Don Draper/Jon Hamm as Superman?

Google and the CIA to invest in the “future” of web monitoring.

The above image, if you can believe it, is for a condom ad. I love it.

Girls like boys with skills.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s wacky lesbian theory.

“My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat keeps on doing bad, dumb things.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard.

Lost‘s Damon Lindelof to rewrite Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel.

Old Spice’s sales double with YouTube campaign.

Mike Tyson likes cocaine and sex.

Disabled Austrian man eaten to death by maggots while his partner slept in bed beside him.

The first half of the Rubicon pilot is certainly interesting. A show for smart people or a show for people who think they’re smart (and love 70s paranoia thrillers)?

from here.

The Booker Prize longlist announced.

The longest photographic exposures in history.

Quantum time machine “allows paradox-free time travel.” If you need me, I’ll be in the past. Or the future.

The oil spill: when a science fiction nightmare becomes reality.

The plight of Afghan women: a disturbing picture.

“History is merely a list of surprises… It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick: Or, Lonesome No More!

The above is a trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. Here’s an excerpt.

The porniest American Apparel ad ever.

Ship lost for more than 150 years is recovered.

Stieg Larsson is the first to sell one million Amazon Kindle books.

Inception: Dreams vs. Reality.

“Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus.

Also: Every cigarette smoked in Mad Men.

Where did the money to rebuild Iraq go?

Tokyo’s oldest man has been dead for 30 years.

Bethany Cosentino from Best Coast talks about her cat.

Your lack of privacy on the internet.

The Great Wave Off Of Lousiana a la The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, via Reddit and The High Definite.

Also, I guess I’m working up some excitement for the new Arcade Fire album, but here’s “Black Mirror” off their last album:

…and had a good chuckle. It’s by artist/journalist Chip Zdarsky, which I discovered it via Warren Ellis’ site and Zdarsky’s twitter, but who knows. It’s absolutely mind blowingly terrible. And wonderful. Like this:

from here.

Unrelated:

“They say, ‘Evil prevails when good men fail to act.’ What they ought to say is, ‘Evil prevails.’”

The underrated Nic Cage film Lord Of War is on Hulu and it’s not bad, if you’ve never seen it. Think Thank You For Smoking, but substitute guns and arms merchants for cigarettes and tobacco companies, keep the same level of ridiculous, but a much different and frighteningly relevant look at the world. It’s almost kind of depressing, but fun. Other movies you can also currently still find on Hulu include: Starship Troopers, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Killing Me Softly (if you can believe it), the original Captain America movie, The Age Of Innocence, The Man Who Cried, Kubrick’s Spartacus, The Corporation, Richard Linklater’s Slacker, La Femme Nikita, and last, but not least, Doug Liman’s Go, a seminal film from my 90s youth.

No, I haven’t gone to see it. I don’t hate myself.

Ai! Ai! A balrog! A balrog!

Yes, I’m going to heap even more scorn on the oxygen thieves responsible for this franchise. Because lets be honest, reading about how terrible this movie is has to be more entertaining that suffering through its 2.5 hour running time. It’s rocking a 14% right now on Rotten Tomatoes. Many are calling it the worst movie of the year. I’m calling it cultural terrorism. That touchstone you can point to when you’re talking about what’s wrong with the world.

Kudos to Horseface and her hack director Michael Patrick King for producing the first Hollywood-financed Al Queda propaganda film. I mean, that’s what this is, right? You’re trying to make the world hate America, aren’t you? You aren’t? Seriously? No, come on, tell me this is some sort of extremely bold satire. You want us to stab women who say “fabulous” too much. It’s all a big put on, right? At least spin me some bullshit about camp and the queer gaze. No? Are you fucking kidding me? You meant this? You really put in a scene where this rich bitch who doesn’t work and has a housekeeper AND A FUCKING NANNY is whining about how hard it is to be a parent? You intended this? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Was the goal to validate everything haters like me always said about the show?

