The Dream Machine: A Posthumous Reminder of Perfection

The Dream Machine is a posthumous film by anime director Satoshi Kon, who has revolutionised cinema, computerised aesthetics, and our hearts with Paprika and Paranoia Agent. Having found out about its existence and its release that is due this year, my mood instantly shifted from a  6 to a 10. It makes me feel like a sun covered in silk and tigresses.

Satoshi devastatingly passed away of pancreatic caner at the age of 46. It is too sad to think of what he would have created in the next few decades. He has left enough of a legacy to be cemented as a cinematic genius for many centuries to come. If anyone has ever watched Paranoia Agent then they know what I am talking about. Seeing his work is knowing that art can transcend existence through the faculty of the imagination.

He let slip in an interview last year, that the film will feature no human characters. So far all we can do is speculate with the pictures released so far. I just feel a warm fuzzy nice feeling in my body knowing that there will be another masterpiece by Satoshi released on this earth. Who knows perhaps up in the heavens he will make some films. And send them down to use via a colourful bevy of angels and spinning clouds, that warp and shrink into a byte, flash on our screens, yes I know this sounds a lot like Paprika, I feel like I have lost a friend, and as I reminisce him I think of all his movies that breathe such life into me, which bring me past the dreariness of this world into his imagination. This is a place I would happily swoop this reality for any day. Imagine if we woke up and our world was re-fleshed with anime textures, we would brush our teeth with star struck, shiny teeth and look into the mirror into our spherical eyes, letting out a smile J

If you speak Japanese, there is an official website about The Dream Machine, with news etcetera at  http://yume-robo.com/ Meanwhile for the English speaking world who are waiting In anticipation I leave you with a trailer from Paprika. Goodbye Satoshi, you will be missed forever xx

Akira: Visions of a Future Past

When people think of Cyberpunk, alot of films tend to spring to mind, but there is one film that always makes its way onto the list. Akira is one of those types of films that is literally cooked in the fat from the genre in which it emerged. Akira is a very special and important film to the Cyberpunk genre as it not only conveys all of the conventions that make up the genre accurately, but it also manages to hone these characteristics and synch them with the world’s reaction towards a nuclear holocaust and Japan’s post-war economic revival. The realism that is brought to this movie, fused with the psychological and philosophical themes, truely allows for not only one of the most unique Cyberpunk experiences, but possibly one of the best cinematic experiences available.

Akira (アキラ) is a 1988 anime film written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo based on his hit manga. The film is set in a futuristic and post-war city, Neo-Tokyo, in 2019. While most of the character designs and basic settings were adapted from the original 2182-page manga epic, the restructured plot of the movie differs considerably from the print version, pruning much of the last half of the manga.

One of the most amazing things about Akira is how it presents revival as something that is synonymous with complete destruction. Otomo has no qualms about presenting man as the architect of his own demise. This is evident in the opening scene where the A-bomb kindly introduces us to the world of tomorrow, but amidst all of the chaos there is a promise of hope. Thankfully this is not ever fully defined, thus leaving the viewer in a position that they should always remain in (uncertain about the future). One of my favourite things about the film is how it manages to confront the rapidly accelarating nature of technology and how like a bomb, it can just hit the world completely out of nowhere. Even though the current threat of technology is more metaphysical, we must remember that our own minds are just as abstract as the technology that we now relate to and with. Inside this mode of thought there is a fear and a curiosity that not only makes this film vital viewing, but also constitutes to the processes that make us human.

It has recently come to my attention that there are rumours about an American remake of Akira to be released some time in 2013. I’m not even going to bother writing how I feel about this being even considered. What I will do instead is post a video that I feel summarises very well how I feel about the whole subject. Lets just hope that this is one of those films that remains in-development. It really would be a shame to see such a powerful film get tainted by the irony of America remaking a film, thats powers lie in how it uses Japan’s experience of nuclear attack as a tool in exploring a vision of the future.

A Brief History of the Evolution of Psychedelic Cartoons

Since the advent of the colouring pencil, perhaps even before, cartoons and narcotics have gone hand in hand.

As we can see from this mild example Betty Boop and a clown become hysteric due to laughing gas, this cartoon was later banned and perhaps this repression sewed the seeds for later drug-laced cartoons. In the next clip we see the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland an opium icon.

All this and the Sixties were yet to happen, the tripped out minds of a generation had failed to be influenced. I only intend to give you a snippet of the evolution of cartoon-narcotics because the spectrum is so broad and colourful, that an opiatic haze is the best impression one can inspect without a great deal of digging. I only have a trowel so this will have to suffice. 

