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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 25 October 2001
[politics] You can’t beat a bit of bullying — more on the way the way a Labour Whip dealt with an awkward MP over government policy in Afghanistan. ‘…they found it impossible to stick to the argument. Within minutes they had moved from the issue of loyalty to attendance records to trust (Marsden: “It would help if your deputy didn’t send me snotty letters”), to the question of war as a matter of conscience, to risible fibs about telephone messages (“Er, perhaps I got the wrong number”), to appeasement “Don’t you dare!”), to the pressing question of which of the two was the more northern (Marsden: “Do you mind? I spent four years at Teesside Polytechnic”).’
24 October 2001
[books] Sue Townsend: You ask the questions … ‘[Q] Where do you see Adrian Mole aged 51? [A] Still trying to flog his abysmal novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, to a London publisher. He’ll almost certainly have early prostate trouble and I think he’ll be really strong on cardigans, in particular the Marks & Spencer zip-up range for men.’
[comics] Two interviews with the Big Scary Hippy Magician Guy (who writes comics) …
Comic Book Resources interview with Moore ‘The thing that turned me towards magic was a panel in From Hell where William Gull was saying something to the effect that the human mind is one place where all of the gods and monsters in human mythology are arguably real, in all of their grandeur and monstrosity. And after writing I thought, oh shit, that’s true. Now I am going to have to rearrange my entire life around this. There is no way to disprove it. I thought I was writing this great piece of Gothic villain dialogue. The gods and monsters inarguably exist and they are real. Because if they don’t exist how many people died because of them, or how many history changing things have been done in the name of these Gods that don’t exist? If they don’t exist why do they kill so many of us in their name?’ [via WEF] Massive Two Part Onion AV Club interview with Moore [Part 1 | Part 2] ‘I’ve got the whole of Big Numbers plotted. I’d got this enormous A1 sheet of paper the size of a tablecloth that had been divided into 40 rows down the side, and 12 columns along the top. One column for each of the 12 issues, 40 rows for each of the 40 characters. And then, in this grid in tiny, incomprehensibly small biro writing which looks like the work of a mental patient, and which gives you a migraine just to look at it, there is what happens to each of the 40 characters in every one of the 12 issues. It’s this map of the entire plot. I’ve never done it with any other work, because it is kind of an insane thing to do. I’ve kind of got all that stuff in my head anyway, so the only real reason for writing it down on paper is just to impress and frighten. But because I’d still got the plot, we were able to reconstruct the basis of a 12-episode TV drama series. Whether it’ll ever make it to TV or not, no idea.’ [thanks to Kenny] 23 October 2001
[wtf?] A long way from Ambridge — Afghan’s are addicted to a BBC World Service Soap opera based on The Archers…
‘The Afghans were very news hungry,” says Andrew Skuse, a social anthropologist who wrote his PhD on the success of the soap. “They really trusted the BBC. After years of abuse of the media under various regimes, the BBC was seen as more trustworthy than the national service. Some thought it was the national service. They hadn’t a clue where it was located. People would often tell me they thought the BBC was a village in Afghanistan”.’
[politics] ‘Those that are not with us are against us’ — interesting transcript of a conversation between the Labour MP for Shrewsbury Paul Marsden and the Chief Whip Hilary Armstrong about UK Government policy over Afghanistan…
‘HA: In fact we may well hold a vote, but if we do, it will be whipped. PM: That is outrageous. You won’t even give us a free vote on whether we go to war – it is an issue which should be a matter of conscience. HA: War is not a matter of conscience. Abortion and embryo research are matters of conscience, but not wars. PM: Are you seriously saying blowing people up and killing people is not a moral issue? HA: It is government policy that we are at war. You astound me.’ 22 October 2001
[comics] Excellent, long Comics Journal interview with Peter Bagge by Gary Groth … ‘Ya know, Alan Moore recently described the current state of alternative comics to me really well, comparing it to right now as opposed to five or ten years ago. He said it’s kind of like somebody left the top of the soda pop bottle off, where it looks the same and it tastes the same, but the fizz is gone.’ [Related: Bagge’s Website]
[movies] Return of the Legend — brief interview with Nick Broomfield about the documentary he is currently working on… ‘Broomfield is an undisputed success at marketing his own image, even down to starring in self-parodic adverts for cars. And he’s loaded: an English country pile; a place in Santa Monica. What’s interesting is how he divides opinion. Depending on who you talk to among those who really know him – producers, co-producers, commissioning editors, journalists, film-makers and friends – he’s an innovator, a shark, a genius, a fraud, a legend or a has-been; people love him or hate him. The work is brilliant or boring, revealing or repetitious, always fresh or endlessly formulaic. They all have to agree, however, that a Nick Broomfield film is hard to ignore.’
