He looked sort of like Michael Caine but was taller and more gaunt.
The dream began with a climactic scene where the tall man somehow duplicated himself and skinned the head of the clone, peeling back flesh from the bone of the skull. This was at night on the side of a road, possibly in or near a cemetery.
Both the tall man and the clone continued to live, in various guises and states of connection between themselves and others.
In one vignette, the tall man, still on that roadside, sat and talked to a young hitchhiker or itinerant. The tall man lectured or proselytized but wasn't communicating to the hitchhiker directly. Instead his speech was transmitted by means of a long rectangular plank of wood, painted like a native totem-object with a checkerboard of solid colors. The individual squares morphed from one shade to another in liquid, wave-like movements. The hitchhiker had no difficulty understanding this visual speech.
Later the tall man had a confrontation with another tall man on a train. This was not the clone, this was a rival tall man who began hectoring "our" tall man from a seat at the rear of the train car. Our tall man got up and walked to the back of the train, arguing with his rival as he approached him.
It was a political argument involving revolution. It seems our tall man is mixed up in politics or is some kind of messiah-figure.
In another scene our tall man was apprehended by the authorities and taken on a plane to a place of interrogation. All the passengers were being strapped into the reclining airplane seats with harnesses around their necks. Just as an attendant was attaching the tall man's harness, a shot was fired and the attendant slumped dead over the tall man. A group of revolutionaries took the tall man off the plane and ran up a steep hill, firing machine guns behind them as they climbed. The point of view was the tall man's as he strained with the physical exertion of the climb.
They reached the top of a mountain (in the desert) and then everyone ran down the other side to the safety of a vast, unpopulated wilderness.
newt discovers it's not just a cell phone anymore
Newt Gingrich meets the smartphone
Lauren Weinstein annotates a particularly boneheaded speech where Newt ponders what to call this new computer-in-a-cellphone thingy.
Gingrich may not know what to call it but he has no qualms about suggesting it's an all-in-one device that could alter the way you live, work, and shop.
For any serious detailed work, though, whether it's art, music, video editing or spreadsheets, the "pros" are going to continue to use a large screen (or two), a keyboard, and a mouse (or stylus/tablet), supplemented with a phone for traveling around. This idea that your whole life is going to happen in a phone is a consumer fantasy being sold to the rubes.
It's not inconceivable that ten years from now every workplace will be re-tooled so that a new stockbroker, travel agent, bank employee, etc will be handed a phone or pad on the first day of work and shown to a cubicle half the size of present ones, to go quietly mad in eyestrain hell. Or that the same employees will "work from home" using these devices and go quietly mad there. Downsizing equipment would certainly benefit the ownership class and it's possible the present phone-for-everything bandwagon is taking us to this future. More likely big hardware will stick around longer than this time frame, however.
marlboro
by Homer, posted on dump.fm
A few words about this. (Don't want to trowel on the recent-SAIC-grad theory blather but at the same time hate just reblogging "cool pics" without comment.)
Marlboro is an enduring symbol of machismo cool coupled with toxicity and rotting flesh.
The brand is so successful you can literally paint it with a few broad strokes. I like that this image is also a collection of "imaging program" tics and jokes. Ephemeral and cheesy "papyrus" font in place of the manly serif, the brushed grey background that looks like a class picture matte board, the 360 degree drop shadow that flattens the cardboard package to credit card thickness; the gratuitous black border, the white horizontal rule where the fliptop box opens. A love-hate rendering in the best Pop tradition.
GIFs as cinema
Have been describing animated GIFs as "ubiquitous mini-cinema" since before they were ubiquitous and now here's a post on whether they are "a type of cinema," written from a filmcrit POV.
You kind of have to laugh at the scholarly attention lavished on the "Picard vs Chunk" GIF but it's useful to apply film terminology such as the "180-degree rule" to GIFs (if for no other reason than it's a good way to learn about that concept):
Both [Bruce Conner's] A MOVIE and these animated gifs employ some common cinematic principles. The cuts create an eyeline match, which make it appear as though the characters are looking at one another, and obey the 180-degree rule (meaning that if you draw a straight line between their eyes, our perspective stays to one side of it).
Also considered is whether animated GIFs are video or photos:
In her recent Salon article, “Better Than Actual Porn!“, Tracy Clark-Flory ponders whether pornographic animated gifs are more like short videos or longer photographs. I’d argue that they exist on a spectrum between those two forms, capable of moving more toward one side or the other. The above Picard gifs are more like short videos. But the NYC subway gif and the dancing baby gif are arguably more like enhanced photos.
That's all fairly obvious but it's nice someone's trying to think beyond GIFs as throwaway culture and/or lifestyle trends. Around here we're mostly interested in the relation of GIFs to painting (abstract and otherwise), collage (surrealist and otherwise), and text (conceptual and otherwise) and also in taking GIFs beyond their ordinarily understood meaning as a vehicle for "Picard vs Chunk" jokes. Which is not to say those "meme" GIFs don't show up here occasionally.
"Where and Who"
"Where and Who" [mp3 removed -- a revised version of this track is on Bandcamp]
Used another Reaktor synth, "Aerobic," to crank out some remix fodder (ten loops in all) that was then moved over to the Octatrack, where it was layered together and augmented with some piano and more synth. The dopy slap bass riff at :17 is a preset and I did most of the rest. The ending is kind of pretty.
First messed with this instrument five years ago, when I posted the above screenshot. Time flies when you're having beats.