Gizmodo puts a face (so-to-speak) to the eleven-eyed cyborg behind The Google Maps Street View Camera…and it’s a fucking VW New Beetle!!! OMG, who didn’t see that one coming?!?!?!
Read a thought-provoking entry on The Daily Siege about the conflict between presidential and public power. Of course you have to scroll down past the photos he took while fucking someone named Sylvia in Germany…
Here’s my response:
I will agree broadly with commenter OHGOD and Mr. Cubitt (and goddamn do I love your photography) and say that many facets of life in this country have been expertly manipulated by the rich and powerful to solidify their own wealth and control. Volunteer Armed Forces are a good example. Compulsory service would get a huge amount of the public interested in shaping the government’s defense policy and that’s the last thing the government wants. The government wants impunity to bully other nations when asking “Please?” won’t work. The lessons of the Vietnam War teach us that very well in hindsight.
I’ve felt in my bones that there is a thriving military class separate from all other social classes. It is a group whose experience of America is very different from many of our own, which gets us to disagree on what we should be fighting to protect/destroy at any given time. This group’s welfare is tended to by our government, and most visibly by the president — our government’s figurehead. This situation creates loyalty to that figurehead that most of us don’t feel. We are living in the private sector where our welfare is (mostly) up to us.
Saying the public is complacent, comatose, lazy, or stupid is getting old. People who speak that way usually forget to include themselves as a member of that “pathetic” public. It is hard to get excited about something that has no direct effect on your life. Since most of the public is (as Mr. Cubitt quotes) unaffected by the deployments and casualties of the military, how are we supposed to get all that worked up about them killing or being killed in a far away country?
There are alliances working together to isolate us from one another because there is money to be made. An individual caves in to peer pressure pretty easily when a surrounded by a group whether they are telling him or her to smoke a particular cigarette or vote for a certain candidate. President Eisenhower said it over 50 years ago: making war a for-profit venture via a huge military-industrial complex is a bad idea because it will be in their interest to make sure war is going on all the time. The only hope of changing that is by the public raising our voice together…
That leads me to conclude that people are better off when involved with groups that don’t involve profit. I am usually against organized religion, but as a form of social gathering free from economic and political considerations it is ideal. Unfortunately many religious societies are not free of those influences…End of rant. Tired.
Wow. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later is spot on. The tone matches the original, and it does not retread the same territory covered by Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. It is 6 months later mark with London being slowly repopulated under the supervision of the US Army. Snipers dot the roofs of every building in the “Green Zone” in the case of a new outbreak of the Rage Virus, the disease that instantly turns humans into brainless cannibals.
Robert Carlyle is Don, a survivor who’s teenage daughter and tweenage son were not in the country during the outbreak. Their reunion is emotional and hopeful until he has to tell them their mother died in an attack by the infected (don’t call the zombies!) while they were hiding out in the country. They don’t take that well, nor do they like being locked up in the Green Zone, so they do what any kid would do: escape and explore London on their own. Hilarity ensues in the forms of violent military action, fountains of blood, massive carnage, heroic sacrifices, and dark tunnels strewn with decayed human remains.
‘Nuff said. Go see it now!!!
Hip-hop fans not interested in Rock the Bells will likely appreciate Nerdcore Rising. The focus of this documentary seems to be MC Frontalot, a bald white guy with thick glasses that rhymes about computers with an affected “urban” accent. It’s a white minstrel show, how does this fuckhead sleep at night?! If you saw Awesome, I Fucking Shot That!, remember “Weird Al”’s “White and Nerdy” video, or have heard of MC Paul Barman, nerdcore is nothing new to you….only the name is. Barman is (IMHO) the best white rapper that raps about nerdy stuff (like books and N.O.W. marches) — and his conspicuous absence from this movie makes it highly suspect as a piece of serious journalism. And where is Datarock?!?!
