==pla|\|ing lakes==
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Inflatable church [STARE]
Think I'll just leave this alone. . .
11:41 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Friday, April 18, 2003
Uzumaki: Japanese horror/Manga [Wiley Wiggins]The film, adapted from Junji Ito's manga bearing the same name, invites the viewer to spend some time in the eerie working-class town of Kurozu-cho. While things at first appear normal, a closer look reveals that the town is struggling with an apocalyptic, mystical obsession with Uzumaki, translated into English as Spirals.
2:53 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Website for A Mighty Wind
2:43 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Wiley Wiggins on Truck TurnerWhat is not to like about this movie? Scatman Caruthers as a toupee'd creme-de-menthe drinking pimp and Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek) hissing obscenities and slapping hoes as a madam?Director Jonathan Kaplan has had kind of an up-and-down career, hasn't he?
I liked Over the Edge (vintage Matt Dillon) and Heart Like A Wheel (ditto Bonnie Bedelia and Jeff Bridges), and Love Field was the Michelle Pfeiffer film that David Thomson liked so much, I think. It featured Dennis Haysbert long before 24 & Far from Heaven, too.
Can you tell I've finally had enough of politics for now? Just plumb worn out by shrubco and their enervating fascist tweaker minions.
And the poor fools who support them.
2:20 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Julian Cope's Top 50 Krautrock albums and Matthew Ingram's 10 runners-up [close your eyes]
I'm a big Cluster/Harmonia/Roedelius fan, some stuff by Moebius solo and otherwise too. Also Kluster '71 (Roedelius/Moebius w/ Conrad Schnitzler), a fair selection of Can (unlike many true believers, I'm more a fan of their mid-to-late 70s material, Future Days, Saw Delight, though some early tracks like "Spoon" and "One More Saturday Night" are great too), and in the right mood Neu!, esp. 75. Popol Vuh were neat too; their soundtracks to some of Herzog's movies were integral to the experience (particularly Aguirre and Nosferatu).
I loved Kraftwerk back in the 70s, even went to see them in NYC in '81. They were hilarious.
I had a friend named Jeff Capshew who turned me onto much of this between '77-'79, for which I owe him. Good times. There weren't many of us in central Jersey, I can tell ya. Of course much of this was only available as expensive imports too.
Amon Duul, Klaus Schulze, TD -- these other ones Cope mentions, weren't up my street so much. But I never know what I'll like til I hear it, and it's been so long, I'd have to hear them again to know.
No one had any idea then how influential this stuff would be, except Lester Bangs and Eno.
2:01 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Terry Gilliam's latest (and hopefully to be completed) project is The Brothers Grimm a fantasy/history hybrid
1:06 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Thursday, April 17, 2003
Discovering labyrinthsBuckman also is a member of Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, which in 1995 became one of the first area congregations to include a labyrinth in its ministry. Like many contemporary labyrinths, the church's painted canvas resembles a stone design dating to circa 1201 and found on the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France. The pattern features 11 circuits, or rings, that wind back and forth to form four quadrants leading to a flower-shaped center. The quadrant divisions suggest the shape of a cross. Such labyrinths became popular in medieval times, when they apparently were used for rituals such as liturgical dance, Lenten activities and as symbolic journeys to the Holy Land.There was one at a church in Flagstaff I used to go to on February 15th, which was significant in some way I don't remember.
The Rev. Lauren Artress of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco became inspired after visiting the Chartres labyrinth. Her 1995 book, "Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool," launched the renaissance of labyrinths in the United States. Now, labyrinths of various designs and sizes can be found not only at churches but at locations such as hospitals, New Age retreat centers, parks and schools.
It's a great meditation tool.
10:42 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Got an email from an editor of The Land-Grant College Review, asking for a link, and it looks legit
It'a a print pub with stories.
Some samples.
8:42 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Microsoft culture mogul Paul Allen will transform 13,000 sq ft of his Experience Music Project into The Science Fiction Experience in summer '04According to promotional material, SFX "will explore our culture through the broad, historic and compelling lens of science fiction." The material promises models of "bug-eyed monsters" and exhibits that illustrate "science fiction's alternate realities."
In an interview, Allen said the enterprise would be incorporated as a nonprofit enterprise but might eventually become a business. He called it "a hybrid project" that would have "a multimedia component" but would "not be a theme park or a ride."
