Decline of War (smiley face emoticon).

-  On Thanksgiving I wrote quite a long piece about the infamous comic strip “Huxley was right; Orwell was wrong”.  It very poorly tied the idea that Huxley was right to Black Friday now spilling over into Thanksgiving now, the day of the year we’re supposed to be thankful for what we have.  The only day of the year in this country where we aren’t supposed to be consumers.  It also compared and contrasted 21st Century living to what Brave New World and 1984 predicted would happen to our societies.  I wrote it, edited it, and published it.  For some reason the published version wiped about 3/4 of the thing clean.  Probably a good thing as it was terribly written.

-  The Atlantic: “With 35MM Film Dead, Will Classic Movies Ever Look The Same Again?“.  It’s a depressing question with probably a more depressing answer.

“In June, director Martin Scorsese tried to show his 1993 film The Age of Innocence at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s editor for the past 40 years and a three-time Oscar winner, called Grover Crisp, the senior VP of asset management at Sony, for a 35mm print. But Sony not only didn’t have a print, it couldn’t even make one.

“He told me that they can’t print it anymore because Technicolor in Los Angeles no longer prints film,” Schoonmaker recalled. “Which means a film we made 20 years ago can no longer be printed, unless we move it to another lab—one of the few labs still making prints.”

-  A swath of Nordic countries (all of them?) are telling Facebook to stop unsolicited advertising of users in their countries or face legal action.  Good for them.  Not only did they cite the current EU on “privacy and electronic communication” in their threat, they also are looking into amending the law to uniquely tackle the topic.  “It is prohibited to send electronic advertisements to consumers who haven’t given their consent, either by email or SMS… We think that some of the advertising that Facebook calls ‘sponsored stories’ is beginning to look like unsolicited electronic messages.”

-  The Independent: “The Future of War Is Looking Bleak“.  What a spectacular title for a news article!  Now we’re talking!  Havard Hegre, a professor  at the University of Oslo, developed a model for predicting future events and trends on a global scale this past year, his work has just been published.  In it Hegre discovered that the amount of “wars” (defined as a conflict between countries in which at least 25 people die) has dropped dramatically in recent history, and the extended model shows a continuation of decline in the next 40 years.  “War has become less acceptable,” Hegre said,  “just like duelling, torture and the death penalty.”

-  Sonny

Neuroposter Mask.

-  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?]

Brendon over at BleedingCool seems to think he’s courting Hamill and Fisher about being in them… this sounds risky.

-  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):

-  A Rioter’s Prayer: Pussy Riot’s Yekaterina Samutsevich on protest, art, and freedom.

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.

-  Chuck Klosterman on why Fantasy Football is bad for the game (and your mental health) over at Grantland.

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.

-Sonny

The Spectacle of TX.

-  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.)

Oh, and he’s also begun work on his next novel.

-  Well this is excellent news too:  Joss Whedon is returning to direct Avengers 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.

-Sonny

 

 

Boming The Data Dimension.

Quick link dump.

-  FutureEverything: The Data Dimension.

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.

-  Operation Plowshare: The Plan to Bomb America With Kindness.

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.”

-  Moon Formation: Was it a hit and run accident?

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.

-  Hacking The Future of the Book Industry.

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.

-Sonny

Black Widow Quiet Comes.

-  Gimme Noise has just posted a list of 50 “fun things to do” in Minnesota, my home state.  I’m sure your state is neat and unique, but mine is pretty cool.

-  New Com Truise is streaming at Stereogum.  Beautiful, ambient, dancey stuff.  The album came out yesterday, it is called “In Decay”.

-  Exhibit A of why Image Comics can compete with the “big 2″ year-in/year-out: people who don’t normally read comics don’t give a shit about the big new “event” crossover comic, but they are interested in things like Saga and Fatale.  Things that are familiar in a way, and relatable, yet wholly foreign and bizarre at the same time.

“Part of what we do is make good comics, and we want to be the best version of Image Comics. But part of what we do is create a sustainable market. It has to be a part of what we do. Things like Saga and Walking Dead and Fatale, these are things that people want to return to. People can recommend these things to their friends, even people that don’t read comics. As opposed to tailchasing events, these yearly spike makers, but who’s going to be talking about AvX ten years from now.”

-  Jon Morris re-imagining classic pulp novel covers with Marvel characters (speaking of Marvel).

