“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’ve now got a SModcast app on my phone after enjoying having WTF! W/ Marc Maron on my phone for a few days. They’re really nice things to have access to in your pocket, eh? I wasn’t aware of this, but the “SModcast” network (Kevin Smith and friends, for those who don’t know/click/Google) features a whole slew of podcasts with and without Kevin Smith, some about comics and some not. There’s one that still gets released on a relatively regular schedule called “The Breaks”, wherein a DJ Smith knows veers into all sorts of different territory but manages to always talk music and spinning records.
Course now that I’ve got this on my phone I should probably get a Ray Kurzweil podcast or something to balance out the Universe.
- With PS Store redeem codes I received as a birthday gift, I downloaded Journey, Braid, and The Walking Dead yesterday. Cheap games… 15, 15, and 20 respectfully. I only briefly played Journey last night, and it seems spectacular: artistic, intuitive, graceful, unique as all hell. It’s going to be really nice to have a break from people sending me nasty messages after I play them in NHL 12.
- Last night I was racking my brain trying to wrap it around the concept for my next proper LP. It will be based on the most transformative part of my life (so far). I want the album to go through the journey of what I went through; this could get a little painful as particular memories are brought up, but hopefully the good memories outweigh the bad. And they do. Musically, I guess I would like to move a little bit back towards the more sample-based sound of two albums ago. My last album (I don’t know who I’m talking to, if anyone, so I’m gonna assume you have not heard it; which I’m totally cool with) went a bit more instrumentation based, with sort of complex arrangements mixed in with breakbeats. It was less about the beats and samples, and more about the instrumentation/arrangements. I want a mix of the two, of course, but this last time I used samples to compliment the synths and guitar lines I was writing, I’d like to flip that. Also, THIS BAND. Very inspiring. Seemingly unconnected and obtuse samples tied together through synths and other original instrumentation to form a cohesive whole. Also, apparently, Japanese music. Like, classical Japanese music.
I think I would need to listen to the album again in its entirety — which is a quite a job — to really say how much I like or dislike like it. So I’m categorizing this under the “upon first listen” thoughts. Which can, and do, change. I’ve been up to date with Neil Young’s modern material since 2003′s “Greendale”, having listened to all his albums since then. And I like most of them. Fork In The Road was probably the weakest of the batch, followed by the ground shaking Le Noise (which, in a strange bit of artistic freedom, featured little to no percussion). So new Neil Young, or old for that matter, is nothing new to me. Hearing him with Crazy Horse in the world of cellphones and private space companies, however, is. Turns out Americana was just rehearsal for the big dance. They’re really bringing out the big (epic, long, operatic, etc) guns for this album. And that world of cell phones and nano-tech is not something Mr. Young wants to be a part of; he sings on the 30 minute opener, “When you hear my song now, you only get 5 percent, you used to get it all… I’m driftin’ back”. The instrumentation is a little nostalgic too, with the band hearkening back to their 70′s days of drawn-out freeform jams, mic’ed 30-watt amps, and that vinyl, analog sound. It feels good on the ears (even if it feels a little strange when just a few years ago Young made an album about retro-fitting his classic car(s) with enough modern tech to free them from gasoline), and it’s sometimes nice to hear the legends crave the old days.
- Then you’ve got Kendrick Lamar’s debut full-length which deserves most of the credit it’s getting.
