Hey guys, Uncanny Valley 0002 is here! (So is Molly, our cat.) We'll be shipping out the preorders tomorrow. But also, because we love you, and because the magazine shipped a lot faster than we were told it would, we're going to extend the preorder deal for one more week: buy the issue before next Friday, and you get our first issue free as well. Of course, if you don't want the first issue (because you already own one, for instance) that's fine. But you could always give it to a friend.
Also, while we're here: there are two more episodes of the podcast. One is about First Knight, and the other is about Battleship. The Battleship episode is one we're especially proud of. You should check it out! And subscribe to the feed. And tell your friends. And buy the issue?
We've been hesitant to post something that would push our last post down the page (yes, you can and should still pre-order issue 0002 of the magazine and get a copy of Uncanny Valley 0001 for free) but we have indeed been podcasting regularly over the last several weeks. Our most recent episode, and I think the best of the three, is about the 2004 Reese Witherspoon version of Vanity Fair. We also talk a little about the weird and in many ways upsetting impact of Netflix on how we watch and talk about film and television.
The previous episode was about Treasure Planet, Disney's x-treme makeover of Treasure Island, and the one before that was about The Adventures of Tintin and imperialism. Of course, if you're keeping up at the podcast's page, or subscribed to its RSS or iTunes feeds, you already know all of this.
I keep myself intentionally ignorant about the podcast's listenership right now, because I suspect it's quite small. You can help us grow the podcast by listening, by telling your friends, by sharing it on Twitter and Facebook, and by reviewing us on iTunes. At this point I feel pretty good about the show -- I think it's both funny and a good way to exercise your writerly muscles in narrative, structure, drama, and characterization. It's definitely got a few dedicated fans, now, but it could use more. Maybe you should be one of them.
Uncanny Valley issue 0002 is now available for preorder. If you order it now ($14 with free shipping), we will mail it to you as soon as the issues arrive late this month or early next. Last year we wrote you sticker-notes and defaced your copies; we're trying to think of something fun for you this year. In fact, here's something I forgot: Preorder now and we'll throw in a copy of Issue 0001.
Here's the awesome stuff you'll find inside:
John Colburn:The Story of the Second Husband, The Two Witches Rachel B. Glaser :The Moody Pencil Tyler Gobble :Three Poems J. A. Tyler :My Brother Came Shome Dasgupta :Mud, Gone Went the Rabbit Rachel Yoder : Partial History of a Parallel World Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert:Three Jokes A. D. Jameson : The Woords René Georg Vasicek:The Improbability of Being Here Now Michele Harris :Two Poems Justin Anderson :Box Trap
Lindsay Hunter : The child the mom the dad the girl
The work in Issue 0002 is as ambitious as Issue 0001, but with, I think, a wider range of surreal worlds to explore. It's also an issue that covers a lot of emotional ground. We're confident you'll find something that stirs you.
Check out the preorder page now, and spread the word. We'll be bringing you more news and more ways to check out the magazine soon.
So I was all ready to tell you that this might just be the episode of Pimp My Fic where Tracy and I got the formula, found our chemistry as podcasterinos, learned to edit a smooth transition, and finally made the sort of product that you would completely want to tell your friends about. In other words I was going to tell you, "We're pros now, guys. We got this. Please spread the word and help us get Internet famous."
Then I listened to the final podcast file to make sure all was well and discovered a six-second gap in the audio at the 2:36 mark.
I'm pretty sure I know how this happened, which means that I can probably avoid it next time, but there's no fixing it now. If you're curious what happened in those six seconds, I believe that was the portion where I explained that this episode's subject (Prometheus) is, in some ways, better than most movies that came out in 2012, the year of its release. We then proceeded to elaborate on that though! You'll hear those elaborations. And then jokes about this ridiculous cinematic search for God, and how it could have easily been better.
So this week Tracy and I decided to mix it up a little and 1) upload the podcast on Monday, because no one is on the Internet on the weekend apparently, and 2) talk about something good (the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon) and what makes it good, instead of talking about something that sucks. We were honestly pretty surprised by how good the show is! My brothers and I watched it obsessively when we were kids -- the ones we had on VHS, anyway -- but I was pretty sure it would suck now that I'm an adult. It doesn't! It's pretty fun!
You can stream the podcast here, but as always we recommend subscribing to the iTunes feed here.
Here's the song we start with; the song in the middle and the song at the end are Special Surprises! (One of the surprises is German, and the other is orchestral.)
This week on the podcast we fixed Finding Forrester. I'm busy this week (and every week, forever) making cool stuff for you and your pals, so I'll keep this short: listen to this episode to learn about our agreement with Hollywood that Literally Everyone can get laid, among other important ideas. Here's the iTunes feed. Tell your friends. Give us love. Etc.