-  New Flying Lotus has been announced.  The album is called “Until The Quiet Comes” and will be out via Warp Records October 2nd.  Damn, this is a good year for me in terms of music releases.  This is the cover:

Track listing:
1. All In
2. Getting There feat. Niki Randa
3. Until the Colours Come
4. Heave(n)
5. Tiny Tortures
6. All the Secrets
7. Sultan’s Request
8. Putty Boy Strut
9. See Thru to U feat. Erykah Badu
10. Until the Quiet Comes
11. DMT Song feat. Thundercat
12. The Nightcaller
13. Only if You Wanna
14. Electric Candyman feat. Thom Yorke
15. Hunger feat. Niki Randa
16. Phantasm feat. Laura Darlington
17. me Yesterday//Corded
18. Dream to Me

-Sonny

House of Multiplayer.

-  I’m giving the new Aesop Rock my first listen.  Will probably give it a full post tomorrow.  So far AM DIGGING.

-  Videogame Industry expert Michael Pachter is claiming that the biggest threat to the industry is multiplayer gaming.  Anyone who spends time figuring out how to get more money out of people I’m not really a fan of (“Pachter also blasted free-to-play business models and Nintendo, and praised “ripping gamers off”), but the guy is completely spot on.  People get addicted to those games, they spend about 10 times more hours on Call Of Duty than they do on Arkham City.  That’s not my statistic.  Which is great if you’re Activision… but not if you’re a different publisher pouring more money and time and work into your product, and trying to sell that to someone addicted to an Activision game that never ends.

-  A UK judge is ruling that the Samsung Galaxy tablet does not infringe on Apple because it’s “not as cool”.  This is funny for lots of different reasons.

-  Last night Charlie Rose had Brian Greene and Michael Tuts — both from Columbia — on his program to discuss the discovery of Higgs Boson and to talk about the the future of physics research.  It was super, super interesting.  Even if a lot of it goes over your head, I suggest giving it a try.  Here’s THE LINK.

-  Once upon a time Woody Guthrie — American folk hero — wrote a novel that never got published.  It is called “House of Earth”.  Now, thanks to Johnny Depp and Douglas Brinkley, it will finally see the light of day.

House of Earth is Guthrie’s only “fully realised” novel, they said, influenced by his experiences in America’s Dust Bowl, as well as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Tracing the story of Tike and Ella May Hamlin, “hardscrabble farmers” in Texas, it is a “searing portrait of the Panhandle and its marginalised Great Depression residents”. Despite a slightly esoteric focus on the importance of adobe housing, House of Earth also includes graphic sex, including “a scorching lovemaking scene on a hay bale”.

-  The Guardian asks: Why are we so happy to be entertained by movie remakes?  Is our thirst for familiar stories growing, or are fresh ideas simply drying up?

-Sonny

Architectural Strokes, American Classic.

-  “Wet Strokes” by Kynd (yes, that’s an alias) redefines what visual art can be by showing the process of painting, not the finished product only:

-  Love, Actually at Guernica by Eva Illouz argues that love in the modern sense is based very much so on social structures and tropes, particularly validation and insecurity in the social sense.

“The notions of “validation” and “insecurity” do not appear in the vocabulary of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century accounts of romantic love and constitute a new terminology and a decisively new way to conceive of the love experience. In fact, the notion of “insecurity” has become so central to contemporary notions of love (and of much contemporary advice on love and dating) that it compels us to inquire about its meaning.

Such psychological description contains and addresses features of our social world. What in common psychological language is called “insecurity” points to two sociological facts: (a) that our worth and value are not prior to interactions and are not a priori established, but are in need of being ongoingly shaped and affirmed; and (b) that it is our performance in a relationship that will establish this worth. To be insecure means to feel uncertain about one’s worth, to be unable to secure it on one’s own, and to have to depend on others in order to secure it. One of the fundamental changes in modernity has to do with the fact that social worth is performatively established in social relationships.“

-  The final issue of Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera comic series Scalped is finished and will ship at the end of the month.  Sad but exciting news for me.  I’ve been reading this comic since its inception; it’s one of the most unique crime stories I’ve experienced, in any medium.  There have been rumors of — what with the uber-success of Walking Dead on AMC — that Aaron’s already been called by Showtime or HBO or AMC to discuss a possible adaptation of the story into TV form.  This guy seems to want that:

“It’s exceptionally rich, unbelievably dark, socially relevant, bleakly humorous and extraordinary. The Walking Dead — which I also love, as a comic and a TV show — is Law & Order. At the risk of repetition, Scalped is The Wire. (Yes, yes, Scalped and Walking Dead are two different genres, arbitrarily linked because they’re both comics. But that’s all producers care about anyway when they’re pitching, so let’s be results-oriented, yeah?)“

It would work so well.  But the content almost predisposes it to HBO or Showtime.

