Gromolko
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Posts posted by Gromolko
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Just read Planetary Nr.25. Grand. It had been a long time since I remembered why I fell in love with it. But does the ending mean I have to wait till 2011 for Ellis to finish it? Damn!
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What's that ridiculous Italian film about the priest and the metalhead trying to track down Satan to prevent the final battle happening?
Has anyone answered this yet? I think you mean El Día de la bestia by Álex de la Iglesia. Funny stuff. I remember seeing it in the Cinema, it was the opener for the german fantasy film festival 1995.
Not "Day of the Beast" or some such is it?
Saw it one drugs (I know how passe), s'why I cant remember it.
Dia de la bestia = day of the beast.... :) its spanish, by the way.
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What's that ridiculous Italian film about the priest and the metalhead trying to track down Satan to prevent the final battle happening?
Has anyone answered this yet? I think you mean El Día de la bestia by Álex de la Iglesia. Funny stuff. I remember seeing it in the Cinema, it was the opener for the german fantasy film festival 1995.
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I´ll try to expand without having actual reference before me. It seems to me that Lem had a very profound knowledge of philosophy on top of his scientific merits. Many of his stories start at scientific ideas that are not so far fetched or sometimes even realistic. Then he magnifies those ideas to a level that they become metaphysical problems or rather the metaphysical problems become visible.
I don´t know the english titles, so I´ll have to translate them from german, no guarantees.
For example "Do you exist, Mr. Johns" is about a lawsuit between a cybernetic company and a customer of theirs, a racecar driver (Mr. Johns) whose body was complety exchanged by cybernetic parts accident after accident. Since he couldn´t pay his bills, the company tricked him into replacing his last original body part and then tried to impound him since he no longer is a person. There are many stories of Lem concerning the metaphysical problem of the connection between body and
soul; of the material world and consciousness . There is a very funny dialog called "The Resurrection Machine" written in the style of the english philosopher George Berkley where a Materialist and an Idealist discuss the subject of personal Identity using science-fiction like thought experiments. "The Congress of Futurologists" is another very funny novel which should appeal to all the fans of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" on these boards.
"Solaris" is the most subtle and profound, going right to the heart of the matter: can personality (as in: the attribute of being a Person) be understood only as independent "Substance" for itsself or as an dependent "Akzidenz" of other things and how we can (or rather can´t) identify personality.
Lem identified many scientific superstitions about the connection between "mind" and "matter" and saw those in Artificial Intelligence research and Neurophysiology. He held that Subjectivity can not be created or explained through Objects.
Another theme of Lem is that of "situated cognition": that human intelligence has developed within a human body and with actions in his surroundings. Lem held that its Power of understanding would cease when it expands to things beyond the limits of human experience. There are a series of Novels where he put spacefarers in worlds with a completely different evolution and let them struggle in vain to conquer or even explain those worlds (Eden, The Undefeatable, Solaris) He was opposed to scientific "Unified" theories that should explain all and everything and made fun of those in some of his "Robot Fairy Tales".
He certainly wasn´t the first one to have those ideas, but he had astounding knowledge for an autodidact and a talent to integrate these thoughts in stories easily on one level with Philip K. Dick.
I think I have to mention another two short stories, my favourites : The "Experimenta Felicitologica" and "The washing machine tragedy"
Wow, that expansion has become a complete eulogy.
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Solaris is the best Science Fiction Novel ever imo. Its the essential Lem, so thickly packed with layers of meaning. My tip: read solaris, then every other story he wrote, then read solaris again.
Sorry to hear he died. From his last interviews I gathered that he felt unappreciated and misunderstood concerning his work and angry about the many presumptions of science when it comes to metaphysics and religion, presumptions he thought (rightly so) debunked by his work. That makes me sad.
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(although definitely not as visually accessible as it should be...no book should be an actual effort to read, which this was)
I actually like the more twisted designs of Ware and the more associative flow which take quite some time to read and understand. Its what I like most about him. The "How to read Comics section" in pictures only is hillarious, and trying to figure out the cut out instructions (is it possible to make that thing work?). "Quimby the Mouse" excells at this.
I agree with Mark that it doesn´t seem to mean anything (besides Wares sentimental idiosyncrasies). I remember having read an Interview with Ware where he says that Jimmy Corrigan is a character he found interesting in his mid-twenties, but thankfully he had moved on and now thinks of him as one dimensioned. I think so, too, but the novel gets better, or even good when it shows the "speechlessness" and isolation of other characters than Jimmy Corrigan, which happens not often enough imo.
