Peruvian Fan Art.

-  Finally saw Django Unchained last night!  It was pretty awesome.  It’s just about exactly what one would imagine a Tarentino homage to Spaghetti Westerns based in the antebellum Deep South to be.  It’s incredibly violent and bloody, which should not come as much of a surprise considering its namesake.  Django – the original, 1966, coffin with a Gatling gun Django – was at the time one of the most violent films ever made. It was banned in several countries, and even when it wasn’t it often received an 18+ only rating (I think we used to call that “X”).   But I don’t want to paint Django Unchained as a single, well over 2 hour outburst of gratuitous violence.  There’s also some other lovely things going on here:  great performances (particularly from DiCaprio, Jackson, and Waltz), cool cinematography (the shot of Big Daddy getting shot on the horse wherein the horse’s legs are the only viewable subject was awesome), the Western equivalent of The Crazy 88 fight scene, some great references, and sweet, sweet justice.  I’m sure he can do better, and maybe someday he will.  But to see Tarentino tinker with another polarizing and shameful part of history is just too much fun for me.  I think people need to take these things far less seriously.

Basterds fan art:

-  Catching Fog In Lima.

One hundred and fifty thousand people pour into Lima every year from Peru’s provinces. Like Rodas, most end up in pueblos jóvenes—literally young towns—in improvised dwellings with no running water and sporadic access to electricity. This constant influx means houses are added by the day, built into the rocky hillside with walls of salvaged wood or concrete if the family can afford it. Like Rodas´s parents, most immigrants come to Lima to find work, shelter, and perhaps a way to break out of poverty—they aren’t able to build themselves homemade shelters, except in some of the poorest areas of the country, where they often do so on unstable ground. Paradoxically, many residents of the pueblos jóvenes are forced to pay two to three times more than they would to live in downtown Lima: these settlements are unauthorized and so subject to extortionist landlords who tax access to pirated utilities.

-Sonny

Link JERSEY??

-  Hurricane Sandy as the Fibonacci Spiral/Sequence:

-  I wonder how close this is to the character from 2001…?  Someone has decided to make a HAL9000 robot for purchase and — I’m assuming — mounting on your wall somewhere?  You can preorder it for $500 right now.  LINK.

-  Then we got some what looks to be hockey jersey’s that are really fucking nerdy and awesome at GeekJerseys.com.  This Link jersey is really, really fucking awesome:

Thanks Topless Robot for the tips!

-  The Biggest Expansion of Man In PreHistory?

DNA sequencing of 36 complete Y chromosomes has uncovered a previously unknown period when the human population expanded rapidly. This population explosion occurred 40 to 50 thousand years ago, between the first expansion of modern humans out of Africa 60 to 70 thousand years ago and the Neolithic expansions of people in several parts of the world starting 10 thousand years ago.

-  Warren Ellis FAQ featuring some interesting writing questions.  Such as:

I was wondering if you had any advice regarding making ideas more important. I have pages of different events + characters that I can only develop so far because, after a time, all I can add to them are “WHO CARES?” and “WHY DOES THIS MATTER?” (I’m talking about events characters will go through. “Statues come to life all around Greece” is immediately followed by “WHO GIVES A FUCK?”) Does this ever happen to you? Thank you very much for your time, and sorry if you’ve answered a similar question!Ungh.  This is a really tough one.  There are two ways, maybe, to attack this.

1) One way of doing it, and this works okay for standard dramatic storytelling, is this: what do your characters WANT?  The secondary questions are, what stops them from getting what they want, and how far are they prepared to go to get what they want?  But start with the simple first question.  What your character wants defines how we perceive and feel about them in the story.  Find one thing they want, and see how that feels to you.

2) From a certain view, stories are two things.  There’s what the story’s about, and what the story’s REALLY about.  Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS is about a Martian invasion of Earth.  But it’s REALLY about something else entirely.  There’s a subtext: there’s the thing Wells wrote the story toactually talk about.  What you may be encountering is having a story that’s all surface, or a story with a subtext that isn’t working out for you.  Find out what you really want to say with your fiction.  If it matters to YOU, it’ll matter to other people.

