- I’ve now got a SModcast app on my phone after enjoying having WTF! W/ Marc Maron on my phone for a few days. They’re really nice things to have access to in your pocket, eh? I wasn’t aware of this, but the “SModcast” network (Kevin Smith and friends, for those who don’t know/click/Google) features a whole slew of podcasts with and without Kevin Smith, some about comics and some not. There’s one that still gets released on a relatively regular schedule called “The Breaks”, wherein a DJ Smith knows veers into all sorts of different territory but manages to always talk music and spinning records.
Course now that I’ve got this on my phone I should probably get a Ray Kurzweil podcast or something to balance out the Universe.
- With PS Store redeem codes I received as a birthday gift, I downloaded Journey, Braid, and The Walking Dead yesterday. Cheap games… 15, 15, and 20 respectfully. I only briefly played Journey last night, and it seems spectacular: artistic, intuitive, graceful, unique as all hell. It’s going to be really nice to have a break from people sending me nasty messages after I play them in NHL 12.
- Last night I was racking my brain trying to wrap it around the concept for my next proper LP. It will be based on the most transformative part of my life (so far). I want the album to go through the journey of what I went through; this could get a little painful as particular memories are brought up, but hopefully the good memories outweigh the bad. And they do. Musically, I guess I would like to move a little bit back towards the more sample-based sound of two albums ago. My last album (I don’t know who I’m talking to, if anyone, so I’m gonna assume you have not heard it; which I’m totally cool with) went a bit more instrumentation based, with sort of complex arrangements mixed in with breakbeats. It was less about the beats and samples, and more about the instrumentation/arrangements. I want a mix of the two, of course, but this last time I used samples to compliment the synths and guitar lines I was writing, I’d like to flip that. Also, THIS BAND. Very inspiring. Seemingly unconnected and obtuse samples tied together through synths and other original instrumentation to form a cohesive whole. Also, apparently, Japanese music. Like, classical Japanese music.
- So Disney bought Star Wars. If you don’t know. Which is… meh. I mean, I’m not like a huge Star Wars fanboy or anything so I don’t have to strong of feelings either way. I do, like 80% of humans, love the old Star Wars movies; and I do, like 85% of humans, hate the new ones. From what I’m reading from people who know a lot about this stuff, there are novels that act as the official “post-Original Trilogy” story. Something to do with Han and Leia’s kids, Luke running a new Jedi order, and the resurgence of the Empire and the Sith. This could be decent I suppose. The problem with the new ones — and I’m sure this has been written about extensively — is the fear of treading new ground. This notion that they had to fall back on the old ones to be good. You can see that in everything from the bizarre and wacky coincidences written into the story, the way the ships are designed, even the way Palatine was scarred to look like a shitty Halloween costume of himself in Jedi. As long as they don’t do any of that, and focus on a new story, new characters, new designs, they should be alright I hope.
[But hey, I'm one of like 3 million assholes writing my opinions on the Internet about this so what the fuck do I know?]
- William Gibson’s seminal novel Neuromancer is being turned into a film as we speak. Little is known about the project. The IMDB page is empty, to say the least. Liam Neeson’s name is on the cast, which may or may not be true, but sounds awesome. If you don’t know about the novel it’s one of the best science fiction novels of all-time. It started the genre we call “cyberpunk”. It also featured characters “jacking into” the Internet which was obviously directly lifted for The Matrix movies. Anyways, here’s a new poster (the first):
I have the impression that this is the opinion the government wants to impose on people, their way of opposing the situation. I think that when a person goes somewhere, she reflects, she thinks about where she is going and why, because she is using her time and energy. It’s a conscious choice. I don’t go to a demonstration because it’s cool. It isn’t at all cool to go to demonstrations today. The forces of order are nearby. They can beat you up. The demonstration on May 6th proved that. Nowadays, many people find themselves behind bars solely because they went to a public demonstration.
