It's been quite some time since we've heard any news about the Neuromancer, but director Joseph Kahn is apparently still working on it. He tweeted about it over the weekend — and William Gibson tweeted back. Kahn wrote on his Twitter feed:
Epiphany. I finally figured out how to end the movie.
To which Gibson responded:
Scroll, or voiceover?
Kahn responded:
LOL. Freeze frame.
Poor Willie c/w Party Boys
Lonely Island c/w (You Make Me Wanna) Cry
Heart Trouble c/w That Was My Girl
It's a play... no it's a reading... no it's... hard to tell. But on November 22, from noon to 6 pm, the New Museum in NYC is doing some sort of cool six hour Neuromancer thing that they describe thusly: "An ambitious new work by Brody Condon, Case is a contemporary adaptation of the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Combining Gibson’s 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction, faux 'virtual reality' scenes will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara." Full post here
According to the io9 posting that first hipped me to the event: "Creator Brody Condon wrote to us, and said, 'The performance event... occurring at the new museum is a deadpan reading of Gibson's reading, not a theatre piece.'
The performance or reading or whatever it is also boasts Sasha Grey as Molly. Besides acting in various adult films, Grey crossed over to act in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience and she is part of the music group ATelicine.
@'h+'
Many of the changes made under Hitler, put in place to remove the influence of the Jewish-born baby Jesus, are still in use today, much to the alarm of modern Germans. The swastika-shaped baking trays and wrapping paper adorned with Nazi symbols have long gone, but traces of the Third Reich Christmas can still be found in the subtly rewritten lyrics of favourite carols.
The discoveries have been highlighted by a new exhibition at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.
“I always thought that Unto Us a Time Has Come was a song about wandering through winter snow,” said Heidi Bertelson, 42, a lawyer who visited the exhibit told Times. “I didn’t realise that Christ had been excised.”
The Nazi version, which removed the religious references and replaced them with images of snowy fields, remains in some song books and is sung in many households.
The same goes for carols referring to Virgin Birth and lullabies that invoke the Baby Jesus.
The rewriting was supervised by the chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler led the way in de-Christing Christmas.
Their plan was to remove the emotional ties of the Church and merge Christmas into a Julfest, a celebration of winter and light which drew on pagan traditions.
“The most important celebration in the calendar did not match their racist credo so they had to push out the Christian elements,” said Judith Breuer, who helped her mother, Rita, pull together the exhibition.
Rita started trawling flea markets in the 1970s in search of her childhood Christmas and turned up boxes of Nazi-era Christmas decorations complete with swastikas and grenades.
“After the Nazis had gone you could still find textbooks on Christmas that use exactly the same phrasing,” she told The Times.
when it first dropped, then you got yourself three CDs' worth of Tom Waits. That's a lot of Tom Waits! But if you decided to wait for the vinyl, then you've got an even more humongous Waits onslaught coming your way.
On December 8, Anti- will release Orphans as a limited vinyl set. You'll get all of the tracks contained on the CDs, plus six bonus tracks. That's 62 songs spread over seven LPs, all of which will be pressed on 180 gram vinyl. You'll probably want to limber up and do some stretches before you even attempt to lift this thing.
Free TC Electronic M30 ReverbFeaturing a superb Hall algorithm, the M30 Reverb is perfectly suited to vocals but can also be used with a wide variety of instruments and audio material. It features a superb Hall algorithm which is fully editable and is a plug-in that you can use in all sorts of music production and on all types of instruments and vocals.
(Tip o'the hat to Mark S)
Grateful Dead fans may remember the lyrics, "Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes." Mickey Hart, a drummer for the Dead, is still thinking about the cosmos, and he recently contacted Smithsonian Under Secretary Richard Kurin to arrange a discussion with distinguished astrophysicist Margaret Geller of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, science historian David DeVorkin and ethnomusicologist Atesh Sonneborn; I also participated. Our question: How might Hart perceive and record the "music" of the universe? Can lightwaves reaching Earth after traveling hundreds of millions of light-years speak to our creative, as well as our scientific, selves? Geller answered yes, and offered ideas for how Hart might translate what we observe into music. She suggested that a musician she knows—a person who also has superb computer skills—could help Hart convert strings of numbers representing star formation, gamma ray bursts, black hole binaries and other astrophysical phenomena into music. In an e-mail, Hart reacted to his Smithsonian visit: "Exciting....As Soupy Sales would say, 'My brains are falling out.'" Such intersections of science and the arts occur frequently at the Smithsonian. At a recent materials science workshop, Julian Raby, the director of our Freer and Sackler Galleries, described the ongoing collaborative research being conducted on ancient Chinese metalwork and ceramics by the Freer and Sackler with Chicago's Field Museum and China's Shaanxi Research Institute for Archaeology. And at the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, Freer and Sackler conservators have created a lab to treat the museum's collection of bronzes; a U.S. exhibition of some of them is being planned. The Freer and Sackler Galleries have also partnered with our Museum Conservation Institute (MCI) to analyze the paint on sixth-century Buddhist sculptures. Currently Freer and Sackler staff are using radiography to study Japanese writing boxes. Used by aristocrats between 1392 and 1868, these intricately decorated lacquer boxes all stored calligraphy tools, but they vary in construction. Is it because of their function or their date? Radiography may help answer the question.
With the National Museum of Natural History, the Conservation Institute is also helping preserve, in their natural settings, Mongolia's deer stones—3,000-year-old plinths carved with elaborate flying "spirit deer." MCI specialists are also capturing pictorial information about these monuments with 3-D laser scanning. And Conservation Institute director Robert Koestler is helping investigate rapidly growing soil mold that threatens one of the world's great treasures—the Paleolithic cave at Lascaux, France, and its nearly 2,000 animal images painted 16,000 years ago. Science and the arts are unusual partners at most places, but not at the Smithsonian.
