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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 9 September 2001
[comics] UltraMoore… tributes to Alan Moore (in Italian and English) from various notable comic creators… Barry Windsor-Smith, Eddie Campbell and Jay Stevens. Windsor-Smith: ‘The intelligence and perspicacity of Alan Moore’s MARVELMAN was responsible for bringing me back into the field of comics. For that, I’m torn between loving and hating him.’ [Related: Alan Moore Fan Site]
8 September 2001
[books] Today, I’m mostly reading… Fast Food Nation by Eric Sclosser. Ray Kroc (one of the founders of McDonalds): ‘We have found out … that we cannot trust people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry … The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.’
Fast-Food Nation: The True Cost Of America’s Diet [Part 1 | Part 2] … this is the original article on which the book was based … ‘A middle-aged woman in a lab coat handed me a paper plate full of premium extra longs, the type of french fries sold at McDonald’s, and a salt shaker and some ketchup. The fries on the plate looked so familiar yet wildly out of place in this laboratory setting, this food factory with its computer screens, digital readouts, shiny steel platforms and evacuation plans in case of ammonia-gas leaks. Despite all that, the french fries were delicious – crisp and golden brown, made from potatoes that had been in the ground that morning. I finished them and asked for some more.’
[comics] The Old Bastard Speaks! … Long, interesting interview with Warren Ellis in Comicon concentrating on the business of comics … ‘I mean you may remember back in the eighties when the term graphic novel was coined. There were some serious graphic novels, but there were a great many 48-page books called, ‘The Incredible Hulk vs. The Living Monolith Graphic Novel’, which led to the form being buried. It’s a little early to tell. Things like Jimmy Corrigan shifting in the tens of thousands and presumably things like Safe Area Gorazde and Pedro and Me doing similar numbers can only be a good thing. But in the eighties the only real breakout, serious, non-genre graphic novel was Maus. And now there are a spread of them. So that alone is better.’ [Related: Ordering Comics, WEF]
[death] The Autopsy — blogger Brooke Magnanti takes a close look … ‘The autopsy is an examination of the body as machine, a hardware hack on hopeless equipment. As with some bugs you may never find out what went wrong. There may be several ailments: a pancreatic cancer, say; a cirrhotic liver. The evidence of death is incontrivertible, but the cause is an eel slipping out of your hands.’
[Updated 11/2009: Searchers for Belle de Jour can find more about her here] 7 September 2001
[books] Conducting Black Operations in the Corporate IT Theatre from O’Really … could come in useful … ‘Black Operations. Silent, undetected and above all untraceable acts of system administration which get the job done. Of course, if you’re fired or captured the secretary will disavow any knowledge that you ever had the root passwords. There’s a job to be done, work without backups, casualities are acceptable. Do what you know to be right.’ [Related: CopyLeft T-Shirt, link via Camworld]
[wtf?] Some of Dale’s skirt pictures and Ahhh, those Hooters® girls — Skirtman is a website I’ve been meaning to blog since I began … ‘I used to belong to a Southern Baptist Church, but they had a real problem with men in skirts.’ [reminded by Blogjam]
[books] Dot.Bomb — first chapter of the book by David Kuo … ‘Winn’s goal was not just to sell a lot of one kind of stuff or another. He wanted to use the Internet to revolutionize every facet of retail, creating a one-stop Internet shopping site of unparalleled selection, product information, and efficiency. It would be for the Internet age what Harrods was for the entire British Empire at its height: the shopping source for all things. Winn knew it was an inspired – and possibly psychotically lucrative – vision.’
6 September 2001
[web] Dutchbint started the National Online Decency Compliance Standard page… baited it with search-engine referrals from her weblog and redirected a few choice words — cuntbusters being a particular favorite apparently — soon the appeals started to roll in… ‘I am a hardworking man who does not need permission from anyone on weather or not i can look at pretty women catfighting. Why don’t you idiots concentrate on the perverts trying to find kiddyporn? They are the ones who need help. Meanwhile leave people like me alone. Don’t try to take away my rights. If you guys tried loosening up a little bit you might have a little more fun. Maybe try to enjoy life a litte more. It should be guys like me watching guys like you. I’ll bet your the ones cheating on your wives.’