If I mentally transpose the words “entertaining” and “sport,” Dylan’s sentiment gets close to what I’m trying to express (and what I want to feel, but can’t). There was a time when I watched football in order to not think about my day-to-day life, but fantasy sports slowly changed that — in fact, my affinity for fantasy only makes it worse. I turn the players I draft into tiny parts of my life, which stops me from remembering that they have no relationship whatsoever to who I am. It makes me unconsciously think of them as extensions of myself. And I wonder if this is more problematic than I want to accept. Do I have any right to get angry at Chris Johnson? Does anyone?
- The Trouble With The Mask. Great op-Ed on the inherent problems with the new Joker in Batman and featuring a brilliant Bukowski quote.
- Great news for Warren Ellis! His upcoming novel — Gun Machine — will be adapted to television by 20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment. Ellis himself will oversee the show, serving as Executive Producer, and Trauma creator/writer Dario Scardapane will be the head writer. I’m so happy for Internet Jesus… he’s been an awesome writer for so long, he deserves some mainstream success. (Not that I don’t wish he’d write comics again.)
- Well this is excellent news too: Joss Whedon is returning to directAvengers 2. Not only that, but he’ll also be the creator and executive producer (and probably do some writing too) of a Marvel movie-verse TV show for ABC tied to his films. I figured he wouldn’t want to do the Avengers sequel, considering a project that massive doesn’t allow for much side work. I suppose the C-141′s full of money can’t help (was gonna go with “truckload”… but didn’t think that sufficed). This is awesome though, because ever since the end of Avengers I’ve wondered where Whedon would take the sequel… what with sequels being the darkest of three movies and all (typically) due to dramatic structure.
Coincidentally, Whedon was/is working on a sort-of Internet-show with Warren Ellis. I hope that sees the light of day considering how busy their lives are about to get.
- David Cronenberg has a son who is now directing. And it’s looking like his movie’s will be as grotesquely creepy as his father’s. Antiviral is his first full-length and is I believe out in select cities/theaters. It stars the kid who played Banshee in X-Men: First Class. Caleb Jones. I think he’ll probably become a household name in the next 5 to 10 years. Also, apparently he plays drums and sings in a band called Robert Jones.
- In other movie news, Francis Ford Coppola looks like he’s bitten off a lot more than he can chew with his new film idea. The Edgar Allen Poe masks with 3D eye-holes are one thing, but having to put it on and take it off constantly? Not to mention he has “devised an interface between himself and the film so he could alter it in real time, adjusting the flow of the narrative as he read the audience’s reactions. This interface was built as an iPad app.“ Obviously the rebuttal here is… so he’s going to be present at EVERY ONE of his screenings…? The Bleeding Cool writer called this “several bad ideas crashing into one another”. He should know, he was at the Comic-Con screening.
- More reasons Texas is kinda batshit crazy. Or… at least has their priorities in a bunch. This HIGH SCHOOL football stadium costs $60 million. That’s American bucks. And before we go all “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE… HOW IMPORTANT HS FOOTBALL IS DOWN HERE”. I do not. But, I hail from Minnesota, where High School hockey is super important. Where professional players, who have played and won the Stanley Cup (and in some cases Gold Medal games in the Olympics) have said that playing in the MN High School final was a more memorable experience. Hell, I bet we have a higher percentage of NHL players than Texas has NFL players. But you know what they do up North? They fucking play outside. In a rink that probably costs a couple grand to manufacture. But hockey is life up there. Really explains both the differences between BOTH hockey and football, and MN and Texas. Down to Earth love-of-the-game shit vs. massive spectacle.
