"Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists" (Penguin Press), by Kay Larson

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Bio of John Cage explores Zen Buddhist influence

BARSTOW In a Barstow authors hypothetical history, the Civil War is still unfinished business.

Comes the Southern Revolution, written by Barstow resident James Elstad, mixes history and futurism in a new twist on the war.

When James Elstad a veteran of the Marine Corps and California National Guard visited Petersburg National Battlefield in Virginia with a Virginia National Guard batallion from a nearby base, troops described the battle that took place there between Confederate soldiers and the federals.

The tone of their voice was, We would if we could, Elstad said, and their seemingly bitter tone stayed with him.

That got him thinking just what that would look like and sparked his story of a cocky southern Army National Guard General who relaunches the Civil War in 2016.

This is possible, Elstad said, because the general is a direct descendant of Gen. Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederate Army, and in the story Lee installed a group of 12 friends to raise his descendants and ensure their eventual return to hostilities.

He said he came up with the idea in 1996 and wrote a draft. He showed it to his wife, who praised the storyline, but not his writing style, he said.

In 2009, Elstad joined the High Desert chapter of the California Writers Club, which meets at the Newton T. Bass Library in Apple Valley. Each month, members gather at the library and critique each others work.

I went and took my work to their critique group and they helped me work through it, Elstad said. Its now half the size it was before, and its much better.

While his work might have some parallels to the Tea Party movement, with conservatives lingering distrust of the federal government, Elstad said he did not intend the book as an overt political statement.

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Book imagines a future Civil War

Clay Dean spends his days imagining the future. You might soon be driving what he dreams.

As executive director of General Motors' advanced global design department, he is currently envisioning the roads of 2040, and what he sees is very different from today.

We are on the verge, he says, of a renaissance, an era in which car design will change the look of our roads, the way we commute to work, how much stress we endure throughout the day, even our impact on the planet.

"Today, it is all possible," says Dean, who sees Walt Disneys vision of futurism as a model. "It is an exciting time to be a designer."

This month marks 85 years since GM became the first automaker to create a department devoted entirely to body design. That department now finds itself at a crossroads: as GM, the worlds biggest automaker, and other major American manufacturers seek to regain the country's confidence and engage younger buyers - and even expand their business to more distant, untapped markets - innovating at a pace beyond what most car companies are used to will be key.

GM hopes its history will be instructive. The company's first design chief, Hollywood coachbuilder Harley Earl, added colors beyond the then-standard black and is credited with the idea of the "concept car" - as in, a sexy, wild-looking design (albeit one that people may not actually be able to drive). By the time Earl retired in 1958, he had some truly progressive designs to his name, too, from the 1938 Buick Y-Job, with its hidden headlamps and electric windows, to the 1956 Firebird II, which included a guidance system that GM said would soon be integrated with the "highway of the future," enabling the car to drive itself.

This hasnt quite come to pass.

Even if automakers push through innovative new products, it's unclear if people will buy them. The most popular cars today aren't known for their radical styling. The Toyota Camry has been the best-selling car in the U.S. for every year since 1997 except one.

Nor is it certain the automakers will manufacture anything too out of the box. Take the Chevy Volt, the advanced hybrid battery-powered car that has won accolades and awards for its design, but almost didn't happen. It took the persistence of one top executive to convince the company's board that the idea made financial sense.

These are the kinds of challenges the Big Three U.S. automakers have struggled to meet for decades. The flying cars promised more than half a century ago remain far from dealers' lots, but with their companies' futures anything but certain, designers at GM, Ford and Chrysler now seem to feel a new urgency as they grapple with new material compositions, shifting transportation needs and, not least, the legacies of their predecessors, which loom large around them as they work to make Americans fall back in love with the automobile.

