Friday, December 4, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Sing-Along Jesus Christ Superstar

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 08:09 PM PST

As a kid, I liked classical and easy listening music, not the rock or disco that other kids listened to. But at age 12 or 13, I was, for some reason, moved to tape Jesus Christ Superstar off of the radio. I played that cassette over and over again, memorized the whole show, then kept playing it and singing along whenever I got the chance. I played it loud, too, turning the volume up higher than I'd ever wanted to before. I was cranking JCS one evening when my dad came home from work. With an expression of curiosity, he asked me why I had the music up so loud. I said "I don't know," and then he asked if I'd gotten the idea from anywhere. I told him no, and he said, "Hmm-- interesting!" He didn't disapprove, but I got the sense that he recognized something happening to me.

JCS taught me the story of Jesus, which as a jewish boy in Los Angeles, I never knew. It had a huge impact on me. Ever since, I've looked at the world in terms of Jesus vs. Rome, righteous rebellion vs. institutional power, hippie values vs. capitalist values, love vs. control. As far as I'm concerned, the "hippie Jesus" of the 1960s and early 1970s is the true Jesus (and centuries of art bear me out on this, at least superficially). "Jesus Was A Hippie" -- that's the tagline for my imaginary ad campaign to take Christianity back from all the high-power imposters and restore it to its apolitical, communitarian roots.

Continued after the jump 

I've long outgrown my love for much music I used to like (Spyro Gyra, I'm talking to you), but never JCS. I was indignant when I flipped through the 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards and saw Ted Neeley picked for "Worst Performance As Jesus Christ" in the movie version. And I've always been attuned to other JCS-lovers, other people who know all the words. Mitchell Morris, professor of Musicology at UCLA, you probably don't remember me, but I'm a friend of your grad school colleague Steve. About 15 years ago, when we were all having lunch one day, JCS came up, and I know you know all the words too! Some BB readers may recall Suck.com, which was the first website that had a new fun thing for me to read every day. One day on Suck, a cartoon character's speech balloon said, "Fools-- you have no perception! The stakes we are gambling are frighteningly high!" This is a line sung by Caiaphas in the song "Jesus Must Die," and seeing it in such a different context (which I also liked) gave an explosive jolt to my soul-mate radar.

In more recent years, the rock band Skycastle performed the show around Easter every year at the Transmission Theater in San Francisco, staging it with costumed singers, minimal props, and no scenery. I went a couple of times (I think they stopped, unfortunately), and it was always a thrill. Pretty much everyone in the friendly audience of like-minded JCS-heads sing along to the whole thing. I imagine that outside of a gospel church, there is no feeling more righteous than that of screaming, "Die if you want to, you misguided martyr!" with 200 other people over wailing guitars and crashing cymbals. My friends John and Sophia say that a band in Boston used to do the same thing over there, with the same annual success.

Which brings me to my business proposition. I love karaoke and sing-alongs, and I've been pleased to see the success of subtitled, sing-along versions of The Sound Of Music, Grease, Mamma Mia and other favorite musical movies. So how about a sing-along Jesus Christ Superstar? It's a trivial job technically-- just some time spent pasting lyrics into a video editor. I have the movie on DVD and I could do it bootleg, but I think it needs to be legal so that it could be advertised, shown in theaters and churches, and draw crowds. It would be good, clean fun-- who could object? I understand that JCS was disliked by many religious leaders when it was new, but if they had just felt threatened by the hippie-ness of it, I'm sure that has since faded.  

So it's basically a rights and distribution issue. I've tried to track down who subtitled The Sound Of Music, but had no success. I've asked two entertainment lawyers that I know where I might start with something like this, and they don't know. So: does anyone in Boingboing-land know how I might do this, or how much it would cost? Does anyone want to invest in the project? Did I just blow it by posting this, thereby possibly signaling the rights owner to inflate their price or do it themselves? I don't care-- as long as somebody gets it out there.

Tiny Lego guitars

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 03:02 AM PST


LegoWow created these tiny, perfect Lego guitars and amps.

lego guitars (Thanks, LegoWow!)

