'After the Wall: Traces of the Soviet Empire.' Via MeFi.

MMLD #2.

* The recession comes home to Randolph: they're closing our beloved Pathmark.

* A musical tribute to "Ozymandias" from Handsome CD Plus Three.

* On everybody's lips: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Links to reviews here and here. I look forward to having time to read this c. 2017.

* "Do It Again: One Man's Quest to Reunite the Kinks."

* Comics Should Be Good is running a month-long "iconic panels" series all month long to celebrate Marvel's 70th.

* And Joss Whedon says they should have renewed Terminator instead.

Getting very close to the start of my term at [Undisclosed Location], which will mean a lot less blogging. I won't be blogging much during the day at all.

In other words, it'll be kind of like today.

* In the comments earlier today sb offered me a much-deserved Trophy of Perpetual Futility.

* Today's Infinite Summer writeup comes from the L.A. Times book blog. Via Paper Cuts.

JC: Might this turn into an annual tradition, perhaps with other books?

MB: I have already received a raft of suggestions for next summer's reading, including "Ulysses," "Underworld," "Don Quixote" and the entire "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Whether this becomes an annual or year-around thing will depend largely on how successful this one proves, and whether or not I am utterly exhausted by its end.

* Non-Essential Mnemonics, at McSweeney's.

What about Jersey? Mafioso, murderers, addicts, juvenile vagrants, Bon Jovi. Here they praise these felonious people. Blighted little Jersey: guns, hookers, Goombas, Atlantic City. "Come home, criminal miscreants" reads the tourism website. And here come the hucksters, racketeers, trannies, and every korrupt-cop. Jersey, news flash: Criminals rarely benefit children, businesses, or organizations.

A short essay on the socio-political climate in New Jersey and a mnemonic for the last names of all 44 American presidents.

* "Locavore," "frenemy," "staycation," and "vlog" make Webster's.

* Salon's David Rakoff and Anthony Lane review Brüno. Here's Lane:

How efficient, though, is embarrassment as a comic device? It’s a quick hit, and it corrals the audience on the side of smugness; but its victories are Pyrrhic, and it tends to fizzle out unless held in by a plot—as it was in “Fawlty Towers,” which, from its base on the English seaside, fathomed the most embarrassable race on earth. Baron Cohen, in exporting his japes, comes up against a people much less devoted to the wince. I realized, watching “Borat” again, that what it exposed was not a vacuity in American manners but, more often than not, a tolerance unimaginable elsewhere. Borat’s Southern hostess didn’t shriek when he appeared with a bag of feces; she sympathized, and gently showed him what to do, and the same thing happens in “Brüno,” when a martial-arts instructor, confronted by a foreigner with two dildos, doesn’t flinch. He teaches Brüno some defensive moves, then adds, “This is totally different from anything I’ve ever done.” Ditto the Hollywood psychic—another risky target, eh?—who watches Brüno mime an act of air-fellatio and says, after completion, “Well, good luck with your life.” In both cases, I feel that the patsy, though gulled, comes off better than the gag man; the joke is on Baron Cohen, for foisting indecency on the decent. The joker is trumped by the square.

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of what George Saunders wrote of Borat, or, for that matter, of the bad taste it still leaves in my mouth.

The New York Times Magazine covers the ruins of the Second Gilded Age. Love the caption for this one at MetaFilter's DU: "Even Aperture Science is feeling the pinch."

UPDATE: MetaFilter ruins everything.

Some links for Sunday.

* Robin Sloan has a filtered #iranelection Twitter feed with most of the repetition and chaos stripped away. Via Boing Boing.

* Salinger and kids today: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ” Via MeFi.

* Another ruins of the modern world roundup. This one has some repetition but also a few I hadn't seen before.

* Advantage: chubbiness. People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.

Lots of pictures of Ozymandian Detroit around this weekend, from Time to Flickr. Lots of images to choose from, but the one I went with is a R. Crumb poster linked in the MeFi thread.



