Archive

Archive for the ‘Cthulhu Cthursdays!’ Category

Cthulhu and me. And you!

November 19, 2009 Marco Sparks 1 comment

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:

Cthulhu Cthursday Miller Time.

November 5, 2009 Marco Sparks Leave a comment

The Great Old Ones enjoy some great cold ones.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?

Tricks in search of treats.

October 15, 2009 Marco Sparks Leave a comment

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.

PSA.

September 24, 2009 Marco Sparks 2 comments

Knowing is half the battle!

from here, and here, and here.

The Post-Modern Prometheus.

September 17, 2009 Marco Sparks Leave a comment

“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…

The House of Mice/Ideas.

September 1, 2009 Marco Sparks Leave a comment

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.

The other Gods, the outer Hell, and Cthulhu Cthursday.

August 27, 2009 Marco Sparks Leave a comment

In case of confusion:

from here.

Solitude is everything.

June 18, 2009 Marco Sparks 5 comments

“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

Dark stars.

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.

I am a traveler of both time and space.

March 26, 2009 Marco Sparks Leave a comment

When he wakes up in the morning, Sayid from Lost takes a shower, makes himself some breakfast, cereal probably, and then goes out and creates red hot paradoxes!

Last night’s episode of Lost, entitled “He’s Our You,” wasn’t a great episode, but it was certain a damn interesting one. And, at least for me, a welcome return to the single character flashback system, focusing wonderfully on Sayid, always the coolest character in any room, but also one of the most interesting, and played with graceful nuance by Naveen Andrews.

And it looks like Ben was right all along about Sayid’s killer nature, years before he ever knew it. Or knew he knew it. Of course, it’s easy being right when you’re laying face down in the mud on the Island.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like Sayid’s bullet hit evil little Harry Potter young Ben right in the chest, practically right in the heart, right? A killing shot, to be sure, and yet I somehow suspect we’re in for some twisty simple non-super crazy fun paradox way out of it. Was little Ben wearing a bullet proof vest? I almost wouldn’t put it past him.

Though I’ve got my fingers crossed for some hot, raw paradox action. Maybe Desmond’s not the only person that the rules don’t apply to.

Even more fascinatingly to me at the moment was the book that Ben gave Sayid to read during his captivity: A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda, the fiction-as-anthropology dealing in Mesoamerican neo-shamanism. The book, one in a series by Castaneda, detail the author’s many years in an apprenticeship with a Yaqui shaman named don juan Matus. Matus, who was perhaps the original Tyler Durden or Jacob, identifies Castaneda as having the energetic configuration of a nagual, essentially saying that he has the soul of a leader-sorcercor, one who can percieve the higher planes of reality via the use of psychotropic plants and may quite possibly have the gift of transmogrification.

Even better: Ben tells Sayid that he’s read it twice. There’s so many shades of things we’ve seen in the technoshamanism that Lost dabbles going on there, that it makes sense. I’d read it twice too, you little shit.

Many critics have doubted the authenticity of Castaneda’s works, including Joyce Carol Oates, and Donald Barthelme even went so far as to parody his books, though substituting any uses of the word brujo with “brillo.” Castaneda is a classic plastic shaman, but he’s an entertaining one. Just don’t forget to wear your God helmet!

Being a mega-dorky fan of this and an even bigger fan of implied connections a la synchronicity, all of this double interests me because of my recent viewing of Altered States (thanks for that, by the way, Benjamin Light), the 1980 film written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Ken “Apocalyptic Sexuality” Russell.

The film stars William Hurt as a scientist trying to study other states of consciousness while getting over his loss of (Christian) faith in the world, and ends up experimenting with a fictionalized form of the psychoactive amanita muscaria mushrooms in a sensory deprivation tank because they can supposedly bring about the same hallucination in every user: unlocking the keys to genetic memory. They do in his case, causing him to de-evolve into a type of primitive man beast, and then later into a form of man-shaped cosmic energy. The special effects for the hallucinations and the genetic changes are both amazing for their time period and predictably horrible.

Blair Brown plays Hurt’s wife in the film, and of course his savior, because predictably it’s discovered there really is no God, no Jesus, no higher plan (which makes sense), there’s only now and love, and, sigh, love conquers all. Young Blair Brown, incidentally, is gorgeous and is bascially eye candy in the film, her acting talents totally wasted accent in a typical wifely “Be careful” whisper as Hurt’s scientist character goes off in search of different levels of understanding. She is currently playing a cyborg on Fringe, which had a scene with a sensory deprivation tank in it’s pilot which worked as a nice little in joke to the film.

Meanwhile, back on the Island…

I like how so many of our main characters on Lost are still so grounded, despite all the weird shit going on around them. At this point, they’re so used to it, so when Sawyer says, “Oh, by the way, we’re in the 70s,” Jack just kinda bobs his head in an understanding way. In fact, he looks like he’s still on the hillbilly heroin in some of these scenes.

But as much as I like Jack, and wold like to see his character return to the fore in a decent way, I’m kinda digging Sawyer as the main man in the 70s. I can’t say that I’m really excited about a love triangle there, but was happy to see that the Juliet/Kate “confrontation” played out much more civil in the episode than the advertisments would’ve lead us to believe. Essnetially, Juliet: “I’m giving Sawyer what he needs, Man Hips.” Kate (feeling dejected): “Well, shit. Maybe Jack needs a pity fuck…” Juliet: “Or some pills… Oh, hey, there’s Sayid. I bet he’s about to go do something awesome.” Kate: “When is Sayid ever not doing something awesome?”

You got that right, Kate.