Via io9, this 6-minute trailer for Cloud Atlas looks pretty incredible.
Author: Bradley J. Fest
Infinite Boston
William Beutler just informed me about a really interesting project he has recently begun. Infinite Boston is a tumblr blog that will present photographs from approximately 50 locations around Boston that are referred to in DFW’s Infinite Jest. Now, if someone could do that for Tucson . . . (where I grew up and went to school. . .). A couple samples:
The End May Be Sooner Than We Thought
In “The Universe Could Tear Itself Apart Sooner than Anyone Believed,” George Dvorsky looks at recent theories about the Big Rip and how the Universe may have a much shorter projected life-span than physicists originally imagined.
Into Eternity
Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen’s new documentary, Into Eternity, looks like it might be pretty fascinating. The film follows the construction of the Onkalo Waste Repository at the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant on the island of Olikiluoto, Finland. Probably gonna watch it this weekend. The trailer:
Why Yes! Of course we will Stand Under the Exploding Nuke!
On NPR‘s website, Robert Krulwich reports on this unearthed video of 5 men standing under a nuclear explosion.
There is a “Nuclear Vault” at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. (Archives and Nukes. . . .)
And I just found this excellent blog, Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, run by Alex Wellerstein.
Abstract: Decadence and Sincerity in the Risk Society: Katy Perry and Britney Spears Partying at the End of the World
Below is an abstract for a paper I will be presenting at the 2012 Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association Conference, taking place November 1-3, in good ole Pittsburgh, PA. Along with two of my fellow colleagues from Pitt, we will be presenting a panel titled, “Celebrity, Authenticity, and Decadence: Lady Pop in the Age of the Networked Star.”
Decadence and Sincerity in the Risk Society: Katy Perry and Britney Spears Partying at the End of the World
It is a familiar trope in the rhetoric of the American jeremiad to draw a comparison between the high decadence and subsequent fall of the Roman Empire and the similar decadence of the contemporary United States. So it is tempting to make such a comparison when considering a recent series of pop songs celebrating “partying.” The videos for Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok,” Katy Perry’s “Friday Night,” and Britney Spears’s “Till the World Ends” portray gyrating bodies having simply way more fun than anyone could possibly have, reveling in their own meta-celebration. Such images easily invite a critique of these videos’ lack of self-awareness and apolitical celebration of decadence as a mode of being in a time of global financial crisis and austerity. Inarguably outgrowths of a specific brand of American exceptionalism and a youth culture where hedonism has become an end in-itself, what is perhaps most disturbing about this party program is its relative sincerity. By focusing specifically on Perry’s strangely sincere meta-filmic nod to the 1980s and Spears’s dance club at the end of the world, I will argue that these videos should be read not as jubilant affirmations of life and individuality, but as particularly cynical expressions of life in what Ulrich Beck calls the “risk society.” Perry and Spears signal a cultural inability to imagine a coherent future in the face of the present multiplying networks of global risk, and exemplify a need to perpetuate and maintain a decadent cultural fantasy by erasing the disasters and crises that define the present through the spectacle of nostalgically reappropriating the past or fervently anticipating the end.
The videos:
The Sound of Contemporaneity
So, on a bit of a personal note. I’ve been writing about the apocalypse in Pynchon a lot. While writing, or more likely making a sandwich, I find myself humming a little ditty. But the humming is only one note: the tuba, trombone (perhaps french horn) blast that is repeated three or four times in the following. In the game, this is the sound of the aliens’ lasers. For me, this note has come to feel like the sound of contemporaneity itself.
Walden, a Game; or, Oh Come On
Came across a piece in the latest Harper’s talking about a project from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Walden, a game. I sorta can’t believe that anyone is making this. Like, didn’t some advisor at USC try to dissuade the makers of this? Or, did the team maybe, like, reread Walden and think, hmm, perhaps Thoreau was thinking something different than a video game (even one that looks like it admirably emphasizes contemplation rather than play). But seriously . . . .
And on a Further Iranian Nuke Note. . .
Mark Halper has reported in The Guardian that American company Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc. and Tehran’s Islamic Azad University are banding together to pursue that nuclear holy grail: nuclear fusion power.
The New Proliferation: Cyber Weapons; or, the Internet is Tubes, its Tubes!
Thanks to Racheal for drawing my attention to the following things. The first is an article from yesterday’s New York Times about the US use of cyberweapons, the virus attacks on an Iranian nuclear facility, and the spiraling proliferation of the militarized internet. Misha Glenny writes in “A Weapon we Can’t Control,” in what sounds very much like digital-nuke-speak rhetoric and quickly maps onto digital destruction rhetoric:
During the cold war, countries’ chief assets were missiles with nuclear warheads. Generally their number and location was common knowledge, as was the damage they could inflict and how long it would take them to inflict it.
Advanced cyberwar is different: a country’s assets lie as much in the weaknesses of enemy computer defenses as in the power of the weapons it possesses. So in order to assess one’s own capability, there is a strong temptation to penetrate the enemy’s systems before a conflict erupts. It is no good trying to hit them once hostilities have broken out; they will be prepared and there’s a risk that they already will have infected your systems. Once the logic of cyberwarfare takes hold, it is worryingly pre-emptive and can lead to the uncontrolled spread of malware.
Hyperarchival parallax indeed.
And Dwight Garner has an interesting review, “He Has Seen the Internet, and it is Us,” of Tubes by Andrew Blum.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 