[distractions] Another classic time waster… On-Line Air Hockey. [via Pop Bitch]
[books] Hip to be square — interview with Douglas Coupland … ‘When I lived in Tokyo, on the subways everyone would be reading papers or manga, but now everyone sits there reading their phones. Every medium creates its desired form. It’s like AM radio created the two-and-a-half-minute song, then FM radio created art rock and the double album, and TV created the video and the 22.5-second news burst. It turns out that people want their printed information in three minutes; as long as they have three minutes’ worth of words, they’ll pay 100 yen. It’s scary. It’s the future.’
5 September 2001
[comics] Plan To Get Laid At DragonCon 2001 Fails … ‘According to Melcher, women in his hometown of Calhoun Falls “wouldn’t know the Green Lantern from the Green Arrow.” As a result, he has not had a date since former girlfriend and longtime Illuminati: New World Order opponent Carrie Lenz broke up with him in March 2000. “I know a lot of girls online, but that’s not really the same,” Melcher said. “I needed to see some face to face.”‘ [via Comic Geek]
[more sleaze] Internet Gossip … a brilliantly cruel gossip site covering Blogs, Everything / Nothing and cam girls / boys. I’ve always been confused by Everything / Nothing Sites — it’s like bizarro blogworld — there’s a good explanation of them here and here … ‘Intergrity. Funny word. E/N has been run over with people simply wanting to get their hits up as high as possible. It’s not hard to do. Well, not if you’re willing to sell out by posting porn at every turn, and whoring yourself out for plugs and links. Otherwise it can be quite a pain to try and make anything successful.’ [via Metafilter]
[sleaze] Call it blackmail if you want — interview with Max Clifford from The Telegraph … ‘Perhaps the most telling insight into Clifford’s motivations is a childhood memory of his sister. “I would be seven and she’s 20, and she’s sitting in our tiny front-room, trying to entertain a boyfriend. My brothers would gee me up and I’d run in, stark naked, fart and run off again, which she didn’t see the funny side of at all.”‘
4 September 2001
[comics] The antique rude show — the Guardian looks at Chris Ware’s Acme Comedy Library … ‘…Ware’s emotional levers typically pivot not on what is realised or revealed, but on that which is withheld: “You can now make more money than your grandparents did. You can also drive really fast and change your sex. You can find friends without having to go to church, and you can see movies in your own house. You can get pictures of naked people almost anywhere and you can curse out loud freely. You can get your face stretched tight like when it was new, and you can be sick and not die for a really long time. You can even wash your clothes in a machine, so why can’t you figure out a way to be happy all of the time?” (that’s an “advert” for Dr Linn’s Bronchial Wafers.)’
[comic ads] Count Dante, so-called Deadliest Man Alive (he died in 1975) has his own website and was actually the World’s Deadliest Hairdresser … ‘Count Dante personally went to Muhammad Ali’s (Cassius Clay) house on the south side of Chicago and challenged the Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the world. Count Dante’ also challenged the World Heavyweight Wrestling Champion and the World Heavyweight Judo Champion. Count Dante personally entered the contest and defeated all the comers.’ [via Memepool]
3 September 2001
[comics] Side by side in the fantasy league — Roger Sabin reviews recent comics in the Observer including The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill … ‘The ‘league’ is led by Mina Murray from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and consists of H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quartermain, Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde and H.G.Wells’s Invisible Man, all brought together to combat an evil criminal mastermind from the East and his band of ‘sly Chinee’. Thus begins a penny-dreadful adventure that mimics modern superhero team-ups – Moore’s own Watchmen comes to mind – while retaining an all-important sense of humour. This is very postmodern humour, you understand – Quartermain is discovered in an opium den and the Invisible Man is caught hiding in a girls’ school. Yet it never threatens to overwhelm what is essentially a ripping yarn of a rather quaint kind: you feel that Moore and O’Neill really yearn for a bit of old-fashioned romance.’
[films] The George Kennedy Appreciation Society… Pictures from Airport 77 … ‘Find out everything you ever wanted to know about the great thespian George Kennedy.’ [Related: Airport 77 at IMDB]
2 September 2001
[tv] Family secrets — the Observer goes behind the scenes of The Sopranos … ‘I heard David Chase say one time that it’s about people who lie to themselves, as we all do. Lying to ourselves on a daily basis and the mess it creates.’ — James Gandolfini on what the Sopranos is really about.
