Thoughts on the arts, society, politics, and various geeky topics.
This is the blog of Janice Dawley. Why is it called “Central Cortex”? Well, the Cortex was the interplanetary equivalent of the internet in Firefly, a show I was totally into back in 2003 when I first created this blog, and I’ve never changed the name since then. Strangely enough, I’ve barely written anything about Firefly here, but I’ve written a LOT about other TV shows and movies, as well as literature, politics, various cultural topics, and my own life.
My mother died on Friday, December 12. She was 76 years old. I’ve been working on an obituary over the past week and wondering how to distill her life and place in the world down to a single column in a newspaper. It’s hard to do, so I ended up copying the structure of the obituary she wrote for Dad in 2004. Lots of names of relatives, educational milestones, jobs she...
This is a story about my engagement with the life and work of Robert Downey Jr. It starts with a series of roles I saw him play in movies in the last couple of years. A Scanner Darkly (hilarious motor mouth double-crosser), Zodiac (drunken reporter sliding into the trash bin of life, delivers my favorite line of the movie to Jake Gyllenhaal: “You’re doing that thing, the thing we discussed, the...
We’re having another slow morning today, downloading photos off our cameras, blogging and recovering from our marathon day trip to the big island of Hawaii yesterday. Beth booked a trip with Polynesian Adventure Tours that required us to get up by 4:30 AM and didn’t get us back to Oahu until about 9:30 PM. It was a difficult schedule, but worth it for all the ground we covered, and...
I just watched the first episode of Joss Whedon’s web musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It is hilarious, in the vein of silly superhero creations like The Tick and Mystery Men, but with Sondheim-esque compositions! It stars Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, and Nathan Fillion! It was independently produced by Joss and his relations! It is the future of entertainment financing...
I just learned from Making Light that Thomas M. Disch, the author of 334 and On Wings of Song — two of the best works of SF I’ve ever read — killed himself two days ago. Damn. Fucking damn it. Yes, he was a bastard sometimes, particularly lately, but he wrote some amazing stuff that spoke of a larger spirit and artistic sensibility than most people ever know. I wish he had had a...
It’s a couple of days into WisCon, and I’m struggling to keep up with all the programming, people, and basic physical needs like eating and sleeping. But I’m hanging out with Liz and John and getting reconnected with lots of other folks and blogging, and it is good. I plan to write something up after the convention, but in the mean time I’ve been posting to Feminist SF...
Last night I joined my sister, a friend of hers, and my nephew for a kickass performance by They Might Be Giants at Higher Ground. I saw these guys perform back in the late ’80s when they visited my college, and I swear they look exactly the same as they did back then. The cool thing is, they’ve produced about 20 million albums in the interval, so they had a lot more songs to choose...
Finally, we’re officially out of winter. Yeah, we keep getting ice storms and other crapola falling out of the sky, but summer IS on the way. Thank Peep, because 2008 has been one of my least favorite years so far. Relationship distress, a nasty case of work, and an inner ear infection that gave me persistent vertigo all combined to give me an insomnia/anxiety/depression sucker punch...
This blog has been silent for way too long, so I decided to write a series of “best of 2007” posts. Originally it was going to be one piece, but now that I’ve written up the film and TV section, I realized that if I continued on at such length for the other sections (books & comics, music, and events) it would be one long winded post. So I’m starting smaller...