SubVerse

Um, as you may have noticed, I haven’t really given Subverse much love this year. It is what it is.

But I invite you to take a gander at my new and very exciting (and very different) new site. It’s an Image Stream, that I curate with my friend Donovan. It’s kinda deep.

Peruse here, friends: DoJo

Man, I have always loved this Hal Hartley dance number!

And whatever happened to Elina Löwensohn? She was too cool and so beautiful. 

I got to rent her video tapes at Kim’s Video once, 12 years ago when I was but a lowly video store clerk. I told her I was a fan. She was surprised I knew who she was, and hung out and flirted with me for a few minutes. Made my day!

Check out some great animated pieces I found online this morning.

This is a music video from an Israeli singer named Oren Lavie, with some lovely uplifting stop-motion. Utterly charming…

There’s a page all about how the video was made: here. It notes: 

* Some of the bed sheets used in the video were taken from Oren’s own bedroom and are now considered collectors items, worth at the moment not very much and therefore used as bed sheets.

Here’s a trailer for a film called “Sita Sings the Blues,” that was animated by a woman named Nina Paley. 

Here’s the description:

“Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epicRamayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”

Very excited to see this movie. It plays on WNET PBS in NYC on March 7, then at the New York International Children’s Film Festival (NY), on March 14.

The website’s here.
And here’s a great NY Times article all about it too.

Okay, I’m clearly in a childish mood these days. First “Where the Wild Things Are,” and now this. But so be it, this made me very happy too.

Feist singing her song “1, 2, 3, 4″ on Sesame Street, changing the words to better fit. But it already seems as if it was always meant to be right here…

Yummm…
These first images released from Spike Jonez’ and Dave Eggers’ “Where The Wild Things Are” are making me very happy. (click the pics for larger images)

And you must check this out too: A small scene has leaked online, and it’s adorable.

You can really hear Eggers’ voice in the writing. And it has that casual, psychedelic feel of the old “Little Prince” film from the 70s. Just a kid chatting with his imaginary monster, the way any kid would.

And, though I know some people aren’t too excited that Jonez chose to use animatronic puppets for the Wild Things, I personally think it’s great. We’re so used to seeing everything done with CGI these days, but you just can’t beat the reality of old school, man-in-a-suit muppetry. It’s Big Bird, who’s just so clearly, physically there standing in front of us. He’s literally keepin’ it real. I applaud that.

This week’s eclectic mix moves from soul to hip hop, through big orchestra to singer-songwriter lushness. But each track has that sticky funk, that gets in your head and makes you want to groove. Whether they’re singing about the stickiness of good lovin’, that makes you want to hang around for more – or the sticky good greenery you want to roll up and huff and puff – these ten tunes are gonna get in your soul, and keep you coming back for more.

Sample the tracks individually, or download a Zip File (78MB) of all the tracks here.

1) So In Love – Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions

2) Rosebud – SA-RA Creative Partners

3) You Know, You Know – Mahavishnu Orchestra

4) Les Fleur – Ramsey Lewis

5) 2 Wicky – Hooverphonic

6) River Man (Nick Drake cover) – Shawn Lee

7) Honey Bee – Jessie Mae Hemphill

8) I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl (Nina Simone cover) – Nikka Costa

9) Kiss (ft. Will Oldham) – Scout Niblett

10) Everybody Loves the Sunshine – D’Angelo

11) Abstractionisms – Q-Tip

12) Who’s Got the Weed? – G. Love and Special Sauce

(c) Images this week by Siege.

I really am a little obsessed with zombies. Even this bizarre video caught my attention, and even kinda gave me the chills.

At the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines, inmates have found the perfect way to pass the time: memorizing the dance choreography to American pop anthems of the 80s. The crowning achievement has to be their rendition of Michael Jackson’s ”Thriller” video, complete with a guy in drag playing his date, while they’re surrounded by hordes of unruly undead (performing pretty awesome zombie dance moves!).