Here’s another guy taking an academic lens to the series, and also calling it “the best comic in the world”.  I’ll miss it.  I’ll be sure to review it when I get my copy from my LCS.

-  Walking Tour of Helsinki’s Architecture at Guardian.co.uk.  Helsinki is known for having some of the world’s most beautiful and unique architecture.  This year is apparently it’s 200th anniversary of being the capital of Finland.  Anyways, they take their design so seriously over there, that they’ve created a government agency (SITRA) to shape the style of the city’s design.  Fuckin’ commies!!

Oh, and there’s also a band from Australia called Architecture In Helsinki.  They’re pretty good too, though their instrumental stuff is better than anything with singing.

-  With the release of several official stills from Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming adaptation of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” many people, at least that I’ve seen, have been showing their contempt for the book.  Which I really do not understand.  The idea that — used in bit/joke material by the late Andy Kaufman — the novel IS the definition of a long-form, out of date, snooze fest seems to be almost self-perpetuating.  Something that’s been going on for so long now that people believe it without have ever even sat down with the novel itself for more than a few minutes.  By the Wikipedia count (so this could be the first edition perhaps?) the book clocks in at 218 pages.  Hardly The Brothers Karamozov, or to be modern about it, Infinite Jest.  The novel also culminates in a murder, hardly “boring” by my standards.  But of course the greatest thing about the novel is it’s satirization and depiction of American greed, high-society, and morals and values.

“The enduring appeal of Fitzgerald’s third novel, as with many great novels, is partly dependent on a benign misinterpretation on the part of readers, a surrender to fascination with wealth and glamour, and the riotous frivolity of the jazz age. Fitzgerald was by no means an uncritical observer, as some have suggested; the most villainous of these characters are the wealthiest, and Nick Carraway is something of a middle-class prig, who, much as he tries to reserve judgment, is ultimately sickened by all the profligacy and the empty social rituals of his summer among the wealthy of Long Island.“

That was a quote from Jay McInerney’s article from the weekend, delving into WHY “The Great Gatsby” is so damn good.  And why, as brilliant art usually does, it is so misunderstood.

-Sonny

 

 

2012 Here We Come.

-  I have just sent high(er) quality MP3s to the boss over at Black Lantern Music.  Still hoping I can find someone to do physicals with it.  The album is done.  It’s called “The Parallel”, for several reasons.  You know, for being knee deep in the Great Depression in the 1930′s, we certainly accomplished quite a bit.  Here’s a short list of things we invented in the 30s:  scotch tape, the frozen food process, the jet engine, the electron microscope, the drive-in movie, the tape recorder, radar, canned beer, the helicopter.  What else?  We built the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building.  New forms of artistic expression emerged like Expressionism, Surrealism, and Realism.  Now, the idea was that tough times actually result in massive increases of creativity.  Ask any CEO of a company, they’ll tell you the same thing.  So “The Parallel” not only refers to the idea that we’re going through the same things as we did in the 30s (so why can’t we go out and invent new things, build new buildings, express ourselves with new artforms?), it also refers to my creative process stemming out of tougher times.  Plus, when I was researching the 1930s for this project I read through a lot of Dos Passos, particularly The 42nd Parallel.  I sat with that book for hours upon hours.  So the title is also a reference to that 30s novel.  Suffice it to say I’m very excited about the whole thing.  I’ve also written a flash-fiction companion piece which embeds the song titles into the “story”.  More on that to come.

