“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.”
- Julian Assange hiding out in Ecuador comes close to defining irony; here’s an article from February of just this year titled, “Ecuador’s [President] Under Fire for Media Laws”, which goes on to say, “President Rafael Correa of Ecuador is leading a relentless campaign against free speech” and “the most comprehensive and ruthless assault on free media under way in the Western Hemisphere”. Nevermind, it defines irony.
- One gripe I have with current state critically acclaimed music is that a disproportionate amount of it is infinitely happy. I’m happy sometimes too. It’s good to be alive. But far too many bands are failing to explore the darker sides of music (some of these band’s lyrics get dark, I guess). It’d be very interesting to somehow take all the acclaimed albums of the last two years and compare the amount of minor-key’d songs to that of years past. A lot of it is major keys, with very consonant, resonant melodies and hooks. In previous decades/cultural trends this has been the aim of Top 40/Pop music, not independent and/or acclaimed music. And considering the uncertain atmosphere that seems to be leaking into almost every aspect of our lives on a global scale, one would think it’d be the opposite. What’s probably really going on here is bands/musicians/possibly artists are overcompensating for this, and using their output to cope with all the unrest. But for me, it just doesn’t seem honest a lot of times. And even when it does feel honest, it is not for me.
I tried Googling this, to see if anyone else what noticing or writing about this… I found nothing.
She was also intrigued to discover that Hopper, who is regarded as a realist and who painted the houses in Gloucester with great precision, manipulated one important aspect of what he saw. “He changed the light and shadows in his pictures a lot and combined different times of day so that the shadow might go in two directions – that’s how he created his narrative, his drama.” Albert Halaban responded to this by taking a more painterly approach to her photographs and manipulating the light as Hopper had done in the 1920s. “The houses that he painted remain, but the narratives he created only exist on his canvases. Standing in the same places, I was inspired to take my own liberties and create narratives that are my own.”
- Francsesco Francavilla has been doing minimalist Breaking Bad posters for each episode throughout July. I’m hoping he’ll eventually do the entire series. Here’s an example:
- Economist Dambiso Moyo explains how to close the resources gap with China, and how they’re quietly and very successfully buying up land all over the world to extract exotic minerals and other natural resources:
“Even if all nations were to engage in multilateral discussions about resources, the world would still face the core problem–too little supply for too much demand. Aggressive government meddling in commodity markets (such as banning commodity speculators) has, on balance, tended to do more harm than good. Policies aiming to curb demand, such as higher taxes on consumption, are possible but remain politically unpalatable in a world dedicated to possessing ever-more material goods and a higher standard of living. A few supply-side policies show more promise. These include eliminating inefficient food subsidies and discouraging food waste, encouraging the recycling of metals, and investing in research and development for alternatives or solutions to resource scarcity.”
The decades since the ’30s and ’40s have witnessed considerable broadening of the superhero’s narrative and thematic ambition, an evolution (some would say cynical decline) that accelerated with the mid-’80s arrival of the glibly monikered Dark Age. Inspired by pop-culture touchstones like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, the new strain of superhero comics attempted to incorporate greater psychological depth, artistic experimentation and gritty atmospherics, launching a bevy of condescending “Biff, Pow: Comics Have Grown Up!” headlines that continue to this day.
These aspirations were regularly confused by over-zealous creators with an open license to escalate violence and sexual content, but often enough, the writers and artists succeeded in taking the genre to new places. These were not happy destinations, rife as they were with anti-heroes and psychopaths feeding off each other’s pathologies. The defining quality of the deconstructive new tales was a readiness to say uncomfortable things about the sort of person who might actually be inclined to put on an outlandish costume and run around attacking sociopaths. In short, it was no longer possible to generalize about the basically hopeful nature of superheroes.
Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them. Especially if the picture is very beautiful or very sexy or just really weird, if it has some surreal element in it. It makes people do a double take and then, if they’re looking at the picture, maybe they’ll read the text under it that says, “Come to Union Square, For Anti-War Meeting Friday.” I’ve been operating that way ever since—that art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself. In art school we’re always taught that art is an end in itself—art for art’s sake, expressing yourself, and that that’s enough.
