- 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“This may sound incredible, but in recent years, research on using signals from the brain to operate machines has taken great strides. Scientists have developed brain-machine interfaces that allow paralyzed humans to move a computer cursor or even use a robotic arm to pick up a piece of chocolate or touch a loved one for the first time in years. Nicolelis has set his sights even higher: He wants to get paralyzed people up and walking around. If he succeeds it could be a tremendous advance. Right now he’s still developing this technology in monkeys. There’s a long way to go.
But Nicolelis was brimming with confidence in January when I visited his lab at Duke University to see how his work is progressing. “We’re getting close to making wheelchairs obsolete,” he said.“
- I’m going to be working on music all day today. In fact, I’ll probably hop to it after writing this. I’m staring at three pages from my creativity book — one ripped out — trying to discover the natural succession of songs as they should unfold in relation to what the album is about. What it means to me. This is easily my most personal album I’ve ever done, as it vaguely (it doesn’t beat you over the head or anything) tells the story of the hardest years of my life. So far. But in a meta-way, this time… this experience, is kind of what birthed the idea and the sounds that would become my current musical persona to begin with. It likely wouldn’t exist in this way without this experience. So it’s all a little bizarre. About halfway through I’m remixing the very first track I did officially under the pseudo-name, in an effort to recreate the frustration of what was happening boiling over and me finally going down to the basement and making this droning, Electronic beat. So… I’m excited.
That’s Doldrums new album, “Lesser Evil”, released yesterday on Arbutus Records. Canadian (Toronto) -based Electronic music that isn’t trying to make you dance (though you probably could), but that doesn’t get weird for the sake of it. There’s a hint of that new wave of Canadian electronics in here, the sounds we heard from Purity Ring and Grimes in 2012; those textures are supplemented with the more analog sounds of a group like, say, Black Moth Super Rainbow. The vocals are surprisingly un-effected out (generally speaking), and there are nods of good old-fashioned storytelling inside some of these songs; but it is not afraid to use a voice as a pure and simple instrument in and of itself as well. On top of that you’ve got these rhythmic, hypnotic back-beats that have clearly been recorded live, with a kit, in a large room with padded walls. Definitely worth checking out.
- I really hope Warren Ellis will be getting some amount of dough from Iron Man 3, if the movie is directly lifting his nanotechnology, biological modification, Extremis from his run on the character.
Speaking of Uncle Warren, he’s apparently been inspired by newspaper comic strips, and has been releasing single panel comics on his website of late… as part of a world he calls “Scatterlands”. Here’s the latest:
- 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.”
- Wow… so you know how sometimes you hear the argument, “Wind power? Wind?? Why on Earth would use hundreds year old technology to power anything in the 21st century?”. Well I just read on Phys.org that new information from Australia states — obviously in certain regions — wind is cheaper and generates as much or more energy as traditional forms. The study found that down under wind cost $80 per MWh (that’s “Megawatt Hour” or one million watts/hour), whereas it costs $116 for the same amount from a new gas plant, and $143 for the same amount of energy from a new coal plant. Coal is much higher, however, because of the government’s carbon tax… but the article notes that even without any sort of carbon tax, Coal comes down to the Gas plant numbers (still not close to Wind’s $80/MWh). Apparently this can be mostly attributed to the cost of renewables (mostly wind and solar) dropping hard in the past few years and the cost of traditional forms of energy continuing to increase. The article also notes that, “large solar photovoltaic installations will be cheaper than coal or gas by 2020, and solar thermal and biomass systems will be at least competitive by 2030.”
