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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 5 February 2002
[books] Machismo isn’t that easy to wear — interview with Norman Mailer … On America: ‘What would we think of someone who was seven-foot tall, weighed 350 pounds, was all muscle, and had to be reassured all the time? We would say that fella’s a mess!’
[blogs] A bit of UK Blog history — thinking about a UK Blog Timeline …
Any others? Tell Me. 4 February 2002
[books] Soap and the serious writer — interview with Philip Pullman … ‘Will and Lyra are a sort of Adam and Eve but, instead of reaffirming the Creation story, CS Lewis-style, they subvert it. Pullman is, actually, all for Eve listening to the serpent and trying the fruit. “I see it as a positive act,” he says. Because it shows curiosity, a willingness to embrace life? “Yes. Absolutely.” He says that if his book has any message, if readers go away feeling anything, he hopes it is that “this physical place, where we live, is a place of great beauty. We forget it as we grow up. We get so overlaid by habit. I want to say, open your eyes. Living is exciting, a source of amazing joy, and with that comes the responsibility to live it fully”. Oh, come on, I say. None of us can go round in a state of marvel all the time. Can you? “No. I do get tired and fed up, especially when I’m doing my VAT returns.”‘
[blogs] Need To Know: ‘The BLOGGIES are announced, and all of the constantly updating, filter and linking, daily diarists of the Web are there to cheer the winners on. Excepting the www.livejournal.com folk, and those everything/nothing kids, and the advogato/kuroshin journalers, of course. Nope, this one’s for people who do *proper* weblogs.’
[comics] Moore’s murderer — yet another profile / interview of Alan Moore … ‘Magic is now at the centre of his life, he admits, but he knows where all this can lead. He has heard of David Icke, and he’s aware that he’s already off most people’s scale when it comes to sanity. “I’m not a millionaire but I’m very comfortable doing what I do, and I’m more productive now than I was in my mid-20s. It’s all down to functionality eventually. If you’re functional it doesn’t matter if you’re mad.”‘ [via Robot Wisdom]
2 February 2002
[music] The unsinkable Ian Brown … ‘He orders lunch carefully – no cheese, no pork, no wine (he hasn’t touched alcohol for years: “I can’t get with the taste of liquor”) – and lights a cigarette. “There were about three weeks in 1989 when everyone loved us and no one slagged us,” he recalls with a smile. “I wasn’t on stage to be worshipped or for people to look up to me. I was with the crowd. We started out to finish groups like U2 – that was what it was all about. And they’re still the biggest band in the world, so we failed. We didn’t really do anything, people wore flares for a year or two, d’you know what I mean?” he laughs. “That’s all we did.”‘ [Related: Tanya Headon on Fools Gold / Stone Roses]
1 February 2002
[uk] Lunch is for Wimpys — the return of Mr Wimpy … ‘There was something very British about Wimpy from the moment that it sprang from an item on the menu in the Lyons Corner Cafe, to its own fully fledged chain in 1954. Whether it was the insistence that fast food should be eaten with a knife and fork, or the appearance of toasted teacakes on the menu, or even the willingness to name itself after the burger-munching character from Popeye (can you imagine an American chain calling itself Nerdy?), it was markedly different from McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the rest; more closely associated to the tea urn than the flame grill. Then, in 1989, Wimpy went west, or so it seemed.’
[comics] Classic banned Judge Dredd strips — the Burger Wars and Jolly Green Giant stories from the Cursed Earth Saga… ‘Don’t worry, Folks. Everythin’ in MacDonalds is Disposable — includin’ th’ staff.’ [via The Haddock Directory]
31 January 2002
[911] David Icke on 911 …
[blogs] Psychology of Weblogs by Dr. John Grohol … ‘Most weblogs are drivel, banal shit written by angst-ridden teenagers and adults sharing feelings, thoughts, and mind-numbing details about their daily lives that provide little insight into anything or anyone.’ [Related: Follow Me Here on Grohol]
[911] The Perfect Soldier — profile of Mohamed Atta. [via Douze Lunes]
‘In November, on a blustery cold day in northern Germany, a young woman in Hamburg, the former girlfriend and now wife of one of Atta’s old roommates, talked about an image she couldn’t get out of her head. She said when the bombs started falling in Afghanistan, she would sit in front of her television, staring in disbelief, unable to comprehend that the bombs were in a very real sense put in motion by her husband’s old roommate. Watching the explosions, she would try to match them, the war, everything that has gone on in the world since Sept. 11, to her memory of the slight young man padding around his student apartment in his shower shoes. It didn’t fit. She would ask herself: All of this because of Mohamed? It’s impossible, she said. Not little Mohamed in his blue flip-flops.’ 30 January 2002
[uk blogs] One last link about UK Blogs … Watch a nation of 419 blogs update with the Recently Updated List.
[uk blogs] The GBloggies have a website … ‘What’s it all about!? UK Bloggers like to complain! So we’re giving them an opportunity. As Five should have said, “Let’s Bitch!” NOW WHAT?’