This is probably the strongest Rap debut we’ve had in some time. I use the term “Rap” deliberately. The production is rock solid, rarely missing the mark. And the slate of producers, besides perhaps Just Blaze, are a little bit off-kilter compared to the sometimes predictable melody makers of 21st Century mainstream Hip-Hop. I always like Pharrell’s beats, and I almost wish he’d do an entire album for a guy like Kendrick. And what of Kendrick himself? He lives up to the hype. Well, most of it. A lot of the these lines are really thought provoking, more than what Top 40 Rap was giving us in the hey-day of materialism Rap, when the illustrious 50 Cent album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” was the big anticipated album of the moment. Those days are gone, thank God. And Kendrick Lamar, along with a whole slew of new-ish rappers, are taking mainstream Rap into the 21st Century (finally) with equal parts style and substance. It’s nice to see. What this album is not, is “Illmatic”. This is not an “instant classic”. It might become a classic one day, but it’s not instant. In fact, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City might suffer a little bit from Dark Knight syndrome: levels of anticipation so off the charts there’s absolutely no way it can live up them. Which is too bad. This album isn’t breaking down any walls, it’s not shattering the paradigm Rap music exists in as it stands, but it is solid. And it’s the best mainstream Rap has been (w/ a few notable exceptions) in quite some time.
- 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:
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.
- Holy shitballs, hello! I got back from Europe last week and have been sort-of slowly getting back into my life in MN. But that’s not the whole story. Another part of it is I thought after dedicating myself to a almost hour-long album for around 10 months I would take some time off of making music. This is not the case, as I’ve got a whole slew of new beats in the pipeline already, and a remix project that’s a whole boatload of fun to boot. Long story short: I’M ADDICTED to it. Anyways…
- 8 Epic Heroes Who Committed Mass Murder at IO9, apparently in honor of Judge Dredd and the new film version. Supposedly the movie is a faithful to the original 2000AD strip, and John Wagner (creator) endorsed it. I’m guessing this is true, considering Karl Urban (who was probably initially hired at least partially for his looks) does NOT take the helmet off through the entire run time. But this article is getting it wrong in a sense: Dredd is not a hero. He’s a fascist who’s so dedicated to law and order he puts that ahead of the people he supposedly serves. Like Rorschach (also very much so not a hero).
- I’m on Twitter. I have been since the Spring(?). Twitter’s cool because you don’t get all these damn graphic memes that have become a staple of Facebook. eCards stand as notoriously annoying. If someone posts a picture, you’ve got to click to see it. Also, you don’t get these rambling rants that drift into nowhere fast. My feed consists mostly of comic book artists and writers, and musicians. It works.
- More great news for Warren Ellis while I was away: he’s been signed to write his first non-fiction book! The book will be based on a very interesting talk he gave at something called Cognitive Cities Conference in Berlin last year. It has to do with the “haunting of what hasn’t happened yet” as it relates to futurism and science fiction. Here’s the original talk:
I actually find myself weirdly nostalgic for the authentic monsters of politics. Even the sly, hollow hustling of Tony Blair would be preferable to the callow bafflement of Nick Clegg, the unnaturally shiny forehead and beta-male posturing of David Cameron, and the… well, whatever Ed Miliband is. There’s Vince Cable, whom lots of people seem to like the idea of, but his presence, unfortunately, is that of Gravedigger #2 in one of the less successful Hammer Horror films.
- Finally, a little magical sigil from Deviant Art. Not sure what it means, but I am fascinated by this stuff for some reason.
- First up, a gorgeously stunning picture of the Perseids Meteor Shower in beautiful high definition. This was taken on the Snowy Range of Wyoming, a composite of 20-some pictures into one. Awesome:
- Wait, there’s a chance that Will.I.Am will be quitting music to focus on computer coding?? A very plausible chance? Right the F on! Now all we need is for one more member of Black Eyed Peas to do something else with their life and maybe we’ll never hear from them again.
- Great news for Warren Ellis! His upcoming novel — Gun Machine — will be adapted to television by 20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment. Ellis himself will oversee the show, serving as Executive Producer, and Trauma creator/writer Dario Scardapane will be the head writer. I’m so happy for Internet Jesus… he’s been an awesome writer for so long, he deserves some mainstream success. (Not that I don’t wish he’d write comics again.)