It’s an exhibition that shows artists cleaving a new space for artwork, that’s less about pure concept, aesthetic or object, and more to do with pragmatism, education and storytelling. Many of the works are interactive, and feel like they’re caught somewhere between the White Cube and the Science Museum. The art snob in me was harrumphing from time to time; could this really be called art? Is art that invites play not ’serious’? Or is it the art market that demands art be static and handed down from an elevated plain of vision and skill? There’s no doubt that singular, non-interactive art objects will continue to be made (and coveted), but the data art world is a refreshingly open-minded, often big-hearted new sideshow in the art world.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s, the entire focus of the atomic program was to create the weapon to end any war, even one as all-consuming as World War II. After the war, the makers of the bomb saw its power, and their own uneasy public, and tried to think of ways to both soothe the American people, and put the bombs to good use. Some of their minds drifted to the Bible verse in Isiah 2:4, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
What is certain is that some sort of impact from another body freed material from the young Earth and the resulting debris coalesced into today’s Moon. But the exact details of the impactor’s size and speed have remained debatable. In a report online to be published in Icarus, researchers suggest that the crash happened with a much larger, faster body than previously thought. Such theories need to line up with what we know about the Moon, about the violent processes that set off the creation of moons, and what computer simulations show about the more sedate gravitational “gathering-up” that finishes the job.
There seemed to be a twofold acknowledgement amongst the speakers.
Firstly, it was recognised that today ‘books’ are competing for attention in a flattened entertainment market, in which competition arises from literally any digital media available via the Internet, not just other book titles or genre rivals.
Secondly, it was recognised that to thrive in this flattened market, in which competition is multiplied and therefore ferocious, book publishers must think less about the specific format and dogmas of the ‘book’ as an object of tradition, and think more about the intrinsic qualities that separate book reading from other leisure pursuits.
You want to go to something that is made literally of flesh, rather than organized energy that is going to disappear at the press of a keystroke. There is nothing like touching history, smelling history, reading it from a 700-year-old book. There are lots of things that digital data can do, things that medieval manuscripts cannot do — aggregating, virtually putting together a medieval library of things which are not disparate, searching it once it’s been transcribed — but there’s a lot digitizing an object can’t do. And for that, people are going to have to go and consult or see the original. (But the way the public is going to see that the original is there is by first seeing a digital avatar on the web. That’s the point.)
Designer Drugs, The Zombie Apocalypse and You, wherein the recent… umm, mind-bendingly disgusting attacks in the world happening right fucking now, resembling the most grotesque zombie fiction, are examined. The article stems originally from Modern Mythology, where years ago the writer predicted the same thing would happen. However, he did not predict it with bath salts, rather with designer drugs sold in head shops and new age shops. Where the frontal lobe would be cut off from the rest of the brain… a “chemical lobotomy”. The victim would then be only “concerned with only the most rudimentary functions of the limbic brain: fucking, eating, and killing”.
No, It Has Not ‘Always Been This Way’, where Thomas Harrington at Common Dreams.orgbriefly analyzes the fallacy of disregarding criticisms of values which boils down to, “there’s no fighting it, it’s always been this way and will always be this way”.
And because most Americans today have been brought up on a steady diet of punditry churned out by people whose knowledge base and thinking skills are said to be oh-so-much-greater and sharper than their own, they tend to have very little confidence in their ability to generate personal opinions on social and political issues, and hence, believe they have very little standing for contesting the Darwinian pronouncements of their local, self-proclaimed Alpha male.
The author of Freedom and The Corrections, regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists, said consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology. “The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.
“I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”
- Since the announcement that the White Stripes were no longer going to be a band, Jack White has been busy. He’s been involved with a litany of side-projects (most of which are good) producing, writing, drumming, and playing guitar and singing. Now, he’s announcing his debut solo album on his own Third Man Records. I would assume he’ll be doing damn near everything on it, he’s an excellent drummer at least.
“Jack White has launched his solo career, announcing he will release his debut LP in April. Recorded over the last few months, Blunderbuss is “an album I couldn’t have released until now”, he said, revealing the first single on his new website.
“I didn’t really even think of recording under my own name for a long time,” White told Radio 1′s Zane Lowe on Monday night. “I thought, ‘I’ve got the rest of my life to do that.’” The release comes almost a year after the White Stripessplit. The singer and guitarist has hardly been twiddling his thumbs: he continues to play with two other bands, the Dead Weather and the Raconteurs, and is one of rock’n'roll’s most sought-after producers and songwriters. But his solo album was an accident, he told Lowe.”
