- 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.”
“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.“
- 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.
“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.”
- 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.
“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.”
“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.”
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staple’s space opera/love story has been consistently good since it’s debut last Spring on Image Comics. And it isn’t just me saying this: all over the net and in stores across the country people who have been entrenched in comics their entire lives are saying the same thing. What makes it so good? It delivers on everything only comics can do (unique, high-concept, bizarre), whilst also delivering everything a good novel or film does (beautiful, hopeful, funny, witty, with healthy helpings of heart). In this issue a character who has been mentioned before makes her proper debut appearance and definitely throws another piece into the puzzle, as she is someone with a personal connection to the new family that everyone is after. Upon second reading I’m seeing some parallels between this new, pseudo family in the corridors of The Will’s ship and the title family. And I’m starting to feel like I know Gwendolyn and Will as well as I do the main characters. Both are written and drawn with care, and definitely not painted as “bad guys”. They are real people, each with something that’s driving their hearts and actions. Staples draws brilliant expressions and gestures. She’s one of those artists that is neither highly stylized or highly detailed, just spot on. Whether it’s action or subtle conversation she’ll get the proportions and angles perfect. And Vaughan is of course a wonderful craftsman of character. Everything in this book breathes. Anyone who’s into comics even just a little owes it to themselves to at least give SAGA a try.
- NEW AVENGERS #2
While the lineup of Jonathan Hickman’s other — more popular — Avengers book just continues to expand, New Avengers is taking the opposite path, focusing solely on a very select few of the best minds of the Marvel Universe to tackle massive, mind-bending problems that have no easy solution. What’s happening in the pages of this book (only 2 issues in, mind you) is the reuniting of the think-tank type organization known as ‘The Illuminati‘: Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Namor, Black Bolt, Dr. Strange, a dead Charles Xavier, and Black Panther. The first issue saw a mysterious and other-worldly figure show up in Wakanda (Black Panther’s home country in Africa), to announce the destruction of Earth a result of a collision with another planet looming in the sky. What’s going on here is somewhat explained in the pages of this issue, though not entirely because even this team of geniuses does not understand this fully. Hickman uses his design skills (if he isn’t making money off of side graphics design gigs he should be) to present the high concept through the eyes of Reed. It’s heavy stuff, but the chart (for lack of a better word) Reed uses spells it out plainly. The team makes a decision to — if it comes to this — destroy another planet to save their own, at the behest of some of the more honorable and/or idealistic characters like Cap and Black Panther. It’s an interesting moral dilemma, and I’d like to see more of this type of conversation from this book. So far and for the immediate future it’s drawn by Steve Epting who does amazing work all the time. I still remember the days of Warren Ellis’ Thunderbolts and just being blown away by Epting’s work. I typically don’t read big superhero stuff like this, but I am very excited to see where this goes.
- THE MASSIVE #8
The Massive is easily the most plausible and realistic of these three books I’m writing about today, and I can’t stress enough how smart it is in the context of the World we live in now. When baby-boomers tell me that they haven’t seen such uneasiness and unrest in the world in their lifetimes (including the 60s) that they’re seeing now, I know that there’s something special going on with the human race. It isn’t good or bad, it’s beyond those terms. It’s beyond all previous applications of what we thought we knew. Transitional phase. The Massive takes these gigantic problems we face and cranks them forwards until they’ve snapped, and now the world is on full-on reset mode. Culturally, geographically, morally. And the organization known as “Ninth Wave” — who had in 2004 blockaded a gulf with their sister ships to protest one of the big energy companies, to give you an idea of what they do — is struggling to find their place in the new world that has emerged from the rubble of the old one. The current arc, this is part 2 of 3, sees the crew stumbling upon an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where an ex-terrorist has supposedly found a new purpose and creating a thriving community on the decks of said rig. While they’re anchored a storm hits, and the entire rig gets put on lockdown. In this issue we really get to see new sides of the crew of Ninth Wave, beyond its leader Cal and his right hand (trigger) man Mag. Each of them have their own ideas of what their purpose is in a post-Crash society, and that is highlighted here. It’s looking as if this arc will usher in a change in the organization, for good or bad.
- Alfonso Cuaron‘s first film since 2006′s brilliant Children of Men has finally set a release date: October 4th, 2013. While this may seem like eons away it really isn’t too far to go considering it’ll have been seven years since “Children”. The movie stars Clooney and Sandra Bullock as astronauts attempting to return to Earth. I’m a sucker for high concept, intelligent sci-fi flicks, so I’m counting this as one of my most anticipated releases of the year. Not to mention Cuaron’s spectacular direction… he’s certainly got an eye for it. The movie is called Gravity.
