Category Archives: Futurism

With the sixth generation of the Mustang, Ford has made a purposeful move away from the retro lines of the previous generation and toward a decidedly more modern look. Fortunately for those that prefer the heyday styling of true 60s and 70s muscle cars, there's a new option. Michigan-based Equus Automotive combines classic muscle-car looks and power with luxuriously appointed interiors.

We've previously looked at the Equus Bass770, but the public premiere at this week's North American International Auto Show was the first chance we got to get up close. We're not all that sure there's much of a market for a US$250,000 luxe-muscle car, but if there is, it's sure to storm Equus' doors. The car has some serious presence.

While automakers like Ford and Dodge are focused on more of a "retro futurism," Equus has the courage to say without hesitation that the most imitable muscle car designs were the originals. So what if they're 50 years old, they still look good. We think car enthusiasts will agree as they look over the Bass770's flat face, round headlamps and fastback cabin, all of which look lifted straight out of muscle-car past without much modernization at all. Equus knows what it likes about muscle car styling and it's not afraid to emulate it.

In its quiet downstairs corner of the Detroit show, from a distance the Equus booth looked much more like a classic muscle car display than the home of a world-premiere sports car. It wasn't until you walked past the velvet ropes and popped the driver-side door that the car's true character came to life.

The interior is hand-wrapped in rich, colorful leather that is carefully matched to the exterior. Polished metal and modern instrumentation pop vividly against the leather backdrop. It's certainly a staircase beyond the transmission tunnel-divided bucket seats, floating dashboard and flagpole-sized shifter of a 60s-era Mustang.

Since the Bass770 hasn't changed much from its first appearance in September, we won't cover all the ins and outs, but we do feel obliged to repeat the meatiest specs. The 770 is powered by a 6.2-liter supercharged GM LS9 V8 that puts out 640 hp and 605 lb-ft of torque.

From a comfortable niche within the front of the aluminum chassis, that engine pushes the car to 60 mph (96.5 km/h) in 3.4 seconds before firing it up to a 200 mph (322 km/h) top speed, as the driver shifts manually between six speeds. Systems like magnetic selective ride control and performance traction management ensure all that brute power is put to work creating a tight ride.

Equus recently began production on the $250,000 Bass770 and told us deliveries will take about three to five months. It plans to work closely with each customer to create a bespoke machine hand-built to their specifications.

Source: Equus Automotive

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Muscle cars get swanky with the Equus Bass770

From New World Encyclopedia

Futurism was a twentieth-century artistic movement. Although a nascent futurism can be seen surfacing throughout the very early years of the last century, the 1907 essay Entwurf einer neuen sthetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music) by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni is sometimes claimed as its true beginning point for the movement. Futurism was a largely Italian and Russian movement, although it also had adherents in other countries.

The futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theater, music, architecture and even gastronomy. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first among them to produce a manifesto declaming a new artistic philosophy in his Manifesto of Futurism (1909), first released in Milan and later published in the French paper Le Figaro (February 20). Marinetti summed up the major principles of the futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. He and others also espoused a love of speed, technology and violence. The car, the plane, the industrial town were legendary artistic subjects for the futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of man over nature.

Marinetti's impassioned polemic immediately attracted the support of the young Milanese paintersUmberto Boccioni, Carr, and Russolo who wanted to extend Marinetti's ideas to the visual arts (Russolo was also a composer, introducing futurist ideas into his compositions). The painters Balla and Severini met Marinetti in 1910 and their artistic creations represented futurism's first phase.

The Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) wrote a Manifesto of Futurist Painters in 1910 in which he vowed:

We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.

Russian futurism may be said to have been born in December 1912, when the Saint Petersburg-based group Hylaea (Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burlyuk) issued a manifesto entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Although the Hylaea is generally held to be the most influential group of Russian futurism, other centers were formed in Saint Petersburg (Igor Severyanin's "Ego-Futurists"), Moscow (Tsentrifuga with Boris Pasternak among its members), Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa.

Like their Italian counterparts, the Russian futurists were fascinated with dynamism, speed, and restlessness of modern urban life. They purposely sought to arouse controversy and to attract publicity by repudiating static art of the past. The likes of Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to them, should have been "heaved overboard from the steamship of modernity." They acknowledged no authorities whatsoever; even Filippo Tommaso Marinettiwhen he arrived to Russia on a proselytizing visit in 1914was obstructed by most Russian futurists who did not profess to owe him anything.

