“Size of Your Life,” a song about surviving and the great possibilities of life has special meaning for me, going back to the difficult months after my daughters were born. This rendition of it is especially good.

Kadrey spends a great deal of time building up Stark’s world and supporting cast — his years as an arena champion in hell, his treacherous old friends, an aging French alchemist mentor, a mysterious magical doctor, a beautiful and monstrous woman and a young female sidekick. Sandman Slim is clearly meant to be the springboard for a longer series — it is hardly a self-contained novel, and the ending very much opens up plot threads for future volumes.

Despite the fact that many of the ideas in the book have been used before, only a few things stand out to me as a bit weak. First, the name “Sandman Slim.” It is introduced rather late in the book, and it seems to come straight out of nowhere. The fact that the two words together don’t mean a thing (is he a skinny Sandman?), and aren’t sufficiently explained, took me out of the novel every time they were used. Not only that, but every time someone calls Stark “Sandman,” I can’t help but think of the Neil Gaiman series of the same name.

Another issue for me is one group of antagonists, the Kissi, who are a third faction in the usual Heaven versus Hell conflict. They are not sufficiently defined compared to the other species in the book and seem to be just a vague variation on classic demons (but they’re not demons … they’re Kissi!). Even the name seems a bit silly.

That said, Sandman Slim is still in many ways superior to similar urban fantasy series — in particular the Dresden Files — due to Kadrey’s writing and Stark’s hardboiled narration. Good writing can elevate otherwise average material, and that’s true here. This isn’t a series that will change the world, but it is certainly enjoyable for what it is. If you’re a fan of series like Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries where entertainment and not an overarching narrative is key, then you’ll probably enjoy Sandman Slim.

Lillyhammer is Netflix’s first experiment in original content, and it’s a good first attempt. It features Steven “Little Steven” Van Zant of The Sopranos and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band as a New York mobster named Frank “The Fixer” Tagliano who agrees to testify against a rival mobster in exchange for witness protection relocation to Lillehammer, Norway, a town Tagliano has been infatuated with since the 1994 Winter Olympics. This all occurs within the first five minutes of the show — from there, we head straight to Lillehammer, Norway, and Frank’s new life as “Giovanni ‘Johnny’ Henrikson” (his mother was Italian, his father, Norwegian).

Much of the show centers around the culture clash between Johnny and his new neighbors as he settles into his new life. As a mobster, it doesn’t take Johnny long to fall back into old patterns of lawlessness, but it’s not as if he’s becoming Lillyhammer‘s crime boss — Johnny is largely retired from crime, and most of his shady activity is the result of his frustration with the Norwegian bureaucracy. I think it’s safe to say that the show is largely intended for a Norwegian audience — many of the jokes are specific to the culture in Norway, and an American unversed in the ways of Norway, Scandinavia or Northern Europe, may find themselves missing out on some of the best bits. Still, I think most Americans will laugh at the complicated Norwegian bureaucracy, the vanity of rural bureaucrats, not to mention the ridiculousness of the Norwegian prison system (Johnny spends 48 hours in “the can” in episode six of the series, and finds a an environment that is surprisingly friendly and pleasant).

The show is in Norwegian, subtitled in English, with the exception of Johnny, who exclusively speaks English. The tone of the show veers towards comedy with some occasional dark turns (the brutal death of a supporting cast member is a bit jarring and unfortunate) and in many ways is reminiscent of Showtime’s Weeds (not quite a full-on comedy, definitely not a drama). Overall, I’d say Lillyhammer is extremely enjoyable, although the eight episode run does feature some padding — they could have easily cut it down to six and had a much stronger series.

Calling it a Netflix original is a bit of a stretch — even with Van Zant as the lead, it’s obviously a foreign series that Netflix licensed for the domestic market. I’m sure Netflix’s money had some influence on the overall production, though ultimately it is the joint product of a Norwegian studio and a German television network (with Steven Van Zant as a producer and co-writer). Still, it’s good to see Netflix dipping its toe in original content — and if their upcoming originals are as good as Lillyhammer, they may begin to make a Netflix subscription a must-have for fans of good television. Lillyhammer may not give HBO a run for its money, but it’s easily on par with shows produced on Showtime and Starz. And that’s no small feat for a company that started business renting DVD’s by mail.

Dunham’s characters exist in a bubble of Tribeca privilege — they don’t have problems with money, there are no social issues to speak of, and the greatest tragedy is the death of a pet hamster. They are quite literally the “Urban Liberal Elites” that the Republicans rail against. But beneath the veneer of privilege you find sad, miserable people who are very dissatisfied with their lives — as if the lack of conflict and the very low stakes in which they exist leave them unmoored from life itself.