[distractions] Check out:
21 October 2001
[books] All Authors are Pyschotic — interview with Douglas Coupland … ‘…when you look at the history of the smile in the photo… up until World War II most people in photographs had their normal faces. And then Kodak and other camera people and filmmakers always had their people smile, and then we entered this cult of the smile collectively. If you try not smiling when people are taking your picture they basically tell you to fuck off and start smiling.’ [Related: BBC News on Coupland, via Feeling Listless]
[history] Hinges of Opportunity — was 9-11 a “hinge moment” in history… where everything changes and we feel that nothing is the same as before? [via Ghost in the Machine]
‘What changes after a hinge is our stories of ourselves. Who we are, how we got that way, where we’re headed, and what makes us tick. The lesson is that any cultural revolution represents a grand new alignment of great forces — technological, economic, environmental and spiritual. These shape the tales we tell to make sense of our new world.’ 20 October 2001
[aftermath] The Last Post — the inside story on the 90,000 mails per-day sent to addresses at World Trade Centre which don’t exist anymore and one of the people who used to deliver it…
‘Together the carriers have recreated, in miniature, a semblance of their old routes. The World Trade Centre buildings were allotted sorting areas ringed with dozens and dozens of beige and grey metal pigeonholes to accept the buildings’ mail.Thornton’s cubicle is marked with a large sign that reads “1 World Trade Centre” in bold black letters. Each of the companies on her old route has its own pigeonhole. She sits in this cramped, dim space for eight hours a day sorting mail. When a pigeonhole fills up, workers come and dump the overflow into large, marked crates. Thornton says she doesn’t want to feel ungrateful. After all, she is alive and getting a pay cheque. But most days she feels lost and disorientated. She misses the din of the building, the rush of the lifts, the friendly chats in the lobbies. “I have no place to go,” she says. “It is like I am homeless.”‘
[comics] Mad Man — MSNBC interview with Alan Moore … ‘[Interviewer] Are you planning on attending the “From Hell” premiere? [Moore] If left to my own devices, I wouldn’t. I’m not really a big cinema guy, and I don’t really like public appearances. I only signed up to be a writer. I didn’t really sign up to be a celebrity. When I became a comic writer there was no more obscure job in the world. But my daughters, they’ve got some sort of plan that involves kidnapping Johnny Depp and giving him roofies. So I’d probably better be there.’ [via Barbelith Underground]
19 October 2001
[film] Terry Zwigoff: ‘Every guy wants a teenage girlfriend’ — facinating interview with the director of Ghost World. ‘…Ghost World’s Seymour has a horrid mom. What’s Zwigoff’s like? Until now, Zwigoff’s sails have been full of wind. Now they collapse. Mrs Zwigoff, it turns out, was “very critical, very negative, everything I was wildly passionate about she had no interest in whatsoever”. She didn’t get to see Ghost World (“she died, luckily”). She did, however, get to see Crumb, at its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. When the lights came up, she turned to Zwigoff’s cousin, Sherwin, and said, “So, are you still awake?” I tell him she sounds hilarious. He shakes his head morosely. “She was a very depressed person.”‘
 [comics] One of the weirder comics of the 70’s: Superman vs. Muhammad Ali‘From start to finish, the book is a miniature time-capsule of the era that spawned it. For starters, it sports a wrap-around cover depicting hundreds of late-70s celebrities from the world of pop culture. Entertainment legends like Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball are easy to spot, but for today’s readers even the “key” inside the front cover may not explain the identities of all the has-been stars. Ron Palillo and Robert Heyges? (Here’s a tip: “Up your nose wit’ a rubber hose!”) Tony Orlando? Wolfman Jack? Trust me, kids, you didn’t miss anything. Sharing “the good seats” with these pop icons are comic book characters like Billy Batson, Hal Jordan, Oliver Queen, Barry Allen and Diana Prince. Little do they know that neaby sit the DC writers and artists who control their destinies (Joe Shuster, Jerry Seigel, Neal Adams, Wally Wood, Cary Bates, Gil Kane, E.Nelson Bridwell). Over there in the front row is something you don’t see every day — President Jimmy Carter sitting next to Sonny Bono and Batman (!).’