This afternoon I'm going to finally design Uncanny Valley 2's interior (or at least a lot of it; the rest I'll do tomorrow). Then we'll have announcements! For now, sate your thirst for Mike + Tracy content with the third episode of Pimp My Fic, our podcast wherein we fix movies and other stuff so they don't suck so bad. This time, we're fixing Star Trek: Nemesis, the Trek movie so bad it guaranteed we'd never see the Next Generation cast in another film ever again. Our cat Molly makes a rather heated appearance, and, for true fans, we've included a coda with additional Star Trek facts!
So, we picked kind of a weird time to launch a podcast, which led to our immediately taking a week off, but the second episode is done and posted and ready. It features an awkward beginning and an awkward end! Also, it features discussion of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a well-meaning movie that nonetheless kind of sucked tremendously. We did our best to fix it, while conceding that its lady 'stache technology was truly years ahead of its time.
There are big things coming down the pike, including (just ferinstance) our next issue. And then even bigger things! But for now, the beginning of a weekly feature: Pimp My Fic, a podcast made by Tracy and also by me. In what seasoned industry professionals are already referring to as "PMF," we discuss potential fixes for failed or flawed movies, books, video games, and other. (But, honestly, mostly movies, because they're manageable and because a much larger number of you are likely to have seen what we're talking about in any given week.) You can download it here, stream it on this rather unpretty page, and the RSS feed is here.
Why are we doing a podcast? For the same reasons we do everything, more or less: we like a lot of podcasts that other people do, and it seemed fun. For a while we were tossing around ideas for shows, but nothing felt right until we were (unrelatedly) having a conversation about how to fix Fight Club, which might be the subject of a future episode. (The short version? Put some actual fight club in it, fergawdsake.) Tracy and I do this a lot -- using a combination of our shmancy education and practical experience as storytellers, we riff on how stories we almost loved could have been better. We realized, as we were having the conversation, that it might be a fun show! Then we made a couple practice episodes before settling in to do this one.
Let us know what you think! The podcast will be available via iTunes as soon as iTunes gets its act together. (In the mean time, you can subscribe by using the "Advanced" menu in iTunes, choosing subscribe to podcast, and pasting in the URL of the feed.) We'll take requests and suggestions for future episodes, but the next one is probably going to be about a movie that rhymes with Phwilight.
#24 (120 seconds): A medical team stands tight around an operating table. Machines beep, a ventilator hums, lights are so bright they flare out the camera as it moves to show us the focused face of each doctor and nurse. We stop for a while on one particularly grim mouth, eyes, and pull back to see how this man's posture is different than that of his colleagues. This is the lead surgeon and he has a hand in the patient, now outside of the patient, gory and slick. A nurse gives him a new tool, which he slips into the patient, and for ten seconds maybe he works. There is a tiny camera in there and we can barely see what it sees, displayed on a screen near the operating table.
Suddenly, the lead surgeon yells and throws up his wet hands. He takes in the shocked faces around him, then reaches back into the patient, pulls out a long slithering thing, then more of it, then another. Someone touches his shoulder and he throws a punch. The other doctors now back away while he tugs things out of the patient and a machine beeps more quickly. Almost imperceptibly, a plastic tube threads its way into the frame from overhead and begins to flood the room with vanilla pudding.
#25 (15 seconds): A well-dressed family of an indiscernible number of generations sits around a carefully dressed dining table in a carefully maintained restaurant. Dishes and wine glasses and knives and forks and rings and necklaces and teeth shine. An old man at the head of the table stands and conversation respectfully dies. "You all," he says. "You're all my Deans." He smiles, waiting for appreciation, but no one knows what he's talking about. No one at the table knows anyone named Dean. They live in a universe without people named Dean. Also this universe still has dinosaurs, but they are tiny, having evolved to hide in the spaces where they will not be harassed by children or scientists. What has happened is that one has bitten the old man, just moments ago, and the venom of his tiny mouth has already acted on the old man's brain.
For a while in
graduate school I wrote something called The Review of Cats. If you lived in
Ames, Iowa and had a cat I knew about maybe I would come to your home and creep
around, interviewing your animal. This was a great excuse to hit parties and
also to slip out of awkward conversations. "Your thesis will cover which
elements of the Midwest condition? Oh, sorry, that Siamese is just…look at how
she's…staring."
II. About playing her off
A couple weeks
ago I drove to work and the people on one of the local stations were ha haing with Katie Hill, who had put together a festival of internet cat videos as part of the Walker Art Center's Open Field program, which hosts quirky and
fun events like drawing clubs and storytelling programs and live music in a rolling field of grass greening out of a mostly developed neighborhood. Katie said this event, the Internet Cat Video Festival, started as a joke. By now it had caught
enough press that, hearing the interview, I couldn't believe the festival was still in the future. It seemed I'd heard about it for months, which I had. My fiancée, Sarah, was interested, I knew. I, well—I used to review cats. And
the people on the radio were so enthusiastic that one of them had brought her
cat into the studio. When Katie Hill finished the interview, Keyboard Cat played her off.
