EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

God almighty, it’s filthy weather out there. Any thoughts I had about doing some gardening have been washed away in the face of the battering the world’s getting outside my window. Time to settle back with the Blackbook and indulge in a little light reading.

Reason Magazine has a fascinating interview up with Ed Burns, one of the prime movers on The Wire, probably the best TV show evar. He skewers the War On Drugs with alacrity, anger and a twist of humour. Which is pretty much what The Wire did over it’s five seasons.

Further to the announcement earlier in the week of the death of Will Elder, The Comics Journal has reprinted a massive interview they did with the man himself back in 2003. There’s insightful and intelligent discussion on the precariousness of the comics business in the 50s and 60s, and Will’s warmth and humour shine brightly all the way through. Lots of reprints of his artwork too, including some old friends like Mickey Rodent and Shermlock Shomes that I hadn’t seen in years. If you’re a fan of comics at all, I really can’t recommend this highly enough.

And finally, Futurismic have done a good’un with their weekly list of free fiction. Andre Norton, Joe R. Lansdale, and lots lots more. That should keep you going for a while.

Now, stop bothering me. Can’t you see I’m trying to read here?

As the smoke settles for another year, the arguments begin again. I’m not going to describe Eurovision as a guilty pleasure, because there’s nothing to feel guilty about. Eurovision is the best and worst of Europe all crammed into one gloopy, over-sugared, glorious mess of an evening. All the factionism, petty political point-scoring, all the eccentricity, all the glamour, all the weirdness. All there, all singing, all dancing, all for you, you lucky punter.

And once again, the bitching from the UK camp about how badly our country has done over the past few years have re-emerged. Terry Wogan has threatened to stop doing it, citing exactly the kind of openly partisan voting that’s made the competition much more fun over the past few years. Which is of course, hardly a big surprise as it’s been going on for as long as the competition’s been running. Mewing “no fair” at this point in proceedings is disingenuous, to say the least.

Despite all the griping about the Russian victory, (I was rooting for the crazed rock opera of Azerbaijan’s entry) let’s not forget that the song is a heartfelt if slightly dull ballad about believing in yourself and following your dreams – in effect, it’s a song about Eurovision. Factioneering aside, it was always in with a good chance.

Let’s be frank. We’ve hardly been sending our best and brightest out to the contest lately, have we? While France, for example, have a song produced by Daft Punk, Germany have sent their equivalent of Girls Aloud, and most of the ex-Russian protectorates have voted in their biggest selling and most popular artists, what have we got? An X-Factor reject with a duff piece of disco-lite. In fact, we’ve been sending out reality show rejects to die on their feet for the last five years or so. The last time we won was in 1997, when proper band Katrina and the Waves won with a proper Eurovision song, Shine A Light. I’m still of the opinion that the great lost opportunity for the UK was the failure three years ago to sign Morrissey up for the cause. That would have been something.

Did we deserve to come last? Well, our attitude to the contest doesn’t help. With the element of complacency and the irritating smugness that comes with our pretense that actually, we’re a bit too cool for this nonsense, being the place where all the good music comes from and all, yes, we did rather deserve the drubbing we got. Why not throw a proper, credible band into the contest next year? I say, Radiohead for Eurovision. If we lose then, we may as well pull out of the contest altogether.

(decidedly odd photo credit: werewegian on the BBC Eurovision Flickr group. And that’s by no means the strangest photo on there.)

I used to get told off when I was young for reading in class.

The small library at my primary school in Cambridgeshire was based in my home room, and it stored treasures. Almost a full shelf of the alcove tucked in one corner of that room was dedicated to French editions of TitTin and Asterix books. Presumably it was an attempt to get yer average kid interested in a foreign language. They never worked that way for me.

Nowadays I’d call the books bandes desinees, but back then they were utterly indescribable. Beautiful, magical, huge impenetrable works that made sense only in the sense of their visual storytelling, because I was eight, and French may as well have been Klingon to me. The experience was all about the interplay of picture and text in the purest possible sense. The closest I’ve been to that feeling since is reading some of Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso’s work in Zap reprints, where they would abandon narrative clarity in favour of the sheer panel-to-panel rush of tumbling pictures. Too add to the effect, their speech bubbles would frequently be filled with heiroglyphs, or squiggles. I had a twinge of nostalgia in reading those works, although I’d never seen them before, and I blame that on my early TinTin readings. I found joy in the knowing and simultaneous not knowing what was happening.

I couldn’t leave those books alone. Lunchtime, breaktime, there I was, the quiet, bookish spectacled child (no change there, I’m afraid), hunkered in a corner, buried in an Asterix. It became an addiction. So I was regularly pulled up for having a copy of Asterix Et Les Britons (imagine the headmangling I took for seeing English habits through a French lens, in a language I didn’t understand, and being too shy to ask why all the British warriors stopped fighting at four o’clock for cups of l’eau chaud) or Les Tresor Des Red Rackham open on my lap when I was supposed to be concentrating on my maths.

