Counterforce

So… the first day of a new month, and you ponder as you recover from the madness of mars, how are you supposed to prepare for a whole new month when the first day of said month is one for joking and tomfoolery and hoaxes. And you wonder about this new month, who does it belong to? The jokers and manipulators or the gullible and foolish?

from here.

That’s a question we can ask ourselves, certainly, but maybe another time.

Cause we are clearly not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I haven’t seen a lot of great April Fool’s Day jokes out there, not even a tremendous amount of RickRolling either, but Maria pointed out that Joel McHale took over Ryan Seacrest’s site, which is kind of funny to me, and also an upgrade, obviously.

How can Ryan Seacrest’s joke be anything but a failure when it’s a celebration of someone like Ryan Seacrest? An age old question. If you look good and hard at the walls in Plato’s cave, that question is written there, along with mythic super hero hieroglyphics and crude depictions of humans hunting animals and having sex with lightning bolts or whatever crazy thing people were onto back then.

Oh, and then I just saw this:

I giggled a bit at that, I won’t lie.

Oh, and this:

Way to go fake science news, as reported by CNET UK: “A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had traveled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.”

So many lovely references in the CNET UK article there, I recommend you glance at it, sci fi nerds. There’s a nice glance towards H. G. Well’s famous novel in the paragraph above, but the story also references that the mysterious stranger from the future was wearing “wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age,” which is a lovely nod to the fact that, as I shall remind you once again, the new series of Doctor Who starts this weekend with the brand new Doctor.

Oh, and this clips’s decent as well.

Maybe I was wrong before when I saw that time travel was something special about last year, something that was meant to stay in last year and that our lurch towards something big and new and wonderful here in the year we make contact was going to be just that, here, now, in this year. But maybe time travel isn’t done with us yet. At least not in pop culture. I say that half seriously, half in jest, and a whole other crazy half in an attempt to segue into how I think that next week’s episode of Lost, which of course is a Desmond one, makes me think it’ll be similar to “The Constant.”

What do you think? Yes, no, maybe? Oh, who knows. We’ll just watch and see. It’s Desmond, so it’ll be good.

But Benjie Light and I were talking the other day, gabbing and gossiping as we’re prone to do, waxing poetic about things we’d like to see as the last season of Lost winds down and half jokingly, and half in an eerie calm wave of deadly seriousness, we decided that whatever the finale image of Lost is… whether it’s Jack smiling at having found his destiny or a gorgeous sunset or Sayid marching off into the future with a whole bevy of beautiful women on his arm, we’d then like the producers to immediately cut to this:

from here.

And if, for some reason, Cthulhu isn’t doing it for you today, there’s always this:

via the always always always interesting Molly Crabapple, but look also here and perhaps maybe here, if you’re into that kind of thing. And let’s face it: you probably are, right?

Edited to add:

ALSO! Up next: Post #500! It’s been that many, can you believe it? Shocking, right? For that very special post we have something planned that may be very interesting. Or, it may suck hard. Either way… stay tuned! Until then, here’s a picture of Sarah Palin visiting herself from the future:

from here.

If Obama can bring people together to talk over beers, then why can’t fictional semi-religious horror icons like Cthulhu and Jesus do the same?

This is my rough estimation of what your top Halloween costumes will look like this year…

1. Michael Jackson. I don’t think this will be a big surprise. We love death! Especially celebrity death, and what better way to celebrate a man who had faded into a rather ghoulish appearance/existence/notoriety than to dress up in his horrifying visage on All Hallow’s Eve. It’s a special kind of homage. For reference, see…

2. The Joker/Heath Ledger. This appeals to the above mentioned death fetishists, those fuckers who dress like clowns/painted demons every goddamn year, and Crow/Cure fans 3.0. As annoying as this gets once you’ve seen it forty times at the same party, it could be worse people. The same guy dressed up in a Joker costume could instead be dressed up in some kind of fishnet mesh shirt… thing.