Aura, the film’s protagonist, finds herself adrift in Manhattan — college is over, and yet she doesn’t know what to do next. She spends the summer pining for two men — one, a “YouTube star” who has taken residence in her mother’s loft but shows no romantic interest in Aura, and the second, Keith, a chef in the hip restaurant where Aura takes a job as a hostess. Both men abuse and take advantage of Aura in different ways, but the end result of both relationships is Aura blaming herself for their selfishness.

Meanwhile, Aura deals with the dysfunctional relationships she has with her mother, a famous artist, and her genius sister, who wins a major poetry award without trying. An old friend from high school, Charlotte (who may or may not be British, but has a British accent), provides Aura with companionship and bad advice, and another friend, Frankie, a new friend from college, is seen mostly from afar via telephone calls. But the two operate as counterpoints to one another — one, an affluent young woman who lives a life of leisure and wants for nothing, and the other, a driven middle class girl with career ambitions — and represent the two choices Aura has. The friend she sides with isn’t particularly surprising, but it does help underscore the point of Tiny Furniture.

That ultimately, life is ugly and unsentimental — that people make bad decisions and live to regret them. And despite their desire to fix things, they keep making the wrong choices. I may not have enjoyed Tiny Furniture as much as the marketing suggested I would, but I did appreciate its honesty and integrity — both in its unflinching portrayal of the life of a young woman and its refusal to bow to Hollywood standards for coming of age stories. In Tiny Furniture, people don’t come of age, they just get older. And the ticking clock of time provides no pat closure or life lessons, only the knowledge that old age is coming, and even if you manage to get things together, you may still fail to find happiness and understanding. But you may learn to live with it.

Although the film was meant to evoke Woody Allen or the early work of Nora Ephron, I’m also reminded of similar films of unsentimental youth, including an obscure indie film featuring Lauren Ambrose called Swimming, the claustrophobic personal films of John Cassavetes, and the starkly cynical 1970′s BBS films, especially Five Easy Pieces.

The film was shot on HD originally, and Criterion provides a flawless transfer. Despite the pristine, yet cold cinematography, I found the film to lack the artificiality of other films shot straight to a digital format. Mostly this is due to unvarnished bodies of the actors, who look and act like real people, zits and all.

The extras include four of Dunham’s short films, her first full-length feature, Creative Nonfiction (which is only an hour), an interview with Dunham conducted by Nora Ephron, and a rousing defense of Tiny Furniture by legendary writer and filmmaker Paul Schrader, who quite surprisingly is well-versed in the mumblecore genre where Tiny Furniture ultimately has its roots, as well as the criticisms leveled against both Dunham and the film. This edition continues Criterion’s excellent documentation of the work of young independent female directors that began with the excellent British film, The Fish Tank.

The Operators is a book-length version of the Rolling Stone article, covering the first few years of the Obama administration’s efforts in Afghanistan. And those looking for a hero in the story are going to have a hard time finding one. Even Hastings, the narrator and ostensible protagonist, isn’t particularly likable.

The war Hastings describes is one dominated by political infighting, with various factions hidden away inside their own insulated bubbles, incapable of recognizing the truth, or refusing to admit the truth when it conflicts with ideology. The Obama administration comes off as weak and ineffective, the Afghan government as corrupt and impossibly incompetent, and the American military as an isolated culture more concerned by its own inner workings and politics than whether or not it can achieve actual “success” in a country as thoroughly broken as Afghanistan (or even what “success” might mean). The media gets the worst of the criticism though, compromising its professional integrity in exchange for access to the people in power. The only people presented at all sympathetically are the individual American soldiers and infantry units who face the true reality on the ground every day.

It’s hard to come away from The Operators feeling like there’s any hope — not just for America in Afghanistan, but for our ability to accomplish anything substantial on a large scale. The dysfunction in America seems baked into our DNA, with political polarization and personal ambition overriding any sense of the greater good. Granted, this is just one person’s view of the situation in Afghanistan, but given that no one is treated terribly well, it’s hard not to believe that The Operators may be close to the truth.

Although I haven’t read McHugh’s previous stories, I am familiar with her work as an ARG designer (most notably, the trailblazing “I Heart Bees” campaign for Halo 2), and I put a lot of faith in the tastes of Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, the editors and owners of Small Beer Press. That said, this collection is not so much an assemblage of complete stories as it is a compilation of (mostly) interesting premises. Once the high concept of each story is revealed, the rhythms of plot and character have a hard time finding satisfying resolutions. The stories end, but lack the emotional punch or character insights that make the form so effective.