- Well this is excellent news too: Joss Whedon is returning to directAvengers 2. Not only that, but he’ll also be the creator and executive producer (and probably do some writing too) of a Marvel movie-verse TV show for ABC tied to his films. I figured he wouldn’t want to do the Avengers sequel, considering a project that massive doesn’t allow for much side work. I suppose the C-141′s full of money can’t help (was gonna go with “truckload”… but didn’t think that sufficed). This is awesome though, because ever since the end of Avengers I’ve wondered where Whedon would take the sequel… what with sequels being the darkest of three movies and all (typically) due to dramatic structure.
Coincidentally, Whedon was/is working on a sort-of Internet-show with Warren Ellis. I hope that sees the light of day considering how busy their lives are about to get.
- David Cronenberg has a son who is now directing. And it’s looking like his movie’s will be as grotesquely creepy as his father’s. Antiviral is his first full-length and is I believe out in select cities/theaters. It stars the kid who played Banshee in X-Men: First Class. Caleb Jones. I think he’ll probably become a household name in the next 5 to 10 years. Also, apparently he plays drums and sings in a band called Robert Jones.
- In other movie news, Francis Ford Coppola looks like he’s bitten off a lot more than he can chew with his new film idea. The Edgar Allen Poe masks with 3D eye-holes are one thing, but having to put it on and take it off constantly? Not to mention he has “devised an interface between himself and the film so he could alter it in real time, adjusting the flow of the narrative as he read the audience’s reactions. This interface was built as an iPad app.“ Obviously the rebuttal here is… so he’s going to be present at EVERY ONE of his screenings…? The Bleeding Cool writer called this “several bad ideas crashing into one another”. He should know, he was at the Comic-Con screening.
- More reasons Texas is kinda batshit crazy. Or… at least has their priorities in a bunch. This HIGH SCHOOL football stadium costs $60 million. That’s American bucks. And before we go all “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE… HOW IMPORTANT HS FOOTBALL IS DOWN HERE”. I do not. But, I hail from Minnesota, where High School hockey is super important. Where professional players, who have played and won the Stanley Cup (and in some cases Gold Medal games in the Olympics) have said that playing in the MN High School final was a more memorable experience. Hell, I bet we have a higher percentage of NHL players than Texas has NFL players. But you know what they do up North? They fucking play outside. In a rink that probably costs a couple grand to manufacture. But hockey is life up there. Really explains both the differences between BOTH hockey and football, and MN and Texas. Down to Earth love-of-the-game shit vs. massive spectacle.
- I had this thought today that I would watch a movie while writing and doing other things on my computer… then I picked The Tree of Life and now I can’t look away. It almost reminds me more of an Iñárritu movie than a Terence Malick one. The imagery, the narrative nature, even the loud/quiet/loud sound dynamics. It’s beautiful to look at, if anything. And this isn’t a review, cause I’m in the middle of the damn thing. The shots of the Universe and volcanoes erupting and cellular structure are really fucking cool; reminds me a bit of 2001. Also, some of the most realistic portrayals of dinosaurs ever on film.
- Did George Lucas honestly say that Empire Strikes Back is the worst Star Wars flick?? Wow. Now, the context might point in the direction of a joke. So it should be taken with a grain of salt. Or it could be one of those things where somebody makes a joke to cover up the fact that it’s actually a sore subject. Either way, it’s far and away the best Star Wars movie and Lucas didn’t direct it. Thought this was a cool Hitchcockian type poster for Empire, found it on DeviantArt:
- Cody Walker at Sequart.org has some brilliant comics articles (as do other writers at the site). A lot of them are particularly of interest for me, being a massive fan of Grant Morrison’s years-spanning Batman epic. Walker has three part articles on the passive aggressive (eventually turning plain old aggressive) feud between Joker and Dr. Hurt. That series is very interesting to read because he delves into the history of Morrison’s writing of the Joker, including the deconstruction of his personality way back in 1989′s Arkham Asylum (Dave Mckean’s art still messes with my brain every time I open that book). He also writes extensively about the transformation of Bruce Wayne’s son Damien, from his initial appearance in “Batman & Son” to his heroic turn in GM’s Batman & Robin. His character arc was plotted wonderfully: Morrison deliberately wanted him to be hated when he first appeared, the wrote him more and more likeable as the issues and years passed by.