-  PoliFact has a list of “Scariest Lines from the 2012 Campaign” up for Halloween.

-Sonny

Quotes of the Deceased.

-  There’s a really cool internet show going on right now featuring original X-Men art at Planet-Pulp.  A lot of them are pretty typical.  Logan looking tough, and Shadowcat going through solids.  But I like this one by Otis Frampton (an excellent new take on Xavier’s very first class):

-  I AM SO ENTIRELY FUCKING SICK OF “THE CULTURE WAR”.

-  Chuck Klosterman wrote an article about spending back to back nights with two of the most hated bands of all-time: Creed and Nickelback.  Interesting, to say the least…

It’s hard to get inside the existential paradox of Kroeger’s life on tour: Every day, he gives interviews to journalists and radio DJs who directly ask him why no one likes his band. Every night, he plays music to thousands of enraptured superfans, many of whom love him with a ferocity that’s probably unhealthy. Every concert ends with a standing ovation; if he feels motivated, he spends the remainder of the night partying with forgettable strangers who will remember him for the rest of their lives. Eventually, Kroeger falls asleep. And then he wakes up in a beautiful hotel room, only to read new articles about how everyone in North America hates his band.

There is not one part of his life that’s real.

-  A friend of mine blogs over at Film Misery.  Today he shared his thoughts on the new Sight And Sound poll of the greatest films of all-time.  They only come out with the list of the 10 best films ever every 10 years, so it’s neat to see how it changes — or doesn’t change — from decade to decade.  I can’t believe how much the list changes from Directors to Critics.  Or maybe I can, I suppose.  HA

Go and read it, it’s an excellent write up!

-  I’m sure you know, but Gore Vidal is dead.  BBC has some of his best quotes of his life up today.  Some are priceless.  He was a bit full of himself, like a shitload of writers, but at least he had the brains to back himself up.

“In America, if you want a successful career in politics, there is one subject you must never mention, and that is politics. If you talk about standing tall, and it’s morning in America, and you press the good-news buttons, you’re fine. If you talk about budgets, tax reform, bigotry, and so on, you are in trouble. So if we aren’t going to talk issues, what can we talk about? Well, the sex lives of the candidates, because that is about the most meaningless thing that you can talk about.”

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.”

“There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.”

-Sonny

Bohemian Chord Progression.

-  There awaits to excellent features at Guernica for you:

BAT-MYTHOS: Superhero idealogy, Batman, and the Aurora shootings

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.

Street Art and the New Bohemian: A conversation w/ Eric Drooker and Molly Crabapple

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.

Drooker’s work:

And Molly’s:

-  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.

-Sonny

Turn of the Millennium Court.

-  America Doesn’t Need Another CREEP.  Ciara Torres-Spelliscy delves into the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision 40 years after the Watergate scandal.

The policy options to address today’s money-in-politics problems have been curtailed by five Supreme Court Justices, but there are still constitutional actions state legislators, federal regulators, Congress and the President can undertake to address the issue. This is not the time for a do-nothing government to sit by as elections go dark, and Super PACs become the new normal. Democracy has a right to defend itself from corruption, both the venal quid pro quo variety and the equally insidious strain of expenditures for access.

-  Avengers/Sesame Street mashup T-Shirt from Jack of All Trades:

More Avengers shit.  Francesco Francavilla doing the team outta… what, turn of the millennium Europe?

-  ARTIST OF THE DAY is Jeremy Fish.  He did the cover artwork for Aesop Rock’s last solo album (“None Shall Pass”), he works outta San Fran:

LINKS:  Blog / Official / Other / Other

-Sonny

Kickstart Comics.

