==pla|\|ing lakes==

Saturday, January 11, 2003

Doran Wittelsbach's magazine Bloody Beautiful takes up the Virtual Victorian lifestyle pioneered by David McDermott and Peter McGough back in the 80s

McDermott/McGough were actually part (peripherally) of the late 70s/early 80s East Village art scene, with Madonna, Keith Haring, Ann Magnuson and Laurie Anderson. I had a book that gathered them all together but it's passed out of my hands.

Interesting, from a distance anyway. The Satanist connection is um off-putting.

8:57 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Renaissance Man Jim Steranko

8:37 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. Maurice Pialat

I saw À nos amours years ago on video, which I think was my introduction to Sandrine Bonnaire, who was very intense, like Pialat. He made difficult films and didn't pull many punches. Bonnaire and Gerard Dépardieu starred in Sous le soleil de Satan, his most (in)famous film, I believe.

7:36 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

A 16 year-old college student in Ireland has developed a browser that is 5 times faster than (I assume) IE

Can't wait to get my hands on this baby.

7:25 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Hard to believe the Brits are so shocked to find out Kate Winslet was airbrushed for a GQ cover

But perhaps it just points out that the image industry and the woman on the street are not on as easy terms as they once were. That can only be a good thing.

4:24 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, January 09, 2003

A diverting selection of the 10 Best Books of '02 from the Baltimore Citypaper

Several titles here I hadn't heard of.

11:11 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Microsoft Reader cracked

10:32 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

10 Tips for Digital Photographers [the null device]

10:18 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

You're hearing it here...too: Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is downloadable (free!) in several formats

I don't even know when I'll read it (I'm not getting into much recent SF really), but if I want to, it's there. And if I really like it, I'll get the book.

Thanks, Cory.

10:15 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

A couple links from the In erzØne

Technoccult

IncuBLOGula (the ONG's Hat people)

3:08 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Referrals

Siblings Positive Effects of being the olbers child
chung king express sociology
labia art galley
vulva punishment shocking
10mb porno films
chauncey gardiner mp3
ridley scott alien ambient music experimental
planing things to go to missouri
pictures of platypus tracts
Divine secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood skins for windows
poetry on lakes
museums motorization
password username plump
What influenced Annie Leibovitz's style of photography?
black teenagers commit street crimes in London
planing a poem
dropdown ads
family planing picture
"npr" "turkey hotline"
adult kickball leagues
eyeless enron
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brain planing
lakes in vietnam
doo rags in uk
dada: warning transport

My other site gets more colorful referrals, and more of them.

2:16 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

Nice LA Weekly article on David Rees

Al the proceeds form his book go to de-mining Afghanistan -- though he's not exactly rich.

"Get Your War On" has been attracting that kind of traffic since two weeks after Rees started it, a heavy load for the servers at his Web host. Frequent crashes have led some to suspect that Rees has been censored by the FBI, the CIA or the not-yet-extant cultural-control department of the Office of Homeland Security. "I start getting e-mails and phone calls from people saying, 'Oh my God, they finally got you! Just let me know where you are and what you need and I'll spring you.' And I'd have to tell them, 'No, I haven't been censored. It's just my fucking Web host.'"

3:13 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

The 50-year expiration on copyright in Europe promises to unleash a flood of releases from the early 50s -- much to the squonky chagrin of the RIAA

2:19 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Anthropologists deflate the patriarchy

Foraging and scavenging were more the rule for early man than hunting, according to new studies

2:14 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

DeCSS programmer acquitted on all charges

12:27 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, January 06, 2003

Lost in translation

Looks like if you want to read Stanislaw Lem's Solaris you have to learn Polish -- the only English translation is copped from a bad French one. Cold War weirdness and misunderstandings seem to follow him around like the rain cloud dogging Pigpen in Peanuts [FAS]

Lem also began contributing essays on English-language sci-fi to scholarly journals and fan magazines alike. These essays were often acerbic: While he admired the work of Philip K. Dick, Lem saw himself as the heir to Kafka and H.G. Wells, so he had little regard for those mere hacks who wrote commercial fiction for the pulps.