- There’s more to the recent scientific finding that music has become less original and louder over the years. In terms of volume, we’re using significantly better tech to both create and consume music. It’s hard to drive a V-10 at only 40 MPH when you know that’s only a quarter of its power. Know what I’m saying? Then there’s a cultural aspect to everything being louder (literally and figuratively) now: to block out the world with headphones nowadays requires more volume in a city than it probably did in 1952. And in terms of notation… well that is easily debunked. Or questioned, at the very least. Obviously as time goes on and on more and more musicians have to use the same chord progressions and melodies and structures. There is only so many keys to use. And within that limited number of keys there’s only so many ways to rearrange chords. And within those structures there’s only a percentage of them that are consonant (a fancy musical term for “feels good on the ears”). Clearly scientists, not musicians, did this research.
- So I’ve been working very hard an album that I’m hoping to get out before I spend 3 weeks in Europe. It’s been going great; all weekend the material and ideas and notes just rolled out of me on their own. It didn’t even feel like I was manifesting all this… it just came out. And I’m getting addicted to it (not like I already wasn’t). So after spending pretty much all year without too long of absences — or posting every single day — this place has been, and will continue to be, sporadic at best. Not that it’s a big deal at all. I’m not shattering worldviews here, just sharing things I like. That being said, let’s get going.
- ARTIST OF THE DAY is absolutely Dan Quintana. Dan is one of many artists out there boldly dragging surrealism into the 21st Century, though he stands out among them. His work feels a little Francis Bacon-esque: the existentialism, the religious imagery, the filth. I’m not sure how he makes his pieces, but they seemingly use multiple forms of media. This could be a case where it’s a ruse, he JUST painting… but often times computer generated looking numerals will appear or photo realistic faces or the like.
Anyways, check out his Tumblr. He’s good. He’s an example:
- I think it’s hilarious that a bunch of God-fearing zealots are using the recent news of Higgs boson discoveries to prove that God exists. Higgs boson, which you probably know if you’re reading this, is also referred to as the “God particle”. It was dubbed that because it is so sub-atomic that it’s nearly impossible to prove of it’s existence. And I’m not even an atheist. Some of the comments sections on many of these articles must be out-of-this-world…
- More augmented reality news. This time relating to a mobile application that has just hit android devices.
““No network required,” reads the promotion. “Results appear immediately on your video screen when you need it, anywhere in the world.”
Word Lens uses text recognition to work out what the word or phrase is, and automatic-translation software translates it into the new language. The translation is then pasted over the original location. “An optical character recognition engine works with the in-built real time translator to translate foreign phrases for you. The converted text is then displayed on the screen of the smart phone.”“
- Relatedly, Warren Ellis hits it on the head by saying that by wearing contacts or eye-glasses you’re augmenting reality. The future is happening everywhere all the time, in every era:
- NPR is streaming the new Baroness record right now in its entirety. Baroness is one of my favorite heavy bands (for lack of a better term) of the last 10 years. There is no guitar duo creating sound today that gets a warmer tone than these guys. Great, great work. And their songs are so all over the map it’s hard to categorize them, though “Metal” instantly springs to mind.
“It seems obligatory for a band that wants to move forward to try to do things that seem impossible and seem way out there, because that’s going to be where you define yourselves,” Baizley says. “And that’s how you’re going to make steps forward, is by doing things that feel a little exposed and feel a little uncomfortable at first. That’s personal music. That’s where the heartbeat of this band lies. We can do something this year that we were completely incapable of doing last year. Once we’ve done this and it becomes a part of what we do, then we’re just going to look for something else. Music — it’s a super-broad thing. We are all individuals, so we’ve got broad tastes. It’s a disservice to the band, it’s a disservice to us as individuals and it’s a huge affront to our audience if we don’t try.”
- Interview with Robert Kirkman at CBR. In it he discusses the upcoming 100th issue milestone of Walking Dead, why he thinks the series is so popular, and how he legitimately thinks issue #100 features the most gruesome scene of the series’ long history. If you’ve read even 50% of the book, you know how stirring of a statement that actually is.
As the film progresses, action and suspense are chased and harried with mounting moments of levity, monologues, and convenient conflict resolutions. Those convenient conflict resolutions showed themselves again and again in how superhero fights were ended in the film. Most of the fight scenes had no pay off because of the state of the people fighting, a situation completely absent in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. During the diverse fist-a-cuffs between members of the eventual The Avengers team, nothing is really at stake, except in one of the fights (Hulk vs. Black Widow) and that fight, theoretically, should have had a different conclusion. With everyone’s super powers, no one can be hurt or killed so there is nothing at risk (except property damage) and nothing to lose. The viewer seats and watches colorful crash dummies throw each other through walls or into inanimate objects.
