July 9, 2012
The Bullingdon Club is a secret society dining club for exclusive students at Oxford University. The club has no permanent rooms and is notorious for its members’ wealth and destructive binges. Membership is by invitation only, and prohibitively expensive for most, given the need to pay for the uniform, dinners, and damages. The club was founded over 200 years ago. Originally it was a hunting and cricket club. This foundational sporting purpose is attested to in the Club’s symbol.
‘The Wisden Cricketer’ reports that the Bullingdon is ‘ostensibly one of the two original Oxford University cricket teams but it actually used cricket merely as a respectable front for the mischievous, destructive, or self-indulgent tendencies of its members.’ By the late 19th century, the present emphasis on dining within the Club began to emerge. ‘The Bullingdon Club dinners were the occasion of a great display of exuberant spirits, accompanied by a considerable consumption of the good things of life, which often made the drive back to Oxford an experience of exceptional nature.’
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July 9, 2012
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is an adventure video game developed by Capcom. It was first released as ‘Gyakuten Saiban’ (literally ‘Turnabout Trial’) in Japan exclusively for the Game Boy Advance in 2001. The game stars Phoenix Wright, a rookie defense attorney in the Fey and Co. Law Offices, owned by fellow defense attorney Mia Fey. Other characters include Maya Fey, Mia’s sister; Miles Edgeworth, a rival prosecutor; Dick Gumshoe, a scatterbrained detective, and Larry Butz, an old friend of Phoenix’s.
The game features five court cases divided into episodes. Each case flips between two game modes: investigation and the actual trial. In the investigation aspect of the game, Phoenix gathers evidence and speaks to characters involved in the case. In the trial aspect of the game, Phoenix defends his client using said evidence, cross examines witnesses, and solves the mystery surrounding each case. The court perspective is usually in the third person, while the perspective outside of court is in the first person. Since the release of the Game Boy Advance version, the Ace Attorney series has produced many sequels and spin-offs, in a variety of formats including Nintendo’s WiiWare and Apple iOS.
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July 9, 2012
Black Hole is a comic written and illustrated by Charles Burns; it was published as a 12-issue limited series between 1995 and 2005. Set in the suburbs of Seattle during the mid-1970s, the comics follow a group of mostly middle class teenagers who, over the summer, contract a mysterious sexually transmitted disease known as ‘the Bug’ or ‘the teen plague,’ which causes them to develop bizarre unique physical mutations, turning them into social outcasts.
Burns has said that the mutations can be read as a metaphor for adolescence, sexual awakening, and the transition into adulthood. The look of the comic is meant to evoke the feel and atmosphere of classic 70s teen horror films like ‘The Last House on the Left,’ ‘Carrie,’ and ‘Halloween.’
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July 9, 2012
Charles Burns (b. 1955) is an American cartoonist renowned for his meticulous, high-contrast and creepy artwork and stories. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, painter Susan Moore.
His earliest works include illustrations for the ‘Sub Pop’ fanzine, and ‘Another Room Magazine’ of Oakland, CA, but he came to prominence when his comics were published for the first time in early issues of ‘RAW,’ the avant-garde comics magazine founded in 1980 by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. In 1982, Burns did a die-cut cover for ‘RAW’ #4. Raw Books also published two books of Burns as ‘RAW One-Shot: Big Baby’ and ‘Hard-Boiled Defective Stories.’
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July 9, 2012
Maakies is a syndicated weekly comic strip by Tony Millionaire. It began publication in 1994 in the ‘New York Press.’ It currently runs in many American alternative newsweeklies including ‘The Stranger,’ ‘LA Weekly,’ and ‘Only.’ It also appears in several international venues including the Italian comics magazine ‘Linus’ and the Swedish comics magazine ‘Rocky.’
The strip focuses on the darkly comic misadventures of Uncle Gabby (a drunken Irish sock monkey) and Drinky Crow (an alcoholic crow), two antiheroes with a propensity for drunkenness, violence, suicide, and venereal disease. According to Millionaire, ”Maakies’ is me spilling my guts… Writing and drawing about all the things that make me want to jump in the river, laughing at the horror of being alive.’ Maakies strips typically take place in an early 19th century nautical setting. There is rarely any continuity between strips.
