from here.
Category Archives: cultural self-loathing
Either/Or.
Mad linkage:
The important new dynamic in modern human communication.
The first image (fucking finally) from Joss Whedon/Drew Goddard’s Cabin In The Woods.
Are wide male faces a predictor for unethical behavior?
James Spader is joining The Office, but not as the boss, not for long.
Zadie Smith turning to speculative fiction and sci fi.
Infidelity might just keep us together.
Spike Lee to direct the American remake of Oldboy?
Above: Katie West summer print sale.
An oral history of Explosions In The Sky.
Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter.
The paradox that was G. K. Chesteron.
Don’t let them cut off your balls, boys.
At least Glenn Beck is gone from the airwaves.
An oral history of Michael Fucking Bay.
9 steps to foolproof outdoor sex.
“In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant…. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known—no wonder, then, that I return the love. “
-Søren Kierkegaard
Harry Potter’s favorite magic potion is booze.
Speaking of which, some of your favorite fast food chains are now serving alcohol.
Also, the “experts” are now saying that some “light drinking” may be “safe” while you’re pregnant.
And: An oral history of the Harry Potter film series.
The evils of “like” culture.
“All I want is to have incredibly violent sex.”
from here.
Massive amounts of cheating discovered in Atlanta public schools.
Topless sunbathing in the bit city.
How Charlotte’s Web was conceived.
The perfect penis.
Alfred Hitchcock recalls working with Salvador Dali.
“You are a computer salesman – I am fucking JAMES BOND.”
Ours might not be a holographic universe after all 
Harbingers
As you may have gathered from some of my past writing, I’m a big Neal Stephenson fan. He is one of my favorite authors. I was discussing with Marco the other day how when reading, say, the fifth Harry Potter book, it felt like Rowling’s editor needed to step in and convince JK to tighten it up a bit. But with Stephenson, even when he’s plowing into a chapter-long tangent, you don’t mind, because he takes you interesting places. That’s not to say that Rowling is not a talented writer, but the voice that Stephenson writes with is just on a different, more stylistic level. His sometimes indulgent asides are what make him so much fun.
I’d like to talk about a concept of punishment he puts forth in his novel Anathem. It’s called the Book. A brief primer: Anathem takes place in a world similar to our own, but where scholars live a quasi-monastic life of simple means behind the walls of big stone concents, cut off from the rest of society for a period of one, ten, 100 or 1000 years. This separation allows the “avout,” as they are called, to dedicate their lives to scholarly work without distraction or interruption. While there are your typical chores and kitchen duty that can be assigned to reprimand bad behavior, there is also the Book. When an avout needs sterner discipline, the administrators can “throw the Book” at them.
The idea of the Book, as the main character Erasmas explains it, is to punish the mind of the wayward avout. It’s 12 chapters long, filled with inane, inaccurate and possibly insane content that must be memorized and tested against. Imagine a mathematician being forced to learn and apply false proofs, or a writer who must memorize incorrect definitions. The Book is designed to poison the mind, taking a sledgehammer to the foundations of an avout’s critical thinking and logical faculties. And each chapter is exponentially harder than the one before. In the novel, it’s said that only 3 men ever completed all 12 chapters, which took a lifetime, and they were all thoroughly insane when they finished. That the avout have dedicated themselves to learning makes it all the more heinous a punishment to them, as they are forced to corrupt their minds and waste their time working counter to their own life’s work.
One example Erasmas gives is a chapter full of nursery rhymes that almost, but do not quite rhyme. Another is five pages of the digits of Pi. In the novel, he is assigned the first five chapters as penance, which takes him several weeks to complete. And the idea is that, if you get in trouble again, you could get assigned even more. It is suggested that going higher can permanently damage one’s ability to process and organize information effectively.
I mention all this as prelude to my latest movie review:
Surely, if the Book were real, Chapter 6 would be the shooting script to Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. And the less said further the better.
