Aside from providing a redundant communications system in the event of nuclear war and distributing porn, the internet is also useful for collecting pictures of strange animals.
The heroes of the internet who comb over every ounce of data from the NASA website looking for proof of alien life, have once again struck paydirt. It looks like the Phoenix lander has practically crushed some sort of worm. Or maybe it’s just a cockroach that fell out of the probe when it struck the ground?
It’s called the Telectroscope and the story of how it was built and how the system of lenses and mirrors allows you to view straight from London to New York is right here.
It brought to mind the 1935 movie The Tunnel, which I saw on PBS when I was eight or so. It’s an epic story about the construction of a sub-Atlantic tunnel between London and New York.
I don’t know why everyone is so jazzed up about linking these two cities. It’s not like they have that much in common except for the wealth, culture, and high cost of living.
There’s a great scene in The Tunnel where the architect of the tunnel has to drive a nuclear drillhead through a submarine volcano. Everyone knows the North Atlantic is lousy with those volcanoes.
Also: I have finally passed up Bruce Sterling in the topical information department. A full twenty days after I blogged the super-exciting news that Amitabh Bachchan has his own blog, Sterling also reported that story on his Wired blog.
Although Sterling seemed to like it a lot better. Can’t say I’m a big enough fan to actually read the actual text of Bachchan’s blog. The man writes like Immanuel Kant. No doubt another sign of the Bachchan genius.
This 30min movie title: NEIL GAIMAN‘s A Short Film About John Bolton just showed up on Netflix instant viewing. I’d seen the movie before in the video store and I was pretty much shocked by the cover, which depicts a naked vampire woman growling with bared fangs.
"Wow, Gaiman’s really sunk if he’s producing documentaries about fan art," I thought. But I had nothing better to do this evening, so I streamed it.
Luckily it wasn’t as bad as all that. I would favorably compare this documentary with Peter Jackson’s Forgotten Silver. I looked it up on the web, and John Bolton has worked with Neil Gaiman in the past, so Gaiman was able to bring special insight into the character of the artist.
The best part of A Short Film About John Bolton, and the sly-est scene, is where they interview people at a gallery showing of John Bolton’s art, and everyone tries to say something profound about the art without actually mentioning that it all appears to be fan-porn paintings of naked vampires.
I also saw Romero’s Diary of the Dead.
Every since I saw Zombie Diaries at the Austin Film Festival I had been looking forward to Romero’s take on exactly the same premise: video cameras meet the living dead. I figured, the master of zombie horror, with a comparably larger budget, ought to have a pretty good showing compared to a buncha English wannabes.
Well, my gushing review of Zombie Diaries has withstood the test of time. Everything that Zombie Diaries did well, Romero fumbled. Every scene, every line of dialogue, every performance, every character, and every scrap of lighting in Diary of the Dead seemed contrived, whereas Zombie Diaries felt authentic straight through. (are you having trouble keeping the titles separate yet?)
Here’s a tip Romero, if you’re going to have a ragtag buncha college kids in an RV beset by zombies, why pretend to try to make it seem real? And the moralizing about the complicity of a voyeuristic society? I could do without that. I’m just too busy looking at fan-porn.
In this context if I referred to "Varley," everyone would think I was talking about some writer guy. But there was a period when I lived at Sasona Co-op when Varley referred only to one Mike Varley, a Long Island fugitive who camped out in the crappiest room in the co-op for six months.
I haven’t met many people more likable than Varley. Not only do people effectively relate to him as their little brother, they actually articulate it in those terms. His consistently upbeat and cheerful disposition never feels smarmy, because underneath it all is the wounded melancholy of a compulsive artist.
During his stint at the co-op, when he wasn’t skyping his long-distance girlfriend, he made an impromptu installation with the box of non-sugar sweetener packets that had sat untouched in the pantry for as long as anyone could remember.
And I was fortunate enough to hear him read an epic story in the courtyard, a tale of garage sales, romance, and TV-advertised exercise equipment. Varley has an impressive sense of humanity in his writing. I only wish that he would stop being so highfalutin and write something genre so I can publish it.
These days, Varley has moved away from short fiction, stating a disillusionment with the form (which I can understand and expound on later). He’s been doing a series of audio commentaries about the campaign season. When last I saw him I urged him to put in on an RSS, but until then you can scroll through the list manually. My favorite from this series is a narrative about Obama’s trip to Africa to visit his estranged father called "On Turban Etiquette(mp3)." It postulates a secret character behind the Obama public persona that is simultaneously judgmental and considerate, more or less what I had always imagined lived behind the hopeful mask.
