Ran across this thinking it was possibly a cartoon rendering of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith (see previous post). Nope, just E.T. looking to take an axe, or, in this case, his finger, to The Shining‘s Wendy Torrance. And here’s a bit of that film’s Shelley Duvall (now, sadly, bonkers) talking about shooting with director Stanley Kubrick:
(via SlashFilm)
While my Fall phase stopped completely with ‘88’s still-excellent I Am Kurious Oranj, Mark E. Smith and his rotating cast of band members have continued pumping out albums with almost Woody Allen-like consistency (28 albums, 33 years).
In yesterday’s NYT article, Mr. Smith Shows His Staying Power, Ben Ratliff calls the new Fall album, Your Future Our Clutter, one of the band’s best. He also attempts to zero in on just what it is that makes Smith such a fascinating, and yes, endearing, character.
Um, maybe it’s the crank factor? The 53-year-old singer claims that Pavement, “didn’t have an original idea in their heads.” He also thinks that Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore should “have his rock license revoked.”
And while Smith may have written in his autobiography, Renegade, “The Fall are about the present, and that’s it,” what follows below is a considerable chunk of his past, Part I of the ‘05 BBC documentary, The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith (links to the other parts at the bottom).
The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith Part II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX
While the sandstorm clouds of another Dune movie threaten to gather once again, tidbits of the visually striking David Lynch version keep rolling in. Back in ‘83, the one-time future Mrs. Novicoff actress Sean Young, who played Chani against Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul Atreides, brought her video camera to Mexico City’s massive Dune set. Here’s a bit of what she experienced:
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Frank Herbert & David Lynch discuss Dune
Once again Mr. Eddie Ruscha points out a confounding delicacy for our obscure delight in the form of Derdiyoklar (roughly translates as The No Problems): a Turkish self-styled diskofolk duo based in Germany and, as evidenced in the completely unhinged and nicely confusing live clip below, mostly played weddings and other events amongst fellow “gastarbeiter” Turks.
When not enacting elaborate melodramas in a live setting, the records (check the clip below) rather more live up to their description. There is nothing bad and a whole lot good about electric phase-shifted baglamas over groovy disco beats.
I have the cover story over at h+ magazine today, about the new artificial intelligence upgrades to the space program. (Jet Propulsion Labs has upgraded the Mars rover with artificial intelligence firmware… could intelligent AI nanoclouds be far off?) Read on at the link below for the rest of my reporting live from NASA’s labs.
Though we may not have found intelligent life on Mars, NASA has just beamed up its own.
As announced at the end of March, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories has upgraded the Opportunity rover (already stationed on Mars) with artificial intelligence firmware, code-named AEGIS. Short for Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, AEGIS allows the Opportunity to identify high-value photography targets — making its own decisions about which Martian rocks to photograph and send back to Earth. As the rover has limited downlink capacity, this is expected to greatly increase its productivity, allowing it to retrieve more data in fewer trips across Mars’ surface. AEGIS isn’t the first artificial intelligence application developed for space, or even at Jet Propulsion Labs — JPL has been in the game as far back as the Deep Space 1 craft in 1998.
I visited JPL on a recent rainy afternoon. Nestled in the mountains near Pasadena, California, the NASA campus dates to the 1940s, and was an early stalwart of the United States’ rocketry and space programs. Beyond security checkpoints, rows of polished, glass-and-steel buildings house the facility’s various projects — major foci at the moment are the Mars rovers and Reconnaissance orbiter, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, and the Spitzer space telescope. Further up the hill is a simulated outdoor Martian landscape, with volcanic rocks resting in red sand. It’s an eerie thing to see through a gray LA fog.
Whether or not we all dissolve into rainbow-shooting dolphins and unicorns of the 27th dimension in 2012, AT LEAST WE KNOW FOR SURE THAT THERE WILL BE A NEW BATMAN MOVIE. OH GOD YES.
The release date for the new film, presumably directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale, and completing a trilogy of the most UTTERLY SWEET FILMS IN ALL TIMES KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, is set at July 20, 2012.
(Note: Above poster, with David Tennant as the Riddler, is not real, just in case it had to be said.)
In one of the most anticipated announcements in recent memory, Warner Bros. officially set a date this morning for the follow-up to The Dark Knight. Tentatively known as Batman 3, the movie will debut July 20, 2012 in conventional and IMAX theaters, almost exactly four years after The Dark Knight opened to record-breaking numbers.
At this time, there are no details available regarding the plot or the cast, though it is assumed that Christian Bale at least will be reprising his role as Bruce Wayne/Batman. Warner Bros. was also unable to confirm whether or not Batman Begins and Dark Knight writer-director Christopher Nolan would be taking on those responsibilities again for part three.