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July 9, 2012
Tony Millionaire (b. 1956) (real name Scott Richardson) is an American cartoonist, illustrator and author known for his syndicated comic strip ‘Maakies’ and the ‘Sock Monkey’ series of comics and picture books. The nautical settings of much of Millionaire’s work draw inspiration from his childhood memories of his grandparents’ artwork and seaside home in Massachusetts as well as the novels of Patrick O’Brian, of which he is an avid reader. He draws in a lush style that mingles naturalistic detail with strong doses of the fanciful and grotesque. His linework resembles that of Johnny Gruelle, whom he cites as one of his main sources of inspiration along with Ernest Shepard and ‘all those freaks from the twenties and thirties who did the newspaper strips’; many of Millionaire’s admirers adduce a similarity to the work of E. C. Segar in particular. He draws with a fountain pen.
When asked in interviews why he uses a pseudonym, Millionaire maintains that he does not, and that ‘Tony Millionaire’ is his real name: ‘It is my legal name, and it’s been around a lot longer than I’ve been a cartoonist.’ He has claimed that his unusual surname is an Old French word meaning ‘a person who owns a thousand serfs.’ Skeptics trace the origin of the name to a character in an episode of the ’60s TV series ‘I Dream of Jeannie.’ Millionaire has speculated that in the future he may publish some family-friendly works of his under a different moniker in order to dissociate them from his other, more ribald output.
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July 9, 2012
The Believer is a United States literary magazine that also covers other arts and general culture. Founded and designed in 2003 by the writer and publisher Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s Publishing, it is edited by novelists Vendela Vida and Heidi Julavits, along with’Village Voice’ editor Ed Park. The magazine is published in San Francisco nine times a year. Eggers and his cohorts initially planned to ‘focus on writers and books we like,’ with a nod to ‘the concept of the inherent Good.’
The magazine urges readers and writers to ‘reach beyond their usual notions of what is accessible or possible.’ Illustrations and cartoons are featured throughout the magazine. The cover illustrations are done by Charles Burns, while most of the other portraits and line drawings are by Tony Millionaire (following Gilbert Hernandez from the fifth issue on). Michael Kupperman’s ‘Four-Color Comics’ has appeared in many issues, and in most issues a series of images from a given artist or other source run throughout the articles à la ‘The New Yorker.’
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July 9, 2012
The Atomic Cafe is a 1982 American documentary film produced and directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty.
The film covers the beginnings of the era of nuclear warfare, created from a broad range of archival film from the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s – including newsreel clips, television news footage, U.S. government-produced films (including military training films), advertisements, television and radio programs. News footage reflected the prevailing understandings of the media and public.
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July 9, 2012
Ugly American is a pejorative term used to refer to perceptions of loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless and ethnocentric behavior of American. Although the term is usually associated with or applied to travelers and tourists, it also applies to US corporate businesses in the international arena.
The term has been defined as: ‘Americans traveling or living abroad who remain ignorant of local culture and judge everything by American standards.’
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July 9, 2012
Futurism was a modern art and social movement which originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England, and elsewhere.
The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theater, cinema, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture, and even gastronomy.
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July 9, 2012
‘The Art of Noises‘ (‘L’arte dei Rumori’) is a Futurist manifesto, written by Luigi Russolo in a 1913 letter to friend and Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth, and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city.
In his letter, Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the noise of the bustling urban industrial soundscape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition. He proposes a number of conclusions about how electronics and other technology will allow futurist musicians to ‘substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.’ ‘The Art of Noises’ is considered to be one of the most important and influential texts in 20th century musical aesthetics.
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July 9, 2012
The Age of Spiritual Machines is a book by futurist Ray Kurzweil about the future course of humanity, particularly relating to the development of artificial intelligence and its impact on human consciousness. It is also a study on the concept of technological singularity, the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means.
Originally published in 1999, the book predicts that machines with human-like intelligence will be available from affordable computing devices within a couple of decades, revolutionizing most aspects of life, and that eventually humanity and its machinery will become one and the same.
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