I’m the white dude.I grabbed a copy of the UR Magazine (a free, local culture monthly) on my way back home with my 2pm DD breakfast. Flipped through it at my desk and saw my own mug looking back at me on page 41. The issue is the “Summer Preview” (translation: a preview of summer events) and the article is about the Ginza Holiday, a celebration of Japanese culture held at the Midwest Buddhist Temple every August. I usually get on stage with Choyokan Kendo Dojo — the martial arts group I practice kendo with — to demonstrate “the way of the sword”. In the picture you can see me, Tommy Fergerson, and Zia Uddin watching Umeki Sensei and Sakamoto Sensei demonstarting Nihon Kendo Kata. Pick up a copy of UR from its box next to the Reader’s box, or download a PDF of it at their site.
IN A WORLD…Where one man…must fulfill his DESTINY…of reuniting…the Wu-Tang Clan! Rock the Bells is his story.
StarscreamToo late to influence the movie now, but WTF is the deal with these walking tribal tattoo looking robots? These ridiculous monstrosities look like brittle, delicate art pieces that would seize up and die from a few grains of sand getting in the gears. The amount of segmenting into small, sharp shapes would seem to preclude selling these things as toys for children. What’s the deal with Frenzy!?! Why not make that crazy abstraction into a Ravage-style panther instead? And I know Starscream is a villain, but how can we properly fear him with that orangutan/kite-shaped body and double jointed legs?
There is obviously money in the nostalgia business, but the people turning our childhood fantasies into 2-hour nuggets are doing a fair amount of revisionism too. The best current example is Spider-man’s black costume, the story of which is abridged like crazy in the movie Spider-man 3. In the comics it is a saga that unfolds across at least 50 issues — that’s over 4 years! It begins during the Secret Wars on another planet where Spider-man’s costume gets shredded and he mistakenly liberates an imprisoned alien symbiote that he takes for a high-tech costume. The story goes on to involve tie-ins with other heroes (i.e., assistance from Reed Richards), a battle between Parker and the alien suit pre-Venom, Parker defeating it and adopting a cloth black costume, Venom, huge battles with Venom, Mary Jane’s fear of Venom forcing Parker to retire the black costume, a Venom offshoot called Carnage, and I don’t know what else since that’s about the time I stopped collecting. The story of that suit deserves it’s own movie without the distractions of Sandman and Hobgoblin.
Where the TFs are concerned, sure it’s OK to update the vehicles to more modern ones. Ghetto blasters aren’t quite so popular anymore, neither are F-14s, original VW Beetles, bright green dump trucks, and Nissan minivans. I also realize it is important for the movie versions of the Transformers to look more complex than the boxy cartoon robots I grew up watching on TV. The new TFs should be more subtle than the toys I grew up playing with, too. (”Oh, that one’s feet look like a VW Bug’s hood. It must turn into a VW Bug.”) The creators of this new generation of the saga obviously want to get away from the Japanese origins of the series that resemble Tranzor Z, Robotech, Voltron, and Gundam. But when they transform into robots, how about making them look like robots with distinct arms and legs with discernible shins, knees, and thighs instead of postmodern metal scrap sculptures!? And what’s the deal with the insect-like faces. Traditionally they were very humanoid, giving the Autobots and Decepticons personality. Even the new Autobots look about as friendly as the Predator with its mask off!!
OK. End of nerd-boy rant. Despite my gripes I am excited about this movie. I think it’ll be every bit as exciting to watch as the animated movie was on opening day. Thank Christ Dane Cook didn’t elbow his way into the movie and get a fight scene with a TF (I guess that would have been against Frenzy!?). That makes me wonder how the physics of scale will work. Megatron is clearly a military vehicle and not a handgun, but based on trailer footage, the robot modes of the TFs appear to have more mass than the vehicle modes…And will they have different vehicle modes before they get to Earth!??! OK, done. If you read this far you need a life.
