Should it be functional or fashionable? Should it say “survivor” or “apocalypse fashion victim”? Should it carry a message?

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I’ve been hanging on to these for much too long… now I’m going to post an article with so many links out that Google will probably decide that the blog is a link farm and stop indexing it…

Today is the day before Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” goes into limited release in the US (on Wednesday, November 14th), and wide release this Friday, November 16th.

Richard Kelly, you may recall, wrote and directed “Donnie Darko”, the (dare I say) dark, funny, somewhat-science fiction film that I want to say launched Jake Gyllenhaal on the world, except that it wasn’t his first film and not many people saw it. The film involved time travel, possible hallucinations, a man in a rabbit suit talking about the end of the world, and disenfranchisement, and suffered from being released soon after September 11th, 2001 - a major plot point in the film involves falling aircraft pieces.

This is all very timely for me as I had the good fortune to see a stage adaptation of “Donnie Darko” by the American Repertory Theatre this weekend (held at the wonderfully named “Zero Arrow Theatre” - it’s at 0 Arrow St.). The production was surprisingly good.

Kelly’s new film - “Southland Tales” seems to follow on similar themes. Sarah Michelle Gellar is cast as a porn star trying to break into mainstream film (”Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted”), pitching her script through an amnesiac action star played by “The Rock”, Dwayne Johnson. The film takes place in a Los Angeles in the near future, after nuclear attacks in Texas have propelled the USA into becoming more of an in-denial-police-state.

The film famously was booed at its premiere at Cannes in 2006. Sony Entertainment picked it up and Richard Kelly cut the film by 25 minutes.

Three graphic novels are available as a prequel to the film: “Southland Tales Book 1: Two Roads Diverge”, “Southland Tales Book 2: Fingerprints” and “Southland Tales Book 3: The Mechanicals”. The three are also collected together in a single volume: “Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga”. They follow the main characters and explore the setting, presumably leading up to the events of the film.
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Steampunk: Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England…

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Two views of the Vatican Museum’s exhibit on “The Apocalypse”. Opening Friday (that would be today) and running through December 7th, the Vatican Museum has an “iconclastic show” illustrating what St. John the Divine wrote in the Book of Revelation.

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China reports that they have the six-horned Goat Of The Apocalypse… I’d say born but if it’s got horns it’s not a baby. Six horns! Okay, maybe five would have been better… five gets you a pentacle, especially good if it had a horn under its chin (inconvenient for it, though)… six is more like a Jewish Star of David goat, though it doesn’t seem to be wearing a yarmulke. So Goat Of The Apocalypse it is! Let’s name it “Asmodeus” and go visit it in Mongolia!

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“Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse” is an anthology of post-apocalyptic stories due out on January 8th. It includes stories by Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, Orson Scott Card, Octavia Butler, Cory Doctorow and others… and while it’s post-apocalyptic it apparently is grounded well enough to not include zombies or aliens.

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When some of the first words you hear in a film are David Cronenberg telling you that he’s calling for the gas company, which will do its best to keep the gas flowing until the very end, that this isn’t a traditional end-of-the-world film. In fact, it’s a film that doesn’t really get into the nitty-gritty of how the world ends, and isn’t going to have Bruce Willis show up to protect us all at the very last moment.

Instead, “Last Night”, written, directed by and starring Don McKellar - who later won an Oscar for the screeplay for “The Red Violin” - the film has other familiar faces in Sandra Oh (“Sideways”, “Under the Tuscan Sun”, “The Princess Diaries”, “Grey’s Anatomy”), Callum Keith Rennie (“Memento”, “Battlestar Galactica”, “Blade - Trinity”) and Genevieve Bujold (“King Of Hearts”, “Dead Ringers”, “Coma”).

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Or - the end of the world isn’t a useful solution for solving problems.

[update: I didn't make this up! Check out Jamais Cascio's link below and his blog in general]

Via: Open the Future: Solving Problems by Getting Away From It All
[tags]jamais cascio, apocalypse, rapture, singularity, exit strategy[/tags]

It’s not often that I get to mention gadgets on the Apocalypse Blog, but if all goes well around this time next Friday I’ll have a Jesus Phone - I mean Apple iPhone - in my sweaty little hands. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to blog from it, and will roam the world blogging about things apocalyptic.

Probably not so much (the roaming part, at least).

The apocalyptic element to the iPhone? It’s an article written by Josh Quittner wherein he waxes apocalytpic about the iPhone:

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People in the 70’s were, I think, more concerned with what it would be like after the end of world (despite the semantic issues involved in end) than we are today. Today we seem more concerned about how the world will end and less about what happens next (granted the idea that we even get a “next”).

We’ve talked about the seed banks here before, but now you can have your seeds and… read about them, too.
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