The Dark Balloon

A weblog by Hao Lian.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
A note that thanks you for being born, all those years ago.

§
Failing beautifully.

Wallace’s work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about American novelists, “I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.” Wallace failed beautifully. There is no mystery whatsoever about why he found this novel so hard to finish. The glimpse we get of what he wanted it to be—a vast model of something bland and crushing, inside of which a constellation of individual souls would shine in their luminosity, and the connections holding all of us together in this world would light up, too, like filaments—this was to be a novel on the highest order of accomplishment, and we see that the writer at his strongest would have been strong enough. He wasn’t always that strong.

John Jeremiah Sullivan writing for GQ.

[(2011 August 21) .]
[(2010 March 18) .]

§
Jammies.

“Jammies”, an SNL Digital Short. (Amuricaonly, sorry internet.) (Likely to have expired on Hulu by the time you’ve read this.)

[(2010 January 2, 2!) .]
[(2009 August 2) .]
[(2009 July 23, 1!) .]
[(2009 June 26) .]

§
St. Barbara-Glass.

Monks on Segways, with fire on the top of their heads, playing “Lightning” by Philip Glass. Good night, everybody. We’ll start storyboarding the next chapter of the internet tomorrow because this one just ended.

[(2009 June 18) .]

§
There’s a lot of astral projection in this story.

It’s your story, your voice, your choices, and I don’t want to question them, but why these words?

Comments Written By Actual Students Extracted From Workshopped Manuscripts at a Major University, collected by Tanya Rey for McSweeney’s.

[(2009 June 5) .]

§
For the week of May 24, it’s a video dump everybody.

Ze Frank’s Hard Times: Optical illusions.

The Daily Show: John Oliver reports on the Parliament corruption scandal.

The Peter Serafinowicz Show: Ringo Starr writes the Goldfinger theme song.

Chris Milk: Last Day Dream: a man watches his life pass before him.

Peter Serafinowicz: Fifty impressions in two minutes.

The Peter Serafinowicz Show: The Brian Butterfield Diet Plan

Look Around You: Water.

The Peter Serafinowicz Show: The Brian Butterfield Karaoke Bar.

[(2009 May 24) .]

§
Monkey boners, 2.

I uploaded a theater script for the Monkey Boners post. A shout-out to Celtx (Wikipedia), a free multi-platform screen-writing application based on Mozilla and XUL that made this way more fun that it should have been.

[(2009 May 11) .]
[(2009 May 8) .]
[(2009 April 16) .]
[(2009 March 16) .]

§
A quick note.

A quick note: Fragments is moving cheerfully along WITH OR WITHOUT YOU, Brian.

[(2009 February 22) .]
[(2009 February 19) .]