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Futuristic Car Design Is Already In the Works At The Detroit Automakers

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Lanvin Tops Summer 2013 Men’s Collections

MOVIE PREVIEW

Columbia TriStar Marketing Group Inc

Total Re-Recall

Topping off a summer of reboots, remakes, and reunions is Total Recall, a reimagining of the 1990 sci-fi thrilleritself loosely based on a short story by science fiction legend Philip K. Dick. The earlier film starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, an unsatisfied, late 21st-century construction worker in search of adventure. He gets a memory implant of a vacation to Marsonly to accidentally uncover his true past as a rebel-hunter on the Red Planet. The powers that be, whom he double-crossed, pursue him throughout this fast-moving, casually violent film (punctuated by Ahnolds trademark Austrian-accented one-liners). In the new film, Quaid (played by Colin Farrell) goes into the memory clinic for a dose of excitement and comes out realizing hes really a superspy. This time, Quaid is caught not between two planets but between Earths future superpowers, Euromerica and New Shanghai, and their agents: his once-devoted wife (Kate Beckinsale) and a rebel fighter (Jessica Biel). Rather than emulate the originals campy tone, Total Recall redux aims for sleek action sequences and stunning dystopian scenery. In theaters August 3. Valerie Ross

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Sci-fis #1 Muse Philip K. Dicks reality-warped stories have inspired a dozen films. As with Dicks writing, though, the quality varies widely.

HIGHS

Minority ReportGuided by psychics, a police unit stops murders before they happenbut then the forces captain (Tom Cruise) is fingered as a future killer. This dark film splices big-budget action with meditations on free will.

Blade Runner Harrison Ford stars as a bounty hunter charged with disposing of fugitive androids. The film is often credited as the first sci-fi neo-noir, where latter-day Sam Spades pilot flying cars.

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Hot Science: The Best New Science Culture | DISCOVER

Guitars have always been cool. The shape is as sexy as an hourglass figure and the sound has always felt dangerous.

But in the digital age, their futurism took second place to the synthesizer, an instrument that can literally sound like anything, so long as the knobs are turned right.

But Delicate Steve's performance at Visual Arts Collective June 29 was a reminder of why the guitar remains king.

The New Jersey band dropped instrumental shred-pop mastery by the score, including material from its debut album, Wondervisions, and its new release, Positive Force.

Despite the lack of lyrics, the band's songs rocked guitar leads with melodies so recognizable and catchy, Delicate Steve might well turn out to be The Ventures of the indie-rock era, if it puts out around a thousand more albums anyhow.

But as much as the melodies stood out, so did the tone. Though the beats were lagging and percussion heavy, many reminiscent of calypso, the guitars were bold and brassy, jacked up two octaves through a whammy pedal so every note screamed like it was straight from an '80s metal solo. Delicate Steve mixed in a few keyboards, especially on its signature track Wondervisions, a keyboard melody you may never excise from your head, but it put the guitars back in the spotlight, showing any doubters in the audience that there is absolutely no substitute.

The band may not carry itself with the 10-pound testicle swagger of the guitar hero, but it filled the audience with an urge to shred every bit as powerful as the finest of Iron Maiden or Steve Vai solos.

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Delicate Steve May be the Savior of the Guitar

Friday, June 29, 2012, by Rob Bear

Have a nomination for a jaw-dropping listing that would make a mighty fine House of the Day? Get thee to the tipline and send us your suggestions. We'd love to see what you've got.

Location: Glenbrook, Nev. Price: $24,995,000 The Skinny: Named Wavoka after "mid 19th century Northern Paiute mystic who pronounced a life of harmony, peace, and truth," this waterfront mansion on Lake Tahoe looks more like an alien spaceship than a house and boasts a price to match at almost $25M. Built in 2001 to designs by architect Theodore Brown, the five-bedroom, seven-bath spread measures 9,200 square feet and features a waterfront boathouse, swimming pool, and an angular design that mixes Frank Lloyd Wright and futurism. The house was commissioned by the late casino executive William Ledbetter, who managed the Harveys Lake Tahoe hotel for many years and whose love for Native American culture was reflected in his home. Set on 2.73 waterfront acres, Wavoka, with its private beach and views of the lake and Sierra Nevada mountains, is one of the area's most unique estates. 1192 US Highway 50 [Zillow]

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House of the Day: A Mystical Mansion/Alien Ship on the Shores of Lake Tahoe

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Anthony J. Wiener, Forecaster of the Future, Is Dead at 81

Following their success scripting rebellious simians, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have been asked to do the same for angry dinosaurs.

