The following card game, meant to be played with a pack of Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot cards, was invented by Anders Sandberg. Sandberg holds a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He’s a leading transhumanist and is quoted extensively in Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near.” Back in my day, however, we knew him as the guy who ran the most wicked “Mage: The Ascension” fan page on the Internet. If you know what this game is (aka “Dungeons and Dragons wasn’t enough to corrupt you brats into the occult? Here, have this.”) (aka “Nothing in this game is true, but it’s exactly the way things are”) you are already doomed. If you don’t, it’s too late to explain now.

The card game can be played by anybody without any previous knowledge of any other system, including Crowley’s deck. Looks very keen.

The game is played with a deck of tarot cards and a few ten-sided dice. There is nothing magical about the use of tarot, except that it is good for bringing up associations. I have used the Aleister Crowley Thoth deck, and would recommend it because the cards both have a rich symbolism and (in the case of the suits) written names giving helpful suggestions for their uses (four of disks is “power”, two of cups “luxury”). It can be run using other decks of course, but often the images are less helpful and the meanings more psychological. Knowing the symbolism and meanings of the cards makes the game far more entertaining and flexible, but just looking at the images can give inspiration. The knight of wands is riding a black horse and carrying a huge torch – a violent warlord. The fool is carrying a sack of coins – an opportunity to swindle.

The basic system is simple. Each player represents one group, society, organisation, person or something different. There may or may not be a GM with a final say, although it is useful (as is having somebody as a note-taker if the results are to be used later). Over the span of the game players may join or leave depending on whether their sides are removed or new sides of the story appear (temporarily removed players make good note takers). Unused players may act as “fate” or “chance”, playing cards that represent outside forces.

(Anders Sandberg: Genesis)

(Thoth Tarot Deck)

(Wiki on Mage: The Ascension)

Incoming imminently: A documentary about Sly Stone, one of the great unsung music geniuses of all unsung music geniuses. Via Arthur, who I link to too much, and who are the great unsung heroes of Our Age.

(Arthur: Higher)

(Read Greil Marcus on Sly Stone: Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music: Fifth Edition)

Epic Strega Fail: Check out this bizarre ad for Italy’s center-left political party featuring a befuddled tarot reader. Via Osocio.

Welcome to Pidiello, a magician, a fortune-teller, he predicts your future in his television show. The phone rings and a women ask about her future because her husband can’t find a job because of the financial crisis. Pidiello says: “Pidiello sees and foresees” and the solution he foresee is in the cards he shows with the pictures of Tremonti (the Italian Minister of Economy and Finance) and Berlusconi (the Italian Prime Minister). Pidiello says that the two faces sees it all: there’s no crisis: “it’s as real as long the spotlight could fall on my head…”

At the end, Pidiello’s wife ask him to find a real job and the the ex-magician answered: “impossible because of the economic crisis”.

The tv-spot is from the Partito Democratico, the centre-left political party in Italy.

(Osocio: Magic in Italian Politics)

 
It seems like I often write about the topic of bad movies here on Dangerous Minds. Good bad movies, not bad bad movies. Nobody likes a movie that’s just plain terrible. A good bad movie has to have that something special, like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Santa Claus vs. The Martians, or The Room. Or just about any Elizabeth Taylor film after a certain point.

And then there’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror, which I posted about earlier. Tara and I went to see it with Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin this weekend and I must say, Birdemic truly lived up to its good bad advance hype. It was bewildering, but hilarious. Tim and Eric’s Tim Heidecker, co-host of the screening we saw on Saturday night, stared out at the audience when the film was over and after a dramatic pause, asked “Don’t you all just feel like assholes for sitting through that?” In a sense he was right, although Heidecker admitted this screening had, in fact, been his fourth.

I was telling a friend today about the dubious cinematic charms of the utterly perplexing Birdemic and he asked me had I ever seen Gymkata? I had not and he suggested I look it up on YouTube. Here’s a brief review of it, from Film Critic:

I’ve seen Gymkata three times. That’s not a boast. The first time I caught it was on videotape in the late ‘80s. The second and third times it was on some late night cable station and I was either too sleep-deprived or inebriated to turn it off. I know it’s cliché, but the whole car wreck analogy fits almost too well. When Gymkata is on, I just can’t turn away. And I’m not alone - - the net is littered with sad accounts of similarly affected individuals.

