cybergnitohidinginaholeami
In anticipation of the upcoming Indiana Jones movie, I dug through the old comic book box and came up with this, Marvel’s “Official Comics Adaptation of the Hit Title” — the original Raiders of the Lost Ark in comic book form (larger image).
You’d think this would be worth some money on eBay, but it looks like they’re going for about a buck a pop. So much for another one of my “collector’s item.”
Posted on May 18th, 2008 by Mark (Add a comment)
The Passively Multiplayer Online Game has been generating a lot of hype lately. Yesterday I installed the necessary Firefox Extension, “played” for a few minutes, and then decided to uninstall the extension and maybe come back to the game once it gets interesting.
My main objection to the PMOG is this: It tries to make web surfing, which I do for work, fun again. And it attempts to do this by making it like work. Badges? Leveling up? Laying “mines”? Who has the time?
The game will either be interesting months and months from now, when there’s rich, non-time-sensitive activity going on. Or else the game would have been interesting years and years ago (like when you used to use Excite as your search engine) before the web was colonized for profit.
Either way, now is not the right time. At least not for me.
Posted on May 17th, 2008 by Mark (Add a comment)
That is, Dream Jungle, House of Leaves, The People of Paper, Tropic of Orange, Little Brother, Cloud Atlas: A Novel
Posted on May 2nd, 2008 by Mark (Add a comment)
I’m not quite finished with the concerts of the nineties yet, though from here on out I’ll be jumping around chronologically, as I remember the shows. And here is one I can’t believe I almost forgot:
Indigo Girls, Toledo, 1995
Two things I remember about this show, maybe three.
(1) I went with Tim, my closest friend in Toledo, an alien city at the time. Tim was basically the guy who nudged me on to graduate school after I roosted for a few years as a high school teacher.
(2) This was the Indigo Girls’ Swampophilia tour, the first CD of theirs that I didn’t buy, and never did buy, and I don’t know why, because it’s great.
(3) The show was at the Masonic Complex, a great indoor venue, and I just love saying the name, Masonic Complex. It’s like something Freud would have to diagnose.
(4) Tim and I later saw La Boheme at the Masonic Complex (Masonic Complex, just say it with me). I don’t think the musical qualifies as a rock concert, but it’s worth mentioning anyway, because there’s another great name involved here, a student of mine who I remember seeing at the show, his nose buried in a book the whole time. This would be a troublesome nerd I had a great fondness for, Alaric. If Alaric didn’t have Asperger’s Syndrome, he should have.
So that’s four things I remember, not three. What did the Indigo Girls sing? I have no idea, but I’m sure “Closer to Fine” was in there, the only song of theirs I ever mastered musically and vocally, only because Matt Sutter had told me a few years earlier that the Indigo Girls were the future of alternative music. (And we were in, at the time, the home of the Future of Rock and Roll, 97X…)
Posted on April 22nd, 2008 by Mark (Add a comment)
Anybody who follows Facebook has probably heard about the user who found it impossible to delete his account; even after he deactivated his profile, it showed up in searches and various Facebook news feeds.
If you can’t get out of Facebook when you’re alive, what happens when you die?
What happens to your Facebook profile when you die?
Sadly, this is not a rhetorical question. I’ve had two Facebook friends–first a colleague (and true friend) and second a former student last month–pass away. Yet their Facebook pages persist, digital ghosts with mini-feeds still growing, updated with the usual nonsense and noise (”Mike joined the group Free David Hasselhoff” and “Barrald Terrence and Will Navidson are now friends”) that fill anybody’s Facebook feeds.
In fact, in the second case, I only found out about my student’s death from a terse, surreal update to her profile by a family member, which then showed up in my Facebook news feed. Her Facebook profile has since become a kind of memorial, with dozens of friends writing their goodbyes on her “wall.”
In the first case, nobody has written on my friend’s wall in the six months since he died, though he was loved and respected by hundreds of people across the country. I suspect the difference between my student and my friend’s post-mortem Facebook activity is generational; digital mourning, at least in a consumer-oriented space like Facebook, is considered insensitive or insincere by anyone over the age of 30. And so my friend’s profile is eerily silent, his feed simply stating with no irony that he “has no recent activity.”
I imagine that eventually Web 2.0 will catch up with real life and incorporate grieving into its ecological landscape. Maybe this will be the beta version of Web 3.0.
I don’t know which is creepier: a Facebook engine that doesn’t know when we die and carries on as if we hadn’t; or a Facebook engine that somehow taps into public records and newspaper obituaries, detecting when we die, and initiates a sort of prescribed last will and testament profile update, a more tactful 404 error message.
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Mark (2 comments)
I’ve always suspected that Tater Tots were the ultimate comfort food. Something about them calls us back to childhood, back to the deep fried goodness of elementary school cafeterias. Even full grown adults are susceptible, drawn to the warm potatoesque mush inside and the crunchy, flaky shell outside. Some salt and some ketchup, and we’re in heaven.
