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Comments: 204 +- Entertainment: William Gibson's Neuromancer Staged With Porn Star on Monday November 23, @09:27AM
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destinyland writes "Sunday night saw a reading of the William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel featuring porn star Sasha Grey at a New York art museum, along with sculpture-props simulating virtual reality. Artist Brody Condon promised to combine 'Gibson's 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction,' but the editor of H+ magazine challenges that description. 'In a 1993 interview, Gibson himself told me: "I think my world looks dystopian if you're a middle class white guy doing reasonably well in 1993... There are so many places in the world today that are so much crappier than anything I'm writing about."' And earlier this month William Gibson shared his response to a blog post about the event. 'Gol' dang! It's news to me!'"
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Not a play, just (Score:2)
.
Rats
Re: (Score:2)
Oh well. I think it would be better as a movie than as a play anyway. Unfortunately the special effects department would probably get carried away when the characters jack in and suck up so much time that they'd forget to tell the story.
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Well, it's probably more to do with the producer than the special effects team, as they're usually just following directors orders. It's kind of like theres both chocolate and vanilla ice creams, but it's possible to eat them together too and sometimes its even more delicious that way. Or you could also pour some chocolate dipping in to it, or cookie crunchs and m&m's on top.
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All this talk of chocolate and vanilla ice cream in response to an article about Sasha Grey makes my id go wild...
My ID would like to subscribe to your newsletter... RIGHT NOW...
Re:Not a play, just (Score:5, Funny)
I've staged War of the Worlds in my living room with my cats as the aliens, but it didn't make it onto Slashdot.
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"sculpture-props simulating virtual reality" (Score:5, Funny)
sculpture-props simulating virtual reality
You get the sense that someone doesn't quite grasp the basic concepts.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
sculpture-props simulating virtual reality
You get the sense that someone doesn't quite grasp the basic concepts.
No, actually, they got it right. Something real styled after something that doesn't exist must be simulated.
Thinking about any one of their props hard enough leads me to this train of thought: It's a real object, therefore it is real reality. So it can't be real virtual reality, it has to be simulated virtual reality which is what any real real reality made with real virtual reality in mind has to be, though since it's based on a cyberpunk novel it's really a simulated virtual fictional object, or a non-r
I think my world looks dystopian... (Score:5, Funny)
But the world looks utopian if you're a middle class white guy doing Sasha Grey.
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But the world looks utopian if you're a middle class white guy doing Sasha Grey.
Until the test results come back.
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STD's are actually fairly uncommon in the mainstream porn industry. Some performers wear condoms (which if you wore during your little escapade with Ms Grey then you have little to worry about - it's not a 100% thing but it's close enough not to fret over it), and those who don't are constantly tested and essentially sign contracts explicitly stating that they'll only have sex with others in the porn industry who are subjected to the same tests. Generally they'll stick to that as, well, most people in por
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Old (Score:2)
Re:I think my world looks dystopian... (Score:5, Interesting)
If your boss gives you a car, you feel great.
If your boss gives your co-worker two cars, now you feel badly.
The last three decades have consisted of taking away pieces of white middle class males cars until now they are riding a used bicycle only very slightly better than everyone else's.
The drop in status, income, prestige, and even the ability to retain a job has been painful and protracted. Very soon white males will be a minority in many areas and from what I've seen, the former minorities have a lot of illegal practices (like hiring only the same minority as they are) which no one is willing to fight against yet. I think that at some point very soon (the next 10 years), you will see a Mexican company based in the U.S. sued successfully for not hiring/promoting white males.
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A minority to who? The only way that's at all possible is if you say we're a minority compared to everyone else added up, which is stupid.
You might think it's stupid, but that's what the word "minority" means!
Minority means < 50%
Majority means > 50%
Super-majority means > 50% + X, where X is some positive number.
They are not relative terms.
Article written by... (Score:2)
R.U. Sirius
This can't be real????
Re:Article written by... (Score:5, Informative)
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Wow I didn't know! Thanks for the clarification.
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convergence of cyberpunk and porn, either...)
It's truely hard to think cyber without porn...
I saw this... (Score:5, Funny)
They're Still Dystopian (Score:5, Interesting)
The world of _1984_ would look great to someone from Somalia or some of the other hellholes of the world. _Brave New World_ even more so. Yet they're still both considered dystopian. Same goes for Neuromancer.
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Agreed.... The fact that you can point to even worse situations or living conditions somewhere doesn't mean the fictional world being described in a book like 1984 or Brave New World is any less disturbing or "bad".
In fact, one can often infer that even in those fictional worlds, there are probably still places where people have things worse off than in the cities they're describing.
Dystopian is contextual (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, they're all considered dystopian in the context of the West, but I think his point is astute, that whether something is a dystopia is contextual. The people living in positions of privilege, i.e. the West, wring their hands over and work hard to prevent these various dystopias from occurring, even while they may be actually working against the interests of the majority of humanity.
What we have now, if it wasn't reality, could be easily portrayed as a dystopia in a novel. Worse, the people with power to change things (the powered and moneyed people who are citizens in the first world) are unwilling to consider a lot of possibilities that may be on the table because they seem worse than their own privileged positions, without considering how badly off the majority of humanity is under their current system.
