There is a slight time warp in the chronology of recent postings. My iMac came back from the shop yesterday (Wednesday) fitted with a new logic board (and integrated Ethernet port) but temporarily befuddled as to what day it was.

MacUpgrades in Bethesda, MD did the work; I can't recommend them whole-heartedly because they had the machine for over three weeks and did a poor job of letting me know what was happening. But at least they could diagnose the problem. Micro Center in Vienna, VA first took the machine, and couldn't detect that the Ethernet port was faulty. I still don't know what their technician thought he was about.

posted: 10:28:51 PM  

"Tracings," Dana Tai Soon Burgess & Co., Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Washington

Dana Tai Soon Burgess's dance, which relates the story of his great-grandparents' emigration from Korea to Hawaii, is an earnest but unchallenging piece. It is weighted down by its need to literally tell the story of his ancestors' fall from their place as palace servants to one as laborers chopping pineapples on a plantation.

Only a love duet, featuring Burgess, has any spark of feeling or of creative invention.

Most disappointingly, the choreography reads as generic modern, without much trace of the Eastern perspective that is peculiar to Burgess's company. The piece clocks in at a shade over 60 minutes.

posted: 10:19:34 PM  

Oryx and Crake, a novel by Margaret Atwood

In some respects, Margaret Atwood's well-written dystopian story succeeds at extrapolating current technological trends to their unfortunate conclusions, while in others it does less well.

Her novel is set in a 22nd-century North America in which the battle against global warming has been lost, genetic engineering is in full swing, and yet computing and telecommunications technology has stagnated. It's this last area in which Atwood's imagination for outrage has failed her. Her protagonists still get their entertainment and news from the web and DVDs; while some of the media content has changed (broadcast public executions are common), it's hard to find the idea of Atwood's Noodie News shocking when Canada's Naked News is currently available.

Yet her depiction of the debasement of education and respected cultural figures is chilling. Her protagonist, Jimmy, fails to secure a position at an superior college, and has to settle for the third-rate

Martha Graham Academy, named after some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century who'd apparently mowed quite a swath in her day. There was a gruesome statue of her in front of the administration building, in her role—said the bronze plaque—as Judith, cutting off the head of a guy in a historical robe outfit called Holofernes. Retro feminist shit, was the general student opinion.

Jimmy takes jobs writing advertising copy at a time when language is dying noun by noun, each ugly neologism ("pigoon," "HelthWyzer") replacing a once-thriving word.

Everything in his life was temporary, ungrounded. Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble.

In just the same way, the genetically-modified creatures of this Huxleyan landscape take over the niches once filled by natural micro- and macrobiota.

Atwood captures the Patio Man fear of the other, the urge to return to walled communities. In her world, society has stratified into three ways of life and territory: the elite corporate-run Compounds, connected by sealed bullet trains; the less-prosperous Modules; and the vast, ruined third world of the "pleeblands," comprising most of what is left of the 20th century's cities, suburbs, and countryside.

As the novel is told partly in flashback, the narrative is propelled by the mystery of exactly how this world meets its inevitable apocalyptic end. A neatly open-ended conclusion, with allusion to Defoe, brings this fine book to close.

posted: 8:01:24 PM