3. Pirate. Ugh. Shiver my timbers, you morons. Go walk a plank. Seinfeld summed it up best years ago: But I don’t wanna be a pirate! This is not the costume of a self respecting man. The Dread Pirate Robert being the only exception, of course. And last but not least…

Anything “sexy,” or…

…”adult”-ish, or…

…involving cat ears or devil horns. Hey, I’m not judging. And I’m not really complaining either. It’s an interesting place to be. Intellectually, I respect a woman who wants to dress up like Amelia Earhart or Marie Curie or Lucrezia Borgia or whatever. But then again, if you want dress up like Wonder Woman or a sexy astrophysicist or a sexy brain surgeon, I’m okay with that too. In fact, more power to you.

But, me, personally, I’m going to go with the dark horse candidate this Halloween. This year it’s all about the infamous figure everyone will be dressing up as next year: Roman Polanski.

It’s either that, or something involving a cape. And I don’t know what the going rate on capes are these days, but I think this will be cheaper.

This costume really only requires a camera, some qualuudes, and an invite back to Jack Nicholson’s house. It’s the perfect thing for a very frugal season. And, on the plus side, it’s so very, very, very much in incredibly bad taste.

Knowing is half the battle!

from here, and here, and here.

“The ancient teachers of this science… promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”

-from chapt. 3 of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.

And the pictures are, of course, from James Whale’s 1931 adaptation (which you could very loosely call it) of the story, and were found at this lovely blog of all things Frankenstein-ish. More soon…

from here.

Disney bought Marvel comics!

from here.

What that actually means in business terms. It’s interesting stuff. One thing: Payoffs, big time.

The top 70 Marvel comics panels of all time.

Sand castle codes.

Brian Jones’ death to reexamined.

The cinema of romantic revenge.

“I don’t know what color your eyes are, baby, but your hair is long and brown…”

What you need to know about one of the greatest comics ever, Love And Rockets.

Chris Brown blames Larry King for what happened with Rihanna.

Africans “under siege” in Moscow.

The five faces of Two Face and Rob Liefeld.

One of my favorite comics ever, Young Liars by David Lapham, presented to you in 17 panels.

Stray Bullets, also by David Lapham.

The future of contextual advertising.

William Golding, author of The Lord Of The Flies, was an attempted rapist.

How to deal with annoying friends.

Batshit nuts pastor prays for Obama’s death.

A remembrance of Sharon Tate.

India abandons their moon mission.

Jack Kirby and the severed head of Superman.

from here.

Symbolism and the $1 bill.

The sequential art version of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.

Where science fiction gets serious.

Grant Morrison and Clive Barker.

New Batgirl. And you know I like Batgirl.

Someone is actually adapting Shhh! by Jason into a film. Nice.

Akiva Goldsman to write a reboot of those shitty Fantastic Four movies.

Science ponders zombie attack. The gist of it: We lose.

In case of confusion:

from here.

“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

from here.

“For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”

-Aldous Huxley

from here.

Who’s worse, Hitler or God? I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the answer.

Does the internet make us more lonely?

“the internet has my brain so backwards. now the only way i can express undesirable feelings like anger or being generally displeased is through facebook statuses or random blog postings like this right here….booo….“

-Peanut St. Cosmo

“At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.”

-Jean de la Bruyere

Speaking of Cthulhu, June 18 is International Sushi Day.

Man rescued after stranding himself on an island.

An acoustic black hole.

Is the universe all in your mind?

from here.

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”

-May Sarton

from here.

“In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.”

-Laurence Sterne

also from here.

“Light and color, peace and hope, will keep painters company to the end of the day.”

-Winston Churchill

from here.

“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.”

-Rachel Carson

This very brave astronaut is Bruce McCandless II, the first man to take an untethered space walk, on a Challenger mission in 1984. He used a back-pack propulsion system called a Manned Maneuvering Unit to control his movement. You may recognize this semi-iconic photograph, taken of Bruce during this very spacewalk.

The above words from here and image from here.

“I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

The other night I had the weirdest dream. In it, I was walking around in some old 1960s Italian film, lots of heavy imagery floating around. But actually, there was none: It was pitch black, tone-less. I was strolling through an absolutely dark playground at what I would have to assume was night. I could only hear the sound of my expensive leather shoes as they moved along the pavement.

from here.