In contrast to Marinetti's circle, Russian futurism was a literary rather than plastic movement. Although many leading poets (Mayakovsky, Burlyuk) dabbled in painting, their interests were primarily literary. On the other hand, such well-established artists as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, and Kazimir Malevich found inspiration in the refreshing imagery of futurist poems and experimented with versification themselves. The poets and painters attempted to collaborate on such innovative productions as the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, with texts by Kruchenykh and sets contributed by Malevich.

Members of the Hylaea elaborated the doctrine of cubo-futurism and assumed the name of budetlyane (from the Russian word for "future"). They found significance in the shape of letters, in the arrangement of text around the page, in the details of typography. They held that there is no substantial difference between words and material things, hence the poet should arrange words in his poems like the sculptor arranges colors and lines on his canvas. Grammar, syntax and logic were discarded; many neologisms and profane words were introduced; onomatopoeia was declared a universal texture of the verse. Khlebnikov, in particular, developed "an incoherent and anarchic blend of words stripped of their meaning and used for their sound alone," [1] known as zaum.

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Futurism - New World Encyclopedia

Four Tet has incredible ears.

So, in a way, it was inevitable that Kieran Hebden would be seduced by grime, by its aggressive, heavily-layered futurism. Communicating with fans via Twitter, Four Tet confirmed late last year that a number of collaborations were at the planning stages.

Amongst them was a grime track with Terror Danjah - arguably one of the genre's defining instrumental voices. Since then, fans have been desperate for more details.

Yesterday (January 15th) Kieran Hebden tweeted that the tracks would be titled 'Killer' and 'Nasty' respectively. Four Tet has since deleted the tweet, but since Terror Danjah's long term home Hyperdub has social networked the news Clash presumes that it is legitimate.

Due for release via Hebden's own Text Records imprint, 'Killer' b/w 'Nasty' is set to follow the upcoming reissue of Crazy Bald Heads First Born.

(via FACT)

Fancy some archive Terror Danjah to keep you going? Check out his archive Clash mix - packed full of 140 invention and aimed straight at the floor.

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More Four Tet x Terror Danjah Details

The Dali Thundering Concept - Realism : The Stone Ego Paradox Ft. Hugo (TNB)
The Dali Thundering Concept : Futurism - The Prometheus Addiction Ft. Hugo ( The Nation #39;s Breakdown ) ACDM Fest @ l #39;Abordage - Evreux 20/04/2013.

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The Dali Thundering Concept - Realism : The Stone Ego Paradox Ft. Hugo (TNB) - Video

History is stuffed with rumors of strange and secretive Satanic cults. Some of those rumors are nothing more than a load of hot goat's blood, and others are something more. Check out the best cults in history, and see if they ever really existed.

Ah, Salem. In 1692, over a period of only a few months, 200 people had been accused of witchcraft and jailed, and 20 had been killed. (One man had been tortured to death. His interrogators had piled stones on his chest he smothered.) It started out as a few girls - none of them over twelve years old - "having fits." It soon became a storm of accusations that only ended when the governor's wife was accused of witchcraft and he shut the whole thing down. Many people confessed to trafficking with the devil and writing their name in his book. Under torture, they named others who they had seen at black masses. One woman named her own daughter. On paper it looked like a good part of the village was a Satanic cult.

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Was it Real?

What's strange about the Salem Witch Trials is not that no one believes it now - it's that no one even believed it then. The village of Salem was known to be a nasty place. Its members quarreled with each other and with their neighbors. The town couldn't keep a minister because the supposedly devout Christians refused to pay ministers their agreed-upon salary. Once the trials began, letters poured in from the surrounding countryside condemning the very idea, and ridiculing the use of incorporeal evidence, like visions and dreams. Executions seemed to be meted to the less popular and the less protected. The woman who named her own daughter as a witch was hanged. The daughter was not. Nor was Tituba, a slave who was one of the first people accused of witchcraft - and the very first to confess. Possibly she lived because, as she had no property and no ability to cause trouble for others, no one stood to gain from her death. After the trials were shut down, the town reversed its stance on witches quickly. The accused were let go. The use of incorporeal evidence was deemed unlawful. Within fifteen years, the verdicts were declared void and restitution was paid to any accused yet living, even if they had confessed. Everyone seemed to know it was a fraud, but during the trials no one spoke up.

