Neo-Noir Quasar.

-  On Sunday I was this close to finishing off my record.  Then I realized my basement carpet was damp.  Ha.  The tribulations of going through MN winters, I suppose.  But yep… just about done with her.  She’ll be 21 tracks, running about 55 to 57 minutes.  Just short of an hour.  Self titled, because she will chronicle the section of my life that made me start doing this to begin with.  So it’s sort-of a “birth of…” thing, if you will.  But what… I’m gonna call it “The Birth Of…”??  C’mon, I’m an asshole but I’m not that pretentious.  Other self news: I’m leaving for Memphis Monday for my new job.  So I’m not sure I’ll be posting here much.  Course, this could go the opposite direction and I could be so bored with what to do with myself that I’ll be posting several times a night in my hotel room.  It’s looking like the release date should be in May; until then keep up with Black Lantern Music cause some really cool stuff is going to be coming out between now and then.

-  Sooo… this is only the second time in history we’ve discovered a triple quasar.  The easiest way to define a quasar is a “galactic seed, or nucleus”.  With double-quasars, it’s believed to be a result of two galaxies colliding.  In other words, there’s crazy shit going on out there… we’re not even specs of dust.  We’re specs of dust on one side of an electron only.  Here’s the article.

-  Years before Rian Johnson scored a moderately mainstream hit movie in last year’s Looper, he directed Brick.  A neo-Noir throwback to the crime, in over your head flicks and novels of the late 30′s and 40′s taking place in an American suburban high school.  It strangely works very well.  And I have a feeling it would have been taken more seriously if the film starred adults and not teenagers.  Anyways, yesterday The Onion’s AV Club posted an article about the opening sequence of Brick.

“There’s also sorrow in the juxtaposition of a slow push into Gordon-Levitt’s face, half-hidden behind hands clasped together in a classic thinker’s pose, with inserts of the girl’s lifeless body at the edge of the water. It was during this back-and-forth, as the camera measures Gordon-Levitt by way of his non-reaction to shoes, hair, and odd-shaped bracelets, that I mentally wrote the note “Dear Dear Wendy: Sorry.” Until then, though, I couldn’t necessarily articulate what made this sequence of shots seem so powerful. Watching it again, I belatedly realized something: Gordon-Levitt’s eyeline never changes. We see him ostensibly looking at different details each time, but that’s never cued by eye movement. And then I realized something else, which I can’t believe I never noticed before: Those inserts aren’t from the angle at which he’s viewing them. From where he is, her feet should be at the top of the frame; instead, they’re at the bottom, shot from her other side. The other two shots are likewise reversed. You could call that an error, I suppose, but coupled with the fixed eyeline, what it suggests (and I think this is what I always responded to, unconsciously) is that Gordon-Levitt can’t process what he’s seeing.”

-  Relatedly, Danny Boyle’s 7 film-making tips.

-  ARTIST OF THE DAY is M.S. Corley.  Here’s a commission he did for a “Blighted Druid”:

 

-Sonny

How To Stain-Glass Watertowers.

-  Okay so I was actually able to find a hard copy of the new How To Destroy Angels at a major, corporate outlet.  I know what you’re thinking: “what’s a hard copy??”  I was there to pay bills, not to record shop.  So it was a nice treat; because — and I might be in the minority here — I do like owning a CD much better than just having it on my computer.  Granted, this will get thrown onto my computer at some point… I just have yet to do that cause I’ve been blasting it through the stereo for the past few days.

