Let's start the week with some wonderful weirdness (start as you mean to go on, after all). John Cusack, guest blogging on BoingBoing, celebrate the work of the 'Prague alchemist of film', Jan Svankmajer, a truly remarkable, artist who has been one of my favourite animators for many years. From Cusack's post: " They call Svankmajer a surrealist, but his visions make as much sense to me as escalators or velcro. It's hyperreality, and after all, it exists because he made it, so there it is —just like styrofoam and Fresca. Absurdism is the logical extension of the truth— or of current trends. Surrealism is true becouse it unearthers the subconscious, the stuff of fever dreams and fractured memory. It exists if one has the guts or madness to bring it to be... ( combine Surrealism and Absurdism and mix it with Dada, you get the Sex Pistols)."







(a clip from Svankmajer's Alice in Wonderland)



I've been in love with the cinema of Svankmajer for a couple of decades - like Cusack I can't remember where I first saw his work, probably a short piece somewhere, but it got under the skin and into the brain, seeping, trickling, dripping slowly into the subconcious where it lived and moved, casting strange shadows on the screen of the mind... I sought out his feature works in the arthouse cinemas and anywhere else I could find them - and as Cusack notes in his article, one of the wonderful things about today is that you can now find huge amounts of his work easily online through YouTube. When I first found Svankmajer's works I had to look about arthouse cinemas for a screening or a retrospective at a film fest, now you can go and explore it whenever you want - god, sometimes I love the web... His work is fascinating; often mixing live action with various forms of animation; it can be funny, it can be creepy, it can be downright disturbing, combining the seemingly everyday then watching the unusual, the odd, the downright weird and surreal bleeding through that everyday, a world where logic can melt and flow like a Dali timepiece.



And since I'm on a Svankmajer kick, here's a clip from Dimensions of Dialogue, which many of you have quite probably seen a bit of without knowing who it was by as it has been used frequently in a number of programmes over the years and spawned countless imitators:







As with all the most interesting artists in any medium I've found developing a fascination with one artist has lead me to others that I might never have come across otherwise, which is one of the remarkable qualities of any good art, be it animation, comics, books, music, film, you never take it in isolation, other works you've seen feed into your experience of the new work and the new work sparks ideas and images in your imagination that lead you on paths to other works and those lead you to more... Here's the Brothers Quay (huge admirers of Svankmajer) with their famous Street of Crocodiles:







and part 2:







Considering how easy it is to find some of this work nowaday you owe it yourself to go exploring for more - especially if you love work by people like Tim Burton or Edward Gorey or Neil Gaiman, or you devoured the disturbingly weird old Doom Patrol strips. Go look; if you haven't seen them before, you'll thank me later, if you have seen them you'll be delighted to find it is so simple to rewatch them now. And you'll have strange dreams...

Red Rabbit

Rather nice wordless animation (via Boing Boing):

Red Rabbit from Egmont Mayer on Vimeo.

Sebastian's Voodoo

This lovely animation, Sebastian's Voodo, by Joaquin Baldwin comes via Boing Boing and is in the running for a short film award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival; you can vote for it via YouTube and while you're at it check out some other animations (and other works) from the National Film Board of Canada on YT:

Tesla Coils do Doctor Who theme

The Tesla Coils do their own unique interpretation of the iconic Doctor Who theme (via Boing Boing) - geektastic!

"We call it the Voight-Kampff test for short"

I read about this prototype sensing device for the twats at the Homeland Insecurity department in the US on Boing Boing (bad enough US authorities have such a belief in their 'lie detector' technology which most psychology lecturers I know find laughable, now they want these stupid things which will never catch a bad guy but will get stressed travellers into trouble for no reason) and I couldn't help but think of the Voight-Kampff test used in Blade Runner to try and detect who was a Replicant.

Free your mind, style monkey

I love this story on Boing Boing - a man bought an Ipod for his daughter for Christmas, but when she opened the box instead of the over-priced product there was a note, written in classic 'ransom note' style of cut-up newspaper lettering, reading: "Reclaim your mind from the media's shackles. Read a book and resurect [sic] yourself. To claim your capitalistic garbage go to your nearest Apple store." When they returned to the store it transpired others had the same experience. I think if this had happened to me I'd have rather mixed feelings - annoyed but also quite amused at the same time. Mind you it would be more appropriate for the Iphone, really, wouldn't it? Not that I dislike the product (in fact it looks quite cool), just the mercenary (and anti-competitive) way Apple screw their loyal customers (and also stupid fashion junkie monkeys) with over-inflated costs and tying them to a single service provider, which seems to me to be so anti that freedom Apple was originally supposed to be about...

