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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 21 January 2003
[books] Extract from A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker. ‘…when the hole in the sock on my foot became intolerable, I reached down and pulled it off in a clean, strong motion and flipped it across the room in the direction of the trash can — although I have to say there is something almost painfully incongruous in the sight of an article of underclothing that one has worn and warmed with one’s own body for many days and years, lying bunched in the trash.’ [via Anglepoised]
20 January 2003
[comics] The Accidental Artist — interview with David Rees the creator of Get Your War On. ‘…despite rumors of hate mail, Rees says the response to the strip has been almost unanimously encouraging. “The positive outnumbers the negative 30-to-1,” he said. No one has made the slightest move to shut him down. “This is an awesome country!” he exclaimed. It’s hard to be sure whether he means it. On the other hand, it’s possible that Capitol Hill has just not yet noticed Rees. “It takes like 400 years for culture to get there,” he observed.’ [via Sore Eyes]
[film] The Two Jacks — profile of Jack Nicholson … ‘Nicholson has often said that his films are “one long autobiography” – the reason he has no plans to write a memoir. With a little poetic – or comic – licence, you can well imagine many lines from his movies being written about the actor himself. In Five Easy Pieces, his character is criticised for abandoning his pregnant girlfriend: “I can’t say much for someone who’d leave a woman in a situation like that and feel easy about it.” “I don’t think he’s overly psychotic,” a psychiatrist says of his character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “but I still think he’s quite sick.”‘
16 January 2003
[comics] Warren Ellis reviews Get Your War On. [Buy GYWO: UK | US] …
 ‘This book, collecting the majority of the strips so far, is an amazing artifact; not only is it one of the few successful transferences of web material into print, but it clearly shows the guy growing into the work and, in a few short months, sees him go from clunky-but-funny into someone totally in control of his materials and timing.’ 15 January 2003
[web] With Friends Like These — Rod Liddle on Friends Reunited … ‘The long, intervening years since school are assumed to have overlaid a gloss of civility, nostalgia and affection but, really, they haven’t. Radgey: you can sod right off, you little thug. So can the snivelling, boring, fat boy who, in a physics class in 1976, we wired up to the mains using crocodile clips. Zzzzapp! They have photos at Friends Reunited and he is still fat. And snivelling and boring, too. He communicated with me, the fat boy, in the manner of a much-loved, long-lost friend. But really he was just curious to see whether I was in prison yet.’
14 January 2003
[comics] Begging the Question — interview with Bob Fingerman the creator of White Like She and Minimum Wage …
‘NRAMA: So that’s the key to success? 13 January 2003
[books] Particular Obsessions — profile of the author Nicholson Baker and his new book … ‘A Box of Matches isn’t just about groping around the house before dawn and lighting fires. It also deals – in exhaustive detail – with such domestic mysteries as hole-ridden socks, belly-button lint and emptying the dishwasher. It features a protagonist/narrator practically indistinguishable from Baker himself and a family suspiciously like the wife and two children sleeping soundly in various rooms around Baker’s 18th-century wood-panelled, oak-beamed house. Even the pet duck that features prominently in the book is instantly recognisable as one of two now quacking in the yard. Baker has made a virtue of celebrating daily existence, whether it is the kaleidoscopic detailing of a single lunch hour in The Mezzanine [or] the labyrinthine sexual obsessions of The Fermata…’
11 January 2003
[uk] A Cynic’s Guide To Entitlement (*cough* ID *cough*) Cards — an internet campaign against proposed compulsory ID cards in the UK …
‘ID Cards are one of those ideas that the public never votes on, but governments always propose. When you’re a minister, having an easy-to-get-at list of everyone in the country sounds a terrific idea. But when you find out quite how many people don’t share that opinion, you’re tempted to think again. Especially when those people are voters. Oh, sure, that’s us speaking cynically. But cynically speaking, we think, is better than not speaking at all.’ [MORE] 10 January 2003
[cloning] A Clone Writes — Lowri Turner writes about what it’s like to be a
[comics] Author Praised for Comic-Book on Palestine Tragedy — more on Joe Sacco and his comic Palestine … ‘Drawing on first-hand experiences, extensive research and more than 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews, Sacco has gained access to unusually intimate testimony, giving space to details and perspectives normally excluded by mainstream media coverage. “I came from the standpoint of ‘Palestinian equals terrorist’,” Mr Sacco wrote. “That’s what’s filtered down in the course of watching the regular network news.” He makes no pretence of the observer’s invisibility and depicts his own initial disbelief of reported detentions and torture. Nor does he shy away from revealing his own ambiguities as a visiting Western journalist.’ [via Egon]
9 January 2003
[blogs] Nico asks: ‘If you kill your clone, is it suicide or murder or both?’