- Warren Ellis thinking out loud is always extremely fascinating. Which is probably why he’s been able to put together compilations of these “brain dumps” — he calls them — POD them, and sell them via the Net. (For example) And probably why he’s a sought-after speaker at tech shows and idea conferences. Check this out:
“And mostly missing the point (especially when calling it “an art movement”): it’s already happened. Bruce Sterling termed the NA tumblr a “gaudy, network-assembled heap made of digitized jackstraws,” which is a very Bruce Sterling way of handling James Bridle’s flat declarative “(it’s a) series of artifacts,” But it surrounds the actuality, which is that it’s raw reportage. It’s an unsorted Wikileaks dump of evidence that The New Aesthetic has been here for years, and it slid into view so insidiously that we didn’t even notice it. We were all looking at tiny bits of it. Everyone (in the fringe-y design-y tech-y circles that I exist on the outermost edges of) has gone nuts about it because so few people had had the massed raw evidence presented contextually to them like that.
The New Aesthetic may indeed have an ever changing (or at least oscillating) pattern of vibratory activity, but I don’t think whole thrust of the NA aggregation really supports the notion that it’s conscious. And ferreting out a specific psychic reality may lead you down the path of machine awareness and cosmic layers of psyche, but I would suggest that that gets you only a few years of fun in a Weimar Cabaret bierkeller while your neighbourhood’s been marked up for drone vision.”
- Last night after work I grabbed a slew of new music I had never heard of before. If you’re wondering: I troll the AllMusic site quite a bit. I look up things I’m sampling in my own music, I read reviews and entries in their blog, I use the “Followed” tab to get me into things my favorite bands like or were inspired by. But every month (sometimes a few times a month) I’ll check THIS LIST. The editor’s choice albums never really seem to disappoint, if you’re open minded enough. There will be things I won’t like from time to time, of course, that’s only natural. But I still feel looking into the stuff I’m not gaga for isn’t a waste of time. It’s valuable, actually. Anyways, last night I downloaded (legally…mind you; I do a pay-per-month deal):
Quakers -Quakers. This will be making it’s rounds on my stereo, for sure. In fact, next time I’m at a legitimate record store (nope, Best Buy doesn’t count) I may have to just pick up the hard copy. It’s essentially a hip-hop compilation from the label Stones Throw, which does great work regularly. Calling it a standard rap-label compilation though — as I kinda did — is a titch deceiving. The album is much more cohesive, interesting, and plain good than that label implies. 41 tracks, clocking in around 70 minutes. It’s an odd beast of a thing. Heavy electro programming, MPC-type sampling, and more rappers than you think you know. One to check out at least, if you enjoy hip-hop at all.
Carter Tutti Void – Transverse. Got this thing on right now. At first I thought, “well that’s kind of a weird for the sake of weird name”… then I read their very short bio on AllMusic: “collaboration of two generations of dark British electronic/industrial musicians, Carter Tutti Void features Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Nik Void of Factory Floor”. Yep, just their names. Apparently this group made lots of noise doing some improvised sets somewhere over the pond, which led to this album’s creation. At you can hear it in the tracks. They feel improvised the way certain Jazz albums do: not over-produced, and it sounds like a single take. There’s 4 tracks, each about 10 minutes. “V1″-”v4″.
