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.