10/24/2007
10/16/2007
10/09/2007
10/03/2007
Wilful Are the Ways of the Countryside
-from Travaux publics (Éditions Matiére)
Yuichi Yokoyama (new book out soon from PictureBox)
Reminds me of:
-from
Legal Daisy Spacing by Christopher Winn.
9/29/2007
9/21/2007
9/20/2007
What Happens Beyond Death?
One for the ages! from one of the greatest blogs on all civilized planets, Pappy's Golden Age fanzine.
9/19/2007
9/18/2007
9/10/2007
9/09/2007
Talking Heads
Someone should make a program that automatically selects the talking heads--just the heads--of people on CNN and fuzz out all the background bustle and sexy graphic framing and the maddening crawl and DOW Jones numbers...
9/06/2007
Literature is not Comics
Here's a link to an interesting San Diego Comic Con panel, "Comics are NOT Literature." The link will expire at the end of September, by which time we'll apparently be hearing all about what a great idea it would be to kill tons of Iranians. It's an interesting panel. It has its dull directionless times, which is par for the course, but overall gave me a lot to think about. I wish someone would write those ideas up. I agreed with whoever said it's basically identity politics. The formal issues are interesting to a point but beyond that it's about economics and accidents of history. I always think most issues or questions, especially about words, would be better attacked by cutting to the chase and being pragmatic about it. What needs to be done and said to keep things healthy and diverse and thriving? So I was like "right on" when Dan Nadel were talking about how applying words like "literature" to comics is less about how well or not the label fits, and is more about speaking the language one needs to speak to gain institutional support (major gallery collections, major library collections, grants, academia) etc. Nadel says something like "the lack of institutional support is the major problem comics have faced in the 20th century." But we're getting there. Of course institutions bring their own set of problems too... There's other good stuff in there too, and the panel reflects a spectrum of approaches people take--from Nadel's "I don't even think of it as reading" to folks who come from the literary side.
9/04/2007
Astrona
-both of these by Chris Foss.
From a huge selection of these radical paintings
over at Astrona: Space and Astronomical Art Journal.
From a huge selection of these radical paintings
over at Astrona: Space and Astronomical Art Journal.
9/02/2007
Inspired by Graphic Novelist
(Looks like a skull, doesn't it, and the lightning looks like the track of a tear.)
and
-Joshua Clover reviews Stardust. Isn't that strange and scary–the idea that people think there's such a thing as "graphic novel culture" and that these movies reflect it?"It is surely an act of unfairness to judge graphic novel culture on the basis of a movie, one made from a story that meant to be a novel and was only a graphic novel incidentally.
Still.
One gets the sense that Neil Gaiman's rep as a genius must somehow be a reflection on the subculture that has so elected him."
8/31/2007
8/27/2007
8/13/2007
8/12/2007
7/27/2007
Rumbling
This thoughtful and pointlessly melancholy man has been living for many years, by now, in the basement, because the house that rose above it has been destroyed or is uninhabitable. When the religious wars broke out, he had hoped it was a question--he was a foreigner in that country and practiced another religion--of the customary depravities to which that region's inhabitants were inclined, all of the sanguineous of dying in some noisy and exhibitionistic way, and of killing others with particular cruelty. He bore no love for that country, where he lived as the secretary to the ambassador of another country, where wars of religion were not waged. His country fought atheistic wars, scientifically based. At the moment when the wars of religion had broken out, the secretary had been unable to return to his native land, where a ferocious scientific war was then underway: a war concerned, at least in origin, with hexagons and acids, but which bit by bit had then expanded to the inclusion of nearly all the disciplines, with the sole exclusion of ancient history. Now, the secretary, whom you see in sober dress, has been said, in generic terms, to practice another religion, but there is also the possibility that he practices none at all. What his country most respects is allegiance to ideals upon scientific bases; he himself, however, has no great love of science, and if he had to choose a field in which to specialize, ancient history would be his choice. But since this is the only non-controversial subject, choosing it would have been regarded as suspect, and derided as cowardly. He would have been put to death. Fortuitously, the outbreak of the religious war had allowed him to give no response to requests for clarification that had come from his homeland, but at the very same time he had definitively exiled himself in the country of religious wars. For years he had ventured no more than a few dozen yards from his cellar; he was probably the only foreigner left in a country where massacre was pandemic, and becoming pedantic; a country that no longer had cities, but picturesque expanses of ruins awaiting the death of the last combatant, so as then to grow ivy-covered and be transported into History. Though he had never admitted it in so many words, he liked to live in that territory precisely for its being the theater of a war that was alien to him. So History was none of his doing, but was something perceived as a rumble to which he had grown accustomed; as a lover of ancient history and dead languages, he too looked forward to living--as had always been his dream--in a country made only and entirely of ruins among grasses that have no history.