Jonathan Lethem's CHRONIC CITY, surreal and beautiful sf explores the authentic and the unreal

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 03:38 AM PST

Jonathan Lethem's extraordinary new novel Chronic City tells the story of Chase Insteadman, a washed up, grown up child actor living off his sitcom residuals in wealthy, Upper East Side New York. Chase is caught between two improbabilities: his fiancee, a dying astronaut stranded on a space-station walled off from Earth by a Chinese orbital minefield, from which vantage she commands daily headlines; and Perkus Tooth, a media-obsessed Philip-K-Dickian ex-rock-critic who lives in a weed-smoke- filled cave of a rent- controlled apartment from which he obsessively watches obscure movies and reads obscure books.

Chase's story -- magnificently told in Lethem's most poetic language -- is the quest for authenticity. An actor, Chase finds himself acting the part of the grieving widower-to-be, of the handsome beefcake at the swanky party, of the sincere sidekick to the ascerbic and unintelligible Perkus Tooth. And as Chase begins an affair with Oona Lazlo, a celebrity ghostwriter autobiography writer, he finds himself even more drawn to the questions of what is real and what isn't?



For example: is America at war? Depends on which edition of the New York Times you read -- their "war-free" edition is flensed of all mention of the war. Or how about this: what is the true nature of the "escaped tiger" that is destroying Manhattan one bodega and run-down apartment building at a time? Is it really a two-storey-tall tiger? Or is it (as Chase's City Hall insider pal insists) a cover story for a rogue 2nd Avenue Tunnel-digging machine that got lonely and now marauds beneath New York?


The story grows progressive weirder and more mystic -- there's a sub-plot involving the true nature of Marlon Brando's relationship with the "Gnuppets" (a thinly veiled version of the Muppets); another involving a fictionalized version of Second Life; a third involving "chaldons," mystical vessels that can only be found on eBay, where you are always, always outbid.


In some ways, Chronic City is the bookend to one of my favorite Lethem novels, the brilliant Motherless Brooklyn (if you can find the audiobook read by Steve Buscemi and only available on cassette, jump at it). Motherless is all about the gritty, the real, the urban -- street kids who work as hoods-for-hire for a dirty private eye. In its own way, it's also about authenticity -- about whether the "authentic" street identity of the characters is just a role, just another put-on.


By moving uptown to the genteel and posh precincts of rarified wealth and pathological intellect, Lethem is able to summon all his PK Dick chops, to channel the media-nuts who circulate in literary scenes, to ask important, hard-to-articulate and impossible-to-answer questions about what is genuine, what is artifice, and when it matters.

Chronic City

Previously:

Smile Like You're Dead Inside photoblog

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 10:24 PM PST

Chain-mail tetris blocks

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 10:20 PM PST

Visit to the home of a steampunk house-restorer

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 10:35 PM PST

Jake von Slatt sez, "Last week I went out to Sharon, Massachusetts to visit the home of Bruce Rosenbaum, a friend of a co-worker whom I was told was 'interested in steampunk.' When I got there what I saw blew me away!"

Bruce and Melanie Rosenbaum started ModVic (Modern Victorian) Home Restoration in June 2007 and have now moved onto steampunk Home Design. ModVic's mission is to authentically restore historic Victorian homes (1850 - 1910) to their original beauty and richness while completely modernizing the home's systems, functional layout and conveniences for the family of today (sound familiar?). Bruce and Melanie also love the steampunk design aesthetic of combining the best of Victorian high design and craftsmanship with modern functionality and usefulness...
A Visit to a Steampunked Home (Thanks, Jake!)

Happy Holidays! "Elf" threatens to blow Santa up with dynamite

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 10:17 PM PST

A 45-year-old Atlanta man put on an elf costume, headed to a shopping mall, got in line to have his picture taken with Santa, then told Santa he was packin' dynamite. Police arrested the elf, and charged him with possessing hoax devices (memories of Boston!) and making terror threats. The mugshot's priceless. So is this local news headline.

