Category Archives: Caturday

Phrenology.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

“I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.”

from here.

-Neal Stephenson, from an interview with the Associated Press, in which he coined the term “text literacy.”

Also, Neal Stephenson coined the term “anglosphere” as well.

Turns out that David Cronenberg is going to direct one of my favorite books…

…the lovely and underrated As She Climbed Across The Table by Jonathan Lethem. The thing about Cronenberg’s movies is that they all kind of fit together, they all kind of hit those little bits of Cronenbergian weirdness that you expect from him. They’re like pieces to a puzzle that only fully reveals the shape of one’s interests and desires and fears when placed together.

The last two films he did, A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises, confound that mindset briefly, but once you really think about it, you can see exactly where the concepts behind them fired up all the right neurons for him. As She Climbed Across The Table is similar, though you wouldn’t think so at first. It’s the story of a man who’s girlfriend leaves him for a singularity, and then… well, it’s about exactly that, and yet, so much more than that, of course.

When I first read that he was going to adapt it, I thought, “Huh?” But the more I think about it, the more I think it could work as a part of his filmography. The only thing is… the book is really, really funny (well, in a way). I’ll be fascinated to see what the director does with this very dry, almost fatalistic sense of humor between the words.

From the internet:

from here.

And:

from here.

So, yeah, clearly, other than talking about a few authors and movies based on their books, and words, and funny pictures, and LOLcats, I’ve got nothing else to say. Check back tomorrow. Maybe then. Maybe. In the meanwhile, if you need me, I’ll be examining the shape of my own head in the mirror.

Don’t go chasing waterfalls…

Posted by Marco Sparks on

…stick to the rivers and the streams that you’re used to, mmkay?

More later about last night’s incredibly interesting episode of Lost, “Across The Sea,” including theories about the nature of the Smoke Monster/Man In Black that we’ve seen thus far, but before we go there, what really matters is… What did you think?

Without your permission.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Mad linkage:

A visual representation of Ice-T telling Aimee Mann to eat a hot bowl of dicks in their recent twitter spat.

The entire archive of Twitter is going into the Library Of Congress. Seriously.

Think gene patents are controversial now? Just wait.

Steampunk Indiana Jones French hotties.

Psychedelic information theory.

Steven Seagal sued for allegedly keeping sex slaves.

Mel Gibson is splitting with his new girlfriend and Larry King is cheating on his wife with her sister.

Street Art pictures from here.

Conan O’Brien going to TBS. “Very funny.”

Does our universe live inside a wormhole?

Lions and tigers and blogs, oh my!

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Ah, March. The Madness of Mars! Oh… the madness of it. Well, you know what they say about this month: In like a lamb and out like a…

Ha ha.

Yes. Like a lion.

Did the V countdown clock during last night’s episode of Lost hurt your enjoyment of the episode?

The most influential brands of 2090.

LL Cool J and Sarah Palin and Toby Keith and CONTROVERSY.

Something terrifying for you today, in visuals: the “Teabonics” photo set.

from here.

Reputation is dead. Time to overlook our indiscretions?

“Mind boggling” artwork that will tower over London.

Someone finally apologized for Battlefield Earth.

from here.

Though they’re not Roman, lions are kind of the gods of war in the jungle, right?

Do you honestly think that you could kill a zombie if you had the opportunity?

Terrifying sea creature hauled up from the ocean’s dark depths!

“Say hello to my little friends…” or, Scarface as a school play.

Tiger Woods blames it all on Michael Jordan. Gotta be the shoes!

Someday I’d like to see LOLcats evolve into LOL LIONS!

When I googled “LOL LIONS” just now I found this picture…

…from here. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! Ha ha. Eeesh, that’s disturbing. Of course there’s someone out there who thinks that Jesus and bestiality go hand in hand.

Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren is being adapted as a stage play.

Jay Leno: “Conan got screwed. I got screwed.”

Robin Williams likes comic books like DMZ and Tekkonkinkreet.

A comic you should read: Brian K. Vaughan’s Pride Of Baghdad.

Useless factoid: March starts the same day of the week as November every year.

Also, the mars bar, which was previously discontinued in America, makes it’s return in 2010. It’s the year we make contact… with chocolate, almond, and nougat apparently. Honestly, I don’t know WTF nougat is.

The MGM logo and Nostradamus.

George Lopez and Lindsay Lohan arguing on twitter!

Fuck bullshit like “mansplaining,” now it’s all “retrosexuals” and “The Menaissance.”

Is robbing a bank on your bucket list? It should be, right?

“I’m not the messiah,” says food activist.

Puberty makes you stupid.

The second half of the current season of The Venture Bros. returns in August.

