Monday, February 28, 2011

From All Over the Internetz...

Pictured: Matt Damon, in what appears to be a non-dodgy chair, in The Adjustment Bureau...

Here I am again, with just enough time for a quick stroll through the weird world of Dickian effluvia. The Philip K Dick Article Machine can be heard chug-chugging to life amid the dying wreckage of print journalism as the world prepares for yet another PKD adaptation to hit the screen this Friday - which is no good for me because I've got a thing that night. Saturday too. Maybe I could do a midnight show on Friday, but so far it's not looking like it's gonna be a whole lotta theaters. Maybe a Sunday matinee? Any Bay Area Dick-heads up for something like this?

As promised is a quick tour of the PKD article machine's latest sputterings:

My least favorite (that's the polite way of saying it's the worst right?) of the pile was this Washington Post article written by the mysterious Beale... This article's greatest sin is that it's just long enough to include all of the information previously written about Philip K Dick in similar articles. Paranoid? Check. Drug-addled? Check. Bad writer? Check. I have to admit that's the one that gets me. Isn't it kind of like talking about a terrific painter is no good with paints? Cuz that's one of those self-negating statements Horselover liked so much...

1) God does not exist
2) And anyhow he's stupid.

On the plus side, this article has got quotes from a wide variety of sources. I'm not sure if I think more or less of them for not consulting me...

The most annoying thing is that they don't mention Radio Free Albemuth while listing all the upcoming PKD adaptations. Write a little something (keep it respectable) in the comments section, let's see if we can get them to take notice...

I guess that's the only PKD machine article, now that I think about it...

There's this temporal lobe epilepsy article that mentions PKD (hat-tip to Frank Bertrand)

A reader emails: "if you want to see the Philip K. Dick robot in action, this week's ep of Nova ScienceNOW called "What's the next big thing?" has a segment on it. I don't pretend to understand PBS scheduling, but in my neck of the woods (Vancouver), it's on again on Friday and on Sunday." er, uh, sorry, that might be last week, but nothing digital ever really dies so if you find it, point us to it in the comments section please.

PKD Otaku number 21 (!) is now available here. Of course it's chock full of the good PKD-stuff!

5 comments:

OneTenderBranson said...

In the sentence, "Here I am again, with just enough time for a quick stroll through the weird world of Dickian effluvia," did you mean to say ephemera instead of effluvia? Seems an odd word choice.

OneTenderBranson said...

Disregard my previous comment. The word choice makes sense in relation to the rest of the post. My apologies.

Pantomime Horse said...

Annoying indeed. Radio Free Albemuth seems likely to be one of the top two or three PKD movie adaptations. The only one I've very strongly wanted to see since Blade Runner.

FCBertrandJr said...

The temporal lobe epilepsy article should be compared with another about the same core study, titled, "The Doctors and the Divine," by Stefany Anne Goldbert at thesmartset.com. The study itself is called, "The Hallucinations of Frederic Chopin," by Manuel Vazquez Caruncho, and Franciso Branas Fernandez, in the British journal Medical Humanities. Intriguing how were starting to get more and more retrospective/flashback type "criticism" of Philip K. Dick.

Hugh said...

If you're inside the US, the episode of NOVA can be streamed on the PBS website. If not, grab this torrent.