Tuesday, August 3, 2004

Merci beaucoup On this day of the reopening of the Statue of Liberty, WWDT would like to thank France for its beautiful statue and its expression of our shared value of liberté. 8:23:01 PM    comment [] We don't need no stinkin' bounce Zogby thinks that the poll numbers show good news for Kerry and bad news for Bush: The most recent Zogby poll shows deeper trouble for President George W. Bush beyond just the horserace.  Mr. Bush has fallen in key areas while Senator John Kerry has shored up numerous constituencies in his base.  The Bush team's attempted outreach to base Democratic and swing constituency has shown to be a failure thus far, limiting his potential growth in the electorate. He then goes into the numbers. And they're not pretty. Bush is even losing THE SOUTH. [Thanks to EA] 12:41:53 PM    comment [] PKD in the News Last week the Boston Globe had a nice retrospective on Philip K Dick, his style and cultural influences. It ends by nicely tying together "A Scanner Darkly" with the spirit of his time: "Scanning," taping oneself, narcing on oneself, turned out to be the metaphor of the `60s; at the decade's fractured end everyone was split-minded and self-suspecting. In the Oval Office Richard Nixon was smoothly activating the occult tape-reels. Fallen Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, on the run from drug charges in Canada in 1976, was seen by a friend having an apparently schizophrenic conversation into a hand-held device. "Someone's taping us right now," he complained. To which the inevitable answer was: "Of course someone's taping us, I'm taping us." Dick called Nixon's America "the betrayal state." He was certain the FBI was watching him. But as a writer he had been narcing on himself from the very beginning, observing the being called Philip K. Dick with a dispassionate and not entirely benevolent eye, policing its thoughts and processes, producing them in evidence. And speaking of "A Scanner Darkly," readers may recall that Richard Linklater is making a film version of the book with a star-studded cast. Comingsoon.net has a brief interview with the director. I love that about Dick's stuff: paranoia plus a generation equal reality. It's like we're living in his science fiction as we speak, so it seemed really timely to me. [Via the official Philip K Dick site] 10:23:51 AM    comment []

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