A collective experiment in brand perception.

Izzy [Stradlin, Guns N'Roses' rhythm guitarist] made a call and we went over to a friend of a friend who we’ll call ‘Bill’. We’d gotten a taste of smack again in Australia, so the craving was there by the time we got home. Besides, after two years of touring, subconsciously, we both felt that we deserved it. Anyway, Bill had a taste for drugs and always had plenty of every variety; he was also very generous. When you start to get famous at all, a few typical things start happening: in Hollywood, if you’re out at a bar, everyone wants to buy you a drink, you can get into any club; whether you like it or not, you are suddenly a figure on the nightlife circuit. When that started happening to us, there was nothing less interesting that I could have imagined doing with my time. That Hollywood scene was the same old shit, and the more recognisable I was, the less I liked it. The amount of ‘dudes’ who wanted to ‘party with me’ had quadrupled, so I became entirely insular; looking back, it makes complete sense to me that I allowed myself to slip into a seductive heroin comfort zone. I didn’t want to go to strip clubs or look for hot chicks or otherwise exercise my newly found status. All I wanted to do was hang out at Bill’s and do drugs. It turned out to be the start of a long and nightmarish obsession with heroin that lasted from 1989 through 1991….

Soon I started speedballing heavily and really enjoyed the unique brand of hallucinatory paranoia that comes with it. No one had taught me to speedball; I just thought it would be like a narcotic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Coke and heroin were two great tastes that I knew would go great together. The rush of the coke would send me up and then the dope would kick in and the trip would take a wonderful turn; and the two would weave in and out of each other from there on out. I’d always end up shooting all of the heroin before I’d mowed through the coke, so usually I’d get wired to the point of an impending heart attack. At the end of those nights, I was also often left with the distinct feeling that I was being watched, so I started to think that walking around my house armed to the teeth was a good idea.

There are shades of Hunter S. Thompson (R.I.P.) in Slash’s retelling, in all its maniacal, drug-fueled outrageousness. But the difference therein is that Slash is all about the matter-of-fact; so remarkable is the complete abscence of rockstar pretension. While Thompson’s prose feverishly incarnated his establishment-crashing hijinks and mind-bending freakouts, Slash’s writing is cucumber-cool; in relief against the deadpan delivery, the contours of his hallucinations (which were every bit as far-gone as the Doctor’s) are all the more exaggerated. The madness seeps off the page and contaminates your banal reality …Makes for a highly entertaining read.

Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 this morning.

From the Nobel Foundation’s statement:

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

And the response from the Gores:

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis – a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Well, after a tremendous year of accomplishments and honors (an Emmy for Current TV, an Oscar for Inconvenient Truth, the Live Earth global concert over the summer), this is the final benchmark for Gore; if he doesn’t run for president in 2008 now, then he definitely ain’t runnin’ …

A more literal (har) expression of the aforementioned text/space interrelationship …

Artist Brian Dettmer excavates vintage books and gives dimension to their interior viscera.

Posts from BoingBoing and Centripetal Notion. And links to gallery exhibitions here, here and here.

JG Ballard’s writing room

As an undergraduate architecture student, I often found a strange, ineffable kinship between architecture and english majors.

Maybe it was due to the symmetry between our pursuits of ideal worlds. Or to their difference in kind … The writers, using words, lack materiality of expression yet are equipped with an infinite malleability of meaning. Architects have ‘bricks and mortars,’ but ultimately silent form; it was up to the critics and the theorists (and sometimes, the clients) to derive – often strainingly – the semiotics of their creations. The two occupations revolve around this seemingly exclusive reciprocity, but perhaps it’s this longing, across an unseen, subterranean divide, that fuels and intensifies the mutual appreciation.

Who really knows what it is, but your belief in this mythology of the writer/architect will probably inform your fascination for, and interpretations of, the following photographs, taken of various accomplished writers’ writing spaces.

Alain de Boton

Seamus Heaney

Hanif Kureishi

Mark Haddon

[via The Guardian]

With shades of theme park artificiality and cheeky, faux-nostalgic imagineering (I’d guess that the majority of young LES urbanites who make it here have never spent an evening at a drive-in theater), Grand Opening has installed a 1965 Ford Falcon convertible and a movie screen in its small Lower East Side space, and is charging $75 per private screening.

This is so awesome.

What you have to appreciate is how an atavistic expression of post-war, car-crazy rural Americana is incorporated into the knowing (and winking), urban belly of downtown Manhattan, and the way in which the private-in-public principle of the erstwhile drive-in itself (one in which the audience enjoyed the communal and outdoor spectacle of a movie while sitting inside their separate and insular aluminum cocoons) has been détourned once again; “public viewing” is really a private experience after all.

I can only hope that there’s a breeze machine and some glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling.