- I generally don’t like to talk about my life on here — me smart, doing this 2nd — but a little update on the current batch of tunes:
I have 22 songs, about 70% of which are “done” but not done-done. Before you think “wait… that’s like an hour and 20 minutes worth of music”, most of the songs are between 2 and 2.5 minutes. The first song, and two others (so far), are between 1 and 2 minutes. And the last song will probably clock in at about 5 or 6. Why am I doing this? It was sort of sparked by listening to Kareem Riggins’ excellent piece of work last Fall, “Alone Together“. The album is 34 tracks, only 8 of which break the 2 minute mark. When I heard this album straight through for the first time it had been a few months since I’d wrapped an album I called “Hills Run Red“; a western concept album that had 3 tracks: the first two were 16.5 and the last was 20 mins. So when I was getting to about track 23 on “Alone Together” I thought… “dang, maybe I should do something like this?” At the very least it would provide a new challenge for me, and if people think a song sucks at least it’ll be over soon. Ha. And it isn’t like I’m self-imposing rules, saying “all songs need to be 2:15 long”, hence the minute long tracks and the much longer track. I just was quite inspired by “Alone Together” (and, before I knew it, El-P’s “megggamixxx3″), how the song comes together, shows you what it’s got, and moves on. Also, for as proud as I am of some of the arrangements and instrumentation on “Hills“, I was going to go back to a more sample based album anyhow, and you have to be really good (much, much better than me) at sampling to make 5 minute tracks and have them stay fresh and never get dull. So yeah. Also, I would say a good 80% of the samples (for the song foundation; I’m not counting using Dinah Washington or someone like that for vocals, which I’m doing a lot on this) are classical samples. Mostly, from these two records:
But there’s still synths, too. And I have a concept, but I’m not sure yet the level of how obvious it’ll be. I dunno, I’M EXCITED. I guess so, Rambles McGee.
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.
- David Lynch might be revisiting his Twin Peaks universe? That’d be something. I still haven’t seen Inland Empire, though I’ve heard bad things about it. Right now it’s hovering stable at 72% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve heard people argue that it makes no sense, even for a David Lynch film. I think they might be more forgiving if they knew how he made it: traveling around L.A. with the cast crew looking for aesthetically satisfying locales without a script of any kind. Think of it as a sort-of free flowing Jazz song, totally improvised, just for the sake of making Jazz. Now I need to track down a copy.
- Top Science Long Reads of the Year. 2012… that is. There are some fascinating articles here (great list, Ed Yong at NatGeo!), including one where a woman “commandeer[s] a robotic limb with her imprisoned mind” and one about bristlecone pine trees (they’re going extinct) being “repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past. Over this past century of unprecendented deforestation, a tiny cadre of scientists has roamed the world’s remaining woodlands, searching for trees with long memories…”
- Very very sad: some 60,000 people have died in the Syria conflict in 2012. And what’s worse, as the article states, is that the rate of death is increasing as the violence drags on: it continues to escalate with both sides using heavier and heavier weapons. And I openly admit that I have no clue what the right thing to do is for the rest of the world, especially the US… but it’s hard to just stand by and watch this happen. But I guess the Western world does it with Africa all the time too, so it’s absolutely nothing new.
- 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.
- Last night I made the mistake of beginning to watch the Lance Bangs Pavement documentary “Slow Century”. A mistake because I should have known it would’ve been too fascinating to turn off, no matter how late the hours got. If you’ve got the time, here it is:
- Sage Francis has resurrected the Tumblr Hello There, Racists after an apparent shut down. I think it’s outrageous to say it isn’t fair to publicly chastise these people, knowing full well that Twitter and Facebook are publicly viewed domains (they’re basically the 21st Century “public square”). It also serves to remind us of some very important things, two of which: you’re not invisible on the Internet, and if you want to say outrageous shit you’d better damn well be posting anonymously (then again anyone with half a brain can trace an IP address), and yes… racism definitely still exists. Some of this shit is just disgusting.
- Very interesting article, that very well might go over your head a little (went over mine at least), on the nature of dark energy. Is it static or dynamic in its existence. If it’s dynamic… yeesh, the philosophical implications of such a thing are astronomical; a form of matter whose density and composition and structure changes as it shifts though space time??
While hypothesized dark energy can explain observations of the universe expanding at an accelerating rate, the specific properties of dark energy are still an enigma. Scientists think that dark energy could take one of two forms: a static cosmological constant that is homogenous over time and space, or a dynamical entity whose energy density changes in time and space. By examining data from a variety of experiments, scientists in a new study have developed a model that provides tantalizing hints that dark energy may be dynamic.
The results are still far from conclusive, but the scientists hope that future data might narrow down the models with greater accuracy. They hope that observations by the Planck spacecraft (launched in 2009; first data available in April 2013) and the Euclid spacecraft (launch date is 2019) could help pinpoint the dark energy models that most closely describe our expanding universe.
- Great piece of street art (graffiti, if you prefer that term; I really could care less what it’s called) from GOIN, who I believe works out of the UK:
