Culture

Yo, Unknown USA people! Were you aware of Anais Mitchell’s folk opera, [Hadestown](http://web.archive.org/web/20160915135516/http://web.archive.org/web/20160915135516/http://hadestown.anaismitchell.com:80/ (original):80/) (original)? It’s just a folk opera retelling of the Orpheus myth set in a post-apocalyptic version of the Great Depression, no big deal. Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco are part of the cast. I may be the last person to know about this.

Quick notes from the 1 PM Novels You Should Have Read Since Chicon 7 panel. Any errors are wholly mine. Panelists: Elizabeth Bear (moderator), Willie Siros, and Jess Nevins. Any really outstanding books? Siros: Sea Change, S. M. Wheeler fairy tale fable, internal logic, compared to The Last Unicorn Nevins: Brian Catling’s The Vorrh fantasy that avoids the usual fantasy tropes Bear: Cassandra Rose Clark, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter SF, robot civil rights, riff on “Bicentennial Man” issues of climate change, peak oil, global cultural change as background elements Siros: Iain Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata ...

Susan and I will be hitting LoneStarCon 3 (original), aka Worldcon 2013. It’s in San Antonio, so we can take the whole week and spend a few days in Austin first. Mmm, barbecue. Mmm, breakfast tacos. Mmm. I have now poked my nose back into Worldcon site selection politics and am delighted to note that it’s still Worldcon site selection politics. By which I mean I’m relieved that I moved to California just when I would have gotten sucked into convention organizing in Boston. I dunno, Orlando looks good to me for 2015. ...

The first two issues of High Society showed up on Comixology this week. The first one was free, so I bought it. It’s really gorgeous: high-def, quality scans for the most part. There are one or two pages where the white on black text fills in a bit much, but given the unfortunate house fire which destroyed a bunch of the negatives recently, I am not unhappy about that. It’s gorgeous and funny and an amazing achievement and this is even before Gerhard came on board. Plus there are 30 or so pages of notebooks and historical stuff at the end. Issue two is only 99 cents, which is a bargain – at the rate of a couple of issues a week, I would have no financial qualms about buying all the Cerebus this way. ...

I like fiction delivered to a convenient and elegant place to read! So: Go to ifttt, log in/register/whatever Create a new task. Choose the Feed trigger. Choose New Feed Item. Use the Feed URL https://hilobrow.com/tag/world-shook/feed/, on the assumption that you want to read HiLoBrow’s H. Rider Haggard serialization. Feed it into Instapaper (or Readability if you like that). You can leave the default field values alone. If this is your first time using ifttt, you’ll need to register the channel first. Give it a description. Or just go ahead and use the recipe I made.

Cronenberg makes a movie without Viggo Mortensen. Note: violence aplenty in this trailer. Like, aplenty.

Last night I headed down to the new Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane location, since movie tickets were two bucks during this week’s soft open of the theater. It’s way out of the way for us, particularly coming from work, but seems reasonably convenient for South Austin peeps. Take Mopac south to the first traffic light and turn right, then immediate left. It took twenty minutes flat to come home at 12:30 AM. Kind of late? Well, cheap movies, so I caught a pair of them. Oh look, the title of this post is a bad joke. Look, they were both set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it’d be way amusing to watch a motion captured Andy Serkis in an Oakland A’s uniform. ...

I won an award! I am the 2012 Rose & Bay Best Patron, which is pretty cool. I think mostly this means that C. E. Murphy has a lot of fans who listened to her when she said to vote for me because I convinced her to try crowdfunding, but I guess that implies I deserve some kind of credit for something. It wouldn’t have gone far if she wasn’t an awesome writer, though.

It’s all very well that we’ll see a new iPad in a week or so. I’m holding onto my anticipation for two weeks, however: new Tim Powers!

Tuesday night plans: Sneak preview down at the Alamo. It’s a pretty Hong Kong week for me, yep.