The Divine (Robo)Spark

http://www.photoblog.com/pulpin/2012/04/28/

INTERNET QUA PROCRASTINA-TANGENTIALIZATION

The internet/interwebz is an incredibly helpful tool, a seemingly endless source of information, a great facilitator of communication and a repository allowing access to a wealth of artistic inspiration. It also encourages hours of procrastination, sly, omniscient seductress that it is. At it's most stream of conscious, it allows for the creation of strings of ideas, inspiration and inspired ebbing and flowing as you jump through different media, from prose to string quartets to short films and pictures. The result is a "six-degrees of separation"effect with an infinite amount of connective possibilities. An example follows:

It starts with the following picture, a promotional piece for the band "Gorillaz" entitled "Tank Girl" rendered by the band's long-time visual collaborator Jamie Hewlett.

"Tank Girl" having piqued my interest, I continued exploring and eventually stumbled onto these gems...

At this point, I was torn: should I follow the illustration thread and head down the "Tank Girl" rabbit hole or listen to some Gorillaz? Quite the quandary indeed. And then I started thinking to myself, "wait, this band is legit, so is the art, why aren't I listening to one of their funky, slightly dystopic jams, while immersing myself in the world of "Tank Girl"?  So while pursuing various links related to the comic (tumblr, issue #1, wikipedia, downloadable issues), I pulled up a playlist on YouTube for a little background noise. Eventually, the background came to the forefront when the song "Dirty Harry" began playing. Eager to find out more about the track, I stumbled on this immensely strange video for it:

Sweet and funky jam. Weird and creepy video.

Feeling a little freaked out, I then felt compelled to seek out Mr. Eastwood's interpretation of said Inspector Callahan and came across the clip below: 

Feelin' lucky?

And with that, an hour had passed and it was time to start doing some actual work. The danger? This pattern could repeat itself ad nauseum. For example, you continue the Eastwood vein to Unforgiven and that powerful final scene with Little Bill, portrayed masterfully by Gene Hackman. There we follow the "Hackman Connection" to The Royal Tenenbaums and it's classic soundtrack (or Wes Anderson's empathetic and surreal body of work). 

Or, considering Eastwood's legendary western performances, we could link Unforgiven with the likes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which begs mention of either director Sergio Leone or composer Enio Morricone, both of which were big influences on the style of Quentin Tarantino. 

The possibilities for distraction are endless and as such should be managed lest the situation get out of control. 

Word of the Day: Sapiosexual

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This link will take you to a copy of a letter by a young Kurt Vonnegut, addressed to his family (presumably his father; his mother took her own life on Mother's Day, 1944). It encapsulates his experience during the final year of fighting in Europe during the Second World War. The suffering he both endured and witnessed infuse the missive with a gut-wrenching pathos and open-eyed sincerity. Its tone is one of shocked disbelief and the writing features many of his most estimable authorial talents, gifts that would become trademarks of his storied and prolific career: an almost elegiac sense of irony, a twinge of survivor's guilt, a glib and sardonic sense of humor and wry yet compassionate observations on human nature and suffering.

It's eerily inspiring to read something like this. Private Vonnegut, your guide, takes you to the brink of apocalypse and back, a grim survivor's tale. It's also a tale of history within history: we witness a formative experience of one of the most human and wisest satirists in the North American canon, the basis for his best known work.

He would later write: "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too." It's with quotes like this one, we see that apart from his prodigious imagination, the man possessed a really big heart, too. He is missed.

MODESELEKTOR!

These guys kill. Composed of Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary, they're an electro-duo out of Berlin and have several excellent creative collaborations with Thom Yorke under their belt. Their infatuation with IDM, glitch and hip-hop necessitate a production-style that emphasizes copious amounts of buzzy low-end, bass drum and infinitely danceable beatz. The following is a sample of their work:

Deboutonner (Fan Video)

Sucker Pin

Skip Divided (Thom Yorke Remix)

Evil Twin

Website: http://www.modeselektor.com/

AN INTERWEBZ TRIBUTE TO MY LOVE OF DRAWING AND ANIMATION

The following is a collection of images and links produced by some immensely talented artists working in the fields of drawing and animation. The point is to exhort anyone reading this into further exploring the creators herein featured and to increase awareness of their work, which I'll let speak for itself.

First up: Supakitsch and Koralie -

A pair of very talented drawers and illustrators, their use of color, anime-inspired designs and graffiti-style techniques have are awesomely inspiring.

(The above wall painting is entitled: "Euphorie". Here is a making-of video)

(Another making-of video (highly recommended))

Websites:
http://www.supakitch.com/
http://cargocollective.com/koralie

Up next: Blu -

Famous for his large-scale wall animation projects and other graffiti work, his stop-motion piece, "Muto" was passed along to me by a friend back in college. After visiting Buenos Aires and seeing some of his other work, I decided to check the rest of his stuff out, surreal and frightening genius that does not disappoint, be it factory-sized murals or his idiosyncratic stop-motion shorts.

("Muto", a wall-painted, stop-motion animated short)

("Big Bang, Big Boom", another wall-painted, stop-motion animated short)

("Combo", a collaborative wall painted, stop-motion animated short by Blu and David Ellis)

Website:
http://www.blublu.org/

"A Screaming Comes Across the Sky"

Gravity's Rainbow. Read this book. A hilarious, infinitely inventive, post-modern, impeccably researched transgressive historical fiction that features drug dealers, soldiers, scientists, smugglers, displaced persons and shady government operatives on a mission to impose global industrial hegemony, set in "the Zone" or Western Europe during the closing months of World War II as recreated by Thomas Pynchon.

Talking light bulbs, "crazy kamikazes", a super-intelligent octopus, sado-masochistic pedophile Nazis, megalomaniac statisticians, a ballooning enthusiast with a sweet tooth, Major Marvy (a "capitalistic frontier killer"), double agents, porn stars, ghosts, monsters and a half-man, half-mechanical Russian Intelligence Operative by the name of Tchitcherine are just a few of the more than 400 characters populating the pages of Pynchon's magnum opus.

Unfortunately, this book is surrounded by a myth of impossibility, mainly propagated by those not familiar with Pynchon's work. One of his prodigious gifts is the ability to draw from an almost overwhelming number of topics (everything from biochemistry and drug fabrication to Freud's commentary on the sexual aspects of death to Rilke and Nazi-era German military hardware) and tie them all into his (admittedly very loose) narrative.

He challenges you to keep up, which doesn't appeal to everyone.  As one reviewer put it, "[It] is bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached and blasted". The allusions and technical science and math jargon have inspired/necessitated several extensive guides explaining origins, usage and contexts. But don't let that daunt you; there is enough information, wisdom, wordplay and imagination in this one book to last you a life time.

Pynchon is a prose mathematician whose talents and encyclopedic knowledge allow him to create a sort of dystopic past; a re-imagining of the events, people, inventions and reasons surrounding the Second World War. He takes full advantage of the wealth of possibility implied by setting the novel during the final months of the most cruel and violent episode in human history, which in turn gives way to a credibly eery  foreshadowing of the future greed, pain and violent control struggles to be found throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century. He does so through a selection of short stories and story arcs that eventually delineate the main arc/trajectory of the novel.

In an attempt to entice any potential readers, here's a scene referred to as, "one of the finest extended surrealistic excursions in modern American fiction." It involves the novel's protagonist, Lt. Tyrone Slothrop sliding his way down a toilet into the sewers below, only to find that which brought him there in a glistening Alpine stream some seven years later.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H-f6IvxoV6bQKB8nZft7Ub3bf1mmt61Uu-qE-cauiMU/edit