For those of us who grew up with Ren and Stimpy even as our burgeoning child brains rolled and rippled as our gyri and sulci took shape, we could not help but cast some thoughts of introspection and wonder about the content of such a cartoon and consider how the mind-altered states the characters exhibited altered the state of our minds as they developed along Piagetian and Vygostkian highways. 

Eventually these minds grew up and some of them began to flex their creative cartoon muscles, and although the following two shows are less about the taking of drugs and more about the creative process that ensues. This cartoon was clearly drawn by the shaky hand of the junky and imagined by an LSD-soaked mind.

Enjoy the rage rainbow!!

Death Powder: “Is there life without death?”

After previously looking at the precursors to the Japanese Cyberpunk genre, I thought it was about time that I looked at the first of the core films in the genre. Death Powder is probably one of the most incoherent of the Japanese Cyberpunk films. All that is really evident is how it allegorically inspects the notion of how technology is eroding at the fabric of human existence and sooner or later will eventually lead to the destruction of mankind. What’s most interesting about this film is that it is the first of the core films in the genre and from its almost suicidal ambiguity it has helped in the spawning of a plethora of movies based in and around the genre of Japanese Cyberpunk. Personally I feel that the movies existence is an attempt at answering the question that the android called Guernica in the movie asks (“Is there life without death?”). Seeing as the film now plays an integral part in the formation of the genre it is evident that even though it doesn’t really answer any of the philosophical questions it is asking the very fact that they are being asked projected a standard for each and every subsequential film.

More info on Death Powder available @ http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/death-powder/

Egyptian Crisis

BREAKING NEWS:

As you may by now be aware, Egypt has erupted in an afternoon of protests and violent. Details are sketchy at the moment, but we have received the following rumours from our correspondent in Cairo, Mr L. Ulz.

·      Anti-government protests reached a head when the president Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak announced the government had spent over US$1.5 billion of public finances on a misjudged pyramid scheme.

·      Violence erupted after rumoured use of unprovoked police brutality. Police forces are in denile about the incident.

·      A brief statement issued at a government press conference confirmed that a curfew has been put in place in Cairo and other major Egyptian cities. When queried whether the army were being called in, the spokesperson announced “I sphinx so, but am not certain at this moment in time”.

·      Egyptian women have joined the protest by burning their ras.

More on this cisis as it develops.

The History of Casshern

Few people I know have seen the 2004 epic Casshern, but what has recently come to my attention is that even fewer people are aware of its origins that go back 31 years before its live-action counterpart finally came into existence.

Neo-Human Casshern (新造人間キャシャーン, Shinzō Ningen Kyashān), also known as Casshan, is an anime series created by animation studio Tatsunoko Productions in 1973, which was based on a serialization in Kodansha’s Terebi Magazine and Akita Shoten’s “Boken Oh” (Adventure King).

After a 20 year sabbatical Casshern was resurrected once again. Even though the series was now in a more contemporary style it still managed to hold on to some of the charm of the original series, whilst also interweaving more philosophocal dialogue between the frantic and colourful action sequences.

Casshan: Robot Hunter, known in Japan as Robot Hunter Casshern (ロボット・ハンター・キャシャーン, Robotto Hantā Kyashān) or simply Casshern (キャシャーン, Kyashān, romanized asCasshan in the official logo), is a 1993 OVA produced and animated by Tatsunoko Productions and Artmic. This series is based on Tatsunoko Productions’ 1973 anime series Neo-Human Casshern. Casshan: Robot Hunter was originally released as a four-volume series in Japan. However, the American publishers edited the four episodes into a single feature film for its English-language debut in 1995. In 2003, ADV Films re-released the four-episode series on DVD.

11 years after Casshan: Robot Hunter graced the world with its presence, Kazuaki Kiriya wrote and directed a film adaptation of the Casshern series. To this day the movie is considered one of the best attempts at achieving a live-action portrayal of Japanese anime. Apart from the style, the film is quite flimsy and often the narrative bends under the unrelenting pressure of the intense anime-like visual. In terms of cyberpunk cinema it is a must see.

In the wake of the positive response to the Casshern live-action movie and due to a sustained fanbase, in 2008 Casshern Sins was released.

Casshern Sins (キャシャーン SINS, Kyashān Shinsu) is a reboot of the classic anime series Neo-Human Casshern, produced by Tatsunoko and animated by Madhouse. It premiered in Japan on October 1, 2008, following a sneak preview of the first episode at Otakon 2008 in Baltimore, Maryland.

