Field Recordings

Ridley Scott's Prometheus delivers a thrill ride and offers up an armchair philosopher’s worth of provocative questions. It's gorgeous, the high def cinematography is vibrant, crisp. The creases in Charlize Theron's Meredith Vickers suits are so fine and precise they cut the air. Heck, I'd even say that her suit and David's suit function as architecture, they're so straight and even. The performances are equally sharp, and purposeful, and are means to an end: to hold up the popcorn confection philosophy of sci-fi creationism. Combine it with the smarts of the script and the mysteries they probe and you've got a fine slice of sci-fi, speculative fiction.   It's scary, beautiful, and possible. Many critics and movie-goers were baffled by the quasi-prequelness of much of the hype--it’s not a direct prequel, the film takes place a hundred years or so earlier than the events that destroyed Ripley’s Nostromo , but instead of "wtf" they should hav...

The US has a new Poet Laurette, Natasha Tretheway ,  whom I'm not overly familiar with. Not yet anyway. However, the world of words is a vast multi verse, and it takes one helluva dedicated reader to be up to date with everyone. The intoxication of the art form, the ease of which one can publish, in print or electronic, has helped explode poetry; a second big bang if you will, fueled by the gases of spoken word, slam, and protean clouds of workshops all over the world. A multi verse that Tretheway finds herself at the center, ready to pull everyone into poetry’s orbit. Poetry is immense and ever expanding. Students of poetry know this. Professors of poetry might know this, slam artists, street poets, and visionaries know this, but the general public probably doesn't know this. The world of poetry is inaccessible to the un-initiated, Natasha Tretheway's appointment to the office of Poet Laureate, is bound to have most of the world...shrugging. “Who?” or “...