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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 19 June 2001
[blog different] The Bum Notes. After almost 2 days of clogged up bowels, I entrusted a frightening amount of gloopy shit to the porcelain this morning. It was a double-flusher, double-brusher. My efforts left the drain gasping for air, and I could hear some satisfying thuds as the fruit of my bowels descended through the rather ancient plumbing system. All in all, I would give this one a 9 out of 10. Most satisfying shit of the week. [via Parallax View]
[stuff] Random Linkage 2:
[politics] Anne Widdecombe checks out… Steve Bell’s view and Simon Hoggart’s…. ‘We have lost her from the high seas; no more will we gaze at the billowing sails, the ensign fluttering proudly from her poop deck! And what made it perfect was that she went down with her guns firing – specifically at Michael Portillo, a pocket battleship which made the terrible mistake of approaching her broadside. Crump! “I don’t believe that Michael Portillo is the right person to lead the Conservative party!” Thump! “This is nothing personal, all I can say is, that this is what I sincerely believe!” Nothing personal? She loathes him. “I don’t want today to turn into personal denigration of Michael Portillo,” she added, to the sound of a 12″ gun slamming into foot-thick steel. This means, in translation, “I want you all to take it personally”.’
18 June 2001
[distraction] Amazing photo of an iceberg above and below the waterline… [via Betty Woo]
[tv] The King of New York — Interview with Michael Imperioli (Christopher from The Sopranos). ‘…amid the plaudits heaped on the cast’s shoulders, it’s Imperioli’s performances that have provided many of the show’s greatest moments. Sure, James Gandolfini’s Tony may be The Sopranos’ (a)moral centre: but it’s Moltisanti, with his neuroses and screenwriting aspirations who’s walked the most dizzying tightropes, his development littered with audacious segues from the hilarious (greeting Martin Scorsese with the words “Kundun – I liked it!”) to the just plain brutal.’
[profile] Nice profile Of Patrick Marber. ‘Despite his stratospheric rise, Marber has contrived the air of a drifter to whom things just happen. “The internet has opened up a new kind of inertia for people like me, where we don’t have to get dressed, where we can just sit in our pyjamas and access the universe,” he said. “I’m a potential internet junkie, it’s just that I haven’t worked out how to use it yet. I’m like an alcoholic who doesn’t know how to open the bottle.” Four months of every year, he says, he spends “doing nothing – I mean really sitting on my arse”.’
17 June 2001  [comics] Charles Shar Murray reviews Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware. ‘This exquisitely packaged graphic-novel edition of the strip, which ran in Ware’s own Acme Novelty Library for most of the 1990s, has been hailed as a masterpiece, and rightly so. Ware has been praised for the acute psychological insight of his writing, for the crisp, pellucid elegance of his art and design, and for his formal innovations, not least the dizzying variety of graphic idioms and narrative through-lines set in different time-periods, which he juggles with awesome self-assurance.’ [Related: Buy Jim Corrigan at Amazon]
[soap] Walford gets its golden boy — Goldie’s appearing in EastEnders… ‘Fame, he says, no longer has the same appeal. He spent his whole life wanting to be somebody, wanting to tell his story. ‘I wanted it so much it made me sick. But ultimately you think, “Goldie, they understand. You can stop now.”‘ He screams out loud, a long howl of pain. ‘I’ve been screaming since I was three.’ But now, the screaming might stop. What he’s learning is patience. ‘When you have rejection all of your life, you expect it. And you want to give it. But sometimes you’ve just got to say, someone owes me out there, there’s some kind of karma. And you’ve got to wait for it to come.’
16 June 2001
[reboot] ‘Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don’t you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don’t you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?’
I’ve lost my blogging mojo… and I’m not sure that two Nurofen and a new wallet are going to help me find it again.
