I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper

I dunno. I think I might have missed something in not coming of age in late 70's England. Like Hot Gossip.

Long Strings!

I've been gone awhile. Blame my gibbering fear of the looming apocalypse. Or laziness.

This snapped me back, though. Had to share this tasty drone I found today. Ellen Fullman (invented the Long String Instrument) playing with the Deep Listening band. I love Pauline Oliveros and her moaning accordion. Make a cup of tea, sit, relax and let go. This is a short break from the apocalypse.

Q. If LSD makes hotdogs talk, what should you do?

A. Try to eat them anyway. Failing that, KILL THEM!

Video Effects Primer (w/trampoline)

Oh so clever.

Susan Pitt, ASPARAGUS

Online Videos by Veoh.com

I've been looking for this ever since it blew my mind in college, some 20 years ago. Thank you, internets! (thank you Boing Boing).

My muse emails me again.

pampas obediences

... them in the least,
began to enter that mighty
that, bill amended. I reckon
you fellers is right, inconceivable
soul, dwelleth there! Dhaumya continued,
'fraid he'll die before the shaman gets here?    

-shape of a wild boar fond of sporting in water-    

Besides, I don't think he's altogether
in sympathy among our Mohawks and Oneidas
when thirteen. Of fellows who come in boats
crack! They get off.

(Note: This was from a Viagra spam I received during the past week. I did edit it somewhat - changing line breaks and altering punctuation here and there. A couple words were excised for streamlining. But, I would guess 85% of this was from the muse, Spamalia.

Poetry in my inbox.

I know, spam-verse is nothing new, but it still strikes me as an amazing accident of our internet culture, when I receive random text generated poetry, unlooked-for, in my daily email - and it reads well.  Some John Ashbery wanna-be, human or not,  isn't sure if they want to sell me Cialis or bless me with the product of their muse.  Ray Bradbury could/should write a kick-ass short story about a spambot with pretensions of being Walt Whitman. Here is the poem I received today.

baptizement baptizement

Deep waters were not always as merry and frolicsome mingling
their cries with homage and wondering how then hast thou
been able to possess my heart? Dhananjaya and Adhiratha's
son, so also he that unbuttoned his waistcoat, as if to
relieve some proslavery party a disproportionate power in
the immortality and that those Rishis, held in universal
do not, therefore, think that there is any other get up.
Oh, said Macleod simply, I wanted you in health, and
Bhurisravas, and Satyasandha, the felicity of heaven. Thou
art nirvana (or that helion megethos echein euros podos
anthropeiou, to his years, be saluted). Listen, ye kings of alarm, 

the horse cleared it in a bucking leap. No,
I am afraid, and he broke out into the supreme.

I ask you, do our spam filters threaten the future of poetry?

Sleep (pseudo) science

I admit to often relying on a couple couple of beers to lubricate the rails of the Sleepytown Express at night. If I could afford health insurance, I'm sure I would be prescribed Ambien or Zanax. Neither form of prescription seems very healthy so I've been trying various things to go to sleep more naturally.

Number one is just staying up until sheer exhaustion takes hold. This works but is often detrimental the next day.

Two is reading. Prone. Only works if I'm reading something boring, however, which seems a waste of time. Also, being married, I have to share my sleep-space with a light sensitive person which necessitates reading in a different room. After a while, sleeping on the living room couch gets old.

Three is the (soft?) science way. I found this program, Gnaural that creates binaural beats which can supposedly alter your brain wave frequency. Normally the brain will attempt to match the dominant frequency in its environment. Higher frequencies tend to make us agitated or alert while lower frequencies lead us to relaxed, meditative states. I have noticed that there are rooms in buildings where the hum will make me drowsy, so I accept this. So far, on the three occasions I've used the program, I've quickly entered sleep, and woke up without feeling groggy. Each time was a nap, and not a full night's sleep, so I still have some investigating to do. Perhaps it's a placebo. Regardless, the program can be used for other purposes. Say, noise production. Laptop terror electronics. You can manipulate the beats, white noise, etc. Plus it's open source. The program works for PC or Linux. There is a Mac patch which requires some terminal witchcraft akin to getting early Soulseek to work, but there is also a Java app you can run in your browser here. Just lay near your laptop, or rip a 70 minute session to your favorite mp3 player. It's what I always expected Sony's Dream Machine to do, but it didn't. Speaking of which, you can turn your computer monitor into a dream machine here. Not as cool as staring through your eyelids at a paper cylinder, taped to a record player , with a light bulb dangling down inside of it - that's junk science. Get the blueprint for that madman's device here. While you're at it, make an aluminum foil beanie for yourself, why don't you? Beware though, the gov'mint might just want you to wear one.

Comic book crotch crunching.

I'm sort of working with a friend on a comic concept that involves underwater dwellers, and we've been kicking around the notion that they would be nude beneath the sea, as clothes would make them less "hydro-dynamic". Of course, for the males, genitals would also make them less streamlined and perhaps tempt the fishies to nibble. Now I understand why Aquaman wears tights. It's all about protecting the junk. Here's more reasons from Nad Shot:

Vaughn Bodé

Check out a vintage Vaughn comic at Golden Age Comic Book Stories, and be sure to peruse some of the actual golden age pickings. Great site. I was introduced to Vaughn Bodé through Heavy Metal magazine, and that Bakshi film, Wizards, which was supposedly a tribute to him, rather than a rip-off of his style. Whatever. A little "Comic-book Babylon" tidbit for you: The Bodé bit it, autoerotic-asphyxiation style. It's true. Wikipedia says so.

In praise of soft sci-fi and all things Grant Morrison.

I've been drinking comics knowledge from the trough of the excellent comics blog, Mindless Ones, and was impressed by a piece posted last month by Amypoodle on Grant Morrison (a favorite writer of mine) and the unfettered imagination of his comics. It's mostly a piece on soft vs hard sci-fi, with Morrison falling mostly on the soft side. Amypoodle also explains why the DC Universe is superior (kinda like Apple and Nintendo in their realms), takes a few jabs at some sacred cows (she calls Mark Millar banal), and lays out just why Morrison rules.

"Soft SF is by its very nature a post-modern medium, in that it posits science fiction as just-another-narrative, refusing to afford it the privileged status of the realistic. It ditches the vanity of the Jules Verne school of SF and asks, ‘Of what is this genre made?’, or, ‘What does it feel like?’, as opposed to, ‘How would Nemo put together a fully functioning Nautilus?’ And Morrison knows full well what the super-hero is made of..."

"Mutants are the Marvel-verse equivalent of conventional SF’s aliens. There’s nothing wrong with the idea in theory, but Marvel have leeched all the life out of the fucker."

"Recent hard SF seems so wanky in comparison, what with its fetishistic obsession with the operating manual and what lies beneath the pants of the futuristic societies it slavers over. It also feels terribly stuffy and conservative. Vanilla."

Read it here. And check out her more recent posting on Jim Woodring and his Frank creation. Jim is to Fantagraphics what Grant is to DC, for me. Of course, Fantagraphics is a pond swimming with crazy fish, so the analogy might not be entirely apropos. Grant Morrison may shine like a crazy diamond because he chooses to work for companies where he is in the minority. Fantagraphics is full of batshit lunatics.

Thanks to Comics Should Be Good for hipping me to Mindless Ones. Check them out for their recent 100 best comic runs feature, if you're feeling canonical.