Bhopal, 25 years later: Henry Rollins in Vanity Fair

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 08:36 PM PST

bhopal-march-copy.jpg Henry Rollins, who you may know best as either the Black Flag frontman, a television host, a radio DJ, or a spoken word performer, has an item at Vanity Fair about traveling to Bhopal:
I came to Bhopal to see what the 25th anniversary of the disaster would be like. I hired out a taxi for the day and went to the place where the speeches were going to be given and the yearly march to the U.C.I.L. plant would start. I stared at photos of dead bodies, children holding human skulls, dead cattle being put in trucks by winches. I sat in the sun under a beautiful blue sky and listened to more than three hours of men and women speaking and shouting in very impassioned Hindi while traffic roared by. The marchers were not many in number; the entire procession would take about a minute to pass you. It seemed that the majority of Bhopal had moved on.

As I watched the marchers start on their multi-kilometer walk, I saw the effigy of Warren Anderson roll unsteadily towards the plant, where it would be burned, I felt sad that for all practical purposes, U.C.I.L. and U.C.C. had perpetrated perhaps the most lethal industrial disaster in history and nothing had really been done about it.

Twenty-five Years After the Disaster, Bhopal Is Still Ill

Previously:


Space Patrol tribute poster by Michæl Paukner

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 04:58 PM PST

spacepatrol.jpg

Illustrator Michæl Paukner, whose poster art I've blogged a few times now, has started a terrific series of images paying tribute to the über-kitschy German science fiction television show Space Patrol (Raumpatrouille). Shown here, the Orion 7 craft. If you're unfamiliar with the show, this fan-site is a great place to start. Video clips and links to past appreciations of the TV series on Boing Boing after the jump.


Below, the opening sequence of an episode:


And here, a remix of the theme song with clips from various episodes:

Below, a misbehaving robot:

Below, some crazy dance moves:

Previously:

Torture whistleblower in Iran killed by poisoned dinner salad

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 04:20 PM PST

In Iran, a 26-year-old doctor who exposed the torture of jailed protesters died after eating a salad laced with an overdose of blood pressure medication. Political opposition members believe he was killed because of what he knew.

Obama ecstasy tablets

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 05:30 PM PST

Obama-E After you come down from the Obama LSD that David was peddling yesterday, you can take some Obama ecstasy tablets.

UPDATE: It appears that these tablets are phony adulterated piperazine, not ecstasy. The Erowid Experience Vault reports suggest piperazine is a bummer. It's like the President Obama story in pill form! (Thanks, Xeni!)

Obama E!

Surprised Kitten: The Boing Boing True Hollywood Story

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 03:37 PM PST

Surprised Kitten, which was the subject of much squealing in a Boing Boing post, can haz a backstory. Aude Baron, the French journalist who previously wrote about YouTube star Tsimfuckus (the child who has Progeria and loves gangsta rap) contacted the mother of the teen who captured the kitteh that launched a gajillion clicks.

Here's the article, auto-translated from French. It appeared in Lepost.fr. After the jump, I summarize the contents in English.

THE TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORY OF SURPRISED KITTEH

The kitten in this viral video hit is a female named Attila, as in "The Hun." She is fierce, hence the name.

But, wait for the paradox: she is also cute. Hence the surname, "fluff."

So, the kitten's full name is "Attila Fluff".

She was between 6 and 10 weeks of age when the video was made.

The teenager who shot the video is named Rosa.

Attila does not belong to Rosa. She belongs to a friend of Rosa's, who came by with the kitty one day to visit.


Rosa thought the kitten was so cute that she decided to shoot some video. The video ended up on YouTube.


Millions of people have watched the video now. Attila the kitty is famous.


Now Attila has a coke habit and wants implants, and thinks she might be a lesbian.


TMZ is posting rumors that Attila has invested in a franchise of catnip dispensaries supplied by the feline prison gang known as the Manx-ican Mafia.



How'd I do with the French translation? I hope I didn't mess any of that up.

