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© 1999-2009 by John Varley; all rights reserved |
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Wednesday, January 7, 2009 Happy Birthday, Jerry Stilwell! |
December 30, 2008: 4 Movie Reviews: Burn After Reading ● Monty Python and the Holy Grail ● Run, Fatboy, Run ● Scrooged
December 23, 2008: John and Lee’s Guide to Disneyland - Last Disneyland We decided to make one more visit to Disneyland before our passes expired. It will probably be our last one until some of the changes are made at California Adventure.
December 23, 2008: 3 Movie Reviews: BURN-E ● Vanishing Point ● Without a Clue
December 14, 2008: 6 Movie Reviews: Trafic ● The Closet ● The Driver ● Hancock ● L.A. Story ● The Shop on Main Street
December 8, 2008: 5 Movie Reviews: CSNY Déjà Vu ● Expo: The Magic of the White City: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 ● Twilight ● Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa ● Clockwise
December 4, 2008: 3 Movie Reviews: Bolt ● Beverly Hills Chihuahua ● Cops and Robbers
December 3, 2008: Headline at Boing Boing: Spider Robinson reads Varley's "Persistence of Vision" Cory Doctorow: "Spider Robinson's latest podcast installment is a reading of John Varley's towering and brilliant 1979 novella, 'The Persistence of Vision,' winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. I'm a gigantic John Varley fan (especially of his short fiction) and this story may be the best of the lot."
November 21, 2008: 7 Movie Reviews: Advise and Consent ● The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing ● Get Smart ● Quantum of Solace ● Passengers ● Our Town ● The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
November 13, 2008: A Hallowood Hollyween We had a lot of fun last Halloween at the West Hollywood street party, which happens on about mile of Santa Monica Boulevard and features some of the wildest costumes you’ll ever see, some by make-up professionals, many by WH’s vast gay community.
November 13, 2008: 6 Movie Reviews: Full Circle with Michael Palin ● Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure ● My Sister Maria (Meine Schwester Maria) ● The Savages ● Quarantine ● Lakeview Terrace
November 3, 2008: John and Lee’s Guide to Disneyland - Part 9 I guess I’m a wimp. It wasn’t actually that hot, mid to upper 80s. I used to be able to shrug that off. Heck, when I was in the 1st and 2nd grade in Fort Worth, I’d go out and play, and hunt for horned toads, when the thermometer was well over 100.
October 31, 2008:
Happy Halloween from John and Lee
October 20, 2008: 6 Movie Reviews: Body of Lies ● Righteous Kill ● Smart People ● Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day ● Shine a Light ● Twilight Miss P. is a governess down on her luck, and through comic misadventure and a bit of guile, she becomes the social secretary for an air-headed American actress-wannabe, Delysia Lafosse (real name, Sarah Grubb).... More reviews...
October 6, 2008: 3 Movie Reviews: Confessions of a Superhero ● Hallelujah! ● Three Ages One of the pleasures of living maybe a mile and a half from Grauman’s Chinese Theater is that we get to drive by that two-block tourist stretch quite often. There’s always something going on; in fact, that street is closed off about as much as it’s open, for one thing or another, for as much as 10 days at Oscar time. One of the things that is always happening is the costumed characters that haunt the place, to the despair of the Grauman’s owners. More reviews...
September 29, 2008: Paul and Me A few days ago we lost a great American. Entrepreneur—seller of salad dressing, pasta sauce, lemonade, popcorn, salsa, and wine among many other things—philanthropist, devoted husband, father, and grandfather, race car driver, owner, and sponsor, founder of a dozen camps for severely ill children … and, oh yes, he acted a bit.
September 25, 2008: The Gaean Trilogy is now available at Audible.com Just got an email from Allyson Johnson that she'd finished recording DEMON. Also available at Audible.com: The Persistence of Vision and Press Enter, narrated by Peter Ganim; and The Ophiuchi Hotline, narrated by Gabra Zackman.
September 17, 2008: SF Signal asked Varley (and others) two questions: What makes a successful sf/f book adaptation? Why do adaptations sometimes fail? Varley's answer follows Jennifer Pelland's.
September 15, 2008: Movie Reviews ● In Bruges ● Mad Hot Ballroom ● El Padrecito Try to remember what you were like in the 5th grade. You’d passed through that brief period when it didn’t much matter which sex you were; boys and girls played together, sometimes, though the boys were rougher. Then the segregation began, some regimented, and some self-enforced. All through elementary school girls stuck with girls and boys stuck with boys.
September 10, 2008: Kiss Your Ass Goodbye The first time I went to see the end of the world was June 14, 1968. The asteroid Icarus was going to come within four million miles of the Earth … or so they would have us believe. Four million miles is a gnat’s whisker in cosmic terms. There were those who said it was actually going to collide with our planet, and “they” were keeping that information from us to avoid panic.
September 6, 2008: St. Francis Dam William Mulholland was a colorful character. He was responsible for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, opened in 1913, which stole water from the Owens Valley, 233 miles to the north. It flows downhill all the way so it takes no power to operate.
September 6, 2008: Movie Review - Woodstock I was there. I didn’t get to hear much live music, other than that made by the people around me. In fact I made it to the stage only once, and didn’t stay long. I had other responsibilities, to my wife, who was on crutches and couldn’t make it through the mud, and my 18-month-old son.
September 2, 2008: New Hollyweird - Rudolph ValentinoAugust 23 was the 81st anniversary of the death of Rudolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Piero Filibert Guglielmi De Valentina D’Antonguolla, in New York City, of peritonitis following a perforated ulcer.
