Lady Gaga allegedly left “large amounts of blood” in a hotel bath. The eccentric singer reportedly shocked staff when she checked out of London’s lavish Intercontinental Hotel last summer and they discovered a pool of red liquid in the tub of her suite.

One housekeeper claimed the pop superstar was “bathing in blood as part of a Satanic ritual”.

She told website Truthquake: “Lady Gaga left large amounts of blood in the suite during a stay this summer. The incident was reported to the concierge, who was told to put it out of her mind.”

Other sources believe Gaga could have been using the red liquid as part of a “weird” stage costume or prop.

Read More: Independent’s website (cached version)

Chuck Berry. Photo: Roland Godefroy (CC)

You do? Well in that case you must be a Gee-Bee. Jim Fusilli explains for the Wall Street Journal:

It’s 1955 and you’re in a record shop. The proprietor puts on “Maybellene” by a newcomer named Chuck Berry. You’re enjoying it, but a fellow customer saunters over: “That’s nothing more than Roy Acuff’s ‘Ida Red’ with different words,” he says, pointing out that Acuff cut his track in 1939. “I wouldn’t call that original.”

Or it’s 1963 and you’re listening to “Girl From the North Country” from “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Someone says, “Dylan didn’t write that. That’s ‘Scarborough Fair.’ It’s on Shirley Collins’s ‘False True Lovers,’” he adds, referring to the 1959 recording. “Dylan put new words to Martin Carthy’s arrangement, that’s all.”

Or it’s 2012 and there is a multitude of young singers, songwriters and musicians trying to develop their own sound. They’re not quite there yet, so the music they make is still familiar to veteran pop and rock fans, some of whom dismiss them, often without reflection or musical expertise.

These naysayers among us demonstrate a kind of generational bias that can blunt a promising musician’s career. It can be summarized thus: “The only valid music is what I liked when I was in my teens.” They tend to be vocal about their disapproval and aren’t likely to exploit new methods of dissemination, such as downloading or using Spotify, to hear new sounds. When they come across new music, it’s usually pushed toward them by a critic or a friend, or they hear a snippet on television. Had they been around in 1955, or 1963, they might have dismissed Messrs. Berry and Dylan too.

Often aggressive and belligerent, the generationally biased—let’s call them Gee-Bees—rarely attribute their affection for the music of their youth to tender memories. They present their argument as perceived wisdom: Popular music was better then. For you to disagree is to reveal a deficiency on your part. Cite examples of excellence among today’s musicians and you too are dismissed…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

Psychopathic personalities are some of the most memorable characters portrayed in popular media today. These characters, like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, Frank Abagnale Jr. from Catch Me If You Can and Alex from A Clockwork Orange, are typically depicted as charming, intriguing, dishonest, guiltless, and in some cases, downright terrifying.

But scientific research suggests that psychopathy is a personality disorder that is widely misunderstood.”Psychopathy tends to be used as a label for people we do not like, cannot understand, or construe as evil,” notes Jennifer Skeem, Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Skeem, Devon Polaschek of Victoria University of Wellington, Christopher Patrick of Florida State University, and Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University are the authors of a new monograph focused on understanding the psychopathic personality that will appear in the December issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Read more here.

Allegedly, this is a picture of a Godzilla-shaped Christmas tree that appeared in the Aqua City Odaiba shopping mall.

Within minutes, it destroyed the mall.

So, in retrospect, it was a really bad idea …

First published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was destined to become the universally-acknowledged masterwork of vampire fiction, but it was not, by any means, the first of its kind. Stokers genius consisted not in having invented the modern vampire monster, but in the imaginative way he synthesized and expanded upon the ideas that prior authors had already been exploring.

One of these was J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose 1872 tale Carmilla provided a template for many of Dracula’s best-remembered characters and motifs, including the occult doctor (Dr. Hesselius), and the lonely Gothic castle set in a barbarous region of Europe. Many of the proper names in Dracula, in fact, are direct allusions to Carmilla’s characters and settings: “Karnstein” became “Carfax,” “Reinfeldt” became “Renfield,” and so on. Le Fanu’s protagonist, Laura, corresponds roughly to Stoker’s Mina; both are afflicted young women whose souls come depend upon their families’ efforts to unravel the vampire mystery.

Carmilla is told in the first person, from Laura’s point of view. She is a lonely Englishwoman who lives with her father and governesses in an ancient scholss in Styria (southeast Austria). After receiving word of the sudden death of a would-be guest, Bertha Reinfeldt, Laura and company gather on the castle drawbridge to admire a calm, full-moon night when an out-of-control carriage crashes in upon the scene. A weak, unconscious Carmilla is thrown from the compartment in the accident that ensues. Her “mother,” a mysterious noblewomen, professes to be on an urgent, secret mission, but reluctantly consents to leave Carmilla to recover in the family’s care.

Laura quickly recognizes Carmilla from a dream she had as a child; a dream of being visited in bed at night, and bitten on the shoulder. Carmilla, too, professes to remember Laura from a corresponding dream, wherein she awoke to find herself in an unfamiliar bed chamber, and Laura there. Quickly, they develop an intimate friendship, characterized pressings of hands, kissing of cheeks, and plenty of blushing.

[More at Victorian Gothic]

Courtesy of Brandt Hardin

From RockStarMartyr.net:

Pantera’s furious music was propelled by guitarist Darrell Abbott’s maniacal claws ripping across a Washburn fretboard. The music was aggression distilled, warfare on vinyl, the hellish harmonics of testosterone-pumped teenagers smashing beer bottles and crucifixes, the pentatonic expression of sociopathic sexual impulse turned loose on loose pussy, power chords and possession, amplifiers and alcohol, whammy bars and whimsical youth. Pantera was pissed. And yet, no one remembers the jolly Dimebag Darrell being particularly pissed in day-to-day life. Not nearly as pissed as John Lennon was, anyway.

Behind the lead Beatle’s circular granny glasses and tireless promotion of peace burned a fury unmatched by most metal enthusiasts. Lennon was pissed at his parents, pissed at his bandmates, pissed at his stay-at-home wife, pissed at Her Majesty the Queen, pissed at America’s war machine, pissed at the world for not giving peace a chance. Lennon was fucking hostile. But neither Dimebag nor Lennon were as pissed as the two pistol-wielding schizophrenics who made them into rock star martyrs, both on December 8, twenty-four years apart.

To be fair, John Lennon’s youth in England was marred by parental abandonment and random death. His sea-faring father left John in 1946 when he was only five, and his eccentric mother, Julia, left her son in care of his aunt Mimi in a house full of women. His mother eventually came back into John’s life a few years later—even buying him his first guitar—only to be run over and killed by an off-duty cop one sunny afternoon when John was only seventeen.

John took his personal pain and pissed disposition to the Liverpool College of Art, where he met the straight-laced Cynthia Powell, who would become his wife, and became best friends with the brilliant painter Stuart Suttcliffe, who for a brief time would become the musically incompetent fifth Beatle during their formative residencies in Hamburg, Germany.

In January of 1962, the Beatles signed a contract with their new manager, Brian Epstein, a closet homosexual Hebrew who immediately fell in love with the young John Lennon. Epstein’s savvy negotiations would see the barely-known Beatles become the biggest band in the world within two years, and that astonishing success would see Epstein become, in Lennon’s playful words, a “rich Jew fag.” Everybody wins until somebody dies.