- Similarly, Shane Caruth‘s first film since the brilliant Primer (2004) is also set for release this year, it’s called Upstream Color. Primer is confusing, no doubt, but it’s one of the best science fiction films of the 2000s and one of the best time travel films of all time. And — it could be argued — the complexities of the film serve a purpose, in putting the viewer in the shoes of the characters. Synopses for “Upstream” have been vague to say the least. The IMDB description reads: “A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.“ The obvious wrench in there is “ageless organism”. Hmm.
- In 1926 William Douglas Burden, of the American Museum of Natural History, set out with a hunter, a herpetologist, a cameraman, and his wife to capture giant dragons they’d only heard about. Turned out they were actually Komodo dragons. No one had seen them in the Western world though, they were only a legend. Besides bringing back footage to New York, the group also brought back several Komodo’s, some dead… some living. This was the inspiration for King Kong.
- OK, What Should We Make of Benghazi? by Thomas E. Ricks. Ricks is a pretty brilliant Foreign Policy journalist, he knows his stuff. This article is filled with close calls, including one from an ambassadors mouth in 2011 Syria. Here’s a standout paragraph:
Surprisingly few of Crocker’s PRTs were killed in Iraq, primarily due to the robust US military presence there. But that is seldom the case in most unstable areas where US engagement is essential. From 1968 to 1979, a US Ambassador was killed in office on the average of one every two years, so its is not just about “our times.”
A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein’s law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.
- Wally Pfister — the regular cinematographer for Chris Nolan – is working on his directorial debut. Supposedly it’ll be some sort of plausible science fiction type deal, reportedly titled “Transcendence”. Johnny Depp will be playing the lead. Christopher Waltz will likely get a supporting role. Naomi Repace will likely be getting a supporting role. These are all good things. Oh, also at the link he’s ragging on the framing of many of the shots in Avengers. Which on its own is interesting to read about (coming from a cinematographer); I had noticed some of the crooked angles for no reason upon first viewing, not sure if that’s Whedon or his DP.
The Orionid meteor shower — one of the year’s most spectacular natural light shows — is upon us. This weekend, Earth will plow through a dense stream of celestial debris given off by Halley’s Comet. These fragments of Halley will collide with the planet’s atmosphere at speeds approaching 150,000 miles per hour, setting the night ablaze as they streak and explode across the pre-dawn skies of Saturday, October 20th and Sunday, October 21st.
“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:
Our attention isn’t boundless. Our time is finite—even as we try to extract value out of every second (we don’t have time to waste). We cannot respond to every utterance, click on every link, read every post. We have to choose even as the possibility of something else, something wonderful, lures us to search and linger. Demands on our attention, injunctions for us to communicate, participate, share—ever shriller and more intense—are like so many speed-ups on the production line, attempts to extract from us whatever bit of mindshare is left.
- The newest music on my family’s label (Black Lantern Music) is from a guy called SJ Mellia. Here’s a little taste off the album:
- The candidaite in Maine who likes World of Warcraft… yeah, apparently she’s getting attacked for it. The Maine GOP party has written: “In Colleen’s online fantasy world, she gets away with crude, vicious and violent comments like the ones below. Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world”. This is a new level of stupidity and uselessness.
- Nazi Buddha ‘Came From Outer Space’. Which isn’t the official title I guess; it’s just the one to get you to click on the link. It works. Turns out this ancient Buddha statue, discovered in the 1930′s via a Nazi organized archeological dig, was carved some 1000 years ago out of a meteorite that crashed to the Earth’s surface some 15,000 years ago. This has Indiana Jones written all over it.
Also from the BBC:
- Hubble Telescope Captures One of the Most Extraordinary Views of Universe to Date. The image comes from a result of astronomers pointing the Hubble towards a very specific patch of sky for around 22 days. Letting in 500-ish hours of light to the scope. It captured around 5,500 separate galaxies, including the farthest it saw, UDFy-38135539. Just to give you an idea, that galaxy is over 13 BILLION light years away. Which is of course so mind-blowing it is almost incomprehensible…
- Hey I made a new remix! It got a little dark… yeeeaaaahhh sorry about that:
Just to give you an idea of how different it is, here’s the original:
- Mikey Mictlan of Doomtree has a new album out. And he’s offering it up for FREE (but give him a few bucks, eh):
