I HAVE NO BLOG, AND I MUST SCREAM
What happened in Houla was vile and attrocious; almost beyond my capacity to process.
But what makes it worse - almost unbearably so - is the nagging suspicion that pernicious, repellent shit like this happens on a daily basis across the globe, but mostly goes unreported. Simply put, it’s a shitty world we live in.
The desire to help change it in some way for the better has become a tug - an abstract gravitational pull - that I now feel on an almost daily basis. But to give into that feeling would almost certainly be arrogant, vain and naive - as much as events upset, repel or disturb you, the fastest route to insanity is thinking you can change things - that you can wage war in some way on the tyrants of this world - when better men than you have tried and failed. Paradoxically, I think you have to be able to access some special form of thick-skinned vanity - be focused and driven in ways I cannot quite grok - to tackle evil at that level.
I wish I had the stomach for it.
I wish I could make things better. I can’t.
Some of those reports made me want to weep. It is a special type of evil that descended on the people of Houla - a cold, wicked form of brutality - one that has no name. Nor deserves one.
I’ve always felt that Tumblr wasn’t the right platform for what I wanted to do or say, that it was only a temporary stop-over on the way to…something else.
I may not be taking up my sword against these fucking monsters - I’m too much of a coward…I lack the spine to do what really needs to be done - but it doesn’t feel right any more for me to be on here, trading digital images - cartoons, stills from films, book covers - like bubblegum-cards in the school-yard…no, not after Houla.
I’m sure I’ll feel different in a few days, but right now it feels shitty and disrepectful for me to be doing that. I think some of you will prob. know what I mean.
And no disrespect meant to the lovely folks I met on here (and the ones I knew before) - you guys gotta do what you gotta do. You’re all clever, talented, creative people - you’ve got albums to sell, shows to promote, lives to lead; and that’s cool…
but at the risk of sounding like some kind of humourless leftie killjoy, I think that after hearing about what happened at Houla I need to be doing something else for a while, though I’ve no idea right now what that might be.
These are fictional magazine covers from Blade Runner. They were created by production illustrator Tom Southwell in 1980-1981 and appeared in the background on a magazine stand in the city streets. (!!!!)
Kek: they’re fun, but mostly kinda disappointing, tbh.
Via telephants
Have you seen the New Aesthetic? Everyone in the Twittersphere was talking about it. Depending on whom you ask, it was a “shareable concept,” (James Bridle) a “theory object,” (Bruce Sterling) and a “weird, hot, movement” (Ian Bogost). Or simply “things James Bridle posts to his Tumblr,” as Bogost quips — and to which we might add, “which got really popular really fast and I wish I knew what it actually was.” Bridle’s Tumblr became a SXSW talk in March 2012. And then a week later, Bruce Sterling wrote a 5,000-word opus on the New Aesthetic for Wired. As if to a younger sibling, praising and cautioning in equal measures, he contextualized the New Aesthetic as not just a Tumblred accumulation but the art movement 21st century creatives had desperately been waiting for. The essay was a flash point, prompting a flood of responses. What better empyrean spark than the convergence of SXSW and, as he describes himself on his Twitter bio, “one of the better known Bruce Sterlings”?
SHIP CANAL ON RICH HUGHES / THE VISITOR / CAMBRIDGE 105
A much belated cheers! to the wonderful Rich Hughes for playing a track off the 19f3 SHIP CANAL CD on his Cambridge 105 show, The Visitor. Thanks, Rich!
An oddly familiar scenario, this, within the context of my own family.
BTW: We live on an old rusting freighter that ran aground on a weir in the River Yeo.
(Source: negativepleasure)
Getting drunk with wife sat out on the step listening to wonderful, perfectly cryogenically-preserved Reprise vinyl of Neil Young / Crazy Horse’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere…
Man!
todf:
Happy Birthday Pamela Suzette “Pam” Grier (born May 26, 1949)
Foxy Brown ~
helllllllllll yes.
(Source: oldfilmsflicker)
You all know China Mieville’s writing Dial H For Hero, right?
It’s pretty good. 10 years ago, it woulda been a Vertigo comic.
One day you can get me drunk and I’ll bore you rigid about the time DC asked me to pitch in the 90s and I sumitted a Dial H idea that was probably just about the crappiest thing ever, apart from the Doom Patrol one I did. Yeesh. *cringes*
Still, some of the dial-up characters were pretty awesome (wonder if I kept the list?)…
So, as much as I enjoy reading comics like this, it’s always kinda tempered by a smidge of sadness / regret that I’ll prob. never get to write Dial H and a handful of other C-List characters that I have a huge fondness for.
*shrugs*
Ah, well: just means I’ll have to get on and actually do some worthwhile shit of my own.
YET ANOTHER REASON WHY I FUCKING LOVE M. JOHN HARRISON
(As if I, you know, actually needed any more)
“Some forms of SF are becoming irrelevant not because we’re living in “the future” but because, with the rise of gadgetopia over the last decade or so, science has begun to directly claim its place in the spectacle. In another ten years, with less need for publicity partners, shared branding may be over. But this could be an advantage. No longer a junior partner in the SciArt project – no longer limited to proselytising & pegagogic duties, & owing no one anything in the way of intellectual fealty – science fiction could return to one of its shadowier, guiltier, more fulfillingly imaginative relationships with the concept of knowledge. SF writers could rediscover the freedom of being unapproved outsiders working in a space which precisely isn’t a teaching aid.” - MJH
DEAR GOOGLE…
Yes, let’s celebrate (what would’ve been) Robert Moog’s 78th birthday by putting a software-driven digital synth on our Search Page.
Man, I fucking hate Google. Shitty company run by shit-bags (a general observation; one not sepcicifically tied to the Robert Moog thing); but I keep forgetting to not use them. Heh.
“…the Moog sound has lived on, with musicians such as Fat Boy Slim choosing to continue to use it even in the digital era.”
“Fat Boy Slim.” Oh, f’fucksake.
Memo-to-self: Research. New. Search. Engines.
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