Iran threatening expat critics in the US via email

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 02:48 PM PST

"Koosha," a 29-year-old Iranian-American engineering student, received an email warning that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn't stop criticizing Iran on Facebook. Two days later, he realized the email was no joke when his mom called from Tehran to say that his father had been arrested by state security agents. (thanks, Cyrus)

How the Afghan surge was sold

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 02:43 PM PST

At Wired's Danger Room, Nathan Hodge on the often-blurry line between Afghan surge "policy analyst" and Afghan surge pitchman: How the Afghan Surge Was Sold

Professor Robert Langdon Facts

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 02:40 PM PST

professorrobertlangdon.jpg

My buddy Ross Pfund, senior editor at the surprisingly un-boring Minnesota Law & Politics magazine, has, for some reason, decided to read the latest Dan Brown novel. Over the last few days, he's been sharing facts about Professor Robert Langdon, the be-mulleted academic/literary hero played by Tom Hanks in "The DaVinci Code". The punchline: The facts are not made up. Well, OK, they're made up in that Professor Robert Langdon is a fictional character. But any comedy you find here is the work of Dan Brown and is, ostensibly, unintentional.

  • Did you know: Professor Robert Langdon avoids enclosed spaces because a childhood accident left him trapped at the bottom of a well for a day.
  • Did you know: Professor Robert Langdon wishes someone would ban the word "awesome."
  • Did you know: Professor Robert Langdon was an All-American water polo player in college.
  • Did you know: According to Professor Robert Langdon, the favorite beverage of Harvard freshmen is alcohol.

  • Did you know: No matter how dire the circumstances, Professor Robert Langdon prefers not to look at a piece of art on the internet if the original is in a gallery nearby.

  • Did you know: One of Professor Robert Langdon's foremost professional regrets is that he's only an expert in a single runic language--Futhark, the most basic runic language of them all.

  • Did you know: Like most teachers, Professor Robert Langdon hates being lectured to.

  • Did you know: When you and I watch ESPN, we see end-zone celebrations. When Professor Robert Langdon watches ESPN, he sees athletes engaging in pre-Christian ritual traditions.

  • Did you know: Professor Robert Langdon prefers hand-ground Sumatra coffee beans for their exotic aroma.

Pictured: A god among men.



Government-backed gay bar in "Communist China" not so popular with The Gays

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 02:37 PM PST

What if they opened a gay bar and no one came? Wait, no no -- don't go there. A gay bar in China's Yunnan province that receives government funding from the state health bureau for AIDS prevention is empty, because all the gay people are afraid that being seen there will lead to discrimination and harassment.

Bhopal, 25 years later

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 02:26 PM PST

It was a human rights tragedy on December 2, 1984, and it remains so today. Shortly after midnight on that date, 25 year ago, thousands of tons of lethal chemicals leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. About half a million people were exposed, roughly 10,000 of whom died in the immediate aftermath. Another 15,000 died in the following two decades.

One of my first jobs in the technology industry in the 1990s was doing intranet/extranet dev work for a large law firm that defended the company responsible for this disaster. Knowing how many high-paid corporate attorneys around the world have been paid so much for so long to preserve impunity for Dow, which took over Union Carbide in 2001, the odds of justice for the victims seem long indeed.

WITNESS and Amnesty International collaborated on a video report about the ongoing fight to "make the government do something about the suffering of the victims," as one Bhopal survivor says in this piece.

Despite a quarter of a century having passed the factory site has not been cleaned up. More than 100,000 people continue to suffer from health problems. Efforts to provide rehabilitation - both medical care and measures to address the socio-economic effects of the leak - have fallen far short of what is needed. Many of those affected are still waiting for adequate compensation and the full facts of the leak and its impact have never been properly investigated. No-one has ever been held to account for what happened at Bhopal and efforts by survivors' organizations to use the Indian and US court systems to see justice done and gain adequate redress have so far been unsuccessful.
Bhopal - End 25 Years of Injustice (WITNESS)
Amnesty International's call to action: write India's prime minister, and hold Dow Chemicals responsible.