Jonathan Cabot (Kurt Thomas) is a U.S. gymnast sent to the backwater country of Parmistan to participate—and hopefully win—The Game, a dangerous, obstacle-laden decathlon. Why? Because the U.S. government needs to set up a “Early Warning Earth Station for the Star Wars program” and sending in troops to do it is “out of style.” Indeed. Thing is no one has survived The Game in 900 years. There’s a reason for that, too. As if the course weren’t hard enough, contestants must maneuver through numerous ninjas, crazies, and Parmistani thugs that try and stop them.

A cheap plot description can’t do justice to the inanity on display here. Perhaps descriptions of a few choice sequences will: the film’s crowning triumph is the Village of Crazies, an entire hovel populated only with cannibal psychopaths and screaming schizos who try and claw our hero from the sky as he swings and vaults through the decaying town. What, that’s not crazy enough? How about the fact that there just happens to be a convenient pommel horse in the center of the town?!? Still not doing it? How about clumsy ninjas wearing fur vests? Or a guy named Thorg with a red headband and silver He-Man arm braces? Honestly, I could go on and on.

Did you catch the part in the trailer where he just happened to have the gymnastics horse to fight the baddies with? How does that get explained?

Not sure I could sit though this one. Yes, I’ll watch the movie with the poorly animated CGI birds that shit fiery bombs, but even I have standards.
 

 
Gymkata on iMockery
Thank you, Scott Dallavo!

 
Last week saw the release of Joanna Newsom’s new album, a 3 CD set called Have One on Me. You have to admire the nerve of an artist putting out an album in 2010 that clocks in a little less than Sandinista! Hasn’t she heard that the entire world has a 30 second attention span? Evidentially Newson, who includes a 25 page libretto in the set, didn’t get the memo.

Jonah Weiner, writing on Slate:

As demanding albums go, Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me is pretty smooth going. Songs amble along leisurely, heavy on warm, plucked strings, stately piano, and bright horns, as Newsom sings in a voice that’s both resolute and vaporous: an amplified sigh. Some agitations and eruptions breach the surface here and there, but mostly the pond just shimmers. And yet the album is demanding because it wants us to do something that we’ve grown largely unaccustomed to doing in the digital-music era: namely, to stop what we’re doing—close all the tabs in our browsers—and give it our undivided attention.

Have One on Me, released last week, mounts a three-disc, 18-song protest against distraction, against rushing, against gulping. Newsom, an audacious 27-year-old songwriter from northern California, tells complicated stories that don’t invite parsing so much as necessitate it, and the album forms a panorama so sprawling that the mind’s eye struggles to survey it in full. Here she is in one song, stealing a horse and hanging for the crime; here she is in another, pondering the life of Lola Montez, 19th-century bohemian scenester and mistress of the Bavarian King Ludwig I; here she is fallen in with ash-masked volcano worshippers.

The album—a patchwork of American and Celtic folk, medieval music, gospel, classical, country, and piano-pop—lasts two hours and four minutes. That’s two minutes more than Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, 12 more than Wu-Tang Forever, and 20 less than Sandinista! But it takes at least three plays to begin to feel you’ve really heard it. One listen is necessary to collect first impressions and sketch a rough road map; a second to read along with the precisely transcribed paragraphs, parentheticals, puns, and mellifluous A.P. English stumpers—etiolated, palanquin, gormless—that take up a full 25 pages of liner notes; and a third listen to put down the liner notes and let the words settle back into partnership with Newsom’s music and phrasing, which emphasize lines that may have seemed throwaway on the page while underselling other, would-be zingers.

This takes some effort, but mostly it just takes time. Have One on Me is worth the cost, though, and worth the actual price tag retailers put on it, too, because it is exactly what it purports to be: a major work, moving, mystifying, transporting. You emerge from it with your bearings knocked askew.