The series completely discards the continuity presented in the original Neo-Human Casshernanime series, in which Casshern was a cybernetic superhero battling the evil robotic forces of Braiking Boss in a post-apocalyptic Earth. In Casshern Sins, Casshern is presented as a cyborg subordinate of Braiking Boss who was ordered to assassinate the savior of mankind, and has thus doomed the Earth to ruin.

A manga adaptation had been announced recently and it was published in Jive’s Monthly Comic Rush Magazine.

How You Will Probably Die If You Don't Cop On

Most of us will spend a great deal of our lives imagining how we will die, contemplating different scenarios, different diseases and conditions. Most of these imagined scenarios will however be typically more exotic than the predictable fates that awaits us. The WHO lists ten of the worlds biggest killers as ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, lower respiratory disease, HIV/AIDS, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diarrhoeal diseases, tuberculosis trachea/bronchus/lung cancers, malaria and road traffic accidents. 51.2 % of all the deaths worldwide can be attributed to one of these conditions. However, when you think about it, those of us who live in developed economies are unlikely to die from malaria, TB or diarrhea, so as the incidences of the other conditions rise what kind of picture are we left with. 

Grimly enough the image above isn't far from the truth. In the EU two thirds of deaths are caused by circulatory diseases and cancer, much of these deaths are attributable to dietary factors like fat intake (specifically low-density lipoproteins), salt intake and alcohol consumption. When we break down the statistics a little more we see that 41% of these deaths are caused by heart attacks, strokes and other circulatory diseases, whilst the other portion of deaths cancer is responsible for the fate of 25% of us. I have used the word fate ironically so far, in that many of the bad choices people make, be it dietary, lack of exercise  or use of recreational toxins, they have determined their fate in the greater majority of circumstances. We are all consciously writing our fate everyday. If we examine a smaller subsection of the population, what should be the healthy cohort, we still find high levels of unavoidable deaths. Suicide and traffic accidents are responsible for killing the majority of 20-40 year olds who die young, with a greater percentage of males dying from suicide. My issue here is that once again people are dying needlessly, if people suffering from mental illnesses were given the right kind of support, they wouldn't have to resort to such drastic measures. I don't even want to attempt to assess the situation in the developing world because the situation there is just incomprehensible, no food = no life, that's simple enough but the socio-economic-political situation is horrifically (although needlessly) complex. I digress. My biggest issue with many of these deaths come about through poor education, ignorance (stubborn and empirical), selfishness and neglect, people live there lives by bad decisions. So many health systems in the developed world are literally clogged by the arteries of people who didn't look after themselves and now they want someone else to fix their mess, meanwhile people who are genuinely ill through no fault of their own are often dropped down the waiting list for burger-hearts and whiskey-livers. In addition to this so much money is spent on operating on these people, rehabilitation and drug treatments, money that could be invested into education or something more worthwhile.

I know this article reads like a rant but it's the only way I could write it (rage consumed me throughout the process). If I can leave you with one thing, you are probably going to die from a heart attack, a stroke or cancer, these are the statistical favourites. Why not do something about that now eat healthy, live healthy and don't become another statistic. Wouldn't it be great if we could turn around and say in 2050, that 50% or 75% of people just die from old age without having become an expensive and draining burden on society because they adopted a gluttonous and reckless life.  

Live long and prosper

MRHP's  Doctor Owl McCop Thefuckon

Burned Bath

It was three in the morning, the second day I move Galway, far far from my small but good-looking cottage in the foothills where I own one mean agroecosystem where I left behind the sweetest donkey a man could ever own, the darling ears would lap on me, curl my lips with lemons juice then flounce off into a nearby slope, oh and my wife and seven children too lived with me and remain there to look after my celestial home and belongings.

Of which I will reveal to you them in order of the most important first then descend to ones less so proud: My map of Eurasia, dated 1607 (my lifelong dream was to become a shepherd there, but sadly when I arrived for the first time, three nights ago, the date has expired on Eurasia and I can no longer live my dream but live something else, not a dream, but not bad) , my copies of Time Magazine (from which I learn all my English from), complete collection from 1972-1978, missing some issues from 1976, machete seven inches and three centimetres long, butterfly net, tweed jacket slight blemish on left underarm, my cans of ajiaco.(which is the nicest stew in the world made from potatoes, chicken, corn, avocado and herbs.) ,and finally the least favourite of my items I belong, the mirror which my wife’s parents gave us, to remind us of who we are,I hate what I see in it, the map is my mirror, that is why I want now to travel the world, and not look at myself and get depressed by how many lines are on my faces, chewing away at my man.

