John Carpenter's 'They Live' & Banksy

I'm watching the Banksy documentary which is well worth downloading from www.nikflix.com (somebody should buy that domain). I'm struck how politically it closely ties in with the movie 'They Live'. It's practically a palimpsest.

Update: ODD has produced an excellent analysis of They Live.

The Disney scene in the Banksy movie is extraordinary. It morphs from family fun to plain clothes Guantanamo Mickey Mouse security on Robocop pathology. To quote The Beatles I was playing earlier, "It wont be long, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah".

It's a very provocative and entertaining movie and possibly the most self referential piece of art I've come across for some time. Part postmodern, part self fulfilling prophecy. Watch it if you can. Maybe I should come back to the John Carpenter movie They Live some time because of Freeman's slick sick synchronicity spiel on it. Mind blowing stuff.

With Thanksy to Banksy

As Above So Below

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

Go Google

Love the way mainstream media in the US portrays democracy in Egypt as a bad thing. Bad bad Google. God bless America and its dream.