How did I know it was a playground since it was so dark, since I could see so little? I don’t know. The feeling of it, I guess. The sound of rusty chains as the wind gently blew the swings back and forth. The absence of laughter. Just a feeling.

But then I could hear the steps another. I stopped and looked around. I could see nothing, of course. And his footsteps stopped too. For too long of a moment, there was absolute silence.

from here.

And when I started walking again, so did he. His footsteps matching mine perfectly. I stopped again after a moment and so did he. I waited. Then just a few feet away from me, his face was illuminated by a lighter as he lit a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“I didn’t see you there,” I said, or something equally stupid.

“No shit,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, ignoring it. “Dark out tonight, huh?”

“That’s because all the stars were eaten out of the sky,” he told me. He said it so slowly, rhythmically, nonchalantly, like it was this normal thing. Or worse: that this horrible thing had happened years and years earlier and he accepted it. Like there was no more words to be wasted on this. I wanted to question him about it but then I woke up.

from here.

The world felt weird to me then. I saw everything in half light wherever I went, and viewed everything from a weird angle, which put a sinister lean on just about wherever I went. It reminded me of the implied post-nuclear imagery in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse:

Obviously the dream kind of hung with me a good portion of the next day, just lingering over me. Not so much like a rainy cloud like you would see in a cartoon or anything like that, but more like an unanswered question. But there was no question there, so certainly there could be no answer, right?

The why’s behind how I blog are like that, in a way. It’s how my mind works: Constantly looking for connections between different things that probably should not be connected. It doesn’t always – or usually – make sense to others, but then again, I don’t ask it too. I just ask that it makes sense to me, somehow (even if I do secretly worry about others getting it too).

Let’s just say that I was so thankful when the idea of synchronicity came into my world. It made me feel like maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t crazy.

Later that day, the day after the dream, I ran into my good friend Conrad Noir. He had this half excited, half puzzled look on his face. “Hey,” he said when he saw me. “I brought back that book you let me borrow. I just read it. I…”

“What book?” I asked. And he showed it to me:

Black Hole by Charles Burns. “Oh,” I said and smiled. He asked me why I was smiling but I didn’t answer.

Yesterday at work, Conrad and I were bullshitting through our day with one of our co-workers. The co-worker had just watched the trailer to the new Michael Jai White film, Black Dynamite. If you haven’t seen it, just know that it’s pure wonderful ridiculous, and I highly recommend you watch it. Go do so now. I’ll be here when you get back.

We were sitting around, talking about it like stupid little fanboys, just like we are, and laughing about how a movie like this excites more than a hundred million Tarantino projects like Inglorious Basterds.

“Some day,” Conrad said to us, “I really want to make a blaxpoitation movie. Like the blackest, meanest blaxpoitation movie ever. I just don’t know what I’d call it.”

I’ve got a great title for you, I told him. On my face I wore the same smile that I had on when he brought me the book the day before. “What?” he asked. My smile grew larger, produced teeth, and I said, “The Black Blackness.”

from here.

We had a good laugh about that, ha ha ha, and joked about how perhaps BizarrObama could make an appearance in there somewhere. Ha ha ha. But when the laughter died down a little, I was left there thinking to myself about things…

But that’s a story for another time. I don’t want to bore you with philosophical pondering into the abyss and useless questions like…

…nah, that’s not for me. Not right now, at least. Instead, I have thinking to do. Maybe posting this is the answer, but maybe it isn’t. Just like… maybe I should sit here reading about dark stars and looking at pictures of black holes online or maybe I should go put some extra dreamy shoegaze on my headphones and go outside to wait for the stars to come out?

Either way, you should go read Black Hole by Charles Burns. Eventually it’ll be made into a movie, which at one point was going to be directed by either the French guy who gave us Haute Tension or by David Fincher with a script by Neil Gaiman. But you want to read it now, trust me. Just imagine how great their film would’ve been had it not fallen into a black hole of it’s own.

Perhaps it’s a perspective thing. Perhaps I was half right before?

Perhaps not everything has to make sense.