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Just read Kochalkas Superf*ckers 1 + 273. Seeing "Ralph!" as a soundword for puking made me laugh so hard I almost did it myself. "Ralph!"
The combination of slacker attitude, gutter languange and superheroes is good for some more hard laughs. "I´m not gay" "Let´s just look at the FACTS. No girlfriend, plus you´ve got a man´s face in your ass. Hmm...should we ask the SUPER COMPUTER?"
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Bulleteer and Frankenstein Nr2
Wow
Seems TomC and Mark figuered it out. (Since I want to have a "I knew it", too, Jaqueline Pemberton is the Daughter of Meredith Pemberton.)
Beautiful how this comes together in Frankenstein 2. The "D´oh, I really should have seen this coming but i´d be damned if i suspected something" factor of that series is sky high.
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Oh Noooo! Hawkgirl and Wonder Woman burned a library with Pierre Menards Don Quijote in it! Hm. Not such a loss because its supposed to be word by word identical to Cervantes Don Quijote.
I´ve just started watching this series and loving it. Due to the screening schedule on my internet I´ve only seen two episodes, S1E05 and S2E05, both starring Wonder Woman and I´m wondering if she ends up in bondage every episode?
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I think Nightmare before Christmas has at least to be taken into consideration. imho better than anything mentioned here (with the possible exception of Bad Santa, which I haven´t seen. But I´m willing to excpect much from it due to Billy Bob Thornton and Zwigoff) .
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Has anyone seen him in Gods and Monsters (as James Whale, the Frankenstein Director)? I thought it was great acting, but now i´m learning that it came natural to him... :D
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The Three Main Rules of Discipline are as follows:
(1) Obey orders in all your actions.
(2) Don't take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses.
(3) Turn in everything captured.
The Eight Points for Attention are as follows:
(1) Speak politely.
(3) Return everything you borrow.
(4) Pay for anything you damage.
(5) Don't hit or swear at people.
(6) Don't damage crops.
(7) Don't take liberties with women.
(8) Don't ill-treat captives.
The fact that these pretty simple, maybe even banal rules were considered revolutionary among the cinese soldiery and peasants should tell you something about how war was GENERALLY fought earlier in China.
Hey, if you add the uniform working dress, a disdain for individuality beyond the task one works at and the benign dictatorship, thats a description of the smurfs... :D
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I was wondering when that would come up... I decided early on it wouldn't be me that posted it.
It was the first thing to come to my dirty mind. I was wondering why it hadn´t come up yet. But when one is under the spell of the obvious, it always seems incredibly clever.
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I wonder if the couple knows what its doing. They really should read this before playing their little dolphin games.
WARNING it used to be attached to goatse. It contains no pictures, text only.
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Just tool the chemistry test. 4/10. So much for bare reason...
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10/14. Thanks to John McLaughlins "Shakti" and reading Phillip Roth. I´m missing questions concerning Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, though. I guess thats not a very well represented religion.
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The Filth is transparent for you? On what drugs are you?
:) Seaguy is more accessible for my tastes.
That Popmatters Author Jesse Hicks seems to be a Morrison Fanboy:
http://popmatters.com/comics/seaguy-1-3.shtml
(and an academic show off; there is really no need for that name dropping to display his thoughts.)
I agree that philosophical reconstruction isn´t really needed, its just a way among many others to express the content. The image of Seaguy and Chubby dying of thirst in a Sea of chocolate is stronger than most conservative criticism of culture. And its immediatly clear if one chooses to read it as such, even if one can´t read Baudrillard (and who can? I can´t, thats for sure).
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Philosophical themes in Morrison Writings:
I´ve just discovered this. It has only marginally to do with Seven Soldiers, but I don´t know where else to post it
http://www.popmatters.com/comics/filth-2005.shtml
contains possible THE FILTH Spoilers
THE FILTHWriter: Grant Morrison
Artist: Chris Weston
Publisher: DC Comics / Vertigo
June 2005, 320 pages, $19.95
by Jesse Hicks
"It is important to accept man in his totality, his shit, and his death. In the acceptance of obscenity, excrement, and death there lies a spiritual energy which I make use of."
