Paysage totémique (1938) by Wolfgang Paalen

 

 

In an introduction to V for Vendetta, Alan Moore lists the painting "Europe After The Rain", by Max Ernst, as an inspiration. It depicts a post-apocalyptical surreal landscape, and that's precisely what I also saw on this Wolfgang Paalen canvas - in exhibition at the Bozar (Bruxelles). Both were painted during the first years of World War II, when tensions and prejudice filled the air, the horrors just around the corner.

Sticky Drama (2015) by Daniel Lopatin and Jon Rafman

This is the best MS Paint-inspired, ketchup and cardboard-stuffed, LARP virtually-composed crusade from 2015 I've seen yet. It could be described as audio-visual meme-poetry extracted directly from the code of some 1990s RPG. The sounds come from Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) new record, "Garden of Delete", while the motion picture was directed by post-Internet hyperstar Jon Rafman. The live-action 11-minute long film features a cast of over 35 children, lots of Tamagotchi and some fluorescent goo. Sticky Drama was commissioned for and exhibited at the Zabludowicz Collection in London, but its second part is also the official music video

Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio. (1914) by Ricardo Reis

Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio.
Sossegadamente fitemos o seu curso e aprendamos
Que a vida passa, e não estamos de mãos enlaçadas.
(Enlacemos as mãos.)

Depois pensemos, crianças adultas, que a vida
Passa e não fica, nada deixa e nunca regressa,
Vai para um mar muito longe, para ao pé do Fado,
Mais longe que os deuses.

Desenlacemos as mãos, porque não vale a pena cansamo-nos.
Quer gozemos, quer não gozemos, passamos como o rio.
Mais vale saber passar silenciosamente
E sem desassossegos grandes.

Sem amores, nem ódios, nem paixões que levantam a voz,
Nem invejas que dão movimento demais aos olhos,
Nem cuidados, porque se os tivesse o rio sempre correria,
E sempre iria ter ao mar.

Amemo-nos tranquilamente, pensando que podíamos,
Se quiséssemos, trocar beijos e abraços e carícias,
Mas que mais vale estarmos sentados ao pé um do outro
Ouvindo correr o rio e vendo-o.

Colhamos flores, pega tu nelas e deixa-as
No colo, e que o seu perfume suavize o momento —
Este momento em que sossegadamente não cremos em nada,
Pagãos inocentes da decadência.

Ao menos, se for sombra antes, lembrar-te-ás de mim depois
Sem que a minha lembrança te arda ou te fira ou te mova,
Porque nunca enlaçamos as mãos, nem nos beijamos
Nem fomos mais do que crianças.

E se antes do que eu levares o óbolo ao barqueiro sombrio,
Eu nada terei que sofrer ao lembrar-me de ti.
Ser-me-ás suave à memória lembrando-te assim — à beira-rio,
Pagã triste e com flores no regaço.

As I've said before, Fernando Pessoa created several heteronyms, complex characters with their own biographies and writing styles which he devised over the course of his life. Of the major ones, only the heathen monarchic Ricardo Reis lacks a date of death. Today marks 80 years since Pessoa passed away, so it seems like a fitting moment to celebrate the one who will live forever. The poem above comes from "Odes De Ricardo Reis".

Concerned by Christopher C. Livingston

In 1996 Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two former Microsoft employees who had become millionaires over their stint with the company, decided they wanted to create a computer game. They started their own developer, Valve, decided the game would be a 3D first-person shooter, got the license for the Quake engine (from id Software, makers of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom) and hired the best coders and animators available. From the start of the project they were focused on a particular vision: instead of just creating a virtual shooting range, they wanted to build a complex, dense and intriguing world, where a sci-fi story with a believable outline could be smoothly told in an appealing setting populated by full-fledged characters, surrounded by a tense soundtrack. They set themselves to explore the full possibilities of the medium and they delivered. After some delays, Half-Life was released on November 8, 1998, being later recognized as the best release of the year and one of the most acclaimed games of the decade. There's no need to get too technical explaining why it worked so well (NPCs with a much improved AI and digital skeletons, scripted chains of events to advance the narrative without cutscenes, ...), basically it made most shooters released before it seem hollow and stripped of any life and set a very high bar for subsequent products.

