Strange island

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Modern Britain is a strange island, if you’re a Vanuatuan native:

In March this year, a British TV company invited a small tribe called the Kastam, from the tiny South Pacific island of Tanna, to send a delegation to England, a country none of its people had ever visited before. They spent a month living here, learning our customs, and making a film about the way the strange and alien inhabitants of a modern western democracy live.
[...]
The five reverse anthropologists are engaged in nothing less splendid than fulfilling a religious prophecy: that the Son of God will one day meet with them and agree to return to live with his brothers in the South Pacific. The men believe, to adapt a song from the football terraces they have visited (to study sporting culture) only days earlier, that the Duke of Edinburgh is finally about to be coming home. Watching a group of Kastam come to terms with our customs is both instructive and very, very funny. Many of the things you’d expect to leave them flummoxed duly do: at meal-times, for example, the group struggle to cope with sitting at table, and using plates, knives and forks (they are used to dining with their hands, cross-leggeed on the floor). In one early scene, when they attend a dinner party, Yapa tucks into the contents of the butter dish, with some gusto. He is either too polite, or too confused, to stop until the entire slab is finished.

In another, the group attends a rural pub on a Friday evening, which they describe as the white man’s version of the “nakamal”, or village meeting place. They are perturbed by how noisy it is. JJ remarks that the white man’s fire-water (Adnams bitter) makes everyone behave in a strangely boisterous manner. Yet although the Kastam are uncomfortable with drunkenness, they turn out to be extremely handy at another English pub tradition: darts.

Brock Samson in the 80s

Friday, September 7th, 2007

Evidently Stephen DeStefano is one of the cartoonists working on Venture Brothers Season 3 — and he helped put together these teaser images of Brock Samson in the 80s.

Figwit

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

In reading up on Flight of the Conchords and The Lord of the Rings, I just came across the story of Figwit:

In New Line Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy based on the book of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien, Figwit is the fan-derived name for an unnamed Elf extra played by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords fame. “Figwit” is derived from “Frodo is great…who is that?” This is in reference to the distraction viewers may experience due to Figwit’s physical appearance and demeanor.

Figwit is seen in the first movie during the council of Elrond. He sits next to Aragorn until they all stand up to argue. After Frodo shouts “I will take it!” and everyone turns and looks at him, Figwit is standing on the far right. He is standing in the background for only a fraction of a second.

Bret McKenzie is also seen in the third movie (credited as “Elf Escort”) in the scene where Arwen is leaving for the Grey Havens and has the vision about her future son Eldarion. He is the one who tells her to get back with the others. He has two lines: “Lady Arwen, we cannot delay!” and then “My lady!”

Figwit’s rise to fame began shortly after the first movie. Peter Jackson, who directed the trilogy, stated in the DVD commentary for The Return of the King that he was given dialogue in the third movie because Jackson became aware of the attention given to this extra. Jackson mentions the phenomenon in the commentary track on the extended version of the Return of the King DVD: “the decision to give him a speaking role was developed after the scene was scripted. Originally just a random cast extra was to give the lines, but it was decided that it would be fun if the Figwit actor was brought in to deliver them.”

HBO renews cult favorite Conchords

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

HBO renews cult favorite Conchords. That’s the good news. Now Bret and Jemaine need to put together enough songs to fill out a second season, and they don’t have years to do it. That’s the not-so-good news.

Frodo, Don’t Wear the Ring

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

I just caught up on Flight of the Conchords, and naturally I loved their video for Frodo:

Of course, the best lyrics come near the end, when Bret and Jemaine start busting rhymes:

Yo Frodo, what you doin’ wearing the ring?
All powerful jewelry, is that your new thing?
I know it’s hard when you’re little more than three foot four
Your little ass so close to the floor.
Trying to lead the fellows to the gates of Mordor
The Fellowship!
(Yea the fellowship)
I don’t rap about bitches and hos,
I rap about witches and trolls,
just passing on the words of the Elven king,
Wisdom to all
Frodo! Don’t wear the ring!
Frodo don’t wear the ring,
The magical bling bling,
You’ll never be the Lord of the Rings

Fans of Tolkien and of rock music probably know that there are plenty of Tolkien-inspired rock songs. Some of the most famous include Led Zepplin’s Ramble On, The Battle of Evermore, and Misty Mountain Hop. The earliest of the three, Ramble On, from 1969′s Led Zeppelin II, shares the folk-and-hard-rock flavor of Frodo:

The Distant Future does not include “Frodo” — but “Robots” and the others should tide you over until the full album comes out.

Science Channel

Monday, August 20th, 2007

The Science Channel is looking for “someone who makes science FUN the way the Mythbusters do” and “can demonstrate its complex principles in a simple way” — as demonstrated through a 3- to 5-minute video. Hmm…

Interview with Alan Moore

Saturday, August 18th, 2007

This Interview with Alan Moore is about “how radicalism informs his work” — although I find “inform” a peculiar word to use in this context:

It furthermore occurred to me that, basically, anarchy is in fact the only political position that is actually possible. I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation — that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice. All it means, the word, is no leaders. An-archon. No leaders.

