Sdtrk: ‘Intercity 215’ by Merzbow

This can be, in no way, shape, or form, a good thing.

Gaping hole found in universe
Thu Aug 23, 2007 7:31PM EDT | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A giant hole in the Universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter, astronomers said on Thursday.

The team at the University of Minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they have no idea why it is there.

“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” said astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick.
the rest of the article is here

Let us… let us consider this for a moment. Space contains an awful lot of, well, space, but it’s not completely empty, as we all know. Then there’s the issue of dark matter, which is, quoth Wiki, ‘hypothetical matter of unknown composition that does not emit or reflect enough electromagnetic radiation to be observed directly, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter’. Which basically means that although it’s bastard hard to detect, there is something there where you’d think there’s nothing there, out there.* But these astronomers and scientists have stated that this void they’ve stumbled upon contains no stars, no planets, no black holes, no dark matter, no nothing. Actually, the only thing it seems to have in it is Nothing.

I don’t know about you, but with the discovery of this Void, a number of various apocalyptic scenarios are forming in my mind. You know: a great rift between universes, the walls of reality being rent asunder, Elder Gods of unspeakable power and malevolence pouring into our fragile little cosmos to wreak devastation until the end of time itself, stars winking out one by one, breathable atmospheres of inhabited planets turning into blood, the endless screams of anguished souls praying for a sweet release that will never arrive… huh. I think I’ve just described a typical day at work

*The Wiki entry then goes on to say, ‘It has been noted that the names “dark matter” and “dark energy” serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance, much as the marking of early maps with “terra incognita”‘, which I found to be pretty funny

Sdtrk: ‘Welcome to the circus’ by Susumu Hirasawa

This occurred while I was at work, but ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’ received its 100,000th visitor yesterday! Who are these people? Actually, the thing is is that a lot of the hits aren’t garnered from actual humans; they’re from Google image search results, so that hardly counts. So perhaps it’s better to say that ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’ received its 100,000th symbolic visitor yesterday. N.B.: that’s not necessarily a more accurate thing to say, just better. Yeah.

I don’t really understand that either, but it’s late and my sinuses are testing my patience. Nevertheless, Thanks to all of you for stopping round!
*toots horn, stumbles off to bed*

Sdtrk: ‘Ne cherche pas à plaire’ by Mireille Darc & France Gall

A fitting epilogue to my whole Wacky Voyage into Myspaceville. The ironic thing is that I actually found this on a Myspace profile.

And I’d spotted this outside of a party store a couple of days ago:

But how exactly would the Devil throw up the devil horns? That’s one for the philosophers

Sdtrk: ‘Ashes to ashes’ by David Bowie

Apart from the heat and humidity, there’s one more really good reason why I despise August: the fucking Woodward Dream Cruise. Ugh.
Since it’s that time of year again, I will now trot out the post I wrote back in 2005, concerning this seasonal atrocity. As SafeTinspector says, if you haven’t read it before, it’s new to you.

Jeeves, fetch me my rocket launcher

The Woodward Dream cruise, if you’re lucky enough to not be familiar with it, is basically an excuse for all the gearheads and nostalgia freaks in the state (as well as a couple from neighbouring states) to cruise up and down Woodward, which is the main drag of the Tri-county area, as well as the dividing line between the west side and the east side. It’s ostensibly a sad reenactment of the ‘good ol’ days’ of the Fifties and Sixties, when Detroit had both a functioning auto industry and places worth visiting, and young people would drive aimlessly up and down Woodward in their oversized automobiles. Now, once a year for the past.. however many years.. all those individuals who grew up during those years that have reconditioned ‘classic’ cars spend an entire week-end, driving aimlessly up and down Woodward, slowing traffic down, and being a general nuisance.

Superior!

Sdtrk: ‘Across the universe’ by Laibach

At times, I’m glad I’m not rich, as I am a bonafide sucker — perhaps one could even call me a sucka — for obscure and anachronistic technologies. ‘Technological white elephants,’ as Danielle Dax once called them. I used to own one of the infamous Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camcorders back when they debuted in the late Eighties — you know, the ones that record sound and image onto normal audiocassette tape — and since I sold mine, I start each day weeping softly into my pillow, regretting the tragic mistake that I’d made. Especially since working PXL-2000s run about $400 – $500 on eBay these days.
So you can imagine my Glee Meter (and my Esoterica Meter) going well into the red when I saw this online: VinylVideo.