September 2, 2008: Movie Reviews ● Fosse ● Judgement at Nuremberg ● The Crusades
August 4, 2008: At the Drive In ● Hellboy II: The Golden Army ● Wanted
July 18, 2008: VarleyYarn - Hillside CemeteryIt’s been a while since we went on a celebrity body hunt, so when other business called us down to the lower reaches of Culver City, we decided to visit this graveyard, which is rich in famous bones. It’s also a Jewish cemetery, like Mount Sinai, which always affords a few surprises.
June 6, 2008: John and Lee’s Guide to Disneyland - Part 8: Walt Disney TreasuresIn 2001 the Disney company released four sets of DVDs in metal boxes, called Walt Disney Treasures, and has been bringing them out yearly ever since, in what they refer to as “waves.” There are now seven waves.
June 2-3, 2008: VarleyYarn: Land of 10,000 Plates - Part 1 & Part 2A few days ago we were driving around and I stopped at a red light behind a car with a South Carolina plate. In case you haven’t seen one, it is mostly light blue with a palmetto tree in the center (South Carolina is the Palmetto State). Across the top is this legend: “Smiling Faces. Beautiful Places.”
July 2, 2008 - RECORDING HAS BEGUN - Last week Audible.com began the recording of the books they bought from me. Titan, Wizard, and Demon will be read by Allyson Johnson. Read more
May 26, 2008 - I'm a Martian Citizen! About an hour ago as I write this, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander successfully delivered my novella, "In the Hall of the Martian King," to a soft landing near the Martian north pole.
May 16, 2008 - Diary of a Male Fashion Model Friday, May 2nd, 2008, 6 AM: Up early for the Americana shoot. Spend a hour in the shower. Does the beard need a trim? Nah.
April 28, 2008 - The BCAM at the LACMA If the above acronym soup is confusing to you, let me translate: BCAM is the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and LACMA is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (We Angelenos say it as “The Bee-cam at the Lackma.”) BCAM is a new building at LACMA, the first part of a three-phase expansion plan. It opened in February.
April 14, 2008 - The Shrub That Ate a House The sleepy little town of Sierra Madre is off the beaten trail, wedged as it is between Arcadia, Monrovia, and Pasadena, at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. But not so very long ago it was at the center of a struggle for the very survival of humanity.
March 30, 2008 - ROLLING THUNDER now available at Diesel eBooks!
March 19, 2008: Hollyweird - St. Pat's Day at the Egyptian with the Rutles They had the 30th reunion of the Rutles at the Egyptian Theater on St. Patrick's Day. All four of the lads from Liverpool, together again for the first time. You remember the Rutles, don’t you? The Pre-Fab Four? Dirk McQuickly, Barry Wom, Stig O’Hara, and Ron Nasty? Ring any bells?
March 11, 2008 - io9 Talks to John Varley about Climate Disaster and Space Opera
March 4, 2008 - ROLLING THUNDER in books stores!
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Below the fold
“... this Podkayne's story is not a Shavian-Voltairean satire but a nicely traditional combination of bildungsroman, alien contact, planetary adventure, and disaster scenario featuring a smart, mouthy young person as narrator and stirrer-up-of-plotpoints. ” Russell Letson, Locus
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Varley and Janis Ian
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Quotes from some of Lee's favorite Varley movie reviews...
"There’s no getting around it, somebody tries to describe this film to you and it sounds … creepy. You try to describe it to somebody else and it sounds creepy."
"They walk. They walk and walk and walk. They walk some more. They manage, idiotically, to get lost. They walk some more. They talk about nothing."
"The dialogue here is so sharp you can cut yourself listening to it, particularly between Nick and his only two friends: a lobbyist for guns and another for alcohol who call themselves the MOD (Merchants Of Death) Squad."
"If the '60s was the big part of your youth, see this immediately. And if it wasn't, you need to see it even more, as it goes farther toward explaining what that crazy time was about than any number of '60s documentaries I've seen."
"It has a heroine/victim who keeps doing the right, smart thing (until one little mistake at the end, which I warned her about, but did she listen?)..."
"I saw a marriage dissolve in about 90 seconds over a series of breakfasts."
"She is a breath of fresh air to one, like me, who cringes at liberal circumlocutions like 'differently abled,' or 'senior citizens,' or 'people of color.' Or how about 'the N-word'?"
"Very soon I was making a lot of mental notes, various nasty things to say, really vicious cuts and overhand chops and knees in the nuts. But I soon lost my enthusiasm. It would be like kicking a big, steaming, fresh mammoth turd."
"The world isn’t changed, minds aren’t changed but they are opened up a little. And it is all so perfect, so right, that you find yourself nodding and smiling at everything that happens."
"You can say, rightly, that socio-economic pressures drive young black men into poor career choices such as dealing drugs and being in gangs. But I believe that being a pimp requires a rottenness of the soul, a deep-down hatred for women, and thus, practically by definition, you can't be a pimp and a decent man at the same time."
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Born This Day Jann Wenner (1946); Nicolas Cage (1964) Left The Planet Thomas Clap (1767); Nikola Tesla (1943); Hirohito (1989); Bronko Nagurski (1990)
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Tho stiff |
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Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people. |
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The beard |
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That nature gave |
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Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each. The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each."
The villagers rounded up
all their savings and bought all the monkeys for 700 billion
dollars. Now you have a better understanding of how the WALL STREET BAILOUT PLAN WILL WORK !!!! It doesn't get much clearer than this... Thanks to Jack Katosh |
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It shaves |
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Like down with |
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A $7 billion missile-defense system for the United Arab Emirates. An estimated $15 billion potential sale of Lockheed Martin’s brand-new fighter plane to Israel. Billions of dollars in weaponry for Taiwan and Turkey. These and other recent deals helped make the United States the world’s leading arms-exporting nation. Frida Berrigan |
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