[via Racked]

after a long and hard summer, and after a losing fight against his ibd despite months of treatment, we made the difficult decision to let popeye go. he left us peacefully and gracefully last night at around a quarter to eight.

we are not exactly sure how old he was, but our and the vet’s guess is around eight years old. jane plucked him up from a pound in temple, tx, in april of 2002 — popeye was the stud at a boston terrier breeder farm there which burned down in a night fire and killed its proprietor. all his little bostons were sent to the local pound, and it was from there that we brought popeye to the mean streets of new york. manhattan is a million miles and change from texas hill country, but we do think he eventually got used to the garbage trucks, the pitbulls, the screeching brakes, the pigeons, the police sirens, the hard concrete. and the rats …

but no matter how street-wisened he became, he nevertheless betrayed his country roots whenever he laid eyes on, and then made a determined beeline for that rarest of new york rareties — a patch of grass! i like to imagine popeye hopping off the sidewalk and on into endless fields of green.

he will be in our dreams, as we hope we will be in his. we’ll miss you, buddy …

In an effort to muster up an adequate escape velocity to leave my end-of-summer doldrums behind, I have been re-reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. There are too many memorable snippets to excise, and anyway it’s the exuberance and vividness of the sometimes stream-of-consciousness writing rather than individual, underlineable passages that matter (Miller, like Nietzsche, refers to his writing as song. And if that is so, then Tropic of Cancer is an opera inverted; extended arias interspersed with the occasional recitative).

BTAIM, two bits that I love:

Walking along the Champs-Elysées I keep thinking of my really superb health. When I say “health” I mean optimism, to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the nineteenth century. I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans. Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. “I have only to talk about a meal,” he say, “and you’re radiant!” It’s a fact. There mere thought of a meal—another meal—rejuvenates me. A meal! That means something to go on—a few solid hours of work, an erection possibly. I don’t deny it. I have health, good solid, animal health. The only thing that stands between me and a future is a meal, another meal.

And this:

Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust—what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fangwhorl and star cluster.

Whatever one thinks of Henry Miller (and the courts didn’t much, as Tropic of Cancer was banned in the US for a good 30 years on grounds of obscenity), that motherfucker can sing.

In the sheer number of typologies (architecture, narrative, film/video, music, and interactivity) rolled up within it, HBO’s recent Voyeur project is truly, and spectacularly, ‘multimedic.’

Derived as a promotional campaign for HBO by its ad agency, BBDO, Voyeur integrates eight unfolding stories within the conceit of a single New York apartment complex, which, with its walls laid transparent, privies us to an omniscient, dollhouse view of the proceedings. The eight stories interweave and points of intersection occur throughout, both spatially and chronologically. Part of the delight in experiencing Voyeur is the intricacy of this orchestration (director Jake Scott does an impressive job knitting the pieces together); the other pleasure is purely sensual. The textures, colors, and the archetypical purity of the stories themselves (a murder in one apartment, comic hijinks in another, and two apartments linked by opposite sides of an imploding romantic affair) are intoxicating.

The multithreaded film has been done before, with Mike Figgis’ Timecode, in which the viewing screen is divided into quadrants, each one engaged in separate but realtime exposition. Set in L.A., scenes from one quadrant occasionally lazily drift into one another, but all storylines immediately synchronize and respond in unison to ‘global’ events, i.e. random earthquakes ripple through the city of L.A.; when these quakes take place, all the characters in all four quadrants hit the deck together. It’s clever, but the summary effect of the movie is baroque and distancing. Longform cinema is a commitment, and in lacking a narrative hold on the viewer, Timecode’s conceit quickly wears out its welcome. It comes off as a precious exercise in form.

The scenarios in Voyeur, on the other hand, are iconic; they are narrative shorthands that don’t require elaborate exposition, nor even dialogue. They are told, elegantly and efficiently, in broad but communicative gestures by the actors. They are hard not to watch … These vignettes are then deposited within the framework of the apartment building (the flash/video site was handsomely put together by the indefatigable Brooklyn-based boutique agency Big Spaceship), and given a new axis over which to unfold — the spatial. The filmmaker Chris Marker made a similar move with his CD-ROM project Immemory, evolving his traditionally medium of film into the interactive. He wrote in its preface:

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very lease we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw on the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends.

The little stories and tiny figures in Voyeur, bound together in the geography of the apt building, yet freed from typology and linearity, gain even more power.

While it’s easy to smile at stories of people changing their lightbulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents, or choosing to ride to work on a bike over driving a car, it takes more than anecdotal blips at the grass roots level to feel confident that a sea change in attitudes and behaviors is happening in the face of our looming environmental crisis. Sometimes it takes knowing that Big Capital is playing on the same team — a dicey proposition however you cut it, given that powerful corporations are the worst offenders and their political influence and financial machinations ensure that their loyal politicians sit out badly needed regulatory measures to keep those very corporations in heed.

All of which is why stories, such as this one in Vanity Fair about General Electric and its young and dynamic CEO Jeffrey Immelt, seem so encouraging. When the second largest company in the world, after Wal-Mart (which too has recently embraced sustainability). His emphasis, for better or worse, is not ‘about being trendy or moral. It’s about accelerating economic growth.’ Green must beget green, in other words. Schmarmy as that may seem, it is realpolitik; for a shift in the environmental practices of major corporations can’t be catalyzed unless they are convinced of that shift’s benefits in terms of the bottom line.