–Benjie
blackberry, i love you but you’re bringing me down
you know, i’m a normal girl. nothing too crazy, like having a cat farm as i’ll never have children. i have a boyfriend, he’s mad cute and likes me!!! i don’t talk to myself in public. often. ok, that’s a lie, but i’m pretty balanced. but i have a special relationship that i just can’t hide.
oooh yeah gurl, work that shit
her name is blackberry curve, and we’ve been together two years now. two special years. we’ve had our ups and downs, you know, like everyone else. but she keeps me connected, mostly. i look out for her too. i get her insurance and even clothe her in boring little gel covers. you know, in case i drop her all crunk like. but when she slips out of that cover….damn!
i wish that we could talk about it, but there, that's the problem
it’s a sleek phone! it is! i hear other peeps talking about their texting machines; iphone, androids, misc machines out there. yeah, that’s all great for you. it is. but i’ve gotten to know this thing, and change is hard. you get this shiny pretty thing, never bothering to read all the pamphlets and watch the tapes. this BB and i have gotten to know each other. she takes my photos, sends my facebook updates, tweets my nonsense, and deletes my shitty spam email. she’s been an important part of my life!!! there’s few humans i would trust with those tasks, but i trust her!
dare i? no...no, maybe she isn't good enough to have my last name.
so here we are, at contract renewal time. i put a lot of faith in you, but like all old models, you’re breaking down. not what you used to be. it’s like the relationship that just starts to fall apart. i don’t get texts because you won’t get off your fat ass and receive them. you put your needs ahead of mine, always needing charging and self absorbed things like that. i pay your bills! keep you looking good! hate to go all janet, but what have you done for me lately??? she can’t blame me for having that wandering eye….ooooOOOooooyeah!
sound of silver talk to me. makes you want to feel like a teenager.
it’s not to say i don’t believe that someone can find eternal and committed love. i do, it exists, i think? jonathan franzen wrote a little piece about something similar recently. it touched the unfeelingness that i and a lot of people had been feeling. ever since these little devices/angels from heaven had been introduced to our lives. the disconnect of connection. the like of ourselves when others *like* us. “we like the mirror and the mirror likes us.” this is a topic that’s been covered-ish. what did i mostly take from this article? franzen had a blackberry!! my literary idol shares my love, but is also a bird watcher…so there’s that.
so this isn’t a decision to take lightly, obviously. she’s meant a lot to me. sadly though, there’s a ton of the twist, but we’re fresh out of shout….to be continued….
Michael Fucking Caine.
This is Michael Caine:
This is his twitter account.
This is how Michael Caine talks:
This is a great Michael Caine impression:
And this is Michael Caine giving you a masterclass on how to fucking act in a movie:
Also:
Sheep have great potential.
People whose arms were stroked by a robot nurse named Cody felt more comfortable if they believed Cody was cleaning them than if they believed Cody was attempting to comfort them. People who have low serotonin levels underestimate the intimacy shared by couples they do not know. The children of depressed fathers are four times as likely to be spanked, and the brains of depressed mothers are less responsive to the cries of the mothers’ children. Mental illness was going largely untreated among American babies. Test subjects experienced fear when they were given a third, prosthetic arm and researchers threatened that arm with a knife. A connection between violence and happy hour was noted in Wales, where officials planned to move ahead with a badger cull in Pembrokeshire and to rebeaver the countryside near Furnace. In England, Slimbridge scientists surveyed the fatness of swans’ behinds, and doctors treated a three year old for alcoholism. Welsh mountain sheep were deemed capable of following rules. “Sheep have great potential,” said Jenny Morton of Cambridge University. “They’re not as daft as they look.”
Chemists discovered why Van Gogh’s yellows were fading; a Dutch ornithologist remained unsure whether the yellow breasts of great tits change with age but found that the offspring of older females are likelier to die young. In Finland, tawny owls were evolving from gray to brown and sperm quality in humans was deteriorating. Religion was going in extinct in the Czech Republic. A sacred soft-shelled turtle in Hanoi, one of only four species left in the world, was gravely ill yet continued to evade capture. A female mite preserved in amber with her mate was observed to have been controlling the terms of their copulation. Florida could be up to 50 percent older than previously believed. Astrobiologists hypothesized that the first multi-cellular animal resembled cancer. Tonsillectomies make children gain weight. Weight-loss surgery makes children lose weight. Doctors touted the benefits of removing the gallbladder through the vagina. Texas scientists cut holes in the hearts of baby mice; the hearts then healed themselves.