VinylVideo™ is a fake archeology of media.
We designed a device that retrieves videosignals (moving image and sound) stored on a conventional Vinyl (LP) record. The discontinuity in the development of electronic film technology constitutes the historical background for this fictitious video disc technology: Even though television, the electronic transmission of moving images, had been feasible since the late 1920’s, storage of these images became possible only after development of the video recorder in 1958. Recording images for private use did not become available until the mass introduction of the VCR in the early 1980’s (!). Before, the average consumer was confined to use Super-8 film, a technology dating back to 1900, usually without sound. Recording of television was not possible at all.
VinylVideo™ reconstructs a homemovie technology of the late 40’s/early 50’s and thus bridges a gap in the history of consumer technology. The images are stored on a conventional analog record, with a running time of ca. 8 min / side (Singles 4 min / side). These records are played on a standard turntable with an ordinary diamond needle, the signals are then processed by the VinylVideo Home Kit into a videosignal that is displayed on a black and white TV-set.
taken from the presskit

So it’s basically like the bastard child of Edison’s wax cylinders and SelectaVision, RCA’s well-meaning-but-doomed analogue storage format from the Eighties. Huh!

The site is fab, in and of itself; there’s a lengthy infomercial that explains, in a rather tongue-in-cheek fashion, what VinylVideo has over boring conventional television. Essentially, VinylVideo is a medium for video artists to make their art arguably more available to the public — it’s easier and cheaper to purchase a VinylVideo kit than it is to buy a work by Nam June Paik — and its super-lo-fi technology (they call the image’s quality trashpeg, tee hee) makes it easy to use and alter for one’s own purposes, if you’re into the whole deconstructionist thing. Personally, the biggest draw for someone like me is that it’s composed of sexy retro-tech!

You hook up your telly and home hi-fi turntable to this outsized converterboxthing, fiddle with a few knobs to fine-tune the image, and voila! Greyscale visuals flicker across your screen in a ghostly fashion, for as long as the record plays. The images that the conversion present seem like the perfect sort of medium for videos done by the growing crop of ‘eldritchtronica’ artists, such as those found on the Ghost box and Blank workshop labels — even the high-contrast pictures seem washed-out and murky. Lovely stuff…

It’s a shame I’m not rich, as the playback kit alone for VinylVideo goes for the horrifying amount of just over $3,400 USD. Kinda makes the highway robbery that extortionists want for a PXL-2000 seem quite reasonable and pleasant, eh?

Technorati tags: VinylVideo, Ghost box, Blank workshop, SelectaVision, Fisher-Price PXL-2000

Sdtrk: ‘Liebeszimmer’ by DAF

First Ian Curtis, then Martin Hannett, then John Peel, and now Tony Wilson? This is looking extremely grim.

Tony Wilson: Driven by music and Manchester
Former Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, who died at the age of 57, kept up his two major passions until the very end

By Cole Moreton
Published: 12 August 2007 | The Independent

Tony Wilson was a twat. The poster for the film about his life, 24 Hour Party People, said so right under a picture of his face.

Actually it was comedian Steve Coogan, who played the founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda nightclub in the semi-autobiographical movie. But Wilson approved the image, saying: “I found it very funny.”

Abrasive, acerbic and well aware of his own legend, Wilson would have laughed, too, at some of the more fulsome tributes paid to him yesterday, after his death at the Christie hospital in his home city on Friday night, aged 57. Pop stars and politicians alike praised a man who remade Manchester, crediting him with inspiring a cultural renaissance that began with the post-punk sound of Joy Division and resulted in a confident modern city.

“He had two driving passions,” said Stephen Morris of New Order and Joy Division. “One was the music and the other was the city that he lived in. In later life he was a campaigner for devolution for the North-west. I strongly suspect this was so that he could become Prime Minister of Manchester.” Hacienda regular and writer John Harris said Wilson showed Mancunians that they did not have to leave, and “sowed the seeds of the cultural regeneration of Manchester which has now come to pass”.

But Wilson knew that his abrasive, fast-talking personality got up some people’s noses. “People have treated me with contempt,” he said in his last television interview. “Quite rightly.”
the rest of the article is here

Without Tony’s forward thinking, Punk wouldn’t have gotten as big of an audience in Northern England, and without Punk, there would be no Post-punk, and without Post-punk, there would be no Joy division, and tracing the many myriad lines of influence Joy division’s made on music would be far too detailed for me to get into. Cliched as it sounds, Tony Wilson had a huge influence on the music culture of Northern England, and put Manchester on the map as far as the starting point for hundreds of bands.

