to die off. The film's outrageous trailer never saw distribution in theaters, ads never appeared on television, and aside from a few sub-par efforts for the film to go viral (a Black Dynamite yourself feature on Facebook, fightsmackintheorphanage.org) it mostly went unheralded and unsung. The film's editor and composer, Adrian Younge, explained their situation to LI News: "It's just one of those films that…the studio's afraid of it. They felt that it was just too much of a niche film. So, I mean, there wasn't much that we could do… Because it's a low-budget film, we don't have that much money for marketing and all that stuff. It was just one of those things where we hoped that the public would just spread the word of mouth, you know?"

Well. It didn't.

But the story isn't over for "Black Dynamite." Most enduring cult features flopped in the cinema, in a weird way it's almost a right of passage. "Office Space" barely took in $10 million during its full theatrical run, and it's a similar story for movies like "Army of Darkness" or "Pootie Tang," another unsung blaxploitation spoof. While it's yet to be seen if "Black Dynamite" will ever reach the cult status of those slow burn success stories, the movie is certainly funny and wild enough to gain a massive following. While "Black Dynamite" is far from perfect (its appeal begins to taper off during its belabored, over-the-top climax), it's the type of imperfect film that strikes that key balance between broad and weird, and cool and dorky that cult audiences salivate over.

 

Even though the film failed to find an audience at the box office, its buzz lives on. Aside from the future DVD release, White and Sanders have both reported that an animated version of the movie is in the works for Cartoon Network that will be headed up by the creators of "The Boondocks." No official word from the network yet, but White seems to think it come out sometime next year.