Now, is it just me, or at the beginning when that “couple” is suddenly surrounded by a thousand orange-jump-suit clad zombies, and the trannie girlfriend is acting all terrified – well, it’s really a little scary, isn’t it?

I’ve always intended for Subverse to be an MP3 blog (among other things). But I have been woefully lazy in the year and three months now that this site has existed. It’s time to start following through on my original idea.

My hope (or rather, as my shrink insists I say, my plan) is to put up two mixes a month – every other Sunday.

SUNDAY MIXES: Consisting of curated music on a theme, ideally meant to be listened to in order, as a DJ-ed set.

A mix-tape from me to you.

Today’s theme is simply the weather of this weekend I’ve spent at the farmhouse (in upstate New York). It’s gone from breathtakingly beautiful summer sun across the flower gardens and lush green hillsides – to moody grey hours of drizzling rain and thunder rumbling in the heavy clouds. Only to, once again, be surprised by a peek of golden light breaking through the grey over the Hudson River just before sunset.

And so today’s Sunday Mix No. 1 offers a similar journey. From the joy of a sunny morning upstate, to the quiet of an afternoon indoors, and back again.

See you next Sunday.

- Woodstock – Alice Russell

- Devil Do – Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs

- Shake It Off – Wilco

- History Song (Live, with instrumental intro) – The Good, The Bad & The Queen

- Roll On (Ft. Jenny Lewis) – Dntel

- Assoul – Tinariwen

- Reckoner – Thom Yorke (Acoustic @ Free Trade Show 4/16/07

- Ray-O-Graph – Jackie-O Motherfucker

- Cajuina – Forro in the Dark

- First Desert Ride – Jeff Simmons/Randy Sterling (Naked Angels OST)

- Whole Lotta Love – Ike & Tina Turner

- Jardin d’Hiver – Keren Ann

- All I Want Is You – Sugarplum Fairies

- Paisley Park (Prince cover) – Richard Swift

- Lay and Love – Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy

- The Ride – Joan as Policewoman

- Contusion (Live) – Stevie Wonder

- The Light – White Magic

- Mr. Whippy (ft. Eslam Jawaad) – The Good, The Bad & The Queen

- Boom-Biddy-Boom – Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren

A tune to help you through the afternoon:
The Brightness of These Days – Electric Sheep (feat. Ua)

Electric Sheep is a nu-jazz group associated with Kyoto Jazz Massive. More important is the vocal contributions of Ua, Tokyo’s answer to Bjork. Beautiful and mysterious, Ua is much too little known in America, and she should be very famous. Her voice is transfixing and uplifiting, whether she’s scatting or jazzing or deep soul-ing, i want to crawl inside the sensuous sounds she makes and rest there a while.

My god, what a blast from my childhood…
I actually still have that red-and-blue Shogun Warrior in my room in my parents’ house. And for years, I’ve had no idea what he was or where he came from.
I love when little mysteries like these are solved.



His name, apparently, is Great Mazinga! (With rocket launchers.)
Love it.
“Hey, sweetheart. Wanna come up to my room and see my great mazinga?”
And that line about Godzilla: “Imagine his breath is a blast of fire!”
I’m afraid I’ve dated girls I didn’t have to imagine.

Thanks to Plaid Stallions for the hook-up. A great romp through the past.

This is quite amusing. An episode of the short-run British TV series “Danger 50,000 Volts,” in which Nick Frost and Simon Pegg of “Shaun of the Dead” teach us valuable lessons about how to survive a zombie apocalypse.

You know… just in case.

“When I was growing up, only the geeky and socially marginal people were into stuff like Spiderman and JRR Tolkien. But in the last five years they’ve become the biggest entertainment phenomena around. How did it get so nerds are suddenly driving popular culture?

“I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these things. Now everybody’s into Tolkien. And I feel a little like, hey, I’ve been into that stuff my whole life. And in fact, you used to beat me up for it.”

- Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine

Photographer Diane Arbus said:

“Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. you see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.

“And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic. You know it really is totally fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.”

The corrupt and brutal regime of President Ceausescu of Romania was infamous across the world. His ferocious government had run the country emphatically for many years, crushing any sings of dissent ruthlessly. In November 1989 he was re-elected President for another five years as his supporters at Party Conference gave him forty standing ovations.

On December 21st the President, disturbed by a small uprising in the western city of Timisoara in support of a Protestant Clergyman, was persuaded to address a public rally in Bucharest.

One solitary man in the crowd, Nica Leon, sick to death with Ceausescu and the dreadful circumstances he created for everyone started shouting in favour of the revolutionaries in Timisoara. The crowd around him, obedient to the last, thought that when shout out “long life Timisoara!” it was some new political slogan. They started chanting it too. It was only when he called, “Down with Ceausescu!” that they realized something wasn’t quite right. Terrified, they tried to force themselves away from him, dropping the banners they had been carrying. In the crush the wooden batons on which the banners were held began to snap underfoot and women start screaming. – The ensuing panic sounded like booing.

The unthinkable was happening. Ceausescu stood there on his balcony, ludicrously frozen in uncertainty, his mouth opening and shutting. Even the official camera shook with fright. Then the head of security walked swiftly across the balcony towards him and whispered, “They’re getting in.” It was clearly open on the open microphone and was broadcast over the whole country on live national radio.

This was the start of the revolution. Within a week Ceausescu was dead.

- from graffiti artist Banksy, in his book “Wall and Piece”
Source: John Simpson BBC News

This is pretty.

meaning simply… do you really need so much of it?
here’s a fun little Flash anime Time Eater for all you with just too much of it.
a little old school skateboarding, Atari “Pitfall” style.
it’s utterly pointless and repetitive, and yet, i don’t know, tapping away at those little arrow keys (and Space to jump!) brings a sort of Zen calm over me.

Man…

The LOST 2-hour season finale tonight was a little bit mind blowing, hunh?
Those guys are going all the way out now. They’re not holding anything back.
They have once again, completely transformed the scope and even the underlying concept of the show.
This thing is like a “serial” the way Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN was a comic book.

It’s true, at points along the way this season, I’ve felt like these guys have had no idea where they’re going. And I think some of that comes from their need (and orders from on high) to stretch the series out for five to nine years. But they’re answer to that is different that most TV shows, which try to recreate the same show season after season. Like CHEERS, most shows are all about giving you a place of comfort and familiarty to come to, where everyone knows your name.

But LOST, at the end of two seasons in a row now, have instead completely transformed the idea of what the show is about.

We now know that they are not on a normal island.
And we know how they were brought there.
And we know that when Desmond, the last inhabitant of the hatch, tried to escape by boat, he sailed for some eight weeks away from the island, and the first sight of land he saw – was this island again.

This brings up a few potential readings.

1) They’re in some kind of snow globe. A massive dome. And on the other side is:

a) Some kind of TRUMAN SHOW-like other world. Some huge experiment is being conducted on them from outside. The entire island is like the hatch. The hatch which was being watched by someone in an abandoned post for a very long time. The entire island itself is inside some kind of self-contained unit, and it is being watched.

b) Or maybe it’s some kind of virtual reality, where the edge of the world – like in a video game – just leads you back into the game platform.

c) Or there is nothing else out there, the rest of the world has been destroyed.

d) Or maybe, as Sawyer guessed, they’re on an alien planet. (Which would be backed up by the giant stone foot, the ruins of some colossus on the coast, which had only four toes.)

But I think the answer is clearer than that.
I’m leaning toward option:

2) It seems now that the island is, in fact, built on top of a massive magnetic energy generator.

The generator is controlled by the pushing of the button, which dissipates the excess built up energy every 108 minutes. When the button isn’t pushed, and the energy is allowed to build – the magnet effect builds so intensely, that anything with a few hundred miles is sucked toward it.

