I finally received my issue of the Monocle Mediterraneo summer newspaper today, but it wasn’t easy. I ordered it in early August, and after a month going by with still no paper in my mailbox (they promise delivery in two weeks) I finally decided to get in touch on Monday. To their credit, they immediately got back to me, and said that they would send me another copy using registered mail, and it has arrived today (although I suspect it may just be the original issue that was mailed out, which would mean it took 5 weeks for delivery).

The reason I bring this up is because from the feedback I’ve gotten through Twitter after I started wondering “out loud” where my issue was, I got quite a few responses from others having similar problems, so my example is far from being an isolated case. What’s to blame? Is it the UK mail service? It is rather disappointing to receive a copy of something that celebrates summer in September, a frustration compounded by the fact that a few weeks ago I stopped by the Monocle Shop in Aoyama and saw it sold for 500 yen — ordering it online costs 7 pounds, which is almost double. Quite surprising considering that the Japan cover price for regular issues of Monocle is 2310 yen (almost $30), which itself is ridiculous.

But despite these complaints, it really is a beautiful thing. The paper’s smell may have turned into a joke, but its pages really do have a great, almost nostalgic odor. I love the format and the size, and would really like to see more publications/magazines use it — and it sounds like we can already expect Monocle to repeat the experiment during the winter holidays.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the use of test patterns as a graphical element, many people reminded me on Twitter that it’s still very much in use in the industry (video and TV production) or film school, and so a lot of people still deal with these quite regularly, so it’s not that far fetched to still be in use as a graphical association with the medium. I guess we should treat it the same way a film reel is still often used to represent anything that relates to movies.

Tonight, I can’t stop thinking about one of the more influential, yet relatively obscure artists at work during the post-Happenings decade. Ana Mendieta:

From Ana Mendieta’s “Body Tracks” series, 1970s.

It’s all too easy to scoff at raw, bloody, chthonic feminist performance art these days. Hell, it’s all too easy to scoff at just about anything that whiffs of pussy power. After all, this is 2010! No need for histrionics, right? We’ve been liberated, reborn. We’re fierce and comfortable, right? We’ve seen it all a hundred times before… rrrriiiiiight?

Then again, what Alice Miller said about scorn holds a lot of sway: ?Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one’s own despised and unwanted feelings.? In light of that assessment, whether one chooses to roll their eyes or not, Mendieta’s (earth-)body of work, and the circumstances under which she died, resonate as much right now as they did in the 1970s and early 80s. (Although, come to think of it, there were plenty of eye-rollers then, too.)

In any case, on the 15th anniversary of her mysterious death, I’m lighting candles for Ana Mendieta and wondering what comes next.

(Read more after the jump.)

Read the rest of Remembering Ana Mendieta

Post tags: Adornment, Art, Flora & Fauna, Gender, Grrrl, Memento Mori, Multiculti, Revolutionary, Sculpture, Sexuality

That’s right. Los Angeles this weekend. Portland, Oregon next month. Can’t say I’ve been, unfortunately, but always hear about good stuff getting screened at the fest.

After you watch Mike Boas’ promo above, you can check out the official site for the festivals.

H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival
Promo by Mike Boas [Youtube]

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I was in Denmark last week, speaking at NEXT 2010. The subject... geoengineering (dun dun DUN).

Here's the talk.

When I watched a part of it, the sound was off-sync with the video, so fair warning.

And fun game for any of my talks: count the "Jazz Hands"!

Second-hand Tang Poem, Maleonn’s series from 2007, is only a small sample of a portfolio overflowing with surrealistic delights, but it is among my favorites. These black and white dioramas tell the story of a mystical, far off land ? a tale both somber and silly. It’s a dichotomy seen throughout his work and he uses this balancing act to great effect. His work isn’t on exhibition in the US at the moment, but he does have a show at Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong.

Read the rest of Maleonn’s Second-Hand Tang Poem

Post tags: Art, Fairy Tales, Photography, Surreal

Some items of interest:

