''Life'', Feb. 16, 1968 An advertisement for Smirnoff Vodka. Source
Richard Avedon (1923-2004), 'Edward Gorey', 1992 "Gorey acknowledged his debt to the Surrealists:
"I sit reading André Breton and think, “Yes, yes, you’re so right.” What appeals to me most is an idea expressed by [Paul] Éluard. He has a line about there being another world, but it’s in this one. And Raymond Queneau said the world is not what it seems—but it isn’t anything else, either. These two ideas are the bedrock of my approach. If a book is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed."
But, however much Gorey owes to the Surrealists, I see in him, equally, their less fun-loving predecessors, the Symbolist poets and painters of the late nineteenth century: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Khnopff, Munch, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon. That strange world of theirs, caught in a kind of syncope, or dead halt, of feeling—open a Gorey volume on a winter afternoon, and that’s what you get. (Source)
Hector Garrido (1928-2020), ''The Ecstasy Connection'' (The Baroness #1) by Paul Kenyon (aka Donald Moffitt), 1974 "A former Vogue and Elle cover model, the Baroness is a "long-legged beauty in her early thirties" who runs a model agency as a cover for her espionage missions. Her preferred weapon is the Bernadelli VB .25 caliber. She drinks martini cocktails, smokes the occasional joint, drives a red Porsche, throws lavish parties in her Rome mansion and enjoys fiery but casual sex with a series of handsome hunks, including suspected enemies she may well have to kill. Her jade green eyes, raven black hair and "explicit cheekbones" prove the perfect smokescreen. "There wasn't a line or shadow on her lovely face to show the deadly secrets that lay behind it." (Source) Quick fun fact: Hector Garrido did all the packaging art for the G. I. Joe toys in the 1980s, art I was well acquainted with as a wee lad who was really into ninjas and dug Storm Shadow and Snake-Eyes (but not so much the military propaganda masquerading as a toy line they were associated with).
thoughtportal
It’s one of my rare re-bloggings (breath deep and take it in people). Give the Rolling Stones article a read. Here’s a snippet: “As AI has exploded into the public consciousness, the men who created them have cried crisis. On May 2, Gebru’s former Google colleague Geoffrey Hinton appeared on the front page of The New York Times under the headline: “He Warns of Risks of AI He Helped Create.” That Hinton article accelerated the trend of powerful men in the industry speaking out against the technology they’d just released into the world; the group has been dubbed the AI Doomers. Later that month, there was an open letter signed by more than 350 of them — executives, researchers, and engineers working in AI. Hinton signed it along with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his rival Dario Amodei of Anthropic. The letter consisted of a single gut-dropping sentence: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” How would that risk have changed if we’d listened to Gebru? What if we had heard the voices of the women like her who’ve been waving the flag about AI and machine learning? Researchers — including many women of color — have been saying for years that these systems interact differently with people of color and that the societal effects could be disastrous: that they’re a fun-house-style distorted mirror magnifying biases and stripping out the context from which their information comes; that they’re tested on those without the choice to opt out; and will wipe out the jobs of some marginalized communities. Gebru and her colleagues have also expressed concern about the exploitation of heavily surveilled and low-wage workers helping support AI systems; content moderators and data annotators are often from poor and underserved communities, like refugees and incarcerated people. Content moderators in Kenya have reported experiencing severe trauma, anxiety, and depression from watching videos of child sexual abuse, murders, rapes, and suicide in order to train ChatGPT on what is explicit content. Some of them take home as little as $1.32 an hour to do so. In other words, the problems with AI aren’t hypothetical. They don’t just exist in some SkyNet-controlled, Matrix version of the future. The problems with it are already here. “I’ve been yelling about this for a long time,” Gebru says. “This is a movement that’s been more than a decade in the making.” Edit: I failed to suggest that you, dear reader, should peruse Cathy O'Neil's 2016 book, 'Weapons Of Math Destruction' which details the opaque nature of algorithms and the biases that are baked into them. As O'Neil puts it, "Algorithms are opinions embedded in code." O'Neil is careful in what kinds of algorithms she targets with her critiques and isn't offering a blanket denunciation of algorithms per se, just the large, scalable and, in her evaluation, unfair algorithms that have begun to have direct impacts on people's lives, often in destructive ways. "I worried about the separation between technical models and real people, and about the moral repercussions of that separation," O'Neill writes."
Kent McClard, ''heartattack'', #50, 2006 Source heartattack was a zine that began in 1994 and one I read until the last issue in 2006 (the one above). It was a reading staple in my life like Maximumrocknroll (which I came across in 1989) and Slug & Lettuce (started reading in 1991). The above is part of Kent McClard's (one of the founders of both Ebullition records and heartattack) farewell after deciding to discontinue publishing the zine. There's been many definitions of punk but this snippet fairly summarizes the ethos of the DIY, underground punk scene that I spent a good portion of my existence participating in. Just thought I'd share it.
John Buscema (1927-2002) & Romeo Tanghal, ''Marvel Super Special - Labyrinth'', 1986 Source The conversation between Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) and the worm remains my favorite scene from the movie (in case anyone was wondering).
