November 2011
My new book is now available: Trash and Vaudeville
Please check out my new collection of short stories called Trash and Vaudeville. It also includes some great artwork by Eliza Gauger, Molly Peck, and Katie West. Print copies are available here, as well as on Amazon.
The cost is only $9.99 (plus S&H).
I expect e-book versions to be available in the next week or so.I want to thank all of you that have been so supportive of this blog and my writing over the last 2 years. I can’t place a value on all the feedback and encouragement I’ve received. Tumblr tells me there’s more than 4,000 of you that read this blog, so please re-blog and help me spread the word.
You heard him.
“My vision of global harmony comes in a 16:9 aspect ratio”
—
Imagine, if you will, that instead of reading this garbage, you’re enjoying an exciting night out at the theatre. You take your seat and, after a few minutes, the curtain rises – but something’s wrong. The actors look decidedly squat. Stretched out horizontally. Their faces smeared to almost double their usual width.
Come to think of it, the set also looks wrong – as if it’s reflected in a funhouse mirror. The whole thing makes you feel nauseous and slightly drunk. You look at your hand, which appears normal, then back at the stage – which still looks strange. You glance around the auditorium in distress, only to discover your fellow audience members – also normal – don’t even appear to have noticed. They’re all happily following the on-stage action, apparently oblivious to the bizarre optical illusion taking place before their very eyes.
Confused, you stumble out into the lobby where, as luck would have it, you bump into an usher. You explain what’s wrong and beg him to help. But he merely shrugs and asks: “Does it matter?”
Obviously, that’s a mad scenario. But that’s the sort of thing that happens in cinemas these days, when there’s only one projectionist looking after umpteen screens. The encounter with the usher actually happened to someone I know. And to answer the usher’s question: yes, it does matter. Because if your cinema can’t be bothered to show films properly, we might as well stay home and watch dogs blowing off on YouTube.
The best rant about aspect ratio you’ll read today. Aspect ratio pedants all over the world say thank you, Charlie Brooker.
(via byronic)
“These drawings are really my journals. I use them to explore whatever I find interesting, confusing, or upsetting on any given day. But here’s the beauty part—these private thoughts are filtered through the prism of moody children and blasé pets, disillusioned middle-aged men and weary matrons, among others. And so I get to work through whatever I am thinking about in a coded way. No one but me will ever know what the real seed of each image and caption was. So I can be as free as I want to say whatever I want, and no one can catch me. It’s great.”
—Bruce Eric Kaplan, This Is A Bad Time (cf.)
Search and Destroy
The Stooges
The Stooges - “Search And Destroy”
You might be a BAMF if you’ve got a Henry Rollins song tattooed on your back. You’re the King of BAMF if Rollins has your song tattooed on HIS back.
This song changed my world when I first heard it.
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
—Wendell Barry, “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” 1982, from Standing by Words: Essays (Saw this quote in my Tumblr feed this morning, broken up into verse, and titled “The Real Work.” The quote, like most quotes, is much, much richer in context.)
“
People pay to see others believe in themselves.
” —Kim Gordon (via magnificentruin)