The great arranger arranger Van Dyke Parks, who has worked with Brian Wilson, Carly Simon and other notables, told the London Times about hearing Joanna Newsom sing her song Emily the first time they met. Parks said: “In my mind were the images of the bards, the troubadours, the poets. And the very druid marrow of my bones started to shout at me, ‘You should serve this person!’” High praise indeed.

This sounds epic. I can’t wait to get my hands on this!
 

 
Actual apartment buildings here in Los Angeles. I like the mid-century dingbat stylings of the Crapi myself.
 

via this flickr stream

 
As these things go, the recent “viral” campaign for Blu Dot, a New York-based furniture store, is among the most clever advertising stunts we’ve ever heard of. Dreamed up by advertising agency Mono, the idea was to place 25 “Real Good Chairs” in places all over Manhattan. If someone just leaves something somewhere, hey, “curb-mining” is fair game, right? Sort of, but this time there were strings attached ... well not exactly strings, more like a GPS!

From Media Creativity:

Each chair was GPS-equipped, allowing Mono to track the chair’s location and pay a visit to the chairs’ new owners. Can you imagine taking a chair off the sidewalk and having someone ring your doorbell to inquire about the chair? An eight-minute-long documentary was created that chronicled the chairs’ initial drop off, patient cameramen waiting on nearby buildings for someone to take the chairs and visits to the homes of those who took a chairs.

According to Michael Hart, creative director and co-founder of Mono, each chair was valued at $129 and equipped with a cell phone with GPS software. This software is valued at $200, so do the math; the GPS software is worth more than the chair itself.

Mono’s biggest challenge was obtaining long-lasting battery life for the cell phone, something longer than 8 hours. Mono worked with technology consultant Tellart, who created an electrical switch to trigger the battery when the chair was picked up. Translated: the GPS was activated once the chair was on the move,

The folks who took the chairs home were tracked by the camera crews and later asked about their semi-illicit hauls. Some were surprised and startled that they’d been followed; others wondered if they’d snagged (read: stolen) someone else’s chair. Most, however, got the joke, allowed the crews into their homes and sat for an interview.

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
What is it exactly about Final Placement that is causing such widespread consternation, furious beard stroking, fuming anger and panty tossing excitement ? It’s almost as if these four innocent Texans have altered the very fabric of reality, calling into question our previously held sacrosanct metrics of aesthetic goodness and perhaps even causing us to reconsider the role of The Lord in our lives. Nah, it’s just that FP made a horrifically bad recording and truly thought it was good enough to make a groovy video of to share with the world. Ooops ! Oh innocence, can you never return ?
 

As Final Placement’s “people” continue to play wack-a-mole with these clips we’ll try to refresh ‘em as they get re-posted. Lame, FP !

 
(via The Daily What )

 
I’m really looking forward to seeing this! According to their Facebook and Myspace page it appears as if the documentary is still in post-production and they’re currently searching for a distributor. From directors Mandy Stein and Ben Logan, “The film follows the music and the life of the Bad Brains from 1979 to present day.”
 

“BAD BRAINS has announced that it is in the final stages of production for its acclaimed documentary. No release date has been set yet.

The yet-untitled film was directed by Mandy Stein and Ben Logan and traces the history of the band from their formation in Washington, D.C. in 1979 to the present day. In addition to tons of footage from the band’s vault, the movie includes interviews with all four members (vocalist HR, guitarist Dr. Know, bassist Darryl Jenifer and drummer Earl Hudson) and their manager Anthony Countey, as well as testimonials from Henry Rollins, ex-Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist Ian MacKaye, ex-Minor Threat guitarist Lyle Preslar, ex-Cro Mags vocalist Jon Joseph and guitarist Harley Flanagan, Murphys Law guitarist Jimmy Gestapo and Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch, who produced Bad Brains 2007 album Build a Nation.

In addition to giving birth to the hardcore movement with their song “Pay to Cum” and inspiring all of the aforementioned musicians in the process, the Bad Brains had a huge influence on a new breed of late ‘80 and early ’90s metal bands, including Living Colour, Faith No More, 24-7 Spyz and Fishbone. While the Bad Brains flick is currently in post-production, it will be ready for release in a Jamaican minute.”

Read more over at Metal Underground