Futurians – Pirates in Sci-fi

The Sydney Futurians will meet on Friday September 19, 2008 to discus ‘Pirates in SF’. On this day you may also choose to talk like a pirate, as this meeting coincides with International Talk like a Pirate Day, Aaaaarrrrrrrh!The Sydney Futurians usually meet to talk about SF, SF&F, Sci-Fi and Science News from about 6.50 pm to 8.30 pm in the street level foyer area of the University of Technology, Broadway, Sydney (Australia)

Let me know if you are likely to show up so we can keep an eye out for you, as depending on noise levels, we may be down the stairs in the lower foyer section or round the corner.

What stories / Authors do you feel should be discussed?
Navies without Nations? Pirates or Mercenaries Vs Privateers
Who is to say who is a Pirate/Criminal and Who’s a freedom fighter?
Are there any Australian SF&F stories on this theme?

And do we dare ignore the most modern and technological form of Piracy, the theft and trade of intellectual property via the largely unpatrolled ‘High Seas’ of the Internet?

To get you started off, some books / Sci-Fi TV where ‘Thar Be Pirates’?

Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo
Numerous Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom and other Solar System adventures
Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Tyrant series
Blakes Seven
Lois Mc Master Bujold’s adventures of Miles Nasmyth
Joss Weedon’s ‘Serenity’

Send me your thoughts on the topic (off list) and I will introduce them at the meeting and credit you as a being a ‘contributing virtual Futurian’. If you would like to come to this month’s meeting but might be a bit late or have trouble finding us, email me and using John or Diane Fox’s mobile phone we’ll talk you in to where (in the UTS foyer area we will be meeting this month.

If you really can’t make it to the Friday night meeting but are interested in what the Futurians have to say about the the topic, then contact me off list and I will try to send them out to you when they are written up, or you can look up the Futurian website.

Contacts:
Sydney Futurians Site http://www.sydneyfuturian.org/
Freecon Site http://www.freecon2008.sydneyfuturian.org/

Email: garry_dal@yahoo.com.au
By phone (best after 7 pm) 02-9718-5827
Post Office Box 152, Bexley North NSW 2207

The Sydney Futurians – Powered by the imagination – All possible futures (and pasts) considered

Risky Lunar Love

THIS IS A NEW MUSICAL, not your average, it is sexy, silly, funny, entertaining and full of rude bits..

Luke Milton’s RISKY LUNAR LOVE, is a fun and irreverent new musical comedy, set to captivate audiences with the story of a sexy alien invader who manipulates the desires of two arch rival science-fiction writers in a bid to destroy our planet and colonise a new one!

Fresh from it’s interstate hit season, award-winning Director John Sheedy (Blasted; Unidentified Human Remains; Some Explicit Polaroid’s), Musical Director Ross Johnston (Machine Gun Fellatio), Designer Gypsy Taylor (Baz Lurhman’s Australia; Superman Returns; Chronicles of Narnia) and highly acclaimed choreographer John O’Connell (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge, Shall We Dance, Matrix revolution, Rocky Horror Show, 2008 Academy Awards) will unleash Risky in its premiere Sydney season, transforming Carrigeworks Bay 20 theatre into a Tiki wonderland, cabaret styled, Mai-Tai masterpiece!

CARRIAGEWORKS – Bay 20
245 Wilson Street Eveleigh, NSW
The Carriageworks is a premiere arts venue, situated in the diverse area of Newtown, Sydney, NSW (Australia)
For more information on how to get there and where to find us check here

PREVIEW NIGHTS 15TH, 16TH, 17TH  SEPTEMBER

Commences 18 September – 4 October
tuesday – friday 8pm
saturdays – 5pm and 9pm

website: www.riskylunarlove.com

Trent Reznor’s ‘Year Zero’ may be an HBO series

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has been in talks in with HBO about making a two-season maxi-series out of “Year Zero,” the dark future tale that Reznor has chronicled in his music as well as in a celebrated Alternate Reality Game (ARG) with the same title that was created by 42 Entertainment.”It’s the most exciting thing on the horizon, it’s the thing that when I wake up in the morning it makes me say, ‘God it would be cool if that happened,” Reznor told me this week while sitting backstage before a Nails concert in Toronto. “This is my grand ambition. Will it happen? I don’t know. It was fun sitting and telling [the HBO] guys and watching them shake their head and having writers on board and producers that are in to it. It’s been a fun thing.”

“Year Zero” began (as so many things do in the music of NIN) from a place of negative emotion and sonic experimentation. Reznor was increasingly outraged by the geopolitical situation during the Bush years and he wanted to channel that fury into music, but he was loath to drift into the limiting lexicon of protest lyrics.

“How could I express what I was feeling in a way that didn’t sound like bitching about George Bush? I mean, you know, I love Neil Young but I didn’t want to listen to that record, really,” he said, referring to the singer-songwriter’s “Living with War.” “My reaction to that kind of record is, ‘We know this. It’s obvious.’”