To the surprise of most people, last years Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes was both a critical and financial success. Objectively speaking, it was a solid sci-fi/action movie and while most will be quick to attribute that success to James Francos hipper-than-thou charisma, a lot of the credit has to go to the people who crafted a taut, engaging script for a movie that is, in the end, all about pissed off monkeys. Those people would be Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, and as of this morning the duo has been handed the script writing duties on Universal Pictures upcoming Jurassic Park 4.

Deadline reports:

While Universal Pictures has been trying all summer to generate new franchises, the studio is getting moving with the fourth installment of its biggest one,Jurassic Park. Universal is setting Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver to write the script for thefourth film, which will be produced by Steven Spielberg and Kennedy/Marshalls Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall.

While Spielberg will be producing this flick, Deadline points out that he will not be seated in the directors chair. So far no name has been positively identified as the future director of Jurassic Park 4, but regardless, the lack of a direct Spielbergian touch worries us. Remember the first Jurassic Park? Awesome movie, right? Spielberg directed that one. Likewise, Spielberg helmed the not-quite-as-good-but-still-pretty-solid The Lost World: Jurassic Park. However, when it came time to film Jurassic Park III, directorial duties were handed off to Joe Johnston. While we enjoyed Johnstons Captain America and still think that The Rocketeer is a modern classic, the man is no Spielberg and the third Jurassic Park movie suffered for it. Consider us fretting constantly until the production company finally announces a director for this movie (and then, most likely, consider us fretting a bit more).

All of that aside though, news that Jaffa and Silver have been hired to write the film should be seen as a positive. We have no idea what direction the script is going to head in (save for the obvious fact that it will include dinosaurs), but this writing duo seems up to the task of creating a story that seamlessly blends futurism, action and huge lizards. If nothing else, it should be far more simple to make a compelling villain out of a Tyrannosaurus than it was to do the same for a bipedal ape with delusions of grandeur.

Now lets all keep our fingers crossed that Jaffa and Silver can retain the films rumored government-fundeddinosaur super soldier black ops strike teams. Call it silly if you want, but raptors taking out terrorists with modified submachine guns sounds totally awesome. Thats what people in the business call a license to print money.

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Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes scribes tapped for Jurassic Park 4

The genre of head movies those films that seem destined to be screened at midnight with an audience of people who may or may not be entirely sober has had fewer and fewer entries in our blockbuster film culture. Panos Cosmatos Beyond the Black Rainbow is one of the more recent entries, and its definitely got something.

In 1983, Dr. Barry Nyle (Rogers), is an evil scientist who works at the Arboria Institute, where he keeps a girl (Allan) captive for research purposes. She seems to have powers that are connected to a diamond light, she doesnt talk, and his research mostly involves testing her powers from a distance. She eventually escapes, but to where?

Beautifully shot and well put together, this is the sort of first film that shows a lot of promise, but also one that doesnt necessarily deliver much more than tone. If you can, if you have interest, see it on the biggest screen possible at the maximum volume.

Beyond the Black Rainbow opens today in Los Angeles, and has been playing in New York for a while. It will be playing many of the major cities throughout the summer, see a full list here.

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Beyond the Black Rainbow: Movie Review

Tuesday, June 19, 2012, by Sarah Firshein

Illustration by Grant Snider

Fresh from Colorado-based cartoonist (and, incidentally, orthodontics student) Grant Snider (you've seen him before): an illustration that pairs architectural history with various styles of dance. Architizer's Samuel Medina waxes philosophical after examining the piece in depth:

Anyway, see the rest of the piece below.

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Cartoon Land: "Expressionist Skanking": When Architecture Meets Dance

Zachary Hawari graduated as valedictorian of his class at The Texas Academy of Leadership in the Humanities.

Hawari completed two years of university course work at Lamar University as a part of the program. In doing so, he received Lamar University's President Award with a perfect 4.0 for all four semesters.

He also received the President's Award for Educational Excellence, Futurism Leadership Award, and the Arts and Sciences Academic Excellence Award.

The Leadership Academy is a high school program in which students attend Lamar University and live on campus. Their college classes count towards their high school requirements and as participants take their freshman and sophomore years of college they are simultaneously finishing their junior and senior years of high school. It is one of only two residential programs for gifted and talented high school-aged students recognized by the Texas State Legislature.