III. About crying alone in a field at an
Internet Cat Video Festival
I picked up Sarah after work and we marveled to find an open parking spot near the Walker.
People were already fast-walking past, talking too loud, excited,
carrying baskets and bags. Vendors had erected tents, tables. We walked a few blocks
off for dinner and a few blocks back, spending enough time in the mid-August
outdoors for my allergies to trigger. I was sneezing, swearing, a mess. We
had to cross a blaze of tall weedy grass to get to the Walker's field itself
and then I was nearly ruined. At a little bench at the back
corner of a horizontal pile of people I collapsed while Sarah went to find a restroom. I sat alone,
wet-faced and red-eyed, sniffling, looking like a man lost to emotion and weeping
openly at a cat video festival.
IV. About the tight-roping drunks
People were
everywhere. (The next day, the NYT estimated 10,000 were in attendance.) They rolled down the hill, up the hill,
around the edges of the field. Robot-sounding speakers occasionally buzzed to
existence and asked people not to climb on sculptures. Children screamed at
each other nearby and deranged adults had brought animals. A miniature husky
trotted by, looking impossible.
The bench we'd
claimed was actually four benches, a wooden rectangle surrounding a sunken
ventilation system maybe ten feet across. We could see the little screen far
off at the bottom of the hill, but then as people packed in it became obscured,
then as people stood it became hidden. We stood and the people around us stood.
Then came what can only be described as a pack of drunken youths (and yes, I
feel ancient writing that), who reached tentative feet out into the flimsy
lattice of wooden beams in the center of this rectangle of benches, the weak
net covering the ventilation system set into the earth, and they teetered out,
wobbling, arms reaching, adjusting balance. A few crossed and then panicked, dropping bottles as they
leapt out and into the crowd, but then more came, and some sat, and others came
and were shocked to find the surface not actually a surface, to hear it
creaking and then cracking.
V. About the cats
On screen, cats
began meowing, sliding, dancing, head-bobbing. This was the first cat:
(You can view the festival's preferred version, which can't be embedded, here.) I began writing here that I felt disappointment about this selection, but then I opened the
video here at home, where I can actually see and hear it and . . . those are some cute cats. They are patty caking the hell out of
each other. More cats blind-watch from right behind them, on the computer
screen. The cats on the computer screen are not the cats patty caking. How many
cats do these people have? Do they all patty cake?
Around this time
in the night, someone asked via Twitter if the Don Piano cat had been
featured. Well, he hadn't been yet, but he was up soon (in the #3 spot). You
can see him, and the rest of the official playlist, here.
VI. About the people everywhere
They were
everywhere, and they were into these cats. There were so many giddy laughing
people that I felt compelled to document them with a photo despite the terrible
lighting. They were sliding around and giggling. The older couple next to us
whispered to each other throughout every video for a long stretch. The man kept
saying things like, "Oh! He did it!" and "Oh my, how,
what!"
One of the
conceits of this cat video festival was that the audience had helped build the
playlist. People submitted their suggestions, which vastly outnumbered what
the curators expected to receive. Of the thousands submitted, more than 70 cat videos were shown, with nine "people's choice" videos selected by popular vote closing the program.
I expected to be a jaded viewer but was
surprised by the number of unfamiliar internet cats. The animated cats? All new
to me. But then, I'm something of an internet cat purist. My internet cats are live,
they are unrehearsed, they are spontaneously goofy, amazing.
VII. About the cat video that
unforgivably went unshown
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, which I read at my grandmother's house the summer I was 11. It completely blew my preteen mind...despite the fact that it's over 800 pages, I read it a couple of times a year from then on. I also dabbled in Wicca and became an avowed Anglophile throughout middle school, basically because of the book (I know!). I still love Arthurian legends and stone circles, and I think the book definitely contributed to my feminist consciousness, as it's all priestesses and Goddess power and fuck patriarchal religion. I haven't read it in maybe eighteen months, but I'm due.
or
The Ordinary Princess, a book I stole from my third grade classroom and read all the time throughout my childhood. It's by M.M. Kaye, who wrote The Far Pavilions, and it's probably the most charming fairy tale ever. It's a book about a princess named Amethyst who is "cursed" at her christening with ordinariness, which means she is plain and plucky and smart. She's nicknamed Amy (so normal!) and she doesn't grow long blonde hair or pale white skin like her perfect princess sisters. When her parents try to marry her off in spite of her plainness, she escapes to a neighboring kingdom and gets a job as a kitchen maid. She also falls in love, of course. It's such good book; so funny, so spunky, so everything you want when you're a bookish little girl who loves princesses, especially those who refuse to be locked up and saved. I actually recently reread it because I wanted to write something about it, but it didn't really work, the essay I was planning.
How about you? What novel or book of stories or poems have you read the most times, ever? Why?