The Tiger Woods Voicemail Slow-Jam remix

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 02:28 PM PST

The folks at HalfDayToday have remixed the Tiger Woods "take your name off your phone" voicemail into a lovemaking-quiet-storm-slow-jam, á la Usher.

Greenpeace ads featuring aged politicians in 2020 apologizing for climate change

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 01:45 PM PST


Darren sez, "Greenpeace is running a clever ad campaign in the Copenhagen airport in preparation for the Copenhagen climate negotiations that start on Dec. 7. They're a series of ads featuring Photoshopped images of sad-looking world leaders, apologizing for not addressing climate change when they had the chance. Canada's Prime Minister looks like the saddest hockey coach in the land."

Greenpeace: i leader invecchiati e il clima (Thanks, Darren!)

Previously:


Bruce Sterling on life in the ISS

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 01:51 PM PST

Here's Bruce Sterling's Dwell interview with ISS engineer Nicole Stott on the living conditions in space:
"BS: It would be great to hear about any wear patterns that reflect the traces human beings always leave in a home. Hand-written labels, fridge magnets, welcome mats, duct tape, foam padding on metal parts where people bump their heads, posters, decals, wise-cracking graffiti, barracks pin-ups, spittoons, any of that. The human dwelling element. "

NS: There are several places across the different modules where "human traces" can be found. We all try to make our sleep quarters as homey as possible with pictures of our families and pets and with special things from home: toys our kids gave us to have with us, books, hobby supplies. We as crews have also established traditions for putting crew patches on display; there is a panel in Node 1 with patches stuck to it from every shuttle crew that's ever visited the station. One of my favorite areas that has the human touch is in the Russian Service Module where there is a classic picture of Yuri Gagarin, an Orthodox Russian crucifix, and picture of [Russian space theorist Konstantin] Tsiokovsky. And then there are some of the science experiments that help bring more life to the station: plant growing, mice, protein crystals, Earth observation photography

Life in Space: Email from the ISS

Twitter-themed fashion spread in Vogue Italy

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 01:32 PM PST

MEISEL.jpg

In the December issue of Vogue Italia, a photo spread by Stephen Meisel that pays design homage to Twitter and Twitpic. Caption the one above at your own peril, in the comments. Fashioncopious: scanned images part 1, and here is part 2. (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

UFOs meet American bureaucracy

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 01:08 PM PST

Next year, residents of Denver will get to vote on whether or not the city should set up a seven-member commission for the study of UFOs and extraterrestrial sightings. UFO advocate Jeff Peckman collected 10,000 signatures in order to get his proposed commission on the ballot. If approved, the commission would cost Denver about $100,000, not including any travel or similar expense requests. Peckman claims gifts and grants will fund the commission and says it would provide such vital city services as opening secret UFO files, establishing a protocol for UFO sitings and performing risk/benefit analysis for close encounters of the third through seventh kinds. (Via Bad Astronomer).

Isaac Hayes: Walk On By

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 01:08 PM PST

I've been answering email today with a bunch of Isaac Hayes songs on rotation from the Stax years. Kept coming back to this one, and stumbled on a 1969 television performance with spectacularly mod staging. Walk on by that large pastel brick with the embedded mirror-donut! The audio in this YouTube clip stinks, but you can preview a better streaming version here. The full, funky glory of the extended 12-minute version is such a thing of beauty, though. Listen to that fuzz guitar! This masterpiece has been sampled to hell by many different artists over the years (Hooverphonic's "2Wicky" may be the most popular). I think of great, timeless tracks like this as big cuts of high-quality meat that can be sliced into little pieces as they age, and made into lesser leftovers by lesser chefs. RIP, Chef.

Combo mousetrap and cheese cutting board

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 11:48 AM PST

200912031146

The multi-talented Tom Parker (author of the Rules of Thumb series of books, and the "Make Money" columnist for MAKE) made this space-saving "devention" that combines a mousetrap and cheese cutting board.

Comcast eats NBC: every media mega-merger needs a cautionary infographic

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 11:14 AM PST

comcastgrafism.jpg

Click for large-size. From Josh Stearns of Free Press.