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Neuromancer dystopian? Are you serious? ;)
When I read that as a kid I would have given anything to live in that world. I still wouldn't mind getting one of their awesome brain-interfaced computers
And some people would love to live in Mad Max. Doesn't mean it's not dystopic.
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> Who wouldn't want to live in Brave New World? It's a society based on instant gratification all the time. Sounds like heaven on earth to me.
>
Plus everyone is engineered to be suited (and satisfied) with whatever role they have in life.
Geeks aren't forced to be salesmen.
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A dying breed, I know.
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Liberty has a very low calorie content and you can't burn individuality to keep you warm during cold winter nights.
I'm not saying they're not valuable, but they're also pretty far down the hierarchy of needs. There's a lesson to be learned here: if you keep people well-fed, sheltered, clothed and socially stable you can actually foster liberty and individuality (and innovation, creativity, etc) because the base needs are met. If you want to oppress people, make sure they don't have enough food to get up o
I want to take der jerbs! (Score:2)
Where do you get jobs like this? First there's the "MIT artist-in-residence" job where you can send messages into space that will never be received. Now this one where you can prattle on about dystopian piffle hoo-ha and people with higher educations will nod and shake their heads knowingly because they don't want to look unhip, or however you kids describe the squares these days.
Hey, I have some lovely post-post-post modern retro-reconstructionist works that would make a great display somewhere. They fract
Middle class "white guy?" (Score:3, Insightful)
That kind of uncritical asinine blather never ceases to tweak me. Middle class anyone, Gibson, you tool. It's amazing that people spout (and think) racist shit like this, and it is left bare, unchallenged, validated by silence thus tacit approval. Fuck that. The assumption is what? If you're middle class but not white that your perspective is different? GMAFB. If you're middle class and white, like me, you can't possibly know about destitution? (I came from it).
Idiocy.
The middle class (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree the race dropping was uncalled for, but he also was giving this response in an interview, where we can't always pick the perfect words for what we're trying to say. If he was just trying to draw a distinction between middle class in the privileged (and largely white) West versus the middle class in, say, India where by US standards you're still desperately poor, I don't think it's entirely illegitimate.
Parent
i give this troll an 8 out 10 (Score:5, Insightful)
the contrived outrage: well-played sir
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I would say that the world does look different to middle class black people, and even middle class white women, at least in North America. To pretend otherwise to to assume that we've successfully removed all race and gender barriers from our society. But we haven't. You can pretend that everything is all sweetness and light if you like, and that all the injustices of the past have been righted and anyone who says otherwise is just a whiner, but the facts simply don't bear that out. Despite affirmative acti
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Well, except for the part where it is pretty clear Gibson is naming middle class white guys as examples of people who were relatively comfortable in 1993, not naming them as the only people who were comfortable in 1993.
Molly Millions (Score:4, Insightful)
When you take into account the mindless sex-doll career of the character Molly, Sasha Grey is an apt choice for the part.
our core culture (Score:2)
Glad to see some celebrities finally appreciating Gibson's work.
I mean - according to Wikipedia, roughly half of all famous people are porn stars, if you go by pagecount. There's something about that I haven't yet found words for.
Porn Stars not what they used to be. (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was growing up porn stars were very rare.
Today they are very common.
The stigma is less but so is the cachet.
Re:Porn Stars not what they used to be. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lol.
What is missing from most porn (old and new) is the seduction.
I've never found people screwing to be erotic (even if both are female). There was one I saw back in the late 80's/ early 90's tho-- I think it was directed by a female (back before females became so much more masculine) and she had two people, fully dressed, standing talking in front of a fireplace for about 5 to 10 minutes that was one of the most erotic things I've ever seen. Both were good but average looking without makeup.
They went from casually talking to credibly aroused and there was the electric moment when both realized they were going to do something. I can't even recall the sex scene after but I still remember that scene two decades later.
Sex is usually about rubbing one spot a lot. It often looks goofy. The seduction is the part that is interesting to me.
Parent
Middle-class White Guy? (Score:4, Funny)
How about if you are a middle class "black" guy doing reasonably well in 1993?
Re:Queen of 'Loser Porn' - Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
What's "Loser Porn"?
It's "I can't even dream of having sex with a girl as pretty and intelligent as Sasha Grey, so I'll just call her a skank and call her work 'loser porn'".
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Re:LOL! One of Sash's Loser Jerkoff Boys Speaks (Score:5, Funny)
translation: I think I am Napoleon Bonaparte.
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Trolls trolling trolls.... (Score:4, Insightful)
trolling trolls trolling trolls.
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It's a redundancy, like "sweet sugar".
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Every "second tier porn skank" was "at one point pegged to be the next Jenna Jameson."
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Re:Why.. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Why.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The first time I had ever seen Sasha Grey was in The Girlfriend Experience. She was awful, probably ruined the film (if it wasn't the writers who ruined it first). Anyway, it was a complete snooze fest. Also who hires a pron star to play a prostitute and has her keep her clothes on for 99% of the film?
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Re:Why.. (Score:4, Funny)
Why is this on slashdot?/quote
Sasha Grey
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