The passages above are from the “Findings” section in the May 2011 issue of Harper’s and were written by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi.
See previously: here, here, here, here, and here.
Immigrant Song.
Look at this:
A bootleg look at the trailer for David Fincher’s upcoming adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Finally. Perfect timing too since I was just watching The Social Network again tonight with a friend. A NSFW work trailer (because of Rooney Mara nudity) for “the feel bad movie of Christmas.” I’m definitely excited.
Also, That’s Karen O’s voice on the cover of the Led Zeppelin song, which is an interesting addition to the soundtrack. And what do you think of Rooney Mara’s look as Lisbeth Salander?
…And I feel fine/No future for you!
Well, I guess the Rapture didn’t happen, huh? Not today, I guess. I mean, I’m still here. You’re reading this, so I guess you’re still here too, huh? The sad thing about “The Rapture” is that, well, besides it being a fictional event in a set of fables in a funny book of short stories about wizards and demons and old world customs, is that… well, I just don’t know anyone who would be going up in this fantastical sounding Rapture thing. It’s just for the good, right? Well, all the people I know are bad, bad people… And I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.
from here.
Oh well, a shame. But I suppose the Internet will quickly find something else for itself to get excited about, right? But there’s still us and there’s tomorrow and a little more juice to be squeezed out of whatever could be “the future” and there’s whatever could possibly come with that…
Mad linkage:
Here’s 10 other recent predictions for the End Times that didn’t come true either.
German insurance firm held orgy to reward salesmen.
Learn how to tie your shoes right.
Quite possibly our first look at Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.
Kirk Cameron vs. Stephen Hawking.
Ricky Gervais on The Office‘s finale.
If you do go up in the Rapture, don’t worry, the atheists will take care of your pets… for a price.
An excerpt from Chris Adrian’s new novel.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
by Beth Hoeckel, from here.
What really goes on in Area 51?
A volcano in Iceland called Grímsvötn has erupted.
Twitter shit about the Rapture from yesterday.
Inside the Robert Redford biography.
Stephen Fry joins The Hobbit.
New discovery about mosquitoes reveals why vampires will never exist.
Speaking of which, Joe Jackson is still a bloodsucking piece of shit.
from here.
“The future is already here… It’s just not even distributed.”
-William Gibson
David Lynch to release an album later this year.
The visual impact of gossip.
The story of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed/failed/totally fucking crazy would be adaptation of Dune to become a documentary. Here’s Dan O’Bannon talking about it a little.
Related: the team up between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney.
Just checking: Still no Rapture, right? Whew.
NBC cancels Outsourced. Good.
The trailer for the new film by Miranda July.
Carrie is being remade and Stephen King suggests Lindsay Lohan for the lead.
from here.
This trailer/movie looks really terrible: Horrible Bosses.
This trailer looks so so, but the movie will probably suck: Another Earth.
It’s Pilot Season! Trailers for (just a few of the) new TV shows that were just picked up:
Awake. Which… looks good, looks interesting, but I just don’t see a TV show that I would follow/watch for years and years there. Funny how both it and Another Earth‘s trailer use that song by the Cinematic Orchestra.
Alcatraz. The latest from the J.J. Abrams camp… The 4400 meets Prison Break, featuring Sam Neill and Hurley from Lost. This looks ridiculous, and I’ll watch it and just hope that it’s not another letdown like Fringe.
Person Of Interest. Another from J. J. Abrams, although it seems like it’s mostly just his name on it and the real creative juice is from Jonathan Nolan, writer of The Dark Knight and brother of Christopher. Looks interesting-ish, but Jim Caviezel? Was that really necessary?
A trailer for the documentary on the showrunners of all your favorite TV shows.
And a nice guide to the shows that didn’t make it to the Fall 2011 season.
