The first episode in its spine tingling entirety! Introduction by Josh Glenn!
Here it is: the first episode of “Parallel Universe: Pazzo,” Hilobrow.com’s Radium-Age Science Fiction podcast, recorded every month (as of January ’10) at Pazzo Books, here in Boston. Below, you’ll find an introduction to Radium-Age (roughly, 1900-35) science fiction, about which I’ve written a series of posts for Gawker’s sci-fi blog io9.com. Our podcast’s inaugural episode is devoted to Radium-Age mechanical and quasi-organic humanoids, which is to say, to ROBOTS.
Transcript of my introduction to the 1st episode:
The term “robot” was introduced in Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots. The Czechoslovakian play, from which the TV show Dollhouse took the name of its sinister corporation, is set in a [probably American] factory of that mass-produces biological humanoids designed for blue-collar occupations. The term “robot” from the Czech word for “serf labor.” These days, however, we’d call Capek’s creatures “androids,” not robots. However, [Radium Age] science fiction is replete with our kind of robot: electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men who — like the Industrial Revolution from which they sprang — promised either to free us from the burden of labor… or else destroy or enslave us. Parallel Universe: Pazzo (1) ROBOTS by HILOBROW
Here’s the second reading from last Friday’s podcast with our friends at hilobrow.com where Pazzo’s very own me reads:
Tom Nealon reads at the Jan. 15 podcast.
Transcript of Joshua Glenn’s introduction to the 2nd reading (of the 1st episode):
Up next is Tom Nealon, who will read an excerpt from “The Last Poet and the Robots,” a 1934 story by A. Merritt. At the time Merritt was considered the greatest science fiction writer of the era, not because of his sometimes clumsy art nouveau style, but because of the grand sweep of his ideas. In this story, Narodny, a Russian superman who is both the world’s greatest scientist and its best poet, grows bored of a world in which all work is performed by robots. He retires, with a few chosen companions, to an underground lair where he experiments with advanced vibration technologies. But when the robots acquire intelligence and rise up, Narodny steps in.
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Stung by Bob’s/Droubi’s cessation of pita making last year and Samia’s closure , I’ve finally branched out and tried Bay Sweets (née Bayeh Market) on Spring St. in West Roxbury (which even has their menu online) and was more than pleasantly surprised. They’ve got a nice selection of semi-local (Providence which beats Canada) pitas in both the thick and houmous perfect variety and the thin but durable roll me a falafel type, plus all your de rigeur Lebanese grocery items (it also has that appealing half emptiness as if someone could swoop in at any moment and purchase all the torshi meshakel). The bakery has a nice variety of reasonably priced, baked on the premises items, but the biggest difference is that, in lieu of the produce section, they’ll make you a sandwich.
They’ve also got the falafel mix I’ve been looking for my whole life – modestly homogeneous with enough grit to know you’re serious, but none of those giant pieces of bulghur or gravel that have always haunted my history with grocery falafel. I will post further suggestions as I consume them, but in the meantime, why not buy some pickled turnips? They’re delicious.
Bay Sweets is at 120 Spring St. which is sort of between the bookstore and the Charles River; just past Shaw’s on the opposite side of the street before you get to Kalambar Dune.
Seek Books is open up the street at 1747 – lovely little shop, great ambiance and a nice selection of SF, Fantasy and Horror including piles of hard to find authors like PKD, Michael Moorcock, Lovecraft, Varley, Delany, and others. Hurry over and get a free DVD including the original Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price.
Samia’s is regrettably no more, but work appears to be moving along in the reconstruction into Shawarma King. We were a bit concerned yesterday when they had a Stop Work on the window but it’s moving along and new windows appear to have gone in today.
I drove past Skara and they don’t look open but they got rid of the pick up window. Bummer.
Boomerang appears on track.
The new Martial Arts Studio (from Corinth next to the Jax in Rozzie) is opening this month.
Family Dollar store professes to be unconcerned with potential competition from the Family Dollar Store in Roslindale.
Two weeks until the cherry lime Rickey wars launch. Last year things got ugly when Iscream undercut Sugar’s prices by 11 cents while upping the lime ante considerably.
Bus 2033 running up Centre St. has been backfiring all day and the last one caught me in the middle of researching a pretty nice Isaiah Thomas bible (1802, Boston, 12mo, not illustrated) and cost me at least a year of my life.
I mention the bible not so much to legitimize my afternoon (interrupted while researching an important American printer! And a bible no less! ), but simply to set the stage. Really.
On a more personal note, it’s been at least a week since they were tearing holes in the street outside the shop and the strange tented structure has disappeared (there was a yellow tent in the street with a suspiciously large hose protruding from it. Speculation was that they were having giant soup parties under Centre Street, but nothing was ever proven).