I find it repulsive that this tripe still gets passed off a progressive in some circles. Contort your ideals all you want, there’s nothing empowering about consumerism and staring at your belly-button isn’t Feminism.

* not pictured: reason, accountability, self-awareness, shame, respect...

Some choice review quotes:

“Everyone’s phoning it in for the first two hours. And let me point out something that I’ve just said there: ‘The First. Two. Hours.’”

from here

“The most grotesque aspect of Sex and the City remains the central characters, all four of whom (to varying degrees) are obsessed with the trappings of wealth. They exist to consume. It’s a three-ring circus of materialism, narcissism, and entitlement.”

from here

“Carrie immediately reveals her kiss to Big, who ultimately forgives her because “I took a vow”—and gives her a big fat diamond ring to “remind her that she’s married.” Charlotte and Miranda bitch about their kids, then raise a glass to the hard work of stay-at-home mothers who do it all—and without help.”

from here

“The stakes are so low that, during the girls’ final madcap sprint through an outdoor market disguised in burqas, the unspeakable outcome they’re trying to forestall is the possibility of having to fly home in coach.”

from here

“The tagline states that we should ‘Carrie on.’ The publicity dept. almost got it right, but the spelling’s off. It needs to be ‘Carrion’ because nothing says putrefying, rotten and vile quite like this sequel.”

from here

“This is the new torture porn.”

that one was my favorite, from here

Do Not Want!

“When Marie Antoinette did this, the people tore down the f’ing Bastille.”

from here

“When Carrie asks Big, “Am I just a bitch wife who nags you?” I could hear all the straight men in the theater — all four of us — being physically prevented from responding.”

from here

This is actually David Duchovny in a wig and shades, SJP was busy the day of the promo shoot.

and finally

“Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of Sex and the City 2 are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row. … Carrie also narrates the film, providing useful guidelines for those challenged by its intricacies. Sample: “Later that day, Big and I arrived home.”"

–Roger Ebert

And Chris Noth, as Mr. Big.

]]> http://counter-force.com/2010/05/28/something-something-bad-pun-menopause/feed/ 1 Benjamin Light light her on fire to see what color she burns written and directed by a gay man? GTFO! tacky song choice Together, they're older than the Constitution. I may not be a fashion buff, but... woof. undesireable Airbrush ahoy Cat don't lie http://counter-force.com/2010/04/11/open-spaces-human-traces/ http://counter-force.com/2010/04/11/open-spaces-human-traces/#comments Sun, 11 Apr 2010 23:53:55 +0000 Marco Sparks http://counter-force.com/?p=7450 ]]> When you live in a city, in a crammed and crowded urban environment, then there’s nothing more shocking then when you get out of it. Go out into the countryside, go into what looks a lot more like nature, and there you’ll find something you don’t find as much in the places where humans cluster and overpopulate: Space. Open space on a sometimes grand scale.

Well, maybe it’s shocking to you. Maybe it’s terrifying. Maybe it’s like hitting the reset button, breathe in some fresh hair, let your self stretch out, psychically trying to fill up that big open everythingness, and then you go and cram yourself back into the human condition, become a part in the machine again and go back to work.

The sad thing is I was reading something once about how cities are actually how humans should be living, at least for the sake of the environment. Sure, they pollute and destroy nature, but that’s because we don’t stop ourselves, and we don’t do better. The constant suburban sprawl is what is eating up our world, getting it closer to inhospitable for all involved, this thing I was reading was telling me. Now, I’m no expert, so take everything I say in this post as fast and loose, but it sounded frighteningly true.

The Crowded City by Kerry Belgrave.

Sometimes you need to go out into nature, find a testament and a monument to the parts of this beautiful planet that were here long before (and hopefully will be here long after us) and just say…

“You rock, rock.” Or something very much like that.