[comics] Two Samples [#1] [#2] from Joe Sacco’s Palestine comic. ”It’s good for the comic. It’s good for the comic. It’s good for the comic.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
8 January 2003
[books] Pattern Recognition — extract from William Gibson‘s new book … ‘Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn’t click, he would say. Damien is thirty, Cayce two years older, but there is some carefully insulated module of immaturity in him, some shy and stubborn thing that frightened the money people. Both have been very good at what they’ve done, neither seeming to have the least idea of why. Google Damien and you will find a director of music videos and commercials. Google Cayce and you will find “coolhunter,” and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a “sensitive” of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing. Though the truth, Damien would say, is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace.’
[comics] Eyewitness in Gaza — Observer review of Joe Sacco‘s Palestine … ‘Approaching such daunting topics with a disreputable and supposedly juvenile medium may seem futile, even absurd, yet Sacco’s greatest achievement is to have so poignantly depicted contradiction, oppression and horror in a form that manages to be both disarming and disquieting.’ [Buy Palestine: UK | US]
7 January 2003
[blogs] William Gibson has a blog … ‘In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.’ [via Boing Boing]
6 January 2003
[comics] Who Cares? — Jack Chick on 9/11 … [via Metafilter]
 ‘Bob, now I know that Allah doesn’t really love me or even care about any Muslim. But Jesus, the Son of God, does. That’s why I must chose Jesus.’
[books] All the Best for the New Year [Part 1 | Part 2] — a cultural preview for 2003. William Gibson’s new book looks really interesting: ‘Pattern Recognition, his seventh novel, is notable for being set in London one year after 11 September, and the business of imagining the future takes a back seat to the complexities of the modern world. In a tip of the hat to Naomi Klein, the heroine, Cayce Pollard, makes her living through an unusual sensitivity to corporate branding. When a toothsome ad executive asks her to investigate the source of a mysterious phenomenon on the internet, which could be the most important viral marketing campaign ever devised, Cayce soon becomes entangled in a world of paranoid surveillance and commodity fetishism. Pattern Recognition is a stylish and ambitious novel.’
5 January 2003
[lmg] What LMG was linking to in January 2001 and January 2002.
[radio] Northern Lights — BBC Radio 4 are broadcasting a dramatisation of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman over the next three weeks… Terrance Stamp is playing Lord Asriel. [via I Love Everything]
4 January 2003
[comics] Scarlet Traces: Digital Artwork Step By Step — Comic artist D’israeli’s guide to creating comic art digitally … ‘I miss the smell of ink and the feel of my fifty-year-old drawing pens against smooth drawing paper, but I don’t miss smearing ink across the page by accident or correcting with process white or trying to erase the pencil on a finished page and constantly finding you’ve missed a bit. Because I trained as a designer, I don’t value original artwork; to me it’s just a stage on the way to the finished product. On the whole, working without originals is a great relief. And I just love the Undo function.’ [via Bugpowder]
3 January 2003
[religion] Why Mother Teresa Should not be a Saint — Christopher Hitchens on the canonization of Mother Teresa … ‘I discovered that she had taken money from rich dictators like the Duvalier gang in Haiti, had been a friend of poverty rather than a friend of the poor, had never given any account of the huge sums of money donated to her, had railed against birth-control in the most overpopulated city on the planet and had been the spokeswoman for the most extreme dogmas of religious fundamentalism. Actually, it’s boasting to say that I “discovered” any of this. It was all there in plain sight for anyone to notice. But in the age of celebrity, nobody had troubled to ask if such a global reputation was truly earned or was simply the result of brilliant public relations.’