“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”
-Dennis Gabor
I had a dream a while back that the world was ending… It was an odd dream, but not a terrible one, I guess. It’s just not something you can prepare for, the end of the world. You can’t ever really be ready for it. You just gotta keep on living, don’t you? And loving and listening to music and dancing and pursuing impossible things and enjoying mundane moments and people and doing all kinds of stupid shit. Take things seriously but maybe enjoy the ridiculous things that surround you just a little bit more? I don’t want to tell you something terribly cliched, like… Live every moment like it’s your last!
No, don’t do that. You’ll probably hurt yourself trying to do that.
But maybe every once in a while, take a single moment and consider that it is your last moment on this beautiful, insane planet, and just really ponder that. And think about what you would do if it wasn’t. Beam yourself into the future and peek in on yourself and see what you’re up to. Take a vacation into the future and see who you are there. Interview yourself and find out what went right and wrong in your life in the moments/weeks/months/years between now and then, and take good notes. And when you come back to the present, remember that little trip. Remember that time you went to the future and appreciate that you’re back here, and now, and then go there again.
The anniversary of Bikini Atoll is coming up.
Chinese “dinosaur city” reshapes understanding of prehistoric era.
Brittany Julious is sexy.
The kind of guys who stay single?
The Cat Rapture for Caturday!
Neil Gaiman on Gene Wolf.
Grant Morrison to write a movie about dinosaurs vs. aliens, Barry Sonnenfield to direct.
from here.
RIP “Macho Man.”
The fashion of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Fleetwood Mac to reunite in time for the end of the world.
The never before seen original ending to Alexander Payne’s Election, which is much closer to the book’s ending.
I don’t think I’m all that crazy about these Odd Future guys.
Skeeter Davis and Henry Moore.
Tom Cruise is a lonely robot repairman.
from here.
How to survive a mass extinction.
Plot details from the upcoming Tim Burton/Johnny Depp big screen version of Dark Shadows.
Will the internet destroy academic freedom?
A history of bedwetting.
Bionic hands! The future is now!
A good prank for the Rapture.
Oh well, hopefully this one was good practice for the next time the world (supposedly) ends. Still plenty of time to get your Rapture Playlist just fucking perfect. No sleep til 2012!
Sweet sensation.
In honor of what will and what will most likely not happen tomorrow…
Sonic Youth’s “Do You Believe In Rapture?”
Headphones.
An introduction: Months ago the amazing Maria and I had this little chat, and like most of our chats, it started off most interestingly…
Maria Diaz: Hey…
Marco Sparks: What an interesting video. That man stabbed himself in the chest! Multiple times! That is some serious follow through.
MD: Huh? Oh, I sent you the wrong one. But i do love that song. Look at this:
and…
Marco: Oh man, that song.
MD: This one is better:Marco: I just remember hearing it one night, late at night when I was homeless and living with a friend, and I remember loving the song. It’s a tired complaint, I know, but this was back when VH1 and MTV still played… sigh… music videos.
MD: Which one, the Nine Days one? Or Vertical Horizon?
Marco: Oh, the Nine Days one, sorry. But I think 
MD: Yeah, that was probably the real reason. Especially because that Vertical Horizon song is terrible.
Marco: Part of it was also because I was really trying to win over this girl who looked like the girl in the Nine Days video and… I don’t know, maybe I felt justified in my affections by the song/video?
MD: the song is kinda cute, I think.
Marco: She was dating this ginormous drug dealer at the time. Well, not “ginormous,” neither physically not, you know, stature in the suburban drug selling racket, but… well, either way, I just couldn’t compete with the guy. And yeah, the song is fine. Probably better than fine.
MD: Awww. Yeah, drug dealers are very attractive to women. All that money. And all those drugs.
Marco: That particular Vertical Horizon song… I liked it maybe the first time I heard it, but every time after… grating.
MD: It’s the reveal at the end of the song… that HE is the one the girl doesn’t want.
Marco: Of course she doesn’t want him. (He’s hideous.) This…“Love can be so boring.”
MD: OMG this song.