Hawari has been accepted into The Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington D.C. He was offered the President's Scholarship Award for attendance at GWU. He will begin this fall.

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Zachary Hawari is valedictorian of his Leadership Academy class at Lamar

Unrelenting winter nights and endless summer days. Temperatures that can plummet to 120 below or more. Snow, ice, and rock. There are few environments on earth more hostile than the frozen Antarctic wastelands. But even with winds of up to nearly 200 mph, it's not impossible for people to survive in the coldest place on ...

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Extreme-Climate Homes

NEW YORK, NY.- Jack Hanley Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Megan Whitmarsh. Using hand-stitching and embroidery, Whitmarsh renders sculptural and painted objects that evoke popular culture as well as abstract and gestural painting. The result, a giant fabric collage of personal and cultural ephemera, reckons both past and present imagery in a rueful Pop art.

The word revolution to the cultural mind may signify a permanent change to existing conditions, but the literal meaning is to rotate back to a point of departure. Something can be transformed, but not eliminated entirely - a rule of thumb. To Whitmarsh, this reading provokes a needed multiplicity and contrast. By faithfully recreating and re-interpreting familiar objects and forms from the 70s to today, her work acknowledges and projects the shifts in our collective material history.

Megan Whitmarsh lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the University of New Orleans, and her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. In addition to her detailed hand embroidery, she works in a variety of low-tech media, including stop-action animation, soft sculpture, self-published comic books, painting and drawing. She has shown internationally in locations such as New York, Seoul, Los Angeles, Reykjavik, Toronto, Miami, Brussels & Barcelona.

Artist's Statement I will create a layered, textile-based installation of recursive artworks launched from recognizable cultural iconography (e.g., Joni Mitchell, science fiction, New Wave, the Muppets, New Age); resulting in a rueful sort of Pop art that explores the oscillation between mass culture and subjective narrative.

I consider art a practice of transformation. We cannot expect to make new energy; instead we must reinvent, recycle, and transform what exists already. Making art is my attempt to synthesize my optimistic vision of the future with my pragmatic appraisal of the world I inhabit.

I am a child of the 70s whose sense of futurism is informed by Star Wars (fucked-up dusty robots) instead of Tomorrow Land. A future with entropy and drug use and weeds growing in the cracks between the scratched plexiglass windows of the geodesic domes. Bits of yarn and dusty houseplants. If this sounds bleak, I don't mean for it to. Perhaps the healthiest kind of futurism is one that admits entropy and flux. Perfection is suspicious; worn and dusty can mean well-loved, too. Who loves the Stepford Wife?

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Megan Whitmarsh's rendered sculptural and painted objects on view at Jack Hanley Gallery

VENICE.- Opening June 9 (through September 16, 2012), the exhibition Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the 4th Dimension. Jean Metzingers At the Cycle-Race Track focuses on a painting acquired by Peggy Guggenheim in 1945 and now permanently on view in her museum in Venice. Exactly one hundred year years after At the Cycle-Race-Track (1912) was painted, the exhibition reveals how Jean Metzinger (1883 -1956) adapted the avant-garde pictorial language of Cubism to subject matter combining the popular sport of cycle-racing with attempts to depict speed and to define in paint the fourth dimensionalluded to in the number 4 in the stadium grandstand. Metzinger, though less celebrated today than contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, figured prominently among the Cubists that exhibited together in Salle 41 of the 1911 Salon des Indpendants in Paristhe event at which the Cubist movement crystallized in the perception of Parisian art and art critical circles. At the Cycle-Race Track is by an artist who is central to our understanding of Cubism, one of the most original pictorial styles in twentieth century art. Together with Albert Gleizes, Metzinger published Du Cubisme (1912), the first book-length account of the aims and methods of Cubism.