Lower expectations = higher enjoyment
Went to see Spider-man 3 yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it despite myself. All the reviewers and critics (there’s an arguably negligible distinction between the two) roundly panned the webslinger’s third installment. To these critics I say, “Thank you.” They lowered my expectations for this movie so much that I was able to watch it and have my proverbial popcorn too. (Although I didn’t really have popcorn. It makes me thirsty and gets stuck in my teeth.) To the mentally-challenged heckler behind me I say, “I’m sorry I sat in front of you.”
The gripes included: too many villains, plot is not focused, dialog is cheesy, actors are terrible, effects are phony. All of this is totally right, but nonetheless, are all things you should kind of expect from a COMIC BOOK HERO MOVIE! ESPECIALLY IF IT’S A SEQUEL TO A SEQUEL!! Critics seem to be looking back on Spider-man 1 and 2 with a weird nostalgia, but we hardcore comic book hero-worshippers are overly familiar with repetitive, and at times redundant (arguably negligible distinction there too), serializations.
Every comic book hero has an exhaustive library of enemies that the fanbase splinters to support, making the fans tricky to satisfy in one fell swoop. Teaming Sandman with Venom, while economical, was a bizarre mix of old and new villains that didn’t work for me. Venom is supposed to be the worst Spidey villain of all time and deserves his own film. He also deserves a a much more menacing actor than Topher Grace. Ironically, Thomas Hayden Church is far closer in appearance to the comic book Eddie Brock.
The plot was a kitchen sink script if there ever was one. Sam and Ivan Raimi may have intended to make a hearty soup, but made an unpalatable stew of envy, jealousy, sexual rivalry, professional rivalry, revenge, vengeance, redemption mixed with amnesia, blackmail, destruction, particle physics, the physics of particles, wave harmonics, solo musical numbers, French jokes, slapstick, and the requisite dose of civic pride for NYC. It was a difficult to swallow concoction even without the vomit-inducing final ingredient.
The third installment of any hero story invariably involves the hero probing before unplumbed depths of his less heroic aspect. Exhibit A for the defense: Superman 3 (in which Richard Prior poisons the son of Krypton with a green gem made with cigarette additives). Clark Kent/Superman develop 5 o’clock shadow and a sneer — 1980’s shorthand for evil. Exhibit B: The last Matrix movie (whatever it was called), in which Neo has to let his true love die to save the world. Exhibit C: Star Wars: RotJ. Luke, now a grown man with the power to choose his destiny, does final battle against his evil potential — embodied by his father.
Spider-man 3 winds up being a lot like Superman 3: Peter Parker becomes a total asshole when a symbiotic alien that enhances his powers, also corrupts his morality. The extra-terrestrial goo that turns his Spidey suit black also coats him with a narcissistic slime, that Tobey Maquire alchemically turns into comic gold. Parker struts the avenues of Manhattan with a Saturday Night Fever-ish swagger — tongue firmly in cheek. Parker’s sex appeal only works in mirrors as almost all of the women laugh at him once he’s passed by them. Peter “Pecker” (thanks Bruce Campbell!) doesn’t quite realize how full of himself he has become until he accidentally hits Mary Jane. The laughs ended there….until a guy in the theater yelled, “You fell down the stairs!” (Shame on you, sir!)
More to come soon…
Surprise, surprise. There’s also a new doco about the world-wide graffiti movement showing at the Tribeca Film Fest. It’s called Bomb It and features a pretty diverse range of artists. Not just bombers from big crews in LA and NYC, but paintbrush wielding femmes from Barcelona, truly old school innovators, Dj-ing crossover hotties, and the now ubiquitous Brazilian duo: Os Gemeos.
We all know that breakdancing is the fourth arm of the cultural juggernaut that is Hip-Hop. (The other limbs being graffiti, MC-ing, and DJ-ing.) Planet B-Boy should be making it to theaters on June 1, but you never know. It’ll probably only be in NY (It’s playing all over Tribeca Film Festival right now for a mere $14-$18) and LA at first.
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