Half-Life revolves around an incident happening at the Black Mesa Research Facility, as you control one of the scientists working there, Gordon Freeman, trying to make sense of it and escaping, armed with a crowbar. The idea of building a game around the story, and not the other way around as was usual, is central to Half-Life as a series. Marc Laidlaw, science fiction and horror writer, was brought in to devise the suspenseful plot and rich characters and was also responsible for that aspect in Half-Life 2, where we check with Freeman as he wakes up, after about 20 years in stasis, finds out an alien race laid waste to Earth and now controls the last remnants of organized society in a totalitarian fashion, and so has to join his surviving colleagues from Black Mesa in their resistance against the invaders. To guarantee the expectations of millions of fans for another innovative masterpiece would be met, Gabe Newell authorized an unlimited budget and didn't put pressure on the team regarding release dates. The second game arrived on November, 16 2004, after more than 5 years of work, 40 million dollars and, again, some delays. The world felt even more organic, set in a variety of very different scenarios with plenty to explore, with state-of-the-art graphics (and amazing display of light and shadows), enhanced object manipulation and more elaborate environmental puzzles thanks to the best implementation of realistic physics to date (and one of the best weapons in any video game), the inclusion of vehicles, over 150 pages of dialogue delivered by actors like Robert Guillaume and Robert Culp and incredible facial animation for the NPCs that allowed them to convey emotions and reactions even just through their eyes, all built within a brand new engine, Source. By the end of the year it was considered a classic, and even today is still regarded as one of the best games ever.

The first game spanned three expansions and depicted the Black Mesa Incident from the perspective of other witnesses, while the story of the second kept unfolding in two episodic sequels (the promised third is anathema to gamers worldwide, 8 years waiting and counting as Valve gets distracted with its groundbreaking gaming plataform, Steam). Besides the spin-off Portal, both Half-Life games also spawned dozens of modifications by talented players, usually known as mods, such as MINERVA, GoldenEye: Source or Black Mesa. Some became extremely popular and were made "official" by Valve: Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Day Of Defeat and garry's mod, also known as GMod. GMod was developed by Garry Newman and released just weeks after the HL2, on Christmas Eve. It allows for players to freely manipulate the items, vehicles, weapons and ragdoll models of the characters from the game, as well as user-created ones, posing them however we want to. And that's actually what I want to talk about today.

the Webcomics are a very particular medium. While the Internet allows for creative persons to share their work without having to resort to a publisher, the level of interest most of the projects shared in such a way attract ins't at the same level as their offline counterparts. Since the late 90s, digital artworks, fan fiction and flash movies created in barely-lit bedrooms proliferated in hundreds of dedicated communities such as deviantART and ytmnd and were consumed enthusiastically there, but those were usually tightly knit groups and those kind of projects rarely reached a widespread audience, even when they became memes. As for webcomics thought, a few managed to appealed to the masses early on, even before broadband access, and nowadays several have become phenomenons, such as The Perry Bible Fellowship, Penny Arcade, xkcd, Axe Cop, MS Paint Adventures or Will Save The World For Gold. The one I bring today is in the middle of the road though, a webcomic that was much loved, but only by a selected and associated audience.

Concerned was launched in May 1, 2005. Its author, Christopher C. Livingston, got inspired by the narrative of the by-then fairly new Half-Life 2 and decided to turn it into a parody with the help of GMod. Not all webcomics are drawn, and this one was virtually staged. He wasn't the first to use a tool such as GMod to make a comic (even in the prolific GMod community examples quickly surfaced), but his effort was much more sustained than what was common. Livingston kept at it for a year and a half, for a total of 205 issues (at first with three released every week, and then two). The utterly amateurish look the early strips had was constantly improved upon, but the writing was sharp and funny from the start, although some of the jokes may be lost in readers unfamiliar with the game. With the subtitle "The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman", the comic followed the titular character and his dealings with the dictatorship in City 17 a few weeks before the events of Half-Life 2 happen. Unlike his fellow citizens, he is happy with the state of things and sees the alien overlords as a friendly people that only wish what's best for Earth, so obviously he longs to become an human-combine hybrid. He gets confused with the prophetic hero of Black Mesa several times on his way and due to his incompetence may end up helping the rebel cause more than he wishes. The name of the comic comes from Frohman correspondence with his idol Wallace Breen, the representative of the power of the aliens, part of which ends up in the game itself.