-  Kristoff Krane, over the past few years, has evolved into one of my favorite rappers.  And songwriters.  He’s a captivating performer, inspirational and wholly original, and he writes excellent lyrics.  If you don’t know much about him, a good introduction to him might be his dual release from 2010: Hunting For Father/ Picking Flowers Next To Roadkill.  The latter features Slug, the late Eyedea (RIP), and POS.  The former features very experimental production from Krane and Eyedea, and blends a singer-songwriter sensibility with Krane’s stream-of-conscious brand of hip-hop.  “Hunting For Father” is one of my favorite albums to come out in years.

He’s back with a new release titled “Fanfaronade”.  The album will be a FREE download, which is awfully kind of him.  However, to offset the cost of making the album, he’s started a Kickstarter page for it.  Any little tiny bit helps.  There’s an excellent video of him explaining all this at the link (I’m having a hard time re-coding it to embed here).  The album is apparently going to be pretty dark, on account of him losing his best friend over that period of time, and features some awesome rappers like Crescent Moon, Sage Francis, and Illogic.

Official / Bandcamp / Kickstarter

-  There’s probably no quote that better sums up my feelings of presidential elections now, and the one this year than:

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s palace”

 

-  Lot’s of good comics coming up this spring (I believe a few came out today).  I’m especially pumped for:

• China Mieville‘s DIAL H.  Mieville’s a batshit crazy enough genre writer to turn an old series about dialing “H-E-R-O” into your telephone and becoming a superhero for a short period of time into a modern trip through popular culture.
• Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ SAGA.  This, I think, came out today.  A creator-owned from Vaughan about new parents trying to raise their baby through an ongoing galactic war?  Sure, why not.  Also, it promises “Star Wars style action and Game of Thrones-esque drama”.
• Hickman‘s MANHATTAN PROJECTS.  Which is already out I believe.  Don’t know too much about this one, but if it’s a creator owned from Hickman, one could guess the concepts will be very high-brow and I’m certain the art will be beautiful judging by the preview.  Also from Hickman, SECRET, which came out today.
• I’m sure there’s more.

- ARTIST OF THE DAY is Michael Karcz.  Holy shit:

-Sonny

Five-Hundred Collabs.

-  At least 50 people are dead in the latest batch of violence in Iraq.  The attacks targeted mostly Shia neighborhoods, particularly police in those towns and cities.  Dictators suck ass.  But the lesson might be: democracy and freedom are not as important as tolerance and liberty (in this case, as they pertain to religion).

-  I’m watching the Simpsons’ 500th episode right now.  It’s pretty awesome so far.  One of the better episodes I’ve seen in some time.  I like the exchange between Lisa and Homer that goes:

Homer: Jeez, Lisa… why don’t you pick up a book once and a while?

Lisa:  I pickup books like you pickup beers!

Homer:  Then you’ve got a serious reading problem.

The opening couch gag was great, a summation of all their couch gags.  I wish Fox allowed that kinda thing on YouTube, I’d post it.  And here’s all of Bart’s blackboard writings.

-  That new Gorillaz song with Andre-3000 and James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem is just okay.  It’s the only way a Gorillaz track could possibly sound with the likes of those two collaborators, and on an LP it would probably have it’s place and serve the album well.  In this case, though, as a stand alone track, it’s just alright.  [Not really digging the Gorillaz Chuck Taylor's either; for which the track is a promotional tool.]  However, I did only recently get into “The Fall” (for whatever reason) which is wonderful.  I can’t believe it was recorded exclusively by Damon during touring.  That’s using your tools (in this case his iPad) to the best of your abilities.

-  WHAT THE FUCK?!?  I just got done talking about how awesome this Simpsons episode has been and what do those bastards do??  They put this at the end of the show (and, it’s super quick so it’s hard to read):

THANKS FOR 500 SHOWS.

[smaller print]  All we ask is that you go out and get some fresh air before logging on the internet and saying how much this sucked.