Michelle Remembers has entirely sunk from the public consciousness by now, but in 1980, when it was published, it kickstarted a whole movement. The book was about the recovered memories of Michelle Smith. Aided by her psychiatrist, she remembered horrific abuse at the hands of an ancient and international cult of Satanists. Among Michelle's memories were things like 81-day ceremonies in a public graveyard during which the cult raised the devil, only to see him fought back down to hell by angels and the Virgin Mary. The book started a two-decade search for child-abusing satanic cults that supposedly populated America and several other countries. That search ended in some drawn-out trials and a few convictions. The fear of underground Satanic cults was so widespread that it earned the name "The Satanic Panic." Geraldo Rivera claimed that there were over a million satanic cults in the US. In South Africa, they actually trained a supernatural crimes unit to deal the the cases.

Was it Real?

Almost certainly not. Although the book got a good reception when it was first published, the public soured on Smith and her psychiatrist when they divorced their respective spouses, married each other, and went on speaking tours. Eventually reporters and television stations began looking into the book's claims, and found out that Michelle had never been out of school for 81 days, and the site of the two-month-long ritual to raise the devil occurred in a graveyard surrounded on three sides by suburban houses. As for the claim that there there were a million satanic cults in America, if it were true it would mean that, at the time of the claim, one in two-hundred people would have been a Satanist.

Founded in 1948, Our Lady of Endor is an example of gnostic Satanism. The founder, Herbert Sloane, claimed to have seen a horned god in the woods as a child. Later he realized that this was Satan. With that in mind, he re-read the Bible story and saw the serpent not as a tempter, but as someone who showed Eve the true nature of God. The "fall of man" was a good thing, but its meaning was twisted by Christian theists.

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The 9 Best Satanic Cults in History

Futurism - Quick Game
Jiggy #39;s Dev Log.

By: Jiggmin

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Futurism - Quick Game - Video

Artist Adam Magyar uses sophisticated software and high-speed camera rigs of his own design to capture beautifully haunting slow-motion footage of commuters, trains and passengers inside NYC's Grand Central Terminal.

Magyar compiled the footage into a 24-minute short film called Stainless. Josh Hammer describes the "long-running techno-art project" in a must-read profile on Magyar and his work, recently published over at Matter:

In a growing body of photographic and video art done over the past decade, Magyar bends conventional representations of time and space, stretching milliseconds into minutes, freezing moments with a resolution that the naked eye could never have perceived. His art evokes such variegated sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, even the 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. The imagessleek silver subway cars, solemn commuters lost in private worldsare beautiful and elegant, but also produce feelings of disquiet. "These moments I capture are meaningless, there is no story in them, and if you can catch the core, the essence of being, you capture probably everything," Magyar says in one of the many cryptic comments about his work that reflect both their hypnotic appeal and their elusiveness. There is a sense of stepping into a different dimension, of inhabiting a space between stillness and movement, a time-warp world where the rules of physics don't apply.

Magyar's aesthetic is absolutely captivating; if you're into this style of art, you'll definitely want to read up on him and his work.

[Adam Magyar via Matter]

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NYC Commuters are Suspended in Time in Stainless

Virgin Galactic's space plane, SpaceShipTwo, finished its third rocket-powered test flight yesterday, breaking the sound barrier and reaching an altitude of 71,000 feet the loftiest in a spate of recent test-runs. Here for your enjoyment is a highlight reel of yesterday's flight.

Via the Virgin Galactic news brief:

In command on the flight deck of SS2 for the first time under rocket power was Virgin Galactic's Chief Pilot Dave Mackay. Mackay, along with Scaled Composites' (Scaled) Test Pilot Mark Stucky, tested the spaceship's Reaction Control System (RCS) and the newly installed thermal protection coating on the vehicle's tail booms. All of the test objectives were successfully completed.

[Yesterday's] flight departed Mojave Air and Space Port at 7:22 a.m. PST with the first stage consisting of the WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) carrier aircraft lifting SS2 to an altitude around 46,000 ft. At the controls of WK2 were Virgin Galactic Pilot Mike Masucci and Scaled Test Pilot Mike Alsbury. On release, SS2's rocket motor was ignited, powering the spaceship to a planned altitude of 71,000 ft. SS2's highest altitude to date and at a maximum speed of Mach 1.4. SS2's unique feather re-entry system was also tested during today's flight.