(Box Office Mojo: Batman Returns in 2012)
(The Freaking Dark Knight (Two-Disc Special Edition))
Yet another essential recent BBC music doc, this time a fascinating glimpse into the history of the seminal indie label/empire Rough Trade. More beloved late 70’s post punk records are touched upon than would be wise to list, but I was particulary awestruck to see footage of the original lineup of Scritti Politti sitting in a dilapidated bedsit earnestly hand-assembling the epochal “Skank Bloc Bologna” single. Founder Geoff Travis comes across as a passive aggressive faux-naif with faultless taste and a talent for the elusive right place/right time nexus. Watch, learn and listen.
above photo : Genesis P-Orridge delivers the 2nd Throbbing Gristle L.P. D.O.A. to Geoff Travis @ Rough Trade HQ, 1978
As Stephen Mangan said on Twitter “Go to 3:45 and prepare to be DAZZLED.”
You will be. Trust.
Attention New Yorkers, don’t miss Return to the Pleasure Dome, a benefit concert event for Anthology Film Archives with a Life Achievement Honor for Kenneth Anger.
Featuring Technicolor Skull (Kenneth Anger and Brian Butler), Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, The Virgins, Moby & other special guests.
Wednesday, May 19, 8:30p.m at the Hiro Ballroom, New York City, $99 via Ticketweb
Video: Kenneth Anger’s 42-second long film, Death. Part of the OneDreamRush project.
“A male cat amazed onlookers with his behaviour to a female cat after she was hit by a car and left dead on the street in Kızılsaray district of Antalya, southern Turkey. Having seen his darling lying on the ground, the male cat started making massage-like movements, to bring the beloved back to life. The scene was likened to a cardiac massage by onlookers. The female cat was taken to a veterinary polyclinic for treatment but died there.”
The LAPD are on the hunt for a man who fled down the fire escape from his penthouse in downtown Los Angeles ala ‘Jason Bourne’ leaving weapons, counterfeiting equipment, and passports in various names. From the Los Angeles Times:
It started 11 days ago when a resident at an upscale downtown L.A. high-rise tower smelled fumes coming from neighboring apartment. Firefighters knocked on the neighbor’s door, but he refused to let them in.
They called police, who broke down the door of the penthouse just as the man inside was escaping through a back window and down a fire escape with multiple duffel bags over his shoulder.
“He escaped like Jason Bourne,” LAPD Deputy Chief Mike Downing of the Counter-terrorism Bureau, referring to the movie spy character. What they found next has begun a week-long mystery.
The apartment contained sophisticated counterfeiting equipment as well as a cache of weapons, including an AK-47. They also found stacks of counterfeit $100 bills totaling $15,000 and a camera tripod.
But detectives’ interest was really heightened when they looked outside the window and saw that the penthouse balcony had a spot-on view of the U.S. Federal Reserve building on Grand Avenue. Detectives now are searching for the suspect, who leased the $3,400-a-month penthouse, paying in advance with stacks of cash.
Detectives aren’t sure what Brian Alexik, a 33-year-old New Jersey man, was up to, and what role, if any, the Federal Reserve might have played in his schemes.
The fake $100 dollar bills found in the penthouse are said to be extremely good forgeries by those who had seen them.
“There were many levels of criminality,” Detective Downing said. “He’s funding a criminal enterprise. He’s dabbling in narcotics, he’s manufacturing weapons parts. But what is it? Was there a bigger plan? What was his intent? We have a lot of questions for him when he is arrested.”
A room with a view to one big mystery (Los Angeles Times)
Weren’t you excited that they stopped making Humvees? Didn’t you breathe a sigh of relief that perhaps some sanity had slipped into the world sideways? Well, hm. Now they’re making a FLYING one.
Generals may be notorious for always wanting to fight the last war but if true, there will be no shortage of tomorrow’s weaponry they’ll be able to choose from. At least in the U.S.
Earlier today, the New York Times ran a big piece on a new class of weapons that can hurl conventional payloads with precision accuracy at a target from thousands of miles away. Or at least that is how it’s being billed at this point.For obvious reasons, that could turn into a very big deal. But with all the attention lavished on Prompt Global Strike, another story got lost in the shuffle that has the capacity to have an equally transformational effect on the U.S. military.
The Defense Advanced Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Defense Department’s research arm, has decided to go ahead with what it calls the Transformer (TX) program. The idea is to enable soldiers to go into battle riding a four-person flying car that also function like an airplane. The vehicle, which will be able to drive 250 miles on a tank of fuel, will not need a runway to get airborne.
