Warren Ellis's Blog, page 10

As I’m sure we all know by now, I prefer these posts to fire while everyone’s asleep…!

Some of these are recently added and being tested.  If the OPML-to-HTML thinger worked as advertised, all these links should be good for both subscribing and finding the originating websites.

I could really use more ambient/drone music podcasts, and some suggestions in the parapolitical/fringe/weird realm.  Also good history podcasts.  I’m @warrenellis on Twitter.

But this is what I’m listening to right now.  Perhaps you’ll find something of interest in there.

 

[RSS] Ultima Thule Ambient Music
[RSS] The Philosophy in a Time of Software Podcast
[RSS] The History of England
[RSS] The Economist: The week ahead
[RSS] The Digital Human
[RSS] The Cargo Culte Audio Field Report
[RSS] Stone Pages Archaeo News
[RSS] Start the Week
[RSS] SPEKTRMODULE
[RSS] Roadside Picnic
[RSS] Psychedelic Salon
[RSS] Philosophy Now
[RSS] Philosophy Bites
[RSS] Monocle — Affairs
[RSS] KEXP Song of the Day
[RSS] In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg
[RSS] In Our Time Archive: History
[RSS] History of Philosophy
[RSS] Great Lives
[RSS] Gnostic Media » Podcast
[RSS] dublab mp3 blog
[RSS] Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History
[RSS] Broken20
[RSS] Avant-Avant – a curated musical selection
[RSS] At Water’s Edge
[RSS] Arctic Circle Radio
[RSS] Analysis
[RSS] Ambient Soundbath Podcast
[RSS] 99% Invisible

#informationdiet

Vast, almost Sunn O)))-scale nightmarish guitar drone.

s/t by Artur Ruminski

Forgive me for not using the correct symbols  – they always get munged somewhere between Windows Live Writer and WordPress.

This is catch-up reading.  I’ve read a few shorter pieces by Zizek in the past that I never found completely compelling – he has, in general, passed me by, and I never really got the adulation.  So I bought a couple of his books, deciding that I really needed to give him a go in longform.  I got a chapter in and then realised I’d already highlighted a dozen phrases and passages, as well as having seen him wander down a somewhat decadent and relativised cul-de-sac and given me the finger.  I kind of get him more now, and the book is remarkably hard to put down.  He’s all over the place, but he’s hugely entertaining and his writing is delightfully pyrotechnic.  I’m having fun with it.

…this would be that revolutionary self-organised distribution process I’d been reading about.  I’m geolocked on all services: even using my Amazon.com account fails.  This would also explain why I saw more than a dozen different streams of the film on movie2K the other week, when I searched for curiosity.  (I was going to double-check that today, but my ISP has now blocked movie2K and I can’t be bothered to run a VPN.)

This is apparently down to Carruth selling the UK distrib rights to a company who doesn’t intend to do a UK cinema release until autumn and presumably doesn’t want DVD or download to dilute cinema takings.  They must be expecting to absolutely mint coins out of the twenty screens they’ll squeeze the film on to here.

So it seems I might get to buy a download in October.  Which I find kind of amusing: when I was a kid, I would read about films in American comics and magazines fully four-to-six months before they made it over the ocean to Britain.  And, in those days, of course, films would open in London first and make their way to the regions over a period of weeks.  Warm memories of seeing a tv ad for a film playing in London and working out how long it’d take to reach the Southend cinemas (the old Rayleigh Regal was gone by then). 

Well done to Shane Carruth and his distribution partners for allowing me once again to experience the film distribution methods of the 1970s.

We like to think of SCATTERLANDS as embracing all the awkward parts of the newspaper strip. Do you remember newspaper strips?  News-pa-pers.  Printed things on very thin slices of wood.  Hello?

This is an autopost.  I am still asleep.  The inside of my head probably looks like this.  God, I hope so.

(Render by Rev Dan Catt)

Who is apparently out of Perth. Very gentle.

Songs by Sima Kim

Her online portfolio.

Fraction kicked this interview with Mitch Hurwitz over to me last night, in which he discusses the series of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT he’s done at Netflix.  As with Netflix’ previous two original offerings, all fifteen episodes of the series will be released for streaming simultaneously.  Also, he knew he was getting all fifteen episodes up front.

And he gets into some interesting stuff about how that environment allowed him to structure the show in ways that were new for him:

Anyway, I started sketching it out, and I had this funny idea for Maeby. It doesn’t quite fit into the master family story, but it’s funny for Maeby, and I do have this funny bit for Tobias where he writes pop songs. He’s written a song called "I Kissed a Boy." I just had all these crazy notions, and suddenly I was overwhelmed by the task of squeezing all these unrelated stories into a movie that has a central plot.

Then I had this idea. "Well, what if there’s an anthology show?" I’ve been in TV for a long time, and one of the ideas that gets pitched a lot is the idea of an anthology show. Those really worked in the Fifties and Sixties with shows like The Twilight Zone, Route 66 and Alfred Hitchcock. It’s a different thing every week.

So I thought, "I might have an opportunity now because of what may or may not be an abiding interest in these characters. I could do an anthology series, like Maeby, episode 3 or George Michael, episode 5." I just loved this idea.

I was working on simultaneous storytelling – "This is what happens from 2006 to 2013." The characters are going to bump into each other. You gotta know that George Senior is going to run into Michael. You can’t just have George Senior doing his thing.

We ended up with an eight-hour movie of Arrested Development where the pieces do kind of come together. Not only was the show told out of sequence, it was shot out of sequence.

And, whether it’s occurred to him or not, he’s talking about big interleaved novelistic structure.  Which, it seems to me, is entirely perfect for a release system where one can (if one’s blowing off work for the day) watch the whole damn thing in a single sitting.