“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.
“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.”
“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.”
- Artists Ryan Ottley and James Harren have a Tumblr where they release non-comic pieces of art they’ve been conjuring up. There seems to be themes, too. Like the other week they called ‘Shadow Week’. The site is called “THEBOG“. James just posted this, as winter is not over yet:
- More comic stores are refusing to sellOrson Scott Card’s new Superman book on account of his straight-forward, clear stance on gay rights and indeed lesbians, gays, and bisexuals as people too. I love that Mark Millar came out and said something to the tune of, “that’s the thing about free speech, it isn’t always something you’re going to agree with. But that doesn’t mean you ban someone, you threaten their livelihood.” Actually Mark, that’s the thing about Free Speech, you can sell or not sell whatever products you choose as dependent upon however you feel about said products, production methods, or producers themselves. And while we’re at it, work on your dialogue please.
- Very interesting perspective here. Former ‘sex worker’, now journalist on what feminists get wrong when it comes to prostitution (from Guernica): WAGING WAR ON SEX WORKERS.
“I’ve been free in my writing to have that opinion. I’ve never been constrained by journalism in a formal way in which I have to hear both sides. I don’t even know who “both sides” would be on this issue. No, I’m not going to have a debate with you about how you feel about sex work. It has no impact on what happens tonight with the police in the streets. Our feelings alone don’t change what happens with the police, what happens in jail, what happens when someone tries to go to the welfare office, the unemployment office, or any kind of state agency where a criminal record comes up for prostitution. How we feel about the commodification of sexuality and violence doesn’t actually translate to those people’s lives. A lot of the debate is really academic and a waste of time.”
- The latest Watch Dogs video looks unbelievable. Too bad this is a PS4 game, cause I’ll probably wait to buy one of those ’til they go down in price. I still haven’t finished even 50% of Skyrim, and have Dishonored to get into. A new Playstation will guarantee one thing though, super outrageously cheap games on eBay and Craig’s List for the last system. Anyways, here’s that video:
- That Sioux Falls group Phantom Balance — I discussed them a couple posts ago — is releasing a new album called “Loser” tomorrow I believe. I’ll stream it here either tomorrow or later in the week.
- New How To Destory Angels (Trent Reznor’s latest band; his wife is the singer, and Atticus Ross co-producers/performs) is streaming. The new album is called “Welcome Oblivion” and will be released March 5th. 13 tracks at 65 minutes. On Columbia Records. Wikipedia’s labeling it as “post-industrial” and “electronica”.
“It started with an interesting disease, I guess. I started writing it in film school, which means I took eight years to write it, on and off. I was sick with the flu, and I had this fever dream. I was obsessing over the physical nature of my illness, and how I had something in my body that had come from someone else’s body, and how that was a weirdly intimate thing, if you think about it that way.
So afterwards, I was trying to think about a character who might see disease as an intimate thing. I thought a celebrity-obsessed fan might reasonably want Angelina Jolie’s cold as a way of feeling physically connected to her in some way. And then it developed into a metaphor, which I thought was an interesting way of discussing that culture.”
- Seriously, Lars von Trier’s newest film is called “Nymphomaniac“? I swear, that guy just lives to push people’s buttons. Which is awesome. I still haven’t seen “Antichrist”… and to be honest I’m a little frightened by the disturbing imagery within. I mean, I’m sure I wouldn’t be fainting or anything like that (as has been reported); but I’m not so sure about my psychological tolerance for self-mutilation of the worst kind. I did however really, really like “Melancholia”, part two of his “Depression Trilogy” (“Antichrist” being part one). Maybe I’ll give this new one a watch at some point.
- Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias posted an excellent little piece about why certain movies do better than others, the relationship between consuming fiction and our lives, and the status of known achievement:
“There’s an apt old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Which highlights the fact that while we like stories with drama, we don’t actually want drama in our lives. If you ignore the very end, and the fact that the characters are very high status artists, Amour is quite realistic and by far the drama most likely to actually be experienced by many of you. Which is why most folks don’t like it, because they don’t actually want to see realistic ordinary drama.
Amour is about a women who gets sick and then dies. I was stuck by the fact that what most bothered her and her husband were the insults to her pride. They could mostly handle the pain, the drudgery, and the loss of opportunity. But the loss of status, oh that stung.“
When I was in Chicago I went to the art institute with my wife, I didn’t go there the last time I was in the city. Anyways they had a special exhibit there featuring the work of one Steve McQueen. No, not that one. This McQueen is from London, now living in Amsterdam. He’s probably most famous for his second major film, Shame. The Michael Fassbender movie from 2011. He also won the Camera d’Or at Canne for his first feature film in 2008. But he’s been making art for a long time. He’s a film artist mostly. So much of the exhibit was reels played on loops. There were a couple different makeshift theaters constructed for some shorts. We watched chunks of two, and the entirety of another. He’s definitely got his own style, but it’s hard to describe. The page for his exhibit in Chicago reads:
Most of McQueen’s oeuvre—including his gallery-based installations as well as feature films—evidences a potent, at times oblique, political consciousness. Many works address specific social and historical moments in ways that seemingly emerge from documentary or journalistic impulses. Other films are more abstract, their meanings shaped by allegory or metaphor. McQueen always communicates directly to viewers through what one writer termed “the medium of aesthetic affect.”
When I looked further into him, I found he shot a feature this summer to be released in 2013 tackling slavery. The cast is unreal: Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Giamatti, Brad Pitt, Paul Dano, Chiwetel Ejiofor (Children of Men, Serenity, etc), and on and on. As hard as it may be to watch, the film reportedly will be hyper-realistic. Almost journalistic, like his shorts. Paul Giamatti spoke about the project with Collider, explaining that McQueen did not want to sugar coat it at all, that he wanted to present it as is. Very matter of factly. The movie is a true story, based on the memoirs of one Solomon Northup. A New York musician who is conned by a couple gentleman offering him a job playing fiddle, they then sold him into slavery. He was in the slave trade for 12 years before returning home, most of which was spent in Louisiana.