All of this occurred to me this afternoon, I’m sad to report to you, in a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is easily one of the prime examples of how human begins are so incredibly good and quite ingenious at owning you in all the little, petty ways. We’re good at compassion and community too, but we’re even better when it comes to making those values a part of a corporate mindset that slowly invades your lives, giving you goods and services you can’t live without.

But, really, this isn’t going to be a post about Wal-Mart. I hate the place, obviously. Sadly, though, I live in a part of the world where I have to shop there just because of the level of income I make and the cheapness in every sense of the word of what they can give me. So I guess I can’t complain? Or shouldn’t? Well, of course I can. And should if I want to. But this isn’t going to be that kind of a post. But we all get the gist of Wal-Mart, and other “big box” department stores. They’re not only soul crushing and demeaning, but they’re affordable in those regards.

Anyway. So there I am in this Wal-Mart today, and they’re remodeling there, I guess. I didn’t know this as I walked in. I’ve gone to get my local grocery shopping done here for years and today I noticed that the usual things weren’t in their usual places. And then I turned a corner and saw something shocking…

Great big open space.

It was like looking at an art installation. I was half expecting someone to walk up with silly haircut and a glass of champagne and tell me what it “means.”

by Lori Nix.

Wal-Mart’s a giant warehouse with fluorescent lights and banners for Miley Cyrus/Jonas bros. bullshit all about and constant calls over the intercom for either a manager or a clean up on some aisle or another. People are always crammed in it. Usually the lowest common denominator of people and you can feel like an alien observer amongst your own human race as you go there, but the point is, things are packed in there tight. Someday aliens or future humans will look at the ruins of a Wal-Mart and treat it like the marketplace of Pompeii or an ancient Aztec city. They’re write beautiful dissertations on how it was important in our lives, and they’ll question what things like J. Lo and DVDs are, as young, nubile Indiana Jones-wannabes dust through what used to be the electronics section with little brushes.

They’ll talk about how money was our universal language, and that even things like God are spoken about in dialects of currency, and Wal-Martw will seem like a holy temple to people of the future and/or alien visitors. This is after some cyberpunk-ish dystopia period where corporations rise up as nation states and you have implants with Sam Walton’s face somewhere in your skeletal structure.

Again, I’m rambling. Apologies. But open spaces. It wasn’t shocking to anyone else. Or, at least, it didn’t appear that anyone else stopped to notice it like I did. Maybe it doesn’t matter to anyone other than me. My other shoppers just filled that newly opened space as they crossed over from $5 DVD bins to the grocery section where you can buy Wal-Mart’s store brand of everything you’d ever need to buy, and now they all come in the same white bag, bland and cold, and reminiscent of the products in Repo Man.

Or stuff produced by the DHARMA Initiative.

Look at that. Rambling again and complaining about Wal-Mart again. And I promised I wouldn’t do that, right? So sorry. But, then again, complaining isn’t so terrible as long as it isn’t all you do. And I should add in that a majority of people who shop/work at a Wal-Mart aren’t terrible people. They’re not all white trash or Jerry Springer rejects. They’re just people. Some of them are people like me, and some of them are better than me, and some are worse, not that it matters. They have lives to live, jobs to work at (when work can be found), and places to be, even if those places are nowhere.

It’s not always easy to rise up from complaining to action, but maybe somewhere on that road is where all your anger and frustration and complaining turns into conversation with others and perhaps eventual solution.

Just remember: As you, me, all of us, everyone and anyone, as we all pick our paths and walk through this life and this world, we’re leaving footprints. Are they for the better or for the worse?

from here.

I’m not advocating anyone go chain themselves to a tree or put themselves in front of a bulldozer. I’m not suggesting you go vegan or start picketing things, but just be aware of how your world is changing and decide if that’s a change you’re okay with and then go from there. Of course, as you make that decision, the park closest to you is being turned into a parking lot so more cars can help to cram more people into a mall and a bunch of trees are being turned into another housing development. These things happen.