That’s… I dunno.  It’s off-putting to say the least.  Especially when you’re logging onto the internet to praise it (and you live in MN, where going outside in February isn’t exactly fun).

-  I went and saw Atmosphere at their one and only First Ave. show of this brief tour.  It was great: excellent and varied setlist, cool re-workings of songs, Sean was in a great mood.  I’m waiting for some kind of review so I can see the official setlist.  Atmosphere fans are really, really strange though.  Some of them don’t even pay attention to the music.  At all.  There was two girls and two guys next to me who were more interested in hooking up than anything.  If that’s why you’re going out, maybe just go to a bar?  So that people who LOVE that band (and there are a lot of them), who will actually go and pay attention, can have an opportunity to go?  Also, it saddens me a ton that no one really cares about Kill The Vultures, cause they are boss.  And that was probably one of the more clean-cut concert crowds I’ve been amongst in some time.  Those people last night made me feel like a dirtball. Which I’m fine with!

-  Pretty eye-opening article from The Onion’s “AV Club” on the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture.  The title?  “How All 9 Best Picture Nominees Reassure Us About the Scary Future”.  I thought it was a pretty weak year for movies.  If anything, the Best Pic noms this year just aren’t as varied as they have been for the past 4 or 5 years.

-Sonny

Millions of Web-Orphans.

-  Why do people start blogs if they are going to so quickly abandon them?  Is it an impulse thing?  I was directed recently (via message board sig) to a blog specializing in beer and rap music reviews; I was interested because I thought it was a really neat idea.  Arriving, I realized the damn thing hadn’t been touched in going on 3 years now.  And prior to that it had been updated far from regularly, like twice a month.  And here I am, feeling like a waste of space for not writing anything for three or four days.  A Google search led me to THIS page, an examination of statistical information from various sources tackling such things.  One report claimed that over 1 million blogs are abandoned after one day.  One day.  The same report said that nearly 70% of blogs had not been updated in 2 months.  It’s an interesting conflation of statistics.  The blog is alive and well… for those who blog.  Ha.  Which reminds me of advice I saw somewhere for being any sort of writer: “To be a writer — or, a good writer — one has to write.”

Relatedly: “On This Whole ‘The Web Is Dead’ Meme”

-  Drummers really like Soul Coughing a lot.  It makes sense I guess.

-  A site called Something Awful regularly hosts “Photoshop Friday” contests that can be a lot of fun.  Last Friday’s was titled “Supervillains In Politics”.  It featured some wonderful entries referencing everything from GI JOE to Austin Powers and Captain America.  Here’s Red Skull making his rounds, presumably in Iowa:

(Thanks for the heads-up, SuperPunch)

-  Apparently Tarentino is using the old Deadwood sets (they’re not really sets, it’s fully fleshed-out town) for his Western Django Unchained.  Fuck all that hype over the Avengers Superbowl spot, this is MY geek-out news.  One of my favorite TV shows ever (and probably the best Western TV show ever; definitely top 3) doubling as the environment for Tarentino’s next film, HIS first Western??  Good God.

- Another file sharing site has shut down, following Megaupload.  BTJunkie voluntarily closed it’s doors today, likely brought on by fear of federal jail time stemming from its creators.

“BTJunkie provided a search engine for Bit Torrent files and was one of the top five torrent sites with “dozens of millions of users a month,” according to TorrentFreak, a website which covers file-sharing news.

TorrentFreak quoted the unidentified founder of BTJunkie as saying that BTJunkie’s decision to close down stemmed partly from recent legal actions against Megaupload and The Pirate Bay, which faces legal action in Europe.

Megaupload was shut down by the US authorities on January 19 and seven people were charged in connection with what the Justice Department and FBI described as “among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States.”

-Sonny

Blacked Out.

Today — as you probably know, if you’re reading this — is the day many websites are striking against SOPA and PIPA across the globe.  But especially here in the United States, where it was conceived.