-  Holy shit 2012 sounds straight outta some science fiction.  It doesn’t feel right, does it?  The great Paul Sizer created quite the rallying cry for humanity with this poster he made for the New Year:

“2012: SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED”

-  There were several albums I thought were going to come out in 2011, so here’s to a better year in music than the last!  I suppose I should, like every other blogger on the planet, release my “2011 yearinmusicaaaaaggggh” list.  And I probably will, at some point soon.  Lots of critics are saying how boring of a year it was because nothing really dominated “Best” lists, I find that to be a lot more interesting than the other way round.  And what’s up with everyone and their brother putting that Bon Iver record in their top 5 or 3??  It was okay I guess, but then I saw Justin Vernon and his band on The Colbert Report and good God I would never pay money to see that.  I mean, I know it’s hard to sing that falsetto in key without multiple takes, but still.

-Sonny

Exegesis of PKD.

Sitting under my laptop right now lies a brand new copy of the daunting Philip K. Dick manuscript “Exegesis”.  Comprised of piles upon piles of both handwritten and typed notes, journals, philosophical wanderings, and the plain weird… the collection was an attempt by Dick to pull some sort of context or meaning out of a bizarre series of events he refers to as “2-3-74″ (or: February and March of the year 1974).  The introduction alone is fascinating.

Now, the precursor to these events — arguably — was the break in he encountered a few years prior.  Dick came home one day to a front door that had been bashed in, and an exploded safe with valuable — and personal — papers stolen.  He apparently ran through a whole slew of suspects in his head, never finding out who broke in… or why.  Like many of the significant events that came to shape Dick’s life (the infant death of his twin sister one of the best and most glaring examples), the break in somehow led to the next series of events, the next chapter, of Dick’s life with remarkable and strange significance.

That next chapter — the “2-3-74″ chapter — was very strange indeed.  It started with a delivery woman, of all things.  She had knocked on his front door to give him his prescribed medication after getting his wisdom teeth removed.  During the interaction a pendent she was wearing around her neck jumped out at him: the Ichthus symbol, the “Jesus fish”.  In that instant Dick had some sort of revelation that I still cannot wrap my head around.  No matter how much I read about it or imagine it I still can’t wrap my head around it.  I’m assuming my moments of clairvoyance — the few I’ve had… Ha — cannot match such a brain as Dick’s moments, but that’s as close as I’ll get to understanding it.

In the ballpark of a week later Dick saw what he describes as a pink beam of light, which he would apparently see again.  And again.  The light communicated with him. This would influence his later works like VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.  There were other episodes of revelation for Dick in these months, a whole slew of coincidence or divine intervention or a bit of both.  At one point a panic attack stuck him about his son, he begged and pleaded with his wife that they take him to the hospital, his wife thought he was hysterical.  As it turned out, his son was diagnosed after they brought him in with some form of rare (blood, I believe?) disease.

There were many more happenings I’m failing to mention here, there may have even been some he didn’t write down for all we know.  Reading through the first few pages last night, it’s really hard not to get a few things out of it: Dick was — pure and simple — an unadulterated genius, and… several, if not many, of these pages and experiences point towards a whole slew of mental disorders.  The editors of the Exegesis mention this also, that Dick shows signs of bipolar disorder, among other conditions.  But good God, the man’s letters to friends alone are the stuff of brilliance.  They’re these beautifully elegant, patient, yet humble letters where he’s writing to close friends about the things he’s going through in his life, essentially.  Except he’s applying a philosophical context to everything, everything, that happens to him.

It really makes one think that everyone should be doing this with their lives.  Writing down their experiences and analyzing them… both for their own sakes and the sake of the rest of the world.  If such notes and journals can be so illuminating — on the nature of reality, God, culture, and more — from one person (albeit a brilliant person), then I’ve got to imagine a billion would only be that much more illuminating.

I think I’ll start soon.

-Sonny

Dos Passos and Today.

I was paging through some John Dos Passos at the library today and noticed some lines that eerily apply to today’s cultural environment.  It’s astonishing:

“It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.”

“I make the prediction that unless those in charge and in whose hands legislation is reposed do not change the present system of inequality, there will be a bloody revolution in less than a quarter of a century in this great country of ours.”

“Law-Hating Gatherings not to be allowed in critical time threatening social upheaval.”

“Bankers Hail Era of Expansion”

“These are men for whom the rabid lawlessness, anarchistic element of society in this country has been laboring over since sentence was imposed, and of late they have been augmented by many good law abiding citizens who have been misled by the subtle arguments of those propagandists.”

-Sonny