Robert Heinlein's minimalist home of the future from 1952

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 10:28 AM PST

Heinlein-Divan

A 1952 issue of Popular Mechanics has an article about Robert Heinlein's 1,150-square-foot home in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which he designed for extreme efficiency. For instance, a table rolls between the kitchen and the dining room to make it easy to set and clear tableware and food dishes. Skylights have mirrors to reflect more light into the rooms. Most of the furniture is built in.

"The built-in bed with storage drawers beneath it, the built-in divans that can be converted to extra beds and all the other furniture are built right down to the floors," Heinlein says. "There is nothing to clean under.

"There are no rugs or any need for them. All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, comfortable and clean footing. Nor are there any floor lamps or table lamps. The illumination is built into the house. General lighting for the living room comes from cold-cathode tubes concealed behind a box molding. These illuminate the ceiling. Adjustable wall spotlights are located at all work and relaxation areas in the house. All electric convenience outlets are at a comfortable hip height. I'm through stooping over to the baseboard whenever I want to plug in an appliance.

After the Heinleins moved in the 1960s, the house was extensively remodeled and enlarged, but apparently the bomb shelter "survives in almost original condition."

A House to Make Life Easy (Via Unclutterer)

The PlayStation Turns 15: What did it mean for you?

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 10:41 AM PST

PS15.jpg December 3rd marks the 15th anniversary of Sony's entrance into the console arena, with the 1994 launch of the PlayStation in Japan. This had me thinking all morning about the impact it had, both personally and for the wider gaming landscape. There's a lot can and has been said on how the PlayStation changed the latter: how it helped standardize optical media over custom-built and more expensive cartridges, along with all the audio/visual upgrades that brought, (slightly overblown) sentiments on how it 'brought the Japanese RPG to the American mainstream' with Final Fantasy VII (a trend that hasn't necessarily carried through with nearly as much fervor), or how it helped ease gaming out of the shameful basement and into the living room as a lifestyle accessory. More directly, it was also responsible for creating or evolving a laundry list of names that remain some of the industry's biggest franchises -- Metal Gear, Tomb Raider, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Resident Evil, Wipeout, Castlevania and Final Fantasy. But my vote for the console's top achievement? It gave birth to the music game. NanaOn-Sha and Rodney Greenblat's Parappa the Rapper might not have been the smash success of any of the names above, certainly in the West (where in Japan Sony would adopt the dog as the official face of its gaming wing), but it managed to make its strongest impact right where it counted.

Previous experimental flirtations aside (primarily Electroplankton creator Toshio Iwai's Famicom Disk System game Otocky and Maxis-published SimTunes), you can trace a clear line (as UK journo Simon Parkin has done) between Parappa's controller-button-Simon interactions to Konami's Beatmania/DDR beat-matching, to -- most importantly -- the creative turning-point at then-still-young developer Harmonix, who openly credit Parappa as leading them from a focus on simulation and instrument instruction to games proper, starting with Frequency, Amplitude and then, of course, the original Guitar Hero through to Rock Band.

It's a startling thought to realize that the tie that ultimately binds gaming to a cultural icon as big as The Beatles is an innocent stocking-capped rapping dog, and it follows that even that game couldn't have existed (at least in as captivating a way) without the music that the disc it lived on afforded, on the only console with the magic-formula of entertainment industry clout to attract that 'outsider' talent.

And on a personal level, too, Parappa was solely responsible for drawing me back into gaming itself, having skipped out on most of the 16-bit era to turn my teen-rebellion attention instead to music. It wasn't until I realized the two could play so happily together that I knew I wanted back in, and without that I wouldn't be writing this here today.

Which leads me to ask: a decade and a half on, did the PlayStation have as meaningful an impact on you? What's your view on its role in games history? Let us know via the comments below.

Book on the myriad uses of the humble blue tarp, TOKYO BLUES

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 10:10 AM PST

Adam "Everyware" Greenfield writes,

Everywhere you go, there are certain things which play heroic roles in knitting the world together, and which somehow remain anonymous, even unseen. The first book from Do projects, Tokyo Blues, is the story of one of them: the common blue PVC plastic construction tarp.

