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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 20 February 2003
[comics] Grant Morrison at the ICA on 28th March:
19 February 2003
[web] Microsoft Gets a Clue From Its Kiddie Corps — Steven Levy on Microsoft’s new IM/P2P app Threedegrees … ‘Threedegrees is also a fascinating experiment in how music can be legally shared over the Internet. After much negotiation, the labels OK’d musicmix, once Microsoft agreed to somewhat hobble its features. (Playlists have a maximum of 60 tunes, and the songs won’t play unless the original owner is participating.)’ [Related: Slashdot on Threedegrees | thanks Phil]
18 February 2003
[blogs] Fame or misfortune beckons for weblogs? — BBC News on Google and Blogger … Comment from Rebbecca Blood: ‘Google buying Blogger validates the importance of weblogs to the internet ecosystem. You can’t devalue people and the things they care about.’
[poet] Wizard of Oz — Guardian Online interviews Felix Denis … ‘There are jobs, particularly database-oriented ones, for which computers are necessary, but for everyday office life, I question whether they have brought the productivity that their enormous cost, up to £10,000 per person, demands. Nor do I believe they will. Computers are wasteful of paper and time. Once, we’d get documents with a few errors. Now, people make hundreds of copies until each sheet is flawless and memos are duplicated endlessly. Managers get swamped with emails.’
17 February 2003
[blogs] More Google Buys Blogger Linkage:
[books] Eggers v the Establishment — update on Dave Eggers … ‘He is what every young literary publisher in New York would love to be if only the accountants didn’t keep telling them the money is in self-improvement books. In short, Eggers can do it all. What he will not do is sit down and be interviewed, having learnt on the road to literary fame that accessibility is the death of journalistic curiosity.’
16 February 2003
[blogs] Google Buys Blogger — WTF?! ‘…now Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company’s director of corporate communications, called “a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation.” “We’re thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies,” he said in a statement on Saturday.’
15 February 2003
[film] Green Party — Entertainment Weekly asks: “Is the Hulk ready for his close-up?” …’the real test of the movie Hulk will come not in the scenes of him smashing tanks, but in his quieter interactions with flesh-and-blood characters. ”In the commercial, we don’t get a sense of whether the Hulk will emote at all,” Knowles says. Given the past work of director Lee (”Sense and Sensibility,” ”Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), some sensitive Hulk moments seem inevitable, and such scenes could show up when a full-length trailer hits theaters Feb. 14 with prints of ”Daredevil.” But even without them, one expert already sees the beast’s softer side. Says Ferrigno: ”I think he’s cute.”’ [Related: Hulk Trailer]
14 February 2003
[film] Let’s Make a Meta-Movie — more on the movie Adaptation … ‘”I guess it documents my failure to do my job,” Kaufman says. The real Kaufman, that is. The real Kaufman is neither balding or sweaty. He is, instead, a wiry man in his mid-40s, hunched inside a black suit, with a tangle of brown curls on top of his head and a faceful of beard. He wears the polite grimace of someone for who all social contact is inherently painful, the only variant how much. “Although it’s not something I’m good at being snappy and quotable about.”‘
[fight] Who could you take in a fight? — the Onion AV Club asks a bunch of celebs. Alan Moore: ‘Ooh, let me see. Most superheroes, really. When you know them, they’re not anywhere near as tough as they appear. Whoopi Goldberg. I don’t think I’d have any trouble there. Macaulay Culkin. He better not start anything.’ [via I Love Everything]
13 February 2003  [comics] Observations from a Reluctant Anti-Warrior — “cartoon journalism” from Pete Bagge … [Related: Mefi Comments | via Boing Boing]
[blogs] UKBlogs Aggregator — follow ukblogs via an updated feed … Also available as an RSS Feed.
[comics] Seth Returns to Palookaville — update on the cartoonist Seth … ‘Outside of his work, Seth is probably best known for his appearances in Joe Matt’s Peepshow comic, where the conversations between those two and Yummy Fur’s Chester Brown has become part of comic book legend. Do the three still hang out? “Sure. But last night the three of us had our farewell dinner for Joe Matt. He’s leaving Toronto for good.” What, can this trio really be broken up forever? “It’s going to be odd. But Chester and I were friends before Joe showed up.”‘
12 February 2003
[tv] The Hair Apparent — Charlie Higson discusses turning Swiss Toni into a sitcom. ‘…Swiss is a man who has invented his own persona in order to deal with the world. A lot of people do this, they create a character for themselves which they can hide behind. The comedy comes from the gap between how Swiss thinks the world perceives him and how he really is. He’s a man putting up a suave, sophisticated front while behind it everything crumbles to dust. So he has an over-the-top look, voice and manner, but somewhere there’s a frightened little boy peering out at the world from inside this glossy suit of armour.’