So how is it, right?  Fucking awesome.  I’m loving this album.  And it’s scary because like I’ve said in the past… I think I like this stuff more than I ever did NIN.  And I consider myself a Nine Inch Nails fan, too.  Mariqueen Maandig, as she’s credited in the liner notes, does a miraculous job breathing more life into into an ever expanding body of Trent Reznor production.  I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t enjoy this as much if it was a purely Reznor sung collection of music.  Not that he doesn’t sing.  He does, only a little.  It makes his vocal appearances all the more exciting, and even haunting, when he’s not around all the time.  To say this album is simply a showcase of Maandig’s etheral, spot-on vocals would be beyond misleading of me though.  Indeed Atticus Ross and Reznor alike really bring their A games to the table here: using their illustrious pasts apart, their work together on David Fincher soundtracks, and something new and simple as a very like-minded production team.  I guess when you go back and really listen to the soundtracks they’ve done — particularly The Social Network — it is pretty simple music, really.  On the surface at least.  Those more ambient leanings appear on “Welcome Oblivion“; they just sit behind some really catchy, borderline basic, Electro/Industrial beats that sound like they’ve ripped directly from a late 90′s MPC.  Catching a theme here?  This record manages to combine simplicity with a more organic brand of Electronic music, which oddly creates a forward-thinking sound.  “A house on fire/burning all the past away.”  Haunting, progressive, simple, organic… like the future.  This is future music.

-  Stained glass water-tower.  Brooklyn.  By Tom Fruin.

-  “Iran shipping Chinese weapons to Yemen” sounds like a Tom Clancy novel’s starting point… but:

THINGS GET WORSE.

“As the article makes clear, the Iranians, via the Revolutionary Guard Corps, are accelerating the volume and sophistication of weapons supplies transferred to extent and potential proxies in the region. In the case of Yemen, that’s the Houthi rebellion. In all cases, Iran’s support is to Shi’a or Shi’a offshoot groups fighting Sunni government or groups.  The qualitative escalation is symbolized by the presence of Chinese-manufactured manpads—the QW-1M. These weapons come from a Chinese state-owned company already sanctioned by the U.S. government for illegal arms dealing.

What are Iranian and Chinese officials thinking (and let me note that in neither case can we assume a monolithic government decision system)?”

-  SonnyW.

Imperfect Cave Slimes.

I’m on a schedule, so a bit of a link dump today.

-  Strange Alien Slime Discovered Living Beneath The Nullarbor Plain.

“Deep in water-filled underground caves beneath Australia’s Nullarbor Plain, cave divers have discovered unusual ‘curtains’ of biological material – known as Nullarbor cave slimes. 

It is thought that the periodic inundations of the Nullarbor caves by the sea occurred a number of times in the geological past and so researchers suggest that the Weebubbie Thaumarchaeota may have a marine origin.

“It just goes to show that life in the dark recesses of the planet comes in many strange forms, many of which are still unknown,” says Professor Paulsen.”

That last quote feels a little… just a little, Lovecraftian if you ask me.

-  Artist Imagines Drone With Self-Consciousness That Feels Bad About Its Job.

“It flies over Waziristan, then to New York City and finally to the UK, asking itself philosophical questions and gradually gaining more self-awareness. However, the Freestone Drone is fated to die by getting tangled up in a washing line — the same washing line that American drone commanders use as a sign of activity inside the homes of suspects. Along the way he also gatecrashes a wedding in Paris, and even travels through time, as part of the piece’s exploration of the changing nature of warfare.”

-  From an upcoming Tomb Raider art show:

-  Imperfect Tools, Or: Melissa Saley interviews Sarah Manguso.

“Were you conflicted about writing about your friend Harris’s death, about using that as a subject?

No. I see no reason not to write whatever comes to me. There was no way I was not going to write about Harris’s death. It’s like when you’re at a cocktail party and you meet someone you know you’re going to sleep with. You might as well get it over with and sleep with them. I’m talking about my former, younger life now. But. There is no point in pretending. I no longer try to avoid the inevitability of what comes to me, writing-wise.That said, there are a lot of factoids that I opted not to include in the book. This is not a book about everything I know about Harris. There are a lot of things about myself I chose not to include. I have written two memoirs but that doesn’t mean that I want to share everything. It’s hard to make it sound as if that argument holds any water at all. I don’t have a personal Facebook page. I don’t want to divulge what I don’t want to divulge.”

-Sonny

The NEXT Sequential Adaptation.