At the Cycle-Race Track illustrates the final yards of the Paris-Roubaix race, and portrays its winner in 1912, Charles Crupelandt. The Paris-Roubaix has earned several nicknames: Hell of the North, owing to the extreme hardship of cycling over the cobbled pav roads of northern France, Queen of the Classics, the Easter Race. Metzingers painting was the first in Modernist art to represent a specific sporting event and its champion. He folded into the image his concepts of multiple perspective, simultaneity, and time, according to his belief that the fourth dimension was crucial to a new art that could compete with the classical French tradition of Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Metzinger belonged to a group of intellectuals and artists, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Albert Gleizes and Frantiek Kupka, that frequented the household of the Duchamp brothers, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, in Puteaux, a suburb of Paris, and who, inspired by their admiration for Maurice Princet, known as the the mathematician of the Cubists, discussed such matters as non-Euclidean geometry, theoretical mathematics, the golden section and non-visible dimensions. The combination of a sporting subject chronicling a new passion in French popular culture and an ambitious intellectual and visual apparatus central to the nascent Cubist movement qualifies Metzingers At the Cycle-Race Track as a masterpiece.

This exhibition is inspired by and curated by Erasmus Weddigen, who first discovered the identity of the cyclist in At the Cycle-Race Track and its precise date. It will include two further paintings of racing cyclists by Metzinger, and a third, recently rediscovered painting, treating the subject of time and the fourth dimension, and signifying the end of Metzingers research into the dynamics of movement. These works will be exhibited together to the public for the first time. Images of cyclists by Italian FuturistsUmberto Boccioni, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini and Mario Sironiwill also be displayed. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) by Boccioni and works by Marcel Duchamp will further reference the elasticity of space. Paintings by Georges Braque and Louis Marcoussis will illustrate the presence of sand as the volumetric third dimension in art.

The exhibition documents the passion, then and now, for cycle racing, and for the Paris-Roubaix race in particular, with early and modern bicycles loaned by the collection of Ivan Bonduelle, a long-term loan to Muse Rgional du Vlo La Belle Echappe, La Fresnaye-sur-Chdouet, Museo del Ciclismo Madonna del Ghisallo, and designer Marco Mainardi of Studio Dimensione Servizi. In addition, the racing cycle of Fabian Cancellara, winner of the Paris-Roubaix race in 2006 and 2010, is loaned by the RADIOSHACK NISSAN TREK. The theoretical and sporting themes of the show come together in the exhibition of a stationary bicycle, to be used by the audience, designed to illustrate theories of space and time formulated by Albert Einstein, loaned by the University of Tbingen, Germany.

Paul Wiedmer (b. 1947), a Swiss artist living and working in Lazio and Burgdorf, Switzerland, has created a new sculpture for this exhibition. It will be on view in the Nasher Sculpture Garden. Titled Cyclosna this work deals with concepts such as the eternity of time and the connection between the past, the present and the future. It will reference other works on display and allude to the philosophical nature of cycle-races.

Erasmus Weddigen is an independent art historian and restorer. From 1970 to 1986 he was Head Conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern. Since 1997, with his wife Sonya Weddigen-Schmid, he has operated the Saveart conservation studio in Bern.

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Cycling, Cubo-Futurism and the 4th Dimension. Jean Metzinger's work at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Classical fans line up outside St. James Cathedral for a Rush Hour Concerts gig.

Summer is officially in full swing, and what better way to celebrate the warm weather than by getting out in the city? TOC has 14 free events lined up, so you can experience all Chicago has to offer this season without going broke. Enjoy!

Saturday 16

Planet Earth Performance 10pm, Late Bar With a track record stretching back to 1994, Dave Roberts's Planet Earth night is a Chicago staple. His new wave selections have taken him from Club Foot to Exit to Neo. It's now found a permanent home here.

Sunday 17

"Bang!" with DJ Terry Hunter 10pm, The Shrine Rising out of the South Side in the early 90s, DJ Terry Hunter has been synonymous with Chicago house ever since. The past few years have seen a lot of action between him and Masters at Works Kenny Dope, but at this Sunday residency, its all Hunter.

Monday 18

Show Tunes Night8pm-2am, Sidetrack BarGet showered in napkins, scream at Madonna's Eva Peron or just whistle along to Wicked at this culty, reverent and usually bustling Broadway tribute night.

Chances Dances 9pm, SubterraneanAccept no substitutes. This mega-inclusive party kicked off a renaissance in indie queer nightlife and is still thriving more than five years later. Always free, always fun.

Tuesday 19

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14 free events | June 16-22

· That was a pretty good Stanley Cup parade yesterday [LADN] · Previewing Oyler Wu's big "Screenplay" installation for Dwell on Design [A/N] · SoCal's Googie architecture and its futurism (and The Jetsons) [Paleofuture] · Nixon's ninety-ninth to be...