• OpenPCR.  An open source version of a high cost tool for biohacking, got double the funding it needed on Kickstarter.  More on the team behind it.
• Inside/outside refrigeration/cooling system.  Begs the question:  what would be the savings of a refrigerator that leveraged outside air temp intelligently?
• Shot spotter.  Being installed within lots of American cities.  Audio surveillance that can locate a gunshot within 35 ft.  See inset. 
• Gang maps of LA.  The alternative political landscape.
• Quran burning in Florida.  Right Wing Extreme, an armed militia, will protect the "Dove World Outreach Center" during it's first annual 9/11 Quran burning.  RWE is currently running a poll on its site:  "Do you think it's time for a second American Revolution?"  Charles C points out that RWE has withdrawn from the effort (see comments below).
• Haystack.  A project to foil national firewalls and state monitoring in Iran (China and Egypt next). Newsweek did an article on the leader of the project, Austin Heap and this turned up: When I first met Heap in January, he was regularly shuttling to Washington, D.C., for meetings at State and Treasury and with senior lawmakers.  
• Global police crack down on the open source insurgency, the Scene. They (the police) just wanted to know who or whom had used two different IPs during a couple of dates in 2009. Since we did not have this information (no logging) there was no information and/or hardware for them to seize. The police did not enter the datacenter, only the office, so no servers or network have been touched by them.

Global guerrilla entrepreneurs, super-empowered by direct connections to the dominant global marketplace (a market that is relatively indifferent to the provenance of the supplies it demands), are taking control of the Burgos basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural gas fields.  To accelerate this seizure, these enterprising guerrillas (likely a Zeta offshoot) are kidnapping oil workers working for PEMEX (as Zenpundit kindly notes, this is a playbook we have seen before -- India, Iraq, and Nigeria).  Here are some choice GG quotes from the LATimes article about it:

"How is it, that Pemex, supposedly the backbone of the nation, can be made to bow down like this?" -- relative of a kidnapped worker.  

"These are territories where the organized crime infrastructure, inside and outside of the police forces, has established power ? a parallel power, a parallel government. That territory is in the hands of a parallel power that has penetrated the government at all levels." Alejandro Gertz   NOTE: This is a nice description of a hollow state.

NOTE, we'll see variants of this in the US as the global economic depression worsens. 

In the US today tomorrow and tomorrow tomorrowtomorrow in the UK, my Thor run reaches its conclusion…

(Unless you’re in Canada. When it reaches it comes out nottomorrow. As in, today.)

Here’s CBR’s review and and you can read the preview here. Which thankfully cuts off before something particularly spoilerific. And as much as I’d like to do a looking-back-on-my-run post, I’m resisting saying anything else, because I’d risk doing the Spoilerific thing myself. It’s not over until those 22 pages fall between your fingers, with our array of final confrontations and the reading of the fine print.

As a whole, the run’s worked better than I could have ever hoped for. None of the three stories were in an easy situation, and that they even worked at all pleases me. I’ve few regrets about what I did and only a handful of what I didn’t do (More with the Broxtonites, Blake, Sif). And all those regrets aren’t really regrets at all, because I don’t think I could have played it any other way. It helped that I was working with such a fantastic string of artists, all of whom were up against it as much as I was. Billy, Rich and Doug - I salute you. Niko for New Mutants too. And, as always, McKelvie gets his own special, less complimentary kind of salute.

Most of all, I’m pleased that, no matter how random its ever-extending nature seemed to be, it’s a body of work. Stick those 11 issues of Thor with the Loki and New Mutants issues in a trade paper-back, and you’ve got something with clear themes and defined character arcs. Also, lots of hitting. The genre will not be denied.

It’s been fun and thanks for reading to those who read.

*****

Another thing strikes me. This is the last comic I have out before November when Generation Hope debuts. When I’ve had as much on the shelves in the last year as I have, that seems like a spookily large gap. The odd thing being, I’m not writing any less comics now than I have been. This month is Generation Hope, my second Avatar book and something else. And it’s a fun something else which I suspect will cause the most communal eyebrow raises since… well, since I was put on Thor.

So, expect this blog to lean more towards interview posts in the near future. Expecting shouting.

Last night I was reading through the latest issue of Rolling Stone — really loved the cover feature on Mad Men, as well as the profile on SNL creator Lorne Michaels — and seeing how they branded the issue’s theme (“Fall Television”) made me wonder just how relevant that particular imagery really is these days. The branding in question is what you see pictured above — it appears with all of the TV-related articles in the issue — and is of course inspired by the TV test patterns of old (pictured below, and technically known as “SMPTE color bars,” as I learned through Wikipedia).

As a retro effect, it works — I certainly remember them — but has anyone under the age of 20 ever seen one? As far as I know — and keep in mind that I’ve been living in Japan for 10+ years — they haven’t been used in at least a decade, and not just because they’re not necessary anymore (in this world of digital sets), but also because we live in a world with 24-hour broadcasts.

I’m just curious as to whether it’s still a good icon or image to use when referring to TV, although I’m the first to admit that I liked how it was used, and I can’t think of anything off-hand that would work better.