-  I’m giving an album AllMusic gave a fairly glowing review of recently.  The album is called “Cover Art”; the debut from a new Jazz-based group of musicians called The NEXT Collective.  What’s interesting — considering the amount of talent and experience that comes with the group — is that this is an album of covers.  But it really does not feel that way, considering it is instrumental music: jams that go on without much structure beyond, “alright, just keep in the key Drake initially had…”  It’s an interesting way to do a debut, and it’ll test your opinion on how artistic covers can or cannot be.  If you didn’t know it, you’d think this is a collection of 10 original and very organic songs, recorded with very few takes.  This is the cover:

Here’s the album in a variety of formats on Amazon.

-  That blog I spoke of last week is now up and running (though the visuals may still change).  The first piece is mine.  Which means you’ll know my real name.  Oooohhhh… I’m definitely trying to flex some creative muscles I haven’t used in some time; I’m sure it could be better.  But it was a blast to get back into more creative writing.  There’s definitely a thesis, I hope it’s as clear to everyone else as it is to me.  Hopefully this will turn into a good little music blog for people to RSS and follow on Tumblr, cause it’s a great mixture of people writing for it.

It’s called “Limitless Lives“.

-  Want To Play In The NHL?  Better Hope You Were Born In The Right Month.

“A pair of psychology professors have discovered that a hockey player’s month of birth influences how scouts and coaches judge his talent, and this subconscious selection bias often puts the wrong players on the roster. The study, published online in the journal PLOS ONE, found NHL teams have long underestimated the talent and potential of players born in the second half of the year and tend to overlook them in favor of relatively older players.  That is exactly the opposite of what they ought to do, said James Deaner of Grand Valley State University. For any given spot in the draft, players born in the first three months of the year are more likely to be successful than those born in the second half of the same year.  “If teams really wanted to win, they should have drafted more of the relatively younger players,” Deaner said.”

-  On The Limits of Adaptation, Or: What Can We Get Out of The Dark Knight Returns Movie?

“But with The Dark Knight Returns being given the full conversion treatment, this criticism of the film can no longer be the result of compression failure. The problems of the film do not come from lack of loyalty to the source. Far from it – this movie shows us, once more, that overzealous reliance on the original work is not necessarily a boon. A lot of what made The Dark Knight Returns such a good comics was, well, comics-related stuff. The movie tries to re-use some of these elements which remain inert in a medium not suited for them – there are long parts in the novel in which Batman’s actions are interjected with a point/counterpoint-style TV show, Miller and Johnson’s art scatter these discussions (along with dozens of other occurrences) all over the page, they become a representation of fragmented culture (as opposed to the more unified and direct media age that gave birth to Batman and his ilk) and watching them, we realize that Batman no longer operates in a world he was not meant to inhabit (and why the story must end the way it does).”

This is what a lot of people fail to comprehend: there are certain storytelling tropes that are completely unique to sequential art.  These tropes may very well explain why (some) comics have turned out to be about the things they’re about; these tropes lend themselves very well to certain high-concepts, visual action, and narrative succession.  No matter how faithfully you adapt a comic to a film, or television show, or web series… it still will never be the same thing as reading the comic.  Because sequential art — though it’s been around since the Dawn of Man — is one of the most unique storytelling mediums we have, for many reasons I won’t get into here.

A really great explanation of this, in the said form (so it’s pretty meta), is Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art”.  Great book.

-Sonny

Present Shock to the ISS.

-  I need to work on a lot of music today, so this is going to be quick… and likely a massive link dump.

-  Phantom Balance’s new record “Loser” is up on their Bandcamp now and FREE.

-  SpaceX Capsule Arrives At ISS.

“A privately-owned unmanned US space capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, bringing to the space outpost food, scientific materials and other crucial equipment.

The capsule named Dragon was captured—with the help of a robotic arm – by NASA Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford and Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn, 5:31 am EST (1031 GMT), when the ISS was over northern Ukraine, US space officials said. The craft, owned by SpaceX corporation, will now be inspected via cameras, brought to the Earth-facing port of the ISS’s Harmony module and bolted into place by commands from mission control.“

-  Really great take on the main characters from The Wizard of Oz by Gregory Manchess:

-  I have a shitload of comics to read.  I AM EXCITE.  I’ll have reviews up here this week.  Also I hate how nobody gave a fuck about Morrison’s Batman for the past year until a major character got whacked, and now advanced orders for the next issue are selling out.