11 February 2003
[blogs] Dear Raed — blogging from Baghdad … ‘Powell speech is around 6pm in Baghdad, the whole family is getting together for tea and dates-pastry to watch the (Powell Rocks the UN) show. Not on Iraqi TV of course, we have decided to put up the satellite dish to watch it, yes we will put it away afterwards until the next event. I don’t exactly like the thought of two months in prison just to have 24 hour BBC…’ [thanks Pete]
[politics] If it was a nasty party that won all those elections… — profile of Norman Tebbit … ‘He admits that he plays “spot the Brit” on escalators on the London Underground. But it would be very wrong to see the man who once proposed a “cricket test” for immigrants as today’s Enoch Powell figure. His distaste for “multiculturalism” should not be mistaken as a cover for racism. He recently was the star guest at a dinner to raise funds for medical services in Bangladesh, and repeatedly praises many aspects of Muslim life. “If we had more people in our inner cities who benefited from extended families and from sharing places of worship, we would probably have a better society,” he says.’
10 February 2003
[music] Bjork Video Gallery — all of Bjork’s videos in Quicktime … [via Metafilter]
 ‘I don’t know my future after this weekend and I don’t want to.’
[comics] Chaykin’s Mighty Love — Newsarama interview with Howard Chaykin … On his new comic: ‘The germ of this came from my wife — who asked me why there weren’t anymore love comics. I explained that all comics are love comics, because they’re all soap opera. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear, so she pushed and badgered me, and ultimately what emerged was the title, Mighty Love — the idea of doing a screwball romantic comedy with people wearing masks. The natural source of that would be The Shop Around the Corner, You’ve Got Mail, and all those stories of mistaken identities.’
9 February 2003
[film] Who’s the proper Charlie? — nice profile of Jonze and Kaufman’s new film Adaptation … ‘…little is revealed about Kaufman beyond what we suspected in the first few minutes; that he is effortlessly neurotic, terminally self-conscious, and spectacularly ill-suited to the latte-sipping, air-kissing, back-stabbing, social snake pit that is contemporary Hollywood. What’s more, the sweating, pacing, fretting Kaufman we see on screen, barely articulate in an interview with an executive, could well be an exaggeration, even a caricature, of the real one. Or, indeed, a complete fabrication.’ [Related: the film trailer, and Kottke’s Adaptation Blog]
8 February 2003
[shuttle] Shuttle Tiles had History of Glitches — backgrounder on the history of Space Shuttle tiles … ‘It took forever to glue on the thermal tiles that shielded the space shuttle from the scorching heat of reentry — nearly two man-years of work for every flight — and the glue dried so fast that technicians had to mix a new batch after every couple of tiles. But they came up with a solution: spit in the glue so it took longer to harden.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
7 February 2003
[books] Brewer’s Unoriginal Miscellany … ‘This is not Schott’s Original Miscellany.’ [via Troubled Diva]
[comics] Matt’s World — Newsarama interviews Joe Matt. ‘The last few girlfriends I’ve had including my current one have all read my comics. They were all fans. It definitely helps. If they can read all that and still want to go out with me the worst is over.’
6 February 2003
[books] AL Kennedy’s top 10 controversial books … [via I Love Everything]
‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S Thompson. Insanity, obscenity, profanity, illegality and reptilian paranoia – but which is more distressing, HST’s lunatic chemical life and Gonzo prose style, or Richard Milhous Nixon and co taking a whole country for a nasty ride? And where, by the way, is the energy of Gonzo now when we need it?’ Brief Extract from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 … ‘On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon’s big contributors in the ’72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning.’ 5 February 2003
[music] Oh, You Little Devil — profile of Kelly Osbourne … ‘She says Jack, her younger brother, is actually less crazed than he used to be. “The therapy has helped. He’s less violent and more motivated to do stuff.” Are you in therapy, Kelly? “God, no. I tried it once and hated it. I can give myself better advice.” I bet she can. And does. She appears not only absolutely to know herself, and her mind, but also absolutely to like herself as she is, which is quite something. If she is fast becoming a sort of anti-Britney, anti-Christina teen icon — “They can both kiss my fat ass,” she once famously said — I think it can only be good news, frankly.’
