- Hurricane Sandy as the Fibonacci Spiral/Sequence:
- I wonder how close this is to the character from 2001…? Someone has decided to make a HAL9000 robot for purchase and — I’m assuming — mounting on your wall somewhere? You can preorder it for $500 right now. LINK.
- Then we got some what looks to be hockey jersey’s that are really fucking nerdy and awesome at GeekJerseys.com. This Link jersey is really, really fucking awesome:
DNA sequencing of 36 complete Y chromosomes has uncovered a previously unknown period when the human population expanded rapidly. This population explosion occurred 40 to 50 thousand years ago, between the first expansion of modern humans out of Africa 60 to 70 thousand years ago and the Neolithic expansions of people in several parts of the world starting 10 thousand years ago.
- Warren Ellis FAQ featuring some interesting writing questions. Such as:
I was wondering if you had any advice regarding making ideas more important. I have pages of different events + characters that I can only develop so far because, after a time, all I can add to them are “WHO CARES?” and “WHY DOES THIS MATTER?” (I’m talking about events characters will go through. “Statues come to life all around Greece” is immediately followed by “WHO GIVES A FUCK?”) Does this ever happen to you? Thank you very much for your time, and sorry if you’ve answered a similar question!Ungh. This is a really tough one. There are two ways, maybe, to attack this.
1) One way of doing it, and this works okay for standard dramatic storytelling, is this: what do your characters WANT? The secondary questions are, what stops them from getting what they want, and how far are they prepared to go to get what they want? But start with the simple first question. What your character wants defines how we perceive and feel about them in the story. Find one thing they want, and see how that feels to you.
2) From a certain view, stories are two things. There’s what the story’s about, and what the story’s REALLY about. Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS is about a Martian invasion of Earth. But it’s REALLY about something else entirely. There’s a subtext: there’s the thing Wells wrote the story toactually talk about. What you may be encountering is having a story that’s all surface, or a story with a subtext that isn’t working out for you. Find out what you really want to say with your fiction. If it matters to YOU, it’ll matter to other people.
1) When the frantic cavorting of the veritable legion of squirrel monkeys makes you immediately lose the capuchins, you may want to reflect on how their spritely bounding also distracted you from taking a solid bearing from the trail. And how you’re… at the river… wait…
2) It IS going to rain. Torrentially. Which means it’s also going to get VERY dark much earlier than anticipated (except, of course, by Shelly… *ahem*).
3) Once you realize that you’re lost, and you’re off trail, and you’re completely disoriented, and it is now completely black, and it seems like you keep crossing the same stream over and over again, and there’s that frakking stream again, you may then also notice that both of your flashlights are getting awfully dim…
- The newest Black Lantern release is just spectacular. Beautiful, wounded, haunting Electro from two guys from Kiev: together they are MR. MORSE. This is their debut album, it is called “Collapse”. Definitely worth checking out. This is the cover:
- Slightly frightening article about a counter-terrorism home-base of operations in Djibouti (which is in Africa).
Camp Lemonnier, a sun-baked Third World outpost established by the French Foreign Legion, began as a temporary staging ground for U.S. Marines looking for a foothold in the region a decade ago. Over the past two years, the U.S. military has clandestinely transformed it into the busiest Predator drone base outside the Afghan war zone, a model for fighting a new generation of terrorist groups.
The Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the legal and operational details of its targeted-killing program. Behind closed doors, painstaking debates precede each decision to place an individual in the cross hairs of the United States’ perpetual war against al-Qaeda and its allies. Increasingly, the orders to find, track or kill those people are delivered to Camp Lemonnier. Virtually the entire 500-acre camp is dedicated to counterterrorism, making it the only installation of its kind in the Pentagon’s global network of bases. Secrecy blankets most of the camp’s activities. The U.S. military rejected requests from The Washington Post to tour Lemonnier last month. Officials cited “operational security concerns,” although they have permitted journalists to visit in the past.