Still, one doesn’t read a small press book expecting a masterpiece (although Kelly Link’s own collections are by and large pretty perfect) — the small press offers an outlet for writers who are more experimental or unconventional, which are two areas where After the Apocalypse succeeds. Although McHugh has a great stock of ideas and clear skill with words, she needs to work more on the mechanics of telling a complete story. An ARG is all about the high concept, but a short story needs more. It needs to matter.

Seriously, get a grip.

The art house video store and independent book shop might have been bastions of culture for people in the big metropolitan areas of the country, but to me, as a kid growing up in rural Maryland, I didn’t have access to any of that. Independent video stores, which is all we had for many years, stocked the hits, but they also stocked scores of low-rent b-horror movies and pornography. If you were looking for art house films, or a lesson in the French New Wave, you wouldn’t have bothered to ask Cletus behind the counter — he wouldn’t have known what the hell you were talking about.

Similarly, we had two book stores in town — Waldenbooks and Coles. Essentially mirror images of each other, they sat at opposite ends of the mall, and stocked best sellers, romance novels, a smattering of science fiction, magazines and a spinner rack of superhero comics. These were not stores that stocked Pulitzer prize winners, much less Brett Easton Ellis. And if you ventured downtown to the used book store located across the street from the public library, you would find a place full of aging best sellers (mostly of the supermarket variety) and romance novels, which it conveniently sold by the pound.

And if you loved music, then you had several choices around town — Waxie Maxies, Camelot (both at the mall), and Kix, an indpendent store. Each sold a wide variety of top forty records, although Camelot did have a respectable “Alternative” section which carried bands like the Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, The Circle Jerks, the Misfits and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Ironically, the independent Kix was the least likely to stock indies, whereas Camelot had a respectable selection (for western Maryland).

And this is the way it was for many years until Borders came to town and brought a wider selection of books and music. By then, though, I had moved out to Washington, D.C., where a much more eclectic group of stores was at my fingertips. However, I think it bears noting that after the closing of Go! Compact Discs in Arlington, VA in the mid-1990′s, most indie records had to be procured through mail order services and catalogs, or by sending carefully concealed cash to record labels advertising in ‘zines like Punk Planet and Maximum Rock’n Roll. Going to the beloved Silver Spring store Vinyl Ink often resulted in disappointment — they rarely stocked the records I was looking for, whereas the late lamented Go! had everything I wanted. Of course, Go! went out of business.

Which brings me to my point here — the old order saw much of the country cut off from the flow of interesting art being produced in metropolitan centers. The only available music and books were produced for the lowest common denominator. “Cool” wasn’t just out of reach and inaccessible — it was completely unknowable. And Borders, for all its former greatness, had been run into the ground by people outside the book trade, a shadow of what it used to be.

Digital distribution is killing brick and mortar stores — not just devices like iPod, the iPad and Kindle, but also big online retailers like Amazon that carry just about everything. And this is a sad thing for the people worked for those stores and the business people who ran them, but is it a sad thing for consumers? Culture — art, music, books, film — is now available to everyone, regardless of where they reside in the country. It is no longer the sole domain of the coastal elites, but is available to everyone. Would a band like Arcade Fire have hit number one on Billboard before the advent of digital sales? Not a chance — no mall record store would have ever stocked them. But now everyone has as much access to Arcade Fire as they do to Lady Gaga. And that is a good thing.

With my iPad, or a low-cost Kindle, I can begin reading any book I want right now. It doesn’t require me going to a book store and hoping they have it in stock, hoping I stumble onto something, or hoping that a clerk will give me a good recommendation. I can research what people are thinking about it, and I can also contribute to the conversation. I think back to how I struggled to find contemporary literary fiction or obscure scifi titles at Waldenbooks — it’s all accessible. The same for film, television and music.

So instead of whining about how a few smug over-educated service workers have lost their jobs, we should really be talking about how technology has made access to culture a lot more egalitarian than it used to be. Good riddance to the old order, I say. Information and art for everyone.

Given my history with the genre, one would expect that Hannu Rajaniemi’s debut novel, The Quantum Thief, would leave me feeling much the same way, but this is not the case. The Quantum Thief, while presenting a radically alien post-human future described in an obtuse new vocabulary, has the one quality his peers lack — humanity. Yes, his characters are post-human, yes they exist as software iterations of themselves, and yes they are far removed from us, but despite their change in form, they are still driven by desires and ambitions and fear and love and all the things that make us human. In effect, by turning themselves into gods, the inhabitants of Rajaniemi’s novel have become like classic mythical gods — omnipotence crippled by human weakness and emotional frailties, their human foibles ever more present the less human they become.

