“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.”
- I’m giving an album AllMusic gave a fairly glowing review of recently. The album is called “Cover Art”; the debut from a new Jazz-based group of musicians called The NEXT Collective. What’s interesting — considering the amount of talent and experience that comes with the group — is that this is an album of covers. But it really does not feel that way, considering it is instrumental music: jams that go on without much structure beyond, “alright, just keep in the key Drake initially had…” It’s an interesting way to do a debut, and it’ll test your opinion on how artistic covers can or cannot be. If you didn’t know it, you’d think this is a collection of 10 original and very organic songs, recorded with very few takes. This is the cover:
- That blog I spoke of last week is now up and running (though the visuals may still change). The first piece is mine. Which means you’ll know my real name. Oooohhhh… I’m definitely trying to flex some creative muscles I haven’t used in some time; I’m sure it could be better. But it was a blast to get back into more creative writing. There’s definitely a thesis, I hope it’s as clear to everyone else as it is to me. Hopefully this will turn into a good little music blog for people to RSS and follow on Tumblr, cause it’s a great mixture of people writing for it.
“A pair of psychology professors have discovered that a hockey player’s month of birth influences how scouts and coaches judge his talent, and this subconscious selection bias often puts the wrong players on the roster. The study, published online in the journal PLOS ONE, found NHL teams have long underestimated the talent and potential of players born in the second half of the year and tend to overlook them in favor of relatively older players. That is exactly the opposite of what they ought to do, said James Deaner of Grand Valley State University. For any given spot in the draft, players born in the first three months of the year are more likely to be successful than those born in the second half of the same year. “If teams really wanted to win, they should have drafted more of the relatively younger players,” Deaner said.”
“But with The Dark Knight Returns being given the full conversion treatment, this criticism of the film can no longer be the result of compression failure. The problems of the film do not come from lack of loyalty to the source. Far from it – this movie shows us, once more, that overzealous reliance on the original work is not necessarily a boon. A lot of what made The Dark Knight Returns such a good comics was, well, comics-related stuff. The movie tries to re-use some of these elements which remain inert in a medium not suited for them – there are long parts in the novel in which Batman’s actions are interjected with a point/counterpoint-style TV show, Miller and Johnson’s art scatter these discussions (along with dozens of other occurrences) all over the page, they become a representation of fragmented culture (as opposed to the more unified and direct media age that gave birth to Batman and his ilk) and watching them, we realize that Batman no longer operates in a world he was not meant to inhabit (and why the story must end the way it does).”
This is what a lot of people fail to comprehend: there are certain storytelling tropes that are completely unique to sequential art. These tropes may very well explain why (some) comics have turned out to be about the things they’re about; these tropes lend themselves very well to certain high-concepts, visual action, and narrative succession. No matter how faithfully you adapt a comic to a film, or television show, or web series… it still will never be the same thing as reading the comic. Because sequential art — though it’s been around since the Dawn of Man — is one of the most unique storytelling mediums we have, for many reasons I won’t get into here.
- To get personal shit out of the way (even though I know very few people who may be reading this care; and those who are probably have been linked here by google searching “george tooker”): That job I interviewed for last week? I got it! I’m getting closer and closer to a final product with this album I’m working on. It should be pretty neat. My wife is pregnant, so soon I’ll be able to share all this art and music and information with a mini-me. Also, my life will obviously get insane… so, I may have to shut this thing down. Okay, enough of that.
- Some of my buds from across the pond, specifically Daniel the curator, will be starting a music blog very soon that I’ll occasionally be writing on. I’ll definitely be linking to it once it’s up and running, I think he’s shooting for a Tumblr-based site.
- New Game of Thrones trailer:
- Jonathan Hickman has been teasing a new creator owned project that comes out sometime in March with Image Comics. This is the latest teaser:
- I saw Beasts of Southern Wild last night and I really, really enjoyed it. Surreal, haunting, powerful, peaceful, humanistic, with a very something-bigger-than-you vibe to boot. The occasional glimpse at the extinct ancient beast “Aurochs“, who have risen from their frozen states, melted out of the ice caps, is perhaps the best visual metaphor in film this year. The acting is top-notch with the occasional good. The directing and cinematography are beautiful, from the fireworks celebration early on to the parting shot of the characters strolling carelessly as the power of the rising ocean bears down on them. There needs to be more movies like this.
