Christopher Hitchens is Just Alright With Me

Via Totten:

"My attitude to posters with swastikas on them,” he later told Alice Fordham at NOW Lebanon, “has always been the same. They should be ripped down."

I Love Alan Moore

Alan Moore is a human portal into the newsprint-pulpy realm of reality that is obscured by the effluvium of the quotidian. Thank The Hoary Hosts of Haggoth that no one will try to adapt his Swamp Things into film form!


Full Interview here (via Comics Journal)

"There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them, that everything be easy. And I don't think that's doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we're becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen's animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O'Brien's King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes, I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because, frankly, I could have gotten someone, a passerby on the street, who could have gotten the same effect if you'd given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver's seat, and I think it's a pretty straight equation—that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination. "

I Love My Baby Cos She Does Good Sculptures

God, I love the Rezillos...

Don't love my baby for
her pouting lips
Don't love my baby for
her curvy hips
I love my baby 'cos
she does good
sculptures yeah

I Love Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser. Milton Glaser. Milton Glaser.


Ten Things I Have Learned
Part of AIGA Talk in London
November 22, 2001

"#1
YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didnt particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle."

Alan Moore, forgive me.

Alan Moore, forgive me. I am starting to get a little excited about the Watchmen movie.

The ads suck. Why can't they use some Dave Gibbons instead of photoshopped-to-death lame looking actors?

But this interview got me

" To me, there is no Walter. I mean, there really isn’t. Even looking at him from the third party, even popping across the iIMDB page where they put everybody’s name, and next to it when I see “ 'Walter Kovacs/Rorschach,' it drives me nuts, it should just say 'Rorschach.' "

--Jackie Earle Haley

I know it will suck, it won't hold up in the light of day. I also know I will be in the first row sometime in the first week, sliently trading lines of dialogue with Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach.

Alan. Moore. I know he's right. Black is black and white is white, Mr. A!

Things to blog/Reasons To Be Cheerful

(from Dashboard, will reformat/edit later to make links live, but just a scratchpad of STUFF at the moment).

El Ten Eleven is the kind of low key I like. http://www.elteneleven.com/

New Foreman/Zorn collaboration: LOUD.
http://www.ontological.com/RF/rfproductionfiles/2009astronome/index.html

Bonnard at the MET: what's more punk rock than painting your wife as if she were part of the furniture & giving all the love to the still life objects and the table they rest on?

Becoming Dutch: installation art mediation on Israel, the Middle East, by turns horrific and darkly, farcically funny
http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/412/museum_as_hub_becoming_dutch_at_a_distance

Cannoli from Termini Bros in Philly by mail order. YES.

20 years since Paul's Boutique. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul's_Boutique
Between copyfight & lawyers, sample, cut, paste remix has added value to our lives and copy clearance has added zilch. What great art has been created by Lars Ulrich, or lawyers ever, anyway?

How much of the future did Susan Kare wind up creating? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_kare

When someone asks me about where I'm from and then they start talking to me about "sports" I realize that my personal style is, contrary to popular belief, not OBVIOUS ENOUGH.

Boston has Revere Beach and gave the world The Volcano Suns. What have YOU done lately?!

MP3 link to White Elephant by Volcano Suns: http://www.mergerecords.com/audio/volcano/allnight/whiteelephant.mp3

What About "Market Forces"? OR Socialism for Duchebags

Bankers can't possibly afford NYC on a mere $500K/year
(Boingboing/NYT).

When it comes to creative people we hear all about market forces. Hey, I never expected a free lunch (although I get lots of free appetizers). The gov't should issue these bums a used bike, some milk crates and some futons off of Craigslist and call it a day. Get a real job, mac!

The alternative could be to arm their children with bamboo rods and go for an old fashioned Cultural Revolution.

Mao was a hypocritical asshole (like these incompetent capitalists) , but let's not throw out all of his ideas. Some of them might work very well when it comes to these 500k a year wonderboys.

Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom. And then, as usual, cut them down for fertilizer.

Something Is Stirring in The Muck

Uhh, just sick here in the Solo cell. Downing probiotic yogurt and organic blueberries in the vain hope that I will regenerate more quickly. (See Swamp Thing #21 pdf here.)

In the meantime, saw the Mission of Burma documentary, This Is Not A Photograph, Superman IV, The Quest For Peace, His Girl Friday and the episodes of the new Batman cartoon, The Brave and The Bold (which is as perfect as I had hoped it would be--both the Silver Age and new Blue Beetle are great and the Ditko DNA blends in marvelously).

Yes, feeding on a diet of comics and indie rock along with acidophilous is pretty reminiscent of the Cramps' liner notes on their first album:

In the spring of 1976, The CRAMPS began to fester in a NYC apartment. Without fresh air or natural light, the group developed its uniquely mutant strain of rock’n’roll aided only by the sickly blue rays of late night TV. While the jackhammer rhythms of punk were proliferating in NYC, The CRAMPS dove into the deepest recesses of the rock’n’roll psyche for the most primal of all rhythmic impulses — rockabilly — the sound of southern culture falling apart in a blaze of shudders and hiccups. As late night sci-fi reruns colored the room, The CRAMPS also picked and chose amongst the psychotic debris of previous rock eras - instrumental rock, surf, psychedelia, and sixties punk. And then they added the junkiest element of all — themselves.

— J. H. Sasfy, Professor of Rockology
from the liner notes of The Cramps 1979 release Gravest Hits

Cramps R.I.P.

Lux Interior, dead at 62.

Pitchfork has the news and great video links


The Cramps were Ramones-like in their ability to be incredibly influential, potent and yet somehow hang in the background of things.

Put their stuff in a mixtape or playlist and it jumps out in vitality and humor everytime. We need more Cramps in our lives.

Update: interview (Real Audio link) from an old radio archive with Lux and Ivy.

Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil

When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?
By JUDEA PEARL

Read it here.

One More Link: Gaza & Michael Totten

This is the most pragmatic, interesting interview I have read on Gaza & the Palestinians.

Khaled Abu Toameh is not your typical Palestinian journalist. He began his career at one of Yasser Arafat’s newspapers and today he writes for the Jerusalem Post.

Read it all. Among the many points he makes is that the tunnels in Gaza are not only for weapons, they are for EVERYTHING.

Smuggling is a business. We're doing Hamas an injustice by saying they're the ones who established the tunnels. These tunnels have been there since 1967. In the 1970s I visited some of the tunnels. In the 1980s I visited the tunnels. When Arafat was there I visited the tunnels. These tunnels are part of the culture. It's a cultural thing over there. If you have your own tunnel it's like you have your own business. Hamas now takes taxes and gives people a license to build their tunnel.

This is also explored in this article from Sarah A. Topol in The New Republic. Of course, one always identifies with bootleggers who are distributing potato chips and chocolates. The Iranian rocket parts are, alas, part of the package.

When I am reading about the Net as The New Human Network half the time and then reading about this stuff, a kind of cognitive dissonance sets in. Like the tribesmen in The Ape Within who immediately seize upon the introduction of an airplane as a method of dropping boulders on their rivals, the new tools will not automatically lead us to The Age Of Aquarius.

Buckley on The Pope

Buckley says it better than I did:

Why on earth would Pope Benedict XVI want to rehabilitate a Holocaust denier?