They don’t have to happen though, but that’s a conversation for another time, maybe. Think, search, learn, grow. Or, do your best at something similar. That’s all I’m saying. It’s okay to be naive and idealistic for a while, but then go turn it into something useful, if that’s your bag. Or, just go find an open space, something still untouched by the hands of man and enjoy it while you can, while it’s still with us…

And try to fill it with your imagination before it gets filled with things and stuff, or trampled all to shit.

It’s Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani, which I first discovered in a quick mention on Warren Ellis’ website, and the description of it alone told me that I just had to have it. That description:

Cyclonopedia is theoretical-fiction novel by Iranian philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani. Hailed by novelists, philosophers and cinematographers, Negarestani’s work is the first horror and science fiction book coming from and written on the Middle East.

‘The Middle East is a sentient entity—it is alive!’ concludes renegade Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the ‘lubricant’ of historical and political narratives.

A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along.

Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil …

At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archaeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth’s tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.

I can tell you right now that comparisons to Danielewski’s House Of Leaves aren’t too off the mark, but this is much more “theory” than “fiction” in the “theory fiction.” And a lot of it is scary true.

One review, by Pamela Rosenkranz of Artforum International’s best of 2009 gives an even more descriptive review:

An American artist, Kristen Alvanson – out of curiosity or simply boredom, it’s not clear – travels to Istanbul to meet a mysterious online contact. The contact never turns up. However, Kristen, as she relates in her jour­nal, does find a manuscript called Cyclonopedia, which in turn purports to be based on the disturbing and dis­ordered notes of an Iranian archaeologist who disappeared while researching a very eccentric theory about oil’s role in history. So begins Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (published by Melbourne’s re.press), a nihilistic but fanciful tour de force of meta-­fiction. Kristen, in addition to being a character, is the creator of the book’s magnificent cover; she is credited on the title page beneath Reza Negarestani, who is the book’s author – and also the author of the manuscript Kristen finds. In this welter of attributions, of course, it becomes doubtful whether Negarestani really wrote the book at all, but whoever the author is, he or she has a profound knowledge of, or a profound imagination about, Middle Eastern archaeology and Islamic mythol­ogy, to say nothing of contemporary petropolitics.

Apocalyptic visions and solar catastrophes have been making their way into my own work, so Cyclonopedia feels especially resonant to me, but its urgency isn’t just personal. The text strips away its own layers to reach a bedrock of premonotheistic symbols and tropes subverting, as it goes, common understandings of “East” and “West” and the relation of these ideas to each other. Creating its own lexis via a Deleuzian philosophical constructivism, building a quasi-scientific machine with madly beautiful illustrations, Cyclonopedia is marked by a peculiar theoretical style. It discovers hid­den paths to a kind of chthonic knowledge; from its speculative abyss issues a horrific “philosophy of oil.” Gazing into this confounding complexity of groundless grounds thrilled my new awareness.

Clearly, the fact that all of that interests me confirms that I’m possibly insane. But it’s fun. And being an fun mental case means you need interesting things to read. I wasn’t feeling too well last night and was up most of the night with this book keeping me company. Perfect late night reading.

from here.

I may talk about it more when I finish it, but as of now (and I should hurry so that I can actively follow the progress of the sequel, which is currently being developed), I’m enjoying it. And… I’m terrified of it. And that’s perfect.

Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Marco and I have been talking for a while about doing a series of posts on movies that should be made. Now don’t get me wrong, the projects we’ll be proposing shouldn’t actually be made. In a better world, the budgets would go to real artists who do good work, but that’s not the world we live it, and at Counterforce, we believe in making the best out of a bad situation. Just like Liam Neeson.

no thank you

So, let’s get right down too it. You know, you know they’re going to make an ID4:2 some day, so we might as well make it enjoyably bad. Hell, just the idea of watching this movie instead of some Michael Bay cartoon-adapted crapfest gives me a boner. You can never ever go wrong blowing up as many international landmarks as possible.