The Beatles returned to Hamburg in April of that year, where they were to visit Stuart and his new wife. They were greeted with the news that Suttcliffe was dead. Coroners had found a brain tumor below an indentation in his skull—perhaps inflicted when a group of thugs attacked Stuart in a pub, or else by John when he kicked Stu’s head into the pavement for leaving the band. John fell into a somber silence for days, finally pulling it together to console Suttcliffe’s widow, and then resume his raucous rock star ambitions.

In July, Lennon learned that Cynthia Powell was pregnant. Rather than getting pissed and knocking her around, as he would do during jealous rages—or paying a £200 settlement for her silence, as Epstein had done for numerous others—John a sked Cynthia to marry him. Their son Julian was born in April the next year, two days shy of Sutcliffe’s deathday. Family life is usually a total cock-stopper for hard rockers, but unlike many aspiring musicians, becoming a father never stifled Lennon’s rise to ultra-mega-super-stardom. It didn’t slow his groupie-scrogging, either.

That year, 1963, Beatlemania engulfed the UK on the heels of Twist and Shout. These dazzling English chaps with their shaggy mops and spiffy gentleman’s suits rode to the top of the world on a wave of squealing pubescent girls. Twenty years later, Dimebag Darrell (then known as “Diamond” Darrell) would launch what would become the biggest, most aggressive mainstream metal band in the world. Of course, in those days the glammed-out members of Pantera dressed like, well, squealing pubescent girls.

✝✝✝

By all accounts, Darrell Abbott and his brother Vinnie Paul enjoyed a remarkably stable childhood growing up in a working class neighborhood near Arlington, TX. Their father Jerry was a musician, and fervently cultivated his sons’ ambitions to become rock stars. Their mother was no less nurturing, working hard at a factory to support her jobless boys’ hobbies.  By this point in history, rock n’ roll was just another pastime.

Darrell spent countless hours alone in his room practicing guitar licks while Vinnie hammered away on his drum set. Unlike many disturbed metal fans, the boys didn’t immerse themselves in hard music to escape from the irritating world outside so much as escape into the powerful fantasy worlds of heavy metal. While other boys went to school, played sports, partied, got laid, got jobs, and all that normal shit, the Abbott brothers continued to rock out at their parents’ house well after most kids had gone off to college and started careers.

Darrell prostrated himself before the guitar gods of his youth until the day he died. He gauged his musical progress by phlegm accumulation—while playing a particularly difficult lick, he would arch back and hock some nostril sauce over his shoulder onto his infamous “loogie wall.” Each thick splat signified another riff under his belt. Listening to the exquisite dynamic between Eddie and Alex Van Halen, the Abbott brothers wouldn’t be satisfied until they became Van Halen.

Pantera’s first six albums were recorded at Jerry Abbott’s studio near the boys’ home. Their father actually created a label for their first releases. Pantera’s early efforts were a dripping cheese sandwich on toasted metal: Metal Magic, Projects in the Jungle, I Am the Night, and finally, Power Metal, which was written by their original singer—who was a pussy—and recorded with their newfound singer, Phil Anselmo—who was pissed. Once Phil showed up, Pantera became what they were always meant to be: cowboys from hell.

Dimebag’s blistering riffs and Phil’s endless anger—at cops, Christ, corporate trendies, and the various cock-nozzles life will throw at you—propelled Pantera to the heights of Headbanger’s Ball and around the planet on multiple world tours. But it didn’t matter where Dimebag found himself—the world was his wet bar, every new face was a new best friend, and each concert was a hysterical joke for which a smashed guitar was the punchline. Darrell rarely found time to be truly pissed. Life was entirely too fun for actual fury.

✝✝✝

Courtesy of Brandt Hardin

John Lennon prostrated himself before many gurus during his life, in his own swaggering manner. Through absorption, projection, and continual metamorphosis, he became the most iconic guru of the revolutionary generation. Lennon became a hero wherever a hero was needed most.

The first waves of Beatlemania saw John Lennon: Sex Icon. He had watched Elvis get all shook up, and now it was his turn. One glance could unleash a spastic spontaneous orgasm—or at least, so it seems from the grainy footage. The Beatles were like sweat-soaked vibrators buzzing across the world. The teeny-boppers lined up in droves, panting, weeping, screaming, fainting, falling all over themselves to get just one inch closer to the sly, if agonized Lennon. Of course, pretty boy Paul McCartney got the lion’s share of adoration, and for the competitive Lennon that would never do.

Fortunately, no other Beatle had the nerve to touch his role as John Lennon: Rebel Icon. Sensible, traditional, down home decent folk balked at his observation that “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink … We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock n’ roll or Christianity.” Inflammatory statements like that ensured that kids would love him and parents would hate him, even if they wound up buying their kids more Beatles albums.

After turning off his mind in the mid-Sixties, he became John Lennon: Psychedelic Icon. Inspired by Timothy Leary’s enthusiastic writings and bombarded with a continuous supply of LSD, Lennon began dosing on a daily basis. The first few times were freak outs, but once he got the hang of it, tripping became his fast-track to enlightenment. The Beatles’ music shifted into another dimension. Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club became psychedelic staples. “Tomorrow Never Knows” and a sugar cube might take you across the universe. It wasn’t long before Lennon got burnt out on chemical mind expansion, though, and set out looking for a heavier trip.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a creepy little gnome, but his Transcendental Meditation cult briefly captivated the Beatles in 1967, and inspired the development of John Lennon: Spiritual Icon. This short period of navel-gazing and chanting the sacred Om was to be an eerily pivotal moment in the singer’s life. After years of abuse and alienation from John’s life of stardom, his wife Cynthia made the decision to leave John after she was pushed back by a security guard while trying to board a train for the Maharishi’s retreat in Wales. The Beatles went on without her. Lennon’s manager Brian Epstein was wary of the devious guru’s exploitation of his clients’ fame, but Epstein died of a drug overdose while the band was meditating at the retreat, so that was that. “Now you will be able to come to India with me,” the Maharishi told them, which they did. Lennon didn’t last long in India, though, what with all the mindless conformity, bland food, and accusations that the Maharishi had sexually assaulted Lennon’s fellow aspirant, actress Mia Farrow. When the guru asked why he was leaving, Lennon replied, “If you’re so cosmic, you should know.” Lennon’s spiritual quest would not end there, however, as he would soon find himself kneeling at the Goddess’ feet.

John met Yoko Ono at one of her art shows at the same Indica bookshop where he had discovered Timothy Leary’s manual The Psychedelic Experience. He later said that lightning struck immediately, creating John Lennon: Pussy-whipped Icon. After a bizarre courtship in which the witchy Yoko basically stalked Lennon at his home and wedged herself between him and his already estranged wife, the two finally consummated their love. The day before, Lennon had held a meeting with the Beatles and core members of the Apple Corps, where he proclaimed with no hint of humor, “I’ve got something very important to tell you all. I am Jesus Christ come back again. This is my thing.” Yoko became his Mary Magdalene with which he could work on half-baked conceptual art projects, record bizarre noises that barely resemble music, release album covers and photo shoots displaying their fig-leafless flabby asses, abandon his band, his family, and his manhood, and of course, do up massive amounts of heroin.