Creationist whackos get science teacher fired

Yup, once more the intellectually feeble throwbacks who constantly espouse 'intelligent design' (which is basically the utterly discredited Creationism dressed up in laughably bad science clothes) have made a move to decrease the IQ of the world a bit more: they used a flimsy excuse to get a science education officer in Texas fired. Christine Castillo Comer's crime? She forwarded an email as an FYI which she had received from one science educational professional to some interested groups about a talk by an author in the area, an author who has looked into the fake 'science' these Intelligent Design wankers keep trying to sneak into school curriculums while also trying to have evolutionary teaching curtailed (no, they haven't realised the 19th century is over).

Her boss's boss dropped her in it claiming simply forwarding this message was tantamount to the education board endorsing it, which is ridiculous since she didn't express an opinion, simply passed on details of a scientific talk to science professionals. Besides which anyone who works for a government department or large corporation knows full well their emails are usually issued under a 'the ideas expressed in this email do not necessarily promote the ideals of the blankety blank department'. Interestingly enough this boss is a political appointee - a Bush-loving one. And the head of the board openly endorses Creationist nonsense and talks yet hangs out one of his science professionals for simply passing on details of a talk involving scientific matters to other scientific professionals.

Sadly this sort of attack on actually using our brains to logically interpret massive amounts of careful scientific date amassed over many decades by many people from paleontologists to genetic researchers is not confined to a few religious crackpots in Jesusland (as Richard Morgan terms the Texas area in his recent novel Black Man) since there have been attempts to push this nonsense in schools in the UK too. This really does infuriate me - NPR has a radio interview with Christine on their site and the whole thing stinks of a political-religious set-up for these right wing fundamentalist eejits to shove someone out the way so they can then install a new person who will agree with their retarded ideology. And if you are a Creationist don't bother explaining to me why your view point is valid, because it just isn't. You're entitled to hold your view but please feck off and don't inflict it on others much less try to infect schoolkids with your idiocy. If you believe this crap you are an anti-intellectual moron brain-washed by fundamentalists who like using their religion as a way to gain more control over people and what they can say or think - and that's the nub of it, these idiots don't just believe this fairy tale nonsense themselves, they demand it be taught to the rest of us. Thankfully the few attempts here have been laughed at in much the same way as trying to each that the Earth is flat would be, but these idiots keep trying... (link via Boing Boing)

Yanks to the world - fuck you all, we can do what we want

The Times reports on a rather chilling legal message (and I use the term 'legal' quite wrongly) from the Home of the Free - America claims that it is perfectly legal under their barbarous legal system to kidnap foreign citizens in any country, even kidnapping citizens of allied countries such as British citizens in their own country. Bad enough the extremely dodgy and morally bankrupt practise of extraordinary rendition but now they claim this highly immoral and illegal (at least in any civilised country which has actual rule of law) is perfectly acceptable according to their own legal standards.

Well, what laws they set in their own borders is up to them, of course, but to act in this arrogant, cavalier manner in other countries, breaking the laws of those nations, is normally what we would refer to as the actions of a 'rogue state'. And since that's a rogue state who ignores international law and has weapons of mass destruction then by the warped logic of their own retard monkey president then surely they should invade themselves and impose a regime change? I mean we all know the current administration is of the opinion it can do whatever it wants anywhere and get away with it, but it is chilling to see such a barbarous set of actions given official blessing by the judiciary of a supposedly civilised democratic society. (link via Boing Boing and Warren Ellis)

Following the Biblical rules

Kevin Kelly has some of a Newsweek interview with a man who spent a year trying to follow some seven hundred rules he found in the Bible. I've made the contempt I feel for organised religion in general and those shagwits who persist in applying literal belief to scriptures in particular many times, but this was still pretty interesting stuff. (link via Boing Boing)

"Feed your head"

