If Only I Were Insane Enough To Remember It!
If I stay on tumblr long enough…maybe that’ll do it!
- The Zeros were a decade in which memes from the underground bubbled up into the mass media and took over the mainstream in a way I would never thought possible. Twenty years ago topics like secret societies and sacred symbolism were purely fringe stuff. Today, they’re kids’ stuff. Twenty years ago, superheroes and sci-fi were kid stuff- now they’re as popular with adults as with kids.
Of course, by the time a meme reaches the mainstream it’s often been drained of any meaning- certainly of any danger. But at the same time, the filtering power of the establishment media has been severely diminished, as the internet creates endlessly mutating microcultures, complete with their own secret languages and symbols.
All of which goes to show that the past ten years have been very interesting ones for those of us interested in looking under the skirt of consensus reality. So many strange memes are floating around out there and bouncing off the walls of pop culture, there’s always something to dig into and pick apart. So, let me tell you what flicks buttered my toast in this often remarkably-unpleasant decade, in ascending order…
- Now that the comics industry has overtaken film, its outstanding writers are starting to step up to the biopic bar. Subversive brainiac Grant Morrison is up next, with a dedicated documentary due in time for next year’s Comic-Con International.
- “He has an uncanny ability to tell stories that are both accessible and progressively avant-garde,” explained indie director Patrick Meaney, whose untitled Grant Morrison documentary, previewed in the exclusive clips above and below, will analyze the writer’s storied run for Marvel and DC Comics on standout titles like The Invisibles, X-Men and Final Crisis as well as more esoteric series like The Filth and Flex Mentallo.
- There’s a lot of ground to cover. Morrison has lived a very full life, from playing in rock bands to experimenting as a transvestite to becoming, like Alan Moore, a chaos magician. There’s a lot of fertile ground in his personality alone, to say nothing of his sometimes autobiographical comics. In the process, Morrison has become a counterculture icon primed for mainstream crossover.
(AWESOME. Can’t wait to hear Morrison spin some more crazy yarns on his life and work as he is a nutcase! Huge fan. Check out his great speech at the NY Disinfo Con on his alien abduction, chaos magic, life and what it’s about.)
- Scholars have often said that the Hebrew texts are the first example of written history. Earlier writing from Sumeria recorded myths (including the Flood story), genealogies, laws and accounts, but the Hebrews were the first to write a narrative history of their people. Before the “people of the book,” the common culture of a clan or tribe was formed exclusively by oral tales and images.
- Images are fundamentally different from words. Leonard Shlain, in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, lays out a theory about this difference and the impact it has had on cultural evolution. Shlain thought that writing stimulated left brain, linear, cause-and-effect thinking, associated with males, while a focus on images produced a more intuitive and holistic style of thought, associated with females.
- The “people of the book” crusaded against images, as their God warned them away from the “alien gods” of other people. The most interesting scenes in Genesis revolve around the struggles within the tribe of Abraham over images and other vestiges of goddess worship, for clearly these stories are about a people in transition. And this is where Crumb’s work becomes important.
- By rendering every letter of Genesis faithfully into images, Crumb has given us a blank canvas on which to color new meaning. Combining words and images together allows us to escape the fundamentalism of either one alone.
snuh:tehqueenisdead:kafuka:suicideblonde:mudwerks:
Dangerous Minds | Psychedelic Spiderman: Revolt in the Fifth Dimension
- Hey, remember that movie The Dark Knight? You know the movie that everyone saw but no one seems able to recall? The one whose IMDB board is filled with chatter having to do with everything but the movie? Is it because generally liberal-leaning superhero and comics fans are silently embarrassed about falling for what is essentially a neo-conservative propaganda film? It isn’t just iMDb- no one on any of the comics or movie sites I checked seems to talk about what is one of the highest-grossing movies of all-time, one that came out less than 18 months ago. Very strange. Usually, these kinds of blockbusters continue to resonate for a while after their original run, but not this film.
Why is that?
Is it possible the poor reception that greeted Watchmen (which is cosmically superior to TDK, IMO) is a hangover from critics and fans uncomfortable with having championed a film that celebrated torture, vigilantism, broad-spectrum surveillance and jack-booted stormtroopers marching in the streets? That depicted terrorism as simple nihilism, and cross-dressing, sexually-ambiguous nihilism at that?
Flaming Carrot Comics #1 - Bob Burden (1984)
Will somebody please start a fuckyeahbobburden tumblr? :) He absolutely is one of my favorites. His coffee table sketch book is something I need to pull off the shelf and review again. Too bad the Mystery Men sucked so bad. They should have just made a Flaming Carrot movie with FC, Sponge Boy and Screwball tearing it up (Tom Waits could have still done his thing too).
Thanks Uncertain and Pieto, glad you guys like this too.
First “Laptop” Discovered in Flash Gordon Comics | Mutate!
- Probably the earliest depiction of a communication device resembling a laptop has been discovered in an ancient Flash Gordon comics by Mende Petreski of Prilep, Macedonia.
- Browsing through his comics collection, Mr. Petreski stumbled upon a panel in Politikin Zabavnik weekly published June 14, 1974, featuring the forces of Ming the Merciless using a device which looks a lot like a laptop to talk to their leader.
I was hoping they were doing so well with the movies they would be able to stay independant, especially of a transnational corp like Disney.