So ya know, all those people bitching about how Tarentino is just using the backdrop to tell a revenge spaghetti Western can go and see this movie this year too. There’s your art-house counter-part. The problem is I’m sure a lot of people will not. I think part of this is people look at Tarentino and for them he’s their artsy filmmaker. But that’s a problem. Cause he isn’t Michael Haneke, and Pulp Fiction is not The White Ribbon. So it’s a catch-22. Tarentino’s take on such a difficult part of our history isn’t examining things well enough for you, it’s just gun play and fake blood, but then again you also don’t watch real art-house, independent movies. That’s as oblique as it gets for you. Know what I’m saying?
- Hope you had a good first holiday. I will be in Chicago for New Year’s Eve, so this will likely be my last post until next week. 2013, damn I’m getting old.
- Wow… so it turns out Quentin Tarentino has similar taste to me! That makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Okay, I openly admit to not knowing who, much less seeing any of his flicks, William Witney is. Apparently he was a director who also worked at Republic Pictures with John Ford, and QT has quite an affinity for the guy. I watched Stagecoach in a film class once. And although I can respect certain scenes for plowing the way for action flicks (particularly the open range chase scene), I really found the entire thing lacking when sandwiched between movies like M or Rules of the Game. Not to be a dick or a snob about it or anything, but like it’s just an action movie from 1939. A damn good action, but still. Nothing more, nothing less. So I’ve always sort of thought John Ford wasn’t as greats as THE greats. Even Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance… they’re just sorta boring.
I thought I was on my own… the “John Ford is just an early version of Gore Verbinski” theory. In a recent interview Tarentino talked about American Western movies (as Django Unchained is modeled off of non-American Westerns, particularly Spaghettis) for TheRoot. In it he talks about how Whitney is one of his American Western heroes, and how John Ford is a racist pile of shit. And here I thought I was the only one, silly me.
- Speaking of The Root, they’ve got an impartial and practical article up right now in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings, and the media’s coverage of the event and what to do about it. Mental health in schools being the major focus.
- I’m loving the Saga #8 cover. It speaks volumes about the character. Saga is easily one of the best new comics of the last few years. Out of all the comics I read — a large variety — Saga is one of the books I consistently look forward to.
“For many years, I have been writing and following resistance movements and the new economic policy. I’ve always found that the chances of coming upon despair are much greater in middle-class households, than on the ground where people are actually fighting. Middle-class people have the choice between hope and despair, just like they have the choice between shampoo for dry hair and oily hair; they have the choice between doing politics and interior design. People who are fighting don’t have a choice; they are fighting and they are focused and they know what they are doing. They are arguing with each other a lot, of course, but that’s all right.”
- I feel really bad for bands/musicians that put out records in December: chances are they’ll be left off any year end “Best Of” lists simply for when their record was released. And, as we know, this is not always their choice. It really is getting absurd how quickly everyone releases their year end lists. It’s like December 1st hits, and all of a sudden it’s legit. Have at it. When really, if you think about a “Best of the Year” list, they shouldn’t even really be coming out until January of the following year.
“One of the great challenges we face as a nation is how we preserve the realm of privacy from government intrusion in the modern age, when so much of what we do in private is recorded by virtue of the phones we carry, the emails we send, the credit card transactions we engage in, the computers we use. How do you preserve this value that is absolutely critical to a liberal democracy when technology has made it easier and cheaper for the government to monitor our every move?“
- The new WTF with Marc Maron Podcastis just spectacular. It is episode 336, in which Maron interviews the infamous filmmaker Todd Solondz. Solondz’s latest film is called Dark Horse. The film is discussed extensively along with Solondz’s career and upbringing, how the former employs the latter. It’s really interesting to hear an extensive interview with the man (even though for a WTF interview it’s a bit short), I don’t know if I’ve heard him speak for more than a few minutes before. Marc Maron is spot on as always, asking just the right questions you’d like to hear the answers to while simultaneously maintaining humor and intelligence and that everyman quality.
- I’m seeing The Hold Steady Saturday and have been looking up videos of them from 2012 this morning. Here’s a good one from “Rock The Garden” (especially cause a lot of these landmarks are a stone’s throw away from where they’re performing):
- Art Under Austerityis a very interesting look at current austerity measures in Spain, as viewed from the scope of where the country has been and is going.
These unexpected points of contact between extremes in a famously polarized country suggest a growing post-ideological unanimity, unprecedented and still unfathomable. The wide social and generational range of those who have come out to march against a Europe ruled by Big Finance, and for a new Constituent Assembly in Spain, reflects the creep of an almost revolutionary radicalism. Even a pair of policemen assured me that 90 percent of the force, as “individuals in society,” would willingly have joined the “Surround Congress” demonstration last September. Until now there have been no counter-demonstrations by right-wing ultras, and not a glimmer of Greece’s party Golden Dawn.
Several months later I received a postcard in the mail, a slightly tattered 4×6 of Dodger Stadium, with Los Angeles smeared across the top in imposing red capitals and a smoggy scattered skyline in the background. By this time I had all but forgotten my letter. I didn’t know anyone in LA, but figured a friend was traveling and decided to drop a line, so I lowered my eyes past the rows of neatly lined and evenly spaced blue ink print to the signature, which was illegible, next to an adumbrated smiley face.
- 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.
“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:
