Java Jive

Walker Evans under the influence

Takashi Murakami

this is not the french guiana i will see next week:<(

puff-n-stuff

Eudora Welty dead @ 92

anyone eaten at Canton @ 45 Division Street??

one person whom has eaten all over the world said that its the only restaurant thats better than my home away from home Grand Sichuan Int'l.....

guess i have to go....

if in Beaune France--i and many others recommand Ma Cuisine and Les Tontons--both seriously yummy

For Mr. Wilson: the fat birder webring

Sad news about the quiet Beatle.

I blog because I hope that if enough people are exposed to points of view that expand consciousness the attended world, there is hope we can transcend our current folly. Thus, the accumulated weight of the community of blogness is a force of transmemetic nature that may even make a massive difference. from abuddhas memes

I just learned that author J. H. Hatfield, an early casualty of the Bush presidential campaign, recently committed suicide in a hotel room in Arkansas. You may recall that his book, Fortunate Son, alleged that Bush did community service for a cocaine bust in 1972. Karl Rove & Co went on the attack, tipping off the right-wing Dallas Morning News that Hatfield had done jail time for a bizarre conspiracy to car bomb his boss. Immediately the media attention shifted to Hatfield, who was humiliated and cut loose by his publisher St Martin's Press (who had rushed his book into print without thorough fact-checking). After that, recall that nobody talked about GWB's coke use for the rest of the campaign. NYU media prof. Mark Crispin Miller wrote a foreword to the recently-released 2nd edition of Fortunate Son; it's worth reading.

Following the unconnected thread to Jims's "hey, hey, hey, what kind of clock is that ?" intrusion. I offer the latest stroller Mom incident. I'm sitting on a park bench in Van Vorst park here in JC, petting my dog in a way which removes the shedding hair from her back. So I'm grooming for a few minutes when I notice the toes of a pair of womens shoes pointing at me. I dont look up but I notice them still there a few minutes later. When I finally do look up I see some 30 somthing Mom is pointing her baby in a sling at me so's they can both drink in the sight of man with doggie. I can't think of any other senerio which would allow someone to stand and stare point blank at a stranger and gawk. And I dont find that excuse acceptable either Keep walking Mom. Bah.

Bill Schwarz - untitled ('70s nude), 2001, six images

Abuse Your Illusion

by Michael Atkinson

Village Voice, July 18 - 24, 2001

An exploding plastic inevitable, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within dares you to be amazed by its soulless mimeograph of humanity. In a dystopian future, this is the only type of movie we'd get to see: manufactured by hard-wiring, stamped from market-proven narrative templates, ostensibly distracting in the sheer bulk of its preprogrammed mayhem. All digital, all the time, Final Fantasy is not a cartoon, but rather a simulacrum of live-action Bruckheimer-ness so factory-pressed it should have an I'm-recyclable triangle embossed on every frame.

Think photo-realism without purpose, ironic or otherwise—and painted by nanotechnology. The movie's conspicuous artillery of faux details is its only Power Point, but today digital imaging is so ubiquitous that the achievement is authentically redundant. (Indeed, the masterfully imitated landscapes evoke the similar wonk-craft of "serious" live-action epics like Gladiator, The Messenger, and Contact.) It is said that a full third of the film's budget was spent on making the heroine's wispy hair convincingly wispy; how many heads of organic hair they could've bought is apparently irrelevant. The exercise is so elaborately pointless you'd think the Pentagon had bankrolled it.

Actually, it's a product of the same Japanese codeheads for whom the eponymous game series has been a spurting cash cow. The story itself is reheated Arthur C. Clarke: As giant alien "phantoms" (resembling microscopically photographed mosquitoes) besiege the earth, Identikit humans rally. There's a digital Ben Affleck (with Alec Baldwin's voice), a digital Neve Campbell (with Ming-Na's voice), a digital Jason Priestley (with Steve Buscemi's voice), etc. In this New Age, everything is helpfully color-coded: Silvery blue is good Gaia, leathery red is bad Gaia. For all of the monumental attention paid to visual fidelity (even a few lens flares and moments of handheld shakiness), the techies still can't manage to make two characters look convincingly into each other's eyes—it's like watching Disney World animatronic figures do soap opera.

The ultimate justification for Final Fantasy, it seems, is the wholesale subtraction of people from the entertainment equation; the games triumphed without the wetware, didn't they? But of course, they didn't: First-person electronic gaming revolves around and happens to a very human player, and without him/her, it's just machine love.

Magic the Hat

dress em up dubya

Quentin Tarantino's analysis of Top Gun from the film Sleep With Me.

"You know what one of the greatest fucking scripts ever written in the history of Hollywood is? Top Gun."

Good Morning Sinners

Scratchy vanity 45s, pilfered field recordings, muddy off-the-radio sounds, homemade congregational tapes and vintage commercial gospel throw-downs; a little preachin' and a little salvation.

"Hypocrisy is better than no standards at all."

This mornings hard copy nyt had a picture of stacked shipping containers, 3 high for as far as the eye could see, lining a street to block stone throwers stones.

webheads up

forgotten nyc

the carvings of avenue c

"Modern mechanical tattooing was invented in New York City at the end of the 19th century. In his shop in Chatham Square on the Bowery, Samuel O'Reilly modified Thomas Edison's "Electric Engraving Pen" and created the first device which could mechanically enscribe a tattoo into the skin. The speed and accuracy of the new technology revolutionized the artform and introduced it to the possibilities of the modern age. Surrounded by the modern urban setting of New York, early tattooing borrowed its imagery from various popular culture sources as it expanded and became more sophisticated."