Thus, The Counterforce Casting Couch: Independence Day 2

PREMISE:

This is gonna be a little rough, we can fill in the blanks during lighting shifts on the set. So, it’s like 20 years after the event of ID4. Will Smith is the President, obviously. The White House will have just finished being rebuilt and look exactly the same as before. Jeff Goldblum will basically be playing Al Gore. Sorta Green Living Apostle / Technocrat in Chief. Shia LeBeouf is Goldblum’s rebellious kid and Aaron Yoo is his buddy who films all their wacky adventures on his Flip Camera. There will be some drama because Shia doesn’t know his dad was a hero because Goldblum’s role was classified or something.

Ryan Kwanten from True Blood will fill in the Hick Character contingent with his little jailbait sister, Dakota Fanning. I threw a lot of brits into the cast so there can be other groups of characters in the UK and Australia, Iraq, etc. Famke Janssen will play somebody’s wife. Maybe Bill Pullman’s.

So, the Aliens come back, only this time, they come in peace and claim to be seeking asylum. Apparently these aliens are the not-evil faction of the bad guys. Will Smith will have all these mixed feelings because he hates aliens, but doesn’t want to be prejudiced to the nice ones. It will be like that scene in Star Trek 6 where Kirk talks about the klingons who killed his son, only this time it will be Will Smith saying it, and he’ll be talking to the First Dog.

Obviously, the bad aliens come back and destroy a shit-ton more monuments and landmarks. They’ll be led by Nic Cage, who is some kind of evil billionaire who helps the Aliens in exchange for world domination. Definitely gotta sack the Burj Dubai, the White House, Big Ben, the Golden Gate, the Vatican, etc. But this time, the good aliens have shared some of their technology, so the fight is slightly more fair, but earth still gets its ass kicked and the bad aliens occupy the planet. This would all take place on July 2nd.

yeah, that shit's gonna fall

The next day would be a lot of failed counter-offensives and characters hiding from Alien stormtroopers. Then Shia LeBeouf will decide to form a resistance and Aaron Yoo will do all the tech shit to get the word out on the internets. Ryan Kwanten will be there with Dakota, and he’ll turn out to be some kind of hillbilly ass-kicker. I see a scene with him, shirtless, feather tied to the back of his head, destroying enemy food supplies boston-tea-party style. Then we’ll cut to Said Taghmaoui in Iraq with a British accent and he’ll be all, “It’s the Americans, they want to organize a resistance, about bloody time!”

And then July 4th will be the big counter-attack. Aaron Yoo will die. Will Smith will fly an alien fighter ship with Bill Pullman as his wingman. They’ll fight their way to the mothership, land on it, then fight their way to Nic Cage’s lair on the bridge. Somehow, Jeff Goldblum will be there too. A big fistfight later, Will Smith wins, then escapes and Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum pilot the Mothership into the sun, sacrificing themselves. Shia hooks up with Dakota Fanning, and then after the credits roll, Samuel L. Jackson walks into a bar to talk to him about the Avengers initiative.

And… scene.

Fuck yeah!

You know you’d pay to see it.

The other day someone came up to me and asked about the continuing fire situation in the southern California area. “It looks like the end of the world,” they told me and were then shocked when I wasn’t shocked by that statement. They asked me if it was still going on, if the fires were still burning, and they asked this as if I knew the answer. Being primarily a still a Californian deep down in my weird little DNA, I’ll constantly let people know where I’m from (in case it’s not obviously and readily apparent why I’m better than them on a variety of levels), but it’s a double edged sword in that I’m expected to have an answer everytime some new weird or stupid piece of news comes out of the Golden State.

So, my answer to this question about the fires was simply: “I don’t know.”  Then the question came: You know a lot of people there, right? Wouldn’t they know from the constant smoke in the distance? Me: “If you live in LA, or spend signifigant time there, I think you make a kind of peace with a lot of things there being perpetually fucked up. The air, especially.” This answer only prompted confusion.