Tokyo Blues is a photographic record of Nurri Kim's 2002-2003 investigation into this humble industrial material and the very wide variety of uses to which it's put in the everyday life of Japan.

From construction sites and homeless settlements to cherry-blossom viewing parties in the park, the ubiquitous blue tarp is a constant of Japanese life and a bearer of multiple registers of meaning. In sixty-four images from the boulevards, alleys, sidestreets and interstitial spaces, Tokyo Blues explores these dramatically different contexts, returning something "we see too often, and then forget to see" to full, vivid visibility. The result is a book that provokes its readers to see the city around them with new eyes - whether that city is Tokyo, or their own.

We thought you'd appreciate two things in particular about Tokyo Blues: firstly, that we released a free and freely downloadable PDF of the book simultaneously with its physical publication; and secondly, that the book in both of its forms is offered under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Our philosophy is that you buy the book if you want the object, but the ideas within are and will remain free.

0901 Tokyo Blues. (Thanks, Adam!)

Anime figurines with complex storylines

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 10:17 AM PST

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False Friends is a series of vinyl figurines created by German-Chinese artist team Coarse. The figurines are for sale, and they come in a super-cute box with a storybook that tells the relationship between the characters in this alternate world that the figurines come from. This anime character-looking man in bunny pajamas and his rabbit-monkey-robot-hybrid frenemy are from a series called paw!

...the young noop begins to mimic the appearance of his natural enemy, paw!, a tactic to secure his own survival. However, after being acknowledged as a paw!, the noop becomes trapped behind this mask forever. A dangerous and fragile friendship takes its course.
You can read the entire story of the noop and paw! on Coarse's blog. You can also buy the figurines on their site; it says they're made to order, and you'll need to email them for a price.

CoarseToys.com (via Dezeen)

Based on a True Story

Posted: 02 Dec 2009 06:01 PM PST

Guestblogger Paul Spinrad is a freelance writer/editor, and is Projects Editor for MAKE magazine. He is the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids, and was an early contributor to bOING bOING when it was an online zine. He lives in San Francisco. 

Here's my idea for a Monty Python And The Holy Grail-like opening title sequence. The following titles fade in and are crossed out one by one:

  • A True Story
  • Based On A True Story
  • Inspired By A True Story
  • Inspired By Real Events
  • Inspired By Reality
  • Partially Inspired By Reality

I've argued here before that storytelling, like language itself, is a compression scheme-- ideally, you leave out everything that doesn't matter or doesn't in some way contribute to the whole. If you're decompressing the story-- reading, listening to, or watching it-- the first thing you need to know is, is this true? You need to know where to put it in your head, whether to incorporate it into the model you use to navigate the real world, or whether it should go into the "not true" bin. Our survival depends on this distinction.

Meanwhile, on the storyteller's side, there are many reasons to blur true and not-true-- particularly, I think, if a story is being told for profit or to maintain of power relationships. Stories interpreted as real demand more attention and more likely to influence people's actions than fictional stories.

There was an interesting discussion here (in response to a great piece by Susannah Breslin) about the future of porn video when CGI can simulate humans realistically. Yes, there is an "uncanny valley" problem where the simulations are not quite realistic enough, but let's assume it will be overcome. My prediction is that there will still need to be living, breathing porn stars in the world, because viewers need something to build a fantasy around, no matter how remote. Recall the parade scene at the end of National Lampoon's Animal House, when a college cheerleader flies through a window and lands on the bed of a teenage boy reading a porno magazine. He says, "Thank you, God!" It's funny because it's true-- or so I am told. 

It's true that people can become obsessed with animated fictional characters, and for them the real/unreal issue doesn't matter (or works the other way). But those of us with more "stalker" type personalities want to be able to think, "I wonder what she's doing right now?" Instead of pitching our fantasy tents comfortably in the world of fiction, we anchor them to some contrived but remotely plausible chain of circumstances where we might, just might, really have a chance.
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