— Salvador Dali
In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Rene Descartes penned one of philosophy's most famous dictums: cogito ergo sum, "I reflect, therefore I am." In his search for a rational philosophical foundation, Descartes began from a position of absolute skepticism: he could doubt the existence of the world around him -- after all, an all-powerful, malevolent demiurge could be deceiving him about its existence; he could doubt the existence of other people; and he could even doubt the existence of his own body. All that must exist was the self which held such doubts. Hence, cogito ergo sum.
But just what was the substance of this "I" in "I reflect, therefore I am"? Having eliminated any physical object as a possibility, the philosopher declared his true self to be beyond the material world, connected to the body but not of it. The essential "Rene Descartes", he believed, was something Gilbert Ryle, in 1949's The Concept of Mind, pejoratively dubbed "the ghost in the machine."
In his Meditations Descartes confronted the mind-problem that has haunted the philosophy of mind for centuries -- the question being, briefly, how do mental processes interact with the physical world? How does human will become human action? Descartes answer -- that we each contain a physically-transcendent essence -- puts him in step with much of religious thought, as well as with Plato and early Greek philosophy; the counter-argument, voiced by strict materialists, holds that identity is the end-product of myriad chemical actions within the brain. Consciousness, then, does not transcend the physical, but arises out of it.
Into this long-standing debate jumps Grant Morrison, with The Filth, the story of middle-aged Greg Feely, who lives a gray life of TV dinners and tending to his sick cat. Feely plays the J. Alfred Prufrock role without complaint or reflection until a mysterious woman appears in his shower claiming that he is really Ned Slade, Special Officer 999 of the ontological garbage men known as The Filth. Greg/Ned's life starts to bleed Technicolor, and he finds himself mentally unmoored in a place between worlds.
The Filth, explains the woman, who introduces herself as Miami Nil, exist to enforce Status Q: "the way it is." They take on the jobs too bizarre or grotesque for normal authorities, to "stop the world's backyard from stinking." Their latest quarry is a "rogue parapersona" named Spartacus Hughes -- "educated at Eton, Magdalen College, Oxford Honors Graduate, superb marksman, martial arts expert, sex god."
Hughes, it seems, is the antithesis of Descartes's vision of the self. There is no metaphysical "Spartacus Hughes," no ghost in that machine. Instead, there is "Spartacus Hughes," personality-as-virus, infecting host bodies with his deranged identity. The bodies change, but Hughes remains the same smug, psychotic hedonist. He's gone AWOL from The Filth; it's Ned's job to bring him in.
Ned, though, can't quite shake Greg Feely, a parapersona engineered to give him some time off. "'Identity bends,' they call it," quips Miami Nil. Ned/Greg can't help feeling that he's in over his head as he encounters the world's most decadent billionaire, a murderer who kills with time, giant killer sperm over Beverly Hills, and a real-life superhero whose thoughts congeal in a balloon above his head. Meanwhile, Hughes is infecting more bodies, causing more chaos, and finally, it seems, trying to tell Ned something.
Through the thirteen issues of The Filth, Morrison plays the materialists against their essentialist counterparts. Hughes revels in his status as personality-virus, using it as an excuse to tear the world apart. After all, if we're all just puppets on the strings of our DNA, how can we have moral responsibility for anything? Another character, Doctor Arno von Vermun, explains that the number of germs on the human body outnumber the native cells by ten to one. How liberating -- and damning -- is it, he asks, "to know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt?" Here Vermun echoes the "fallen world" doctrine prevalent in Gnostic Christianity and other faiths. With Vermun, as with many morose metaphysicians, the world's decrepitude becomes an excuse for an end run around the worldly consequences of one's actions.
Of course, as in much of his work, Morrison refuses such an easy dichotomy as "material vs. essence." When one character, a parapersona, asks Ned what lives on after the body dies, he answers, "the soul." She responds, in a thick Scottish brogue, "Aye, right. Mitochondrial DNA. That's yir technical term fur the 'soul.' It's aw aboot how yih describe hings." The essentialists tend to see the world as fallen and rotten, forgetting that it's all in how you describe things. The world is what it is -- Status Q -- and yet Dali found spiritual energy in the excrement; Vermeer turned dried cow piss into Indian Yellow, allowing him to capture in Girl with a Pearl Earring a light that would never again exist.
This process of turning the shit and piss of the material world into something better and more human represents a third way. It's the alchemical answer to both the essentialists who deny the primacy of the material world and to the materialists who reduce humanity to a series of neuronal sparks. "We're all shit," Spartacus Hughes declares while trying to kill Ned Slade. It's hard to know where to go from there.
