Dery has critiqued various aspects of the emerging ``cyberculture'' for magazines such as Rolling Stone, Wired, and Omni, and here he deepens and expands his ideas into a provocative analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of the wired revolution. Dery structures the book as a series of profiles of various ``computer-age subcultures'': junkyard roboticists, ``technopagans,'' cyberpunk musicians, body artists, and others who partake in one way or another of the technological apparatus of the digital era. Along the way he brings to bear an impressive (and sometimes almost too broad) range of sources; in one early paragraph he segues from computer theorist Hans Moravec to science fiction writer Vernor Vinge to Superman, from the Christian evolutionist Teilhard de Chardin to Timothy Leary to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Though at times Dery's sweeping scope leaves some subtopics (such as virtual sex) underexplored, on the whole he presents a convincing overview of a coherent pancultural phenomenon. And he doesn't stop at describing the current face of cyberculture, he dissects it, focusing primarily on what he calls ``the rhetoric of escape velocity''—a tendency among many cyber- enthusiasts to frame their notions in millennial terms, full of body loathing and the dream of digital transcendence. This rhetoric, says Dery, ``seduces us with its promise of a deliverance from human history and mortality,'' encouraging its believers to ignore ``the palpable facts of economic inequity and environmental depredation'' in the real world. He looks with favor on grassroots efforts to ``retrofit'' digital technology to other purposes, using it to elucidate those real-world troubles rather than to escape them. Supported by the words of the cyber-cultists themselves, Dery's critique—neither knee-jerk Luddite nor cyber-starry-eyed- -constitutes a vital examination of the values behind much of the ``cyberbole'' that increasingly clogs the cultural airwaves.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-8021-1580-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Highly recommended—anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.
From the former Talking Heads frontman, a supremely intelligent, superbly written dissection of music as an art form and way of life.
Drawing on a lifetime of music-making as an amateur, professional, performer, producer, band member and solo artist, Byrne (Bicycle Diaries, 2009) tackles the question implicit in his title from multiple angles: How does music work on the ear, brain and body? How do words relate to music in a song? How does live performance relate to recorded performance? What effect has technology had on music, and music on technology? Fans of the Talking Heads should find plenty to love about this book. Steering clear of the conflicts leading to the band’s breakup, Byrne walks through the history, album by album, to illustrate how his views about performance and recording changed with the onset of fame and (small) fortune. He devotes a chapter to the circumstances that made the gritty CBGB nightclub an ideal scene for adventurous artists like Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie and Tom Verlaine and Television. Always an intensely thoughtful experimenter, here he lets us in on the thinking behind the experiments. But this book is not just, or even primarily, a rock memoir. It’s also an exploration of the radical transformation—or surprising durability—of music from the beginning of the age of mechanical reproduction through the era of iTunes and MP3s. Byrne touches on all kinds of music from all ages and every part of the world.
Highly recommended—anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-936365-53-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Making movies may be ``hard work,'' as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clichÇs, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (``Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb''). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release—and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ``I love actors,'' he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and ``Betty'' Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network. Style, Lumet avers, is ``the way you tell a particular story''; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ``No one really knows.'' The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday.
Pub Date: March 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43709-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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