When pet sitting for someone, there are two parts of the house I always take the time to snoop around in: the refrigerator, and the bookshelves. Both of them offer the most candid view of a person’s life you can get, since there’s not much you can do about them in preparation for an inquisitive…
What Does It Mean To Be Human? ‘Blade Runner’ And Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dream
If there’s anything I hate, it’s subcultural neologisms. Not subcultures, mind you, which are exciting and strange and dynamic, but rather the label-making that cements a taxonomy in a larger social lexicon. It’s foul magic, naming something to rob it of its potency. You inevitably trade whatever inspiration and energy that went into first creating…
‘Confessions Of A Crap Artist:’ Leave It To The French To Do A Semi-Decent Philip K. Dick Movie Adaptation
Some have said that we are living in a “short story golden age,” which just goes to show you how little sense of history most people have. If I had to guess, I’d bet this label is the result of our industrialized higher ed system churning out MFAs who, lost in the desert of their…
Hey, Richard Linklater: It’s ‘A Scanner Darkly’ Not ‘A Scanner Dank-ly’
Mythical stories of psychonautical schizoid breaks from reality aside, Philip K. Dick’s drug of choice was amphetamine. Considering his blistering pace, this shouldn’t be too surprising, given he produced novel after novel in addition to his prolific short story writing. Dude wrote a lot and, by his own admission, mostly in days-long binges followed by…
Screamers: Super Canadian, Super Peter Weller, Super…Numismatics?
The “Science” in Science Fiction is often used to justify the genre, a totemic self-identity simultaneously fetishizing both wild creativity as well as technical expertise. This was built into it right from the get-go; early pulp magazines advertised their space operas and rocket tales as stories with both educational and inspirational merit, a new literature…
We Can Forget ‘Total Recall’ For You Wholesale
There are two essential facts about “Total Recall” (1990) that tell you everything you need to know about it, and you already know one of them. The first fact is, of course, that Arnold Schwarzenegger “stars” in it, which is a pretty good indication of what you’re in for. The second fact, and the one…
Minority Report: The Unbearable Loudness Of Spielberg
Steven Spielberg is a Phillip K. Dick character. He’s an immensely wealthy propagandist with a cynical streak so wide and so all-encompassing that, without the proper distance, can easily be mistaken for naïve mawkishness. Spielberg doesn’t have the microscopic misanthropy of, say, a Kubrick or a Lynch or even a P.T. Anderson, dissecting characters to…
Paycheck To Paycheck: Philip K. Dick Meets John Woo
Roberto Bolaño, a writer who cultivated his own tangled style, was a fan of Phillip K. Dick, writing that he was “Thoreau plus the death of the American Dream.” I don’t know what the fuck that means, and I bet Bolaño didn’t either, trusting a jingle like that to be catchy enough to find its…