xkcd #993 & Don DeLillo's White Noise

I'm not sure if the following corollary is coincidence or homage, but xkcd #993 appears to reference a scene from White Noise by Don DeLillo.

Here's the comic:

And here's the scene from White Noise:

We ran into Murray Jay Siskind at the supermarket. His basket held generic food and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labeling. There was a white can labeled CANNED PEACHES. There was a white package of bacon without a plastic window for viewing a representative slice. A jar of roasted nuts had a white wrapper bearing the words IRREGULAR PEANUTS. Murray kept nodding to Babette as I introduced them.

"This is the new austerity," he said. "Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I'm not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. Its like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort."

If it's an homage, I like the subtlety. If it's a coincidence, I like the serendipity. 

Maps and Legends

Fathom Information Design designed a map of the United States "comprised of nothing but the country's roads." Prints are available for $30, and half of the proceeds are donated to Kiva.

Paul Noth Cartoon

A nice New Yorker Cartoon by Paul Noth.

Boba Font

Via Laughing Squid.

Ze Frank's Web Playroom

If you have 18 minutes, I recommend watching this TED presentation by Ze Frank. Good stuff.

Dot: The World's Smallest Stop-Motion Character

Shot with a Nokia N8, Dot is an amazing little film that showcases the ingenuity of scientists, filmmakers and artists.

The film showcases the smartphone’s 12-megapixel photography capabilities and also celebrates the CellScope, an invention created by Professor Daniel Fletcher. The CellScope is a microscopic device attached to a Nokia handset, which the Professor used to produce life-saving technology: with his invention he has helped diagnose fatal diseases in remote areas of third world countries.

Dot: 

The Making of Dot:

The Editorial Cartoons of Steve Stegelin

When I first moved to Charleston, I spent a few years writing for the Charleston City Paper -- mostly book reviews and columns, many of which I've posted on this site. My writing wasn't great, but the paper published it anyway, to be nice I think...

Now, many years later, one of my coworkers, Steve Stegelin, writes the City Paper's editorial cartoons, and Steve's work (unlike my hackery) is fantastic. Stegelin's weekly strip skewers South Carolina politicians such as Joe Wilson and Nikki Haley -- something that must be done. It's a community service really.

Enjoy.

Lucas Aguirre, Redux

I interviewed Lucas Aguirre in July of 2007 and have been following his work since. He recently posted a series of vivid portraits on his blog, so a second post seemed due. Great work, Lucas!

Pixels by Patrick Jean

Hell (by xkcd)

Neko Case: People Got a Lotta Nerve [Video]

Yellow Bird Project

Mission Statement: "Yellow Bird Project is a Montreal-based, non-profit initiative. We collaborate with musicians in designing a T-shirt, we print and sell them on our website, and all of the money we make goes to charity. Which charity? Each of the artists gets to choose their own. We have three fundamental aims: (1) To make money for charities directly through T-shirt sales. (2) To raise awareness for charity organizations through artists’ endorsement. (3) To raise the profile of the artists we like.

Lightbulbs and Lamps

I took they shots a few years ago and still like them for unknown reasons. I should update the series with a compact florescent, to green it up a bit. Gotta get with the times.

Art & Politics

Artist Shepard Fairey of Obey Giant fame recently designed posters for Senator Barack Obama's campaign, and—like most of his Fairey's art—the Obama posters are painting their way across urban landscapes.

Roundup: Rainbows, War, Wes Anderson and Philip Roth

It's nice to begin your day with rainbow-inspired art—that's what I always say. It starts your morning on the right foot. Or the left, depending on your preference. So, with that in mind, artist Jen Stark turns ordinary paper into kaleidoscopes of color that rival Joseph's Technicolor dreamcoat.



The New Yorker ~ There's not a graceful way to segue from rainbows to World War II, but here goes: using well-crafted sentences, Nancy Franklin trashes Ken Burns's latest documentary, "The War."

You have to work very hard, and take yourself very seriously as the keeper of the keys to America, to make a tedious documentary about the Second World War. But that is what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done with their fifteen-hour series “The War,” which will begin on September 23rd, on PBS. They’ve taken a subject that is inexhaustible and made it merely exhausting.

New York Magazine ~ David Amsden hangs out with Wes Anderson, whose new film, The Darjeeling Limited, hits theaters this week.