Marco: There’s a very sad, very tragic playlist of recurring songs that I listened to a lot circa 1999 – 2002ish, and this song was on it intermittently.
MD: I bet we had many of the same songs. This was definitely on mine.
Marco: I feel like I was carrying around this very shallow sense of sadness or regret… like I had lost something that should be crucial but wasn’t, not really, though you at the time you couldn’t convince me of that… and my music reflected that.
MD: Exactly.
Marco: It’s strange that you got me thinking about that cause I was really thinking about a lot of music from back then lately the first summer I moved to this shithole state I live in… I did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Ate shitty food. “Ate shitty” as in “ate terribly.” Drank beer. Lots. Laid on the couch in my huge bedroom listening to music and reading. That was it. Oh, and thought up ridiculous plots of silly Clive Cussler-esque thrillers.
…but that one U2 album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind? I associate that album so strongly, oddly enough, with Bret Easton Ellis’ first book and with Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary because I listened to that album on repeat while reading those books for the first time that summer.
MD: The first Bret Easton Ellis, that’s Less Than Zero?
Marco: Yeah, Less Than Zero.
Okay, that invisible pain I mentioned… do you want to see a really bad example of a song from that period?
MD: Of course. Always.
Marco: okay, this artist I’m about to bring up is ridiculous and you kind of knew that when she first debuted, but just how ridiculous and plastic hadn’t quite hit yet…
Anyway, her first two singles were just silly radio pop fluff, but this was her third single, I believe, and I remember hearing this song for the first time on headphones while walking somewhere late at night… and it just seemed to resonate with that tragic void living inside me…MD: hahaha YES! I felt similarly about this song…
Marco: (Holy shit, Lizzy Caplan is in that video.)
It’s probably been so long since i’ve bought an actual CD i’m sad to say because I still like CDs, I’m still a guy who likes CDs, but I have a lot of bad pop punk CDs from that circa Avril era. I mean, I probably have 700 cds and it’s just this incredibly awesome, sexy music collection, but just figure that 30 or so of those cds are from artists like…and
MD: Nothing to be ashamed of.
Marco: Well, maybe a little, but it was a time and a place and everything changes and you make explorations and sometimes what’s bad is good and vice versa. And blah blah blah. And anyone who doesn’t get that is an idiot, right? Plus, these tiny revelations made here are hardly the worse musical sins I’ve committed as a listener…
Though, thankfully, this was the time period in which was i also really discovering, like, The Get Up Kids, so it wasn’t all bad. And that said, I gotta tell you, I’m sorry, but I can’t join you on the Jason Mraz journey.
MD: hahahahaha.
When I was flying back from Europe with an ex, we had a HORRIBLE fight. And this is like 10+ hours of flying BTW, and I just listened to this Jason Mraz song over and over again on the airplane radio system. It was really quite sad.
Marco: I can imagine. I think I’d like the song if it was a different artist, you know?
MD: Yeah. Jason Mraz is easy to hate.
Marco: And it’s something about Mraz himself that I just despise.
Okay, so I am about to hit you with two megahits from that time period. i don’t know if you’re ready for it.
MD: I’m so fucking ready.
Marco: That is exactly what I wanted to hear. But first, let me just say… Thinking about that Unwritten Law song… I was working where I am currently already when that song was unleashed on me and it’s so vivid in my memory the girl I had a crush on then that I associate that song with… I mean, nothing ever happened with that girl. She thought I was profoundly weird without ever realizing just how right she was and yet I still think of her when I hear it. Anyways… Prepare thyself!
MD: Getting ready…
Marco: You say that but can ever truly be ready to go back to… this:…and also this:
BOOM!
MD: OH MAN, that Lifehouse guy. Do you think he made his voice sound like that?
Marco: Ha ha. Do you remember where you were when you first said out loud, “NO WAY, THAT BIG VOICE DOES NOT SOUND LIKE THAT LITTLE GUY FROM THE CALLING.”
MD: Wow. Seriously. I had no idea this band even had a name. It was just a song that was everywhere at the time.
Marco: Like back then, as they were signing their record contract they must’ve known they would not last.