For no particular reason, here is a cat named "Booger":
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I spent the last few days crunching through the Space Squid slushpile. We seem to get a submission or two every day, so if I let things slide for a few weeks (or a month) then there’s a lot of work waiting for me.
I was struck by the high quality of submissions these days. Sure, there’s plenty of the wacko subs, but there were a lot of stories that I ended up rejecting that I would have gone to bat for only a couple of years ago. Nowadays all it takes is a couple of mis-worded sentences or two paragraphs in a row that bore me.
Here’s my strategy for reading slush: I only break into the submissions when I’m tired and irritated. If a story holds my attention when I’m in that state of mind, then it’s special enough for Space Squid.
Or spastic enough, which is practically the same thing.
A friend of mine just finished his magnum opus of relationship commentary, a claymation film with an Eraserhead-like worm. I should mention that the blue-clay figure looks exactly like the director.
Another friend has started work on a web-based panel-comic creator tool called Toonlet.
The point seems to be that you can create "American Splendour"-esque blogs in a time-efficient manner. Here’s a typical creation with toonlet.
For the past few months google alerts has returned a high number of hits for the search terms "zombie" and "lapdance." Normally this is rare. But don’t go thinking that everyone is talking about this stupid blog.
No, they’re talking about the hard work and true genius of a largely unrecognized American Hero: Jenna Jameson.
The modern queen of porn transitions into respectability in the film "Zombie Strippers," where she plays the part of a naked dancing zombie. Jameson sinks her teeth into her role (so to speak), quipping about Nietzsche one moment and shooting golf balls from her noonie the next. This might be a serious acting roll for her, but don’t go thinking that her perfectly spherical bowling-ball breasts don’t make an appearance. By all rights they should get second billing.
The nudity is the only thing that isn’t done sloppily in this movie. And oddly enough, the actresses who take it off, far from being the bottom of the talent barrel, give the most nuanced and naturalistic performances of the whole shebang. Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund runs a little slipshod with his now typecast roll "MC for nude zombie dancers," and every other clothed actor follows his lead, hamming it up in a crude parody of a Troma film performance.
In a triumph of audacity, the filmmakers claim that they didn’t write a film around the high concept of zombified strippers, but rather they based their film on Ionescu’s classic of French absurdist theater "The Rhinoceros." I haven’t actually watched any French absurdist plays (because I’m too busy watching zombie movies) but if I had to guess, I’d say that all the non-sequitor speeches the strippers make about the perils of conformity are probably taken verbatim from Ionescu.
And that’s what’s confounding about "Zombie Strippers." Is it an edgy arthouse film masquerading as camp, or an exploitation flick with delusions of grandeur? Or does one option make the other inevitable?
It’s enough to make your head hurt thinking about it. A similar cognitive dissonance probably snared the filmmakers, who try too hard to straddle the line and exist in both states, to be both art and trash simultaneously.
The low-budget spectacle feels as forced as the commentary about the commodification of sexuality. And just when you think the filmmakers have made a valid point, they give us another five minute all-nude pole dance, complete with the tinny, scratchy bass of a strip club sound system. Followed by cannibalism.
"Zombie Strippers" takes a sleazy inflatable sex doll of a premise and blows it up with pretensions of profoundity.
But the last thing I want to do is criticize anyone who has made a connection between lapdances and zombies.
An airwolf helicopter is on ebay:
The description doesn’t mention if it goes mach-one, but apparently the chaingun is available.
I’ve gotten into the habit of carving wooden art objects for my father, roughly on a yearly basis. Last year I experimented with busts.
This year I’m going for a more classical theme.
So I think I figured out how to register this blog on technorati. There was a holdup because to claim your own blog you have to cut and paste a coded link into a blog entry. Because these blogs don’t support html code, it took me a while to figure out that I could just translate the link into the BBCode format, removing the "rel=me" tag that seems to be superfluous.
Well, Zombie Lapdance ranked at the technical bottom, the 10,000,000th most important blog in the world.
You know how you felt the first time Carl Sagan said there were more stars in the universe than there were grains of sand in all the beaches of the world? That’s kind of how I feel right now. Only with blogs instead of stars.