But… it goes on to say:
If The Avengers is an exercise in escapism like most “tentpole”, “popcorn” films and how could it not be deemed as such, these quips and qualms are irrelevant.
Exactly. My thoughts exactly. I went into the movie with the expectation of watching a super awesome nerd-gasm inducing action flick (featuring some of the biggest names in comics), and that’s what I got. However, that does not mean that I still was a little disappointed with aspects of the film. The world never actually feels that threatened. Neither the heroes. It’s something easily forgivable considering this is the first go of it. But if Joss Whedon is going to do 3 of these things, it would do him (and whoever else scripts) a whole lotta good to up the tension a bit. I mean, the middle segment on the Hellicarier was more tense than the final scene. Much more. That’s the vibe ALL of the 2nd one should have.
- There’s a new Blockhead mix floating around the web right now by a guy named DJ Pizzo. Blockhead makes really great music to have on in your house while you’re painting/writing, or doing laundry, or sitting on your porch/deck. He’s a beautiful sampler, loves his horns, and nothing is ever too overbearing. He’s a pretty big influence on me, I hope one way I can manufacture a song the way he can so well. Probably not. Here’s the 80-minute mix:
- Morning Breath Inc. is an incredible design company. They have done album art for Slayer, TV On The Radio, Maximum Balloon, Placebo, and many more. But they do other stuff too. T-shirts, posters, snowboard/skateboard deck art, promotional art. Here’s a cool test printing they did for a future silk-screening poster:
- Tree Of Life was pretty cool. It certainly lacked story, but I don’t think the object of the movie is to tell the audience an engrossing story. Now that does not mean you don’t go on some sort-of journey with it, you do. It just means that what we’ve come to expect out of the movies we sit down to watch is something very specific: it must be around 2 hours (maybe a little less), it must have moments of action or tension every 10 to 15 minutes, not only must it tell a definite and clear story, it must complete that story with an ending devoid of ambiguity (we allow this to be broken on trilogy-type properties; we’re so shallow), etc. Movies can be visual art and visual art alone, just like paintings can. Some paintings tell a story (Washington Crossing the Delaware), but do not (Mark Rothko)… at least not to the trained eye and brain. Can film not be the same way? Could a movie not just be a series of images and shots for beauty’s sake? And this movie isn’t even that far on the spectrum. There certainly is a narrative… perhaps not as clear-cut as what we’re used to, but there is dialogue and character arcs and rising action and falling action. I’m reminded of A Propos de Nice, one of the more powerful movies I’ve ever watched and there’s essentially no narrative at all.
- I’m missing record store day tomorrow because I’m working all day… such a bummer. Please go out and support your local music shops, cause they’re the only ones who will stock the good stuff. There’s also this thing amongst music heads to buy directly from the artist (Bandcamp, official sites, etc.) because then your favorite bands make a bit more money. That is probably true, but I still like to get out to the record store because I can’t imagine a world where the only place to get new music is on the Internet, from the artist’s website. There’s also something very relaxing about wandering the racks of a good record store, among people like yourself doing the same thing.
- So I know I probably pimp out Kristoff Krane A LOT on here. There’s a reason for that though: the guy is a brilliant songwriter, a magnetic performer, and a genuine person. I went and saw him with my girl last night and we had a blast, as did everyone who attended. If you don’t know anything about him, or even have heard his name before, it’s a bit challenging pointing you in the direction of something that represents what he does. Some of his tracks are heavier beats, where he spits hard and idiosyncratically, others are these tribal-infused rhythmic jams where his lyrics wander almost aimlessly, and others are just him and an acoustic guitar where he speaks right to your heart. That being said, “My Coffin” is a pretty decent representation of his brand of tunes:
He’s putting out a new album soon. He took donations to break even (hopefully he made some cash too) through Kickstarter, so he could release it digitally for free. Pretty awesome. Look for that.