By the end of 1969, Woodstock had made people believe in the power of music to create peace, Charles Manson had been inspired by The White Album to slaughter of Sharon Tate and friends to start the race war, Altamont had called all possibility of peace into question, the draft had been reinstated for the Vietnam War, and the Beatles had called it quits with extreme animosity, after less than a decade together.

With his leftist lover now permanently attached, he became John Lennon: Revolutionary Icon. The couple moved to New York and met with the Yippies to lend a hand in stirring up the shit. They wore bags during interviews to subvert the prejudices associated with race, beauty, and of all things, hair length. After marrying, they held a highly publicized “Bed In” as an eccentric “commercial for peace.” John took Yoko’s last name, becoming John Oko Lennon, and began calling his wife “Mother.” He wrote cynical songs about working class heroes, hopeful songs imagining no religion, countries, or possessions, provocative songs about women being the niggers of the world, doubtful songs about not believing in Hitler, Jesus, Kennedy, Kings, or Elvis, desperate songs asking people to just give peace a chance.

They projected the image of perfect soul mates, inspiring people who had given up on love to open their hearts. But in 1973, John took some time off from the marriage. He moved out of the house, got wasted every night, and perhaps most importantly, he started banging his twenty-two year-old personal assistant, the petite Asian May Pang—all at Yoko’s insistence. After a year and a half of belated bachelorhood, he crawled back to Yoko with his tail tucked between his legs. In 1975, Yoko gave birth to Sean. They both retired from public life to raise their son, and the new father settled into John Lennon: Family Man Icon for the last five years of his life.

Three weeks after the release of their comeback album, Double Fantasy, John Lennon signed a copy for a disgruntled fan waiting outside the Dakota apartment building in New York. A few hours later, that same fan shot him dead. The signed copy is presently on sale for nearly one million dollars.

✝✝✝

Dimebag Darrell’s story isn’t nearly as complicated or convoluted. The details of his life are scant compared to someone like Lennon, whose every burp and fart was documented and filed away, but by all appearances, life was really quite simple for Dimebag. He celebrated Halloween like it was New Year’s Eve, and approached life like every day was Halloween. Special occasions called for a drink, and every moment was a special occasion. If you were invited, you had to drink, most likely a black tooth grin (two shots of whiskey and a splash of cola.) And it didn’t matter who you were, everyone was invited.

If he didn’t have a guitar in his hand, Dimebag had a drink or a bottle rocket ready to blast it in your face. He was a tireless prankster. If he caught you asleep, you were canvas. If you were looking the other way, you were a target. If you took yourself too seriously, like the time he stumbled across tedious guitar god Yngwie Malmsteen at a hotel and had his roadie accost him with a bag of donuts (“No, I don’t like donuts! I don’t like donuts!”), you were a piece of performance art for his home video collection. One of his posse’s finest productions was short skit in which a roadie gets his hand smashed off by a road case and stolen by a random passerby. Had he not been so engrossed in music, Dimebag may have been an America’s Funniest Home Videos contender.

First and foremost was family. Dimebag was fiercely dedicated to his brother, Vinnie Paul. When Dave Mustaine left Metallica, he offered Dimebag the spot as lead guitarist in Megadeth. Darrell agreed, on the condition that his brother would be the new drummer. But Megadeth already had a drummer, and Dimebag had better songs to write, anyway.

Whenever Darrell came home to Texas from touring, the first thing he did was have a drink. The next thing he did was visit his mother and pay off her credit cards. Even after he had earned a small fortune, Dimebag’s home was never more than a few miles away from the house he grew up in, which was just a few miles from his father’s recording studio. Pantera’s first six albums were recorded with his father, and the seventh, Far Beyond Driven, was recorded with another producer at their father’s new studio in Nashville, TN. Dimebag never tired of familiar places. His love life was no exception.

Darrell met Rita Haney at the age of eight when she kicked him off of his bicycle. They remained friends until they were teenagers, when he made his first move. They never looked back from that kiss, and were joined in common law marriage until the day he died. By all accounts, Rita never slowed Dimebag down. At the very least, she never asked him to wear a fucking bag during interviews. If Dime wasn’t partying at home or playing onstage, he was doing both at a strip club. How many women Dimebag slept with is not a matter of public record—it could have been one, it could have been one thousand. Considering the typical road rules of the rock star fraternity, one is inclined to believe the latter. A gentleman does not kiss and tell, but it’s doubtful that Rita would care if he did either.

When the band settled into their final four-piece—Phil, Dimebag, Vinnie, and Rex—they shed their girly outfits for regular street clothes. Pantera’s true debut was Cowboys from Hell in 1990, and it blew up like a car bomb. Vulgar Display of Power had twice the blast radius, and 1994’s Far Beyond Driven remains the most aggressive album to ever chart at #1. Any pissed off kid who didn’t want to be pissed alone gathered around Pantera. Their message was blood simple: Fight for your friends and fuck up your enemies.

Phil Anselmo wrote all of the lyrics, but of course, Dimebag sang along to every song. The message flowed through him. Phil was an archetypal warrior male, furious at the world. His words aimed the machine gun and Dimebag fed him the gain-heavy ammunition. Fuck your parents, fuck your girlfriend, fuck the cops, fuck their government, fuck the Christians, and on a bad day, fuck the Christ they stood for. Pantera’s sound was as provincial as Dimebag’s drawling Texas accent, as Southern as the Confederate flag on his custom Washburn, as damaging as the black tooth grins soaking into his liver. Funny thing is, Dimebag never stopped smiling. Everything was a laugh.

While the trials must have been many, Dimebag’s biographies only describe three traumatic experiences in his life. The first was the death of his mother, who succumbed to cancer in 1999. The second came after 9/11, which left Pantera stranded in Ireland for two weeks. Phil had been struggling with heroin addiction for years, exacerbated by degenerating discs in his spine. The tension was mounting over his erratic behavior. When the band arrived back in the States, they went their separate ways but never came back together. In 2003, they finally announced the break up of Pantera. The Abbott brothers had become the “enemy” that Phil was so intent on fucking.

So far as Dimebag was concerned, Pantera and their road crew were family, thick as blood. Nothing could hurt him like the dissolution of his tribe. The Abbotts formed a new band, Damageplan, but had fallen from playing packed arenas to filling small clubs. “The highs and lows of rock n’ roll,” was all the bitching Dimebag would indulge. To make matters worse, a war of words continued in the press between Anselmo and the Abbotts.

In December of 2004, Metal Hammer published an ominous interview with Phil Anselmo in which he unleashed his fury:

“[W]hat comes around obviously goes around, and that is definitely something that is a very powerful force in my life…Cycles on top of cycles. Revenge on top of revenge. I suggest no one do me wrong…Things don’t go so well for them…And I lift not a finger…”

When the subject moved on to the Abbotts, Phil said:

“[Dimebag] would attack me vocally, and just knowing that he was so much smaller than me, I could kill him like a fucking piece of vapor…He knows that and the world should know that and so, physically of course, he deserves to be beaten severely…

“I was…a unique, unbelievably magnetic front man…I have a devoted following that would do anything for me, anything that I say.”

One week later, a crazed fan jumped onstage and gunned Dimebag Darrell down as well as a body guard, a stagehand, and a fan, before being shot by Officer James Niggemeyer. Talk about unfortunate timing.