Tensions with his American colleagues came to a head in a bizarre international literary incident. In 1973, in an effort to promote "international goodwill," the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) conferred an honorary membership upon Lem, a distinction that had previously been given to only one other foreign writer, J.R.R. Tolkien.

But in 1975, the writer Philip Jose Farmer, whose sexually frank thrillers Lem had criticized, raised objections to Lem's honorary membership. Farmer's concerns were echoed by an addled Philip K. Dick, who was experiencing fits of paranoia at the time. Dick maintained that Lem had embezzled royalties from a Polish translation of Dick's 1969 novel Ubik. "The honorary voting of Stanislaw Lem to membership is the sheep voting the wolf a place at the communal hearth," Dick warned SFWA members in '75. "They certainly must be licking their chops back in Krakow right now."

The short article is worth reading in its entirety.

4:33 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

$20 for a review

nyrock.com is upfront about having critics for sale -- it's all they do

4:07 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Hollywood to flip switch on digital cable boxes, preventing recording of certain content

Hollywood's new strategy is likely to affect everyone from computer-adept users of online music services to the average couch potato. The digital future, hailed as more convenient and of higher quality than the scratchy, fuzzy analog past, is coming with multiple strings attached.

Already, people are finding unfamiliar constraints on how they can consume familiar media: listen to music on your PC, but do not try to copy it to your MP3 player; watch a movie in your home as often as you want for 24 hours ? because after that it will evaporate into the ether; marvel at your plasma-screen TV, but be prepared for your picture quality to be diminished if you do not have the latest model with anti-piracy equipment.

2:32 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. Conrad Hall

Might be the only reason I watch Road to Perdition. I just taped The Professionals last night, oddly enough.

I didn't know he was born and raised in Tahiti, but that accounts for the light in Hell in the Pacific and Tequila Sunrise (another film enjoyable mostly for the cinematography). And his father wrote Mutiny on the Bounty!

Thanks Mr Hall.

3:36 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, January 05, 2003

I hadn't even heard about the death of opensource/P2P pioneer Gene Kan in June [edwardmillerdotorg]

Not that I keep up with this area like I was a programmer, but these people have yet to get their due. I'm sorry he won't be here to collect his.

3:17 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Do not resolve and refit the product optionally due to safe reason.

Awards for worst tech manuals [Undernews]

2:57 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Grammar police spray their territory: net illiteracy attacked [Undernews]

Hey, if it made e.e. cummings look like a visionary, surely it'll do the same for you, right? Wrong. It makes you look like a lazy fuckwit. (Unless you demonstrate that you can use the shift key: for instance, by using characters that demand it, like double quotes. Then it makes you look like a pretentious fuckwit.) Even if you somehow manage to pull off the no-caps style with grace and flair, the best impression you will make is that of a fuckwit admirer of e.e. cummings. That puts you one up on ninety-eight percent of the Internet, but you're still a fuckwit.

1:18 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Old classical music (when is that term going to expire?) label Vox reissues long-out-of-print albums on CD -- by demand, over the Net [Undernews]

When will pop labels get a clue?

1:02 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

In case you don't keep up with the infrequent but invigorating metascene: Lou Reed on, well, the 60s really, though ostensibly about the music

Read this Aspen piece and Thompson's FALILV for the most potent dose of what the 60s were if you actually lived through them. And had ears.

Funny how all the darkness that the Velvets were compares to the obvious ecstatic glow Reed emanates here.

Funny how close your eyes' poll of the best album of '67 had The Velvet Underground and Nico getting 3X the votes of Sgt. Pepper.

Of course it had to happen, it really had to happen, it was the natural end to Beethoven's Ninth. Everyone was getting sicker and looking like a wolverine while the people pushed colleges. Dirty buildings with lawns for people to lie on blankets. Well-groomed wasps or purposefully disheveled sensitives reading Spengler. But meanwhile everything was dead. Writing was dead, movies were dead. Everybody sat like an unpeeled orange. But the music was so beautiful.

11:33 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Proposed Australian solar tower project website

3300 ft. high (twice the Toronto CN Tower), 300 ft. wide. The site is about 470 miles west of the national capital Canberra in southeastern Australia. Completion 2006.

Seems like solar and wild power would be naturals there.

3:39 AM - [Link] - Comments ()