[comment] The View From Smalltown, USA — Chuck Palahniuk on 9-11 … [via Barbelith Underground]
‘On television, the towers fall in slow motion. The same crowds of people stand around on the West Side Highway, observing. There’s the same jiggling, chaotic shot taken by some cameraman fleeing the cloud of dust. Watching this, David says: “This is worse than The Blair Witch Project.” Then he asks: “They ever find that intern, Chandra Levy??”‘ 18 October 2001
[lmg] I’ve just added a proper blog comment system… Just click on the [Comment] link below to let me know what you think about LMG and the links…
[film] Interesting review of From Hell from the New York Press:‘…despite its surface slickness and baldfaced artistic pretensions, this is an angry, empathetic movie. It’s genuinely interested in the lives of the poor, and righteously angry at the rich ruling class that has used the poor as servants, whores, entertainers and guard dogs since civilization began. The second half spirals into a bizarre conspiracy that turns history into a slanderous comic book, then delivers an intelligent, downbeat, provocative ending that’s sure to alienate most viewers, and finishes up by reminding us that nothing we just saw can be taken at face value because it’s all the memory of an absinthe-pickled opium addict.’
[wtf?] Bin Laden as Lex Luthor — Salon compares them… ‘Like bin Laden, Luthor is an ultramillionaire whose aim, we are told, is nothing short of the defeat of the civilized world and/or the enslavement of mankind (or, in the diabolical Saudi’s case, women). His loathing for Superman is personal: According to DC comics lore, Luthor went bad as a teenager when Superboy, rescuing him from a scientific experiment gone awry, inadvertently caused him to go bald. Similarly, the U.S. rescued bin Laden and the other mujahedin during the Afghanistan War, but then emasculated him by persuading the Saudis to take in our troops instead of his during the Gulf War.’
17 October 2001
[big questions] Why is Snot Green? … From Notes and Queries. ‘I agree with Dr Powell that is is the enzymes in neutrophils that give snot its green colour. However, I thought this was due to another powerful antimicrobial agent, peroxidase. Incidentally, this is the same enzyme that gives wasabi its green colour – a lovely thought for the next time you’re in Yo Sushi!’
[tv] Edie Does It — William Leith interviews Edie Falco (Carmela from the Sopranos). ‘If you haven’t seen The Sopranos yet, you should. Filming is about to begin on the fourth series and the third will air on Channel 4 in November. How good is it? Well, the New Yorker magazine recently reported a conversation between two real-life mobsters who were being bugged in just the sort of police operation you see in The Sopranos. One mobster says, ‘What’s this Sopranos? Is that supposed to be us?’ The other replies, ‘What characters. Great acting.’ ‘
[comment] What Now? … Bruce Sterling on what might happen next. [thanks to Paul]
‘Many More Wild Cards. This is neither an “age of terror” nor an “age of freedom”. This is an age of random calamities. It’s a genuine end of history, in which the passage of time in human affairs no longer has any rules as we previously understood them. There is no great historical narrative at hand, nor is there any grand scheme by which a rational analyst can make useful sense of events. NYC 9.11 is quickly eclipsed by other, biggest factors even more untoward and shocking: perhaps dumber acts of terror by even smaller groups, plus some Greenhouse calamities, an asteroid strike, some brand-new plagues, or even free beer and five cent nano-genetic intelligent cigars. Humankind has lost all control of our destiny and nothing can restore it. Probability: 3%’ 16 October 2001
[comment] When War Drums Roll — more from Hunter S. Thompson …
‘Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history — which is no doubt true — but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over, folks’
[emergence] Only connect — why the internet is like an ant colony …
‘The simplest rule of all the systems I talk about in the book is: learn from your neighbours. An individual ant alters its behaviour based on the behaviour of other ants that it happens to encounter; out of all those semi-random encounters, the higher-level order of the colony emerges. A neuron in your brain decides to fire or not to fire based on the input from other neurons to which it is connected. A given “block” in the game SimCity decides to raise or lower its crime rate or pollution levels based on the crime or pollution in neighbouring blocks. All of these systems follow relatively simple rules, but they project those rules out over thousands (or, in the case of the brain, billions) of interacting agents. Given enough interactions, and given the right rules, something magical happens: the colony starts organising its workforce; the brain starts thinking; the simulated city comes to life on the screen.’ 15 October 2001
[bioterroism] How to spread terror for the price of a stamp … what it’s like to be in the middle of an anthrax scare.