There was a City Weekly article on bartering at Pazzo in today’s globe. Since I’ve been looking at public companies for my End Times Index, I’ve become considerably more sanguine about the emergence of a parallel barter economy. It’s shocking how few of the absolute necessities of life are provided by companies that are held by the public, and you’d hope (or maybe I just imagine in my blurry edged utopian fantasies) that private companies would be able to be more flexible in their exchanges.
An article in yesterday’s Washington Post notied that people are increasingly consigning collectibles on Ebay (at small businesses which list items for people) which, in my current frame of mind, speaks of a desire and willingness to look outside of conventional sources of exchange.
We need to build BarterBay – that’s a thinker though; Many have tried and it’s thorny without a real world component – which may be the way to go (keeping it local is what made craigslist and freecycle work).
I’d like to add hard sausages to the barter list as well as table cheese.
When you really think about it, books are a terrific investment for the collapse of civilization. They need no electricity, batteries, or complicated equipment, they’re portable and durable and will be one of the only sources of entertainment (other than traveling theaters/circuses and oral poets; if you want to get in early on a growth industry I’d start memorizing epic poems today).
With the U.S. treasury hell bent on printing as much money as possible, and the airwaves rife with news of the impending apocalypse, we at Pazzo decided to take action. Starting Thursday October 2nd, every Thursday afternoon will be Barter Thursdays at Pazzo Books. Initially we’ll be accepting barter items from 1-3 every Thursday afternoon (bartering is better after lunch – we don’t want any low blood sugar blow ups) but we hope to expand this slowly. Ideally we’ll be going gangbusters by the time the U.S. financial system actually does collapse and we’ll barely notice the transition off of currency entirely.
Here’s a short list of items that you might want to swap for books:
Padded envelopes
Canned foods (corned beef hash, pigeon peas, red beans are all favorites)
Salt cod
Records (blues, hip-hop, jazz and indie rock are all worth a try)
Diapers (year and a half size)
Gasoline
Coffee (espresso preferred)
Interesting posters (preferably foreign – esp. Eastern European)
We’ll take anything especially interesting be it a matchbook, a paperweight or a hat
We’ll be adding to this regularly and eventually we hope to have an active swap system in place where we can take anything we have a market for elsewhere. Note to the IRS – we fully intend to comply with all barter laws – at least until you cease to exist.
Studies have shown that the inability of chimpanzees to make intelligent bartering decisions is what prevented them from taking over the world, so we don’t want to backslide now that the chips are down. If I have anything to say about it, the next great species on planet earth after the fall will be Homo sapiens sapiens
Online bartering sites like swaptree have already popped up (we’re testing it out right how and will report back) but it’s just too likely that any crisis will take the internet with it – we need a real world solution.
We’re quite serious about this and to demonstrate the approaching worthlessness of the greenback, I give you the chart of the value of gold:
The outrageous spike there at the end is pretty scary. There was one like it in 1980 (Iran crisis, oil crisis, Russian problems, Japan taking over the world economy – seems eerily familiar), and though we’re all still here, I’m not taking any chances.
What’s interesting is that palladium, a scarce but more industrial rare metal hasn’t run up at all.
That spike around the millennium was probably due to perceived demand for high tech products, but you notice there’s no increase in value recently. Once the financial system collapses and we’re all living in caves there will be little demand for palladium – note how it has actually tanked as the extent of the financial crisis has become clear (this despite the fact that Iron Man uses it in the mini cold fusion reactor that powers his suit. How this didn’t send the price soaring is a mystery).
Enough doom and gloom! Let’s start bartering – every Thursday from 1-3!
Nice little human interst story on West Roxbury businesses Pazzo and Kalembar Dune this afternoon on Channel 5 (here’s a link to the video). The idea for the piece is that second hand shops are recession resistant (I’ve long claimed that used bookstores are counter-cyclical – that link isn’t from very long ago, so does little to prove that I’ve LONG claimed it, but I digress) and able to survive, nay, thrive, in this sketchy economy we find ourselves in.
It’s a very short bit and Brian (who seems quite credible to me, but I’m his brother) doesn’t get to mention much more than frugality as a sales driver, but there is some truth here. While you won’t find me wishing for a bad economy (only liquor stores and bankruptcy attorneys are actually counter-cyclical), this particular one with high gas prices keeping people local, and a weak dollar helping out our international sales (especially at the high end) isn’t the worst for used books (at least not yet; my superstitious side does balk at saying anything like this out loud). Mostly I just love the message though – the entire U.S. financial system may be a smoking ruin, but Pazzo Books is doing fine! I hope viewers take some solace from this.
Lightning took out an electrical line behind the store at around 4 today (actual according to the analog clock across the street that stopped, it was 3:54) taking our block’s electricity with it. It was pretty impressive, actually – you heard the crack of thunder overhead and the lights went right out as the sound subsided.