- Should Art Be Austere In A Recession?It’s an interesting question, and one that Guardian writer Jonathan Jones tackles sure-handedly. His answer is no.
In art, thinking about luxury is not the same as grasping it. Art can imagine everything from a feast to a fast – and yet it is always an idea, an image. This is not confined to artists: it is an aspect of how people think about food and fashion – we don’t necessarily leap from thought to action. Fashion fans do not all have the money to purchase everything or anything they see in a magazine, any more than an art lover has to have the clothes they see on a fabulously dressed person in a portrait. Fantasy is part of looking and thinking.
Leave it to clergymen to blame society’s ills on images of the unattainable. Imagining luxury is as human as imagining want. The real ugliness of the age of austerity would be to limit innocent pleasures, to force misery on the modern mind. It’s bad economics (someone has to buy some stuff if the economy is to grow), and it’s hopeless human psychology. You can’t impose austerity on the imagination.
The corporate society has been an enduring wellspring of stories over the last century. Inspired by the factory production line, Aldous Huxley predicted a future where humans were born and bred only to fulfil a corporate function in Brave New World. The cyberpunk vision of William Gibson’s Neuromancer charted a future where government had collapsed entirely, and society was ruled by a few super-powerful corporations.
In the midst of a global economic crisis that has shed light on the darker workings of the capitalist system, these days corporate society seems less like SF fantasy and more like a living reality. Whether it’s the revelation of the “super-cluster” of 147 companies who have grasped control of 40% of the world’s entire wealth, or the barely-reported $16tn loans made by the US Federal Reserve to banks and business soon after the 2008 financial crash, multinational corporations seem to wield incredible and unaccountable power over our democratic society.
Klosterman evaluates that puzzling phenomena where a good, not great, band shoots up the “indie” ladder to become one of the most talked about bands of the year. This time it’s Tune Yards (or however the hell you spell that shit; seriously… just write your name normally!!):
“When (and if) you listen to w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs, you are listening to two things: a record that’s very good, and/or a record that will someday seem way worse than it actually is. And logic suggests the latter is more likely than the former, even though that’s no reflection on the value of the artist.
I am rooting for you, Merrill Garbus. I like your record, and I hope you make many more. I want you to be a genius, and I have no reason to believe that won’t happen. But maybe don’t sell the puppets, because maybe you are doomed.”
“Robert Hooke discovered the cell, established experimentation as crucial to scientific research, and did pioneering work in optics, gravitation, paleontology, architecture, and more. Yet history dismissed and forgot him… all because he pissed off Isaac Newton, probably the most revered scientist who ever lived.
This seventeenth century polymath, who has been called the English answer to Leonardo da Vinci, almost disappeared from history entirely after his death in 1703, as even the only known painting of him was unceremoniously destroyed. It took over two centuries for his reputation to recover and his myriad of accomplishments to be properly celebrated. He’s a cautionary tale for just how dangerous it can be to find yourself on the wrong side of history.”
“It may seem like common sense that you need to get your ideas out of your head to act on them, but how many of us walk around with an always-updating to-do list in our heads only to forget one of them later? One of the basic principles of GTD and many other productivity systems is that your first step is to get your ideas and to-dos out of your head and on paper or into some system as soon as possible so you have the clarity to actually work on them. “
Here’s an awesome video of Kristoff Krane playing in a record store for some people in San Diego. He’s a wonderful performer, apparently even when there’s only like 10 people watching:
“The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.“
The PhysOrg article mentions several statistics, I’d assume from the book, to support the hypothesis. It mentions “genocide deaths” (which was 14,000 times higher in 1942 than it was in 2008), “battle deaths” (which has dropped 1000X “over the centuries”), and even the number of democracies (from 20 in 1946 to 100-ish now). But these statistics don’t come without some obvious rebuttals.
