Cropped Will Cardini artwork

December 2nd, 2009

73# vv33>£4~>z

Sorry about the missed post on Friday, I was taking a little Thanksgiving blogcation.

My parents live in The Woodlands, a master-planned community 28 miles north of downtown Houston. Although the suburb was bought out by real estate developers in 1997, George Mitchell’s original vision for the community was focused on aesthetics. Relics of some of the original ideas can be seen. On Research Forest Drive, office buildings made entirely out of mirrored windows crouch among the pine trees and swampland. It’s as if Superstudio’s utopian Continuous Monument was begun in the Great Piney Woods of East Texas.

These buildings house genetics firms with nondescript names like GenSys, GenTech, and BioSynth. Inside these corporations, sinister DNA-bending scientists are working to create a new subspecies of humans who can thrive in the petrochemical smog that blankets Houston. One day, they will break free from the labs and take everything within 50 miles of the refineries in Pasadena away from their oxygen-breathing brethren.

March 31st, 2009

The International Space Station

Filed under: Fiction,Inspiration — William Cardini @ 12:58 am

via wikipedia.

According to universe today, now that the solar panel modules have been added to the as-yet uncompleted International Space Station, it is the second brightest object in the night sky, next to the moon.

via universe today.

Venus has been dethroned, and this is just a sign of things to come. Our children’s children will look up into a sky filled with artificial satellites, floating space cities twinkling in the twilight.

A lone guitarist, camping on a mild post-global-weirding Saskatchewan winter night, will sing a song about a woman who left him for a life in space. The sky is so bright with habitats, he can hardly pick out her new home. Her muscles, weakened by the lower gravity of the Lagrange-point colonies, will never be able to support earth’s gravity again.

January 18th, 2009

Fragment – Hologram Screen

Filed under: Fiction — Tags: — William Cardini @ 7:58 pm

The Hypercastle of the Miizzzard lies deep in the Urscape. It was built in the fold between two ridges of pale orange rock that have pushed through the plains. Here, close to the substrate of reality, the Miizzzard observes the realms of the multiverse and performs his ablutions of the macrocosm.

Through his telescope, he is closely observing the skin of the living multidimensional cosmos. It is pocked and pitted, burned and scared from the violence of its birth. The scorched flesh forms a pattern, a tattoo that is the after-image of its fiery birth. On its other side it is cool, and it casts a three-dimensional shadow onto the walls of its cave.

But the Miizzzard is not interested in shadows. He is closely scanning the skin, looking for infections. On an inverse of the anterior edge of the eleventh-dimensional manifold, he sees a small outcrop of brackish, fuzzy slime that has accumulated enough mass to loom above its crater womb. The Miizzzard blinks and shifts in his seat. From his felt suit coat, he pulls out a worn, turquoise notebook and writes down the eleven coordinate points of the infection from his display.

He gets up and takes the long walk down spiral staircases to the lower floors, working out the stiffness of his joints. The Hypercastle has no foundation, it rests directly on the foamy surface of the Urscape. The Miizzzard is standing in a huge room, his bare feet touching the bedrock of reality. An orb is suspended in the middle of the room, with steps leading up to it and wires stretching away to the darkness of the corners and into the Ursurface. The Miizzzard enters the body cavity within the orb and the door scrapes against the threshold as it closes behind him. Wires painlessly attach themselves into his skin, and suddenly the Miizzzard is no longer himself; he is the living cosmos. He stretches to accustom himself to the new form and cracks open and close in spacetime. Galaxies shatter as he walks across the cave floor, past the fire still burning in the floor form his birth, and to the entrance. There is a silvery, sludgy stream running there, and thin flesh-colored clouds are racing across the sky, but the light is so bright that the Miizzzard-as-the-cosmos must close his eyes as he bends down to the stream to clean himself. The waters are steaming as he washes in a ritual pattern of left then right then left, seventeen times total. He murmurs a prayer that echoes in the quantum flux, and returns to the cave.

In the basement of the Hypercastle, the Miizzzard descends the steps from the orb. He touches his stomach, and begins the long climb to eat his daily meal of bread.

