The teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Inceptionwas released in some US theaters with Inglourious Basterds last Friday, and the one-minute clip is now online. Inception is Nolan’s first original screenplay since The Dark Knight. The tagline of the movie is,”Your mind is the scene of the crime”. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page (Juno), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer) and Batman veterans, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine, /Film is calling Inception a “a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind”. So, it sounds like your average Nolan mindfuck then. Can’t wait.
It turns out Robert Smith? (question mark intentional!) has done the math, quite literally. A chapter in a forthcoming book on modeling infectious diseases called, “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection”, tells the story.
If you try to quarantine the zombies you won’t catch them all, so “it’s basically humans fighting it out with slightly fewer zombies than there were before.” That’s not what you want, given that you’re dealing with flesh-eating, undead monsters that will either kill you or bite you and turn you into one of them.
If you go for a cure, “unless the cure was 100%, which it would never be in reality, you can’t turn all the zombies back.” You wind up with “this equilibrium where people are always switching back and forth” between human and zombie. Entirely unsatisfactory.
The only solution — and if we haven’t learned this from zombie movies, we haven’t learned a damn thing — is to mount wave after wave of military attacks.
If you dig graff or light writing, you’ll love desinger Aïssa Logerot’s latest project. Logerot has manufactured a fake aerosol can, called the Halo, which simply replaces the traditional nozzle with a tiny LED. The Halo preserves the techniques and gestures of graffiti and transfers them to light writing. It is possible to change the color and the brightness of the LED to change the graffiti’s styles. If the light doesn’t have enough battery, users simply have to shake it to have energy again.
I’m always fascinated to learn how technology and new media is impacting on human development (see my previous post, Surfing the Web: It’s good For You). Without doubt, popular culture has become more complex – due in large part to the fragmentation of traditional media. This, in turn, has required cognitive adaptation and has impacted how we interpret and interact with the world.
There’s a great article by Emily Yoffe on Slate at the moment that posits our addiction to information is a biological imperative which drives our seemingly endless need to check our Facebook profiles for updates or lose oursleves searching on Google. Researchers refer to this desire as seeking or wanting, an activity that affects the dopamine centers of our brains and causes us to chase the potential reward just around the corner (the reward being information). Here’s the rub: the possiblity of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one. This quest for what “might be” creates a feedback loop where consumption continuously renews the appetite.
Since we’re restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away.
Perhaps, suggests Yoffe, “we’ve now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly”.
I am counting the days til the drop of Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3 album. Scope out the tracklist below – some very tidy colloaborations coming from the Jigga Man, including the opening track with Australia’s Luke Steele.
Esra Røise is a Norwegian freelance illustrator, living and working in Oslo. She started out with two years at Einar Granum School of Arts, and is currently taking her bachelor degree in Visual Communications at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. Her illustrations and watercolours are epic – she’s sort of like Norway’s answer to Australian-based Sarah Larnach.
Scope the gallery below and see more of Esra’s work here.
Hands down, Point Break is one of the best action movies, since, like, ever! It was directed by one of the most underrated directors in Hollywood today, Kathryn Bigelow. Ms Bigelow has a new movie coming out called The Hurt Locker (trailer above) and the Times Online recently posted a great profile on her:
Bigelow is a Hollywood anomaly. Most obviously, of course, as a female director in a town that discourages them, she’s one of an endangered species. What makes her really interesting and unusual, however, is that she has spurned the romcoms and other chick-flicks that remain the only preserve of so many female American directors. Bigelow has macheted her own path through the Hollywood jungle, making intense, stylised action thrillers such as Near Dark, her early cult vampire thriller; Blue Steel, in which Jamie Lee Curtis played a tough rookie cop; Point Break; Strange Days, with Ralph Fiennes, a disturbing millennial crime thriller; and 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker, about the crew of a malfunctioning nuclear submarine. As The New York Times noted: “No one will ever say she directs like a girl.”
Writing about Fall Fashion in a recent issue of New York Magazine, Hugo Lindgren has a great piece about the evolution of everyone’s favourite fashion accessory: the humble T-Shirt.