[uk blogs] Meanwhile in UKBloggerland… (in the style of Graybo and Cal) …
While we are on the subject of UK Blogs… the GBloggies. ‘Most likely to fantasize about Thatcher’ [via Graybo] 29 January 2002
[people] A couple of interesting articles from The Independent:
[wtf?!] The Heroes in Spandex Gallery! … ‘Everybody likes to dress up in costume, especially if there’s lots of spandex and superheroes involved! This is the place to show the world your new outfit! ‘ [via Metafilter]
 28 January 2002
[books] Dæmon Geezer — Robert McCrum profiles Philip Pullman … ‘Pullman himself makes an unlikely demon. In person, he is thoughtful, good-natured and passionately interested in what the world has to tell him. Like his admired predecessors, he is only giving back to his audience the stories it has already vouchsafed in a thousand unguarded moments. First and foremost a teller of tales, he acknowledges “the absolute preciousness” of reality in all its chaos and discomfort. “Here is where we are,” he told The Observer, “and now is where we live.”‘
[funny] Peace Activist Has To Admit Barrett .50 Caliber Sniper Rifle Is Pretty Cool … ‘"Look, I realize that the use of this instrument of destruction, even in wartime, is morally reprehensible, and I don’t see how anyone with a conscience could justify owning one," said Robinson, 31, a University of Vermont graduate student in sociology and president of the campus chapter of Amnesty International. "But you have to admit, it’s pretty wild to think that it’s capable of throwing a half-inch bullet into a man-sized target 1,500 meters away."’
[film] Jack the Rip-Off — Iain Sinclair looks at the From Hell movie … ‘What Moore proposes, and what the film necessarily refutes, is the belief that the past is unknowable. ‘In all our efforts to describe the past, to list the simple facts of history,’ he wrote in his introduction to the From Hell scripts, ‘we are involved in fiction.’ There can be no anachronisms when time is a plural concept. Nobody knows, or will ever know, or should know, who Jack the Ripper was. Jack is. Sustained and incubated by tour guides, crocodiles of sombre or giggling pilgrims processing around the locations where the bodies were found, the Ripper lives on. An invisible earner. A waxwork vampire.’
27 January 2002
[blogs] Anti Bloggies 2002 … ‘Like the Bloggies, but bribes are accepted – nay, encouraged.’
[books] A couple more Philip Pullman articles …
[obit] He was a Crook — Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon from 1994 … ‘If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.’ [via Metafilter]
26 January 2002
[young ones] The Complete Guide to Rick’s Poetry … Rick’s Teen Anguish Poem:
oh god, why am I so much more sensitive than everybody else? why do I feel things so much more acutely than them, and understand so much more. I bet I’m the first person who’s ever felt as rotten as this. could it be that I’m going to grow up to be a great poet and thinker, and all those other wankers in my class are going to have to work in factories or go on the dole? yes, I think it could.
[comics] Newsarama talks to Alan Moore about Marvel Comics, ABC and Watchmen 2. On Watchmen 2: ‘That wouldn’t be interesting at all. It would be really fucking boring. I’ve got no interest in re-creating the 1980s. […] With all respect to the fan audience, I’m sure that Charles Dickens never got people writing, asking when he was going to do A Tale of Three Cities. That’s not how I work. It may be how the industry works, but I’m not really interested in revisiting things that are fifteen years old.’
25 January 2002
[comics] Interview with Dan Clowes … On Young Dan Pussey the “nerdish cartoonist superstar”: ‘I was telling my publisher that I wanted to take that book out of print because it?s so mild compared to the reality of the situation. At the time I did it was supposed to be a caricature of the business. Now there are so many more stories that are so much worse that I hear on a daily basis about the comic book business. It just seems pointless to have that book in print.’ [Related: Clowes Bio, link via the WEF]
[blogs] Credo Of The Web Log Writer — the rise and fall of a weblogger… ‘I will write poetry and buy a webcam. I will only link to other ‘A-List’ Web Log Writers and ignore wannabe’s who link to me. Other Web Log Writers will do what I do, only worse. I will ignore or quit my real job since my loyal readership will support me via PayPal and my Amazon Wish List.’ [via 2002 Bloggies]
[books] An honest American Psycho — Fay Weldon reviews American Pyscho in 1991 … ‘Our yuppie hero kills an abandoned dog, slices it with a knife, walks on. No one cares. Women get their kicks from bondage. Yuppie goes too far, the women get to bleed a bit, but they get paid. That’s enough for them. The whole world’s into bondage. Altzheimers or Armani, spermicidal lubricant or Ralph Lauren, everything on the same level. So he goes further. What’s the odds? Not a nice book, no, not at all, this portrait of psychotic America, psychotic us. Just enough to touch a dulled nerve or two, get an article or so written.’ [Related: Bio of Bret Easton Ellis, Geocities Fan Page]
24 January 2002
[war] Back to hell — Mark Bowden – author of Black Hawk Down – on a possible US return to Somalia … ‘Because it is so wild, and because most of its residents are Muslims, Somalia seems a logical destination for al-Qaida and Taliban leaders fleeing the rout in Afghanistan. With the longest shoreline of any African nation, with its lack of government, navy, army or police, there is nothing to stop international outlaws from coming, provided they can run the international patrols in the Persian Gulf and Indian ocean. But once in Somalia, there is nothing to stop the US and its allies from coming after them. “We’ll go wherever we need to go in Somalia,” said one American general who asked not to be named. “It’s not likely that we’ll be asking permission.”‘
[comics] Lego Spider Jerusalem … ‘Being a Lego bastard WORKS’ [via WEF]
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