The Cellar

"Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:40:57 -0400

“Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Fuck the police.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:59:07 -0400

Fuck the police.

The Germans

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:53:00 -0400

The Germans

keanoross: The NE Photo Network book fair at The Baltic, June...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:04:29 -0400

keanoross:

The NE Photo Network book fair at The Baltic, June 2013

An 'Adventure' For Kids And Maybe For Their Parents, Too

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:54:00 -0400

by Neda Ulaby

Count plenty of grownups among the millions of fans of Adventure Time, a kids’ show on Cartoon Network. Some are surely Emmy voters. (It’s won three.) Others are very possibly stoners. Still others are intellectuals. Lev Grossman falls in the last category. He wrote two best-selling novels, The Magicians and The Magician King, and he’sTime’s senior book critic.

Grossman’s critique of Adventure Time? “It’s soooo smart! It’s sooo intelligent!”

Hang on. He’s just getting started.

“I am a little bit obsessed with it,” Grossman continues. “It’s rich and complicated the way Balzac’s work is, which is a funny thing to say about a cartoon.”

For the uninitiated, Adventure Time is set in a surreally pastel post-apocalyptic kingdom crawling with mutated candy creatures, bizarre princesses — think Slime Princess and Lumpy Space Princess — and our two heroes. They’re Finn and Jake, a gangly human boy and his moon-eyed yellow dog.

The show’s creator, Pendleton Ward, modeled Jake partly after Bill Murray’s sardonic camp counselor in the 1979 movie Meatballs, a cooler-than-cool older-brother figure who can laugh at his charges without being mean and whose teachable moments are anything but cloying.

“Jake sees his own death in one episode,” says Ward. “And Finn has to deal with that. Jake’s a hip guy. He can watch his own death, and he’s comfortable with it, and that’s a weird thing, especially for Finn, who’s super young, and it’s really hard on him.”

In the episode, called “New Frontier,” Jake experiences a vision during which he’s taken to an afterlife of stars and darkness by a little banana-like creature (voiced by Weird Al Yankovic).

“When I die, I’m gonna be all around you,” Jake reassures Finn. “In your nose. And your dreams. And socks! I’ll be a part of you in your earth mind. It’s gonna be great!”

“That episode was really tough to tackle, writing it for a children’s television show,” Ward remembers. “It was hard for us to really not make it so sad and scary that you feel really sad and scared watching it.”

Adventure Time insists on emotional honesty — even in its bad guys, usually depicted as cardboard villains in kids’ cartoons.

Grossman offers the shrill, socially maladapted Earl of Lemongrab as an example. An unlikable character, his story is movingly explored and raises questions nearly every kid has wondered about: Why do I seem weird to other people? Why do I seem weird to myself?

Or take the buffoonish, bandy-legged and morally compromised Ice King. “[He’s] psychologically plausible,” Grossman observes. “He’s an old lecherous man who has a magical crown. It’s made him into this strange, awful individual who goes around capturing princesses.”

The king’s crown wiped his mind and warped his body. He’ll die if he takes it off.

“Which is this rather moving tension, and he doesn’t remember who he used to be, but other people do,” Grossman says. “It’s very affecting. My dad has been going through having Alzheimer’s, and he’s forgotten so much about who he used to be. And I look at him and think this cartoon is about my father dying.”

In spite of the critical admiration, the warm feelings of fans and the prestigious awards, Adventure Time nearly never aired. “It actually felt like a great risk,” says Rob Sorcher, the Cartoon Network’s chief content officer. “It’s not slick. It doesn’t feel manufactured for kids, so who’s it for?”

Um, perhaps partly for the kind of grownup who might watch Yo Gabba Gabba with a little chemical assist?

“For me, it doesn’t come from that place,” says Ward. “For me, it comes from my childhood, wandering in my mind. You can’t really go anywhere when you’re a kid. I don’t have a car, I don’t have anything. I just have my backyard and my brain. And that’s where I’m coming from when I’m writing it.” He pauses. “I can’t speak for all the writers on the show.”

Ward and his mom used to watch cartoons together when he was a kid, but he claims today he’s not writing specifically for a co-viewing audience of parents and kids. Still, author Grossman says Adventure Time works for him and his eight-year-old daughter Lily equally.

“It’s really important for us to have something we can enjoy together and talk about together. It gives us in some ways a common language for talking about more important issues,” he says.

Adventure Time’s world used to be our world. Then it was destroyed by a war. It’s strewn with detritus such as old computers, VHS tapes and video games from the 1980s.

“It takes my childhood, the shattered pieces of it, and builds it into something new, which is now part of Lily’s childhood,” he says, almost in wonder.

OFF by Johan Rosenmunthe

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:21:46 -0400

thebeautymodel: Barbara Palvin by Nico for El Pais Semanal June...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:27:46 -0400

thebeautymodel:

Barbara Palvin by Nico for El Pais Semanal June 2013.

Bell’s Brewery, MI

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 09:17:02 -0400

Bell’s Brewery, MI

Photo

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:23:33 -0400

And with your smart words you destroy me.

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:30:25 -0400

And with your smart words you destroy me.

5Rs of Mobile in Transmedia Storytelling

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 00:01:00 -0400

“When considering mobile as platform for transmedia storytelling, it’s useful to imagine it as a window into the imagination. The mobile device provides an opportunity to reinterpret the real world and make the mundane part of a storyworld and vice versa, take a virtual world and overlay it onto the real world.

This conceptual thinking helps the storyteller generate creative ideas without getting bogged down in the actual implementation (which can be considered later).”

Stelton 1 ltr. vacuum Jug

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 23:49:04 -0400

Stelton 1 ltr. vacuum Jug

Meiré wanted to foster a sense of knowing where one’s food comes...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 23:45:43 -0400

Meiré wanted to foster a sense of knowing where one’s food comes from and of being connected to that process.

"Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you. And..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 23:41:27 -0400

“

Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.

Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:18:15 -0400

"…if you say, well, OK, I don’t believe in God, there’s no evidence of God, then..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 23:43:33 -0400

“…if you say, well, OK, I don’t believe in God, there’s no evidence of God, then you’re missing the stars in the sky, and you’re missing the sunrises and sunsets, and you’re missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together at the same time.”

- Stephen King

Photo

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 18:44:29 -0400

Photo

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 18:38:48 -0400

"If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives."

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 16:28:38 -0400

“If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives.”

- Lemony Snicket (via fairycastle)

Photo

Fri, 31 May 2013 22:02:05 -0400