[films] UK Film Release Dates — very useful. [via Sashinka]
4 February 2003
[shuttle] Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty — article from 1980 about problems within NASA’s Space Shuttle program … ‘The main cause of [problems] is currently the shuttle’s refractory tiles, which disperse the heat of reentry from the ship’s nose and fuselage. Columbia must be fitted out with 33,000 of these tiles, each to be applied individually, each unique in shape. The inch-thick tiles, made of pyrolized carbon, are amazing in two respects. They can be several hundred degrees hot on one side while remaining cool to the touch on the other. They do not boil away like the ablative heat shieldings of capsules and modules; they can be used indefinitely. But they’re also a bit of a letdown in another respect–they’re so fragile you can hardly touch them without shattering them.’ [via Metafilter]
3 February 2003
[shuttle] Net History… First Mention of the 1986 Challenger Disaster on Usenet. ‘…it appears that the first inflight disaster of the NASA space program has claimed the lives of six astronauts and NASA’s first passenger. The disaster occured 17 years and 1 day after the Apollo I tragedy.’
[comics] Eddie Campbell has announced he has stopped self-publishing for “the foreseeable future”. Some good news: ‘For the rest of the year I’ll be working on a one-off Batman book, writing and painting. (I seem to have got into this gig by a series of peculiar accidents). In a way it could be viewed as a development of my interview with old Batman artist Lew Sayre Schwartz in Egomania #1. I’ll also be revisiting From Hell territory since the book is set in London in 1939 and involves a complicated mystery and a very eccentric secret society.’ [via ¡Journalista!]
2 February 2003
[shuttle] ‘I knew what was about to happen’ — two NASA engineers describe the “inside story” behind the Challenger Shuttle Disaster in 1986 … ‘When the clock reached T minus five seconds the two engineers held hands and braced themselves for an explosion. But to their immense relief Challenger cleared the launch pad. “I turned to Bob and said ‘we’ve just dodged a bullet,’ because it was our expectation it would blow up on the pad.” The two men began to relax. But then, at 73 seconds, the heart-stopping plume of white smoke suddenly filled the screen.’
1 February 2003
31 January 2003
[distraction] Snowball — throw snowballs and get sworn at. Not safe for work. [thanks John]
[politics] The lady’s not for turning – but will her party turn to her? — what’s Ann Widdecombe up to? ‘…she must be more of a threat to Mr Letwin than anyone on the Labour side of the House. She praises him with deadly condescension as “a brilliant brain”, and predicts that, at the next election, the Tories will advocate the detention of all asylum-seekers. “On asylum, crime and tax, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in 2005 the manifesto that we fight on is the same under another name as the one in 2001.” Ambition still lurks. Twice in the interview, she accidentally referred to herself as Home Secretary.’
30 January 2003
[comics] Interview with Grant Morrison by Rich Johnson. GM on the WACKYJAC photos: ‘…think of it as a kind of Victoria’s Secret that should have been KEPT and perhaps the images won’t hurt so badly. Now if I hadn’t been flaccid, it would have been illegal, so be glad I spared humanity.’ [via Barbelith]
[books] Logomancer — a review of William Gibson‘s new book by Rudy Rucker … ‘Cool hunting, advertising, and marketing pervade Pattern Recognition – the book’s acronym is PR, after all. Pollard “knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned in the world, and sometimes finds herself doubting that there is much else going on.” But The Footage is there to prove her wrong. The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever. Gibson exploits the inherent tension between the monoculture and the emergence of novelty. On one hand, the monoculture lives by assimilating originality. On the other, new art has nothing but the monoculture to launch itself from. It’s one of the happy paradoxes of modern life.’