-  The End of Time Is Not The End of the World.

“Present Shock is a big concept with profound implications for culture, politics and business. A simple visualization (borrowed from Adrian Bejan’s theories of flow systems) is to think of time as a river flowing at a certain pace. Below a certain threshold, the movements of things on the river are fairly linear and predictable. You launch a barge in the river here and three days later you have drifted to there. This is historical progress as we have come to know it over the millennia  But when the speed of the flow increases beyond that threshold, the river becomes turbulent, non-linear, unpredictable. Such is the state of time in 2012.

What does this mean? Rushkoff breaks up “presentism” into five symptoms or challenges and matches each with constructive solutions for pressing the pause button. The “aha-moment-per-page ratio in Present Shock is high. Once you identify these concepts for yourself, you will start to see them everywhere.”

-Sonny

Scatter the Exoskeleton.

-  The Wildly Ambitious Quest to Build a Thought-Controlled Exoskeleton for the Paralyzed.

“This may sound incredible, but in recent years, research on using signals from the brain to operate machines has taken great strides. Scientists have developed brain-machine interfaces that allow paralyzed humans to move a computer cursor or even use a robotic arm to pick up a piece of chocolate or touch a loved one for the first time in years. Nicolelis has set his sights even higher: He wants to get paralyzed people up and walking around. If he succeeds it could be a tremendous advance. Right now he’s still developing this technology in monkeys. There’s a long way to go.

But Nicolelis was brimming with confidence in January when I visited his lab at Duke University to see how his work is progressing. “We’re getting close to making wheelchairs obsolete,” he said.“

-  I’m going to be working on music all day today.  In fact, I’ll probably hop to it after writing this.  I’m staring at three pages from my creativity book — one ripped out — trying to discover the natural succession of songs as they should unfold in relation to what the album is about.  What it means to me.  This is easily my most personal album I’ve ever done, as it vaguely (it doesn’t beat you over the head or anything) tells the story of the hardest years of my life.  So far.  But in a meta-way, this time… this experience, is kind of what birthed the idea and the sounds that would become my current musical persona to begin with.  It likely wouldn’t exist in this way without this experience.  So it’s all a little bizarre.  About halfway through I’m remixing the very first track I did officially under the pseudo-name, in an effort to recreate the frustration of what was happening boiling over and me finally going down to the basement and making this droning, Electronic beat.  So… I’m excited.

Also… help me out.  I’m becoming obsessed with THIS reaching 10 thousand downloads.

-  I’ve got this in my headphones this morning:

That’s Doldrums new album, “Lesser Evil”, released yesterday on Arbutus Records.  Canadian (Toronto) -based Electronic music that isn’t trying to make you dance (though you probably could), but that doesn’t get weird for the sake of it.  There’s a hint of that new wave of Canadian electronics in here, the sounds we heard from Purity Ring and Grimes in 2012; those textures are supplemented with the more analog sounds of a group like, say, Black Moth Super Rainbow.  The vocals are surprisingly un-effected out (generally speaking), and there are nods of good old-fashioned storytelling inside some of these songs; but it is not afraid to use a voice as a pure and simple instrument in and of itself as well.  On top of that you’ve got these rhythmic, hypnotic back-beats that have clearly been recorded live, with a kit, in a large room with padded walls.  Definitely worth checking out.

Here’s the album in a variety of formats at Amazon.

-  I really hope Warren Ellis will be getting some amount of dough from Iron Man 3, if the movie is directly lifting his nanotechnology, biological modification, Extremis from his run on the character.

Speaking of Uncle Warren, he’s apparently been inspired by newspaper comic strips, and has been releasing single panel comics on his website of late… as part of a world he calls “Scatterlands”.  Here’s the latest:

-Sonny

Freudian Salaries.