‘…I had visited the decaying laboratories in once secret cities and interviewed some of the tens of thousands of Soviet scientists who had worked to perfect mankind’s most vicious, efficient killers. I was now familiar with the stench of such places – the haunting mix of bleach, dust, animal waste – the smell of death. The research had terrified me at first. Not even the terrorism I had covered as a correspondent in the Middle East in the 1980s had so unnerved me. But I had remained, through it all, detached from the reality of my often awful subjects. To do our work, journalists had to be. We were trained to be the cool, professional observers that our business requires and readers demand. Yet now I was no longer covering a story. I was the story.’
[comment] The Making of a Master Criminal — John le Carré on the War on Terrorism … [via Follow Me Here]
‘The stylised television footage and photographs of Bin Laden suggest a man of homoerotic narcissism, and maybe we can draw a grain of hope from that. Posing with a Kalashnikov, attending a wedding or consulting a sacred text, he radiates with every self-adoring gesture an actor’s awareness of the lens. He has height, beauty, grace, intelligence and magnetism, all great attributes unless you’re the world’s hottest fugitive and on the run, in which case they’re liabilities hard to disguise. But greater than all of them, to my jaded eye, is his barely containable male vanity, his appetite for self-drama and his closet passion for the limelight. And just possibly this trait will be his downfall, seducing him into a final dramatic act of self-destruction, produced, directed, scripted and acted to death by Osama Bin Laden himself.’
[stuff] Linkage:
14 October 2001  [hoax] Tourist of Death vs. Tourist Guy [Related: Original Photo]From Snopes Urban Legend Reference: ‘…the photo provokes sensations of horror in those who view it. It apparently captures the last fraction of a second of this man’s life . . . and also of the final moment of normalcy before the universe changed for all of us. In the blink of an eye, a beautiful yet ordinary fall day was transformed into flames and falling bodies, buildings collapsing inwards on themselves, and wave upon wave of terror washing over a populace wholly unprepared for a war beginning in its midst. The photo ripped away the healing distance brought by the nearly two weeks between the attacks and the appearance of this digital manipulation, leaving the sheer horror of the moment once again raw and bared to the wind. Though the picture wasn’t real, the emotions it stirred up were.’ [via Metafilter]
[comment] The New Evil … interesting view post 9-11 from Ha’aretz — a newspaper from Israel. [via Scripting News]
‘ …when a handful of fanatics carrying knives succeeded in gaining control over the advanced flight technology of the Boeing company and hurtling it into the advanced engineering technology that built and maintained the Twin Towers, they created a vast metaphor of appalling consequence. They made it clear to everyone who still didn’t get it that the story of the 21st century is going to be that of the enemies of the West using the technology of the West in order to strike at the West. What this fact signifies is that not only individual fanatics but fanatic states and fanatic sub-cultures are liable to shatter, within only a few years, the Euro-American monopoly on power. If they are not stopped immediately, they will try to undermine the foundations of the West by using levers of force that originate in the West itself.’ 13 October 2001
[books] This is how it feels to me — Zadie Smith on what it’s like to be a writer at the moment…
‘We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. And now, when I finish a long day of CNN-related fear and loathing mixed with eyeballing my own resolutely white screen, I do not crawl into bed with 500-page comic novels about (God help me, but it’s OK; I’m going to call on the safety of quote marks) “multicultural” London. I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.’
[comics] Newsarama covers DC’s plans for The Authority with reaction from Mark Millar, Bryan Hitch and Warren Ellis.
‘The Authority will not appear in any form we recognize for some time to come. Because for it to work, it must be callous. It must be horrible, and violent, and must be gleeful about what it’s doing. If it’s not cranked up to ridiculous volume, viciously insulting to the genre that spawned it and blatantly absurd in its scale and its disregard for human life… it’s just another superhero team book. You can find those anywhere. Unfortunately, the clash between the Authority style and the real-life events and attitudes surrounding it means that, at least for a little while, it’ll have to be just another superhero team book. If it’s going to be published at all. Personally, I think the audience is ready for it. It’s escapism, and it’s revenge fantasy on the biggest possible scale. But the people who make the decisions clearly believe otherwise.’ — Warren Ellis. |