- This has made the rounds on my social networking circles (cause my internet friends rule), but I’m still going to share this here because it’s just that good. Laurie Penny discussing journalism in the 21st Century. Def worth a read:
“I thought I got into journalism to tell truths and right wrongs and occasionally get into parties I wouldn’t normally be cool enough to go to. Right now though, with a few exceptions, professional journalism is rarely seen as an exercise in holding power to account. Justly or unjustly, the media, especially but not exclusively the mainstream, corporate-controlled press, has come to be seen as the enemy of the voiceless rather than their champion. Justly or unjustly, few people believe what they read in the papers or watch on the news anymore, because belief has long ceased to be quite as important as complicity when it comes to the Daily Mail, the Daily Post or News International. On the streets of Athens and Madrid as well as during the London riots of August 2011, journalists have been threatened and attacked by desperate young people making havoc in the streets. Why? Not because these young people don’t want to be seen, but because they don’t want to be seen through the half-closed eyes of privilege.“
- I’ll give ARTIST OF THE DAY to Adam Swanson of MN. Some of his stuff is up at the venue/bar Kristoff played at last night. He paints lots of bikes and penguins (and even a penguin riding a bike)I’ll like this one:
“All thinking about the good society, what is to be wished for in the way of life in community, necessarily depends on assumptions about human nature. All sorts of things have been assumed about human nature, and have been found persuasive or at least have been accepted as true over the course of history. We have had a long conversation in this country about class, race, ethnicity, and gender, how the moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities attributed to those in favored or disfavored categories create the circumstances of their lives, and, as they do so, reinforce an acceptance of the belief that these qualities are real, these characterizations are true. When there were no women in medical school or law school, or in higher education, it was easy to believe that they would not be able to endure their rigors. We in this country are fortunate to have a moderately constant loyalty to the idea of equality that has moved us to test the limits imposed by these cultural patterns, some of them very ancient, some of them once virtually universal and now still deeply entrenched in many parts of the world.”
- The new album “Black Radio” from the Robert Glasper Experiment is certainly pleasant on the ears. From the instrumental moments to the Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def (gotta get used to calling him Yasiin Bey), Erykah Badu, and Bilal features, this is a very relaxing album. The instrumentation is beautiful, warming in a way. Each note by Glasper and his band is carefully selected and placed gently into its own spot in the measure. That isn’t to say it isn’t a little bit challenging. And certainly isn’t radio friendly; well, when it comes to commercial radio. My favorite part about “Black Radio” is that the genre-experimentation/cross-pollination is not forced at all. It’s very natural the way the band weaves in their influences to forge a consistent and cohesive sounding album.
With all being said (and it should be clear by now that I like the album), I would’ve liked to have been forced into a little more active listening. Grab me by the throat, shove me around a little. While “Black Radio” doesn’t lack unpredictability — it certainly has its moments of it — those points you’re not expecting don’t shock your ears then brain into listening. They roll through your ears gracefully, and enter your brain and you don’t really notice. Chances are a band of this caliber wanted this to happen, they planned for it. It could be their way of getting into the heads of those who would switch something off if the noises got too obtuse or the notation too dissonant. And I dig that, because it’s a subconscious way of getting people into unpredictability. But part of me says fuck those people, they probably shouldn’t be listening to Jazz anyway. Or maybe I’ve just been listening to way too much Sun Ra recently.
- Why doesn’t Neil deGrasse Tyson have a blog?? I would read the shit outta that.
- Kurt Cobain would have turned 45 today. Probably still living in Washington, hopefully still making music. I’m confident that is the case. It’s amazing how different the industry would likely be now if he were around. And especially throughout the late 90′s/early 2000′s. If you listen to “You Know You’re Right”, you will find quite a different shade to Nirvana under the surface. Upon first listen it sounds like an above average Nirvana song, but bubbling under the surface lies noises running on a loop, fairly progressive drumming, and a surprisingly cleaner gain. I love that song; and it bums me out to no end because I’m certain that’s the direction they were heading. Granted, if Kurt were around it’s highly unlikely Nirvana would still be making music. There’s just no way that could last after they’d been received the way they were. But that doesn’t mean each member could not still be pursuing music. Perhaps Kurt would be making solo albums the way Mike Doughty does. Perhaps he’d be collaborating with any number of people (Danger Mouse?). Who knows. But I’m sure it would be something. Such a waste. Happy birthday Kurt.
- Also missing someone I lost 2 years ago today. Her favorite color was blue… I found this:
“With High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) imagery, the research team examined boulders along a fault system known as Cerberus Fossae, which cuts across a very young (few million years old) lava surface on Mars. By analyzing boulders that toppled from a martian cliff, some of which left trails in the coarse-grained soils, and comparing the patterns of dislodged rocks to such patterns caused by quakes on Earth, the scientists determined the rocks fell because of seismic activity. The martian patterns were not consistent with how boulders would scatter if they were deposited as ice melted, another means by which rocks are dispersed on Mars.”
- My monthly list of awesome things from the “Around The Net” Whitechapel thread:
