Not a dream! Not a hoax! Not an imaginary story!
Oh sweet Christ and all his little fishes that swam and swam right over that dam, boop-boop dittum-dattum wattum, choo—Fafblog is back!
Deep thought.
Cowboy Bebop is ten years old.
Spoiler.
So you’ve read the latest issue of Buffy Season Eight. Quel controverisielle, right? I mean, can you believe they’re bringing back that douchebag from the weakest season opener they ever had?
The shape where things have gone.
Does it make me a bad person that my first thought, my immediate reaction, was that it was some sort of viral marketing thing?
“Never lose the ability to be offended.”
We’ve had our issues, too, over the past five years. I’ll never forget one thing that really grabbed me and Sonja Sohn, especially, brought it to David’s attention. David mentioned—we’d asked him about someone’s murder, you know, why would you do that, and he says, well, there’s no hope.
And we all took great offense to that. If there was no hope, you wouldn’t even have a cast here. All the stuff that the people, that we’ve gone through. So how dare you say that. I remember Sonja brought it to my attention, and it was something she had every right to say, and she really got on David about that. We took issue with that.
That’s Wendell Pierce, who plays the Bunk, from a Sound of Young America interview with him and Andre Royo. [via]
“Maybe we are on the cusp of a change?”
Maybe. —David Byrne publishes a corrective adjustment to his much-linked Wired piece on the business of the music business. (By the way, you really can make webcomics for almost nothing. That’s why the Spouse never goes anywhere Sundays or Mondays or Tuesdays.)
“Now, later. They’re gonna do you.”
Will Shetterly links to a stellar scene cut from the fifth season of The Wire.Since we’re already on the subject of burning the Bronze Age to the ground—
Vincent Baker has a new game out. What are you waiting for?
Dammit, he’s a doctor, not an escalator.
I was on the fence about io9, Gawker Media’s new sci-fi blog, but if they keep posting things like this chart of Dr. Who’s revolutionary tendencies, well, the grass is looking greener than I’d thought.
That’s the way to do it!
The Buffalo Beast’s “50 Most Loathsome” of 2007 is out.
Hey! A new John Sayles film!
“Snooty art-house critics like me sometimes rough up Sayles’ films, which don’t tend to be cinematically or dramatically adventurous and sometimes feel like they’re offering a predictable blend of progressive politics and Dickensian morality tale. (Silver City was somewhat of a snooze, for example, despite Chris Cooper’s memorable turn as a dimwitted, George W. Bush-like cardboard candidate.) Honestly, it’s time to get over that. Sayles’ movies almost always offer terrific casts, ample compassion, tremendous local color and an appetite for exploring the complexities of American life.” —Andrew O’Hehir
—On the other hand: “It needs to be electrifying, and instead, it’s a John Sayles movie.”
An alternative to that protest vote for Ron Paul.
“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America,” says Indian rights activist Russell Means, “and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us.” (Or, wait, maybe not so much.)
Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.
Back toward the end of the ’90s, a throwaway bit in Wired imagined advertising as a virus, mutating and adapting to fill every conceivable niche in the ecosphere of attention-mongering. —A meme, yes yes, but at least a rather specific and concretized example of one, with better metrics.
The bit ended by proposing a king-hell ad-beast slouching through a climax forest of synergistic marketing opportunities: let’s say (it said) that Nike starts buying 30-second TV spots and airing nothing. Not an image, not a sound, not an icon, not a blipvert at the end to brand the logo on your consciousness: just 30 seconds of empty blank nothing. We’d all know, of course, because everyone would be talking about Nike and their crazy empty ad scheme, and constant repetition would drive the point home until every blank wall, every cloudless sky, every television tuned to a dead channel would whisper Nike to our lizard-brains.
Magnificent (for some values of magnificent)—and yet we all know that pound for pound it’s the little things that best succeed in filling niches: the microbes, the bacteria, the virii and prions, like what I saw crawling through the ESPN chyron as I was buying a burrito for lunch: the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. How can one begin to measure the return on an investment like that?
Harsh, yes, but also unfair.
It only just now occurred to me: Alan Moore’s (and Kevin O’Neill’s, yes yes) Black Dossier is really his Number of the Beast.
Don’t shake out your dandruff and tell me it’s snowing, either.
Nordstrom used to have a piano player in each store, genteelly wassailing holiday shoppers, but this year the players have been rendered redundant: “The Seattle-based chain said the company is carrying out its hyper-attentive approach to customers, who it said compliment canned music more often than live musicians,” reports the Oregonian. —Somehow, I have a hard time believing they’re really doing this just to keep their customers complimentary. Golly. I guess Mr. Easterbrook was right.
Don’t hate on a—oh, who are we kidding.
In linking to this post by Carrie Brownstein, Matthew Perpetua—Mr. Fluxblog his own dam’ self—all but proves he’s never seen a Decemberists show.
Drive-by kulturklatsch.
I’m needed elsewhere; I’m trying to Get Things Done. (Never mind the sooty faces tugging at the Forge!) —This is mostly me using the Outboard Brain. And so: this (which found via this) seems somehow to me to be saying something, what, obverse? to this, which is (indirectly) about this. (I’d add something about the stagnation of the direct market in comics as everyone waits for trades that never come because the floppies don’t sell, but I’m not sure where to put it.) So: no thought, just bookmarks. (On a seemingly unrelated note: should I kill the joke about the three lions entirely? I mean, head, hand, and heart, but who the fuck’s gonna follow that?)