Which explains two things. My enduring love of comics, and my inability to add up without using my fingers.

Thinking about it, I was grokking those books rather than reading them. Scuse the Heinlein.

The other source of comicy goodness when I was little came from my Uncle Doug. I will, with his permission, talk more about my Heavy Metal Uncle at a later date, but for now let’s just discuss his exquisite good taste. Doug had a cupboard full of carefully boxed Corgi Bond cars, which I and my brother gleefully trashed in frantic reenactments of the car chases from Goldfinger. Doug had a cupboard full of mid-60’s TinTin reprints, which I snorted. They were familiar and strange at the same time. Guns suddenly went Bang instead of PAN. Snowy’s bark was just that, instead of the AIIIooo that Herge had written for him.

But this was just the core of the motherlode. He also had a pile of Marvel and Mad annuals, and it was these that well and truly spun my head the wrong way on it’s thread. Early adventures of the Avengers and Iron Man were snarfed next to the exquisite parodies and appalling jokes of Mort Drucker, Don Martin, Wally Wood and (yes, finally, we get to the point) Will Elder.

The news last week that Will had died at the age of ninety-five dried something up in me. I would spend hours poring over the insanely detailed artwork he would regularly fire off for Mad. Here’s an example that seems to be popping up quite a bit in the backwash of the announcement: RESTAURANT.

He was an extraordinary draughtsman, an amazing storyteller, and to my mind should be lauded with the guy I frequently used to mix him up with, Will Eisner. Through such errors are other great connections made. It should be pointed out, though, that you only assert that Will Elder created The Spirit to a comics-literate crowd once. Believe me, the memory still brings a flush up my collar.

Will Elder’s work was a gateway to some serious influences on my creative life, and fostered an enduring love in clean, cartoony and complex illustration. It’s a heartcracker that he’s gone, but I’m forever grateful for the path on which he put me.

Hey Will, how’s yer ma?

via BoingBoing.

more strangeness here.

…and the quote of the day…

Katherine has a pink button on her backpack which reads “I’m not shy, I’m studying my prey.”

Heads up. Code Grey has a slot booked for Straight 8.

Any interested parties should report to the Renoir in Mayfair on July 30th at 7:30, where the latest Sick Puppy Thing, the “black and white film about colour” will be screening on the third night of Straight8’s increasingly successful attempt to take over the Rushes Shorts Festival.

Be there or be somewhere else.

(pic credit: Nick Scott)

Oops, my bad. Turns out the clip I posted a couple of days ago is the second time Chris Ware has supplied animation for This American Life. Here’s the first one from 2007…

If anything, this one’s even better. It certainly speaks to me as a film-maker, and as an observer of how sticking a camera in someone’s face will totally change the way they behave.

Oh, this is nice. Pure pop from The Bird and The Bee, and a rather nice little demo of OSX into the bargain, courtesy of film-maker Dennis Liu. And a gentle heads up at the end as to the availability of the song in question – in the iTunes Store, of course!

Now, will they release the promo on iTunes as well?

…and about time too. The Happiest Cartoonist in The World has finally branched out into animation, working on a segment for This American Life.

It’s a thing of charm and humour, and I’d love to see more like this. Think Jimmy Corrigan meets Creature Comforts…

(via YesButNoButYes)

…well, insomuch as there’s any kind of winner when it comes to the filmic freeforall that is Straight8, we’ve made a screening this year.

Code Grey has been longlisted to screen as part of the Straight8 nights during the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival this July. More details as we get them. OK, it’s not Cannes or Channel 4, but it’s as good as to my mind. There’s still a slight question mark as to whether everything on the long list gets it’s three minutes of fame, but I’m not even thinking about that yet. I’m chuffed that my mate Fiona Brownlie’s in there as well. If it comes off, it’s gonna be a party.

Great news from the freeform gurus at Jersey City’s own WFMU:

Coming soon: an online digital library of music that will allow music fans, webcasters and podcasters to listen, download, and stream for free, with no restrictions, registration or fees. And most amazing of all, it will all be legal.

The Free Music Archive is being directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America, and is funded by a grant from the New York State Music Fund.

We take inspiration for the Free Music Archive from Creative Commons and the open source software movement. Both are based on the idea that there is merit in waiving certain rights to intellectual property. Radio has always offered the public free access to new music. The Free Music Archive is a continuation of that purpose, designed for the age of the internet.

Isn’t that great? I’ve been a fan of the FMU for years, and Beware Of The Blog is a regular hit on my newsfeed. in fact, as I’m writing this, I’m checking out some cool sounds from Philadelphia on one of their regular sampler pages. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about this. Who knows, it could be the impetus for the garagepunk stylophone phreakout I’ve been musing on for a while…