‘…I realized that I’ve allowed many stupid things I’ve said or thought to be printed in comics and magazines, and I’ve regretted them and lived, so what the heck, I’ll give this here journal thing a whack and see what happens.’
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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 7 November 2002
[comics] Big Mouth Types Again — Evan Dorkin has a web journal … [via Egon]
‘…I realized that I’ve allowed many stupid things I’ve said or thought to be printed in comics and magazines, and I’ve regretted them and lived, so what the heck, I’ll give this here journal thing a whack and see what happens.’ 6 November 2002
[russian proverb] ‘The situation is hopeless, but not yet desperate.’
[magazines] Dennis The Menace — an interview / profile of Felix Dennis … [via Kookymojo]
‘Issue 28 of Oz was edited and written by schoolchildren. It was probably the montage of the cartoon characters Rupert the Bear and Gipsy Granny having sex that led to Dennis, Neville and Jim Anderson being prosecuted in 1971 for obscenity and conspiracy to corrupt the morals of young children. The case pitted Establishment against counterculture as squarely as Punch versus Judy. Judge Michael Argyle, QC, MC was a Cambridge-educated racing and boxing enthusiast known for the severity of his sentencing, and an almost comic disconnection with the modern world. He’d described one gay victim of a street attack as a ‘little sodomite from Glasgow’. Argyle said Dennis was ‘very much less intelligent than his fellow defendants’ and sentenced him to nine months, which was quashed within a week by appeal judges who identified 78 misdirections to the jury.’
[wtf?] Superhero for Single Girls — a real life superheroine in NYC … ‘For the past seven years Terrifica has been patrolling New York’s party and bar scene, looking out for women who have had a little too much to drink and are in danger of being taken advantage of by men. She says she has saved several women from both themselves and predators who would prey upon their weaknesses — both from alcohol and a misguided notion that they have to go out drinking to find a companion. “I protect the single girl living in the big city,” says Terrifica, sporting blond Brunhild wig with a golden mask and a matching Valkyrie bra.’ [via Boing Boing]
5 November 2002
[tv] Stick It Up Your Chuffer! — a memorial page for Edmund Trebus … ‘He reached the public consciousness in the BBC documentary A Life Of Grime which showed his heroic determination to hoard what most people call rubbish in his house and garden.’
4 November 2002
[comics] Unseen Artwork from Big Numbers … [via Egon]
 ‘…with the world political situation as it is at the moment the political radical is put in a difficult position because, hum, how do you rebel against chaos? You know, much as political conspiracy theorists would like to think otherwise, the brutal truth of the thing is nobody’s in control, this is a runaway train. Nobody’s in control, there’s not some big conspiracy in control, whether it’s Jewish bankers or nazis or CIA spooks, the simple truth is that the world is a complex storm of mathematics, basically… Very complicated mathematics that is beyond human comprehension.’ — Alan Moore. 3 November 2002
[books] Why He Died Before He Got Old — Pete Townshend reviews Kurt Cobain’s Journals … ‘The entries are not uninteresting. It is simply that they are devastatingly hard to contemplate. They actually hurt. These are the scribblings of a once beautiful, angry, petulant, spoiled, drug-addled middle-class white boy from a divorced family who just happened, with the help of two of his slightly more stable peers, to make an album hailed as one of the best rock records ever. I sometimes get letters from people who write and draw like Cobain. I put them in a file marked ‘Loonies’, just in case they try to sue me in the future for stealing their ideas.’
2 November 2002
[holiday] Happy Campers — Johnny Vegas on his childhood memories of Butlins …
“…the real beauty of [Butlins] was parents being able to go, ‘Right, you’re not really mine. From a certain time in the morning to a certain time at night, I don’t really care. Unless it’s something really serious, and the matron calls us.’ Because, really, there’s nothing worse than going on a family holiday, and your parents are finding things to do in the day that they think’ll be fun for you; they’re miserable, because they’d much rather be in the pub. You’re miserable, because you’re not really that arsed about castles. It was the entertain-yourselves thing at Butlin’s, while your parents were off doing their Paxo-sponsored chicken dance.” Paxo-sponsored chicken dance? “It was like the conga meets the chicken dance.” 1 November 2002
[comics] Geek Chic — vaguely annoying profile of Adrian Tomine … ‘It was lunch hour and all manner of awkward-looking males were standing quietly around the [comic book] store, hardly looking up from their reading to see who was passing. Tomine headed straight to the back where the new releases are shelved. He browsed through a couple items, but quickly put them back where he found them, unimpressed. “It’s pretty rare that I actually buy comics now,” he says. Alternative cartoonists are a lot like music snobs that way. To be a high-caliber geek means maintaining high standards and discriminating tastes, and Tomine is of the highest caliber.’ [via Bugpowder]
31 October 2002
[tv] 24 Continues to Thrill — Jack Bauer is having another bad day. ‘…the star of the show remains federal agent Bauer, played to understated perfection by Kiefer Sutherland. We catch up with Bauer a year after he has left the government counter-terrorism unit he once headed. He is a mess – still mourning the death of his pregnant wife at the hands of his former lover and also dealing with the fact his daughter Kim wants nothing to do with him.’