- I don’t why — considering I’m a Minnesotan — I just recently heard of the Sioux Falls group Phantom Balance. Good Lord, they’ll tear your face off. This is the kind of thing that can only be conjured up in the midst of frozen lakes, crops, and wind chills of negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit:
- I feel really bad for bands/musicians that put out records in December: chances are they’ll be left off any year end “Best Of” lists simply for when their record was released. And, as we know, this is not always their choice. It really is getting absurd how quickly everyone releases their year end lists. It’s like December 1st hits, and all of a sudden it’s legit. Have at it. When really, if you think about a “Best of the Year” list, they shouldn’t even really be coming out until January of the following year.
“One of the great challenges we face as a nation is how we preserve the realm of privacy from government intrusion in the modern age, when so much of what we do in private is recorded by virtue of the phones we carry, the emails we send, the credit card transactions we engage in, the computers we use. How do you preserve this value that is absolutely critical to a liberal democracy when technology has made it easier and cheaper for the government to monitor our every move?“
There may be no other South Park statement I disagree with more than when Kyle says (Season 8, Ep. 3: “The Passion of the Jew“) — very much sounding like the words are coming straight from Matt Stone’s mouth: “we watch movies to be entertained”. He’s referring to Mel Gibson’s slaughter fest about Christ, but it really does feel like that’s what Trey and him believe about all movies. That movies are entertainment, pure and simple. And once you cross over that line your movie turns to garbage. It’s this type of thinking that led to Orgazmo and Baseketball. That’s what happens when you reach no higher than entertainment alone.
I bring this up because last night I saw Lincoln, a film that somehow is caught in the middle of such a debate. A film about the political mechanizations of a two party system, and the struggle to get things done within that system. It should be boring. “Boring”. And it’s funny cause I’m reading a number of reviews that think it is boring, from “critics” and general public alike. They’re wrong, it isn’t boring. In fact, it tries really really hard not to be boring. That’s part of the problem. Why even include that opening Civil War scene? Looking back it seems grossly out of place. The film opens with an incredibly violent war scene between a “colored” regiment of The Union and a Confederate regiment in an all out brawl scene reminiscent of Gangs of New York. Bayonets are stabbed into bellies and before you can blink it’s over. This is probably included to further pad a scene late in the film when Lincoln is strolling through the remains of a battlefield before War’s end. But for the audience, it’s actually less of a shock because we’ve already seen the carnage, even if Abe hasn’t.
It may have been clever (well, I guess not that clever… more like serviceable) to bookend the movie with another horrific scene of violence in Lincoln getting assassinated. Two horrible and terrifying scenes to start and end the film, one with faceless soldiers dying in the muck, the other with the main character dying at a play in the nicest box-seats in the theater. Contrasting bookends. But that didn’t happen either, the film ends in another theater, where the Lincolns’ son Tad is watching another play, sitting in another box. And as the camera panned to the left, my wife and I both thought: “well this isn’t very historically accurate”. But it was all a red herring, and you’re left leaving the theater a little befuddled. It kinda feels like Spielberg is trying to fuck with as many different types of movie-goers as he can, and it turns into a meal someone kinda screwed up but it tastes okay so no one is too pissed but the food is really simple to begin with.
Structurally, it’s just sort of a mess. The “horror of the War” stuff is in there to make the “passage of the 13th” stuff feel secondary, and to make Lincoln seem all the more so wholly dedicated to the freedom of the slaves even to the detriment of thousands more lives. Scenes of Gordon-Levitt as Abe’s older son Robert outside a military hospital feel forced and crammed in, as do domestic scenes between Day-Lewis and Sally Field. Okay… holy crap Sally Field is really bad in this movie. Like, really really bad. And I know that Mary Todd Lincoln was probably bi-polar and suffered from migraines and had mental problems, but she doesn’t really play it that way. You don’t get the sense that those things exist really in that, 1) she doesn’t really play the character that sympathetically, and 2) you can just see it in her face that she’s of a level mind. This may have been the way she was written too, but she certainly does nothing to pull the character off the page and present a real, living, breathing tortured First Lady.
Day-Lewis is, of course, amazing as Lincoln. Everything from the way he walks, sits, writes, speaks, even the way he crawls feels like history in the flesh. Easily one of the best performances of the year. David Strathairn, who probably shares the most screen time with Abe, is almost as good as William Seward, a dedicated and brilliant Statesman from New York (who survived his own assassination attempt the night Lincoln got shot). In fact, the entirety of the cast is just brilliant. And rightfully so, as these are some of the best character actors working today. Hal Holbrook, John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, David Costabile, Tim Blake Nelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, and on and on and on it goes. These performances are what really elevates this movie, without them it’d be just another terribly average period piece.
