I’m not sure I can describe how awesome this is. So I’ll just show you the video.

“I was ready to say ‘YES’ to EVERYTHING!”

My friend Mer @ Coilhouse sends word of a neat interview with Alan Moore, author of Watchmen.  He always has rather fucking interesting things to say about art and culture, and fucking with mediums and discussing how we tend to interpret work:

I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying… It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can’t we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change.

Mer writes in response:

We’ve entered an era ruled by scavengers. We are starving for substance. Obviously, we can’t look to Hollywood schlockbusters to nourish us. Still, the platform of narrative movie making has its own profound and distinctive magic. Here’s hoping that somehow, thanks to the increasing accessibility of equipment and relative price decrease in digital film and editing software, more and more storytellers standing beyond the gates of the sausage factory will be goaded, either by hunger or the pure urgency of inspiration, into making their own moving pictures.

Let’s hope, indeed!  In fact, I’m not even sure we have to hope, I think it’s kind of inevitable.

On a related note, I recently finished Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, and one passage that has struck my brain with his cane is this:

“Now holllld on.  A seventy-year-old serial killer is gonna lecture me on the intynets.”

“Seventy-one.  And I think it’s important you learn this for the future of your enterprise.  We agree that if something is available on television and in bookstores and the papers and all, it’s mainstream, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Well, then, how can something on the world’s electronic mass-communication net not also be mainstream?  It’s easily found.  You told me your friend there saw acquaintances of the gentlemen from Ohio on the Web.”

“Did I?  Okay.  I’m a little drunk.”

“There you are, you see?  It’s not that strange a world, when you can see images of men with testes full of saline just as easily as you can visit the wonderful world of Disney online.  That’s not underground.  It’s mainstream.  Just like me.”

That is a striking idea.  As an artist, if you put your work online (your music, for example), and you are now certifiably Main Stream™.  Huh.

Just like every force must have an opposite and equal reaction, I wonder if the reaction to this mainstream-i-ness, if the opposite of the democratization and ease of access to tools that Meredith is talking about, is the willful abdication of communication?

Can you keep something off the internet?

Can you really have an underground art project or band now?

I’m actually thinking about trying.

Next on the reading list: A Picture of Dorian Gray. 

USS - a portfolio of probabilities _15

Originally uploaded by Prof. Michael Stoll

In the future, cars got even bigger and we got pastel-colored turnpike signs. It’s interesting to see how a now-defunct US steel company imagined the future they wanted to make. via Matt Jones.

The best argument I have read against torture in quite some time appears in a novel placed in 1327, written in 1983 - Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose. Our protagonist Brother William of Baskerville is arguing with Ubertino of Casale, a monk in a wealthy Italian abbey:

“There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what your inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this truly, diabolical) is established between you and him…. These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame. Under torture Bentivenga may have told the most absurd lies, because it was no longer himself speaking, but his lust, the devils of his soul.”

“Lust?”

“Yes there is a lust for pain, as there is a lust for adoration, and even a lust for humility. If it took so little to make the rebellious angels direct their ardor away from worship and humility and toward pride and revolt, what can we expect of a human being? There, now you know: this was the thought that struck me in the course of my inquisitions. And this is why I gave up that activity. I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered that they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”

This is a demo for something.  It didn’t turn out right, it’s not what I was intending to make.  It’s like there’s two different songs.  Still, it’s kinda fun and I did spend a good three hours on it, so here you go.  Have a little funk and violence.

Manchurian Stab.

A really intriguing article over at Coilhouse tells of a city now gone, a pirate’s haven, an anarchist state and describes how it came to be.

I think any lessons the place offers defy easy categories. But because it’s closer in history, it should be a reminder, whenever any of us looks back on the aforementioned pirate utopias, or the romanticized depictions of Tortuga or the Wild West, that those no-rules fantasy lands were real places with all the attendant blood and stink.

Yes, the anarchistic types out there are correct when they say that the Walled City is evidence that humans can co-exist, and even thrive, without laws constantly piled on them. But it’s not that simple. After all, without massive police raids (government incarnate), the place would have probably become a mob-run tyranny. Its residents had a degree of freedom that anyone who comes home to piles of bills or endless forms can’t help but envy. They also had darkness, a lower life expectancy, filthy living conditions and huge numbers of drug addicts.

But if the Walled City is a reminder that lawlessness isn’t quite as cleanly romantic as some might think, it also reminds us that a staggering number of societies are possible — and that every one of them has a price.

Came up with an anagram today for McCain/Palin that describes the general Republican tactic:

In calm, panic

This is still the greatest thing ever:

“Call it the triumph of low expectations”, from Canada.com:

Am I the only one who wonders why this is going on in a country that supposedly needs all the help it can get?
Our athletes won 18 medals. A lot better than the 12 in Athens. Better than the 14 in Sydney. A lot more than anyone believed in the futile first week in Beijing. The nation finished in the top 14 nations, slightly ahead of its own predictions. Tied with Spain! And we had another nine near-misses for fourth (can we get the IOC to cast a copper medal?)
Eighty per cent of Canadians think the team did a swell job. So let’s celebrate as Canada exceeds expectations at the Summer Olympics.

It’s not about the size of your medal stack, it’s how you use it. Amirite? Though there has been talk of bringing back Olympic Tug of War; where athletes from all sports can join together… to gamble their medals against other countries in the mother of all sports. Double or nothing, gentlemen.

Until then, we salute your mediocrity, Canada. We stand on guard for thee!

There are some really good indie campaign ads out there on the you tube.  This one is really powerful, and there’s not a whole lot to it…

Which reminds us melters that we really haven’t been making good use of this you tube and should do so. Coming soon: our first instructional dance video.