More from LA Times blogger Geoff Boucher

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness, a group exhibition curated by Sarvia Jasso and Yasmine Dubois, borrows its title from the first feminist science fiction novel written by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1969. Set in a universe where individuals alternate between genders depending on the lunar cycle, the novel proposes an alternative social model that challenges traditional sexual dimorphism. After being transported from a heteronormative society to this new planet, the narrator states, ‘[...] my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gathenian first as a man then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.’ During this journey, he is immersed in a world that redefines gender and sexual identities as we know them. Using the novel as a point of departure, the exhibition looks at artists who are playing with the dynamics of gender representation within a contemporary context.

Michael Bilsborough’s new mural, Within Reach, depicts an epic, polysexual bacchanal. The figures are suspended in a grid, which both supports and supplants the sensual gratification of the orgy pictured within the space. Paying particular attention to how architectural spaces orchestrate human interaction, Bilsborough’s images are much more than wistful visions of uninhibited fantasies. In Kathryn Garcia’s triptych drawing, a sprawled-out, slender figure claws at its own skin. Its idealized form embodies both masculine and feminine characteristics, while also exploring a constant shift between the two. At once ethereal and diabolical, Garcia illustrates this transitory moment with acute sensibility. Similarly, in Monica Bonvicini’s Red Dot on Parking Lot a sole figure dressed in red lays in the middle of an empty lot. The image invokes feelings of isolation and displacement, suggesting a state of flux.

Tara Mateik’s interest in Psychosexual Metamorphosis, a condition recorded in Psychopathia Sexualis, a taxonomy of sexual aberrations first published in 1886, inspired her work Case 133. The subject of this particular study called himself the Countess V and spent his days in bed acting like a lady of noble position, wearing his hair done up in a knot and breasts that were made out of rolls of bread. An audio recording from the case study is played on a turntable that simultaneously spins a zoetrope, which reveals the Countess’ animated transformation from male to female and vice versa. Matthias Vriens turns his attention to the man-made vagina and the visual construction of new forms of trans-sex. Here, celebratory sexuality, which is the undercurrent of all his photographs, is laid bare.

Matt Greene’s The Pink Room and The White Shoes investigate fantasy and the inability to manifest it in reality. Playing with notions of voyeurism within the history of painting, Greene inverts the male gaze in a way that both appropriates and challenges feminist discourse regarding the representation of women. In Sarah Lucas’ Man Versus Human Nature, a rusty bed frame is turned on its side while pantyhose and a bucket dangle from a pair of suspenders. Using these ordinary objects to question how they have become feminine and masculine signifiers, her investigation of gender roles challenges our preconceived notions.

Tracey Rose’s video, Mousie Mit Blubooi, unravels the trauma that comes with love, while Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s collaborative sculpture, Agenda Pusher, uses a grotesque aesthetic to explore non-traditional, dysfunctional familial structures. In both works, hierarchical roles are overthrown and replaced with absurdly chaotic scenes of everyday life. Trecartin’s video, (Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me.), exemplifies how the dispersion of information in this new technological era has shed light on multiple ways of experiencing sexuality.

In a photograph by Tobaron Waxman, the artist is the protagonist in a rapturous scene that references Chagall’s crucifixion paintings and the primordial homoerotic scene of the Holy Lance with a new Queer iconography. Peytach Eynayim, a name implicating God as site, means ‘(the place of) Open Eyes’ in Hebrew, i.e. Truth in space-time. This references the crossroads where Tamar waits for Judah in this biblical story about love, prostitution, revelation and gendered sexual agency.

Paul Kopkau’s drawings are part of his comic series, Girlfriends. Playing with gay stereotypes that range from the party queen to the dominatrix, Kopkau shows how trying to assimilate can be both humorous and tragic. Paired with these drawings, his sculpture The Vulgar Minimalist, is a direct reference to Yves Klein’s Blue and the pitfalls of minimalism. But unlike the minimalists, who opted to work with industrial materials, Kopkau not only subverts the notion of masculinity by creating paper mache blue balls, but also by imbuing them with homosexual implications. Slava Mogutin’s photographs, which disclose and celebrate macho-on-macho eroticism, capture a queer subculture that does not identify itself with the mainstream. Mogutin defies the conventions of the male nude by documenting it in a raw style that does not fetishize his subjects, but instead makes a political statement about gay masculinity. He also comments on unconventional gender role-play and transgressive sexuality that often involves violence and kink.

Employing a conceptual approach, C.R.E.E.,P. investigates the relationship between language and the acquisition of gender identity in Perverted By Language. Appropriating the title of the 1982 album by the seminal experimental punk group The Fall, this text piece explores how language is embedded with codes that further propagate or, in this case, abolish gender categories. Continuing his exploration of social exchange as an art form, Michael Portnoy (aka the Director of Behavior) uses language to create a game of sex dice, Kimbaw the loam! (Ways to Put People, for 2 persons), which asks that the participants step outside of their comfort zone.

The Project Midtown 37 West 57th Street, 3rd Floor, NY
http://www.elproyecto.com/

Editor’s note: I think you might have to be there!

Trasharama – call for Entries!

