Total Dick-Head Is Five Years Old Today! (now with links)

You read that right, compadres! TDH is five years old today. In a few more years perhaps the blog will be mature enough to get over the dick jokes, but anyhoo, it's been a fairly unqualified success.

Seriously, the coolest thing about the endeavor was being a part of the PKD scene and meeting so many cool people. Mr Hand over at Philip K Dick and Religion has become a great friend, and Patrick Clark and the Otaku folks are super-cool. Erik Davis and Lord Running Clam... I promised myself I wouldn't cry. It's also nice to see PhilipKDickFans.com up and running again. And Frolix-8 has consistently churned out awesome PKD content for ages. And now we have a festival page. Now we're on Facebook too, please 'like' us so we can look big time. It's nice to see more Dick on the Internet.

It's been a big five years for PKD too:

Published by Library of America
Briefly the subject of two dueling bio-pics
Back-handed compliments by The New Yorker
High Profile Profiles in LA Times, NY Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek...you name it
Cinematic adaptations including Next and Adjustment Bureau
A good adaptation of Radio Free Albemuth and talk of a Gondry-helmed Ubik
Publishing of 975 pages of Exegesis writings
(I was going to link all of these, but you're so good with The Google, you do it)

So it's been a fun time. For some reason I feel like the wave has crested, like the publishing of The Exegesis was Dick's high-water mark in pop-culture - actually I think it was a little before that. Maybe I'm wrong, and when Ubik comes out they'll fire up the Philip K Dick Article Generating Machine and churn out "Troubled Misfit Druggie Wondered What Was Real (And He Predicted Robots!)" articles by the dozen.

So, you probably want some links:

Miguel Conner has posted a cool interview with John Simon, director of Radio Free Albemuth (which we'll all have watched some day) over at Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. Check it out.

There's short preview trailer that's been released in anticipation of the Full Trailer for the Total Recall remake:



It's got a dodgy chair - generally considered to be the kiss of death in PKD adaptations - those and hats.

Erik Davis, Ted Hand, and I will be presenting at this year's Esotericism Conference in sunny Davis, California on Friday, July 20. You can learn more here.

Forget Paul Giamatti as PKD, reader Mike Winder found this pic to convince all of us in the PKD group on Facebook that Jeff Bridges is PKD:

News Roundup

Getting back in the swing of things here. At least on this Sunday morning.

I think we should begin preparing ourselves for the restarting of the PKD-article machine to coincide with the release of Adjustment Bureau which imdb.com says will open in July. I will not be writing about or even linking to many of these this time, not unless they provide some new information, or suck so bad that they must be critiqued mercilessly.

But things are happening.

It looks like the Exegesis is happening! According to this article in Publishers Weekly, Dick's new high-power agent is shopping "Philip K. Dick’s The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, culled from hundreds of handwritten notes and journal entries by the late sci-fi icon; the agency calls it a work that “charts Dick’s attempts to reconcile the diverse strands of scientific, philosophical, and theological thought” that inspired his writing, and it is edited and introduced by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson." A close reading of that sentence should focus on the word 'culled,' which implies that this volume will include excerpts, which seems sensible as the corpus of handwritten notes fills two big file-cabinet drawers. But how will this differ from Sutin's volume of excerpts from the Exegesis? Of course that's no longer widely available. Certainly the publishing of new Exegesis material will provide grist for many, many mills.

Radio Free Albemuth has a Facebook page and the movie will have a special screening at the Sci-Fi London Festival next week. You can buy tickets here. I am very excited about the more widespread release of this film, and hope director John Simon can update us soon on when we can expect that.

The Philip K Dick Festival's website has been updated (and fixed, it was a little wonky for a bit). I'm getting excited about this and plan to attend and give a talk or two (if anybody's interested in carpooling or caravaning discuss in the comments).

Finally, Ben Loory, a committed PKD fan (responsible for Philip K Dick's Myspace page), recently had a story published in The New Yorker. It's great, and I think shows a bit of PKD's influence - at least enough to warrant mention on this page. Read Ben's story, "The TV," and then this really cool interview with him.