Film School Breaks Down Cinematic Fission
One of my favorite cinematic bands is Film School, who are not cinematic at all, band leader Greg Bertens once told me for Wired. My latest chat with Film School […]
scott thill
Resurgent Lord of the Rings Rules Fantasy
Peter Jackson’s CGI-soaked fever dream of innocence and evil revolutionized blockbuster cinema in the early ’00s and made a zillion dollars to boot.
Must-See Cult TV, From Danger Man To The Middleman
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s indispensably surreal soap opera ripped apart television tradition as it riveted viewers with a ceaseless mix of dream-noir intrigue and persistent humor.
Science + Fiction = Zero History: An Interview With William Gibson
William Gibson’s new novel Zero History examines the 21st century’s techno-cultural fetishes with a deceptively simple directive: The future is now.
Climate Killers Take Aim At California
California is leading the way out of the enviropocalypse with the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Now a political bullet called Proposition 32 has been fashioned to kill it, […]
Google + Verizon = Bad News For Internet
As Google and Verizon made clear in their proposal, emboldening a publicly engineered alternative wireless Internet is going to be hard to do.
Five Shamless Sci-Fi Oscar Robberies, Spearheaded By Avatar
UPDATE: This goofy roundup on Avatar‘s repurposed return has also been published by my pals at The Huffington Post and Bright Lights Film Journal. Stop by and mouth off. Riding […]
Autolux Is On Our Robot Overlord’s Playlist
“I’m not sure whether to view it as a disease or an evolution. I can’t imagine what the world is going to be like in 200 years.”
Geek The Beatles: John Lennon Assassination Simulations (Abridged)
It wasn’t easy writing this piece, because the reality of John Lennon’s assassination is a heavier load than hyperreality of his simulations. After all, hyperreality’s job is to suck the […]
Alan Moore’s Psychogeographical Unearthing
“We all grow out of the environment and times which we are born into.”
Alan Moore Gives Watchmen the Gas Face
“They offered me the rights to Watchmen back, if I would agree to some dopey prequels and sequels.”
Welcome to the Retirement Nightmare
Remember when the plan was to pour a percentage of your hard-earned salary into a retirement account, usually supplied by your employer? Who then invested your money with the company’s […]
Cerebral Sci-Fi Classics Wipe Minds
George Orwell’s future-fascist classic Nineteen Eighty-Four was really about 1948, although it was published in 1949
Darth Vader Art Feeds Your Head
Stars Wars is no longer the haven of geeks who like to pretend they’re space-faring saviors. It’s gone viral for decades as a pop-culture cipher begging to be filled in […]
Is This The Last Airbender? M. Night Shyamalan Hopes Not
“I love this idea that there would be a mythical leader in our world who is equally learned in all religions, one person whose job is to constantly remind everybody that they are all the same.”
Avatar’s Cinematic Compression Implodes
M. Night Shyamalan’s compression of Nickelodeon’s stunning animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender has serious boots to fill. And it needs much more time to fill them.
Absolutely Essential 90s Band Reunions
From the Cocteau Twins to Bowery Electric to the late, great Gravediggaz, we could really use some bands that were either born or broken in the 90s.
Best Album Art of All Time
By the time The Beatles got to their last proper album, 1969′s Abbey Road, they stripped themselves entirely of simulations and presented four friends parting at the road responsible for pop music’s most memorable sonics.
The Red Bull Racket
Red Bull is a tiny can of caffeinated hope. It’s not the first subject I would pick for an AlterNet article, but that’s why they pay my editor Jan the […]
Neil Young’s Enviropocalyptic Comic, Greendale
Neil Young’s stirring Greendale started life in 2003 as a crunchy concept album about the enviropocalypse, and quickly became an indie film. The inevitable graphic novel arrives…
Hail the Coolest Two-Person Bands On Earth
Evidently, sometimes it does take two to make things go right, as the song and its famous simulations once said. There aren’t too many memorable two-person bands in musical history, […]
The Cell Phone Racket
If you’re not angry with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint — America’s four national wireless providers that reportedly control 90 percent of the market — then here’s some ridiculous news to raise your righteous ire.
Flash Crash: Robotrading The Market
Flash Crash proved that market makers playing both sides of securities could be capable of wiping out any corporation’s stock, perhaps any nation’s economy
Deepwater Horizon’s Epic OilGas Catastrophe
If you’ve been railing for decades against the fossil fuel sector for everything from deliberately removing safeguards that could have prevented what will likely end up being the worst U.S. oil disaster in history to its lethal emissions that could, in the extreme, end up warming planet Earth to the point that human habitation is an impossibility, well, this is all old, sad news.
Geek The Beatles: Let It Be’s Recombined Reality Programming
Forty years ago, Let It Be closed out a decade of The Beatles’ artistic and technological influence.