But hey at least I have new material when someone proposes that Steven Spielberg is one of the greatest directors of all-time… from now on I’m just going to say, “eternal-flame dissolve cut”. Equal bad marks should probably go to Tony Kushner — who’s strength is definitely dialogue (probably why he’s such a good playwright) — showing both a lack of creativity and screen-writing class working knowledge when it comes to structure. In the end, this movie might know what it is, but I hardly do.
- So Disney bought Star Wars. If you don’t know. Which is… meh. I mean, I’m not like a huge Star Wars fanboy or anything so I don’t have to strong of feelings either way. I do, like 80% of humans, love the old Star Wars movies; and I do, like 85% of humans, hate the new ones. From what I’m reading from people who know a lot about this stuff, there are novels that act as the official “post-Original Trilogy” story. Something to do with Han and Leia’s kids, Luke running a new Jedi order, and the resurgence of the Empire and the Sith. This could be decent I suppose. The problem with the new ones — and I’m sure this has been written about extensively — is the fear of treading new ground. This notion that they had to fall back on the old ones to be good. You can see that in everything from the bizarre and wacky coincidences written into the story, the way the ships are designed, even the way Palatine was scarred to look like a shitty Halloween costume of himself in Jedi. As long as they don’t do any of that, and focus on a new story, new characters, new designs, they should be alright I hope.
[But hey, I'm one of like 3 million assholes writing my opinions on the Internet about this so what the fuck do I know?]
- William Gibson’s seminal novel Neuromancer is being turned into a film as we speak. Little is known about the project. The IMDB page is empty, to say the least. Liam Neeson’s name is on the cast, which may or may not be true, but sounds awesome. If you don’t know about the novel it’s one of the best science fiction novels of all-time. It started the genre we call “cyberpunk”. It also featured characters “jacking into” the Internet which was obviously directly lifted for The Matrix movies. Anyways, here’s a new poster (the first):
I have the impression that this is the opinion the government wants to impose on people, their way of opposing the situation. I think that when a person goes somewhere, she reflects, she thinks about where she is going and why, because she is using her time and energy. It’s a conscious choice. I don’t go to a demonstration because it’s cool. It isn’t at all cool to go to demonstrations today. The forces of order are nearby. They can beat you up. The demonstration on May 6th proved that. Nowadays, many people find themselves behind bars solely because they went to a public demonstration.
If I mentally transpose the words “entertaining” and “sport,” Dylan’s sentiment gets close to what I’m trying to express (and what I want to feel, but can’t). There was a time when I watched football in order to not think about my day-to-day life, but fantasy sports slowly changed that — in fact, my affinity for fantasy only makes it worse. I turn the players I draft into tiny parts of my life, which stops me from remembering that they have no relationship whatsoever to who I am. It makes me unconsciously think of them as extensions of myself. And I wonder if this is more problematic than I want to accept. Do I have any right to get angry at Chris Johnson? Does anyone?
- The Trouble With The Mask. Great op-Ed on the inherent problems with the new Joker in Batman and featuring a brilliant Bukowski quote.
- 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.
- 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’m releasing my new album tomorrow — which I’ll post — but in the meantime here’s the flash-fiction piece I wrote for it. Hope anyone who reads it likes it. Items in italicized-bold indicate track names, the album title is “The Parallel”.)