15 fingers and 16 toes!

Things you may not have known about (that you missed) in March: The third week of the month is National Brain Awareness week in USA, which is not shocking that you didn’t know about it, right? March is also National Peanut Month (for us too, of course) and National Umbrella Month. This is also the month that Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in (on March 7, 1876) as well as the month in which Hinckley tried to assassinate Reagan (on March 30, 1981). We know all about “the ides of March,” but did you know that March was originally the first month of the Roman Calendar until Caesar changed it to the third (for shits and giggles)? Also, violets are the official flowers of March. Hope yours was a good one.

Slipstream.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Big sexy wormhole action.

Before work I stopped at the store to get some much needed ingredients to survive all the bullshit, mostly things filled to the brim with sugar or promising me “energy,” and the store was almost empty. Very few customers, stockers and empty boxes littering the aisles, and the checkout clerks were so bored by the lack of business that they didn’t really want to linger at the checkout stands amidst the gossip magazines and plethora of fruity, sugar free gums. In short, it was nice.

The general idea behind wormholes and shit like that.

There were a few other customers wandering aimless like myself. I happened to pass one such woman on the liquor aisle. Her eyes darted from cheap bottle of wine to cheap bottle of wine, not really focusing on anything, since she was talking on her cell phone.

Ha ha, ahhhh yes, things are always funnier and easier to understand when simplified down to cat science.

All I could hear as I approached her initially was, “Uh huh, got it,” followed by, “Uh huh, got it,” and then again, “Uh huh, got it.”

Here we go.

A normal enough conversation, but then, right as I’m passing her, I hear her say into the phone, “Wait, what?! She said what to you? Oh no. No! You tell her this for me, you tell her, you say… GET IN MAH WORMHOLE!”

Tiny hole.

The last part didn’t come out of her mouth until I had just passed her, the words hitting the back of my head and my ears and causing a chain reaction of surprised hysterical laughter within me so hard that I dropped whatever few groceries I was carrying. The desire to laugh lingered all day, right up until now as I replay it in my mind while typing this.

GET IN MAH WORMHOLE!

For one time and one place.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Tonight’s movie:

Sans Soleil, by Chris Marker, who’d previously done the short film La Jetée, which served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s excellent 12 Monkeys.

The film is an experiment take on the documentary and the travelogue as a ficticious filmmaker sends footage and letters back to a woman, who narrates/shares with us his thoughts. It moves from place to place, not really concerned with narrative, and spends some time in Japan, Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco, where it pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s amazing Vertigo, probably my favorite film ever.

The film deals a lot with the ideas of travel and loneliness and memory (“remembering is not the opposite of forgetting“) and the idea that our memories can be replaced with film as a document, amongst other things. This is one of those movies I put on when I want to relax and it never fails to do the trick.

The English version of the film opens with this quote from T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday:

“Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place”

Marker’s an enigmatic and reclusive filmmaker, mostly sticking to the documentary form, and careful to never let himself become the subject of the story. He refuses to do interviews and when he’s asked for a picture of himself, he instead sends along a picture of his cat, Guillaume. But that’s another story for another time. I’ll leave you with live footage of Blonde Redhead performing their song “Ego Maniac Kid” in front of a project of Marker’s Battle Of Ten Million…

Music and cats.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

“There are two means of refuge from the misery of life—music and cats.”

-Albert Schweitzer.

from here.

Here’s something that’s not new: the music industry and the radio suck these days.

The only solution we have for musical artists these days? The internet.

If you’ll wake up one day and tell yourself that you’re going to open your ears to what the smart way to get the kids listening to new music via the internet, what the right marketing strategy is, then you’ll hear about a million different things. For example:

Trent Reznor Digg Dialogg from drawaside on Vimeo. And from here (WordPress won’t embed the interview, and it’s a big of a long one, but an interesting one, certainly).

But the gist is basically DIY, right? Makes sense. And while I’m only a so so fan of what NIN are up to these days, Reznor does make a lot of good points. We don’t know what the new thing is, but it’s not here yet, and the old thing has been dead for a long, long time. And it’s okay to make money off of music, but do it ethically, but more importantly, do it smart: Put the  power in the hands of the artist (as long as they’re not doing this) and the listener, because that will continue to sustain and renew the industry over and over.

Also, CeCe Peniston’s “Finally” is still awesome:

I mean, right?

Personally, for me, the answer right now is 90% the same as say… paintings. Obviously, music is a different kind of art, but bear with me on this metaphor…

Let’s say that I want to look at Picasso’s  Three Musicians.

That’s not really hard at all, is it? All I have to do is turn on my computer and go to the internet. I can go to Google. I can go to Wikipedia. Those are simple and yet. Fuck, I can even go to ye olde Counterforce and there it is!