In Galway everyone I lived with in the Duplex was awake, as does a living vampires as Remy would call us proudly while eating grapes from her long sepulchre fingers. I wonder she could kill a man with them, not a Colombian man though, we are made from the toughest rocks and shells, and our guardians are the hardest mountain goats.

How do I say this next bit in English? I will try my best: Life guard jackets lifestyle croaked on nocturnal demigod remove from its shell. The film The Neverending Story had just stopped, which I thought was deceptive although I was looking forward to seeing some of the creatures in this film here tomorrow, we don’t have creatures like Falcor in Columbia.

So I headed to bed where my eyelids were nearly at a mutiny for they wanted to close. ( I like the way I am allowed to write the word mutiny if you write the word mutiny in my country, men take you away to a urinal)

The sounds of sparks lead me to believe that someone else was having a shower and they me too. Then the sound furious like Mount Vesuvius made us all pay attention. Curtain, towels and hand fleshed spatula of water were dispatched for action, and soon it was quelled beneath a silence, which beat up or broke good the hysteria of girl tears, maniac efforts to beat the fire with my big naturally arms and prayers to obscure gods of which I did not know of, sank down past gridded teeth, to the place of solitude and ruin, the bath plastic melted and vitiated, smelled of Halloween, a black hole oozed, then ashes covered us all in dysentery , like a spray of black crows fried onto cardboard plates and chucked down our throats. This was the first time I felt at home, under the ceiling of ash with people who had went through shit, tough shit.  

LADY GAGA - “CHANGING THE WORLD ONE SEQUIN AT A TIME”

An electric mix of musical pop-art, an elaborate display of rock and roll aesthetic and the meanest electro-burlesque sensation to throb through the massive vibrating dildo that is the music industry, I introduce to you, the acclaimed LADY GAGA.

As you may have gathered from my last post, I am a celebrator of the 80s as one of the most explicitly creative and equally whimsical epochs in social and cultural history. It was an era that lured us from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous, a time where bathos reigned over the culture industries. So why did we love the 80s? The answer is simple; it pushed us to get over ourselves. It was a time of satire and irony, the fashion industry deployed ‘shock and awe’ tactics, allowing little modes of escapism to seep into our everyday lives. Now, in a similar economically depressive and self-obsessive time, the 80s esprit de corps has manifested itself in the multiplicitous embodiment that is Lady Gaga, who beckons us to look at our pathetic, dim little lives and to electrify it with the escapism of art and aesthetic.

Since the music industry has always had its cock in our arses, there’s no wonder why we felt empty, emotionless and used for most of the 90s, just look at what they gave us, shit boy bands, shit girl bands, depressing lyricists in indie bands and scary rapsters, whose music was riddled with the hardships of real life. Needless to say, of course we had our triumphs in the music industry of the 90s, but for the most part it was shit and waaaaay to self-reflective. So we kind of felt a bit like cheap ass hookers, the industry got its bit, we took it hard, we faked orgasms of pleasure when N’SYNC came out with a new hit single, and then felt further degraded when they threw us a measly manufactured pop group from such shows as POP STARS, as a reward for our sweaty, sexual efforts.

So when Lady Gaga came rippling through the industry in a wave of ecstasy and controversial pleasure, it felt like the 80s all over again. With the mantra of “Why not?” of art and beauty and fuck-ups, and sexuality and satire, we had ourselves, at last, a genuine artistic freakshow that we couldn’t take our eyes off. Britney almost had it, but we knew her too well, it was as disturbing as watching your sister grows breasts and her exploits were just too...familiar. Gaga on the other hand arrived on the scene like a gyrating, sexed up avant-garde pornstar, so it was all groovy when the music industry stiffened its flaccid self up a bit, we certainly felt the tweak and boom the era of unfulfilling heavy petting and seedy massages were over, with Gaga here, we were all getting much more pleasure.

That is why we love her, our Lady Gaga. Who doesn’t love that which gives them a tingling pleasure in their nether regions? And while the industry vibrator is whizzing at maximum force, you simply can’t but scream “YES...MORE...YES...MORE..OH.YESSSSSS”, now can you? So sit back, stick on a porno and enjoy it while the battery life lasts, my guess is that she’s packing energizer, rechargeables.

WHY TODD DIMBLEMAN LAUGHED HIMSELF TO SLEEP IN THE NAUGHTY HOUSE

Get in the fucking naughty house you little brat, Todd Dimbleman.