8:20 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
A Mighty Wind
The new Chris Guest movie is a parody of the early 60s folk music scene, which I'm betting will make me roll off the couch onto the floor with laughter
Best of Show really killed me.
3:52 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Richard K Morgan on some of the issues brought up by his new book Aletered CarbonYup, we can do that. Oh, you want to come back from the dead? Well, okay. You'll need a body for that, of course, preferably one that's not being used. Costya, but then doesn't everything these days. Clones are pricey, take my advice you'll go for pre-worn instead. Might be a few minor settling-in complications ? drug addiction, minor damage to organs, old viral complaints, that kind of thing ? but really, it doesn't take too much getting used to. Oh, and try not to bump into anyone who knew the previous owner, that can be, well, awkward.This book was one of the 2 or 3 a year I get immersed in like I did as a kid.
Check it out.
4:47 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
SoulSeek is switching to a more decentralized network, and the old network is down
New version is here.
Just downloaded it and it went right up, faster connect etc. too, as the Zeropaid page mentioned.
May be awhile before people figure this out, not many people on right now.
4:27 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
A new English house called Hesperus is re-issuing short books by renowned authors, in new translations and with short forwards by current authors
Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve, Gogol's The Squabble, Pope's Scriblerus -- many of these titles have been OOP in the US for awhile.
10:56 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Why popular and acclaimed British writer Matthew Branton is giving away his new book The Tie and the Crest [Undernews]Miranda Sawyer: Why are you giving away your work?
Michael Branton: The deal in British publishing is supposed to be that the crap is published and put up with because it funds the good stuff. I'm afraid that I have to ask, where is the good stuff? To quote the Manics: 'Libraries gave us power.' Not any more they don't. They're stuffed full of Sophie Dahl and Naomi Campbell's novels, along with Tony Parsons's drivel, a gang of floppy-fringed public schoolboys and their precious pointless literary fictions, a few failed PR girls and all the rest of the cobblers that passes for a publishing culture these days...
The culture industry in Britain since the early Nineties has come to consist almost entirely of consumer capitalist propaganda dressed up as 'better living': young people are made to feel that living some kind of cross between Sex and the City and Cold Feet with a swindling mortgage and a swindling pension and a house stuffed full of cheap tasteful shit manufactured for sub-breadline wages in China is the best you can hope for in this life. Lots of people (not just let's-run-a-vineyard type yuppies) have rejected this and pissed off out of it to try living another way that doesn't make you so ashamed. Do you remember that census last year that showed a million young men unaccounted for? The only comment was facetious: maybe they're all in Ibiza. No. We're in the remote places of the world, growing our own food, working in kind for what else we need. You don't hear about us because really, why should we tell you?
His last book (The Hired Gun) just came out here, garnering comparisons to Graham Greene.
3:02 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
How secret bulletin boards on the Net determine what films get made, and who gets work [Undernews]"Is it legal?" I ask. "Opinions are one thing. But collusive behavior, or manipulative lies - like the pumping and dumping on an Internet stock board - these are more complicated issues. With no regulation, there's just no way to know how dirty the system really is."
My rant is interrupted by a curvaceous blond hostess brandishing a bottle of Cristal.
The producer replies: "Sure, people do try and manipulate the boards. But whether it's unethical or mildly illegal - does it really matter? Good projects turn into good movies. Bad projects turn into bad movies. The buying is just one part of the process."
2:40 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Sunday, April 13, 2003
Gerald Nachman's Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s: review [Progressive Review's "Undernews"]Everyone knows how the 60's transformed pop music forever, and how, in the 70's, a crop of Young Turk directors gave rise to a second golden age of Hollywood. But what about the similarly epochal shift in comedy? Following close on Mort Sahl came Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Woody Allen and Bill Cosby, a group of idiosyncratic geniuses and near-geniuses who revolutionized stand-up, making it darker, more politically satirical and personally introspective. The story of that revolution has now finally been told, and beautifully so, in Gerald Nachman's Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, a compendium of reminiscences, biography, gossip, score-settling, revisionism and sniping.See also this post on Bob Newhart and the linked WP article.
Added this one to my wishlist for sure.
2:22 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Time-warped mid-westerners file:
North Dakota reaffirms cohabitation as sex crime
12:40 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
and s-integrator
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