zombie links

---Jim Groom discusses Dawn of the Dead

---Rodrigo Blaas' Alma

---the zombie attack as stress test

---kill your lawn

---Night of the Living Dead

---Google-Verizon's betrayal

---the new consumption

---Wilson-Brown's "The Curator's Dilemma"

---the e-book and the novel:

This September, the American author Don DeLillo was asked, upon receiving the PEN/Saul Bellow award, how technology is changing fiction. “Novels will become user-generated,” he speculated. “An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customised, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write and read.”

The “shrinking context” DeLillo describes is the paradoxical offspring of an arena in which all media float free and fight for attention, where anything goes, and yet where it’s only an ever-more-dominant few that are able to spin their stories across media and into the popular consciousness. “Here’s a stray question,” DeLillo continued. “Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?” He left it unanswered. But we shall find out soon enough.

---Sir Ken Robinson discusses creativity in education

---medieval zombies

---movie purgatory

---10 things I learned as a zombie

---Friedkin discusses the chase scene of The French Connection (thanks to @LaFamiliaFilm)

---zombie TV

---Taibbi's Griftopia:

America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And since he's making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall. Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states who've been pocketing Bob Lukens's gas dollars. It's an almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.

---zombie trailers

---MacKenzie's The Best Thing I Ever Done

---Lester Bangs reviews Astral Weeks

---zombie Sears

---Digital media, new learners of the 21st century

---the story of Warren Oates

---zombie political ads

---the evils of in-image advertising:

How long before every photo on the Web is monetized to the max? Every piece of clothing — whether it's in a fashion spread or a news photo about a homicide? Every Ford truck — whether it's in a beer ad or a shot of a crime scene? Every Nike shoe — whether it's being worn by President Obama or a pervert on a perp walk?

News stories will become shop windows and every newsmaker a mannequin. Talk about Photoshopping.

Taken to the extreme, online shoppers will be able to buy a copy of the hat Jackie Kennedy was wearing when her husband was assassinated. Or the T-shirts straight from the mug shots on The Smoking Gun.

And how long before the tables are turned and some politician picks up extra campaign money by wearing certain name-brand clothes?

---how the internet inspires Hollywood

---zombie Red Dead Redemption

---bloggers in jail

---lastly, Sigourney Weaver's big audition for Alien