So “a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over” is still anarchy?

Interview with Douglas Wolk

Friday, August 17th, 2007

In this Interview with Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics, he discusses which comics to recommend to non-fans:

I was talking with some friends recently about the common mistake of recommending Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, as great as it is, as a starting point for superhero comics as one of them put it, that’s like recommending The Seventh Seal as someone’s first movie! For pure, unencumbered superhero joycore, I love Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman — if you’ve heard of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, you know everything you need to know to enjoy it, and it deepens with repeated reading. Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’s cruelly witty Alias, about a self-loathing ex-superheroine-turned-P.I., has lots of Easter eggs for the continuity-obsessed, but it probably works even better as a stand-alone story. And if you’re at all into Victorian literature and/or want to sample Moore’s work, the two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (drawn by Kevin O’Neill) are hugely fun on their own, and also illustrate by analogy the way a lot of the best superhero comics and other pulp art work: providing metaphors to illuminate the central concerns of their moment.

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

A few weeks back, while discussing the notion of bootstrapping society, a colleague mentioned that he had a first edition of A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, and he’d lend it to me if it would inspire me to read it.

I waved off the offer, not wanting to risk even a small chance of harming a rare book, but he made sure I got the book, and I made sure I read it.

One great advantage to reading the first edition is that it comes lavishly illustrated by Daniel Beard. (And one curiosity is that the first edition’s cover says A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court — the Connecticut doesn’t appear until the title page.)

At any rate, the book matched my expectations in some ways and defied them in others. For instance, from what I’d osmotically absorbed over the years, I’d assumed the book was largely about the protagonist’s Yankee ingenuity and technical superiority over the primitives of King Arthur’s court:

Twain’s book precipitated an entire sub-genre of science fiction, characterized by the depiction of a modern time traveller arriving at an ancient society, anachronistically introducing modern technologies and institutions and completely changing its character.

The best-known example is L. Sprague de Camp‘s Lest Darkness Fall in which an American archaeologist of the 1930s arrives at Ostrogothic Italy and manages to prevent the Dark Ages by introducing printing and other modern inventions. Leo Frankowski wrote the Conrad Stargard series where a 20th century Pole arrives in 13th century Poland and by rapid industrialization manages to defeat the Mongol invasion, as well as completely annihilating the Teutonic Knights. Poul Anderson presented an antithesis in his story The Man Who Came Early, where a modern American who finds himself in Viking Iceland fails to introduce modern technologies despite being an intelligent, competent and well-trained engineer, and finds that in a 10th century environment 10th century technologies work best.

In actuality, the book is more about the modern liberal ideals of America, as it repeatedly attacks the notions of hereditary aristocracy, slavery, and an established church.

DNA, A Prescott Educational Film

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

Blows Against the Empire

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

Philip K. Dick is best known for the films loosely based on his stories: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc.

Now, the Library of America has bestowed a certain amount of respectability on his work by compiling Four Novels of the 1960s, a collection including The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ubik.

In Blows Against the Empire, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik examines the troubled writer and his work:

Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three. His reputation has risen through the two parallel operations that genre writers get when they get big. First, he has become a prime inspiration for the movies, becoming for contemporary science-fiction and fantasy movies what Raymond Chandler was for film noir: at least eight feature films, including “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and, most memorably, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” have been adapted from Dick’s books, and even more — from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” to the “Matrix” series — owe a defining debt to his mixture of mordant comedy and wild metaphysics.

But Dick has also become for our time what Edgar Allan Poe was for Gilded Age America: the doomed genius who supplies a style of horrors and frissons.

[...]

Dick’s early history is at once tormented, hustling, and oddly lit by the bright California sunshine of the late fifties. Born in 1928, he had a twin, a sister named Jane, who died when she was only a month old; like Elvis Presley, who also had a twin sibling who died, Dick seems to have been haunted for the rest of his life by his missing Other. He seems to have blamed his mother, unfairly, for her death, poisoning their relations. He had one of those classic, bitter American childhoods, with warring parents, and was dragged back and forth across the country. He had loved science fiction since boyhood — he later told of how at twelve he had a dream of searching in Astounding Stories for a story called “The Empire Never Ended” that would reveal the mysteries of existence — and he began writing quickie sci-fi novels for Ace in the fifties and sixties. “I love SF,” he said once. “I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It’s not just ‘What if’ — it’s ‘My God; what if’ — in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.” The hysteria suited him. He seems to have been a man of intellectual passion and compulsive appetite (he was married five times), the kind of guy who can’t drink one cup of coffee without drinking six, and then stays up all night to tell you what Schopenhauer really said and how it affects your understanding of Hitchcock and what that had to do with Christopher Marlowe.

By the way, Bladerunner fans will want to pick up the new five-disc ultimate collector’s edition.