✝✝✝

Happiness is a warm gun. So heavy in the hand. So easy to pull the trigger. One flick of the finger makes a tiny hole. God-like power. Any idiot can do it.

Nathan Miles Gale grew up in small town Ohio. He was batshit crazy, and pissed as all hell. He believed that Mike Judge was watching his every move, basing Beavis and Butthead off of his pathetic life. He also believed that the guys in Pantera were up to the same tricks. He listened to their music so much that the songs became his own. They were stealing his lyrics for their songs. Why wouldn’t anyone else understand that?

He saw menacing faces hovering above his bed at night. Their voices taunted him, called him a homosexual, told him to hurt people.

Nathan enjoyed drugs. He smoked dope, dropped acid, ate pills, snorted coke. When the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, Nathan was alone in thinking that Marilyn Manson was behind the attacks. He joined the Marines at nineteen, but was discharged when it was learned he was schizophrenic. He moved into an apartment next to his mother. In December of 2002 she bought him a 9mm Beretta. Two years later, he took it to a Damageplan concert at Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio to find Dimebag Darrell and settle the score.

Mark David Chapman was born in Texas, but went to school in Georgia outside of Atlanta. He traveled the world from there. He also smoked dope, dropped acid, ate pills, snorted coke, and became a born again Christian. He was also batshit crazy, a god in his own mind, ruling over the voices which he called the Little People.

After cheating on his fiance, he decided to go to Hawaii where he would kill himself. He was committed to a mental facility there, but was so liked that he was hired on part time after his release. He eventually married a Japanese-American woman, just like John Lennon. He listened to Lennon’s music obsessively, just as he read The Catcher in the Rye. After reading a book about Lennon’s lavish lifestyle in New York, he was extremely pissed. He was indignant that Lennon would arrogantly disavow Jesus. And how could John Lennon: Revolutionary Icon tell people to imagine no possessions and yet live as a millionaire? He told the Little People that he would kill John Lennon. They begged him not to, but his mind was made up. The Little People fell silent.

After two previous attempts were aborted in last minute panic, Chapman arrived in New York on December 6, 1980. The last thing he did before finding John Lennon was buy yet another copy of The Catcher in the Rye, in which he would write: “This is my statement” signed—Holden Caulfield. He left the book in his hotel room, but brought a copy of Double Fantasy and a loaded .38 with him.

By demons be driven.

✝✝✝

John Lennon gave his final print interview to Rolling Stone the day Mark David Chapman arrived in New York, but it was never published until thirty years after his death, one year ago. Many people claim that Lennon had shown foreknowledge of his death, and this interview shows an eerie prescience that makes one wonder if Yoko’s nutty New Age ideas of cosmic connections were really that far-fetched, though it raises a number of questions about the couple’s belief that projecting one’s thoughts and intentions can create one’s reality.

“They only like people when they’re on the way up,” Lennon told Jonathan Cott, “and when they’re up there, they’ve got nothing else to do but shit on them. I cannot be on the way up again. What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I’m not interested in being a dead fucking hero….So forget ‘em, forget ‘em.”

© 2011 Joseph Allen

To see the full collection of the sanctified dead, visit RockStarMartyr.net

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth “spreads resistant messages despite powerful mechanisms of top-down control,” which is ultimately a more empowering message than what you get from searching “cyberpunk” on Google Images. (”Note, if you will, how many topless, pantsless, or pigtailed schoolgirls you see here.”) But even Gibson himself once argued the cutting-edge of cyberpunk is too unfamiliar to be defined.

In fiction and in reality, medicine is designed and set up to operate with the best of intentions, to eliminate pain and disease and the things that push us toward mortality. In theory. In practice, we know that there are holes in this theory. But for all the problems in the reality of medicine, at least we don’t have to worry about these 6 fictional drugs, which were designed to make the world a better place, but failed in all types of spectacular ways.

1. Altruizine from “Altruizine” by Stanislaw Lem

Unintended Side Effect: It makes people too altruistic.

Lem, one of the most widely-read sci-fi writers in the world, wrote a short story within his collection The Cyberiad about Altruizine, a metapsychotropic drug that causes the user to feel the pains and emotions of others within a radius of fifty yards.

According to its discoverer, Altruizine

“will ensure the untrammeled reign of Brotherhood, Cooperation and Compassion in any society, since the neighbors of a happy man must share his happiness, and the happier he, the happier perforce they, so it is entirely in their own interest that they wish him nothing but the best. Should he suffer any hurt, they will rush so help at once, so as to spare themselves the pain induced by his. Neither walls, fences, hedges, nor any other obstacle will weaken the altruizing influence… We assume no responsibility for results at variance with the discoverer’s claims.”

The story, which has a full title of “Altruizine, Or a True Account of How Bonhomius the Hermetic Hermit Tried to Bring About Happiness, and What Came of It,” is about a robotic engineer who creates the drug and sends Bonhomius the Hermit (who is eager to help others) into society to try it out. What happens is people start experiencing things like the birthing pains of a cow, while others run into a newlyweds’ house to experience their new pleasures vicariously…

[continues at Publishers Weekly]

Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s slurring, incoherent “singin’ rappin’” rhymes hit the mic so hard, you have to wipe oozing spittle off your face after listening to his deranged tracks. He spoke the tough truth from the mean streets, delving into the dark crevices of ghetto crackhouses and bitch’s booties, coming out the other side covered in doodoo brown and flashing a steel grille grin all the while. Some believe that the big “G” government” took notice and were highly pissed about it.

Raised in the housing projects of Brooklyn, ODB broke out with the “world domination” scheme masterminded by his cousins, RZA and GZA, whose hip hop exploits are succinctly described by Dirty’s biographer, Jaime Lowe:

“The foundation of Wu-Tang is in its lore, its urban mythology, its appropriation of kung fu, chess, Buddhism, Islam, bible studies, cartoons, comics, Staten Island; anything they came across was woven into an intricate web of culture and identification and a constructed community that bordered on cult. They made themselves a world when the projects didn’t provide. And they sold that world to this other world (a primarily suburban one) in rhymes”

During the 1998 Grammy Awards, Ol’ Dirty Bastard stepped all over singer/songwriter Shawn Colvin’s shining moment when he stormed the stage to declare the Wu Tang Clan’s noble purpose to the world:

“I don’t know how ya’ll see it, but when it comes to the children, Wu-Tang is for the children. We teach the children.”

The day before, MTV broke the news that Ol’ Dirty Bastard had witnessed a gruesome car wreck in New York and immediately rallied his homies to lift a vehicle off of four year-old Maati Lavell, whom he reportedly visited in the hospital during her recovery. Perhaps he imparted the same sort of Nation of Islam-inspired fatherly advice that he gave during his relatively lucid if typically rambling “barefoot in Brooklyn” interview:

“’The black man is God’ … This is for the children … To all my little bastards out there, my bad bastards, keep being bad, just make sure you get a good education in school. You ain’t gotta tell yo’ teacher off, tell yo’ teacher off with education…Bomb his ass! Kno’m’sayin’? White devil muthafuckas … Yo, but um, no, when I say white devil, I’m just sayin’ that, you know, you got some good devils, you got some bad devils, just like you got some good black men, you got some bad devil black men, kno’m’sayin’, ’cause those black man is God, we know that, the white man come from the black man, so, that’s what created the devil, so we know that — Yo, where Panther wit that get high? …”

Aside from the millions of youngsters who bought Wu-Tang’s albums, Ol’ Dirty sired thirteen seeds of his own, who were introduced to the world during an MTV News segment in which they rode in a limousine with their mother and father to collect food stamps. Typical white devil middle-class Americans might think the rapper was an enigma for taking government assistance after receiving a $40,000 advance from his record company, but Dirty’s reasoning seems obvious enough:

“Why wouldn’t you want to get free money?!”