So I attempted a clarification: “Listen, here’s the thing about how people in California operate: Unless your house is on fire, or you’re personally bein evacuated, or it’s fucking up some sex you’re trying to get or, I don’t know, your pot delivery, or something, you don’t really care about a whole lot of other people’s tragedy.”

That’s of course both true and not true. Californians are not that soulless, not really. On the surface, maybe, but deep down… they’re primarily still human beings. Don’t ask me for evidence of their humanity, but just take my word for it, okay? And if you don’t, I’m sure someone will come along soon enough to make a movie with heart that proves me right. But recently, I saw someone put the situation best: “Because the world is always ending in Los Angeles, we are not necessarily surprised when it does. We are also not surprised when the world keeps going on after that.”

from here.

Anyway, after the question and answer exchange about my home land, I came back to my lair, the whole exchange floating around in the back of my head, and I put on my music player, hit random, and the first song given to me was Death Cab For Cutie‘s “Grapevine Fires,” from their nice enough last album, Narrow Stairs.

The video for the song, see above, directed by the Walter Robot duo, is a lovely affair, very nice and effective, but as with so many music videos, it doesn’t follow the lyrical narrative of the song, which is especially a shame here, I think. Particularly since, for me, one of Ben Gibbard’s strengths isn’t just the sonic aspect of his songwriting, the chords he chooses or how well he plays them, but just the way he manages to capture a tone to flow through his short stories.

The songwriter and his brand new bride.

And “Grapevine Fires” is one of the most lovely, most melancholy short stories I think he’s ever released, a beautiful song, drenched in a harmony fit for a funeral, a juxtaposition of the beautiful and the tragic as a man, a woman, the woman’s daughter, all go for a picnic in a cemetery in the Los Angeles area to watch the fires in the distance. There’s wine and some paper cups for the couple, who may have already been evacuated, as they watch the desolation unfolding and the young girl, not aware of the seriousness, or perhaps despite it, just dances around. “The northern sky looks like the end of days” as the man watches her and realizes that, no matter what, everything’s gonna be just fine. Even when it isn’t. Maybe it’ll rain, maybe it won’t. Either way, it’s only a matter of time. And you’re alive today.

“Soon after this episode there was a birthday party for me. Prince came, he was sitting at a table with some people not drinking. I walked up to him, grabbed him by the back of the hair and poured cognac down his throat. He spit it out like a little bitch and I laughed and walked away. I loved fucking with him like that.”

Maybe it’s part of my deep-seated sociopathic tendencies, but I’ve long daydreamed about a lifting of the veil. There’s something seductive about the idea. Much in the same way that Lost mines a collective inner desire to get marooned in a plane crash; the end of the world — deadly chaotic as it may be — feels like our best chance to relax and escape the rat race. When faced with mortgage payments and performance reviews, wouldn’t we all rather be siphoning gas, looting abandoned houses and hiding from feral catamites?

Horrible Disasters seem to mark my life. A few days after I moved into a house in Santa Cruz, some religious assholes flew planes into the World Trade Center. While I was driving down I-5, moving to San Diego, New Orleans was getting obliterated by Katrina. Shortly after I moved back from San Diego, the town threatened to burn itself down. Then, a year later, I was choking on smoke fumes as I walked across the parking lot to a job interview in Northern California. I got the job. And now, it’s LA’s turn again.

Sidebar: this is the fourth catastrophic fire to hit California in the past seven years. And the third year in a row. At what point should we start getting concerned?

Anyway, The night before Katrina wiped out New Orleans, I wrote a blog wherein I expressed my hope that the approaching hurricane would cause catastrophic damage. I got my wish! So let’s give it another shot. I would very much like to see the current fire burn the Hollywood sign. Make it happen!