Art and able for me to touch look at and experience in my own home, just as it should be.

But you know what? Having it hear in my home, like this, is not the same as actually being near the thing. It’s not horrible, but say I want that extra experience. And if I do, I just go to the MoMA and there it is waiting for me.

Personally, as a musical privateer, I believe you should be able to get your music that you want in your own home or in your car or just in your headphones rotating around and making things vibrate in your brain. That should be essential part of your day, whether it happens through “nefarious means” or through legal downloads or whatever. But you know it’s not the same as being in the same room as the artist making that music. And the most spectacular artists make their money off of concerts. Go to them. That’s a kind of magic you can’t replicate in your home. It’s a one time only amazingly special thing as you take a break from your life and go to their world and experience that and you deserve it.

And you deserve good music, and that’s what artists should be giving you always. I hate to quote Lady Gaga here (though this compilation of ridiculous quotes is priceless), but take heed, artists: “It’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about.” So, you know, please get on that for us.

And finally I’ll leave you with a new unsigned artist. Dark Knights Of Camelot is a band that Conrad Noir saw somewhere a while back and he couldn’t stop gushing about their show afterward. They’re a combination of Queens Of The Stone Ago (the aspects of that group that I like, he assured me, since there’s a lot of aspects of them that I don’t like) and Dinosaur, Jr. “They’re really, really fucking good,” he told me and he shared with me their EP that he bought. “Of course they’re better in concert though,” he said. “Of course,” I said. “Of course,” he repeated. This is their myspace and this is their music:

Dark Knights Of Camelot “Wannabe” (mp3)

Dark Knights Of Camelot “I’d Rather You” (mp3)

Dark Knights Of Camelot “Lusterlack” (mp3)

Blog when you’re dead…

Posted by Marco Sparks on

…and sleep now. Or, perhaps the other way around.

A lot of people (online) have been talking about the more than apparent sanitization of Amazon that started this past weekend.  Initially, Amazon PR said, “Oh, don’t worry, it’s just a glitch,” but that’s apparently not the case (though a hacker is taking credit, but it still seems fishy). Not at all, it would seem. And while it sadly seems to be targeted of anything of a predominantly homosexual nature, it also looks to be the beginning of pushing anything remotely adult in nature back behind an electronic beaded curtain. I guess I can understand their wanting to shield all the Harry Potter and Twilight fans from the grown up stuff, but still, it seems kind of sad.

I’m the kind of pervert who likes all his filth right out in the open. Well… mostly.

At least we still have gratuitously violent materials of all sorts to chow down on. Take away my lurid blue materials away, but leave me something to satisfy my bloodlust, if you please.

Earlier today, coincidentally after reading a nice post on the need for good writers and perhaps not so much of an emphasis on improving one’s own brand by our very own Lollipop Gomez, I came across an old issue of Wired, the one with Julia Allison on the cover. Ah, the Queen of self promotion.

from here.

The article is interesting, kind of a bland history and introduction of Julia Allison the character to the mainstream readers of the magazine, and that’s pretty much all I’ll say about her. By now, you get the gist. You either like her or you don’t. You either like what she does or you don’t.  The thing I do want to share from the article is actually from one if it’s sidebars, a goofy little bit on how to twitter successfully (and mind you, this is from August of 2008, when twitter was… well, only slightly less well known than it is now)(although now it’s “a marketing tool“), in which Wired asked some of Twitter’s “top talents” to provide advice on proper twittering in 140 characters or less. This is from a guy named Joshua Allen:

“Every single Twitter post you write should be something that could get you laid, ruin a marriage, or bring a tear to a fat little kid’s eye.”

Good advice. And the very words I live by, both here in the real world and also in the Matrix.

Mad Linkage for you l33t h@x0rs:

John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s panel from SXSW on turbocharging your blog. Very interesting stuff. And it’s nicely targeted at those who just want to do better and not necessarily make mucho dinero (though there’s nothing wrong with that).

Should journalism go nonprofit?

Passenger lands airplane after pilot dies.

Oregon bans bukkake!

Al Franken is officially the next Senator from Minnesota (again, it seems), though appeals are, of course, likely.

Speaking of the GOP: Teabagging.

Marilyn Chambers was found dead today in her home.

Top 10 inaccurate movies about the future.

Lisa Hannigan is (finally!) putting together a solo album.

J. M. Coetzee on Samuel Beckett, Margaret Atwood nominated for an award (on business books, interestingly enough), and the mash up of Pride And Prejudice and the undead becomes a bestseller. And that’s just a few choice links from this lovely collection of them.

Go do a little light reading, internet superstars.