Not since Sex pistols manager Malcolm McLaren had there ever been a band manager as ‘rock star’ as the rock stars he supported. We’re gonna miss you, mate

Sdtrk: ‘Sister Ray’ by the Velvet Underground

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this.

Nice boots, missy

Lars and the Real Girl

Written by Six Feet Under scribe Nancy Oliver, Lars and the Real Girl is a heartfelt comedy starring Academy-Award nominated Ryan Gosling as Lars Lindstrom a loveable introvert whose emotional baggage has kept him from fully embracing life. After years of what is almost solitude, he invites Bianca, a friend he met on the internet to visit him. He introduces Bianca to his Brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and his wife Karen (Emily Mortimer) and they are stunned. They don’t know what to say to Lars or Bianca – because she is a life-size doll, not a real person and he is treating her as though she is alive. They consult the family doctor Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson) who explains this is a delusion he’s created – for what reason she doesn’t yet know but they should all go along with it. What follows is an emotional journey for Lars and the people around him.

Hm. Hrrrm. On the surface, it sounds like a cross between French black comedy ‘Monique‘, and Luis García Berlanga’s ‘Tamaño natural‘. Granted, though, there aren’t a lot of Doll-related feature films to really compare it to; ‘Love object’ doesn’t count, as it’s hardly sympathetic towards iDollators.

There are two main problems I might have with this film.
1) As I was lamenting to New Best Blogger Friend barstowmama (she’s linked, y’know), the trend in popular media ‘culture’ is that whenever a person is given a choice between a Synthetik partner and an Organik one, by the end of the film, the script will have him choose the Organik, having completely forsaken the Synthetik that he was completely happy with before (see ‘Cherry 2000‘ for a prime example, or this music video by Lim Jeong Hee). As professional photographer Elena Dorfman once commented, love can take many forms — just because someone’s partner is artificial doesn’t make the partnership less valid, which is what popular culture doesn’t seem to understand.
2) Society has a vibrating neurosis about people being happy introverts. Extroverts seem to believe that the only good experiences are shared amongst the company of others, which is patently false. Granted, it’s obvious that a person can have fun with others, just not all the time. They don’t understand that not everyone is a go-gettin’ Type-A personality — some people happen to like it quiet and calm. Extroverts are particularly nosey, and seem to be almost offended when introverts want to keep to themselves. ‘How can he be happy if he’s inside all the time by himself?’ Sure, there are people who actually want to reach out and just don’t know how to go about it, but there are others who have done that, didn’t particularly like what they saw, and decided to stick with what they know.

This film says to me we are going to drag you kicking and screaming into the outside world, whether you like it or not, cos that’s what we think is what’s best for you, which is reprehensible. Speaking for myself, I enjoy hanging around people I’m friends with, but large groups of people — especially ones I don’t really know — kinda freak me out, mainly cos I don’t know what they’re pondering. It’s not as if I dress, speak or act like the common herd, and in the back of my mind, I’m thinking that most people don’t really like what they see. Trying to ‘fit in’ isn’t an option any more than getting enormous crowds of people to switch over to my way of thinking, so I prefer to keep to myself or amongst those who I’m familiar with.
From the trailer, Lars alternately seems okay with being out and about, or fearful of leaving his house, but that’s like two different types of introverts rolled into one character. Some are shut-ins due to fear, but others simply don’t want to leave the house cos they know they don’t have to deal with people’s rampant shitwickery.

(I owe a debt, as always, to fellow iDollator and hard-working scribe PB Shelley, for recommending Anneli Rufus’ fantastic book, ‘Party of one: the Loner’s Manifesto‘, as reading and re-reading it has gotten me through some difficult periods…)

One thing’s for certain, however — Bianca is definitely a hottie. Anyone wanting to abandon someone like her would have to be delusional.

(insert typical tongue-rolling sound here)

In fact, she looks like she’s a Leah-type RealDoll; at the very least, she definitely has the Face 4, and as short as she looks, she’s probably got the Body 2. Probably tweaked a bit for the film, but I’d recognise that face anywhere, as that’s what Shi-chan is. I’m not normally a betting man, but I think once the film comes out, there’ll be a handful of orders placed with Abyss to make a Doll that ‘looks just like the Doll in “Lars and the Real Girl”‘. And with good reason!
Like I said, I’ll pass proper judgement when I see it, but as it’s a Hollywood production, I’m visualising Bianca getting the shaft in the end. No, not like that — get your minds out of the gutter