It would be so much easier if we were talking about just the 90s here…
from here.
or late 90′s fin de siècle music, but this period we’re talking about, that early 00s, was just so fucking weird. Here’s a really, really sad fact: I also recall the first mp3 I ever downloaded and while this wasn’t the very first, I believe that lifehouse single was either #2 or #3.
MD: Hmm has this song been on a lot of commercials?
Marco: Probably so very many.
MD: Here’s one for the ages:Marco: the first comment on that video’s youtube page is:
“I paused my porn for this. (:”
Editor’s note: This was a few months ago, mind.
MD: The ultimate compliment for any music video, really.
Marco: For serious. Yeah,back then I really liked the Bleed American and Futures album, which made me go back and look up Clarity. So emotastic.
MD: yeah, all the emo kids were soooo mad when they got popular for 5 seconds.Editor’s note: I then told MD again about the 600ish page political novel that Benjamin Light and I started writing back during the time period being covered in this music discussion. (Separate editor’s note: Those 600 pages ended up only being probably 1/8the the novel’s probable length had it lived past its infancy. Jesus.) Anyway, about 75 pages of that book were written to Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity album. -Marco.
Marco: Wow, the neural pathways of memory and musical taste progression that this trip and fall down memory lane is opening up for me…
MD: That’s what it’s supposed to do!
Marco: I remember there was a period where I went to Burger King for lunch every day – ugh – and I’d order my food and sit myself in the corner, with my back to the TV and so I could see everyone there and I’d listen to music on headphones and eat and read articles from the internet I had printed out earlier in the day at work and just write. I was working on so many things back then and I had downloaded the Wicker Park soundtrack of all soundtracks because I had heard it was “hip.” And on it was this song:MD: Very interesting that the video you found is a fandom vid for The Office.
Marco: …and that begat me downloading their album at the time and I would listen to that Snow Patrol album all the time during that period and write and, of course, it’s strongly associated with a girl at the time and all that blah blah blah. Words and music and women… funny how they’re all so strongly tied together in my head.
And yeah, I thought that was funny too, re: The Office video. I guess Pam/Roy was someone’s OTP at the time?
But anyway, that Snow Patrol thing… I think that was the start of me pushing into a new aeon on musical interests, as far as cruising on the surface of mainstream “alternative rock”ish type music for the masses, and enjoying something about the generic nothingness there.
And that strange sadness that belonged to nothing real in my life? I really think that perhaps it died when I first heard this song…MD: Ah, such a lovely song…
Marco: I remember listening to this song on headphones on a lunchbreak at work and just breaking down into tears. I had to call in to my job from 100 yards away and tell them I’d be late and I just walked around, listening to this over and over again and feeling terrible, and wonderful, and terrible and sad and wounded, and it was like somewhere around then I stopped feeling sad about nothing and it was like the real regrets and misery entered my life.
MD: Like catharsis, like a breakthrough of sorts.
Marco: Yeah, exactly. I mean, like everyone, I have things that happened when I was younger that I carried the pain of those things with me, but I was always too shallow to really be affected by them properly, I think. I was suffering from a different kind of pain, I think, as my early 20s were crystallizing around me, and with that song… It was like the end of something more innocent and silly in my emotional dealings with the world, and the start of me experiencing real world sadness and hurt? Perhaps.
If all of this right now was a part of a documentary about my sad dealings with music at the dawn of my 20s, then the song that would be playing over the end credits sequence would be this:MD: Ha ha, nice. And what does the hero learn at the end?
Marco: Nothing. Nothing is ever really learned.
And that end titles sequence, also, would just be sitting on the sidelines of a Quinceañera, watching young Spanish girls in pretty dresses dancing around with their family.
MD: You know, that sounds oddly hopeful.
Marco: Le Sigh. Remember when everything was just so simple and innocent and… BRITPOP?
MD: And it’s probably right there when i realized that this whole conversation would a blog post.
Marco: Yeah, sorry about that, but I think you’re right… Or maybe it’ll even be two!
Editor’s note: TO BE CONTINUED!