The dust bowl got us moving. I’ll never forget that billowing monster looming on the horizon, inching closer hour by hour, tumbling over itself and infecting all it touched. Sometimes I still see it: a black cloud, spitting venom and creeping into the boundaries of my consciousness. It shouldn’t happen to a dream. We cultivated all we could and got out. The road crumbled underfoot, weary old expansion. Millions of stars played tag in the sky. Summers at Itasca were just memories. Flashes of moonlight, Lakeshore, tiny little rocks in my hand. A signpost outside Pipestone read hash-mark, N, G. We setup camp outside town and scavenged for wood. We were sleeping in our tents when the Earth cracked apart and something terrifying emerged from the unknown. The glow of smoldering embers lit the creature’s face orange. Horns dripping sticky waste, wounds all over. Minotaure of the Beyond. It receded after it saw nothing to fear. The next morning we came to a train yard sprinkled with rust and tags. A teenage boy with a guitar and little more lay hungry amongst the cargo. His case was covered in a story written in white paint. Words, pictures, symbols. The story of his life. We left him with a can of beans and hopped the switchbacks West. A couple days later we came to a taconite mine and managed to flee without being seen. The sound of dynamite blasts echoed through the Range. An aging ship captain let us rest in his home for a day and night. His wife took a shining to Maria, gave her a crushed Velvet dress and some pearl earrings to boot. We hadn’t eaten so well in days. They sent us on our way to St. Paul to meet a 7th Street swing dancer who, they said, could help us in our travels. The road became grey as the season changed over. Frost came and went. Tunnel passage. The map shifted again and again. Smoke signals emanated from the valley to the East. Ancient beacon. We huddled around the fire, singing “Carryin’ On” until our voices ceased. Our last day on the road led us to a farm knee deep in repairs; it had encountered a devastating tornado weeks prior. The fields were cloaked in splintered wood and uprooted crops. The farmhands never stopped working. A photographer from out East photographed a migrant mother with the pea pickers. The negative reached out to me, I reached back. The sharecroppers gave us a jug of their moonshine for lending a hand. It was brown, bitter, and reeked of rotten tree bark. That night we passed it around and stumbled into the city’s outer limits. A bluesman repeated a lick on the corner, while a stranger dressed in all white improvised to the chaos. Blurs like long-form exposure. We woke to one of our party lying dead on his back, the concoction poisoned him. That was one gloomy Sunday. Blast furnace… wondering why. I broke bottles all day in an alley behind the depot. Entry static resonated through the brick. I ran away through the broken glass, cuts in my palms. Trail of blood down St. Peter cobblestone. I ran into a bearded plainsman with a hatchet and a pocketwatch; he clutched me tight, smearing ashes across my face. Light embedded eyes blinded me. I tried to squirm free but it was no use. The traffic stopped and we walked across river road, down to the embankment. On an island I saw my traveling party, my family. They smiled and waved and yelled for me to join them. The plainsman heaved me into the river. I flailed, unable to swim, desperately kicking. The water started to fill my mouth, I began sinking. I touched down to the muddy river bottom. As all hope ceased, I saw their faces emerging from the darkness. They carried me to the surface; I coughed and rolled over on the island shore… Closed my eyes under a full moon and dreamt of…
On an overcast and stand-offish Thursday night (I think?) I had an old friend over for coffee and cigarettes: JT Bates. JT was a part-time well-rounded and experienced drummer when I was comin up — oh, I’d say around 1916 to 1920 — and a full-time bar owner in Chicago. After my family took residence in their second house in the city I always crept out at night, weaseling my way into his establishment to watch some Jazz, and maybe get a shot of whiskey if I was lucky. He hated me for the longest time. Until I offered to clean glasses, sweep floors, and wipe tables for him… for free. Only thing I asked for in return was twenty minutes of stage time on open mic nights, Mondays and Wednesdays and every other Thursday. There was a guy who stomped on a kick drum and played keys, one-man band, JT gave every single Tuesday night to. Don’t remember the fellas name, just the project, which was “88 Keys”. Growley voice. Mysterious bastard, never said much. Anyways, JT talked extensively about my flat, what I should do to it, where I should put this or that. Respectfully, of course. We were movin a desk to the window when I said, “you know, you still let me play even after I stopped workin for you all those years ago, I think I still owe you one…” He dropped the desk in the middle of the room, paused, and walked to the window rubbing his eyes. “Has it been that long? What year is this? Sometimes… sometimes, Sonny, my mind jumps out of my body and it wanders the streets while I’m sleeping. I’m afraid its looking for something that aint there.” It was plain to me then that he was having a rough time adjusting. We all do to some degree, its just a matter of blocking that out to accept what’s happened, and what will happen. “There’s no stoppin it, Mr. Bates”, I put my hand on his shoulder, “what’s done is done. This is our life now.” I remember what Mr. Thompson had told me. That tripped out looney philosopher-king, damn if he doesn’t get it. “Mr. Bates. No one has called me that in years.” The streetlights below shot up into his face, casting it in shallow light. His eyes relaxed a bit, and he looked up into the cloudy black sky. “There is one thing you could do for me, Sonny…” I started pouring out the last of the coffee into each of our cups at the table, JT lit up. “Can you go back to my apartment and steal my journals from me?”
