This nation may turn its lonely eyes to Joe DiMaggio, but the news of Stanley Kubrick's death shocked yours truly right in me gulliver. Kubrick dead? Now? It seemed like a bad joke, after he spent two years watching Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman writhe around naked. That'd be enough to put me down, but then again, I'm not Kubrick. I'm not Rappaport, either, so get that idea right out of your head. This one's for Kubrick. Though I know The Passenger's kind of Artificial Intelligence is no match for what you would have come up with given a few more years and a few dollars more, it's all I've got. I was cured all right. So long, Stanley.
 

Arguably Stanley Kubrick's most significant film, 1968's "2001: A Space Odyssey" still hasn't gotten its full due, largely because many of the so-called intellectuals who slammed it in original release (Pauline Kael, you hear me knocking) never really understood it. The point of the film is, quite simply, whatever you take away from it - the meat is in the questions, not the conclusions. Modemac's 2001 and Beyond the Infinite is one of the better analyses I've read, on the Web or otherwise. And though Modemac hasn't all the answers (I don't quite agree with the analysis of "The Trip") the essay does offer much lucid and compelling commentary, and some Things to Think About - more than enough to get you Jupiter-bound at last.
 

All right, you guys, quit snickering. Karen and Susan Hudes' Graphic Intersections of Dot Cum is a serial cyber-comic, not how-to orgy instruction. In Dot's blurry, charcoal-and-spot-color world, a "synthetic personality" takes "eons to decompose" and shocks are triggered by the "ticklish razor of the familiar." And, oh yes, you experience all of this while strapped down with the protagonist, whose last-known occupation was "toiling in the antechamber of the Floating World Cybordello." This strip is as poetic, deliberate and wholly unique as they come. And it unsettled the crap out of me, always a plus.
 

From Artchive creator Mark Harden comes - not surprisingly - the best photography archive on the web. Masters of Photography isn't quite as large as the Artchive yet - Harden is still developing pages for Diane Arbus, Robert Doisneau and Man Ray, among many others - but what is here is positively dazzling. Proto-photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt is here, and so is that famed V-J Day kiss. Ansel Adams' peerless eye for nature is represented, as are Timothy O'Sullivan's bleak Civil War images. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Alexander Rodchenko and many more offer souls for the viewing. With articles, biographies and links to external sites, there's at least a thousand words to go with every picture, and that's before you add your own. Absolutely matchless.
 

I don't know what Fatboy Slim - nee Norman Cook - has to do with Stanley Kubrick. So you just puzzle over that one for a minute or two, whilst I get my booty movin'. Hey, here's something - like Stanley, Norman prefers not to be photographed or profiled. They're both unorthodox and exacting in their methods. They both prefer to work out of a home workshop, eliminating the middleman. Yeah, I think that's about it. Stanley was a visionary, where all of Norman's gifts lie with the audible - a realm Stanley never bothered to tackle, having recorded all his films in mono. (And Norman isn't wild about videos, for that matter; he pays as little as he can for his promotional films, and appears in them as little as possible.) The official Fatboy Slim site provides more than a few of his sonic pictures through RealAudio samples, a few photos where Norman looks annoyed at having had his picture taken, and a bunch of press raves for the Big Beat turntable pioneer, saying what a damn genius he is - and it's all true.

We've been around, haven't we? Just for old times' sake, be sure to visit the Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide, a Passenger Pick from long past. And the next column in this space will be the first column of the rest of our lives. Open the pod bay doors!