Considering the amount of dough he would drop on defense attorneys over the next few years — including OJ Simpson first lawyer, Robert Shapiro — it’s clear that ODB needed all the cash he could get.

Wu-Tang Forever was released in 1997 and sold over 600,000 copies on its first day and over 4 million by year’s end. The Ol’ Dirty Bastard had already seen his 1995 solo album Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version earn a Gold certification, and with the release of Wu-Tang Forever he was flush with money and “lookin’ for new girls to put babies in.” He took on the moniker “Big Baby Jesus” and launched a new line of clothing. He bought a new grille with gleaming fangs. He also incinerated hard cocaine like he had to burn the evidence.

Given his outspoken suspicion of “the Government,” I imagine that more than one hub got sucked down in one lung-full for fear that the shadowy agents peering back through his cracked motel blinds would soon kick down the door. ODB’s views on the Government went well beyond the persecution of drug users, though, as he explained to TRL viewers across the world in 1998:

“Everybody’s scared of the Government, kno’m’sayin’, because they killed Tupac, and they killed Biggie Smalls. I don’t care what y’all say, that’s my seein’…”

The crowd laughed, but Jesus wasn’t joking.  Carson Daily must have known that the veil had been torn.  A ghetto star had just stated on national television that the Government assassinated two high profile hip hop stars, presumably to keep them from uniting black people against the system.  Could there be a more sure-fire way to join them?  But Big Baby Jesus (aka Osirus [sic], aka Dirt McGirt) was unafraid.  He had provided a safe place for these martyr’s souls to occupy, as he explained to a Swedish interviewer during Wu-Tang’s world tour:

“Notorious ain’t dead, Tupac ain’t dead, they exist within me … they came to me and said, ‘Dirty, Dirty, wake up, wake up, yo man.’ I said, ‘Well come on in!’

“So they not dead. They live in me now, you know, they right here … that’s why they call me Osirus…’cause I went to the next dimension … you see, I already mastered the human lessons … I had to go to the other dimension where it’s all thought, you know, we call it the Land of Nobody … Tupac is right here, and Biggie Smalls right here, they just on my shoulders, you know, you just gotta see ‘em …”

Is that why the authorities were constantly harassing ODB to the end of his days? Perhaps the Government was trying to capture and silence the incorporeal hip hop entities that It had endeavored so stringently to snuff out. Why don’t other people see it?  I mean, think about it, man. Connect the dots. Open your eyes. Read between the lines. See through the smokescreen. Freak the fuck out.

Read the rest at RockStarMartyr.net

Illustration: J.J. (CC)

Via ScienceDaily:

A new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, published online October 26 addresses the influence of age-related stereotypes on memory performance and memory errors in older adults.

Ayanna Thomas, assistant professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab at Tufts University, and co-author Stacey J. Dubois, a former graduate student at Tufts, set out to investigate how implicitly held negative stereotypes about aging could influence memory performance in older adults.

Thomas and Dubois presented a group of older and younger adults with a list of semantically related words. A sample list participants would be presented with would be words associated with “sleep,” such as “bed,” “rest,” “awake,” “tired” and “night.” Though the word “sleep” itself was not actually presented, both the older and younger adults falsely indicated that they thought it had been included in the list, older adults more so than younger adults.

“Older adults are more likely to falsely recall these unrepresented words than younger adults. We investigated whether we could reduce this age-difference in false memory susceptibility by reducing the influence of negative stereotypes of aging,” said Thomas.

Read more here.

Imagine that you wake up one morning, sit at your computer, and you are bombarded with links to a developing story from a major news outlet: Stephen Hawking, by making novel use of Cambridge University’s new quantum supercomputer to analyze data from SETI’s telescope array, has discerned that the universe is awash with signals from intelligent life. It reads like a regular science story, at first, but soon it is revealed that Hawking and his colleagues have tapped into an extra-terrestrial television transmission, and are even now watching, breathless, as the first, dream-like images of alien civilizations display themselves on the Q-computer’s tiny monitor.

You and your friends refresh your browsers compulsively, talking over each new description that emerges of strange alien races and the exotic landscapes they inhabit, as gleaned from upon the wacky sitcoms and low-budget reality shows that they are indiscriminately beaming into space. Then, questions are raised, skepticism emerges. You begin to have doubts. Eventually, you realize that you have been taken in by a clever hoax—you ought to have known better than to trust Fox News, after all—but despite the deception, you find that you cannot help but appreciate how, for one shining moment, people everywhere had set aside their petty rivalries and believed in marvels from above.

Such is how the people of New York City must have felt during the summer of 1835 when the New York Sun published a series of articles describing the startling lunar discoveries that had recently been made by the famous astronomer John Herschel from his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. Using cutting-edge “hydro-oxygen magnifiers,” Herschel had developed a powerful new telescope that could achieve an astounding magnification of 42,000x—enough to resolve objects on the lunar surface as small as 18 inches in diameter—and project the images onto the wall of his observatory. Purporting to be a reprint from a supplement to the (non-existent) Edinburgh Journal of Science penned by Herschel’s assistant, Dr. Andrew Grant, it contained just the right mixture popular science buzzwords and technical minutia to render itself plausible.

The first images to resolve themselves onto the wall of Herschel’s observatory were of basaltic rock, and then, tellingly enough, a poppy field. The telescope next swept over lunar forests, populated by what looked like massive yew trees, by beaches of “brilliant white sand, girt with wild castellated rocks, apparently of green marble,”and clusters of resplendent crystalline spires and pyramids, lilac in hue. Finally, it came to rest on an oval valley, surrounded by crystallized hills of “purest vermilion,” with cascading waterfalls pouring from their cliffs, where they discovered, nestled in among its lush trees and vegetation, a herd of diminutive lunar bison…

[Full Article at Victorian Gothic]

It’s fascinating to read an article from eight years ago and feel that it was truly another era. Via the New York Times, Rob Walker’s piece “The Guts of a New Machine” examined the hype surrounding the cutting-edge devices known as portable mp3 players:

Two years ago this month, Apple Computer released a small, sleek-looking device it called the iPod. A digital music player, it weighed just 6.5 ounces and held about 1,000 songs. There were small MP3 players around at the time, and there were players that could hold a lot of music. But if the crucial equation is ”largest number of songs” divided by ‘’smallest physical space,” the iPod seemed untouchable. And yet the initial reaction was mixed: the thing cost $400, so much more than existing digital players that it prompted one online skeptic to suggest that the name might be an acronym for ”Idiots Price Our Devices.” This line of complaint called to mind the Newton, Apple’s pen-based personal organizer that was ahead of its time but carried a bloated price tag to its doom.