And no character is more flawed than the novel’s protagonist, master thief Jean le Flambeur, broken out of a software prison by a female warrior named Mieli and set on a mission by a distant higher power to steal something of great value in the Oubilette, one of Mars’ moving cities. Le Flambeur has lived so many lives that he’s intentionally forgotten most of them, but reclaiming his Martian memories is one of the key points the novel hinges on. There are so many genres at work here, and so many excellent characters and co-protagonists (such as amateur detective and student art historian, Isidore, and his MMORPG-derived girlfriend, Pixil), that it’s difficult to keep track of them all.

And as dense and challenging as the material is, the climax of the book and the amazing ride and fractal puzzle that unfolds is worth all the heavy lifting. The book is surprising, clever and deeply felt — easily the best science fiction novel of 2011, and the final pages only point to more to come.

Nearly twenty years later, Criterion has released naked on Blu-Ray, for the first time giving me the chance to see the film as it was intended. I’m struck by the composition and stark cinematography — both of which hold up remarkably well, whereas many other films from the 1990′s do not. And although the film documents a very specific time at the turn of the century in economically-depressed post-Thatcher England, it is still very relavent today.

Naked centers around Johnny, a young man from Manchester fleeing the repercussions of an act of brutality that occurs within seconds of the film’s opening. He arrives in London, where he calls on his ex-girlfriend and her flatmate, developing a physical relationship with one as he longs for a romantic relationship with the other.

We then follow Johnny through the next forty-eight hours of his life, drifting through nighttime London and disrupting the lives of the various people he encounters until he inevitably returns to his ex-girlfriend’s flat. Johnny’s odyssey is at once satirical, tragic and so unflinchingly brutal that it becomes difficult to watch.

There is also a parallel storyline involving the owner of the flat, an affluent sociopath named Jeremy who is perhaps one step away from American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Both Johnny and Jeremy are brutal to the women they meet, but are fundamentally different. Although the consequences of their behavior on the women they encounter is the same, their motivations are diametrically opposed. Without Jeremy, it would be impossible for the audience to have any compassion for Johnny.

Much has been made of Naked’s misogyny, but I think it’s important to understand the distinction between documenting misogyny and condoning it. Naked doesn’t justify such behavior, but lays it bare for the audience to see. It may not be pleasant, but it’s a part of human life that should be examined and discussed.

The film is in the middle in terms of getting the “Criterion treatment” — besides offering up a solid HD transfer, it includes an interview with American director Neil Labute (In the Company of Men) about the film, who has also been charged with misogyny for his own cinematic studies of the dark side of masculinity, a thirty minute interview with Leigh recorded for the BBC, a commentary track featuring the director and some of the actors, and the original theatrical trailer (which makes Naked look like a relationship comedy). The extras all help to enlighten Leigh’s motivations for making the film, but lack the “film school in a box” quality of other Criterion releases.

If you’re coming to Naked as a fan of Leigh’s other films, particularly those centered around family dynamics, I think you should be aware that this film is very different from his other work. It dispenses with his usual ensembles and almost solely focuses on a single character. However, if you’re interesting into delving into the psyche of one angry and embittered young man and seeing how he effects the people around him, then Naked is definitely worth your time.

The book centers on Wade Watts, a trailer-dwelling teenager living in the bleak year of 2044, where the planet’s resources have been spent, unemployment is rampant, and basically the only meaningful life to be had is in an online game called OASIS, which has grown to encompass every imaginary universe ever created and the Internet, itself.

The OASIS was designed by a misfit genius named James Halliday — a Steve Jobsian figure complete his own estranged Steve Wozniakian partner — who dies and leaves ownership of the OASIS to the first person who can find an easter egg hidden within the simulation. When the novel opens, some years have passed since Halliday’s death, and no one — not even the well-funded and totally nefarious IOI corporation — have been able to locate the easter egg. That is, until Wade makes an unexpected discovery.

What follows is an adventure story steeped in 80′s nostalgia and references, most of which are pretty obvious to GenXers who grew up on the periphery of geek culture, but may seem obscure to the general population. The pop culture references and the hunt for the MacGuffin are just the shiny outer wrapper, though — Ready Player One‘s strongest elements involve explorations of online relationships and the effects of living your entire life in a digital world, two very important issues given how many people today choose to escape their own lives for the comfort offered by online games and communities.

Although Ready Player One doesn’t meet the incredible expectations and hype, it is both brisk and enjoyable. It’s well worth the time of science fiction fans, gamers and 80′s lovers, alike, just don’t expect it to change the way you look at the future like Neuromancer and Snow Crash did.