July 19th, 2007

Strange Structures

Filed under: Artwork,Fiction — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 1:20 am

The moon was low and large and distant in the sky. The inter-dimensional machineries churned to keep the Trans-Dimensional Hypercastle in place, and the haze produced fuzzed the moon, as if she were the ghostly final slice of a peach. The crystalline lattice of fluorescent blue light tubes slowly unfolded under the heavy-lidded lunar gaze. It seemed to be grasping at the whole of night.

The Miizzzard walked up to it and began to play his Hyper-Crystal Mind-Organ…

July 17th, 2007

A Quick Chautauqua

Filed under: Fiction — Tags: — William Cardini @ 12:45 am

The other day, the Miizzzard decided to take a walk, to more clearly contemplate the strange flowering that has blossomed into the sentient universe and the techno-spirituo-promise of the singularity. “Space is the Place,” sing Sun Ra and June Tyson; “There’s no limit to the things that you can do (Space is the Place) There’s no limit to the things that you can be.” Well, pounding the paved swamp of the Greater Houston Area gives one perspective on the relationship between concrete and the stars. Maybe one day homo cosmos will swim in the free-fall of the middle of hollowed-out asteroids; maybe one day we will all know the joys of the Silver Surfer. But these are days of lead, and each step is heavy.

July 13th, 2007

The Mysteries of the Cosmos

Filed under: Fiction — Tags: — William Cardini @ 12:03 am

The Miizzzard stands alone underneath the mystic crystal pinnacle of his trans-dimensional hypercastle, focusing the magical energies to better delve into the universe. The weight of it all presses against his flesh as if he were buried in mud at the bottom of the ocean; and yet, he is lighter than air atop a structure that cannot be contained in any one locus of the space-time continuum. The paradoxes of his life drive him down the cascading steps, tapestries of lost times mocking his vision; which at times, can cut into the vastness of infinity. But not now. It is occluded.

July 12th, 2007

A Mystical Weave

Filed under: Artwork,Fiction — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 1:29 pm

The Miizzzard has finally finished weaving his face-scrambling cloth:

Here are the results,
giving the Miizzzard a new vizzard:

When applied to his hat,
the cloth transmutes it into an autonomous being

with hidden trans-dimensional vortices,
similar in structure to our Miizzzard’s hypercastle.

June 29th, 2007

Post Script

Filed under: Artwork,Fiction — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 10:45 pm

He would sit in his apartment in the nights of heat and rain and weave, or fold paper, or sew; and as he carefully and drunkenly constructed these illusory selves, he thought of the person who he wanted to be, and he thought of a feminist class he had taken in college, and it was one thought rolling thru his head in time to the music and the wheels and the dawn that would come and pass once more: “Biology is no longer destiny.”

***

“When I was a little kid, I would sit in the bath tub and play with all the shampoos and bubble baths that were sitting around the rim of the tub. I would mix them together in a little plastic cup, and think that if I mixed them just right, and drank it, I would be transformed into Bowser, and I could romp around the town, breathing fire and destroying stuff.”

May 7th, 2007

The Origins of the Miizzzard

Filed under: Artwork,Fiction — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 10:11 pm

Full of Vim and Vigor.

“The Miizzzard no longer exists. He died circa 400,000 B.C.E. while trying to discover the transformative secrets of the Space Yetis.

William Cardini space yeti drawing

His ghost haunts the digital realm and possesses various weavings and synthetic fabrics in the material world in an attempt to recreate Scriabin’s ‘Mysterium,’ a Gesamkunstwerke that destroys this earth to give birth to another.

“He is a figment, a warm bowl of minty fig meat topped with a spoonful of cold jellied plum.

“I have also heard that, although he has lived out only twenty-three years, the path that he traces thru spacetime is discontinuous: he shook to Marie Curie’s radioactive boogaloo, procured pamphlets from Le Sony’r Ra in Chicago, was a starving outcast with Grettir Armundarson on Drang Isle and pissed blue thanks to Yves Klein. His last known location was drunk out of his mind at the Deep Eddy Cabaret, singing karaoke alongside the shade of Rrose Selavy.

“All we can know for sure is that he’s a weird guy.”

-from William Cardini’s biography of the Miizzzard, “A Neo-Archaic Man”