In Paleolithic times, the T-shirt was a humble tool, worn beneath a shirt, to absorb perspiration. But ever since James Dean started wearing one without anything on top, it morphed into a form of personal advertising, a movable billboard. Even Dean’s plain white shirt conveyed a powerful message, which was, You can’t tell me who to be, a declaration that has never gone out of style.
The greatest breakthrough of the last decade was when American Apparel, under the direction of its free-loving founder Dov Charney, turned the fit of a T-shirt into a message. Never mind the graphics or slogans. The message was you—your body thrust out there into the world, shrink-wrapped in every conceivable color. American Apparel remains powerful and ubiquitous in the T-shirt world, but the trends have gotten subtler and more introverted. In the same way that various art movements become hermetic and end up addressing the nature of art itself, today’s cutting-edge T-shirt is all about the T-shirt. Comfort…is the golden principle, but it gets way more complicated than that. Because comfort isn’t simply a matter of how a shirt feels; it is also a matter of how you feel about the shirt. And designers are constantly trying to figure out how to game that relationship with science and technology. Just as denim designers have been doing for years, T-shirt makers are introducing artful imperfections in an effort to turn a commodity into something personal and familiar.
I’ve never posted about sport on this blog before – but Australian football is a passion of mine and today I’ll make the rare exception. The Australian edition of GQ Magazine hit newsagencies last Wednesday adorned with the face of Ben Cousins on its cover. The Cousins story fascinates me. The 31-year-old served a 12-month suspension for bringing the Australian Football League (AFL) into disrepute for an addiction to recreational drugs. Cousins return to the AFL this year was subject to strict drug-testing requirements which saw him become the most drug-tested sports person in Australia – if not the world. Cousins reportedly undergoes urine testing up to three times per week, as well as hair sample testing up to four times per year.
Meanwhile, a TV network bidding war looms over the rights to a tell-all documentary about the fallen football star. The documentary was self-funded by Cousins at a cost of about $100,000, but TV insiders are suggesting that exclusive Australian screening rights could now be worth up to $1 million. More important than the financial return, however, is the documentary’s ability to effectively re-brand a once disgraced Ben Cousins.
Much of modern brand marketing is predicated on the need to create personality and values for inanimate objects. The difficulty for Cousins and his agent, Ricky Nixon, is that the ’thing’ they are branding is a personality (and an addictive one at that).
Naturally, when discussing the business of global celebrity branding and sport, you cannot not mention David Beckham. Beckham’s global appeal has bridged the gap between fashion and football with an iconic sense of style. He is every agents wet dream. He is Mr Clean.
Cousins, on the other hand, is an anti-Beckham. Where Beckham has a sense of style, Cousins a sense of show; Beckham has a common touch, Cousins likes the low life; Beckham has a driven personality, Cousins has an addicitive one. Both are cheeky and passionate about their sport, but whereas Beckham is comfortable with his celebrity status, Cousins seems to have been bruised by his notoriety fame.
Successful celebrity sports brands (like Jordan, Beckham or Woods) seem to have one unifying attribute: dedication. Hard work and a commitment to overcoming all odds is what engenders mass appeal. No one can doubt the dedication of Ben Cousins: the former Brownlow medalist has electrifying skill and pace on a footy field – it’s his off field antics that have been his curse. A self-confessed addict, Cousins has had to harness all the dedication he could muster in order to re-brand himself in the eyes of the broader Australian public.
Thankfully, Australian’s love an underdog. And it seems that this is something Cousins understands explicitly. For an indication of the type of narrative that will be employed to re-brand Cousins in his tell-all doco, look no further than his comments at last year’s Grand Final lunch at Crown casino:
It has only been over the last 18 months to two years that, through my misdemeanors or indiscretions, I have learnt the reasons about why I am the way I am.
Through that I have started to learn how to manage life and commit to overcome addiction.
I have an addictive personality. It’s that addictive personality that has allowed me to hyper-focus on football.
With that came the extremity of the way I balanced that out and that’s what got me into the predicament that I’m in now.
It has taken away my livelihood and given me a hell of a lot of pressure, pain and strain on my family and the people who are close to me.
The odds may be against him – but you can’t keep a good man down.
