11/06/2007
11/05/2007
Memory Palaces
If you can convert whatever it is you're trying to remember into vivid mental images and then arrange them in some sort of imagined architectural space, known as a memory palace, memories can be made virtually indelible.-from Joshua Foer's article on Memory in the November 2007 National Geographic.
...vivid images...then arrange them in some sort of...architectural space...
Apocalyptic Imagination
...Well, I know that the apocalyptic imagination is usually a lack of imagination; it refuses to face the dull prose of suffering, refuses to understand just how bad things can get without history coming to an end. Empires can limp on for centuries.-metameat
...My framed Ulysses poster fell off the wall and shattered, but I’m the kind of guy who keeps a spare framed Ulysses poster in the basement.
10/31/2007
10/26/2007
10/24/2007
10/16/2007
10/09/2007
10/03/2007
Wilful Are the Ways of the Countryside
-from Travaux publics (Éditions Matiére)
Yuichi Yokoyama (new book out soon from PictureBox)
Reminds me of:
-from
Legal Daisy Spacing by Christopher Winn.
9/29/2007
9/21/2007
9/20/2007
What Happens Beyond Death?
One for the ages! from one of the greatest blogs on all civilized planets, Pappy's Golden Age fanzine.
9/19/2007
9/18/2007
9/10/2007
9/09/2007
Talking Heads
Someone should make a program that automatically selects the talking heads--just the heads--of people on CNN and fuzz out all the background bustle and sexy graphic framing and the maddening crawl and DOW Jones numbers...
9/06/2007
Literature is not Comics
Here's a link to an interesting San Diego Comic Con panel, "Comics are NOT Literature." The link will expire at the end of September, by which time we'll apparently be hearing all about what a great idea it would be to kill tons of Iranians. It's an interesting panel. It has its dull directionless times, which is par for the course, but overall gave me a lot to think about. I wish someone would write those ideas up. I agreed with whoever said it's basically identity politics. The formal issues are interesting to a point but beyond that it's about economics and accidents of history. I always think most issues or questions, especially about words, would be better attacked by cutting to the chase and being pragmatic about it. What needs to be done and said to keep things healthy and diverse and thriving? So I was like "right on" when Dan Nadel were talking about how applying words like "literature" to comics is less about how well or not the label fits, and is more about speaking the language one needs to speak to gain institutional support (major gallery collections, major library collections, grants, academia) etc. Nadel says something like "the lack of institutional support is the major problem comics have faced in the 20th century." But we're getting there. Of course institutions bring their own set of problems too... There's other good stuff in there too, and the panel reflects a spectrum of approaches people take--from Nadel's "I don't even think of it as reading" to folks who come from the literary side.
9/04/2007
Astrona
-both of these by Chris Foss.
From a huge selection of these radical paintings
over at Astrona: Space and Astronomical Art Journal.
From a huge selection of these radical paintings
over at Astrona: Space and Astronomical Art Journal.
9/02/2007
Inspired by Graphic Novelist
(Looks like a skull, doesn't it, and the lightning looks like the track of a tear.)
and
-Joshua Clover reviews Stardust. Isn't that strange and scary–the idea that people think there's such a thing as "graphic novel culture" and that these movies reflect it?"It is surely an act of unfairness to judge graphic novel culture on the basis of a movie, one made from a story that meant to be a novel and was only a graphic novel incidentally.
Still.
One gets the sense that Neil Gaiman's rep as a genius must somehow be a reflection on the subculture that has so elected him."
8/31/2007
8/27/2007
8/13/2007
8/12/2007
7/27/2007
Rumbling
This thoughtful and pointlessly melancholy man has been living for many years, by now, in the basement, because the house that rose above it has been destroyed or is uninhabitable. When the religious wars broke out, he had hoped it was a question--he was a foreigner in that country and practiced another religion--of the customary depravities to which that region's inhabitants were inclined, all of the sanguineous of dying in some noisy and exhibitionistic way, and of killing others with particular cruelty. He bore no love for that country, where he lived as the secretary to the ambassador of another country, where wars of religion were not waged. His country fought atheistic wars, scientifically based. At the moment when the wars of religion had broken out, the secretary had been unable to return to his native land, where a ferocious scientific war was then underway: a war concerned, at least in origin, with hexagons and acids, but which bit by bit had then expanded to the inclusion of nearly all the disciplines, with the sole exclusion of ancient history. Now, the secretary, whom you see in sober dress, has been said, in generic terms, to practice another religion, but there is also the possibility that he practices none at all. What his country most respects is allegiance to ideals upon scientific bases; he himself, however, has no great love of science, and if he had to choose a field in which to specialize, ancient history would be his choice. But since this is the only non-controversial subject, choosing it would have been regarded as suspect, and derided as cowardly. He would have been put to death. Fortuitously, the outbreak of the religious war had allowed him to give no response to requests for clarification that had come from his homeland, but at the very same time he had definitively exiled himself in the country of religious wars. For years he had ventured no more than a few dozen yards from his cellar; he was probably the only foreigner left in a country where massacre was pandemic, and becoming pedantic; a country that no longer had cities, but picturesque expanses of ruins awaiting the death of the last combatant, so as then to grow ivy-covered and be transported into History. Though he had never admitted it in so many words, he liked to live in that territory precisely for its being the theater of a war that was alien to him. So History was none of his doing, but was something perceived as a rumble to which he had grown accustomed; as a lover of ancient history and dead languages, he too looked forward to living--as had always been his dream--in a country made only and entirely of ruins among grasses that have no history.
--Giorgio Manganelli,
translated by Henry Martin,
from Centuria: 100 Ouroboric Novels
Also see this BLDGBLOG post.
Spider Spoke
The Spider Spoke is one of my favorite new minicomics, and #3 is the best yet. I was really inspired by this one. Tomu Smith can be reached at tomu_smith at symbol yahoo.co.uk.
7/07/2007
Eternal Sonata
Chopin/Charlie Kaufman/RPG video game fans rejoice:
"Eternal Sonata [for the Xbox 360] follows the adventures of famed composer Frederic Chopin as he travels through his own dream world filled with colorful characters and stunning locales. In a land where music influences both combat and exploration, Chopin sets out on a journey not only of self-discovery, but also one of redemption."
Watch the incredible trailer here.
UPDATE:
Thanks to K. Thor who points out I had mistaken the title of the article for the title of the game. No Charlie K connection.
"Eternal Sonata [for the Xbox 360] follows the adventures of famed composer Frederic Chopin as he travels through his own dream world filled with colorful characters and stunning locales. In a land where music influences both combat and exploration, Chopin sets out on a journey not only of self-discovery, but also one of redemption."
Watch the incredible trailer here.
UPDATE:
Thanks to K. Thor who points out I had mistaken the title of the article for the title of the game. No Charlie K connection.
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