Sadly the picture's not big enough for the lettering to be read, so here's a closeup of the fourth to last panel.



Originally that's where the comic ended, but Crumb later went in and drew three possible answers: ecological collapse, technofuturism, and ecotopia. Right now we're still hovering over "What's next?"

My former students may appreciate the similarities between this static image and the Soylent Green opening titles...

Saturday night's all right for blogging. After the first few links we even get to some stuff that's not about Watchmen.

* Walter Chaw's Watchmen review goes to many of the same places as my own, albeit in a more thoroughgoing way:

Freeze any frame of the film and find in it the panel that inspired it. With each section separated by grabs from the covers of the comic book's initial run, fanboys should have no quarrel with the fidelity of the piece--but the reaction to the picture will likely continue to be fairly muted, as devotees of the graphic novel didn't exactly appreciate it for its slickness and sexiness. I'd hazard that what attracted people to the book is that Moore's vision is one of absolute respect for the power of the image in molding human history. Snyder does seem to understand this in restaging the Kennedy assassination with one of his masked heroes as the culprit, drawing a line pure and true from Zapruder's inauguration of film as history to the comic-book medium's inextricable hold on the collective imagination-in-formation. The power of Moore's work is that it takes the divine and, like Milton's mission, explains the ways of these gods to men in terms that men can understand: they're corrupted by their power and governed by their avarice and the essential baseness of being human. This sentiment is all but jettisoned, alas, by the time Snyder recasts the pathetic victories of sexually-reawakened schlub Night Owl (Patrick Wilson) and paramour Silk Spectre (a severely overmatched Malin Akerman) as triumphant victories. Watchmen--filthy with its director's now-trademark ramping technique--sees itself as a superhero adaptation of a human book. The failures of these characters are just weaknesses our übermenchen must overcome, not the foibles and hubris that lead to their downfall--and ours.

Vu and kate both get at this deep in the comments to my original post as well.

* Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman says Watchmen is a "great film" and then spends the rest of the post explaining why it isn't.

* The headline reads, "Watchmen's first day disappoints." You're telling me!

* John Scalzi argues for a statute of limitations on spoilers.

Television: One week (because it’s generally episodic, and that’s how long you have until the next episode)

Movies: One year (time enough for everyone to see it in the theaters, on DVD and on cable)

Books: Five years (because books don’t reach nearly as many people at one time)

To my mind the whole "spoiler" hysteria needs to end; suspense is an overrated aesthetic in all but the rarest cultural productions.

* Husband, Wife Unaware They Are A Comedy Team.

* I suffered from this for years without knowing there was a name for it besides "being a college student."

* Another picture of a grown-up Calvin and Hobbes for your collection.

* The economy and literature: Will this crisis produce a Gatsby? More at MeFi.

* Does the financial crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? David Harvey on the credit crunch and class.

* Abandoned places: a LiveJournal community. (Thanks, Eli!)

* And attention would-be humanities grad students: there are no jobs. None.

Shea falls.

Things I've enjoyed on the Internet today.

* A Seth tribute to Charles Schulz.

* The ruins of Detroit's abandoned Belle Island Zoo. Via MeFi.

* Spy Vibe, a blog devoted to the '60s spy aesthetic. Also via MeFi.

* Three Jane Austen sci-fi films are apparently in the pipeline: Pride, Prejudice, amp; Zombies; Pride & Predators; and Lost in Austen.. What can account for Austenmania?

* I can't believe putting a totally unqualified action-movie star in charge of the world's fifth largest economy has turned out so badly for California. More on this from Ezra Klein, who actually points the finger not at Arnold but at systemic gridlock, i.e., the California state constitution and deluded Orange County Republicans.

* Why we love gambling: almost winning is almost as good as actually winning, as far as our neurochemistry is concerned.