Todd Dimbleman the child, head hung low like a sack of potatoes from a coat-rack, dragged his bare feet across the parquet. He opened the plastic door on his plastic playhouse. He had received it as a present sometime when he was much younger. It was a dream house. He used to venture out into the garden with his mother’s stewing pot on his head and collect the most exotic flowers his botanist father used to store in his old greenhouse. He used to clip the flowerheads, gather them all up in a great big wicker basket, every last one he could reach, and drag the basket back into the house, and decorate his plastic playhouse with his haul. 

Sit on the fucking naughty chair in your naughty fucking house you little brat Todd Dimbleman.

Todd’s playhouse became the naughty house the first time he stabbed his mother in the leg with a spike made out of hardened caramel. He had seen an awful tear on her leg earlier that morning after she had gotten out of the shower cursing her razor. He had stared at the jagged red line on her leg, before deciding that she needed to be penetrated by something so sweet and sticky to stop the blood from ever flowing from her again. She was baking something delicious for his botanist father at the time, a caramel applecake. When she turned her back, he took the wooden spoon with a dollop of golden caramel out of the hot pot, and stretched it out into a spike, watching it brown as it hardened. The edges glistened. And he stabbed his mother’s leg, right at the red jagged line.

Don’t turn your tiny fucking head toward me you little brat Todd Dimbleman.

His mother swore like a docksman. Todd Dimbleman hated the word fuck because it was much too short. He liked words multiple syllables like BOOGALOO and CATCHABUNGA, but his mother told him to

Stop speaking such fucking nonsense and learn to speak like a fucking human being.

Todd sat beside the window of his naughty house, but banned from looking outward. He stared at a tiny spot where he had mashed an azure petal on the plastic floor. This petal was the most exotic thing he had ever seen, barring the time he saw a bare-chested woman with tribal makeup climbing a wild palm some weeks previous on the television. This petal, such a beautiful colour! How wonderful! But he hated it too, because he only looked at it if he was in the naughty house.

His father’s face appeared at the window of the naughty house.

OK boy, I have brought you some words you might like to cheer you up.

His father handed him some words through the window (there was no glass). Todd didn’t look up but he knew where to put his hand to collect them. Each word was typed in black on lilac colored card. He slowly read them to himself.

HEVEA BRASILIENSIS

ANNONA MURICATA

DESMODIUM ADSCENDENS

When he turned to the next card he had a fit of laughter

PEUMUS BOLDUS

Todd Dimbleman laughed so loud his father became worried. When Todd did not cease his laughter after six minutes, his father panicked and tried to reach inside the naughty house.

Get him out of there! Something’s wrong. Oh no, christ, not again, please not again. I need help. Help! Help! Anyone?!

Todd did not stop laughing even though he could see his father was in a state of excitement, in fact, even if he wanted to he couldn’t stop. The word

BOLDUS

just got to him in an intensely comical way. It had been too long since he had spotted it last in his father’s greenhouse. The word was an injection.

His mother flew into the room on her broom and roared like a docksman. His father threw himself at the naughty house, reaching in with his muddied hands, fingernails black with dirt, trying to yank Todd Dimbleman out by his neck, but he was much too big to reach the boy. His wife tried to smash the naughty house to fragments with her broom. But no matter how hard she huffed and puffed, the house would not come down. 

Todd Dimbleman laughed himself to sleep that night as his parents collapsed with exhaustion around the naughty house.

Monkey Head Transplant

In 1979 a surgeon called Robert White attempted to transplant the head of one monkey on to the body of another. Watch the video below and have a think about this procedure. If such pioneering surgery could be effectively carried out on humans, someone perhaps in a car crash, who experiences severe trauma to their entire body save for their head, could have their head transplanted onto a donor body. What would be even more strange is that coupled with cloning, everyone could grow clones of themselves and then when the clone reaches the desired age lets say 25 your head could be transplanted onto the clones body, this cycle could be repeated every ten years. Of course there are neurodegenerative and central nervous system issues that are not being addressed here but essentially you could remain in a youthful body for a lot longer than the current developmental time frame dictates (let's ignore the paralysis for the moment). Even though your face may age, coupling this surgery with face transplants from the more youthful clone, then this issue can also be addressed to some extent. 

It's not the fountain of youth, but those pioneering monkey transplant surgeries may have been taking us closer to some sort of increased longevity. The question is should we thaw out Robert White along with his ideas or do we let ethics get the better of us? You decide. 

Living Video Games

Okay this is definitely a lot more exciting and interesting than water birth delivery games or other pregnancy related video games. A Standford researcher has begun developing biotic video games. Ingmar Reidel-Kruse has developed a game where living micro-organisms, for example, paramecia which are commonly found in the scum of freshwater environments, are the characters that the player controls. The researcher hopes that the games will lead to increases in education and awareness regarding bio-related topics as well as the crowd sourcing of laboratory work.