15 June 2001
[important question] Which UK Blogger would you most like to see naked? [via Plasticbag]
[distraction] Freaky Moving Circles… Weird! [Cheers Andy]
[books] Poisoned Pen — The Guardian on Richard Littlejohn’s first book. Littlejohn on the Guardian: ‘For the past 25 years it has been impossible to get a job in the public sector without subscribing to the whole Guardian agenda,’ wrote Littlejohn. ‘It’s the only place jobs in teaching, the health service, local government, the social services, the probation service and the civil service are advertised. The prejudices of a smug, self-selecting, metropolitan elite have been imposed ruthlessly on a largely unsuspecting public.’
14 June 2001
[rich] A very English billionaire — Profile of John Paul Getty II. ‘…he has been described as extremely sentimental, and sentimental about England. The quintessence of his view of England is a village-green cricket match  rural, old-fashioned, but probably accompanied by champagne rather than warm beer. One of his chief pleasures is his own cricket ground at his mansion in the Chilterns, Wormsley Park. This misty-eyed notion of an old, idyllic rural England is conservative in more senses than one. When Getty proclaims his belief that “the Conservative Party is the party best equipped to defend the British way of life”, the way of life he has in mind is that once described by his friend John Major  — a country “of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist”.’
13 June 2001
[stuff] Random Linkage:
[babies] Fathers Daze — Tim Lott talks about men and babies… ‘When I was in my 20s I thought that happiness looked like a big desk I could sit behind, ordering people around. I thought happiness was golden beaches, and exciting parties, and recreational drugs, and exotic travel and big salaries and gorgeous women. And I tried all these things – oh, how I tried them. But you can add them up and multiply them by their own power, and none of them achieve the simple intensity of the joy that is granted by pushing my daughters on the swings in the local park on a sunny day, or simply watching while they sleep. No clever piece of artifice – film, theatre, TV – can make me laugh half as much. No stunning piece of art can be so beautiful. No winning of a literary prize would make me so proud. Happiness, it turns out, like evil, is banal.’
12 June 2001
[comics] Tom interviews Kevin O’Neill [Part One | Part Two] artist on Nemesis The Warlock and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Censorship in 2000AD: ‘It was a scene in which two giant Torquemada statues had a bridge slung between them. I didn’t see what was wrong with – there was no blood or anything. But the editors thought the bridge was some kind of penis! It was above the navel! I just thought, ‘Where the hell does he keep his penis?!’. I made the bridge look thinner and that pacified them. But at the same time, they completely missed that Torquemada was married to an underage girl. We had scenes of him in bed with his 14 year-old child-bride and they never even blinked!’
[execution] Steve Bell on Tim McVeigh’s Execution and George Bush. ‘God Bless All The Dead Guys’
11 June 2001
[distraction] Pretty massive distraction actually — Flash Mini-Golf. [via Wanderers Weblog]
[comics] The Comics Journal looks at Dave Sim, Tangents and his proposed boxing match with Jeff Smith. On speculations on the internet that he is mad: ‘When asked about the speculations on his state of mind, Sim said that “it’s difficult to take seriously from people whose social life consists of talking to a typewriter.” He added that although he is vehemently opposed to such Internet activity, “Gerhard followed one thread and said, ‘Well, that’s one hour of my time that I’ll never get back.'” Without such message boards, Sim maintained, there is barely any controversy at all.’
10 June 2001
[tv] Male haterosexuality — Barbara Ellen looks at Men Only (a drama on Channel 4 last week). ‘This, we were told in booming, none-too-literate tones, was ‘THE TROOF’ about men when they are alone, away from the civilising influence of women. There were some upsetting and graphic early scenes depicting men enjoying a game of football, and then it was straight on to the hard stuff. If the male characters weren’t lying, cheating, stealing, taking drugs and fighting, they were leering at women like high-street Vikings, swaggering into massage parlours a full 20 minutes after their groins, socking prostitutes on the jaw and (treat yourself, it’s Saturday night) gang raping helpless nurses, with a camcorder running. Recognise anybody you know? Because no man I know did, though a few confessed to owning camcorders. One man I know called it “Cold Feet on ketamine”.’