Much like this summer’s anticipated Cancer 4 Cure from El-P, the next step in P.O.S.’ discography is probably the most accessible release of his career. But (also, like El-P) he manages to accomplish this without sacrificing any of his personal and artistic flavors: the DIY aesthetic, the percussive tones, the clever but understated wordplay… it all remains. In fact, this might be the album that is most representative of him. Every little moment, hit, lyric, it all breathes P.O.S. That’s not to say he’s not breaking any new ground here. If you haven’t heard, this album is (mostly) Electro inspired; producers like Ryan Olson, Patric Russel, and even some German dudes have cooked up some tasty synths and E-progressions for a dance party behind an abandoned factory somewhere in the future. On some of the later tracks the combination of this new Electronic sound and the percussive drum hits I alluded to earlier is really where the album shines: carelessly treading new ground without reservation or fear of reprisal. In fact, it’s almost daring you to not like it and turn it off. The second half — with the exception of the catchy as hell “Get Down” featuring Mictlan; which feels like the first half — is ALL up this alley, specifically “All Of It” and “Piano Hits”. One of my biggest gripes in fact is that I would have liked to have heard more of these tracks drag on longer. With lyrics or instrumentally, particularly the last song, it would have been nice to hear these songs themselves explored a bit more the same way the initial sound was to begin with. But let me go back to the first half, like I said it’s catchier than shit. “Bumper” the opener is a charming knocker with live drums and possibly the catchiest synth on the disc. Following that “Fuck Your Stuff” and “Where We Land” are impossible not to sing along to, the latter featuring a very cool appearance from Justin Vernon. By the time a pair of head-nodders come around the corner, you’re ready to give your voice a break anyhow; and you do, letting appearances by Astronautalis and Sims shine. Then there’s a mid-point, almost devoid of drums of any kind (“Lock-Picks, Knives, Bricks, and Bats”)… before cruising through about 4 or 5 tracks like nothing that’s ever been done on a Hip-Hop album before. In this sense, the album is structured very cleverly. It brings you in with some amount of charm, then gives you a little break before delving into the weird shit. Lyrically the album tackles 21st Century alienation through freeing yourself from the system in which that alienation exists. “Want to be happy? Don’t even live within their system”. The title of the album sums it up pretty well. When it’s finishing up and he’s saying, “That misstep, that’s mine. That rough wake, that’s mine. This might be it. This might be it.”, you get the sense that if we lived in his world — totally free — he might still have tribulations and struggles and real problems, but at least they will be his and his alone.
- Wally Pfister — the regular cinematographer for Chris Nolan – is working on his directorial debut. Supposedly it’ll be some sort of plausible science fiction type deal, reportedly titled “Transcendence”. Johnny Depp will be playing the lead. Christopher Waltz will likely get a supporting role. Naomi Repace will likely be getting a supporting role. These are all good things. Oh, also at the link he’s ragging on the framing of many of the shots in Avengers. Which on its own is interesting to read about (coming from a cinematographer); I had noticed some of the crooked angles for no reason upon first viewing, not sure if that’s Whedon or his DP.
The Orionid meteor shower — one of the year’s most spectacular natural light shows — is upon us. This weekend, Earth will plow through a dense stream of celestial debris given off by Halley’s Comet. These fragments of Halley will collide with the planet’s atmosphere at speeds approaching 150,000 miles per hour, setting the night ablaze as they streak and explode across the pre-dawn skies of Saturday, October 20th and Sunday, October 21st.
- A few thoughts about the sexual harassment of the woman who dressed as Black Cat at NYCC. Her name is Mandy. She’s a 22 year old freelance designer (here’s her Etsy page) and more who lives in NYC. Reading about her experience at NYCC, from her own blog, is just a disgusting feeling. Especially as a man. To think that a large group of men didn’t think twice about the way they were behaving — or worse, some did but were too big of pussies to say anything about it — is just inexcusable. This isn’t 1952 anymore, and you can’t go around saying these types of things and behaving this type of way. Obviously. That being said, the comics community (fans and creators alike) are missing a massive opportunity to fix, or at least talk about, something that’s been plaguing mainstream books for sometime now: sexism. Mainstream comic books, mostly superhero ones, not only condone sexism, they thrive off it. Don’t believe me? Did you know THIS book exists? Go ahead and Google image search some pages. Not only in the pages but on the covers too, you will find poses that would make Sasha Grey blush. It’s really bad, and has gotten more and more out of hand the past 5 years or so. So I guess I wasn’t surprised when a bunch of adult-adolescents harassed this woman. Not one bit. They probably all read that things like Gotham City Sirens! And Black Cat is one of the characters who gets taken advantage of the most by artists. And I don’t mean making her “sexy”, there is a difference between sexy and gratuitous (go out to a bar on Halloween this year and you’ll know what I mean). Now, of course no one deserves to be sexually harassed when they dress up like Black Cat, or Emma Frost, or fucking Linda Lovelace. But what does it mean when women are dressing as Slave Leia? What kind of subconscious themes are at work amongst those seeing these beautiful women at Cons? Are we just simply feeding the machine to continue to keep female characters down? Will they ever rise from the box they’ve been put in?