Ned, facing the possibility that he is a parapersona created in a lab to fulfill a role in a higher plan, has to confront that question. He storms The Filth headquarters, ready to take out the people who've lied to him, convinced him of his individuality. He is rage and bloodlust, but when he confronts his tormentors, he realizes they too are playing their roles. He breaks down, saying, "And I wanted an explanation. I wanted it all to make sense. But it's just shit. What am I supposed to do?" Holding up a handful of muck to his superior, Mother Dirt (just a cynical description of Mother Earth), he says, "What am I supposed to do with this?"
You do what humans have always done, Greg, when they're not losing themselves in world-shrinking abstractions. You go into the world of muck and filth with dignity, and you try to make it a little better. You share a little warmth with another person just as lost and lonely as yourself. In short, as Mother Dirt answers, "Spread it on your flowers, Greg."
— 1 December 2005
The first coherent seeming interpretation of THE FILTH I´ve seen.
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"Lower Back Tattoos"... They´re called "Arschgeweih" (Buttantlers) around here. Is there a similiar expression in english allready?
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Judging from the platonic and philosophical topoi Morrison used, Klarion has to die a true philosophers death.
And I will mourn...
Wait...An Idea I had just now: Because of the Undry Cauldron a Soldiers death doesn´t have to be final... I was thinking just along the lines of Morrison making a mockery of Platons cave analogy in Klarion. How could Socrates death by drinking from the cup of hemlock be warped? By Klarion coming to life by drinking from the Undry Cauldron? Just an Idea, as I said. I hate these speculations, damnit. This Comic has taken much to much space in my head.
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MiracleMan
in Comics
How is it possible for Todd not to have gone bankrupt, when everyone knows he has shite for brains?Well, even from the little I know of that case McFarlanes bancrupcy seems to have more to do with a shite for brains judge. (Not the McFarlane vs Gaiman case of course, I mean Tony Twist vs McFarlane)
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Spoorloos (1988 Version of The Vanishing) and Don´t look now are the most scary movies I know. The first one got me so bad I never ever want to watch it again.
The second one is one of the most brilliant films I´ve ever seen. Even if one knows the shocking end, the way Nicholas Roeg builds up an athmosphere of threat that seems to come from every direction, always shifting away, gets me every time I see this movie.
The Thing is nice, too.
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Calvin & Hobbes seems to be a long way from dark/mysterious/enigmatic. Well, unless you read it as the story of a shizophrenic. But if this is developing into be an "unasked for recommendation" thread, i´d say the first book to read for comic newbies is Scott McClouds Understanding Comics. Its (mostly) brilliant, always fun to read
and makes appetite to read every comic mentioned there. In a lesser extend, the same goes for Reinventing Comics. This will really get one hooked on this medium.
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Anything less than a brilliant scientific theorie would do Albert injustice, so:
:) 
Fuckbiscuitshitangels (Warren Ellis)
in Comics
Posted
Well, compared to the expectations Planetary raised for me it certainly is a letdown. When I read the first Issue my head began to spin with all the possibilities and allusions. The Snowflake seemed to me like a superhero version of Borges Library of Babel, and superhero (stories) fighting for survival, i.e. literary relevance... I was really curious what all these topoi were going to be developed into. But ultimately its just a cleverly imbedded analysis of the "secret" history" of literary influences that fails to develop a convincing new step in the superhero aesthetics (that is, for me, until now). There seems to be no conclusions in planetary to what direction the superhero story should go, there is no development of an aesthetic theory, only an indication of threads of influences .
The superhero fight metapher as a battle for relevance as a literary influence is not used differentiated enough here to describe these things adequately. There are some very clever things: the deconstruction of the Vampire myth via the sexual subtext (i.e. a kick in the groin for Dracula) the ease the mythic structures of stories brush aside the modern "innovations" that try to make use of them in "Creation Songs" and so on. But this has been done much better before; when Batman feigned his death at the end of his battle with Superman to continue his crusade underground it expressed Millers idea to keep radical ideas in the subtext of comics not to arise undue censorship attention. Even the Authorities recruitment of Krigstein (the creator of the rival superhero teams) at the end of "the Nativity" arc is more subtle than the kill or be killed attitude in Planetary.
But the Planetary series is not concluded yet, and last issues description of Dr. Dowlings superpower as being able to "expand" into other minds was able to rise my hopes again. Hope dies last...