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Morning Linkage: Nixon's Ninety-Ninth in the OC, SoCal Googie and the Future

The US Federal Government is teaming with almost 100 partners to improve America's broadband Internet with "US Ignite," a new program that seeks to make it cheaper and easier for broadband construction in the USA - as well as the creation of apps and services to take advantage of that new Internet.

The future of broadband Internet in America is about to catch fire. Announcing a new initiative entitled US Ignite, President Obama today signed an executive order to lower broadband costs and increase the speed of broadband network installation through federal property while also taking the lead in a new partnership that aims to create a new wave of service that take advantage of state-of-the-art, programmable broadband networks running up to 100 times faster than todays Internet.

The partnership, also called US Ignite, describes itself as an initiative to promote US leadership in developing applications and services for ultra-fast broadband and software-defined networks by foster[ing] the creation of novel applications and digital experiences that will transform healthcare, education and job skills training, public safety, energy, and advanced manufacturing. So far, so election year promises, right? But, according to Ignite Executive Director Sue Spradley, its more than just empty sloganeering and suitably vague futurism.

Today, in Cleveland, Ohio there are families receiving medical care to which they wouldnt otherwise have access through advanced telemedicine built on a new and flexible ultra-fast network. In Chattanooga, Tenn., a dozen new startups are building new applications for everything from improved transportation to disaster response to a smart energy-grid by taking advantage of the citys gigabit-to-the-home fiber optic network, Spradley is quoted as saying in the press release announcing the partnership. The future of technology as many think about it, is possible today. And through US Ignite, well be helping to deploy advanced applications for Americans everywhere.

Ignite already has almost 100 partners, ranging from 60 national research universities to 25 cities across America, as well as big name companies like Comcast, Cisco and HP. Also onboard is Mozilla, which has launched its own Mozilla Ignite site, a collaboration with the National Science Foundation thatll issue up to $500,000 in grant money to third party developers looking to devise and develop innovative apps in one of five areas (Advanced manufacturing, clean energy and transportation, eduction and workforce technologies, healthcare, and public safety).

Of course, this development would be moot if people didnt have the Internet access to take advantage of it, which is where todays executive order comes in. The order will make broadband construction up to 90 percent cheaper along Federal roadways and property, as well as push those agencies managing said properties the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Interior, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs as well as the US Postal Service to offer broadband carriers a single approach across the board to leasing assets to facilitate broadband deployment. By connecting every corner of our country to the digital age, we can help our businesses become more competitive, our students become more informed and our citizens become more engaged, President Obama is quoted as saying in a White House statement.

Will a faster, better Internet make America a faster, better country? Or will we all just find that its even easier to lose hours in front of Netflix?

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White House, federal agencies and US industries team for ‘US Ignite’ program

I Burn Paris, a novel by the Polish Futurist and communist Bruno Jasieski (1901-38), is a strange, fascinating and at times rambling adventure in which the reader is asked not so much to suspend her disbelief as to hang it from the nearest electrical wire and watch the sparks fly.

Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski's translation is the first time I Burn Paris has been brought into English and it thus fills a void for scholars and lovers of Polish literature and Futurism; this is a significant work from one of the movement's most outspoken and tragic characters.

The novel is kaleidoscopic, following a handful of protagonists in Paris as the city's water supply is poisoned with a highly contagious virus that kills almost everyone in its wake. Chaos ensues, after which several factions split Paris between the Anglo-Americans, the Soviets, the Asians and several other ethnic groups, all of whom are antagonistic toward each other and even more so as the food supply begins to run out.

But this spine of a narrative is just that, a point of focus around which this novel turns, spinning in several directions at once and often going off on long tangents in which new characters are introduced and old ones forgotten. In the end, however, I Burn Paris coalesces into a fantastical vision of a post-apocalyptic world in which Jasieski's ideologies of choice rise to power.

I Burn Paris By Bruno Jasieski Translated by Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski Twisted Spoon Press 309 pages

In proper Futurist fashion, Jasieski's writing style takes no prisoners. There is a constant forward momentum in the novel, a constant energy that bubbles to the surface even as the story meanders in seemingly tangential directions. His use of similes, surely the most pyrotechnic of a writer's tools, puts an uncanny spin on quotidian urban events, even as they endow these events with neon vividness.

