Cheesy slideshow from UglyMySpace

Banzai Institute?

Digressions on names and work...

Although the Albert Ellis Institute is currently hijacked by a bunch of jerks, I always loved when Albert would refer to his institute. If I had one, what would I call it? What should I call it? The repeated references to the Banzai Institute in all the support materials for Buckaroo Banzai reminded me of this. Steven Solomon Inc. or something is OK, but...

I am currently doing some text stuff, maybe feeling freed by the Bruce Nauman retrospective I saw in Berkeley this year, and also the wonderful
Miranda July (who I was just lucky enough to see do a reading/performance
at the NYPL last night).

Steven Solo or stevensolo is just a moniker of convenience, since I wanted a ".com" and stevensolomon.com is a "17 Year Old Professional Pianist
Jazzing Up Chicago's Music Scene".

Hey, he is a neat doppelganger and I have been following his career (sort of) since I realized he had snagged the domain.

Linking this blog to www.stevensolo.com has had a chilling effect since
the persona connected to the comics-influenced painting has stagnated so
@#$% much.

I will be setting up some satellite identities this next 6 months, maybe
taking a cue from Hokusai. It is time for multiple secret identities,
movement in general. Art making as communication, directness, shedding the
skin, accepting The Me Of Now (Thanks Oblique Strategies).

Breathe...

Buckaroo Banzai!

I finally saw BB in english!

I saw it in french while travelling--needless to say I missed quite a bit back then. What a great movie. I would love to see it in a triple feature with Repo Man and The Life Aquatic. Add Liquid Sky as the
midnight feature, even. The persistence of the aliens in all three of the mid-eighties movies and their involvement in terran love affairs is pretty weird and interesting.

Great stuff.

One more YouTube link, really...

I know, enough with the YouTube. I need to resize a design and of course this is impetus to immediately go websurfing, do errands, anything but the 30 minutes that it would take to get the damn task rolling.

One more, damnit, one more...from the Helvetica documentary, touching on font fetishism, here it is:

Jor-El Vs. Uncle Ben!

The guy who makes these is 26 years old & is my new favorite filmmaker I think.

Spider-Man 3 links

As a public service, here is a link to Comic Book Resources for a knowledgeable review of Spider-Man 3 with links to good interviews with the principal creators of the film.



I liked Waitress much, much more (saw it on the same day) but since most comics-illiterate reviewers are fucking up so badly at writing about this film, this link is a corrective.



And the movies' version of Sandman just smells like 1963 pulp paper. (Even if they blew it by a dumb ret-con that is as bad as the crappy Jack Nicholson Joker.)

For The Money Hungry

For those obsessed with The Root Of All Evil, today's video:

"Laptop Like You" song

I have jumped on the Jonathan Coulton bandwagon. I _did_ know about him before the NYT article, thanks to Merlin Mann and Ze Frank. But you may
not, go check this article:

But, more importantly, check out his geek love song, "Laptop Like You". I
truly can say that, as an artist, he voiced my deepest emotions concerning
my MacBook Pro.

Go here, scroll to Other Experiments at
the bottom and click "Hear". Then click "Buy"!

"Honour thy error as a hidden intention"

Oblique Strategies as an OS X Widget.

If you don't know about Oblique Strategies, here is the wiki.

No Mac available? Try this website instead.

Again, Brian Eno visualized the world we are now living in 22 years
ago.

Quentin Crisp On Fashion

"Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are."

More here.

Completely Insane Fake Interview

This is Dave Gibbons (artist on Watchmen) doing a fake interview where he channels a golden age of comics inker persona. Amazing.