Don’t take anyone’s word for it, though.  Do yourself a favor and read through the Bill yourself.  The bill would do all sorts of things to websites like this one, and user-generated based sites like YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud, etc.  There’s a whole section titled “Streaming Copywrited Works In Violation of Federal Law”, which could have catastrophic effects in terms of marketing for artists: I don’t stream [Band A]‘s new song, 20 people don’t ever get into [Band A], multiply that by hundreds or thousands of sites like this one, [Band A] may take a big enough financial hit to not be able to make a living as musicians anymore.  The same goes for artists.

There’s a lot more going on here though than that one section, of course.  CNET posted an excellent article delving into a lesser known section of the bill which contains the language “prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States”… it’s referring to ISP’s (service providers), and what it’s preventing access to is the websites the bill deems as “piratical”.  This section very closely relates to the concept of “Net Neutrality”, the idea of keeping ISP’s out of their customer’s bit rates, traffic, and browsing history. (PIPA, a previous version, did not include this language)

They’ve also posted a good FAQ article for anyone new to what SOPA is.

Here, Mashable talks about the bulk of the bill: Section 102(a)(2).  It gives the Attorny General permission to take action against a website if “the owner or operator of such Internet site is facilitating the commission of [copyright infringement]“.  This is a problem because a massive amount of websites could be considered in this umbrella:

“Since copyright violation is ridiculously easy, any site with a comment box or picture upload form is potentially infringing. Furthermore, DMCA Safe Harbor provisions are no defense. You, as a site operator, become liable for copyright infringement committed by your users, even if you comply with DMCA takedown requests.“

Then there’s Section 103, so coded in leagalese that one would be hard pressed to understand it.  This helped me out quite a bit:

“Any site that allows users to post content is “primarily designed for the purpose of offering services in a manner that enables copyright violation.” The site doesn’t have to be clearly designed for the purpose of copyright violation; it only has to provide functionality that can be used to enable copyright violation.“

Here’s another Mashable article, an Op-Ed arguing against SOPA.

And here’s Google’s (they are vehemently against this, they even sponsored a petition) page on the Bill.

Go to this page to find out who’s supporting and opposing SOPA in your State/District.

-Sonny

 

Out of Stock.

Gots to get going soon.  But here’s some brilliant Banksy for your prying eyes:

-  Also, some words of wisdom on the United States’ current political structure/climate:

My view of contemporary US politics, which is that of an outsider and obviously incomplete (and possibly faulty, and subject to change) is as follows:
1. The USA is already a functional oligarchy. (Or, more accurately, a plutarchy.) It has been functioning as such for some time — since 1992 at the latest, although the roots of this system go back to before the Declaration of Independence — it’s a recurrent failure mode. Historically such periods last for a few years then go into reverse. However, this time the trend has been running since 1980 or even earlier. What we’re now seeing are the effects of mismanagement by the second generation of oligarchs in power; the self-entitled who were born to it and assume it to be the natural order of things.

2. It’s impossible to be elected to high office without so much money that anyone in high office is, by definition, part of the 0.1%; even if they’re an outsider to start with, they will be co-opted by the system (or neutralized — usually before they are elected).

3. Public austerity is a great cover for the expropriation of wealth by the rich (by using their accumulated capital to go on acquisition sprees for assets being sold off for cents on the dollar by the near-bankrupt state). But public austerity is a huge brake on economic growth because it undermines demand by impoverishing consumers. Consequently, we’re in for another long depression. (The outcome of this new long depression will be the same as that of the first one: the main industrial power — then it was the UK; now it’s the USA — will lose a lot of its remaining economic lead over its competitors and be severely weakened.)

Yes, there is more at the LINK.

-  The latest BLACK LANTERN MUSIC release is by Krowne, called “Distorted Thoughts”.  It’s a clever bastard of an EP where Electro numbers swoop up out of nowhere and make your ass and hips move.

http://official.fm/playlists/83679

-Sonny