1 September 2001
[comics] Working the web: Graphic novels — the Guardian looks at on-line comics … ‘One thing is clear, though: while mainstream culture is just catching up with comics – sugaring the pill by calling them “graphic novels” – comics have already moved on, by moving online. Free publishing space, interactivity and the possibility of animation are giving an old medium a new life.’
[movies] The Bad Movie Review Site — excellent site about the most awful movies — includes reviews, images, MPEG’s…. From the review of Death Ship: ‘Not only does it have George Kennedy, he’s dressed up like a Nazi ship captain no less. It’s poetic I’ll admit, didn’t know they made uniforms that big. I think there was a typo in the script, what was intended to be “Death Shit” became “Death Ship” and therein lies the tragedy.’
31 August 2001
[comics] The Sandman Ate My Balls … ‘It’s Destiny’s luck to run out of balls.’
[books] Extract from The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman … ‘Lee Scoresby looked not asleep, nor at peace; he looked as if he had died in battle; but he looked as if he knew that his fight had been successful. And because the Texan aeronaut was one of the very few humans Iorek had ever esteemed, he accepted the man’s last gift to him. With deft movements of his claws, he ripped aside the dead man’s clothes, opened the body with one slash, and began to feast on the flesh and blood of his old friend. It was his first meal for days, and he was hungry.’
30 August 2001
[more oj] The UKBlog Kids do more O. J. —
[movies] Speaking Of War — Francis Ford Coppola and David Halberstam discuss Apocalypse Now Redux … ‘…my only point is, to what end? In other words, you fight a war, you make a great sacrifice, but to what end? What are we moving toward? That’s what I’m interested in. Because I think that’s when empires fail – when no one understands what the vision is.’ [via Seething Hatred]
[oj] And another one… The Job is Done [by Chris at Do You Feel Loved]
[web] At home with TVGoHome — BBC News interviews Charlie Brooker … Brooker: ‘I’m still totally interested in doing internet-based things. The nice thing about the internet is that it’s a great leveller. TVGoHome was done on a budget of nil. The one thing that matters is coming up with a simple idea. I don’t know why more people don’t try it and do it – come up with something simple and try to build an audience. Everyone seems to want to create Onion rip-offs, but there’s plenty of room for good online comedy content.’ [Related: Zeppotron, TV Go Home]
29 August 2001  [oj] When O. J. Simpson met the UKBlog Kids… it was Murder!
Think you can do better? Here’s the original… go crazy… and email me the results. Links: OJ and the Dingo Kids met… Metafilter, NTK.  [comics] Joe Matt’s Girl from Ipanema Talks Back… one of the characters from The Poor Bastard book gives her side of the story … ‘Joe’s rapport, or demeanor if you will, with me was always ranging from hostile to aloof & indifferent. He was very antisocial. At the time I figured he was just a bit off because he was insecure. Hostile, but not in an overtly aggressive way. Not outgoingly hostile, he was just never really there. And never really nice, just nonresponsive & I thought just a bit superior & condescending. But I definitely didn’t see the human equivalence of infatuation. He probably came across as nervous sometimes too but it was all linked to his personality because he seemed pretty introverted & not very friendly.’
[tv] Theroux tipped off by Hamiltons — brief inside story on Louis Theroux and the Hamiltons … Theroux: ‘Journalists can dish it out, but we’re not very good at taking it. Maybe it’s because we know what it’s like being in the media spotlight. We’re the last to sign the release form.’
28 August 2001
[books] Author angers the Bible Belt — article on the reaction to Philip Pullman’s books in America … ‘At their core, Pullman’s books are profoundly humanistic. Joan Slatterly calls them stories ‘about love, seizing the day and being alive’. ‘For all the qualities they have,’ says Pullman, ‘mine are ordinary children who come to realise that the world is a wonderful place whose destiny is not their birthright. There are no hereditary traditions or magic wands like in Harry Potter. There is the occult but not in the sense I see in other books. I don’t give people magical powers.”
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