[comics] The Transmetropolitan Condition — interview with Warren Ellis … ‘There are moments of pure, heart stopping beauty in the most tragic and broken environments. And the loveliest community on earth will not be able to eliminate the dog turd.’ [via Boing Boing]
30 October 2002
[comics] A useful directory of the Comics Forum on Barbelith. ‘They can’t kill Beak, he’s a Van Sciver creation, which surely bears as much weight as a Kirby creation!’ — Ethan Van Sciver.
29 October 2002
[dna] DNA as Destiny — a Wired writer gets his DNA scanned for problems. ‘…the string of genetic letters from my mtDNA readout that indicates I’m mostly Celtic, which makes sense. But other bits of code reveal traces of Southeast Asian DNA, and even a smidgen of Native American and African. This doesn’t quite have the impact of discovering that I’m likely to die of a heart attack. Nor am I surprised about the African and Indian DNA, since my mother’s family has lived in the American South since the 17th century. But Southeast Asian? Sykes laughs. “We are all mutts,” he says. “There is no ethnic purity. Somewhere over the years, one of the thousands of ancestors who contributed to your DNA had a child with someone from Southeast Asia.”‘
28 October 2002
[comics] The Magus Speaks — extracts from Eddie Campbell’s interview with Alan Moore … [via Bugpowder]
‘Ah, Lost Girls. Can you imagine anyone else being able to get a wonderfully accomplished artist to spend thirteen years drawing pornographic material for them, customised to demand; being able to declare himself a pornographer and have everyone take it as some bold new intellectual position; or even claiming against tax for high class scud-books like The Art of the Marquis Von Bayros as “reference material”? No. You can’t. This is why I am a genius. “What are you doing in that bathroom, young man?” “Mother, I am doing highly paid reference work.”‘
[redrum] All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy … ‘All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy’
26 October 2002
[comics] ¡Journalista! — the Comics Journal Weblog [via Bugpowder]
25 October 2002
[radio] ‘I don’t take myself too seriously’ — portrait of Tony Blackburn … ‘A few years later, after his actress wife Tessa Wyatt ran off with Richard O’Sullivan (of Man about the House sitcom fame), he gave full vent to his despair on air, though he now denies playing Kool And The Gang’s divorce anthem Jones Vs Jones 17 times in one show. He was reportedly sacked by the BBC for criticising management in the press, something of a habit of Blackburn’s, which might surprise those who regard him as an establishment figure. Depressed, he sought refuge in one-night stands – about 300 of them, in fact, a statistic that has earned him, according to one website, seventh position in the promiscuous celebrity stakes, ahead of Charlie Sheen but way behind former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman and Julio Iglesias, whose tallies are in the thousands.’
24 October 2002
[politics] The Friendly Dictators — political Trading Cards richly illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz and originally published by Eclipse in 1990 … [via jwz’s LiveJournal]
 ‘…”Captain General” Augusto Pinochet seized power from democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973, and buried Chile’s 150 year old democracy. “Democracy is the breeding ground of communism,” says Pinochet.’
[blogs] Updated UK Weblogs — moves to a new home … Thanks to Jez, Ben and especially to Jen. Tom raises some interesting points after the demise of GBlogs … ‘I can’t tell whether it’s because we’re English or because we’re bedroom-bound webloggers that being part of such a community seems to terrify so many people.’