Trasharama A-go-go, Australia’s NASTIEST short film festerval/competition is stalking short films for the 2008 tour. Send in your horror, sci-fi, bad taste comedies, grind-house trailers, sick animations, dodgymentaries and other filmic disasterpices. It doesn’t matter if it’s 20 years old or 20 minutes old, shot on 35mm or camera phone!! You can be in the running for some awesome prizes courtesy of Madman Entertainment, Polyester Books, Inside Film, Smoke & Mirrors, Crumpler, Blackflys Eyewear, Force Entertainment, Movie-Maniacs, Siberian Comics, Chainsaw Horror plus more…. As well as having your film screened to a National audience!!

Only $10 to enter (before August 14) or $15 late entry fee (until Sept 9).
Checkout the website for conditions, entry forms and more info.

http://www.trasharama.com.au/

Mu-Meson April film picks

Friday 25th April
Sex in Space Double

Cinderella 2000
It is a soft core exploitation picture that borrows heavily from the popular Brother Grimm’s fairy tale while injecting a musical component into the mix. It is one of those rare films that can be regarded ‘so bad they’re good.’ The year is 2047, despite the misleading title, and the Controller of this futuristic epoch has publicly declared any sexual act between consenting adult’s illegal due to the sharp increase in population. But to make sure that the population at large are adhering to this totalitarian enforcement, the Controller sends a robot to patrol the city, and anybody unluckily caught doing what they shouldn’t be doing are immediately arrested.         
                   
2060: A Sex Odyssey (1974)
Blasts into orbit with the kinds of heavenly bodies not found in any solar system. Five Venusian aliens have been sent on a mission of grave importance. Seems Venus is an all female planet, and these intergalactic beauties require the services of the earth men to help replenish their declining population. If nudity, sexism and bad taste offends maybe you should find something else to do.  Mu-Meson Archives doors 7.30 for 8pm start $10

For More extensive and detailed information please visit Mu-Meson Archives web site http://www.mumeson.org/

Mu-Meson Archives at Crn Parramatta Rd & Trafalgar St Annandale, Sydney (NSW) at the end of King Furniture building up the steel staircase. Phone 02 9517-2010

The Gentle Strains of Laptops

No one will ever confuse Tokyo’s Laptop Orchestra with the Duke Ellington or Count Basie orchestras.

Swing will not be the thing at the Kennedy Center’s Theater Lab when the delicate sounds of musician Ko Ishikawa’s sho, a traditional bamboo mouth organ, are sent to a sextet of serious-looking musician/programmers (it’s still early for titles in this emerging art form) perched at laptops on stage. They will transform the sho’s tones into something that sounds sci-fi futuristic yet as timeless as the song of the humpback whale.The performance, “1[000] Breath[s],” is part of the Kennedy Center‘s “Japan! Culture + Hyperculture” festival. As with much in experimental music, it’s sometimes easier to listen to and show than to describe; thankfully, YouTube has excerpts of the Laptop Orchestra performing this very piece in Tokyo in 2006.

More…

Sydney Futurian Meetings for 2008 – Feb

The first group calling itself the Sydney Futurians met in 1939 (think of that!), this current meeting started up in the early 1990s. Membership of the Sydney Futurian is conferred by participation. We are an informal group that meets to talk about SF, Sci-Fi, Fantasy and SF-like Science. There is no membership or meeting charge etc, because, for good Science Fiction to be appreciated, the imagination must be Free!

February Science Fiction in Sydney

Friday – Feb 01 – Sydney Dr Who Tavern meeting, pub food and an opportunity to talk about Dr Who and Brit Sci-Fi in general 6.00 pm to real late. At the Town Hall Hotel NEWTOWN close to the station and busses. There are also occasional Video nights held at DWCA members homes.

Thursday – Feb 07 – The Infinitas SF&F Discussion group meet to discuss SF, Sci-Fi, Movies TV Games and comics at the Infinitas bookshop (inside the ‘Blokey Stuff’ shop), 6.45 pm to 8.15 pm, in the arcade at 48 George St. PARRAMATTA .

Friday – Feb 15 – Sydney Futurians meet to discuss ‘The Best and Worst of 2007′, come and compare your choices with our choices of the best and worst SF, Sci-Fi or Science of last year. Circulating around the Basement books bookshop from around 6 pm, meeting at 6.55 pm (to 8.30 pm) in the foyer at the UTS Tower building BROADWAY SYDNEY

Thursday – Feb 21 – The Infinitas Book review group meet to discuss two books each meeting. This month ‘Orphans of Chaos’, by John C. Wright (SF) and ‘Northern Lights’, by Philip Pullman (Fantasy) at the Infinitas bookshop (inside the ‘Blokey Stuff’ shop), 6.45 pm to 8.15 pm, in the arcade at 48 George St. PARRAMATTA.

The Sydney Futurian  topic for February 15/08 is:’Technology Sci-Fi and the ‘Cyberpunk’ Revolution’

Garry P. Dalrymple
email: Garry.Dalrymple@det.nsw.edu.au
Sydney Futurians / 2008 Sydney Freecon
Care of Post Office Box 152
BEXLEY NORTH NSW 2207
A website / graphics etc. possibly later.