Words with no direct English translation fascinate me.  Like mamihlapinatapai.  Or l’esprit de l’escalier.  There are plenty of others, of course.

powerHouse Books presents Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music by Nathan Nedorostek and Anthony Pappalardo.

Radio Silence documents the ignored space between the Ramones and Nirvana through the words and images of the pre-internet era where this community built on DIY ethics thrived, where musicians and fans booked shows, photographed bands, aired pirate radio shows, started record labels, designed album covers, and published zines themselves.  Authors Nathan Nedorostek and Anthony Pappalardo have catalogued private collections of unseen images, personal letters, original artwork, and various ephemera from the hardcore scene circa 1978–1993.

You can pre-order from the powerHouse Books site, or you can save a few bucks (while making me a few cents) by ordering through this Amazon affiliate link.

In Three Lines or Less, by Ben Joseph.

Moby-Dick
ISHMAEL:  I’m existential.
AHAB:  Really?  Try vengeance.
ISHMAEL:  I dig this dynamic.  Can we drag it out for 600 pages?

Titanic ice cube molds.  Probably more trouble than it’s worth.

SLR cameras, sliced in half.

Microsoft concedes their Windows Vista blunders.  …And now they’re ready to try again?

Sigh.  Read the New York Times article, if you haven’t already.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.  Bush’s parting words, leaving the G8 summit in Japan:  “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

By Brian Dettmer.

The late George Carlin, a great idol of mine, on religion:

So rather than be just another mindless religious robot, mindlessly and aimlessly and blindly believing that all of this is in the hands of some spooky incompetent father figure who doesn’t give a shit, I decided to look around for something else to worship.  Something I could really count on.

And immediately, I thought of the sun.  Happened like that.  Overnight I became a sun-worshiper.  Well, not overnight—you can’t see the sun at night.  But, first thing the next morning, I became a sun-worshiper.  Several reasons:  First of all, I can see the sun—okay?  Unlike some other gods I could mention, I can actually see the sun.  I’m big on that.  If I can see something, I don’t know, it kind of helps the credibility along, you know?  So, everyday I can see the sun as it gives me everything I need:  heat, light, food, flowers in the park, reflections on the lake, an occasional skin cancer.  But hey, at least there are no crucifixions, and we’re not setting people on fire simply because they don’t agree with us.

Sun worship is fairly simple.  There’s no mystery, no miracles, no pageantry, no one asks for money, there are no songs to learn, and we don’t have a special building where we all gather once a week to compare clothing.  And the best thing about the sun: it never tells me I’m unworthy.  Doesn’t tell me I’m a bad person who needs to be saved.  Hasn’t said an unkind word.  Treats me fine.  So, I worship the sun.  But, I don’t pray to the sun.  Know why?  I wouldn’t presume on our friendship—it’s not polite.

From You Are All Diseased (1999).

And another favorite of mine.

Not to make light of things, but lolz @ Iran.

Disarming photography of Billboards looming, shot from underneath, by Branislav Kropilak.  Reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Check out his other collections while you’re at it.  Especially Landings and Garages.  (Thanks, Tommy.)

I’m a frequent visitor of MacDesktops.com, and I’m getting tired of boring, bird’s-eye photos of leaves on the ground.  It’s been done a hundred times over and every single one looks alike—obviously.  The cliché is hardly limited to MacDesktops; every wallpaper posting site has a handful of leaves photos.  Furthermore, didn’t a now-ancient iteration of the Mac OS – System 7.5? – include a desktop picture of leaves on the ground?

A few other annoying trends:
• Close-up photography of flowers
• Unremarkable skies
• Fields of flowers
• Sloppy or pointless nature photos
• Pictures of a window (or windows) in the middle of a bare wall (what’s up with these, anyways?)
• Pictures like this (seriously, what’s the point?)

On second thought…  I confess.  The photos of windows bother me more than the leaves on the ground.  It’s always a plain wall – stone, wood, or what have you – and a window smack dab in the middle.  Sometimes the window is purposefully off-center, I admit, for that extra touch of artiness.  Either way, I’ve seen more than a number of these.  But why?

A couple weeks ago, while surfing the net for porn (or, as a friend from work likes to call it, “art”), I accidentally clicked over to a video clip of a kill scene from the critically acclaimed 2002 masterpiece Jason X.  [Spoiler warning?]  The scene shows a female mortician donning a blue knit crop top—medical scrubs of the future, obviously—as she examines a supine Jason.  (If you’re out of the loop, we’re talking about the serial-killer Jason from the Friday the 13th series of movies.)  Needless to say, Jason wakes up, drags the pretty lady to a vat of something very cold (liquid nitrogen à la Mighty Ducks 3?), freezes her face, and then shatters it against the examining table.  Hooray!  That’s all I have to say.  In the end, she’s a skull full of delicious raspberry sorbet.

If you’re interested—and why wouldn’t you be?—you can watch the same clip here.

My appetite whet, I was moved to rent and watch the movie in its entirety.  Now, I know I’m a little late in the game here, but doing so was definitely a good decision, for in Jason X I discovered a new and much more rewarding “art.”  I don’t know if it was the sheer realism and humanity of the whole thing, or simply the subtle ways in which the film sheds light on the human condition.  Or maybe it was just the medical scrubs.  But either way, Jason X is an exceptional film, one not to be missed.  If you don’t believe me, just read the reviews.

If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to see Jason X.  No more spoilers from me.  Well, okay, just one more detail:  The first actor billed in the opening credits is someone named Lexa Doig.  How sweet is that?  A name like that should be reason enough to see the movie.

Highly recommended.

PS:  Apologies for starting off on such an uncouth note.  I promise the next post will be much classier.

If I were to start a blog, the first post might look something like this…