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I've been drowning the waves for you
It is grey and pouring and the winds keep slamming the telephone lines outside the window, a real nor'easter. We saw the T entrances near the waterfront piled high with sandbags last night. Now the downtown is underwater. The Aquarium station flooded. The glittering rich playground of the Seaport has the sea itself in the streets. I approve of this last in theory because the Seaport as a symbol of Boston's gentrification angers me, but since it sounds as though the storm is hitting the construction workers harder than the suits, in practice I'm glum. I don't know how long this weather is supposed to last. I'm hoping it will blow off by tomorrow morning: the Somerville caucus is being held at the high school and I want to be there, to stand as delegate again to the convention this summer and choose a gubernatorial candidate who's even better than an artichoke with ethics. My sleep schedule is borked, but I slept almost eight hours. The cats are in full rainy-day hibernation mode. I cannot blame them.
1. The current issue of Poetry comes with a mixtape. I have not yet tried listening as I read, but of the poems I am particularly struck by Carla Panciera's "And Standing before Those Canvases, He Said, I Would Feel This Tingling," Danez Smith's "sometimes i wish i felt the side effects," Camonghne Felix's "Willing in the Orisha," and Martha Silano's "Ode to Autocorrect."
2. Musicophilia has curated a lot of library music. I feel people who like Ghost Box should know.
3. Tracy Butler draws faces. Man, Boris Karloff had some recognizable eyebrows.
4. The HFA has announced—but not yet detailed—a series of German Films 1945–1957. Please God, let this include a print of Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (1951). The illustrating image seems to point that way.
In the meantime, while the organizing theme of Caught in the Net: The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination seems a reach when some of these titles were made long before there was an internet to be anxious about, any series which offers me an opportunity to catch both WarGames (1983) and Strange Days (1995) on a big screen is just fine by me. When a friend asked me to outline a (purely speculative) 'Thon of my own, both of those films were first-choice programming.
A series of Wim Wenders is also a fine thing. I imagine everyone on the planet will come to Wings of Desire (1983), including me—Otto Sander turned up in the first half of Das Boot (1981) last night, reminding me of how much I love him as Cassiel—but it might provide an equally good excuse to try for Paris, Texas (1984), The American Friend (1977), and Until the End of the World (1991), which I have been generally meaning to see on grounds of Harry Dean Stanton, Patricia Highsmith, and Talking Heads.
5. I know the title of this photograph is "Moonwalking," but she looks like the deep sea to me.
1. The current issue of Poetry comes with a mixtape. I have not yet tried listening as I read, but of the poems I am particularly struck by Carla Panciera's "And Standing before Those Canvases, He Said, I Would Feel This Tingling," Danez Smith's "sometimes i wish i felt the side effects," Camonghne Felix's "Willing in the Orisha," and Martha Silano's "Ode to Autocorrect."
2. Musicophilia has curated a lot of library music. I feel people who like Ghost Box should know.
3. Tracy Butler draws faces. Man, Boris Karloff had some recognizable eyebrows.
4. The HFA has announced—but not yet detailed—a series of German Films 1945–1957. Please God, let this include a print of Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (1951). The illustrating image seems to point that way.
In the meantime, while the organizing theme of Caught in the Net: The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination seems a reach when some of these titles were made long before there was an internet to be anxious about, any series which offers me an opportunity to catch both WarGames (1983) and Strange Days (1995) on a big screen is just fine by me. When a friend asked me to outline a (purely speculative) 'Thon of my own, both of those films were first-choice programming.
A series of Wim Wenders is also a fine thing. I imagine everyone on the planet will come to Wings of Desire (1983), including me—Otto Sander turned up in the first half of Das Boot (1981) last night, reminding me of how much I love him as Cassiel—but it might provide an equally good excuse to try for Paris, Texas (1984), The American Friend (1977), and Until the End of the World (1991), which I have been generally meaning to see on grounds of Harry Dean Stanton, Patricia Highsmith, and Talking Heads.
5. I know the title of this photograph is "Moonwalking," but she looks like the deep sea to me.
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I don't know whether this is about the content of the films, rather than the date - but the origins of the internet go back to the 60s and 70s and some of it was in place by the 1980s (not the wide use that we have now, of course - mainly military-academic?). I have a 1984 TV show that has internet use between war gamers being a plot point, for instance. And many SF writers like to pick up on things that are coming, or they think they are coming. DW had a proto-internet paranoia serial in 1966 (WOTAN is linked up to all the computers of the world and decides to take over!) and I really don't think that was very unusual. (There's a lot of various computers will kill everyone stuff from that era, although not usually via a proto-internet, which is why I mention that one. But it continues through the 70s, so by the 80s, pulling in the existing elements of the internet hardly seems early to me.)
Plus, 1995 was certainly not early at all, as I was on the internet right then and it had been in existence for a while already! I wandered into newsgroups full of people and used Netscape as a browser on the separate World Wide Web.
And I'd have thought a lot of the paranoia comes very early, cos after that it's just normal and the fear seems less plausible. (Unless it's turning accepted tech against us in a particular way, I suppose.)
(I don't know, I don't know any of the films. But it wouldn't strike me as too early for internet paranoia.)
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I don't think—and did not say—1995 is too early for the internet. I also remember Netscape and Usenet. I am also aware that the term internet was coined in the mid-'70's and the internet protocol suite widely adopted by the mid-'80's. But the computer networks available to make use of it at that time were and are not interchangeable with the commercial, accessible internet as it would exist less than a decade later and therefore I object to the three films programmed from 1983–84 being classed as "internet films" and discussed in those terms when what they are really dealing with is the proto-internet. See reply to
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On shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, newspaper morgues, town records, control systems for the local electrical grid, etc., are all connected to the internet and can all be hacked into, at least if you’re a computer-genius witch. It’s as though the Internet was some sort of transitive property that automatically linked up *everything* in the category “electronic devices,” regardless of date of manufacture. There’s probably a TvTropes page for this.
* What I do remember is an irritating number of businesses whose websites were single, non-interactive pages with their physical address, phone number, and maybe a jpg of their building or one of their products, and nothing else.
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I remember this about the school-computer-hacking episode of Ghostwriter, which did not quite match what I knew of chat rooms and school systems. Wikipedia tells me that was in '94.
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https://gizmodo.com/every-webpage-from-the-1995-movie-the-net-1592821504
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(I am old enough to remember griping about Mosaic v Netscape, hah.)
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It's hard for me to tell when the general internet began for other people, because my father designed and built computers and their infrastructure for a living. I didn't have e-mail until my senior year of high school or a computer of my own until I went away to college, but that's separate from my awareness of connectivity. I was a B5 lurker from about 1995 on.
(I am old enough to remember griping about Mosaic v Netscape, hah.)
I haven't thought about Mosaic in years! The dark and backward abysm of time.
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I remember going to the computer lab to type out papers and, later, to download and save email, but didn't have a home connection until 1995. Maybe 1994. Didn't have a cable modem until about 1999, hah.