[URBAN NOTE] Some Saturday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait considers the possibility that our model for the evolution of galaxies might be partially disproven by Big Data.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly reports how she did her latest article for the New York Times.
• Centauri Dreams notes the beginning of a search for habitable-zone planets around Alpha Centauri A and B.
• The Crux looks at how the skull trophies of the ancient Maya help explain civilizational collapse.
• D-Brief notes new evidence suggesting that our humble, seemingly stable Sun can produce superflares.
• Dead Things reports on the latest informed speculation about the sense of smell of Tyrannosaurus Rex.
• The Dragon’s Tales shares the NASA report on its progress towards the Lunar Gateway station.
• Gizmodo looks at the growing number of China’s beautiful, deadly, blooms of bioluminescent algae.
• io9 reports that Stjepan Sejic has a new series with DC, exploring the inner life of Harley Quinn.
• JSTOR Daily looks at an example of a feminist musical, the Chantal Akerman The Eighties.
• Language Hat links to a review of a dystopian novel by Yoko Tawada, The Emissary, imagining a future Japan where the learning of foreign languages is banned.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money reiterates that history, and the writing of history, is an actual profession with skills and procedures writers in the field need to know.
• Liam Shaw writes at the LRB Blog about how people in London, late in the Second World War, coped with the terrifying attacks of V2 rockets.
• The Map Room Blog links to a new book, Wayfinding, about the neuroscience of navigation.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution reviews a Robert Zubrin book advocating the colonization of space and finds himself unconvinced.
• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the ancient comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko explored by the ESA Rosetta probe.
• Roads and Kingdoms provides tips for visitors to the Paraguay capital of Asuncion.
• Peter Rukavina reports that, on the day the new PEI legislature came in, 105% of Island electricity came from windpower.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel argues that, in searching for life, we should not look for exoplanets very like Earth.
• Strange Company shares another weekend collection of diverse links.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little shares the views of Margaret Gilbert on social facts.
• Window on Eurasia suggests Kadyrov might dream of a broad Greater Chechnya, achieved at the expense of neighbouring republics.
• Arnold Zwicky considers some superhero identity crises, of Superman and of others.

[MUSIC] Grimes, “Kill V. Maim”

The Grimes song “Kill V. Maim” is one I’ve been playing a lot this week, with its video set partly in Toronto’s abandoned Lower Bay Station and a threateningly manic song with a chorus–“Are you going to the party?/Are you going to the show?”–inspired by Godfather‘s Al Pacino and by Harley Quinn.

Grimes, a.k.a. Claire Boucher, appears on the latest episode of the “Song Exploder” podcast, a must-listen for music fans who want to hear their fave artists talk about how they created their own songs. In it, Grimes breaks down her thrashing Art Angels cut “Kill V. Maim,” revealing the impetus of it was a friend who doubted her ability to be musically aggressive.

“He kept doing these cute little plucky things, and I was like ‘No, no, let’s make a hard song.’ He was like ‘No, no, you make cute music.’ I was so horrified,” Grimes recalls. “So I went home after that sort of wanting to prove that I could make something that’s going to be really aggressive that I would want to play during an action sequence in a movie.”

After that, she set out to make something that could soundtrack the trailer for a fictional crossover of The Godfather and Twilight. Add in a lot of kick drums, some cleverly buried samples of cheering crowds, and what Grimes calls a “scary, demon chorus” inspired by Harley Quinn, and you have “Kill V. Maim,” which she reveals is “probably my favorite song I’ve ever made.”

[LINK] Abraham Riesman in the Vulture on the Success of Harley Quinn

“The Hidden Story of Harley Quinn and How She Became the Superhero World’s Most Successful Woman” describes how, from humble origins as an intended throw-away character on the Batman animated series of the early 1990s, Harley Quinn has become one of the biggest characters in the world of American comics.

Writer Paul Dini is credited as the creator of Harley, and that’s technically true. He came up with the character while he was writing for the acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series in the early ’90s. But the true origins of Harley Quinn lie years earlier, in the mind of the actress who voiced her on the cartoon: Arleen Sorkin.

In 1987, Sorkin was a regular on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, playing the show’s comic relief: the ditzy, leggy, Noo Yawk–accented Calliope Jones. But unlike her flighty character, Sorkin was a skilled and experienced comedy writer. “I could never just come in and run my lines,” she told Vulture. “I was forever suggesting stuff, probably out of boredom!” So when she went to a screening of the faux-medieval The Princess Bride, an idea struck her: Why not do a fairy-tale dream sequence on Days? The producers were into it and aired an episode in which Calliope acts as a court jester, roller-skating into a throne room and doing some hackneyed borscht belt gags for a royal family.

Dini and Sorkin were college friends, and one day, she gave him a VHS tape of her favorite Days moments — including her jester bit. The tape sat idle for years. But in mid 1991, Dini was sick as a dog and popped the tape into his VCR. He was a budding television writer at the time, cranking out freelance scripts for the as-yet-unaired Batman: The Animated Series. He’d been struggling to come up with a female character to use as a one-off in an episode about Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker.

“I thought, Maybe there should be a girl there,” he said. “And I thought, Should the girl be like a tough street thug? Or like a hench-person or something? And then suddenly the idea of someone funny kind of struck me.” When he saw Sorkin in clown makeup, the pieces fell into place, and he came up with a silly little sidekick. He gave her the comic-book-y name of Harley Quinn, sketched out an idea for her look, and brought the sketch to the cartoon’s lead artist, Bruce Timm.

“He did do a rough design for her, which was, frankly, not very good,” Timm recalled. “It had a weird ’60s kind of vibe to it. It was just odd. Charming, but odd. I thought we could improve on that. So I immediately started researching traditional harlequin gear and did kind of a simplified super-villain version of that. It was always intended to be just a one-off.” Nevertheless, Timm was — and is — a perfectionist and labored to give this cameo character a distinctive look: a red-and-black full-body jumpsuit adorned with playing-card diamonds, ruffled cuffs, and a dual-pronged jester’s cap.

It’s a long read, and a good one.