--Giorgio Manganelli,
translated by Henry Martin,
from Centuria: 100 Ouroboric Novels
Also see this BLDGBLOG post.
Spider Spoke
The Spider Spoke is one of my favorite new minicomics, and #3 is the best yet. I was really inspired by this one. Tomu Smith can be reached at tomu_smith at symbol yahoo.co.uk.
7/07/2007
Eternal Sonata
Chopin/Charlie Kaufman/RPG video game fans rejoice:
"Eternal Sonata [for the Xbox 360] follows the adventures of famed composer Frederic Chopin as he travels through his own dream world filled with colorful characters and stunning locales. In a land where music influences both combat and exploration, Chopin sets out on a journey not only of self-discovery, but also one of redemption."
Watch the incredible trailer here.
UPDATE:
Thanks to K. Thor who points out I had mistaken the title of the article for the title of the game. No Charlie K connection.
"Eternal Sonata [for the Xbox 360] follows the adventures of famed composer Frederic Chopin as he travels through his own dream world filled with colorful characters and stunning locales. In a land where music influences both combat and exploration, Chopin sets out on a journey not only of self-discovery, but also one of redemption."
Watch the incredible trailer here.
UPDATE:
Thanks to K. Thor who points out I had mistaken the title of the article for the title of the game. No Charlie K connection.
6/16/2007
New Construction #1
I made this zine to inspire myself to finish other things.
48 pages
$2
Should be at MOCCA
next weekend, but I won't.
For sale soon at my
website and fine stores.
6/15/2007
Shakespeare in the Wild West in the Park
During our last presidential election I made a vow (wrote it down in my vow/sketchbook) that if Bush won I would give up following political news and wean myself off sweet, sweet outrage and instead work at reading Shakespeare for the next 4 years. Like most election promises, this fell by the wayside. Would a bewilderment/outrage junkie miss out on these fat years?
But the other weekend I did go see "Much Ado About Nothing" with Ted and Sacha. I had a lovely time. It was free in Forest Park and the spin was What if...they talked like Shakespeare in the Wild West?! Claudio the cowboy. We sat toward the back, near the portable toilets. Their doors constantly opening and shutting behind us made a creaking, groaning sound. It was like being on a ship watching cowboys do Shakespeare. Also you could hear thumping dance music from an actual wedding somewhere else in the park.
But the other weekend I did go see "Much Ado About Nothing" with Ted and Sacha. I had a lovely time. It was free in Forest Park and the spin was What if...they talked like Shakespeare in the Wild West?! Claudio the cowboy. We sat toward the back, near the portable toilets. Their doors constantly opening and shutting behind us made a creaking, groaning sound. It was like being on a ship watching cowboys do Shakespeare. Also you could hear thumping dance music from an actual wedding somewhere else in the park.
6/10/2007
100 years
Earlier this year I re-read Pragmatism by William James. It's not James at his best, but it's one of the main things for which he's remembered. I noted that Pragmatism was published in June of 1907, making this month 100 years. I thought about maybe blogging about that and filed it away.
Soon after I worked through most of Rorty and His Critics. Rorty was a follower of James and pragmatist. I had not read Rorty when I was in college "studying" philosophy. After Rorty and His Critics, I read some of Rorty's other books, not finishing any, but finding that he, like James, seemed mostly right on, as far as how I see and feel things to be.
Anyways late last night I saw that Richard Rorty has died, 100 years to the month after the publication of Pragmatism.
Soon after I worked through most of Rorty and His Critics. Rorty was a follower of James and pragmatist. I had not read Rorty when I was in college "studying" philosophy. After Rorty and His Critics, I read some of Rorty's other books, not finishing any, but finding that he, like James, seemed mostly right on, as far as how I see and feel things to be.
Anyways late last night I saw that Richard Rorty has died, 100 years to the month after the publication of Pragmatism.
6/09/2007
A Cultural History of the Modern Age
Oh, Hans, it's true--we can get through 3 volumes of the Friedell's Kulturgeschichte, appreciating its idiosyncracies, its fine anecdotal style, humanism, and tragic vision, while noting its spotty misunderstandings, its exaggerations, and we can feel moved to write on the Internet perhaps a helpful review, a thoughtfully qualified 4-starred recommendation, hoping that somehow a reader or two (of two) out there in the English-speaking world may feel moved to hunt down this long out-of-print, strange, magnificent, entertaining history, but nevertheless, in the end, the pluto-oligarchy will stick it to us.
I got mine out of the St. Louis Public Library.
No luck here.
Here's an electronic Volume I, anyways.
Here's Clive James on Friedell.
and here is how it all ends.
.
6/06/2007
6/01/2007
Turtle
Today on the way home from breakfast I found a turtle in the road. To save him from being run over, I put him in my kitchen for a while. I woke Katie up to look at it. At first she thought it had got into the house on its own somehow. Then it crawled into the cat's food dish and sat there. We put it into a box and brought it to the park.
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