A US professor [Sidney Perkowitz, a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange]... has won backing from a number of his peers after creating a set of guidelines for Hollywood. The proposals are intended to curb the film industry's worst abuses of science by confining scriptwriters to plotlines that embrace the suspension of disbelief but stop short of demanding it in every scene. More in The Guardian, here though the guidelines themselves don't seem to be online anywhere. Meanwhile the Science & Entertainment Exchange website, here, describes it as a program of the National Academy of Sciences, "providing entertainment industry professionals with access to top scientists and engineers to help bring the reality of cutting-edge science to creative and engaging storylines".
Amusing to think that what's wrong with Hollywood movies is the science - and the idea that fixing the science would somehow make the movies better is completely hilarious. What I'm left wondering about now is how other interest groups and areas of intellectual speciality could offer their services to film writers and producers in order to secure more accurate representation. We can imagine a lobby group of office workers or the homeless for example, or perhaps human beings in general could get together as a lobbying group to provide information about the reality of human existence in service of more creative and engaging storylines.
Haunted too by the idea that only when Holywood is 100% accurate on all topics will we be able to sleep comfortably in our beds (or cinema seats).
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Nice presentation from Sydney Padua at The Story conference last week about her great Lovelace and Babbage webcomic, which included diagrams like the one half way down this page. Presentation is here.
Cover for the German edition of The Broken World above. Details here. It's out in May. Interesting translation questions filtering through from my friend Astrid who is working on it, following her translation for the lovely German edition of Endland. Detail below.
You know you are in Tokyo when the dawn brings with it an electronic chorus of speaking voices from screens and speakers, the sound addressing the gray light in the more or less empty streets and crossings - a song awaiting its intended ears. The city speaking to itself aboout pedestrians who are only just starting to emerge. Babbling and enjoining them to cross or to stay still, to buy goods or services, to buy themselves a better life. From where you lie - in a bed in room on the 12th floor of a hotel linked directly to Shibuya - this sound comes to you blown on the wind, in erratic wisps and gusts, with the slowly emerging traffic sounds and the wind itself, the light slipping in gently from round the edges of the plasticised curtains.
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Coming home. Taxi conveys a cargo of passengers from London to Sheffield, adults and kids all sleeping all the way. A strange cargo these slumberers, all limb curled and eyes closed, in another timezone than the driver, daylight immune, dreaming, sleepfidgeting.
In Tokyo presenting performance of Sight Is The Sense.. (Weds-Friday) and Quizoola! on Saturday. Here for more info.
Meanwhile my Guardian Online 'performance diary' piece on the Cambodia trip is finally up here.
One detail I found no space to mention in Guardian piece:
The funeral musicians don't face the audience or each other when playing at a funeral. Instead they sit with backs together and face different directions. Because the dead are not with us. They are gone, scattered.
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