And it has the best cover of the bunch (don’t have a seizure please):
Black Dice – Mr Impossible. This is some bat-shit crazy stuff. I’m talking a Grant Morrison goofy-70s-Batman-was-on-Acid level of craziness. In fact, this album might be good to read his “Batman & Robin” saga to. Interesting. Anyways, the quickest and easiest way to describe Black Dice is by saying they are “Electronic”. Which isn’t wrong, but they borrow from such a grab-bag of genres and generations and movements it seems unfair to use one word to describe it. There’s a track on “Mr. Impossible” where this Industrial type pulse is going, and I don’t think it is 4/4, then there’s this very old-school wah’ed out funk guitar providing the melody (kinda) over the top. So what do you call that? Electro? Industrial? Funk? Funk-Industrial?? I find that genres a lot of times just get in the way.
Chano Dominguez – Flamenco Sketches. This is can classify, easily. Jazz, Jazz, Jazz. In such a pure form. This guy is a pianist, tried and true. And listening to him play is a pleasure to the ears, I’d imagine seeing him live is a real treat. He’s been around for a long time, originally working in groups; he started his solo career in the 80s after leaving a group called CAI. He’s been making critically aclaimed Jazz albums for years, but “Flamenco Sketches” is a little different: it’s a reimagining of a classic LP of the genre, Miles Davis’ “Kind Of Blue”. The last song on that album was titled “Flamenco Sketches”. I’ve seen some purists dog Dominguez for both going down this path and his execution of it (you can’t complain about both). I laugh at that. Not to say music cannot be sacred, most of it is, I think I just see “sacred” as something else entirely.
“In 1995, the head-trauma wing at a nursing home in Bensonhurst began acquiring the lost memories of Def Jam’s first rapper. Terry Keaton, a new patient at Haym Salomon hospital, had emerged from a coma unaware that he was T La Rock. Or that T La Rock had a hit in 1984 called “It’s Yours.” What was known is that the history of T La Rock — and perhaps the time of his life — had been purged from Terry Keaton’s mind with a blunt instrument.
The assailant was never caught, and Keaton spent much of his rehab listening to “It’s Yours,” recollecting lines that the rest of the hip-hop world had been quoting for the past decade. Though “It’s Yours” wasn’t exactly targeting the Yiddish-speaking Russian-granny demographic, this Def Jam moment essentially became theirs: a new memory that required an additional memory for all that excess bass. Listening to an 808 drum machine certainly beat not recognizing your loved ones.”
- And speaking of ghosts and hip-hop: one of those albums I was referring to yesterday is the oft-delayed Ghostface & DOOM record “Swift & Changeable“. Since first getting into Wu-Tang, Ghostface quickly rose to the top of those 9 rappers for me personally. I’m a big fan.
And since we’re on the subject, if you do not already have WUGAZI on your computer I’d suggest getting it. It’s free, and awesome. Now here’s more links:
“Birger Rasmussen, paleontologist with Curtin University in Perth, and colleagues have found natural samples in several sites in Western Australia, and as they describe in their paper published in Geology, it appears likely the mineral is more common here on our home planet than anyone might have surmised.
The mineral has been found in six sites in all, in various remote spots in Western Australia, and occurs in very small amounts. The samples found were actually about the width of a human hair and just microns in length, and that’s part of the reason why it’s taken so long for those that study rocks to find such samples here on Earth. Another reason is that tranquillityite is comparatively delicate and tends to break down when exposed to normal surface climatic events such as heat, rain and wind.“
- Warren Ellis: Five Predictions About The Immediate Future Of Comics. Among them: indie creators being offered deals to do their own bidding via digital storefronts/apps, more self-publishing/direct to book publishers, several of the DC staff will begin exiting the company due to the constant shifting of… everything.
“Cyberculture legend RU Sirius, editor at the Acceler8or webzine, interviewed Joel Garreau and myself about the Prevail project. (Short summary for those who missed the earlier post: Prevail is an Arizona State University-sponsored non-profit organization looking to build collaborative knowledge about transformative technologies and culture.) In a series of back-and-forth email among the three of us, we discussed everything from the logic of transhumanism to the power of the Occupy movement. “