So what exactly are the games that have been developed, well for example, in one game PAC-mecium the paramecia are guided around to eat little balls, obviously this is based on the classic video game PacMan. In another game called Ciliaball which is a play on cilia, which are tiny hair like structures on the paramecia  that allow them to move. In this game the cilia are used to kick a virtual football.

The player uses a controller that is similar to a conventional controller only the controls are rigged to do things a little differently. For example in the game PAC-mecium, the player can change the polarity of an electrical field that is applied across a fluid chamber, this can be used to influence the direction that the paramecia move. In the game Biotic Pinball a chemical is injected into the mix and this causes the paramecia to swim in a specific direction. A highly sensitive video camera and microprocessor tracks the paramecia's movements and keeps tabs on the score.

In another game PolymerRace, which is similar to horse racing people can bet on a process called polymerase chain reaction, a laboratory technique where researchers can develop copies of an organisms DNA on a very large scale in a matter of hours. Several compartments carry out the process and people can bet on which compartment will produce the most DNA and cross the finish line first.  Now Obama and Clinton will have even more to gable on, hopefully taking their eye off the macro-stage.

The researchers ultimately hope that this will inspire a better understanding of biological processes and biology in general in lay people, citing the increasing influence that biotechnology has in our lives as something society at large should better understand. Reidel-Kruse predicts that other disciplines will adopt similar tactics in a bid to increase understanding and awareness in their respective fields. Having had a chance to play PAC-mecium I highly recommend to all you gamers and readers in general that you get out there and buy yourself a biotic video game. 

Flying The Nest For Christmas p.2

As my extended Christmas flight comes to an end, the time to compress my experiences into vague wandering metaphors has finally arrived. New Years came and went with a bang in Leicester Square and the journey to the display thought me many things. I found out that if you need to really urinate that a thorn bush with a junkie staring at your lad is probably the most discreet public urination place you will find. I also discovered that if drunk enough a bottle of Moët will help in masking the reality of a friend bleeding all over the banisters on the tube and in pacifying the danger of falling backward down the exiting escalator.  

After a Kettle crisp soaked hangover I started work on an essay. I took the occasional break that generally resulted in watching a pitbull doing a steaming shit, while its owner scanned the area to see if it was safe to abandon the excrement. My disinterested stares generally resulted in the collection of this waste.

One of the evenings we decided to go see a movie. Little did we know when purchasing the extremely expensive tickets that the screen would only be the size of a very large home cinema. As we drank from our vodka laced drink cup, we soon warmed to this homely environment and eventually our shock dissipated. That was until our neighbours joined us. The first wave found a small child and his mother sitting directly alongside me. They were close enough to smell the vodka fumes wafting from my cup and their reaction made me feel that they were not impressed. I decided to continue drinking, hoping that the secret alcoholic card would maybe lead to their mutual discretion. Then came the predicted only tall man in the cinema, who plonked himself in front of me, unfortunately this was only the beginning of seat-based awkwardness. Finally arrived two extremely obese woman, which resulted in everyone in the aisle not only having to stand up, but also to leave the row completely so the women could just about squeeze their bodies through the rows of empty seats until finally they reached the end corner. From here they proceeded to spend the rest of the movie passing huge sacks of corned goods back and forth. After viewing all of this I decided to act out the following image:

Facebook Fall-Down all Morning

All morning the F5 pushers of the world have been experiencing the backlash of the dreaded Facebook fall-down. This the people at Facebook have declared is due to the strengthening of their security procedures. These seem to have been made so secure that many users are either experiencing very slow connectivity or the site is just completely unavailable. Many have postulated that the issue may be a direct result of a mass exodus from Myspace, due to the recent information that News Corp may be taking it over quite soon. Whether this is in fact the case or if it is just a security/infrastructure problem, the issue seems to have only further highlighted concerns towards Facebook's thirst for private information and the manner in which it seems to be masked by an ethical unavailability that mirrors this mornings connection issues.

eCoupled Self-Cooking Soup and Light-Up Cereal Boxes

Last year I got very excited about wireless charging technology being confirmed as a reality for the domestic market. At the CES show last week the people at Fulton Innovations exposed their adoption of this technology and how they have managed to appropriate this to change not only the way food items are displayed, but also how we interact and engage with these items.