Since then, however, about 1.4 million iPods have been sold. (It has been updated twice and now comes in three versions, all of which improved on the original’s songs-per-space ratio, and are priced at $300, $400 and $500, the most expensive holding 10,000 songs.) For the months of July and August, the iPod claimed the No. 1 spot in the MP3 player market both in terms of unit share (31 percent) and revenue share (56 percent), by Apple’s reckoning. It is now Apple’s highest-volume product. ”It’s something that’s as big a brand to Apple as the Mac,” is how Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, puts it. ”And that’s a pretty big deal.”

Of course, as anyone who knows the basic outline of Apple’s history is aware, there is no guarantee that today’s innovation leader will not be copycatted and undersold into tomorrow’s niche player. Apple’s recent and highly publicized move to make the iPod and its related software, iTunes, available to users of Windows-based computers is widely seen as a sign that the company is trying to avoid that fate this time around. But it may happen anyway. The history of innovation is the history of innovation being imitated, iterated and often overtaken.

Whether the iPod achieves truly mass scale — like, say, the cassette-tape Walkman, which sold an astonishing 186 million units in its first 20 years of existence — it certainly qualifies as a hit and as a genuine breakthrough. It has popped up on ”Saturday Night Live,” in a 50 Cent video, on Oprah Winfrey’s list of her ”favorite things,” and in recurring ”what’s on your iPod” gimmicks in several magazines. It is, in short, an icon. A handful of familiar cliches have made the rounds to explain this — it’s about ease of use, it’s about Apple’s great sense of design. But what does that really mean? ”Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. ”People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

So you can say that the iPod is innovative, but it’s harder to nail down whether the key is what’s inside it, the external appearance or even the way these work together. One approach is to peel your way through the thing, layer by layer.

The Aura

f you want to understand why a product has become an icon, you of course want to talk to the people who dreamed it up and made it. And you want to talk to the design experts and the technology pros and the professors and the gurus. But what you really want to do is talk to Andrew Andrew. Andrew Andrew is a ”highly diversified company” made of two personable young men, each named Andrew. They dress identically and seem to agree on everything; they say, among other things, that they have traveled from the future ”to set things on the right course for tomorrow.” They require interviewers to sign a form agreeing not to reveal any differences between Andrew and Andrew, because to do so might undermine the Andrew Andrew brand — and since this request is more interesting than whatever those differences might be, interviewers sign it.

Among other things, they do some fashion design and they are DJ’s who ‘’spin” on iPods, setting up participatory events called iParties. Thus they’ve probably seen more people interact with the player than anyone who doesn’t work for Apple. More important, they put an incredible amount of thought into what they buy, and why: In a world where, for better or worse, aesthetics is a business, they are not just consumers but consumption artists. So Andrew remembers exactly where he was when he first encountered the iPod: 14th Street near Ninth Avenue in New York City. He was with Andrew, of course. A friend showed it to them. Andrew held the device in his hand. The main control on the iPod is a scroll wheel: you spin it with your thumb to navigate the long list of songs (or artists or genres), touch a button to pick a track and use the wheel again to adjust the volume. The other Andrew also tried it out. ”When you do the volume for the first time, that’s the key moment,” says Andrew. ”We knew: We had to have one.” (Well, two.)

Before you even get to the surface of the iPod, you encounter what could be called its aura. The commercial version of an aura is a brand, and while Apple may be a niche player in the computer market, the fanatical brand loyalty of its customers is legendary. A journalist, Leander Kahney, has even written a book about it, ”The Cult of Mac,” to be published in the spring. As he points out, that base has supported the company with a faith in its will to innovate — even during stretches when it hasn’t. Apple is also a giant in the world of industrial design. The candy-colored look of the iMac has been so widely copied that it’s now a visual cliche.

But the iPod is making an even bigger impression. Bruce Claxton, who is the current president of the Industrial Designers Society of America and a senior designer at Motorola, calls the device emblematic of a shift toward products that are ”an antidote to the hyper lifestyle,” which might be symbolized by hand-held devices that bristle with buttons and controls that seem to promise a million functions if you only had time to figure them all out. ”People are seeking out products that are not just simple to use but a joy to use.” Moby, the recording artist, has been a high-profile iPod booster since the product’s debut. ”The kind of insidious revolutionary quality of the iPod,” he says, ”is that it’s so elegant and logical, it becomes part of your life so quickly that you can’t remember what it was like beforehand.”

Tuesday nights, Andrew Andrew’s iParty happens at a club called APT on the spooky, far western end of 13th Street. They show up at about 10 in matching sweat jackets and sneakers, matching eyeglasses, matching haircuts. They connect their matching iPods to a modest Gemini mixer that they’ve fitted with a white front panel to make it look more iPodish. The iPods sit on either side of the mixer, on their backs, so they look like tiny turntables. Andrew Andrew change into matching lab coats and ties. They hand out long song lists to patrons, who take a number and, when called, are invited up to program a seven-minute set. At around midnight, the actor Elijah Wood (Frodo) has turned up and is permitted to plug his own iPod into Andrew Andrew’s system. His set includes a Squarepusher song.

Between songs at APT, each Andrew analyzed the iPod. In talking about how hard it was, at first, to believe that so much music could be stuffed into such a tiny object, they came back to the scroll wheel as the key to the product’s initial seductiveness. ”It really bridged the gap,” Andrew observed, ”between fantasy and reality.”

The idea of innovation, particularly technological innovation, has a kind of aura around it, too. Imagine the lone genius, sheltered from the storm of short-term commercial demands in a research lab somewhere, whose tinkering produces a sudden and momentous breakthrough. Or maybe we think innovation begins with an epiphany, a sudden vision of the future. Either way, we think of that one thing, the lightning bolt that jolted all the other pieces into place. The Walkman came about because a Sony executive wanted a high-quality but small stereo tape player to listen to on long flights. A small recorder was modified, with the recording pieces removed and stereo circuitry added. That was February 1979, and within six months the product was on the market.

The iPod’s history is comparatively free of lightning-bolt moments. Apple was not ahead of the curve in recognizing the power of music in digital form. It was practically the last computer maker to equip its machines with CD burners. It trailed others in creating jukebox software for storing and organizing music collections on computers. And various portable digital music players were already on the market before the iPod was even an idea. Back when Napster was inspiring a million self-styled visionaries to predict the end of music as we know it, Apple was focused on the relationship between computers and video. The company had, back in the 1990’s, invented a technology called FireWire, which is basically a tool for moving data between digital devices — in large quantities, very quickly. Apple licensed this technology to various Japanese consumer electronics companies (which used it in digital camcorders and players) and eventually started adding FireWire ports to iMacs and creating video editing software. This led to programs called iMovie, then iPhoto and then a conceptual view of the home computer as a ”digital hub” that would complement a range of devices. Finally, in January 2001, iTunes was added to the mix.

And although the next step sounds prosaic — we make software that lets you organize the music on your computer, so maybe we should make one of those things that lets you take it with you — it was also something new. There were companies that made jukebox software, and companies that made portable players, but nobody made both. What this meant is not that the iPod could do more, but that it would do less. This is what led to what Jonathan Ive, Apple’s vice president of industrial design, calls the iPod’s ”overt simplicity.” And this, perversely, is the most exciting thing about it.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

In 1979, Henson showed “Limbo (The Organized Mind),” on Johnny Carson’s show, bringing the Muppets into his bizarre equation. The music was scored by Scott.