My theory was confirmed today at the campus cafeteria. One of the a la carte lines had a hot batch of tots, fresh from the fryers. I helped myself, of course. It was the best thing that happened to me all day, maybe all week.
And as I was walking to a table, no less than four total strangers stopped me, asking where I had found the Tater Tots. They wanted them too. They wanted the comfort, the serenity, the salvation promised by each tiny perfect little tot. All across the cafeteria today were delighted students and professors, as eager for each new tater morsel as my grandma was for her Sunday Eucharist.
Posted on April 15th, 2008 by Mark (Add a comment)
A long time back I began a series of posts about the different live concerts I’ve seen since the eighties. A student of mine who happens to be a Glen Phillips fan dug up an old post about a Toad the Wet Sprocket concert in the early nineties. It got me thinking that I never did finish my concert reminisces. So, here I am, picking up approximately where I left off.
Mojave 3, North Star Bar, Philadelphia, 2001
I first heard Mojave 3 in a coffeshop on Pine Street — the Last Drop Coffeehouse I think. I was there with John, and Mojave 3 was playing softly on the shop’s stereo. This was back when Napster was a revelation operating under the radar, and I went back to my apartment and downloaded whatever Mojave 3 songs I could find. I fell in love with “A Prayer for the Paranoid.”
A few months later Mojave 3 was live in Philly, at the North Star Bar. I went with Matt and Stephanie, about the oddest trio you’d ever seen. But then, put Stephanie with any two people and you’d end up with an odd trio.
I remember Matt saying that no band deserves to sing such gorgeous songs and look so gorgeous on top of that. And they were gorgeous. I smuggled a pint glass out of the bar. Seven years later it’s the only memento I have from that evening, the only memento from that entire spring.
Posted on April 11th, 2008 by Mark (1 comment)
Anyone who knows is me is expecting a flurry of posts about the sad news of Charlton Heston’s death. For a while, back in the late nineties, I was single-handedly trying to forge the field of Heston Studies. My work focused on Heston’s informal sci-fi trilogy from the late sixties and early seventies: Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green. One of those essays — “There Goes the Neighborhood: The Seventies, the Middle Class, and The Omega Man” — was even published in a collection called Shocking Cinema of the Seventies.
I’ve been thinking for a long time about posting the other essays, and finally, tragically, now seems like an appropriate time to do it. So bear with me as I dig through my files and look over these old fossils, and if they’re not too embarrassing, look for them here in the future…
Posted on April 7th, 2008 by Mark (Add a comment)
With my hometown team in the Sweet Sixteen, I thought I’d dig through the archives of a long-defunct, long-offline version of Sample Reality and repost the only thing I’ve ever written about the NCAA. It begins with this Nike advertisement from 2000, a fantastic little commercial produced by Wieden & Kennedy (Portland, Oregon), which illustrates Marx’s idea of the commodity as a “social hieroglyph” better than, well, better than Marx ever did.
Quite simply, what we find in the advertisement above is the fantasy that Nike shoes literally grow on trees. They are not the products of human labor, but the produce of the earth, nourished by the sun and sold at a farmer’s market in sleepy Bracketville, a fictional town created by Nike during the 2000 NCAA championship.
Bracketville, where “dreams grow on trees,” is the fanciful antipode to Indonesia and Vietnam [and now, in 2008, China], where most of Nike’s shoe production actually occurs. Dismal working conditions are disavowed, by both Nike and its customers, and replaced by pleasant images of sunshine and plenitude. Women and children factory workers, whose labor is congealed in every pair of “Air Flight” shoes, disappear, leaving behind no trace. The factories disappear as well. Indeed, Nike itself vanishes. In the corporation’s place we find only the friendly local farmer, selling his home-grown shoes to eager American customers. In a bizarre twist of logic, $1.20 worth of labor becomes a $90 pair of shoes, which in turn becomes an abundant crop sold by the basket-full. [The shoe-fruit, as I say above, is a social hieroglyph, by which Marx meant a commodity whose origins are obscured, its means of production veiled, and any traces of human labor, hidden.]
Posted on March 26th, 2008 by Mark (Add a comment)
Tradermaester-maestertrader Adam remembers young Karol Wojtyla (henceforth known as “the pope boy”) running through the streets of Poland in Marvel’s comic book adaptation of his life. I’m happy to bolster Adam’s memory with these EXCLUSIVE!!! images of the pope boy playing soccer in his hometown of Wadowice (larger image).
For my part, the image from the comic book that has stayed with me for over 25 years, the image which I don’t even have to open up the comic book to recall in vivid detail is the Pope skiing (actually, he was only a cardinal then, but who’s keeping track?). Look at him go!
What form! What grace! What cool pope shades! (Larger Image)
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 by Mark (2 comments)
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