The following video not only demonstrates their wireless charging technology, but also gives us a demonstration of how they have managed to print this coil onto packaging. This is made visible through the light-up Cheerio box that they go on to explain not only lights-up, but offers a whole plethora of interactive possibilities. They give insight into these by explaining that when the product enters the home it can not only achieve this same effect on a similar charging shelf at home, but it also has the capacity to appear on your inventory on either your computer and/or any wireless device. From here you can catalog your items by expiry date and have access to things such as nutritional information.



This technology obviously appears to be ground breaking, lets just hope it doesn't become another site of limitless e-waste.

Alongside their light-up cereal box design, Fulton Innovations also demonstrated their unique self-cooking soup that works with their eCoupled wireless electricity. The aim of this Capbell's soup design is for the user to be able to pull a tab from their soup and press one of three buttons that decides what temperature they want it to be. Then after placing the soup on a eCoupled wireless charging unit their food will quickly begin to cook itself.

Although quite gimmicky, this application of eCoupled technology does find itself hitting on two very futuristic concepts, that if adopted by Supermarkets may just find themselves entering your life as quickly as the microwave managed to become a mainstay in contemporary eating culture. For this reason both the gadget heads and the obese would like to salute the people at Fulton Innovations for making the dream of self-cooking food a reality and for condemning diets to be distracted by flashing lights and app functionality.

Next up is a digital apple by Apple designed for the wealthy and the healthy ;-) :

Eat + Sleep + Brush Teeth = Math

What on earth was Time magazine thinking when they adopted the role of pseudo investigators linking mental illness and massacre? Doing this with such simplicity and naivety as to be shocking and sensationalist for such a Big Time periodical. It’s like using a calculator from the 1960's as opposed to a team of savvy agents and sexy forensic side-kicks. Stumbling across the article I thought I might have mistaken the report as a skit off Saturday Night Live. Here are the warning cues described by Time magazine so you can watch out for another Loughner.

Here is a list of so called warning signs for Loughner a student whom recently shot a     bunch of people in a supermarket, I find it hilarious:

1. For months, he showed a classic symptom of psychosis: disorganized thoughts and   speech. He routinely   made irrelevant and nonsensical comments in classes. On one test according to the Washington Post, he wrote, "Eat + Sleep + Brush Teeth = Math." On another test, he wrote, "Mayhem Fest!!!"

2. He showed another symptom of psychosis, or at the very least, an inability to function in social situations.  One example from the New York Times: he enthusiastically read a poem in class in which he discussed touching himself in the shower.

3. He showed signs of paranoia, telling a classmate that U.S. currency was worthless     and that the government was seeking to control people through grammar. He also         became interested in a concept he called "conscious dreaming" (a concept at the heart   of the mind-bending thriller Inception).

Haha and also 'In retrospect, it's easy to see the evidence that Tucson, Ariz., shooter    Jared Loughner was    mentally unstable. In his community-college classes, he would     laugh randomly and loudly at nonevents. He    would clench his fists and regularly pose   strange, nonsensical questions to teachers and fellow students. "A lot of people didn't    feel safe around him," a former classmate told Fox News.' hahahahahaha how many     people  can you say that about, more than twenty off the top of my head!

Everything that the article describes as outlines of warning signs, would be one out of every second person, that is to say 50 percent of people have a mental illness. Really? This article is going to prevent the next massacre...Not. There's more chance of Eat+Sleep+Brush Teeth=Maths becoming a popular T-shirt slogan for youths. Time Magazine+Math=Sleeping.

Stone Shoes - Trish Scott

Walking home the other evening I stumbled across an exhibition occurring in a derelict shop. The window sill of the shop had some printed black text that informed me that the installation was called Stone Shoes and was made by a women called Trish Scott. The piece consists of a video of some indeterminable "thing" stumbling strangely from out of shot into and through the shot and then back out of sight. As the figure comes into focus it becomes obvious that it is a person trying to walk in shoes made out of stones. What is most powerful about this sequence is the way in which this malleable creature causes its viewer to reflect. She uses this reflection to empower her unique approach to transforming the everyday from banal rituals of routine to something more...

As a constantly changing space I chose to return to her installation a couple nights after my initial encounter and make a brief recording of the nocturnal experience. Darkness seemed to excentuate the beauty of the piece and brought with it an eeriness that only further served to perpetuate the obstruction to the realm of the everyday. For those of you not lucky enough to get to see the piece the following footage will give a basic sense of it. Also, please note that the flickering on the television screen is a result of the recording (although I quite like the effect it adds).

In terms of influence for the piece, her website informs us that finding a large number of partially buried shoes in the land surrounding Cortijada Los Gázquez (Almeria, Spain) prompted her to test how shoes mediate the sensation and experience of walking. She also informs us that she used materials constitutive of different environments to make soles to walk through these same environments. This focus towards the very basic and primal act of walking synchronises with her unique approach to invading the everyday space and making it something more memorable, rather than each moment just dissolving into the next.

