“Who put thing together, huh? Me! Who do I trust? Me! That’s who!” — Scarface

One of my recent obsessions has been Shane Carruth’s movie Primer. The story revolves around two engineers who build a device in their garage, a device that turns out to alter time. As intriguing and fascinating as it is, on a deeper level, the science revealed in the film only acts as a catalyst for the evolution of their relationship, which moves from enthusiastic reliance to complete distrust. The two engineers, Abe and Aaron, start off as best friends hellbent on building their machine, but once things get out of control, a rift develops, and the two find that they can no longer work together. Upon first viewing, maybe their scientific discovery overshadows the nuances of their relationship, but once one gets past the idea of time travel (and the subsequently intricate plot structure), the human elements of the story move to the fore. Read more

The University Press of Mississippi has been quietly putting out an amazing catalog of books for years now. One such set is their Literary Conversations Series (edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw) that consists of interviews and essays with modern literature’s most fascinating authors. I got Don DeLillo, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and Jack Kerouac, but the series also includes Tom Wolfe, August Wilson, Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Ray Bradbury, Gloria Naylor, R. Crumb, Audre Lorde, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among many others. Read more

Mark C. Taylor is one of those people you stumble upon and wonder why you were previously roaming around unaware. His countless books explore many areas of culture, philosophy, art, theory, and, most recently, commerce. I originally came across his work while doing research on artist Mark Tansey (Taylor’s The Picture in Question explores the mix of messages and theory in Tansey’s paintings). Read more

Advertising space being sold on our foreheads notwithstanding, we still live in a multimedia world where attention is the currency in trade. A couple of years ago, Doug Rushkoff sat down with John Brockman for a discussion about media, branding, choices, and what the “self” means among them. Seemingly mundane but paramount to our musing here, the question comes up as to what kind of shoes represent The Thing That Doug Calls “Doug.” Read more

The following blurb was in the Disinformation newsletter today (Thanks, Alex):

Last week the talented frontwheeldrive.com editor Roy Christopher joined the Disinformation blogs community. RoyC’s specialty is underground Hip-hop culture and techno-politics, and his site features a growing collection of interviews and reviews. His latest interview with Aesop Rock proves his skills are very much intact, and his first blog entry is a worthy meditation on the possibilities of free choice in American corporate media. If you want an intriguing angle on what’s cool and what today’s creative artists are really thinking, check out RoyC’s work.

If, as Marshall McLuhan insisted, puns and wordplay represent “intersections of meaning,” then Aesop Rock has a gridlock on the lyrical superhighway cloverleaf overpass steez. Every time I spin one of his records, I hear something new, some new twist of phrase, some new combination of syllables. These constant revelations are precisely why I’ve been a hip-hop head since up jumped the boogie, and Aesop keeps the heads ringin’. I’d quote some here, but you really just have to hear him bend them yourself. Read more

I wish that were the first science fiction joke of 2005 (a lá Cory Doctorow’s Billy Bailey), but it’s not. It’s real.

My initial reaction to this type of thing (i.e., advertising showing up on personal vehicles, weather reports, football fields, etc.) is disgust, but once I think through it and recover, I’ve had hints of a different residual reaction lately. Let me see if I can be brief. This continued and exponentially increasing encroachment of corporations on personal space is just one of those things we can’t change. As Seattle’s The Stranger put it in an article a couple of years ago (in an issue called “Yes Logo” in response to Naomi Klein’s book, No Logo): corporate culture is American culture. There’s no escape. So, what do we do? Read more

Remember when thoughts and theories about so-called “Generation X” were on the tip of everyone’s tongue? We were called “slackers,” and older people said we lacked motivation and passion. I’ve always taken issue with these characterizations because I’ve constantly seen people my age pursuing paths and interests that had no prior archetype — and working very hard at them. Now that the focus has shifted to the next generation, and now that we’ve been pushing for a while, our generation is emerging in new careers and pursuits quite different from our forebears — and in many that didn’t exist before. Read more