Describing a windy day, Jasieski writes: "A violent northwest wind blew in Lyon that day, and shredded scraps of fog flapped like wet underwear on invisible clotheslines. Wind-tossed hats flapped in the air like heavy birds, and headless pedestrians hopped strangely after them like rubber balls."

In most writers' hands, such a faith in the ability of metaphor and simile to lift an everyday event out of the realm of the simply everyday could quickly turn cloying, but Jasieski uses his similes more like firecrackers in this discursive novel that feels longer than it actually is, in part because so much of what happens is completely unexpected.

Yet despite Jasieski's uncanny eye for the odd detail, he also captures some of the bare facts of urban life with a startling energy and imagination. As a Futurist, Jasieski was concerned - not to say obsessed - with technology and modernity. Appropriately, then, his description of something as inconsequential as typists working at their machines turns into a paean to technology.

"The electricity burned bright in the print rooms of the workers' daily; the linotypes clattered and the tar-covered typesetters galloped the equine fingers of their calloused hands across the tiny cobblestones of the keys like strange virtuosi. The levers and scatterbrained letters now leapt up, now dropped, like soldiers instantly falling into line. The fingers flashed once more across the steps of the keyboard. Again, one after another, the letters climbed like acrobats along the lines, along the scaffolding of the levers, and moments later plunged headfirst into the bubbling pool ..."

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Book Review: I Burn Paris

Turbulent times on global sharemarkets look set to continue, but there is light ahead, writes Matthew Kidman.

The most common question I get asked is how the world will pan out once we get through the current mess? Futurism is a dubious occupation but a task we all like to dabble in. When it comes to sharemarkets the best approach is to go region-by-region identifying the key dynamics.

The United States is still the largest and most critical global sharemarket. There can be no new bull market without America leading the charge and I am confident it will find its feet again and retain world leadership.

In the short term the US is in for a rocky ride, dealing with the looming $750 billion reduction in government stimulus. Coined the ''fiscal cliff,'' this involves the end to a series of tax breaks and the start of savage spending cuts, which are due to kick in early next year. Economists forecast this could deduct a staggering 3 per cent to 5 per cent off economic growth. Avoiding this would seem difficult given the political divide and the approaching presidential election. If nothing is resolved by August this could get hairy and trigger another wave of selling on the sharemarket. No doubt the Federal Reserve and its captain, Ben Bernanke, will be ready to counter with more cash manufacturing, all making for a bumpy ride until December.

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Beyond 2012 it is easier to build a more bullish case for the US. The housing crash from 2006 to 2009 threw the world into a tailspin and there is little hope for a sustained recovery without housing playing a central role. Despite the lowest interest rates in history the residential construction industry can't get out of the basement. Housing starts continue to languish at about half traditional levels of more than 1 million a year, leaving US consumers, the engine of world growth, spluttering. At some stage over the next two years the backlog of homes from the great overbuild will disappear, jump-starting residential activity and firing up consumption. The lack of construction jobs since 2008 is almost singularly responsible for the present high unemployment.

US politicians are not willing to attack government debt. Therefore the only way out is via a dramatic step-up in economic growth on a re-invigorated housing industry. This, coupled with high productivity, cheaper energy prices and a growing and relatively young population will get the US back on track. It must be made clear that endless stimulus packages from the government and Federal Reserve are not the answer.

By contrast, Europe has no hope. Putting aside the debt calamity, the continent is sinking to a second-tier economic zone. Europe is the equivalent of a 70-year-old retired person deciding to take out the biggest mortgage of her life. There is no chance of paying it back. The entire continent, particularly the southern rim, has negligible productivity growth, no population growth and an ageing population.

If the debt crisis is adequately dealt with, Europe could easily provide the catalyst for a jump in global equity markets; however, this will not be sustainable and a never-ending recession will take hold, not unlike Japan.

China is a completely different story. Talk of a hard or soft landing is ridiculous given the country is going to grow at an astonishing rate of between 6 and 8 per cent over the next 12 months.

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Bulls will prevail - all in good time