- I’m realizing that there is a fundamental flaw with democracy: to get elected you need votes, to get votes you need to appease people now, to appease people now you need to focus on what ails society now. It’s instant gratification on a very large, sociopolitical scale. And right now more than ever before, we need to look at problems in the long term because what we face has plagued us since we’ve been the modern version of ourselves. Of course, no one’s gonna win with a platform of “We’ll be in a lot better shape by 2060!”.
- The Iron Man 3 trailer is up:
- I’m going as Walt from Breaking Bad for Halloween. Here’s a cool piece of Walter White fan art:
“The key is you don’t want to copy the blues; you want to capture the mood. On III, we knew we wanted to allude to the country blues but, in the tradition of the style, we felt it had to be spontaneous and immediate. I had this old Vox amp, and one day Robert plugged his mike into the amp’s tremolo channel, and I started playing and he started singing. And what you hear on the album is essentially an edit of our first two takes. The band had an incredible empathy that allowed us to do things like that.
But that gets back to what you were saying before: You can’t overthink this music. Mood and intensity can’t be manufactured. The blues isn’t about structure; it’s what you bring to it. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.”
- The new POS is streaming in it’s entirety at NPR. I do have some initial reactions about it, but I’d rather just wait to write a proper review after multiple listens.
“To wander Manhattan is to step into the modern fulfillment of an earlier age. The hurtling traffic, the stylish storefronts and bars, the pyramids of cupcakes, the lantern light of iPhones—it may all seem dreadfully contemporary, but its antiquity lies in the time of steam. “New York is a product of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution,” Lewis Lapham observed in the fall 2010 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, “built on a standardized grid, conceived neither as a thing of beauty nor as an image of the cosmos, much less as an expression of man’s humanity to man, but as a shopping mall in which to perform the heroic feats of acquisition and consumption.””
- We’ve Just Found The Nearest Exo-Planet… it’s revolving in the Alpha-Centuri galaxy. Unfortunately it is still 4 light years away. So… impossible to get to.
- This Munich subway looks like something out of a realist science fiction flick:
I’m giving this a second full listen right now. I had heard the whole thing a few weeks back through the NPR full album stream, then bits and pieces sporadically after that. I still need to get a hard copy of this from my local record shop next time I get there. It’s definitely worth owning. That should give a pretty good indication of how I feel about it, but let me elaborate eh? I own 1983 and Cosmogramma on vinyl, they each get quite a few spins when I’m mixing things in my basement. I do not own a hard copy — only digital — of Los Angeles. I will not mention who Steve Ellison is related to, that’s getting repetitive and tedious. However I will say that the free flowing nature of Jazz certainly existed in his previous work, peaking with his last album (2010′s Cosmogramma). Until The Quiet Comes is more accessible than that album, but it is not any less artistic and that free flowing vibe hasn’t gone away. It’s just been refined. Refined to the point where it feels like this guy could keep up this pace — putting out very high quality LPs every two years — for decades to come. He knows what he does, and he does it well. The features here are done brilliantly, as each very distinct voice (Thom Yorke to Niki Randa) approaches singing on a Flying Lotus track the same way: their voice is just one of the instruments, one of the many layers, present on the track and album. They are not there to make a song stick in your head, or to be the star of any one moment. They are a small piece to the very complex puzzles this guy creates. And they treat their job(s) as such. Just like the songs are pieces to the album as a whole, and the album as a whole is a piece to the discography as a whole. Layers built on top of layers creating sediment for new layers.
