Really - go and watch these. All of them. Maybe not all at once.

http://www.youtube.com/user/tskypress

I thought I was going to see UFOs in Seattle, circling low over the various mountain ranges, dropping off or picking up Bigfoot on a zorbing mission. But I never did.

I guess it makes sense, in retrospect, that they not only do appear in Los Angeles, they’re thicker n flies on wine. And if you don’t know what I mean by that, you should talk to the fruitbat.

Anyhoo, one of these here Flying Saucers (so-called, though actually they come in many shapes and sizes - common designs being film cannisters, flying spliffs, cellular phones, mp3 players, titanium laptops, compact discs and dildos, all of which are mainly driven by movie stars or music producers) did accost me as I traversed Elysian Park one twilit eve. The pilot, an up-and-coming young producer from the Horsehead Nebula, had somehow heard I was from Neptune, and kept a blog. They wanted a review.

I’m going to do them one better.

The errant spin of a musical planet has been corrected, if not for the ages then at least for the now. A shining knight has ventured into the dangerous wastes of conceptual no-man’s-land and returned with a cultural artifact. A wyrmwhole has been drawn between distant plateaus: the garage (basement, bedroom, low-rent guerilla-style home-studio assemblage) and the Phatty Spread of the celebro-core jetset; the DIY and the do-it-for-me; the 70s, the 90s and the Blanks (for we are truly in the throes of the Blank generation); a wyrmwhole in which irony, post-irony, and a certain timorous sincerity collide like muons in a particle-accelerator; the connective tissue nano-braided from strands of the (collective) creative will and a hearty “This rocks!”

The knight? Jasper Johns.

The artifact?

“Jasper Johns Plays The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.”

Every part on every instrument is performed by Jasper himself. Many of the instruments are toys or household objects. Some are “actual” guitars. Some are kazoos. This is a note-for-note remake in which a true heartfelt appreciation for the original artifact is demonstrably apparent, and in which also a genuinely rebel spirit howls and gripes and mutters and yawps, then swiffles away to lounge in a state of ambient hysteria until it’s time for the next round of eggregiously vari-speeded vocal overdubs, oohs and aahs and “Suffragette City! Quite alright…”s. Joy and devotion attend every homegrown note.

And now you yourself may dig the word and decide for yourself if Jasper is the Nazz or just Jiving Us That He Is Voodoo:

download “Jasper Johns Plays The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars”  

…for more information please inspect: Jasper on Murdochspace

starring Lady Zoot, cat of Tom

This is the unexpurgated text of an email I wrote to a friend in response to two DVDs he’d lent me. Both DVDs were of movies called Solaris, both based on the excellent novel by Stanislaw Lem. The older movie is Russian, the newer one is American. The newer one stars George Clooney. Perhaps you have seen it?

Anyway, this is what I though after watching both movies. I’m sure a more detailed analysis could be made, but this should be enough for any casual interest.

Wow -

We checked out the Russian version a few weeks ago.

It’s about the slowest-paced movie I’ve ever seen! Even slower than Fitzcorraldo! Slower than The Shining! Amazing - like watching a painting. Very strange, but I enjoyed it a LOT. The use of rain in the beginning reminds me of the Japanese director who made Rashomon and The Seven Samurai. The whole look and feel of it - I wonder how much was deliberate and how much was budget or technology available at the time? It says in the notes it was the Russian director’s break-out success film, which makes me really wonder about his OTHER ones!

I also saw that Lem didn’t feel like the director quite got it - like, what Lem intended with the book is not what finally made it to the screen. I think this is probably true. As I recall, the book is more idea-driven than plot-driven, and the ideas have much to do with the problem of communication with a vastly alien being - ie, the Ocean of Solaris.

Now, Clooney bugs me anyway. He was good in Syriana, and the Coen Bros know how to use him effectively (he’s GREAT in Burn After Reading), but otherwise I have little use for him and this was no exception, he just doesn’t act. The characterizations were good, but generally not well acted on everyone’s part (I’m such a wet blanket!) … The script was alright, but I didn’t feel like the moviemakers knew what they were trying to do - like, no real sense of form, no real sense of underlying philosophy - I had the feeling they used a few imageries as a kind of homage to the first movie (the spaceship docking when Clooney lands on Solaris), and there was a kind of PhilDick-ness to the plot - the way it was hard to tell what was real and what was not - but it lacked Philip Dick’s sense of structure. We both (Zinnia and I) thought we would have been very confused if we hadn’t sort of known what was going on already from the other movie.

That said, it LOOKED really good, it was paced very well, it was moody without being cumbersome… Just poorly acted and nonsensical. Sad, because I think a movie of Solaris could be made that would attend properly to all these things. Interspecies communication is one of my interests, so I’d like to see that happen.

Thanks so much for lending these! I’ve been wanting to see them both for years (tho clearly not badly enough to go and get them myself). I’ll return them to you shortly.

thanks and good luck
5

I was trying to explain to my cat about my blog.

It started because I was scanning in pictures and she wanted to know what the funny noise was. There are many funny noises in and close to our apartment and I try to explain for her those which are interesting, alarming, or which otherwise seem to be relevant.

So… How do you explain “scanning some pictures in” to a cat? To put them into the “computer” - another tricky concept and one which opens up a whole nother can of worms.

“I’m putting some pictures and posters into the computer” (weak gesture at the computer, which is actually not the one I’m trying to scan into) “so I can… um. Show them to some other people. And put them on the… internet?”

I think she was alright with the idea of showing them to other people, though why that involves a computer I’m not sure she got. The “internet” thing stopped her brain, though. First I thought she was astonished if not appalled at the pure commerce of it, the brochure-ness of the internet, all these people flogging their shizz, plugged into each other’s minimarts, all over the world. What could this mean to a being which spends most of its time sleeping in a sunbeam, chasing a rubber ball, or eating stuff that smells like dried fish served in a hay barn? (Her food smells pretty good, actually - I think she eats better than we do). Cats do not so far as I can tell sell things to one another, and certainly not in a such a passion of feeding frenzy consumerism and desperate thrashing salesmanship!

Although, as far as passion goes, you should see her go after that rubber ball! It has little knobblies on it to make it bounce funny. Actually we have several in different colors. That is only fair as our cat is also several different colors.

But the globalization part, that may have been the kicker: That we should need so much in the way of infrastructure, equipment, technology, dollar-bytes and whoop-de-do to accomplish something cats (if not most other animals) can do effortlessly, organically, reflexively, even thoughtlessly: communicate (share ideas and experiences, data if you will) with all interested members of the species, across great distances and with little loss of comprehension from receiving-node to receiving-node.

I’ve always thought this attribute contributed to flocking behavior - mutual motion coordinated with no evident signals or apparent communication - and it occurs to me now that this might also be why many animals don’t require artifacts: they have the vividness and integrity of truly shared memory.

I suspect that the loss of ability to communicate in this way occurs in a species’ evolution not long after “deceit”.