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My Articles, March 9-15

We read him first (Flashlight)

Now David Marusek is getting attention in even more highbrow places. In November, right before his debut novel, Counting Heads, hit shelves, Marusek, a science fiction author who lives in a dry cabin in Fairbanks and spends his time thinking about the future, was profiled in the Press (This Alaskan Life: “Everyday science fiction,” November 3, 2005).

On March 5, The New York Times Book Review kicked off a new science fiction column by pouring praise over Counting Heads, which columnist Dave Itzkoff called “one of my favorite books of last year in any category, and an exemplary entry in the sci-fi genre.”

Marusek said this week that the Times review has prompted “a nice bump” in his book sales, as well as an increase in interest from Hollywood producers. Itzkoff wrote that Marusek's 10 published short stories are “as concentrated and potent as a dwarf star.” Marusek said he hopes the compliment might convince his publishers to collect those stories, which are out of print.

- Brandon Seifert

Nothing on the radar
Pioneering turntablist DJ Radar spun vinyl... and nobody came. Fire dancers from Seattle spun flaming poi, a traditional Maori dance prop... and nobody came.

Just a few dozen people turned up at The Blue Loon on Friday, March, 10 - probably because most of Fairbanks seemed to be packed into The Marlin, where local punk band Junk Show was giving away tickets to Mexico. The Loon's Quonset hut felt like a cavern.

What do you do when you're a DJ, and there's nobody to DJ for? You play the music you want to hear. “You've got to work with what you have,” Radar said. “That's what DJing is about is adapting.” Mostly Radar just seemed happy to be in Fairbanks for the fourth time.

“I'm trying to showcase the turntable as a modern day instrument,” Radar said. He explained some of the different ways he's gone about it: creating musical notation for scratching, writing the world's first Concerto for Turntable and performing it with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall, teaching Turntablism 1 at a community college in his native Arizona, and building songs out of the sound of scratching without using any pre-recorded music.

Ask him what kind of music he spins, and he answers “everything.” At one point in the night, Radar juxtaposed The Jackson 5 and Jurassic 5.

“Electronic music, it's really separated by tempos,” Radar said. “So me, I don't see it as this genre or that genre, I see it as tempos.”

- Brandon Seifert