Anderson often finds himself in situations like this: real-life circumstances that have the same absurd, art-directed quality as his films. You may be tempted to shake your head and simply say that Anderson has been incredibly lucky, which is true, but that doesn’t give enough credit to his talents—not just as a director, but more generally as someone who has constructed a life almost preposterously conducive to the pursuit of fantastical whims. When he was editing Darjeeling, for instance, he convinced Fox Searchlight to rent him a suite at the Inn at Irving Place, an unmarked hotel on Gramercy Park designed to re-create an era of faded glamour that probably never actually existed. Given that Anderson owns a spacious loft in the East Village that doubles as a work space, and that the studio could have rented any number of generic editing rooms for significantly less money, the logic behind this could be considered questionable.

/Film reports that Wes Anderon's short film, Hotel Chevalier, is being released via iTunes. The mini-movie is a "semi-prequel" to Darjeeling and stars Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman.



New York Magazine ~ Sam Anderson discusses Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, in which Roth kills off his alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman. So it goes.

Zuckerman is haunted all over Manhattan by the ghost of his virility. He’s wrestling now not with actual desire—of which he’s become, over the years, an expert wrangler—but with a more confusing and humiliating force: what he calls “the ghost of my desire.” My reading of Exit Ghost was as volatile as a Roth affair. By page 13, I’d whipped myself into an orgasmic frenzy of marginalia (“heartbreaking, honest, human”), after a poignant micro-biography of Zuckerman’s neighbor Larry, who lives his entire life based on a script he wrote out when he was 10. But soon I relaxed into quieter arousal. The book is like a thoroughly shuffled deck of cards, with moments of perfect psychological clarity and piercing vignettes and bleak wisdom surrounded by all kinds of tedium.

TimesOnline ~ Stephen Amidon presents "A guide to Philip Roth."

The fame and controversy that arrived after the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint was so intense that Roth felt compelled to create a fictional surrogate to take the heat – Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish writer who himself became notorious after writing a book called Carnovsky (whose plot sounds suspiciously like that of Portnoy’s Complaint). Zuckerman, who has so far featured in 10 of Roth’s books, can perhaps best be seen as a sort of pressure-release valve for his creator – the critic Michael Wood refers to Zuckerman as Roth’s “alter id”. He is a surrogate who allows Roth to write about his own emotional and intellectual life without indulging in pure autobiography.

And that's the roundup.

13 Questions: Interview with Cartoonist Scott Meyer

Simple questions often prompt interesting answers, so with this in mind I created a list of thirteen (fourteen, this time around) questions for a new interview series. Some of the questions I borrowed from the Proust and Pivot questionnaires, and the others are my own. The questions are meant to be fun - for the interviewee and the reader - so I cut out the ones regarding organic chemistry. 

Scott Meyer's online comic strip, Basic Instructions, is starting to garner some well-deserved attention - in part because Scott Adams discusses Meyer's work on The Dilbert Blog, but mostly because Basic Instructions is a funny, intelligent comic. Like HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, Meyer's work focuses on the minutia of everyday situations. From caffeine-withdrawal to dancing-avoidance, Meyer instructs his readers on how to tackle life in all its wonderful oddness.



How has your life changed since Scott Adams started his "online reality series" about you and Basic Instructions?

How has my life changed. Interesting question. My [web site] traffic has shot right up. My ad revenue and t-shirt sales have increased from a trickle to a small, but noticeable amount. I'm spending a portion of each weekend answering fan mail, which is the coolest thing ever.

Scott Adams has given me two huge gifts.

1. Proof that what I'm currently doing is of value to someone other than me. As a blogger, I'm sure you know the feeling that you're just throwing this stuff up on the net, but you're not sure if more than one or two people are really enjoying it at all. I now have proof that quite a few people think what I'm doing is pretty good, and that is a feeling you cannot buy.

2. Certainty that I'm being taken seriously. I know that the syndicates are looking at my stuff, and not just tossing it on a pile with the rest of the rejects.

Now I have some really big decisions to make. Primarily, stay online (the medium of the future, I'm convinced) where I have control, and can make whatever kind of strip I want, but have to fight it out on my own, or alter my strip enough to make it palatable to the syndicates and news papers (a medium that's struggling, but is where the vast majority of Americans go for their comics at the moment).