Attached is a link to her website for those who find this work of interest:

http://www.trishscott.org/

   

Homeless to Famous: more than just Ted Williams

At this stage almost everyone has probably come across Ted Williams, the man with the golden voice. A homeless man who was once a radio DJ, but then fell on some hard times. His recent rise to stardom has been meteoric to say the least, but how many other people are there out there who have been homeless and then have achieved celebrity and fame, far more than you think.

Halle Berry

Jim Carrey

Charlie Chaplin

Daniel Craig

Benjamin Franklin

Kelsey Grammar

Cary Grant

David Letterman

Dr. Phil

Jim Morrison (I think every one would have assumed that he was homeless at some point)

George Orwell

Joan Rivers

William Shatner

Martin Sheen

Sylvester Stallone

Hillary Swank

Jean-Claude Van Damme

The list is actually a lot longer and there are many more famous people who, at some time in their lives spent some time on the streets, in the back of a car, or in a cardboard box. So if you are feeling down on your luck in these recessionary times remember things can change. Spare change. Equals more change. Equals life change. Equals home. Just don't make the mistake and go around in a circle and end up homeless again. That happened to me once.

Negro Cake: Tackling racism in a dessert

I came in on a second hand jet with a lady friend (my new jet was in for repairs, the onboard Jacuzzi was kaput). I wanted a challenge, some danger with my meal. I wanted people to think of me not only as the greatest food critic since Gilbert Steinbeck but also a man of the people and liberation. I wanted to confront a racist restaurant and tackle their bigoted perceptions as well review their food as I was born to do.

So I arrive in Arizona on the clock of time, chalked three, a State so racist that it banned Martin Luther King Day and more recently created unconstitutional laws against Mexicans, anti-immigration laws of which Obama sued them for creating such a monstrosity on human rights. 

I chose the restaurant at random; little would they know who I am anyway, with their cultural poles stagnating in bile and puss.

Driving down a dirt track, I arrive at a series of buildings that could account for township. I see a faded red sign blinkering that says ‘restaurant’ yes the restaurant is called restaurant.

The waiter, or owner possibly, greets me with a sigh of relief ‘I taugh you were a foreigner or something but you got that undeniable god’s skin on yee...’ when I replied with ‘I am a foreigner’ he let out a guffaw drenched in diarrhoea, I imagined the particles of gooey brown shit coming together to form the noise of his chortle. He patted my arm in as strange way as almost to accoutre my skin with his testimony and then ordered me to a table at the very back of the restaurant under an insufferable lack of light, I felt like a flower wilting, photosynthesis failing, limbs derailed in all directions. 

I rested my arms on the table trying not to keel over. He served me up a steak without even giving me a choice of what to eat, ‘the best in Arizona, you’ll like it, gives a nice glow to god’s skin’.

I am glad I left my lady friend at the hotel, this was no place for her prettiness, only nastiness can lie here, I see some mosquitoes chilling near the kitchen door, which is a blanket hammered in with some nails. I wonder why they don’t have an actual wooden, practical door, maybe a blanket door is more practical in this climate, and anyway my concern is the food and fighting racism not to get distracted by blanket door origins. The steak is mild, not bad, as the steak goes into the dark of my mouth and down without any pretty arbitrary.  For I feel that knowing the man is racist that I cannot enjoy it.

Next comes desert, ‘some negro cake’ he offers smiling, this reminded me of the infamous ‘drunk negro cookies’.

I jump up snap his arm back, I feel like Malcolm X rising up from the ashes of racism, except if Malcolm X was white, and was brought up in aristocratic family rather than a slum in Omaha. 

Nevertheless I was impassioned, ‘Do you hear that?’ I looked into his trembling eyes ‘Wha-what?’ That’s Michael-fucking Jackson playing in your restaurant, a black man’s music is flowing through the air’, his rebuttal was met by my firm arms thrusting him against the wall ‘So you serve this filthy dessert in the name of bigoted racism yet you play the music of a black soul, so you’re a hypocrite.  ‘Now look here mista, I ain’t no hippo-christ, or whatever word you be using, Michael is white, you sir are a mad man...why are you attacking one of your own?’  I knocked him out in a rage. After that vindication of a knockout blow: Food Critic who fights racism ONE racist ZERO.  I went back to my lady friend and we got funky with some Michael Jackson songs. We celebrated with a proper dessert some forest gateau, yummmmmm!