* Grade inflation is a feedback loop: students now expect a B just for showing up.

* Life as a tie-in novelist.

* Braid, Game of the Year 2008 by all accounts, is finally coming to the PC.

You had me at "Abandoned Amusement Parks." Via MeFi.

This post is for your eyes.

* Andy Kehoe's "Psycho World," a slightly more surreal Where the Wild Things Are (and I can only imagine he's completely sick of hearing that).



* Future worlds and alternascapes from James Paick.





* And WebUrbanist builds off my infamous Statue of Liberty post with 25 Post-Apocalyptic Visions.

Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz's new book is a World Without Us for the very long now: 100 million years.

Letterman on global warming: "Until we get the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we're screwed. We are walking dead people. We are the lost civilization. You're looking at us, right here, time to go, the cab is coming... "



There can be no other response to the mad decadence of the last thirty years but anger.

The seven modern wonders of green technology.

Reading between the lines of the mid-season finale of Battlestar Galactica, we can narrow down the possibilities for the Final Cylon a little bit further. Taking Xena at her word that there are actually only four Final Cylons in the fleet, this suggests that the remaining Cylon was either dead or already on the basestar.

Already on the basestar:
Roslin, Adama, Baltar, Helo

Dead:
Cally, Billy, Kendra Shaw & Admiral Cain, a host of others

I seriously doubt it's Adama, and it really shouldn't be Baltar, for reasons I've already talked about. Helo has always been someone everyone assumed couldn't possibly be the final Cylon because of the Cylons-can't-have-babies issue—which makes him a pretty interesting choice, especially since that assumption's now out the window with the Tigh-Six pregnancy.

Most of the clues right now seem to be pointing as Roslin, but I still like Cally. As far as I can tell she's the character whose return/revelation as the Final Cylon would open the most dramatic doors, and in particular would really point the way towards a realization of the human/Cylon reconciliation plot that appears to be the main thematic for the season.

Good episode tonight, by the way. I was spoiled on the Earth revelation from way back, but I was still moved by the sheer nihilism of the ending shot. Even if it seems a little strange that these characters and only these characters would be the landing party, the final long-take was beautifully, beautifully composed. And while we didn't see a tell-tale Statue of Liberty head, I'm definitely with those who think those were the ruins of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Craig Ferguson visits the abandoned San-Zhr Pod Village in Tawain, a Flickr set of which I previously blogged here. Via MeFi.

And two from Boing Boing: Joss Whedon fans, thinking ahead, are already organizing their "Save Dollhouse!" campaign in anticipation of the show's inevitable cancellation, and Cory Doctorow links to this neat slideshow of abandoned office space from bankrupt companies.

Abandoned hotels seem to be the soup of the day. I'm seeing tons of links to BLDGBLOG's post on the abandoned hotels of Sinai, while Angie emails in this Flickrset of a ruined resort in Taiwan.

Lost America: Night Photography of the Abandoned West. Via MeFi, which has many more necro-aesthetic delights.

Monday night and the feeling's right.

* If you haven't been back to the now-infamous Statue of Liberty post, I've updated it about twelve times with a ton of new images. According to Google Analytics, that page's been viewed over 26,000 times, which is pretty incredible.

* BarackObama.com has video of the Ted Kennedy endorsement, which looks to be an even bigger deal than I'd hoped.

* Schlumberger, the oil-field-services giant that has acquired microwave technology intended to free petroleum from oil shale, won’t bring the technique to western Colorado immediately.

...

The Green River Formation of western Colorado, eastern Utah and southwest Wyoming contains the equivalent of an estimated 1.8 trillion barrels of crude oil, enough, Raytheon said, to meet current U.S. demand for 250 years. We're saved!

* And it's a good thing too; today is the 50th anniversary of history's greatest invention, LEGO, which like everything else is made from sweet, sweet oil.

* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair: the desert reclaims the town of Kolmanskop in Namibia. Via grinding.be.