Compendia Mobile

Fantaticism

A lengthy interview with Serenity / Firefly creator (and all around pop-culture triple threat) Joss Whedon.  No actual spolers but many omens and portents (not the least of which is the track listing from the soundtrack).

A Conflation of Twee

The video for the Decemberists' Sixteen Military Wives combines the precocious musical aesthetic of the Decemberists with the precocious visual aesthetic of Wes Anderson's Rushmore -  even down to the use of Futura.  Hilarity ensues. 

High Bandwidth Theatre

"More" - Mark Osborne's academy award nominated animated short. 

Red Harvest, Yojimbo, and a Fistfull of Dollars

The film enthusiasts of the online review site/journal/blog the Dual Lens trace the family tree of Dashiell Hammet's Red Harvest - a lineage that gives rise most directly to Yojimbo and a Fistfull of Dollars, but which also apparently includes Miller's Crossing and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

The Last Rule of Fight Club...

... is that you use 5160's for letters and 5164's for parcels. Somewhere a packaging designer for Avery Labels has found a way to signal his frustration to the world. in a quiet, desperate way.

Lost In Translation

Recently I met a man who is currently reading the Fagles translation of The Iliad. Being a big fan of this translation myself, I took an immediate liking to him. Beyond his interest in the quintessential epic of strife, his rationale for reading the Iliad truly earned my eternal comity: he said that, should he die in a car wreck that very afternoon, he did not want Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy to be the last he knew of Homer.

I like him already.