That's the most convoluted sentence I've ever created, but my thinking on the subject is kinda convoluted. There is the possibility of doing both, but having your cake and eating it too is rarely successful.

What is your favorite book?

Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams. I love pretty much every word the guy ever wrote, but this book is his masterpiece. It's the only time he ever really showed everything he was capable of as a writer. One moment you're horribly depressed about the plight of the white rhino, the next you're laughing at a researcher wearing a special hat so that birds will mate with his head.

What is your favorite album?

It's hard to pick a favorite album, but the album I listen to most is They Might Be Giants - Then: The Earlier Years. It's actually several albums' worth of material (yes, I'm cheating), and every song is a surprise. I bought it when it came out in '97, and I still discover songs on it that I didn't appreciate at first. I went through a phase a couple of months ago where I was constantly singing "Weep Day." It was not a pleasant time for my wife.

What is your favorite film?

Raiders of the Lost Ark. When I saw it for the first time I was the perfect age to appreciate it (not quite a teenager), and no film since has had as large an effect on me.

What is your biggest pet peeve?

People who take pleasure in making other people unhappy.

Practical jokes, jerking people around, gloating, it's all the same thing. Making someone else feel much worse to make yourself feel a little bit better.



What is your favorite place?

Disneyland/Disney World, (I see you rolling your eyes, but hear me out) because people thought Walt Disney was crazy, and in fact, he was. He bought some orange groves and said, "I'm gonna make tourists from all over the world come here." He wanted to carpet part of it. The story is his wife had to talk him out of it.

After that succeeded, he set up a secret cluster of fronts/companies and secretly bought huge tracts of uninhabitable, gator-infested swampland in Florida to do the same thing again, only bigger.

He hired engineers to build robot pirates. How does it get any cooler than robot pirates?! The original Pirates of the Caribbean (before they PC'd it up) was little more than a musical salute to rape and alcoholism, and we all bought into it as family entertainment.

His original idea for EPCOT wasn't a theme park. He was going to build a city. I couldn't help but think about that as I played BioShock.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

I'd have loved to have been in special effects in the 70's and 80's back when it was all about building robots and blowing up models.

Disney Imagineer would be pretty cool too.

What is your biggest indulgence?

Electronics. I'm a horrible addict when it comes to gadgets. I've so far been able to resist the iPhone, but that really has more to do with the termination fee on my current phone than with any will power on my part.

What is your favorite food?

Pizza. It's the world's most perfect food.

What is your favorite word?

Splendid. Nobody expects anyone to use it anymore, so it shocks people a little when they hear it, almost like cursing. Also, It works well as a sincere statement or as sarcasm.

What is your least favorite word?

Any of the big seven curse words. Not for any moral reasons (they're just words) but because lazy people, myself included, use them as a crutch.

Who do you least respect?

Same answer as my pet peeve.

Who do you most respect?

People who have their own thing going. They Might be Giants and Ben Folds are the first two examples that come to mind. The guys from Penny Arcade are also a good example.

When and where did you answer these questions?

At my desk around dawn on a Thursday.

Basic Instructions by Scott Meyer

Via The Dilbert Blog, Scott Adams has created an "online reality series" regarding Basic Instructions, a comic strip written by another Scott - Scott Meyer. The crux of Adams's posts regard the marketability of Basic Instructions and how it can clear the high hurdle of syndication. I for one, find Meyer's comics more entertaining than most newspaper strips, so I'm rooting for him to make it.

Basic Instructions presents dry humor grounded in everyday life. Time and time again I find myself relating to Meyer's work. If I shaved my head and grew a goatee (if I was capable of growing a goatee) these comics could be about me:



Note: I'm drinking a cup of joe as I type this sentence, and it is so so tasty. I tried quitting once but it didn't stick. The headaches were horrible. Mmmmm, coffee.



Note: Air Supply rocks! Making Love out of Nothing at All is awesome - in a cheesy, campy, over-the-top sing-song kind of way.

Roundup: New York Magazine Edition

I've been reading The New Yorker for ten years or so and still look forward to seeing David Sedaris, John Updike and Alec Wilkinson on the Contents page. Over the past few months, however, I've started reading New York Magazine, and it's quickly become my favorite weekly from the streets of New York.