Read the entire article on MotherBoard

Before there were yuppies, there were uppies—the term Up With People members use to refer to themselves. Most Americans over the age of 35 are vaguely familiar with Up With People, as its cast members have sung to more than 20 million people worldwide, and at the height of the ensemble’s fame it provided the halftime entertainment at four Super Bowls (1976, 1980, ’82, ’86). But many are unaware of the group’s cultish utopian ideology, its political connectedness, and how it was funded by corporate America, part of a deliberate propaganda effort to discredit liberal counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s.

Up With People emerged from the controversial religious movement Moral Re-Armament (MRA)—a cult-like organization that preached honesty, purity, unselfishness and love—so it’s no surprise that the groups bore more than a passing similarity. In fact, Up With People founder J. Blanton Belk was heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist who succeeded Frank Buchman as MRA’s leader in 1961. But Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit after President Dwight Eisenhower urged him to distance himself from the dreary image of MRA.

It’s no surprise that President Eisenhower encouraged and supported Belk. As Mark Crispin Miller—professor of media ecology at New York University—notes during Smile, “The sixties were a time when a lot of longstanding pieties were being seriously questioned…. Students marched and there were race riots and we saw the first upsurge of feminism. This was …extremely worrying to the powers that be,” he says. It also explains why Eisenhower (and later President Richard M. Nixon) was thrilled to see Belk sending throngs of clean-cut, short-haired kids out into the world to sing upbeat, positive-minded songs, thereby countering the protest movement. “What we did was give young people a chance to express their views through music,” says Belk in a sequence from the film. It was a clever appropriation of the same vehicle—music—that had been embraced by demonstrators who opposed the Vietnam War and the establishment.

Of course, Up With People’s songs (“You Can’t Live Crooked and Think Straight” and “To Tell the Truth,” for example) bore virtually no resemblance to the popular music of the time. With simple chord progressions and childish lyrics, the group’s ditties can best be described as “insipid.” But good songs weren’t necessary to get Up With People’s message across, just as musical talent wasn’t a prerequisite to joining. The visceral power of a huge throng of smiling, exuberant and seemingly joyful young men and women rushing on stage and performing as one was enough to entice a reliable stream of new recruits. And thanks to the political connectedness of Up With People’s board members, Belk had no problem lining up gigs all over the planet, in front of audiences that often included presidents, prime ministers and other world leaders. (Up With People has performed for Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, and at the inaugurations of Nixon and George H.W. Bush, to name just a few high-profile engagements.)

But the financial lifeblood of Up With People was corporate America, which recognized that it could use uppies to promote a business-friendly image. Patrick Frawley Jr., a right-wing evangelical who owned Schick, was one of the group’s biggest supporters; he purchased television time and underwrote the first Up With People album, which had John Wayne, Pat Boone and Walt Disney on the cover. But Schick was hardly alone among multinationals. Companies like Exxon, Halliburton, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, General Electric, Coors, Toyota, Enron and Searle donated tens of millions of dollars to the organization, keeping it afloat until 2000, when George W. Bush became president and evangelicals could declare that their ideological war had been won.

The propaganda effort aside, individual members of Up With People certainly fomented their share of positive change, or at least spread good cheer wherever they went. In fact, most were just having a good time performing and traveling the world, oblivious to the agenda of the organization’s leadership and financial backers. “The members of the cast were like puppets. They never stopped to think about where the funding came from, or that someone had to open doors for them,” reminds Storey. Anyway, in some respects the group was surprisingly progressive. Up With People not only accepted members of all races and cultures, but deliberately placed minority cast members with Caucasian host families whenever the ensemble rolled into a new town.

Up With People didn’t lose its way because it lost the ability to control its cast members’ behavior, or because the public suddenly came to recognize that its sickly sweet songs were insufferable. Up With People declined because it became irrelevant, especially after the Cold War ended and American corporations no longer felt compelled to send groups of singing young people overseas, hoping to sweep in behind them to do business.

In the face of diminishing corporate support, Up With People began relying more heavily on tuition fees to pay for its increasingly expensive stage shows. While the organization began charging tuition in the early 1970s ($2,400 in 1972), fees rose dramatically in subsequent years, up to $5,300 in 1982. By the 1990s, the organization found itself struggling to recruit youth capable of paying tuition rates that exceeded the cost of most private universities, a problem compounded by the mostly indifferent response to the group’s public performances.

Before their undoing, the cult used anime videos as their recruitment tool, portraying the secret origins of human life and the heroics of founder/guru Shoko Asahara. Even unsubtitled, they’re a fascinating view:

Photo: RTFM07 (CC)

After reading the Disinformation article “In Defense of the Hipster” I decided that I would defend another subculture that may in fact be universally hated more than the utterly despised (especially by its own kind) hipster. Why does everybody hate the Clueless Fan? The new and enthusiastic kid on the block who asks every writer/musician/comic book artist/filmmaker to take a look at their work. The Groupie 2.0. The type of person who just happens to be a huge fan and supporter of the work that came before them. The Uberfan who is now ready to work with their idols yet completely misunderstands the way that their industry works.

What does one do with the Clueless Fan? Does one post their emails on their blogs so their fanbase can get a good laugh? Does this humiliate the Clueless Fan to the point of psychotic revenge-stalking? These are questions we may not want to ask ourselves but one must wonder how Clueless these New Players actually are in terms of various obsessions. One must assume that the Groupie 2.0 is well-versed in their knowledge and extremely passionate about their own work. In the end all that matters is the quality of their work (and this is true for all artists regardless of ranking) but does the naive attitude of the Clueless Fan prevent their work from being distributed?

One may suggest that all successful artists have been Clueless Fans at one point or another. It is a skeleton in the closet but we all know that our greatest idols have been Clueless Fans who most people looked down upon. I think it is important to remember this no matter where you are in the game. If you are a professional artist why not put your work alongside the work of one of your Clueless Fans and see how it compares. If you are a Clueless Fan why not do the same thing but with a professional artist. View/read/listen to the art for the sake of the art and forget about anything related to personality dynamics. Don’t ask yourself whose work is better but what you like about each presentation and how can each presentation can be improved. If you are the Clueless Fan email the professional artist with your opinions and if you are the professional artist email the Clueless Fans with yours.

In giving the Clueless Fan a chance to present their work and refusing to get caught up in social dynamics of “how the industry works” you are allowing art to take its natural course without letting your industry experience or social opinion effect your perception of Groupie 2.0. Of course there is a major chance that the Groupie 2.0 has no talent whatsoever but I’m asking to give Groupie 2.0 a chance since they are taking so much of their time to email you in the first place. So their emails are annoying. Did you never send anyone annoying emails? That pushy young upstart was you once.

The quality of our work is the most important thing in the end and the only artifact that remains is our output. As artists we view each other on even ground despite our social rankings. Anyone who puts our social rankings before our art is a person we should not be in contact with. The most Clueless Fan in the world could become the Greatest Artist of tomorrow.

Late last night, Samsung filed its opposition brief to Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the United States.

One element of Samsung’s defense strategy is interesting enough that I wanted to report on it beforehand. Ever since Apple started to assert the design of the iPad against other manufacturers, many people have been wondering whether there’s actually prior art for the general design of the iPad in some futuristic devices shown in sci-fi movies and TV series. And indeed, Samsung’s lawyers make this claim now in their defense against Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction.

This is how the related declaration explains why this movie picture is valid prior art for a certain iPad-related design patent:

Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers…As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.