It’s this magnetism that, when Desmond failed to push the button, pulled Oceanic Flight 815 out of the sky and crashed it into the island. Just as the drug plane from Nigeria crashed, just as the 16th century slave ship crashed, just as Desmond’s boat was drawn there and the real Henry Gale’s baloon.

This explanation of the magnetic island seems to answer a lot of questions with some clarity. And, in terms of what the generator is, maybe even some kind of BLACK HOLE, pulling everything toward it with a gravitational sucking force.

But, then… there’s one clue at the very end that suggests one of the more wild first theories might be right.

After Locke doesn’t push the button, and the vast bright light fills the sky (which suggests a light coming from above, perhaps from the top of a dome), there’s quiet aross the beach… And then something falls out of the sky, from high, high above, and crashes in the middle of the camp.

What is it? …. The front door of the hatch.

The metal door of the hatch which seems to have been somehow sucked high into the sky, and then dropped back down when the button was pushed and the magnet when off.

So perhaps the island isn’t the source of the energy.
Maybe the source is high above…

At the top of a dome.

Or hey, maybe there’s a link of some sort, between the island and somewhere else – somewhere high in the sky. Maybe a dimensional portal or a gate is in the hatch. Or, maybe a black hole…?

6.1.06 – Theory Addendum
Remember that big re-stocking shipment of food and materials that fell from the sky during the hatch’s lockdown about 6 episodes back? Remember that nobody heard a plane fly overhead?

How much you want to bet it fell from a hole in the sky – like at the top of a big dome?

This theory’s really been floating around in my head a lot lately. The only problem with it – and it’s a big one – is how the hell did they get in there? They all left on a plane from Sydney, in the real world. At what point did they cross into the snow globe?

MUSIC:

In honor of the vast conspiracy that ABC is allowing these very clever writers and filmmakers to spin for us happy and hooked audience members, here’s some conspiracy and Lost-themed tunes to download and listen to on your iPod today:

1) “Another Lonely Night” – The Willard Grant Conspiracy [from the album Mojave]

2) Fah Daa Bah Dee Bah Doo Bomph – The Mother Funk Conspiracy

3) “Le Monde (ft. Lou Lou)” – Thievery Corporation [from the album "The Mirror Conspiracy"]

4) “Samba Tranquille” – Thievery Corporation [from the album "The Mirror Conspiracy"]

5) “Lost Change in D Minor” – Will.i.am [from the album "Lost Change"]

6) “If Not Now, Whenever” – The Books [from the album "Lost and Safe"]

7) “I Slept with Bonhomme at the CBC” – Broken Social Scene [from the Album "Feel Good Lost"]

INTELLECTUAL QUOTE OF THE DAY:

And here’s a relevant couple quotes from a radio show I heard today on my iPod, while wandering around through a summer’s day in New York today:

On Kurt Anderson’s STUDIO 360 podcast from PRI, he was talking with the novelist Anne Rice about conspiracy theories, and specifically about the popularity of the DAVINCI CODE.

Rice said she understands why so many people are so drawn to the conspiracy story Brown has invented. “Most of life,” she says, “for most of us, is meaningless. Things happen at random. There’s always been a great desire on the parts of journalists and historians and the media, to try and find threads and meaning. So, conspiracy theories are glorified versions of that. Because the random nature of life is pretty scary. And it’s comforting to believe that things happen for a meaning and that there are connections.”

Of course, the other obvious tale-weaver she leaves out is religion, which provides exactly the same kind of vast and cosmic cover story, that explains everything.

Kurt Anderson agrees, that conspiracy theories and religious narratives spring from the same impulse. “To try,” he says, “to impose absolute clarity on an existence whose purposes and meanings are murky and mysterious… It’s why fundamentalism of so many stripes is so appealing to so many people. And why 60 million copies of THE DAVINCI CODE have been sold.”

And perhaps why LOST is attracting record numbers of viewers back to the dying technology of the boob tube.