NYMag's crisp, intelligent writing equals that of the elder New Yorker, but where The New Yorker is sometimes pretentious, NYMag is smart and snarky. With Ripkenesque consistency, the magazine kicks ass like Boba Fett, and almost every word is published online. For instance:

David Amsden profiles the lives and deaths of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake in Conspiracy of Two.

In any suicide narrative there comes the point where one searches for the early signs, for the missed warnings, for the moment when the rise ended and the fall began. And in the story of Duncan and Blake there is no more obvious place to begin this search than in Los Angeles, a city with a long history of thwarting idealists. If New York can be a hostile but ultimately rewarding environment for an artist, Los Angeles is often the opposite: easy and glittering until you begin to suspect that it is all maybe a cruel illusion. It was Nathanael West, himself a New Yorker who settled in Hollywood, who perhaps best understood the potentially grim effects this can have on the mind of an ambitious optimist. “Once there, they discover the sunshine isn’t enough,” he wrote in The Day of the Locust of those who seek a specific paradise in Los Angeles. “Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time … The boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment.”

As an aside, Theresa Duncan's blog, The Wit of the Staircase, is still online and worth a look.



John Heilemann writes about Barack Obama, who still hasn't replied to my challenge regarding same-sex marriage.

From the start of his bid, Obama has styled himself an agent of change, and all the available evidence suggests that voters still consider him the most credible aspirant to that role. The questions facing him have always been the same: Can he fashion a coherent vision of what the change he’s promising would look like? And can he convince voters that transformative capacity trumps experience? While it’s fair to say that Obama has failed to answer either in the affirmative, it’s also true that he’s barely begun to try—and that the opportunity to do so remains in front of him.

The magazine's Fall Preview discusses the Coen brothers, Phillip Roth, Coheed and Cambria, and so on...

Philip Roth is the Barry Bonds of the contemporary highbrow novel. In the mid-nineties, at an age when most of his peers were declining into flabby-sentenced parodies of themselves, Roth pumped himself up on the steroids of wild indecorous honesty (in Sabbath’s Theater, the protagonist imagines his mother’s ghost emerging from his lover’s vagina) and launched an already hall-of-fame-worthy career into the Hemingway-Faulkner stratosphere.

And that's the roundup.

Roundup: The New Pornographers, Jack Kerouac, Gogol Bordello, etc...

New York Magazine - A.C. Newman of The New Pornographers sat down in a Brooklyn coffee shop with Rebecca Milzoff and discussed music, marriage and life in New York.

Newman says he immediately felt more at home here than he ever did in Vancouver. He’s particularly excited about joining the local music scene—much more so, it seems, than he was about belonging to the Great Canadian Band Invasion. Though he calls groups like Arcade Fire a source of “patriotic pride,” he looks forward to hanging out more with the Hold Steady, whom he calls “lovable, well-read, thirtysomething semi-alcoholics.”

Bright Stupid Confetti - Chris posted the art of Chris Ryniak, Anne Austin Pearce and Christian Northeast, who painted Flying Fortress Boy.



The New York Times - Matt Weiland discusses Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which just turned fifty.

Above all, “On the Road” matters for its music: its plaintive, restless hum. In it, Kerouac perfected a melancholy optimism and a yearning for solace a thousand times richer and subtler than the mournful sap that drips down from so many contemporary American films and novels. It’s the lovely ache in the writing of Sherwood Anderson and Arthur Miller, in the cracked voices of Jeff Tweedy and Paul Westerberg. This is the great, lasting appeal of “On the Road,” the reason it will continue to matter to readers for another half-century and more. It’s the reason I’m glad I’ve got another copy, its pages already creased and its spine broken — and it’s the reason I won’t be giving this one away.

Hero Hill - Brian interviews Orenda Fink from Art in Manila.

HH:: What inspires you to write music?
OF:: Writing music is cathartic for me. Other than that, I don't know. It is just something I have to do. I have been saying for years that I am going to stop, but I never can. I had a long talk with my friend, Shannon Wright, about this subject. I guess we likened it to an ex-lover that you can't stop going back to.

Gogol Bordello played All Songs Considered and the concert is available via their podcast.

And that's the roundup.

Download:
The New Pornographers | My Rights, Versus Yours [MP3]

Geoffroy Demarquet

The photographs of Geoffroy Demarquet are quirky and, on occasion, creepy - my favorite of which is below.