[politics] What Portillo did next: ‘He had left his election count at Chelsea and boarded a bus for Stansted airport looking “like a dead man”, according to a fellow passenger. When the news was broadcast of Hague’s resignation, which Portillo had thought unlikely, he stared moodily into space. Once in Morocco, as donkeys passed slowly in front of the tour coach on Friday, he was overheard talking to colleagues in London by mobile phone about the leadership. The serious mood passed. In the Palais Jamai hotel in Fes he was joking around, imitating Ross’s radio show. Witnesses said he was dancing “like some demented genie” at 1am yesterday at a festival in Volubilis. “I am practising my election dance,” he told onlookers. Next he visited a 10th century mosque.’
[comics] Preview Picks looks at the comics available in August…
9 June 2001
[football] Manchester United Are Best Ever! ‘My Name is KOK kokweeuk’.
[comics] Grant Morrison discusses Animal Man… one of his early DC comics… ‘As Animal Man progressed, I moved away from miserablist heroes in their grainy, rainy ‘real’ world (that looked like no real world outside my window) and instead twisted my head into thinking not what would it be like for superheroes to live in the real world but what would it be like for a real person to live in a superhero world – an actual comic continuum, a universe drawn on paper, as thin as the ink surface but as rich and deep and involving as a 50 year-deep, shared, living universe could be. Once I’d worked out the cosmology I decided to start playing with it a little more seriously. I wondered if I could make a comic so close to real life that by writing an event or person into the comic I could make the event occur or the person appear in my own life or in the lives of others around me. I experimented with the Flex Mentallo comic then got serious with The Invisibles, which changed my life and rewrote the world around me.’
[politics] Okay, the final election link — election sketches from cartoonist Posy Simmonds. The Tory Leadership Election starts here… VIVA WIDDECOMBE!
8 June 2001
[politics] Astute analysis from Michael Heleltine of where the Tories went wrong… ‘…Mr Blair’s Labour Party today is in many vital respects a recycled Conservative Party, but with fresh faces and a new language. For the majority of people in this country, rule by Mr Blair has meant little more than a continuation of the policies established by the Tories. But Mr Blair has profited from another vital phenomenon. While the Conservative Party has looked backwards, Labour has adopted the vocabulary of the future. Britain has moved on – whether for good or ill scarcely matters. Marital breakdown, single-parent families, partners, gay rights, a multi-ethnic population are all parts of modern life, while a relatively privileged majority enjoys ownership of homes, cars, pensions, inheritances. These things forced Labour onto the centre ground and keep it there. ‘
[politics] A final election sketch from Simon Hoggart… Tories slapped in the face with a wet kipper. ‘At Tory central office there was a mood of miserable, dull acquiescence. It was as if the whole party had been slapped in the face with a wet kipper. The only excitement came when Michael Portillo declared on television that, whatever happened, he truly hoped William Hague would remain as leader. My goodness, we thought, will the desperate don stop at nothing to get the job? I thought of popping round to his house to see if BT installs phone lines at 2 o’clock in the morning. But some took a different view. Over at ITN, Norman Tebbit was asked if Portillo’s remarks meant that he had finally got cold feet. “I wouldn’t know,” Tebbit replied, “I have never slept with him.”‘
[brilliantly cruel] John’s Not Mad fan-page… ‘In 1989, QED obligingly produced the programme “John’s Not Mad”, featuring John Davidson, a young man from Galashiels who simply couldn’t stop swearing. We now know it as Tourette’s Syndrome – and no self respecting wag hasn’t feigned a gutter gob-rush at some point in their lives. At the time, however, the beauty of a condition which simply made you rude was a new one to the children of Britain. We also never had swearing on TV. LA Law had a defendent with Tourette’s in one episode – but he said nothing worse than bitch and slut. John Davidson, however, said fuck. And he said cunt. And he said big nose.’ [Sound: Fuck Medley]
7 June 2001
[links] Nice controllable London webcam with preset views of the Millenium Eye, CentrePoint and Wardour Street from a roof in Soho…
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