My Duck Is Dead!

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No No Zero Quadrophenia!

FRESH ANNOUNCEMENT!!

No No Zero are playing a rare show July 23rd at the Steelworkers Hall (25 Cecil Street, Toronto in the U of T area) with The Ancestors, Anagram and Teenanger. No hype needed, that's a great bill. And this show will be most rare indeed for ALL FOUR BANDS WILL SET UP AT ONCE AND THEN TAKE TURNS PLAYING SONGS!!!!

I know, I know. That's crazy. That's got to be against the rules or something. It may really be too much altogether (seriously), may just cause the universe to collapse upon itself. But we're going to go ahead and do it anyways. Expect to lose hearing and braincells if not your moped. Frenzied quickies in the alley are encouraged.

Biblical Charts!

"When I was a kid, I could look at that chart ("The Course of Time from Eternity to Eternity") and feel that I understood all of human history. There on the chart it was perfectly explained and simplified. This wasn't anything I could have explained to anybody else. It was simply a feeling of utter certainty".

- Garrison Keillor, 'The Wobegon Preacher', Leadership, 10 (Fall 1991).

Biblical charts are fascinating (Dispensational charts, even more so): tiny pictures of Heaven and Hell aside, they have the power of paradox, seemingly evident proof of something that requires not proof after all but faith; a map of a mystery, as it were.

Describing nothing less than the ultimate realities of God, Satan, Life & Afterlife, the idea that one could follow the lines, read the map, and have the whole thing handed to you "from eternity to eternity", well - the attraction is obvious, the appeal perhaps innate - wanting proof for our beliefs, backing up beliefs with arguments, diagrams and appeals to authority if not rationality.

Dispensationalism lays out the idea that our world is divided into seven dispensations or eras, each of which has its own relationship between God and Man (hence the difference between Old Testament God and New Testament God). It's an idea that works well in chart form and it's a system that can be as simple or as complicated as its designer wants to make it.

From Clarence Larkin's seminal B&W WWI-era charts to the widespread success that has been A.E. Booth's The Course of Time from Eternity to Eternity to even more complex charts by the likes of Dake or Hall, they are artwork and artifice, sensation and avocation.

A visual spectacle. The early 20th century's version of TV? Something fantastic for the pleebs to gawk at and something deep for the thinkers to contemplate and discuss. The charts employed contemporary advertising technique in service of an age-old message, profoundly influencing generations of viewers in their thinking about how the world works and what the big picture looks like when you put it all together.

Desktop publishing and HTML have meant that most anyone can display their own Biblical charts online - and they do! I have looked at way too many of these websites recently. What follows are some of the standout Biblical charts I've found online (click on the chart for a full-size image); most of them are Dispensationalist but there's a whole tossed salad of charts here, a mishmash of mystery maps for hungry eyeballs.

Insane! Blind! Idiots!

From the David Rumsey Map Collection -- charts by Mr. Frederick Howard Wines of the U.S. Census Office for the 1870 U.S. Census.

Facial Recognition and Porn!

The advent of facial recognition technology promises to transform the way people view society, privacy and each other. Imagine being able to find out the names - if not the addresses, product preferences, and internet use - of anyone you have a photo of. While Picassa (who store the photos appearing on Blogger blogs such as this one) already uses such technology, Google is currently weighing the pros and cons. Not that they haven't been playing around with it for awhile now.


The implications for pornography are dramatic and varied. Those anonymous naked pictures you took 20 years ago? Not so anonymous anymore. Or maybe you'd like to see if a given person has ever been photographed in the nude? Or you'd just like to masturbate to someone who looks like them?

The possibilities are endless. Will burqas go mainstream as a consequence? Probably not. But maybe people shooting sex films yet desirous of internet anonymity could begin surgically altering their faces to defeat facial recognition? Or using make-up? Or taking up chewing tobacco? Will amateur porn stars return to wearing masks while they film themselves having it off?

Death In Movies!

The main thing about death in the movies versus death in real life is that death in movies is usually incredibly quick -- take any longer than a minute or so to die once you've started and you're taking far too long. On the other hand, death in films can't be too quick (that is to say unannounced or instantaneous) or else no one has time to say or do anything except react to the death.

People who are shot or stabbed or upon whom some large rock falls or who stumble from a flaming airplane wreck or who are buggered by an outsize alien monster -- all have time for a pithy line or two, something to resonate with viewers, before they close their eyes one last time and are silent. The exception to this is the person dying in a horror film or war film, someone whose death often needs no dialogue because it is by its visual nature entertaining enough without words.

If a character is dying of a disease on the other hand, they may spend much of the film dispensing wit and wisdom (if they're not too busy telling jokes) or 'just' visibly suffering, something particularly difficult to depict onscreen. Regardless, before their curtain closes, they too will normally have ample time for some ultimate gesture or speech (or both). Everything in film is dictated by visual economics, and death is no different.


If film puts limits on death in one way (duration), it also removes limits from death in other ways (notably circumstance but also finality). People die in films in ways that no real person has ever died or likely ever will die. People in films die making the grandest gestures and saying the most perfect things. Their deaths, which almost never come suddenly and unannounced, serve to bring dramas together, seal (or break) contracts and to move the plot forward. They look great dying and they sound great too. Film appears to transcend death itself and indeed will allow the viewer of a film to transcend death as they watch.

Like disturbing scenes, deaths in film have generated a great deal of lists on the internet: what were the best deaths? best kills? best falling deaths? best violent deaths? most sadistic? most gruesome? sexiest? and so on and so on. Perusing a few of these recently, I was surprised at how good many of these lists were. Better than I would have expected anyways, lots of good picks, excellent grounds for discussion for cine-morgue nerds (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).

A few things come to mind I didn't see covered, a few deaths that seem stuck in my own cranium for whatever reason. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

1. Best Seller (1987). At the end of this flick, Cleve (James Woods) is an assassin breaking into the home of a former employer who now wants him dead. The security guards Cleve encounters are all-too-easily disposed of; finally, Cleve forces one of these guys to lie down on a bed and then starts berating him, his lousy skills, how easily he was caught out... The guy very nonchalantly says "enough with the insults, just do it" (or something like that) and Cleve shoots him.


2. License To Kill (1989). In this Bond film, JB flips a henchman onto a large open shelf unit full of live maggots, shuts the shelf (which presumably locks), quips "bon appetit" -- and that's the last we ever see of this poor sod. Was he in fact eaten alive by maggots? Would he have asphyxiated first? Perhaps gone mad? I couldn't stop thinking about this mysterious henchman after the film was over; he could have lasted a week or more in there, possibly.

3. Ta paidia tou Diavolou / Island of Death (1975). There's a whole lot of crazy deaths in this nutty Greek movie, but of these I would highlight the one where our happy protagonists Christopher and Celia nail a guy's hands to the concrete patio beneath him and then force a can of white paint down his throat until he dead.


4. Ai no korîda / In the realm of the senses (1976). Kichizo falls in love with Sada and theirs is an obsessive affair, all-consuming and frenzied, with increasing forays into auto-erotic asphyxiation during which Sada strangles Kichizo while he is inside her. These sequences used a lot of red onscreen and something about the way it was shot managed to make me feel light-headed in the rep theatres I'd watch it in. When Kichizo finally dies onscreen, it's almost too much to take.


5. The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Eh, call me a big softie if you will, but the ending of this great movie, wherein Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) has been shot and he knows he's looking at the end of everything and that he's dying and now he just wants to get to the horse-farm of his dreams and he stops the car at that pretty field and opens the gate and he's running through the field and then he falls down there and the horses come over and smell him... *sniff*