Tek Jansen Comic

Monday, August 13th, 2007

OK, heroes, prepare yourselves for Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen #1:

Solar plexus! Bursting out from the hit Comedy Central show, THE COLBERT REPORT–it’s STEPHEN COLBERT’S TEK JANSEN! In this stunning continuation of Stephen Colbert’s critically acclaimed, yet unpublished prose novel, everyone’s favorite sci-fi hero must stand against the enemies of freedom no matter what dark planet they crawl from! Each issue features two stories: A main serialized story written by John Layman and Tom Peyer with art by Scott Chantler & an independent backup story written by Jim Massey with art by Robbi Rodriguez.

Inside the Mind of the Inner Economist

Saturday, August 11th, 2007

Nick Gillespie of Reason looks Inside the Mind of the Inner Economist, Tyler Cowen:

The 45-year-old George Mason University economics professor has a new book out that mixes self-help with hardcore economic thinking. Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist is rightly drawing rave reviews for its mix of high-end theory and practical advice. New York magazine recently dubbed Cowen, who co-runs the popular Marginal Revolution blog, a “cult hero,” and The Washington Post just wrote up Cowen’s advice on finding memorable ethnic food on the cheap.

Foux du Fafa (Foux Da Fa Fa)

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

Flight of the Conchords can be uneven, but, as someone who studied French in high school, I absolutely loved “Foux Da Fa Fa”:

While “Foux Da Fa Fa” sounds like a stereotypical 1960s French pop song, “A Kiss is Not A Contract” clearly borrows quite explicitly from the old-school video for Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballade de Melody Nelson (about 45 seconds in):

(Edit: The original YouTube video for Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballade de Melody Nelson that I embedded is no longer available, and other versions, like this one, aren’t embeddable — by those of us who lack Serge’s certain je ne sais quoi, at least.)

When I first listened to “Foux Da Fa Fa,” I missed a few of the lyrics, so I looked them up. Unfortunately, HBO does not provide the French lyrics with accents. Of course, they’re not really in correct French to start with, either. As a public service, I’ve added the accents, fixed a few spelling and grammar errors, and provided a rough English translation:

Foux da Fa Fa (with English translation)

Je voudrais une un croissant (I would like a crescent roll)
Je suis enchanté (I am enchanted/delighted [to meet you])
Où est le la bibliotheque? (Where is the library?)
Voilà mon passeport (Here/there is my passport)
Ah, Gérard Depardieu (Ah, Gerard Depardieu [a famous French actor])
Un Une baguette, ah ha ha, oh oh oh oh (a loaf of French bread)
Ba Ba ba-ba Bow! (Ba ba ba-ba bow [gibberish])
Foux da fa fa (Foux da fa fa [no, it doesn't mean anything])
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah

Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Et maintenant le voyage à la supermarché! (And now the trip to the supermarket!)
Le pamplemousse (Grapefruit)
Ananas (Pineapple)
Jus d’orange (Orange juice)
Boeuf (Beef)
Soup Soupe du jour (Soup of the day)
Le camembert (Camembert [cheese])
Jacque Jacques Cousteau (Jacques Cousteau [the undersea explorer])
Baguette (Loaf of French bread)
Mais oui (But yes/of course)
Bonjour (Hello/good day)
Bonjour
Bonjour
Bonjour, monsieur (Good day, sir)
Bonjour mon petit bureau de change (Hello, my little foreign exchange)
Ça va? (OK?)
Ça va. (OK)
Ça va? (OK?)
Ça va. (OK)
Voilà – le la conversation a la au parc. (Look, conversation at the park)
Où est le livre? (Where is the book?)
À la bibliotheque (At the library)
Et le la musique dance danse? (And the dance music?)
Et le À la discotheque. (At the disco/nightclub)
Et le À la discotheque. (At the disco/nightclub)
C’est ci, baby! (This is it, baby!)
Un, deux, trois, quatre (One, two, three, four)
Ba ba ba-ba bow!
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah

Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Où est le la piscine? (Where is the pool?)
Pardon moi? (Excuse me?)
Où est le la piscine? (Where is the pool?)
…Uh…
Splish splash
…Uh…
Eh…
Je ne comprends pas. (I don’t understand.)
Parlez-vous le français? (Do you speak French?)
Eh?
Eh? Parlez-vous le français? (Do you speak French?)
Uh ….No.
Hmmm.
Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah
Ba ba ba-ba bow!

“Foux Da Fa Fa” won’t be on the new Flight of the Conchords EP, The Distant Future, but “Robots” obviously will.

Binary solo!

Addendum: The Flight of the Conchords album is available (on CD and in MP3 format), and it includes Foux du Fafa. (Note the spelling.)

Found, Artifacts from the Future

Monday, August 6th, 2007


Wired 15.01‘s Found, Artifacts from the Future image earned a chuckle from me for its amusing crayon colors:

yellowcake
blue screen of death
toxic waste purple
steampunk copper
red dwarf
vulcan blood
nuked sienna
sky brown
cremains
clockwork orange
iPod white
melanoma
gm maize
soylent green
martian flesh
gray goo
bioluminescent periwinkle
customcolors 2013