First off, if we’re going to have a benchmark year for “genocidal deaths” I would think anytime between 1936 and 1942 would be a skewed benchmark due to what was happening in the world at the time. No? And I would wager that the “technological advancement” argument has or will be applied to Pinkman’s “battle death” statistics. With wealthier military forces opting for Drone strikes, precision bombing (“precision”…), etc. And then there’s more advanced techniques for insurgents also. I think it’s fairly easy and cheap now to create a high-powered IED or bomb than it used to be (not sure?). So my point is that war is less and less a face to face endeavor, the further our technology pushes. Sure, the side getting bombed isn’t dropping in number of casualties, but surely the ones on the offensive are putting less and less lives at risk.
Not that I’m trying to totally refute the books claims. Nor would I like to. I’d like to believe we’re becoming a more peaceful people. Maybe we are. But that might have more to do with circumstance than people themselves. Still though, it’s nice to see a little hope.
- Onto the geeky side of things. After years of poorly recieved and performing Punisher motion pictures, Marvel has opted for the television route with the character. Recently they announced that Fox will be producing a TV adaptation in which Frank Castle will be a young NYPD detective who, during his off-duty hours, moonlights as the justice seeking “Punisher”. This is all, all wrong. I’m all for revamping characters, I think a ton of them could use it, but this isn’t right.
I’m not sure why NO ONE has thought that updating the character for modern times wouldn’t work. What I mean is turning Frank back into his twenties, and having him return from multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq (originally it was the Vietnam War) to a family that no longer recognizes him, a job he no longer has, and a city full of desperate people in desperate times. In Jason Aaron’s PunisherMAX series, he recently had Castle imprisoned for killing a cop. In his world, the NYPD only barely tolerated Castle’s brutal antics, and once he crossed the line by killing a cop (albiet a corrupt one) that tolerability ceased. It’s been one of the more interesting twists to the the run. I suppose one could write in a similar theme to this show; with certain cops knowing about Castle’s vigilantism and turning a blind eye to it. But there’s an uneasiness between the NYPD and the Punisher in the book that is as key as his war against crime.
- I’m just now discovering The Philosopher’s Magazine, a wonderful site and mag based out of the UK that will talk interestingly on just about anything. Their “genre” under the archives tab labeled “Ideas Of The 21st Century“ is particularly of interest to me. There’s 50 of them, ranging from “The Equality of Intelligence” to “Saving a Child — Easily” to “Human Enhancement”. I’m going to go throw one on Facebook just in the vague hope that someone, somewhere will read one.
(This is the article I saw recently that introduced me to the site. It’s about how reported UFO sightings have drastically changed the speed of said UFO from decade to decade, generation to generation; the author examines why this is happening.)
- Really cool, mystical, other-worldly illustrations at Josh Courlas’ Tumblr. I’d recommend following him if you’ve got one. Example:
- I can’t stop listening to this song (it made me cry the first time I heard it):
Been playing around with Turntable.fm lately, a neat little idea that might turn into something big (or, like many things that deserve so much more, fall by the wayside). I suppose one would probably categorize under one these “social media” sites of sort. Users sign up, create an avatar of a character, then join “rooms” with rotating sets of DJs (5 maximum) to simply listen to the music they play. That, or you make a room and DJ yourself. Right now I’m “standing” in front of a stage of 5 DJs who are playing Electronica for me… umm, or us. Someone called “Propaghandi” just played a Electro’ed out Zelda theme song, which I enjoyed quite a bit. When you do enjoy something, you say so by clicking, and you’re avatar nods his/her head to the tune. You can also express dislike of a song. DJs earn “points” based on this system which allows them a few — albeit borderline meaningless — site perks.
It’s a decent idea. It is, at the very least, something to throw on the computer for a variety of radio-free tunes while doing other things.
Which is what I’m doing now.
(One gripe: when hosting a site specifically designed for music listening, DO NOT have an annoying beep sound every time someone enters text in the chat box. Seems a bit counter-productive.)
(OK, maybe two: I’m finding it hard to believe any of these people who have lots of “DJ Points” can actually do anything with a real set of turntables.)