23 October 2002
[ai] I love Lucy — Jon Ronson meets the cleverest robot in the world … ‘I bought my son an Aibo dog for Christmas last year. “From the first day you interact with Aibo it will become your companion,” the packaging promised, adding that if you feed it, it will yelp in delight, if you put it to bed, it will sleep, etc. As we strung it up off the light fitting to see if it would cry, and deprived it of food and light and finally got bored with its constant yapping and turned it off completely and put it in a box, I pondered the same questions the scientists consider. The good news was that we gave Aibo perfect motive to rise up and enslave the Ronsons, and it didn’t. But did it offer a thrilling window into tomorrow’s world? No. Maybe it was our fault; maybe we didn’t give it an opportunity to flourish and learn and grow.’
22 October 2002
[comics] Mists of Time — Warren Ellis discusses Alan Moore’s out-of-print work … On Moore and Sienkiewicz’s Brought To Light: ‘ It’s an absolute tour de force. Sienkiewicz produces mad images, political caricature via Ralph Steadman, slapping down anything that might work — photocopies, splatter, bits of metal, anything that might work. The Eagle, pissed out of his mind and coked to the tits, hunches there at the bar and vomits out the secret history of the American century — impeccably research documentary coming out of the beak of a fictional beard. Remember the best bit of the film JFK? Where Donald Sutherland lays out the whole thing in one long riveting monologue, and then concludes it with a sigh, and: “Well, I never thought things were the same after that.”? It’s like that, only funnier and scarier and more compelling. It demands it be read in one sitting, and it just sears with passion and commitment.’
[blogs] Biased BBC — a weblog from Natalie Solent… ‘exposing the left-wing agenda of the British Broadcasting Corporation’.
21 October 2002
[books] The Rules of Adaption — Brett Easton Ellis interviewed regarding the Rules of Attaction film …
 ‘One of my only complaints about the movie was that it was so much colder and harsher than the book. It’s like Kubrick directing a college film. I really thought there was going to be much more of an emotional pull toward the end, and there wasn’t. This is not a movie to bring your Kleenex to. But I think Roger captured that lack of feeling among college kids as accurate. During that age, you’re becoming an adult, and in that process you realize, “Okay, the world works this way, and it’s hurtful,” and you pretend it doesn’t hurt you, and you pose a lot.’ [via Anglepoised] 20 October 2002
[comics] Garth Ennis interviewed by Jimmy Palmiotti … ‘I was talking the DC editor Dan Raspler about good artists for war stories, and Carlos [Ezquerra]’s name naturally came up. Dan pointed out that no one’s really done a story about the Spanish civil war, at which point a lightbulb went on over my head. It seems odd that Carlos has been drawing for over thirty years and he has never done a story set in his own country, never mind one of its most important moments in its history. Well, here we go…’ [Related: Carlos Ezquerra’s Home Page]
[film] ‘It seems like exactly the wrong film to make’ — Salon interview with Roger Avery … ‘For Avary it was about capturing Ellis’ Faulknerian storytelling mode, not plot or dialogue. “I worked with multiple narratives on ‘Pulp Fiction,'” says Avary. “And Bret’s novel is composed of multiple first-person narratives, each a chapter told by a different person. And they’re all talking about various events, sometimes the same event with completely different perceptions of reality. “It’s an impossible structure to turn into normal, narrative form. But to strip away Bret’s structure is to rob yourself of what makes him so unique. I wanted that literary device. And if you’re doing multiple perceptions of the same moment and you just cut, the way we did in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ then you sever the characters both in their timeline and psychology. The key isn’t to cut, but to play out the scene and pull back to another part of the room. That way you’re actually uniting the timelines as one and making sure everybody is connected.”‘ [via Sore Eyes]
19 October 2002
[music] A troubled hero for our times? — profile of Kurt Cobain. ‘… his formative tastes took in soft-rock bands such as Journey and Foreigner …’
[film] The Soiling of Van Der Beek (scroll down page) — brief mention of Roger Avery’s new film The Rules of Attaction … ‘My notes for The Rules of Attraction include capitalised mentions of all the naughty stuff his drugs-vacuuming collegian gets up to: “Dawson deals coke and crack!”, “Dawson has an eye-popping wank!”, “Dawson shags another bloke!” Sadly, he’s not the character who pukes on an unconscious Shannyn Sossamon’s back, at which point the film runs backwards, showing the vomit flying into its owner’s mouth. If that had been Van Der Beek’s up-chuck, the deal would have been sealed: Dawson is Horrid – Official!’
18 October 2002
[distraction] Candy Train — similar to that classic old game Pipe Dream, rotate the tracks and keep the train moving. … [via Diminished Responsibility]
[issues] Word Association Test — my inner turmoil revealed … [via Dreadberry]
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