-  I was baffled yesterday when chatting with an ex-classmate on Facebook.  Quick background: I went to school with this guy to get a particular type of license, a company who needs people with this particular license is moving it’s HQ to our neck of the woods.  They asked me if there was anyone else I graduated with who might be interested in the job.  So I contacted the guy about the job and dropped his name with HR.  “You ever find anything else about that job?” he asked, to which I replied giving information about when and where, benefits, perks, etc.  “Yeah but what’s the pay?” he asked, to which I told him what the pay was.  “Yeah my current job pays more.”  Well… I understand that.  But perhaps you should do what you enjoy doing?  This is a fascinating field, and you care that much about an extra 5 Grand (or however much more; cause it can’t be much based on the nature of each of these jobs) a year?  Enough to not start a career in something you’re passionate about?  This is the problem — one of far too many — with our society.

-  The new Black Lantern Music release is pretty brilliant.  Called “ill Papa Giraffe“.  It’s jazz sampled, classic boom-bap style BIG beats with clever, socially conscious wordplay delivered with precision and skill.  It’s free… but if you like it, throw the guys a few bucks.

-  The best argument for conservation of our environment?  For men…  Study: Shrinking Otter Penis Bones Could Be Due To Industrial Chemicals.

“The penis bones of otters living in English and Welsh waterways are getting lighter each year, in a worrying decline of the species’ overall reproductive health, according to a report.

Biologists could not conclusively connect the damage to the presence of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in rivers — responsible for a drastic drop in otter populations in the 70s — and so are pointing the finger of blame at endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), also harmful to humans.”

-  Famous Weapons.  By Daneil Nyari.

-  Batman: The Freudian Super-Hero.

“To clarify that thought a little more, I will explain the three tenants of the sub-conscious mind as designed by Sigmund Freud. According to Dr. Freud the mind was broken up into three conceptual parts: the id, ego, and super-ego. The id is the part of the mind that is geared toward instinctual and chaotic thoughts and impulses. The ego is the organized, realistic part of your mind that is at the forefront of the conscious mind. The super-ego is your mind’s perception of what you and society perceive as right, acting as your conscience effectively.

Though how does Freud’s diagram for the human psyche relate to Batman particularly? Couldn’t those same concepts be applied to all heroes? In part, yes, but Batman personifies those concepts most strongly because he is not one man, but three.“

-  Sonny

Flowers For Memories.

-  Holy shit, a week off?  A week??  Well I hope get that job I was interviewed for… hope it was worth it.  Let’s get at this.

-  It’s nice to read direct quotes from Mark Hamill this morning, rather than speculation derived from an article that’s mostly speculating.  In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, he has some really, really wonderful things to say in terms of the direction he hopes the movies take, including a more balanced approach between practical and CGI effects, not such a heavy-handed tone, and that he and all the old actors/characters would not be the focal point.  I’m still disappointed that neither of my picks got the directing job (Rian Johnson and Duncan Jones), but damn Ben Affleck I bet would make a really cool hanger shootout with laser guns… just imagine that last shootout scene at Fenway in The Town, but with smugglers and new government agents…

-  Sadistik’s new album is good.  Perhaps not his magnum opus, but it’s good.  And I mean that in a good way, I think eventually he can do something even better than this.  And with the rise of Macklemore, it’s nice to hear a Seattle rapper who actually reflects the city.  Not that “Flowers For My Father” is all depressing.  The song (and a handful of other tracks) that details the first-hand account of Sadistik and Kristoff Krane knocking on the late Eyedea’s door and no one answering is actually very positive.  In defense of the rest of the tones though, what do you expect from a guy who saw that amount of death firsthand since the release of his last proper album?  I actually find it hard to believe that the production on this was handled by multiple people, there’s a consistency to it throughout (both in quality and feel).

Also, hearing a new Cage verse make me want new Cage album.  And RIP Eyedea.

-  Yesterday marked the 3rd anniversary of someone very close to me.  Something I never thought I would say at the age I’m at now.  But when I think back to that day, and being in that room with those other people I shared that moment with, I remember it as being a really beautiful thing.  I couldn’t stop shaking after it happened, and I was probably in some form of shock, but that wasn’t fear or terror or horror doing that; it was the sheer power of what I — we — had seen before our very eyes.  Something rare and otherworldly and unexplainable.  Something breathtaking and beyond all of us.  I’ll never forget it, it feels like it was yesterday.