29 January 2003
[comics] When Grant Morrison had hair… (click image to enlarge) …
 ‘It was great […] I got to do the Flash. The real Flash, not this abomination that’s running around today. One of the most exciting moments of my entire life, believe it or not, was writing the sequence where Barry Allen presses his ring and the costume leaps out. When I wrote that I was sitting there all charged up with adrenalin. I suppose that just shows how sheltered a life I’ve led.’ 28 January 2003
[mp3] Hating Hilary — profile of Hilary Rosen the frontwoman for the RIAA …
‘Commercially speaking, it’s hard to argue that peer-to-peer music-sharing doesn’t have the same effect as walking out of Virgin Megastore with the latest Coldplay CD under your jacket. But by moralizing the issue – here and in a series of ads featuring artists like Stevie Wonder and Britney Spears – Rosen and her colleagues have failed to grasp the fact that they’ve already lost. File-sharing has become part of pop culture; witness the Intel ad that shows a scruffy guy happily burning tunes onto a CD-R. To some extent, at least, the record companies have themselves to blame. Whereas blank CDs sell for pennies at the nearest CVS, the price of new releases continues to creep up in most stores, to the point where movies can be cheaper to own. Rosen, 44, seems to have planted herself squarely in the path of inevitable technological change.’ 27 January 2003
[politics] Hoggart’s Parliament Sketches — an archive of recent articles by Simon Hoggart about the British Parliament. On Tony Blair: ‘…he walked away with the cheers of his own party echoing round the chamber. It must be an extraordinary sensation – even in these days when the Commons counts for so much less – to arrive facing 30 minutes of abuse and complaint, and to leave hearing huzzas, bellows of applause, and the demented waving of order papers. It was like those TV dramas in which Winston Churchill thrills the House in 1940: the noises are a little too loud, over enthusiastic, too actory. It sounded like that. My guess is that Alastair Campbell has had a silicone chip installed in Mr Blair’s Y-fronts.’
[film] Young and Breathless — profile of Paul Thomas Anderson … ‘Anderson’s main characters talk in just the same way — Boogie Nights’ porn star Dirk Diggler; Magnolia’s earnest LAPD cop, Jim Kurring; Punch-Drunk Love’s Barry Egan, a sex-line-ringing, occasionally violent entrepreneur. These men might seem slow at first glance — even gormless — but all prove remarkable: superheroes whose special power is innocence.’
26 January 2003
[comics] New X-Men #136 — a great thread on Grant Morrison‘s latest issue of X-Men over at the comics forum on Barbelith … ‘There were worrying things about Xorn even in his stand-alone issue, and I remember this being discussed – “If I could save every life, I would” – but you can’t. And how do you deal with that realisation – how do you handle death? Morrison did actually say in an interview early on that NXM would be about death, and he wasn’t kidding. Xorn’s already got so depressed he nearly destroyed the world once – what if the senselessness of it all pushes him that close as well?’
25 January 2003
[email] Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978 — the first ever Spam email … ‘WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH. […] A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE.’ [Related: A Brief History of Spam]
24 January 2003
[links] Remaindered Links — Kottke launches a Linklog.
[politics] British-U.S. Union — web site for the The Expansionist Party who advocate UK union with America … ‘Britain is in the wrong Union. Rather than the European Union, a group hostile to Britain and the English language, Britain belongs in the American Union, on the road to worldwide English-Speaking Union.’ [via politX]
23 January 2003
[blogs] Tagline: ‘So Gangs of New York. Hey, from what I saw: the street fights, the spaceships, the elephant, the Transformers cameo, the ornate facial hair; it looked great, you should check it out.’
[reading] At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft … ‘Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.’
22 January 2003
[comics] Fans Howl in Protest as Judge Decides X-Men Aren’t Human — the X-Men are apparently “nonhuman creatures” according to a Judge in New York … ‘To Brian Wilkinson, editor of the online site X-Fan (x-mencomics.com/xfan/), Marvel’s argument is appalling. The X-Men — mere creatures? “This is almost unthinkable,” he says. “Marvel’s super heroes are supposed to be as human as you or I. They live in New York. They have families and go to work. And now they’re no longer human?”‘ [via Pete and Pelvey]
21 January 2003
[weblogs] Warming Up — the comedian and writer Richard Herring has a weblog (kinda) … ‘I’ll do my best to eventually have something from every day. Sometimes it is quite hard to think of anything. Especially as much of my day is spent sitting in my house writing, or failing to write. But I figure that there has to be one interesting thing in every 24 hours.’ [via Gas Giant]
[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] |