Note: The videos in this post show the really great opening scenes for the main Half-Life games (you can see the ubiquitous G-Man in both), while the images are some of my own experiences in GMod. If you want to check out other comics made using the mod, explore this website. The ongoing series " The Adventures of Hercule Cubbage" are a good place to start.

Powers of Ten (1977) by Charles and Ray Eames

In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames completed the film Powers of Ten, having first produced a prototype in 1968, inspired by Kees Boeke's essay "Cosmic View". It is subtitled "A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero", and for 9 minutes that's exactly what we are shown. It starts 1 meter above a man and woman having a picnic in Chicago, but immediately our point of view starts changing as we move up and away. Every 10 seconds we are 10 times more distant from the couple laying on the grass, our outlook continuously enlarging. We eventually see the complete United States, the whole of Earth, the entire Solar System, the full Milky Way and everything in the observable Universe, when we get to 100 million light-years away (in meters, the number one followed by 24 zeros). Suddenly the direction reverses until we are back at the starting point, and then we just keeps going closer, seeing the skin of the man in detail, red and white blood cells, a DNA structure, an atom, electrons, neutrons and protons in a carbon nuclei, and finally quarks, at a distance of 0,000001 ångströms (in meters, one preceded by 16 zeroes). During the journey we are guided by Philip Morrison (an MIT professor who had worked in the Manhattan Project), his voiceover coming to us over the music of Elmer Bernstein (composer for The Magnificent Seven and To Kill a Mockingbird, among others). You can watch it above.

If you like it, "Cosmic Voyage" (1996) by Bayley Silleck, and narrated by Morgan Freeman, is an half-hour long IMAX documentary based on the same book, but also containing a bit of astrophysics and history of the Universe. As for the Eames, husband and wife who were first and foremost designers and architects, by 1977 they had already created their iconic Lounge Chair and their beautiful home-studio in Los Angeles. They were also present in the groundbreaking American National Exhibition in Moscow (the first cultural exchange between the USA and USSR, used as a propaganda vehicle by the capitalists) with the montage "Glimpses of the USA" (1959), displayed over seven screens.

Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville (1950) by Robert Doisneau

As soon as the news spread that Emperor Hirohito had accepted the terms of the Declaration of Potsdam, ending World War II, celebrations erupted across America. German photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, author of almost a hundred LIFE magazine covers, was at Times Square, in New York City, capturing the festivities with his Leica, when he spotted a sailor running down the street and spontaneously kissing every women he came across. When the sailor grabbed a nurse clad in white, surrounded by several people with pure joy on their faces, Eisenstaedt pressed the button, snapping one of the most enduring and meaningful images of the history of photography. According to Edith Shain, the nurse, it is a monument to “hope, love, peace and tomorrow.”

As great and iconic as that picture is, there's other "kissing" photo I like more. Robert Doisneau was walking around his hometown, Paris, when he spotted a couple kissing. Shy and respectful, he did nothing at first, but then approached them and asked if they could recreate the moment for him to photograph. Françoise Delbart, 20, and Jacques Carteaud, 23, aspiring stage actors, agreed. Curiously, that image was also first published in LIFE.

First they came… (1946) by Martin Niemöller

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Kommunist.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.
Als sie die Juden holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.
Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

As the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
As they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
As they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
As they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak out.

Seventy years ago today, the Allies accepted the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany and the Third Reich was over. It was the end of World War II in Europe.

The poem above (original version and translated, published in "They Thought They Were Free") was written by Martin Niemöller, German theologian and Lutheran pastor. It's a reflection on the dangers of apathy, addressed first and foremost to the German intellectuals, amongst which he included himself, that did nothing during the rise to power of the Nazis to stop the destruction they announced. The author was detained between 1937 and 1945 in Sachsenhausen and Dachau in compliance with a direct order from Hitler, but survived. After the end of the war, he was one of the writers of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (1945), in which the council of the  Evangelical Church in Germany acknowledge its failure in opposing the Nazis. Niemöller went on to became a vigorous anti-war activist, fighting, for example, for nuclear disarmament, until his death in 1984.