-  Chinese Google Arms Servers With Cellphone Chips.

“Chips based on the ARM architecture run a majority of the world’s smartphones, including the iPhone and most Google Android phones, and now, a wide range of hardware makers are building ARM chips for the computer servers that drive web services and the sweeping software applications used inside big businesses. The idea is to significantly reduce the power and money needed to operate a computer data center, and clearly some big-name buyers are interested.”

- Sonny

Player 2 Curiosity.

-  I read one legal analyst compare patents to bullets last year, in that they’re cheap and quick to manufacture and they have the potential to do a LOT of damage.  The past few years have seen an escalation of patent-based lawsuits, and I don’t just mean the high profile cases like Apple v. Samsung (or the latest Facebook suit).  Patent based legal action has skyrocketed in all sorts of industries, but yes… mostly the tech industries.   “Everybody in the hi-tech industry is picking up their patenting, but we are also seeing that litigation is slowing people down,” Gwylim Roberts to BBC in THIS ARTICLE…  “We didn’t see litigation for a long time and suddenly it began. I personally think it might be peaking at the moment – it’s now starting to get in the way of business objectives.”  I believe in the next few decades — as the exponential curve of tech growth continues — we will see a revamping in patent laws across the globe.

-  The Curiosity Rover has drilled into the rock on the surface of Mars, and taken the first interior sample of another planet.

-  Ryan Gosling is co-writing and directing an underwater fantasy called “How To Catch A Monster”.  Weird.

-  UNEMPLOYMENT STORIES, Volume 26: ‘I Want Hope‘ and Volume 25: ‘I Still Exist‘.

“My wife had only recently been unemployed for 4 months and has a good understanding of what it is like. Her warnings and advice have been invaluable. That said, I was not prepared for the full brunt of it. I make a point of applying for at least 2 jobs a day, maybe more. These are not necessarily jobs on my formal career path, but are jobs I am qualified to do based on my career or based on my experience over the last 15 years. Anything and everything. The Kitchen Sink approach. Throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.”

-  A Fascinating ‘New’ Planet.

“Of course, astronomers have known about Mercury for thousands of years, but since NASA’s MESSENGER probe went into orbit around Mercury in 2011, researchers feel like they’ve been discovering the innermost planet all over again. One finding after another has confirmed the alien character of this speedy little world, which you can see this week with your own eyes. Mercury is emerging from the glare of the sun for a beautiful two-week apparition during the month of February 2013. The show begins about a half hour after sunset. Scan the horizon where the sun’s glow is strongest and, if the sky is clear, Mercury should pop out of the twilight, a bright pink pinprick of light. Mercury itself is not actually pink, but it is often colored so by the rosy hues of the setting sun.”

-  Valentine for nerds.  Love you Laura!

-Sonny

Lisa’s In Video Games.

-  NPR wrote a piece just in time for “Dilla Day”, about the legacy of the late James Yancey.

Why J Dilla May Be Jazz’s Latest Great Innovator.

“Dilla’s reach stretches way beyond hip-hop: For one, he’s recently cast a long shadow over contemporary jazz. He never belonged to jazz’s inner circle, but since his death in 2006 from a rare blood disease, his legacy has helped pull the genre back into kissing contact with modern popular music.

The jazz world today finds itself swamped with young talent eager for reinvestment in the discourse of contemporary culture. The shift has roots that run in a lot of directions. It’s a reaction to the neo-traditional revivalism that capped the last century, and to jazz’s withered commercial infrastructure in the wake of the 1990s CD bubble. Add to that the simple fact that millennial jazz musicians grew up listening mostly to hip-hop, R&B and rock.”

-  This is FREE:  Later Babes – LISA

Here’s an the embed:

-  Women In Video Games (Damsels In Distress…), put in similar situations over and over andoverandoveroverover.

-  Relatedly, The Hawkeye Initiative is pretty brilliant in calling out mainstream superhero shit for their years and years of blatant misogyny and sexism.

-Sonny