Interesting post on Alterati (via Boing Boing) comparing the late consciousness and drug guru Timothy Leary's little-known foray into comics with Neurocomics from 1979, exploring his 8-circuit model of the brain (best understood after a generous spliff, methinks) and comparing it to the Promethea series by the great, transcendental, bearded god of comics, Alan Moore, along with a link to a torrent of a scanned version of the comic:

"Promethea is a survey and summation of western occultism through a very self-conscious and post-modern lens, and the techniques that Alan Moore and the artists he works with throughout the Promethea run appear in somewhat abbreviated form in Neurocomics, but they are there. I would not be surprised if Mr. Moore was at least aware of this particular work, as the delivery of highly symbolic and succinct chunks of information in Promethea and the delivery of psychological models through astrological contexts are remarkably similar. But where the 8 stages of evolution and the astrological model of personality types are condensed into a few short pages in Neurocomics, Alan Moore tackles the whole foundation of the occult tradition of the West."

Flâneur animation

A very neat little Flâneur animation by Gould (amazing how inventive someone can be in a minute and a half) - Link via Boing Boing.

Mmm, tastes like chicken...

Boing Boing has a link to a story from a PBS documentary of a tarantula which is almost a foot across, which apparently devours chickens. Yikes! Man, I'm not overly arachnaphobiac - I'm not keen on spiders, but I'm not utterly terrified of them either - but this would give you the heebie jeebies! I wonder if this crittur is related to the giant spider of Metebelis III who brought Jon Pertwee's era in Doctor Who to an end? I think this is one spider my cats probably wouldn't want to chase and eat...

Assassination memorabilia for sale

Only in America: the window Lee Harvey Oswald is alleged to have fired from to assassinate President John F Kennedy in 1963 is up for auction on Ebay, according to Boing Boing, with a current bid north of $3 million. Got to love that American dedication to making a buck from anything, even the murder of a young president - I seem to recall the Zapruder family received a generous amount of money for the famous footage of the actual moment as well. It all seems rather ghoulish and vulgar to me. Meantime I keep remembering my patron saint, Bill of Hicks, talking about visiting the Texas Book Depository and the Assassination Museum (very Texan) where he said the room where the gunshots were supposedly fired from is extremely authentic in detail - because Oswald isn't there! And you can't get up to the window niche he was supposed to have fired from, "because they didn't want thousands of American tourists looking out the window and going 'no fuckin' way! I can't even see the goddam street from here, holy shit they lied to us!!!" How long until we see a Magic Bullet auction? "Back and to the left... back and to the left..."

Spreading

Since Cory Doctorow posted the dismissal story on the excellent Boing Boing yesterday there has been a lot more discussion on this matter (Boing Boing also has an interesting related article on companies who have fired staff over blogs - a worrying trend). Quite a few more comments posted here and a number of other web sites discussing the matter now.

I've also had some very kind emails expressing sympathy, outrage and support from a wide variety of people, many of whom I have never met, including some people who I can't name because they work in the book industry in the UK (indeed some actually work for Waterstone's all around the country) and I don't want to cause them any problems - nonetheless it was very kind of you to get in touch with me, thank you. Kind words from several writers and editors I have worked with have helped cheer me up. One editor generously commented that I had helped increase the awareness and sales of some of their imprint's writers. It's nice to know that so many people appreciated my efforts in bookselling, even if my own company ultimately did not.

As the ostensible reason for my being dismissed was that my sarcastic rambling were bringing the company into disrepute (a rather flexible and nebulous term) this whole shameful debacle has been something of an own-goal for Waterstone's. The thing is, they must have anticipated that the story would become more widely know if they fired me. Both my union rep and I pointed out that potential bad publicity could be an outcome if I was fired (in a general manner, we certainly did not threaten them with such a tactic).

As this move was supposedly because they felt I was causing harm to the company's image why then would the company make this move which could only result in more discussion and coverage of their actions, which most folk seem to agree was heavy-handed? It seems to fly in the face of the argument that they were trying to protect their public image. Quite a number of people have expressed their disgust and their intention to go elsewhere for book purchases, so this whole thing has been an enormously counter-productive move and one which need not have happened had reason prevailed.

Among the latest folk discussing developments(not enough time and space to list everyone) are: The Community At Large, Scribbling Woman, The Republic of T (which also has an interesting piece on an international blogger's rights 'bill'), Detrimental Postulation, Cyber Junky, Foreword.