MELKONIS
Somebody get the cat.

Roby picks a limp cat out of a freezer.

The above is from the original ALIEN script by Dan O’Bannon. The image is from an original storyboard by Ridley Scott himself.

It was always about the cat.

“Let’s not talk about it anymore,” I said. “It gets worse and worse somehow. I wish I’d never laid eyes on the stupid book.” I remember his exact words then. “We can’t turn back the clock now. It’s in us. If we close our eyes, it will jump out at us in the darkness”. I didn’t know what the “it” referred to, whether he meant the story or evil or an amorphous presence, and I didn’t ask. By then I didn’t want to hear. At the same time, I was ensnared like a person in a horror movie who covers his eyes and then peeks.

The Blindfold, Siri Hustvedt

A segment from “On Screen!” looking at Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975):

San Francisco in 1905:

1906

What is that little thing?

I’m good at avoiding the trivial (yet am pretty good at trivia – go figure). Twitter brings hints that there’s a wider world out there – a mention of a footballer here or a pop star there. If what ever it is that they’re doing (besides shifting tabloids) explodes into something big enough to become a movie or get referenced in a (good) tv show then off I’ll go to Wikipedia for the context. I’m aware Michael Jackson died, but I’ve heard maybe four of his songs. I did actually buy the Thriller album on vinyl, but for the Vincent Price bit after seeing the John Landis video – still confused why they ruined a perfectly good zombie/werewolf short with all that dancing crap. Come to think of it I’m not sure I ever played the other side of that record.

My dad had a lot of Johnny Cash and Charlie Parker records.

But let’s get back to that little pixelated white dot. Little doesn’t mean trivial:

Descent of Phoenix with a crater in the background taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

The Reddit thread I spotted this on is worth a read.

“Although it appears that Phoenix is descending into the crater, it is actually about 20 kilometers (about 12 miles) in front of the crater.”

O_0

All this made me think of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Good to revisit that every now and again – Voyager 1 is too busy.

Next time you get bored of the tabloids or are about to complain about the weather just look up. You need really good eyes, but the imagination part is helped along a lot by some little metal things doing their thing on an entirely different planet. On behalf of us.

High five.

Fuck Mad Men.

A show about the only guys in the 60s who weren’t pulling guns on each other.

American comics circa 1979:

A generation using Robin as a role model. The horror.

2000AD the same year:

That’s how you grab a kid’s attention. I was seven years old when I started reading 2000AD.

And my favourite panels from The Judge Child Quest the following year:

The Joker was a fucking amateur.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I love living in the future.

The headline’s the thing, but feel free to burst your bubble with actual content here.

I worked in book stores for many years. Best job ever. Everyone should work in a good book shop at least once in their life. Writing tiny reviews for customers in store kinda got me into blogging in a roundabout way. I was interviewed recently and thinking back at the crap I used to pull in bookstores made me realise I’ve been playing with social media since at least 1999.

But what I wanted to mention here was book advertising – on the whole it’s a mundane business. Book store advertising? Forget it. I remember when a new Thomas Harris novel came out and one of my colleagues emptied the shop window completely, made and displayed a Hannibal Lecter mask and then arterially sprayed red paint all over the display and the window. The locals thought we’d been targeted by anti-something protesters.

I immediately thought of that when I saw this series of ads (1, 2, 3, 4) for Filigranes, a book store chain in Belgium. Here’s my favourite (click to embiggen):

The tag line reads Make your own movie: read a book. The irony is that Kafka Las Vegas should be a movie – or at the very least a heavy metal band.

I haven’t read Kafka in years. Gonna fix that this weekend I think. There should be a short made about a man turning into a bug in a Las Vegas motel though… don’t you think?

Carbon Black is an Englishman well known for not at all acting like one. Nellie Bly

In 1909 French industrialist, banker and humanitarian Albert Kahn travelled to Japan on business and returned with many photographs of the journey. Having already used his unique peace garden as an example of diverse but unified life he turned his mind to the power of photography. His journey and the sights he captured on film prompted him to begin a new project collecting a photographic record of the entire Earth. He sent photographers to every continent to record images of the planet using the first colour photography, autochrome plates, and early cinematographic equipment. Between 1909 and 1931 they collected 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 meters of film. These form a unique historical record of 50 countries, known as “The Archives of the Planet”. This endeavour and the resulting beautiful photographs and film were the subject of a BBC documentary series entitled Edwardians in Colour.

The archive is still in storage in Paris. Kahn died a ruined man and is now best remembered for the gardens he left behind rather than the dusty old photographs that are for the most part still locked away in his often overlooked museum. Meanwhile the exact art of capturing colour images using the same technique as Kahn’s photographers has been lost. There are, however, some beautiful examples of the results on Flickr.

In 1909 Kahn travelled from France to New York City via ship. The majority of passengers below decks were hoping to escape persecution and find new lives in America, but held on to centuries old beliefs and carried their superstitions with them. It’s on this journey that the story get a little curious.

Worried about the dangers that new life in America may bring and distressed by dime novel stories and rumours of the most rank kind, something was accidentally set loose aboard the ship. Originally brought about as protector whatever was released proved difficult to control. 16 people died before the ship came to dock in New York City.