[web] Metafilter: Remixed — A collaborative site for rating posts on Metafilter … ‘The posts you see on this page have been voted on as excellent Metafilter threads. A lot of people find Metafilter a little too unwieldy to read through these days, and a lot of people also wish they had some better way of rewarding great posts other than just commenting “Great thread!”‘ [via Metatalk]
2 January 2003
[world] Our Quality of Life Peaked in 1974. It’s All Downhill Now — George Monbiot on the illusion of never-ending growth and progress … ‘Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion. This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today – governments, business, the media – as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.’
[web] Jamie Zawinski’s Livejournal is always worth a look … ‘You’ll often hear cypherpunk weenies with poorly-thought-out philosophies trot out “information wants to be free” as some kind of pseudo-socialist Utopian vision, but the point is, information “wants” to be free in the same way nature “abhors” a vacuum: it’s not some moral view, it’s just the natural state of affairs. It’s the path of least resistance. It is “the sound of inevitability.”’
1 January 2003
[web] The Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck … ‘Featuring Good Ol’ Charlie Brown’
 The Hierophant: ‘…often represents learning with experts or knowledgeable teachers. This card also stands for institutions and their values. The Hierophant is a symbol of the need to conform to rules or fixed situations. His appearance in a reading can show that you are struggling with a force that is not innovative, free-spirited or individual. Groups can be enriching or stifling, depending on circumstances. Sometimes we need to follow a program or embrace tradition, other times, we need to trust ourselves. 31 December 2002
[lmg] US Marine Toilet Graffiti in Afghanistan — If I had to choose a favorite quote from LMG in 2002 it would probably be this one:
Thus the graffiti on the walls of the Portakabins where, if you got to them later than 9am, you’d be greeted by a 5ft-high pile of soldiers’ faeces: Happy New Year. More of the same in 2003. 29 December 2002
[comics] Ennis’ War Stories — Newsarama interview with Garth Ennis. ‘…what’s most fascinating is the psychology and the behavior of people at the sharp end — the kind of stories that come out of people at this extreme edge of human existence, one that we don’t even have to imagine, as we do with fantasy or science fiction, or even in some crime drama. We don’t have to imagine this, because it was real. In the case of the Second World War, it was the most crucial event in the history of the 20th Century. It defined the rest of the century — it’s real, it actually happened. The drama that comes out of that is more gripping than almost anything else that we take drama from.’
27 December 2002
[comics] Heroes and Villains — Edward Said reviews Palestine by Joe Sacco … [via Bugpowder]
‘…comics provided one with a directness of approach (the attractively overstated combination of pictures and words) that seemed unassailably true on the one hand and marvellously close, impinging, familiar on the other. In ways that I still find fascinating to decode, comics in their relentless foregrounding – far more, say, than film cartoons or funnies (neither of which mattered much to me) seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be said, or wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and reshaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures. I knew nothing of this then, but I felt that comics freed me to think and imagine and see differently.’ 24 December 2002
[tv] A Lucky Man lurks behind David Brent — interesting profile of Ricky Gervais. ‘…when he appeared in Channel 4’s celebrity poker tournament — alongside Martin Amis, Patrick Marber and Anthony Holden — there was a story of an off-camera spat with Stephen Fry, which ended in Gervais saying: “Yeah, but at least I’m not gay.” Was that Ricky Gervais talking, or just “Ricky Gervais”? Does he do it to annoy, because he knows it teases, or does he not realise how it comes across?’
23 December 2002
[comics] Time’s rates the Best Comics of 2002 … ‘Eightball #22. This single, self-contained issue of his regular series Eightball finds inspiration in the style of filmmaker Robert Altman. Its 29 shorts range in length from a single strip to several pages; each one works alone as well as with the others, weaving multiple characters and multiple stories into one cohesive whole.’
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