All Hail the Return of Autolux!
I’ve been writing about Autolux for years, and yet they always sound fresh to me
scott thill
We Nailed It: An Interview With Shaun the Sheep‘s Richard Starzak and Paul Kewley
I spoke with Starzak and Kewley about how and why Aardman’s low-budget, big-picture animation continues to compete in our blockbuster marketplace, and why stop-motion can be even more real than hyperreal CGI.
Poe, Reanimated
Extraordinary Tales brings Poe’s harrowing stories to the screen for newer generations raised on boundless technologies and influences.
When Will We Strive Again For the Heights of Avatar and Legend of Korra?
Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra are two of the most ambitious and moving animated series of this still-new millennium. Indeed, pound for pound, they can stand alongside most non-animated series and still hold their own.
Genndy Tartakovsky On Sony, Popeye, Can You Imagine and Samurai Jack
It doesn’t take long (at all) for the stubborn and refreshingly frank Tartakovsky to hold forth on his frustrations with the way Hotel Transylvania 2 and Popeye were handled.
Happy Birthday, Bugs Bunny!
Whether he’s the destabilizing force of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes’ glory days, or more centered in contemporary reboots that can’t measure up, Bugs Bunny remains a towering cartoon influence.
Geek The Beatles: John Lennon Sketchbook Makes Official Online Debut
“It was created from original drawings by John Lennon and a soundtrack that I also edited together, consisting of snatches of conversation between John and Yoko and song excerpts.”
Corporate Solar Report Card
Ten corporations throwing their clout into solar energy.
Dear Utilities, Adapt Or Die
If the utilities don’t get on board, then consumers will find someone who will.
Indiana Solar’s Koch Problem
There are too many obstacles standing in the way of the inevitable.
Cli-Fi: Director Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea
Like his Oscar-nominated feature debut The Secret of Kells, his new stunner Song of the Sea is steeped in regional folklore but still a universal wonder. But it is a more personal epic, about the extinction of mythological seal people called Selkies, as explored through a lighthouse family riven by loss and misunderstanding but healed by history and magic.
Grant Morrison’s Multicultural, Intertextual Multiversity
“gnaw at the very roots of Batman’s being, fuck up the private lives of his friends and relatives, make him doubt his raison d’etre, set his postal district on fire and blow up his cave.”
Cli-Fi Is Real
Cli-fi is the cultural prism through which we monitor and experience ourselves as we bleed our planet dry while trying to become machines.
IPPR: Utilities Dying, Go Solar
Now it’s calling for the immediate replacement of obsolete utilities with distributed energy.
No One Wins the US China Solar War
We’re in the slow-motion throes of an environmental apocalypse whose existential ravages are terrifyingly “irreversible.” Now is not the time to be arguing over solar cash.
Microgrids: A Cleaner, More Resilient Grid
Microgrids make sense for a world where lighter and cleaner is better. Especially if you want to pack an increasingly powerful punch on a destabilized planet with problems.
I’m Just An Ordinary Alien: An Interview With Sean Lennon
As the dust of the 20th century the Beatles dominated depixelates into memory, Lennon is quietly hacking their legacies to create lasting multimedia of his own.
Renewables Dethrone Dinosaur Utilities
“The question is not if or even when the change will come, but rather, how fast.”
National Climate Assessment: Step Off The Gas, Step Up The Solar
“It does not evaluate mitigation technologies or policies or undertake an analysis of the effectiveness of various approaches.”
Pixies: Feel Bad For People Starting Out Now
Pixies are still making great music, and I’m happy to still be listening and interviewing them about it.
Terror and Terraformation: Alan Moore
“There’s something quaint about these attempts to control us today, in a period where we are boiling with information and complexity, both of which have reached levels that could be called fractal, if that wasn’t a polite way of saying chaotic.“
Here Comes the Sun Journo!
As I turned my back last year on writing about cultural, environmental, political, economic and other lofty concerns for money — because it wasn’t really paying any — I decided to plot another devious experiment.
Life To The Pixies!
Unbowed, the Pixies’ reconstructed band, and brand, now soldiers ahead with street and market cred to spare.
Goro Miyazaki’s Anxiety of Animation Influence
My father’s generation lived through and after the war, and basically had nothing. They forged their paths with their own hands, and created their whole world themselves.
Bilbo the Billionaire: A Short History of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Greed Wars
J.R.R. Tolkien legendarily wrote In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, one Oxford summer while “laborious[ly]” grading papers for some always welcome side money. Both of us, he could have added, will be stinking rich someday.