By that time Albert Kahn had learned two things; the world was not as easy to collate as he had believed and evil does indeed exist. The only man he’d seen stand up to it was a British traveller with an unlikely name: Carbon Black.

In fact not only did Black face off against what the terrified crew were calling a golem, he scraped what was left of it off his boot, after a confrontation that left the rest of the ship’s contingent afloat in life boats, preferring the unknown dark water than the thing that Black happily met armed with only a single pistol.

The effect on Kahn was catastrophic. He’d been about to embark on a plan to enlighten the world around him, to once and for all show his fellow man that the far flung countries of the world held nothing for Europe to be wary of. He had in mind a grand exhibition that would reveal (and in colour no less) that we were all brothers under the same sky.

And yet before traversing a single ocean he’s been set upon by what he described in his diary as “a pure creature of darkness”. If one existed then there must be more. Suddenly his plan to send photographers out into the world seemed naive and worse still would obviously backfire as soon as his new technology caught one of these “beasts of the fantastic” in its stare.

It took him a week locked in a hotel room to fall over the solution. The Englishman who had so easily put down one menace had revealed himself to be some kind of mercenary. Kahn would hire him as trouble shooter for the many expeditions. As soon as the photographers ran into “something unnatural” then Black would be dispatched to dispose of it. And Kahn would document the destruction for future generations. A dark archive would be created that he would hide away until the world was enlightened enough not to be scared of such things…

And in the meantime his archive of light would speed on that happy day.

Extremely fictionalized events of Kahn and Black’s first encounter can be read in the now sadly very out of print ‘Carbon Black and the Unshaped Form’ (1944). Rumours and stories of Black’s exploits grew in a select circle of adventurers and academics, but the very real threat of a second world war soon dispelled what many deemed to be pure fantasy. By the time pulp authors such as Lester Dent were turning to these rumours for fodder for their own stories, Kahn was dead and Black was missing.

How a man born in a place so civilised could go on to live through so many fantastic encounters all over the globe only to be lost somewhere off the coast of Antarctica is a story that has yet to be told.

Over the last year I’ve been digging a little at a time through the history of Kahn and Black. Now after being in touch with the incredibly helpful people at the Kahn Museum in Paris I believe we may finally answer the plea scrawled in faded black ink by a ship’s telegraph operator. The message of unknown origin is now believed to be the very last words of Carbon Black:

Find me.

Note: This is obviously part of a much larger story, but also a little part of something far more important than the story of a man who may or may not have shot a Jiang Shi in the face. More to follow on all of this. But for now many thanks to the Moblog experts for helping me out with some coordinates for this post. Don’t forget to geolocate this entry.

Or How YouTube got its groove back (for me anyway).

These days I jump from one video platform to another and because it was Seesmic that first wooed me to the possibility of online video I’ve tended to ignore YouTube. I’ve just become convinced that this was a mistake. I did have a little alarm bell go off a while ago when I found out about this project to use a community to make a zombie movie. YouTube having a community was news to me. All I ever saw were a handful of good videos, a lot of mess and a truly anti-community inspired comment fueled torrent of badly spelled abuse. And yet here was Bryony tapping into her community on YouTube. I had to wait for Seesmic to come along and get in there early to find something similar.

One of several videos that I did first appreciate through YouTube was The Machine is Us/ing Us. I’ve been following Mike Wesch’s work since, as it taps into the reading I’ve been doing around Ken Robinson (I never bother linking directly to Ken Robinson’s website because ironically it’s hideous and a pain to use), the Network of Networks I’m involved with, the Cool Curve and a small large stack of notes I’ve been making. Today I saw a new video go up on the Digital Ethnography website and it’s a keeper.

It’s not short though. In fact it’s almost an hour long, but trust me. If you only watch one thing today watch An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Don’t be put off by the length or title. It’s important, funny and heart warming.

It covers the impact of YouTube and the importance of how we connect, the importance of Creative Commons and self generated organisation as the new model for a distribution network that we’ve created.

It also points out how all that money ($3.6 million) spent on Super Bowl ads was beaten by a guy in his basement in Kansas collaborating with another guy on the Ivory Coast for no money at all. This I think is key to what everyone involved in Web 2.0/New Media/Social Media is attempting to do. It’s not rocket science, it’s simply bringing the right people together at the right time regardless of geogrpahy and timezones, ignoring the traditional routes which usually hemorrhage money.

Mike defines media as the mediating of human relationships and that line alone made me happy to be working in this field. That he went on to talk about networked individualism and the importance of the invisible audience leading to context collapse was just gravy. This is really important observational work into a medium that is largely ignored, treated like traditional TV or just ripped off my marketeers.

Mike understands and more importantly manages to reveal the paradox that with online video everybody is watching at the same time that nobody is there, that the most private becomes the most public and how wonderful that can be. He also offers a very concise explanation of the ‘go die in a fire’ comment storms that put so many people off YouTube.

And despite the length and that this could have been a very traditional style TED conference video, Mike roped in his students and broke the talk up into endearing but important work culled from YouTube itself (and he even finds a way to allow his students some fun, extra credit and thanks).

I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result:

Crossposted on Network of Networks