Dan Deacon – America
I heard this for the first time a couple days ago but have been wanting to check it out since I heard Dan Deacon would be releasing a new album this year. Right off the bat this album will knock you on your ass. And you will only want to make it louder… and louder. Then that opening track (“Guilford Avenue Bridge”) will settle down a bit, and your stereo or headphones will still be cranked, which means you will hear all the little complexities of the quiet parts before diving into the very catchy second track. The whole of America is setup this way, calculated and structured so cleverly that by a third of the way through you will realize nothing is accidental. It’s a little strange to review and listen to these two albums back to back, in fact. They are stark opposites: one a premeditated, structured work and the other a free-form, loose album. This can be most easily explained and attributed to each person’s background. Dan Deacon went to school for composing. On top of that he also has composed numerous film scores and has even made modern classical music. On this album he really shows off his chops, his knowledge of scales and progressions… programmed into a laptop or analog synth the way a composer laid out sheet music for a 64-piece orchestra in the 1700s. “Pretty Boy” shows this off immensely. But before you know it you’re knee deep in heavy, and I mean heavy, synths that get you turning up your stereo for a second time. Once the “USA I-IV” series of tracks comes knocking on your door you will surely agree that this guy is a modern day American composer first and foremost. This is his best work.
- I’m tuning into the War Rocket Ajax podcast at Comics Alliance right now, mostly because it features an interview with Jonathan Hickman, who I’m a fan of. He might even turn me into an Avengers reader, a feat previously thought impossible. But when I tuned in I was pleased to hear them talking about El-P and Killer Mike, and apparently they talk about hip-hop alot on their podcast (and BBQ). Then they pointed towards a Comic-Con called ColaCon, which blends comics and hip-hop. Fucking awesome. This year Ghostface and Phife (from Tribe Called Quest) are playing. I may have to become a regular listener.
The Nova Convention, three days and nights of readings, panel discussions, film showings and various sorts of performances that sought to grapple with some of the implications of the writing of William S. Burroughs, concluded Saturday night with a program at the Entermedia theater. Actually, the convention was not entirely over; there was a midnight rock concert featuring Robert Fripp, Blondie, and other rock performers. But it was over for Mr. Burroughs and his inner circle, who all went immediately to a private party.
The convention drew an interesting cross-section of people, and one suspected that only Mr. Burroughs could have brought them together. There were more or less conventional poets, novelists, performing artists, composers as diverse as John Cage and Philip Glass, rock musicians, serious students of American literature, street types and others.
All or almost all of them had been touched in some way by Mr. Burroughs’s varied body of work, which includes straight hard-boiled prose fiction, autobiography, nonrepresentational writing using the cut-up technique invented by Brion Gysin, science fiction of a sort, barbed satire, accounts of drug experiences and attitudinal or political pronouncements.
And here’s some audio from the convention as well:
This may not be “Exhibit A” of why DC’s rebranding strategy blows, though it is certainly C or D. I’m not begrudging them for what they’re trying to do with all this “New 52 Issue Zero” stuff, and I honestly think it will lead to their intended goal: attracting and keeping new readers. But in the words of many o’ Conservatives, the strategy will and does have a slew of “unintended consequences”. One is bothering people like me, who read very few mainstream DC books (umm… ONE); whether it crossed their minds or not, they’re risking the loyalty of their current readership to fish for new readership. Does the risk outweigh the consequences? But forget about numbers and market shares and all that shit and think about comics artistically for a minute. Is it good for a comic artistically to disrupt the flow of a story arc by shoving in an introductory single issue into the mix? What does it do for the comic? What does it take away? With a Grant Morrison book (especially this one), this takes away more than it gives. To be honest, it gives very little. What we see here are tropes, scenes, and iconic imagery from the entirety of Grant Morrison’s Batman opus: the Island of Doctor Mayhew, the bell and the open window, the funding from Wayne Enterprises, the recruiting. None of this is necessary. Part of the fun of getting into a Morrison comic is the wanting… the craving, to go back and re-read older issues. When you do this on your own, it’s rewarding. When someone points out all this stuff to you to get people to read what you’ve been reading for some 7, 8 years, it’s insulting. Granted, Morrison and the art team of Burnham/Irving do an admirable job with the task given. But no new revelations plus a hand-holding journey through the past just equals tediousness in the end, I’m afraid. Skip this, return with #4 (which really is #12 considering they already started into “#1″ earlier this year and not counting this #0 which isn’t really part of the run and…. see how confusing this shit is?) which promises to plow the story forward.