'The Good Lord Bird', Episode 2. Ethan Hawke playing John Brown in an adaptation of the 2013 novel by James McBride "about Henry Shackleford, an enslaved person, who unites with John Brown in Brown's abolitionist mission." Some context: the story takes place during the 'Bleeding Kansas' conflict, which was basically a state-level civil war that took place between 1854 to 1860 and was a precursor to the country's Civil War over slavery. ::Brief, slightly unfocused rant begins:: Without getting into a deep dive into American history or the legacy of John Brown, I will say that the contemporary American Rights reactionary measures to erase the knowledge and the teaching of America's history in favor of a truncated—and some might say imaginary—accounting of America's past in order to "protect white children from feeling bad" about the history they've inherited is just another iteration of the very white supremacist philosophy they deny this country was founded on. It also speaks to who they identify and empathize with, consciously or unconsciously, whenever American history is discussed. It never seems to be the abolitionists or people like James Brown who gave their lives to the pursuit of destroying the institution of slavery (and it's certainly never the enslaved themselves). Instead, they choose to center on notions like "guilt" and "fault", often denying that the abomination of institutional slavery has any material relation to how contemporary American society is constituted and that a proper accounting of the legacy of that abomination is unnecessary, even (somehow) "detrimental" (and, even more improbably, a racist act itself aimed against white Americans). I say fuck all that. We all live in the failed echo of Reconstruction, an opportunity in American history that could have re-shaped the country for the better, an opportunity that was squandered and, ultimately, destroyed by the same reactionary forces denouncing how we discuss America's history today (Note: for a recent exploration of this I suggest Heather Cox Richardson's book 'How the South Won the Civil War'). The contemporary American Right's continued assertions that the history of slavery isn't entangled into every aspect of American history—it's founding, it's growth, it's prosperity and how it's politics is conducted—serves to protect the mythology of "American exceptionalism", a myth to which they are committed (they've even revived the notion, introduced by the Columbia historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips in his 1918 book 'American Negro Slavery' that slavery was "beneficial" to those enslaved and that, "at the time" slavery was "no big deal.") Again, fuck all that. ::Brief, slightly unfocused rant ends:: Whatever flaws John Brown carried with him in life, his moral opposition to slavery and his willingness to act on that belief was commendable. In the words of Frederick Douglass on John Brown, "His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine — it was as the burning sun to my taper light — mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him."
'Moonrise Kingdom' (2012) A random assortment of movie stills lifted from my recent re-watch presented in chronological order (I believe).
'Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse' (2023) Finally watched this film and loved it. Felt compelled to capture the cutest of the spider-men variations. Never dig a cliffhanger "ending" but I'm all in for the third installment. For me, superhero fatigue doesn't seem to apply to these movies, wonderful eye candy that they are. Two thumbs up.
For context: "Her name is 841. She is a sea otter.
This week, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced it had launched a multi-agency search for Otter 841 in an attempt to capture and rehome her, after observing her "concerning and unusual behaviour".
Teams from the US and state wildlife agencies have been sent out to sea, armed with a bait surfboard, but so far, she has evaded apprehension.
Otter 841's capture will mark the end of her brief reign of terror and delight along the balmy coast of Santa Cruz - a story of fearlessness, crime and, possibly, a southern sea otter's family legacy."
I've been revisiting some films from my childhood. I give you one David Patrick Kelly from 1984s "Dreamscape.' (which I've posted about before I'm sure). Note: It was this film (but not this film alone) that pushed the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating after parents, thinking it was ok to send kids to a PG movie, were shocked by scenes like the one above. (Give this review, where I acquired this information from, a read if you want a detailed synopsis of the movie.) Note the second: 1984 was the same year as the original 'The Nightmare on Elm Street'. In the scene above, Kelly's character, while in another person's dream, kills a man by punching his razor tipped hand through his back, ripping out his heart. I guess dream killers was just a thing in the zeitgeist.
Unnecessary Update From Poster to Viewing Audience
There’s been a significant gap between active posts on this here tumblr page. Part of the reason is that I finally got around to playing ‘Zelda: Breath of the Wild.’ All the praise the game was lauded with from critics and players has proven to be warranted. It’s one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I’ve had in many years. It’s great fun. Sure, I know that I’m mortal and that one day I’m going to die (could be tomorrow, who knows?) but I’m digging exploring the constructed world on offer in BoTW. The sound design in particular is quite absorbing. Two hearty thumbs up. I’ll get back to wasting time providing this medium with new(ish) content. Whoever you are reading this, I wish you well and I hope that chance favors you.
Asteroid City (2023) Two random stills that give some impression of the cinematography involved. The film is beautifully constructed but the story-within-a-story-within-a-story didn't capture much of my attention. What I've discovered is that Anderson films are worth re-watching since I often don't derive much from his films on first viewing (excluding aesthetics) and I've found giving them a second (or third) viewing opens them up for me. I assume that this will apply to 'Asteroid City' too. Anderson has grown on me as a filmmaker (initially I wasn't much of a fan even though I've been with him since 'Bottle Rocket'). Unlike many American directors, he's remained committed to his own artistic vision whether or not that vision is commercially viable. The parodies of Anderson's aesthetics and style on social media are warranted but they're also inaccurately reductive. There's more going on in Anderson's films than simply "style before substance" critics claim. (<----I basically agree with the thesis linked to here.)
The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart (2023) I have to admit that I've had a variation of this conversation myself.