It would be amazing if the court agreed with Samsung that this constitutes prior art for that particular iPad-related design patent. Whether or not Samsung will succeed, the mere fact that they proffer this kind of evidence is remarkable and will be exciting for many fans of movies in general — and of that movie in particular — to find out about.

Photo: Robin Chen (CC)

Chinese capitalism has something uniquely in common with historical Maoism: atheism. Vast economic growth met with a huge demand for traditional culture has meant Chinese cultural institutions are increasingly trading in their social values for growth-based business plans. Via the Independent:

Young men spring through the air, performing elegant punches and kicks; others bound across the dirt, swords flashing through the misty air. An ancient tree has dozens of small dents, made by “finger punches” of warrior monks over the centuries.

This is the Shaolin temple complex, in the mountains of central China, where kung fu was born 1,500 years ago. Now a place of pilgrimage for martial arts enthusiasts and Zen Buddhists, thousands of young people come to study kung fu, or wushu as it is known in China, in schools around the temple.

The commercial success of the temple is obvious, even if some of the sights are jarring – the telephone kiosks with Buddhas on top, for example. It has some monks shaking their heads and fearing that its spiritual peace is threatened. One monk said he was leaving after decades at the temple to be a hermit in the mountains of eastern China.

“There are internal conflicts here, and it’s complicated. When I came here it was very shabby, and it has improved a lot. But I don’t think this is a place for religion anymore,” he says.

Many others are inspired by the Shaolin tradition. Kung fu is the epitome of martial arts, and practitioners say other fighting arts including karate originated from kung fu. There are more than a million learners of kung fu around the world and many centres of Shaolin culture globally.

More on the Independent

Photo: Vincent Diamante (CC)

Way more positive social action than feeding their machine, but an interesting shot at activism from Nick Bilton in the NY Times:

Anonymous, the hacker group, has jostled with the Iranian government and the Church of Scientology and has briefly shut down the Web sites of Visa, MasterCard and other global corporations.

When members appear in public to protest censorship and what they view as corruption, they don a plastic mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Englishman who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers.

What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.

Read More: NY Times

(Part 1, titled “What Is A Hipster, And Why Does Everyone Hate Them? or: You’re So Fake (And So Am I)“, can be found here.)

As noted in Part 1, the main thrust of the criticisms against hipsters have roots in a notion of authenticity.  Lorentz mentions the words “authentic” and “inauthentic” a dozen times in his article, and the Adbusters piece is just as bad. It’s a fair charge to say that hipsters fetishize the authentic, as Lorentz does. This is hardly unique to hipsters, though; one can find it in practically any sub-culture. It’s so common that I find it disingenuous to use it as a criticism of hipsters and Hipsterism. The problem, as I see it, is that notion of authenticity being used is utter bullshit.

Some years ago, before I became a hipster or had even heard of hipsters, I was confirmed as “real” at a party by a group of counter-culture kids. There were several reasons given. First, I was living in a “real” neighborhood. At that time my rundown flop of a house was located in a neighborhood of Detroit, a mostly working-class ethnic neighborhood that was deemed hip by the minority of caucasian youths living there. It was popular for a number of reasons: it was much safer than the surrounding areas, close to a University and had been, even back when it was predominantly white, an ethnic neighborhood (Polish). Second, I was working two jobs to pay my way through school.  I was living month-to-month, sometimes bills didn’t get paid and I lived for months on brown rice and Siracha stolen from the Chinese restaurant at which I was employed. Third, I had a pretty good drug habit going, the likes of which would eventually take the life of a couple friends later on down the road.

I contemplated this. Apparently, making several terrible choices in the suburbs that resulted in losing my funding for school and having to move to the significantly cheaper housing in the city had made me “real”.  And to think I didn’t even know I was “fake” when I was out in the suburbs!  Apparently, my gritty, dirty, dangerous life meant I was “real” and not some automaton or something.

This notion of realness, of authenticity, is very popular today. Grit and dirt = real.  Danger = real.  This is despite the fact that all of the above can be acquired without much effort: you can move to a shitty-but-hip neighborhood, you can give up your scholarship and work all the time, and believe you me you can pick up a substance-abuse problem with startling ease.

The absurdity soon makes itself apparent. If it can be faked with ease, where is the value of its authenticity? Someone doing the three steps listed above can have just as “real” a life as I was leading.  It would be indistinguishable from the life of someone who ended up there by accident or, like in my case, as the result of poor decision-making skills. The real life can be acquired, and when it is, does that person miraculously go from “fake” to “real”? How does that work? If all the ways one uses to define oneself as authentic are, in a way, “for sale”, how authentic can one’s identity really be?

The primary problem with the counterculture is its rebellion against perceived inauthenticity, against the manufactured lifestyle represented by prime-time television and pop culture.  The problem lies in where we are running to, in what we are clinging to instead of the manufactured lifestyle. We think we are leaving image-without-substance behind and embracing realness, embracing something with meaning and substance. We are doing no such thing.  We’re just falling for a different kind of deception.

They say that if you’re going to steal, then steal from the best.  With that in mind, I offer you an excerpt by Warren Ellis from his discontinued series Doktor Sleepless:

Now, after seeing hordes of people rebelling against Pop and seeking refuge in authenticity, I see his point. Punk, now, is as baldly selling an image, a brand, as any bit of pop culture. It’s about as authentic as Bob Dylan, and the same goes for pretty much every counter-culture.

How do you rebel, then, when all the culture rebels are buying into bullshit notions of authenticity?  What do you do when the people rebelling against the image and the spectacle of pop culture are indulging in an image and a spectacle of their own? The answer is obvious: go the other direction. Embrace the shallowness, embrace the trends that have a half-life of half a season, embrace the superficial fashion and culture that Hipsterism provides. If its authenticity you’re after, be like me.  Be a Real Fake. Be sincere in your devotion to affectations, in the shallow trends…

Via VictorianGothic.org:

This 1896 Lumière Brothers film captures a performance of Loïe Fuller’s “Serpentine Dance.” No, there was no LSD in the 1890′s, but yes, there were colorized films. In the technique used above, each frame was individually hand-tinted using stencils and colored dyes. It was a laborious, manual process, and it was first employed to recreate Loïe Fuller’s stage magic; acclaimed for its early use of chromatic theatrical lights that illuminated the dancer’s flowing white silk.

On a visit to Notre Dame, Fuller became enthralled by the kaleidoscopic light that shone through the cathedral’s stained glass windows. She lost herself in a bedazzled reverie, catching the colors upon a white handkerchief that she waved through the air…and was promptly taken for crazy and escorted out of the building. For Fuller, color possessed a natural harmony that could be honed into new art form, in the same way that sound had been transformed sound into music. “Colour,” she wrote, “so pervades everything that the whole universe is busy producing it, everywhere and in everything … The day will come when man will know how to employ them so delightfully that it will be hard to conceive how he could have lived so long in the darkness in which he dwells to-day.”

To this end, she developed new compounds and techniques for stage lighting for which she held numerous patents. She was a member of the French Astronomical Society, and a friend to Marie Curie, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and countless other French artists, scientists and intellectuals. Some of the most well-respected members of the French creative class featured her in their work, and through her performances she became a prominent figure in the Art Nouveau movement.

[Full Article at Victorian Gothic]