- Manhattan Projects #6
The title of this issue — “Star City” — refers to a sprawling metropolis of the former Soviet Union, the scientific and ideas mecca of the State. We have yet to cover any sort of Soviet ground beyond a vague propagandist notion of who they are and what they want via the Manhattan Projects leering eyes. Misunderstood by the Americans, perhaps… but they are not the good guys. This is made clear (though I find it interesting that they implore the Aldo Raine style of permanent Nazi branding; instead of a knife they opt for a cattle prod). The irony of Communist nations of the past is on full display here: even the greatest mind(s) of the State are subject to Big Brother compensation. Such is the case with Helmutt Grottrup. Grottrup, like many of the physicists and inventors in the book, was a real person. German, he worked for the Nazi’s during The War, developing the V-2 alongside Wernher von Braun (also a character in the book). After the War ended, he opted to work for the Soviets. He thought, mistakenly, that he would be his own master in The Union. That he would not be anyone’s underling, a less than desirable experience under von Braun. But things didn’t change. In the Soviet Union he worked under a man named Sergei Korolev, not so far a character. Korolev in the book might be replaced with a certain Dmitiry Ustinov. Ustinov was the Union’s Minister of Defense for years during the Cold War. Except in the book he’s represented as a brain in a jar with a large robotic body. Anyways, most of this issue involves Ustinov and Braun shoving Grottrup in corners to work and question nothing. Then there’s quite a twist at the end. I love how this book is simultaneously batshit crazy yet steeped in reality, and real people and projects.
- The Massive #4
At some point this comic will dip in quality. The interest it extracts from the reader will level off. And it will still be good, but not this good. Luckily, this peak still feels very far off on the horizon. That is because this world that Brian Wood has crafted with THE MASSIVE is so vibrant and alive the nooks and crannies to explore are next to endless. We’re still learning about “The Crash”; the series of cataclysmic natural disasters which led to a series of cataclysmic sociopolitical disasters. But forget all that for a moment. We also don’t know much about The Kapital or The Massive… the two ships of the (supposedly) pacifist conservatory non-profit Ninth Wave, or their crews. Not to mention Ninth Wave itself. Wood throws in a little taste this issue of the history of the organization and that of the main character, Callum Israel. Ninth Wave had apparently gotten itself on the shitlist of many governments when they used The Massive (the larger of their ships) to blockade oil tankers from exporting out of the Middle East. When 9/11 happened, their name was brought up vaguely, but not outright named. Ninth Wave went off grid. The organization stayed largely silent during a large chunk of the first decade of Century 21. All charges were dropped and their reputation was cleared though. So they resurfaced prior to The Crash. And now, in a post-Crash world their conservationist mission continues; as they see it as important as ever before. A post-Crash World where, as is shown in this issue, the rules and ethics of society have been swept aside. Callum knows this, and admirably (even with a gun pointed in his face in this issue) he sticks to his vow of non-violence. But he wasn’t always that way. We also get a good helping of Callum’s life pre-Crash. Very, very interesting. We learn of his history with a private military contractor (something all too familiar since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan). A glimpse at his former partner then and now reminds us that even with post/pre Crash Worlds, very different Worlds, some people never change. They only amplify. The biggest part of this issue that moves the story along is Cal getting supplies from a shady character, to say the least. The rest is backstory. But the backstory is so damn interesting, I’ll take issues like this all day long. This has got to be one of the best books on the stands right now.
Our attention isn’t boundless. Our time is finite—even as we try to extract value out of every second (we don’t have time to waste). We cannot respond to every utterance, click on every link, read every post. We have to choose even as the possibility of something else, something wonderful, lures us to search and linger. Demands on our attention, injunctions for us to communicate, participate, share—ever shriller and more intense—are like so many speed-ups on the production line, attempts to extract from us whatever bit of mindshare is left.
- The newest music on my family’s label (Black Lantern Music) is from a guy called SJ Mellia. Here’s a little taste off the album:
- The candidaite in Maine who likes World of Warcraft… yeah, apparently she’s getting attacked for it. The Maine GOP party has written: “In Colleen’s online fantasy world, she gets away with crude, vicious and violent comments like the ones below. Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world”. This is a new level of stupidity and uselessness.