Two important SS2 systems, the RCS and thermal protection coating, were tested during today's flight in preparation for upcoming full space flights. The spaceship'sRCS will allow its pilots to maneuver the vehicle in space, permitting an optimal viewing experience for those on board and aiding the positioning process for spacecraft re-entry. The new reflective protection coating on SS2's inner tail boom surfaces is being evaluated to help maintain vehicle skin temperatures while the rocket motor is firing.

SS2's propulsion system has been developed by Sierra Nevada Corp and is the world's largest operational hybrid rocket motor. Although today's flight saw it burn for a planned 20 seconds, the system has been successfully tested in ground firings to demonstrate performance characteristics and burn time sufficient to take the spaceship and its private astronauts to space.

Awesome. Now who wants to buy us a ($200,000) ticket?

More here.

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Beautiful footage of SpaceShipTwo's latest supersonic test flight

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There's a ton of ambition on display in this year's science fiction and fantasy books. Bestselling authors are stretching out of their comfort zones, and our favorite authors are pushing the boundaries. Plus David Cronenberg has written a book about sex and weird diseases. Here's the ultimate guide to this year's can't-miss books.

Want even more? Check out our guide to January's books.

Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh (Crown)

A novel about a hitman in a dystopian near future, in which the rich all escape into virtual reality and everybody else is screwed.

On Such a Full Sea: A Novel by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)

A future dystopia that's more like Clockwork Orange than Hunger Games, as ecological collapse takes its toll on the last surviving power, New China.

Dreams of the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn (Tor Books)

The sequel to Vaughn's After the Golden Age, which skips forward in time and follows the daughter of the original novel's protagonist, who wants to be a superhero like her grandpa.

A Highly Unlikely Scenario by Rachel Cantor (Melville House)

Continued here:
All the Essential Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Coming in 2014

NEW YORK (CNN) -- CNN Money's Maribel Aber has your top business and financial news on this Friday, January 10.

Tyson Foods asks hog farmers to make animal welfare adjustmentTyson Foods Inc. of Springdale said Thursday that it has asked its hog farmers to adopt new methods of raising, monitoring and euthanizing animals and said it would increase supplier inspections in 2014. The Humane Society of the United States praised Tyson's actions, and a similar one by competing meat processor Smithfield Foods, calling it a "big movement from an important company." In the letter signed by Shane Miller, Tyson's senior vice president of pork, and Dean Danilson, vice president of animal well-being programs, the company asked that its suppliers to: Use video monitoring of sows "to increase oversight and decrease biosecurity risks." Stop using manual blunt force as a primary method of euthanizing sick or injured piglets. Adopt "pain mitigation methods" to eliminate or reduce the pain associated with tail docking and castration.

It is good to be the boss! Bosses actually are happier. So says a new Pew Research Center study that found bosses are more likely to be "very satisfied" with their jobs, family life and financial situation than their underlings. And more bosses than workers say they plan to stay put, especially since nearly two-thirds think they are compensated fairly for their efforts. But when it comes to gender workplace issues, bosses and workers have roughly the same views. The overwhelming majority of both feel that men and women are paid equally at their place of employment.

Market has #jitters about Twitter Twitter is off to a terrible start in 2014 after bearish reports from several Wall Street analysts have made investors jittery. Shares of the micro-blogging service were down nearly 9% at one point, and closed down almost 4% Thursday, after Cantor Fitzgerald gave the stock a "sell" rating and Morgan Stanley labeled it as "underweight" earlier this week. On Thursday, Cowen & Co. initiated coverage on the stock with an "underperform." But Morgan Stanley's negative rating was especially worrisome, given that the bank was one of the underwriters of Twitter's November initial public offering, said Robert Peck, an analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.

Economy stinks, books get more depressingAmerican futurism gets pretty dark during bad economic times. Many people start to see technology as the enemy, like they did in the 1930s and 1970s. And people generally feel less optimistic for the future. But new research shows that it's not just futurism that becomes more gloomy during economic recessions. When the economy stinks, all authors start to adopt a more depressing vocabulary. A recent study out of London took different "mood words" that were then broken up into six categories: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. From there the researchers made what they call a "literary misery index" to gauge the relative number of positive moods against the negative moods in 20th century books.

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CNN Money: Top business headlines for Jan. 10