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Jan. 6th, 2010


[info]jj79

Man of the Week: Marc Singer



More Marc Singer )

[info]kdotdammit

Art I Like: Letizia Battaglia



Spent my morning gathering my notes for The Messenger which will be this week's Big Movie Review (as opposed to the Short Takes). In the meanwhile, I got sidetracked by the amazing photography of Letizia Battaglia, so I must pause for a KDD Art I Like Moment.













I also stumbled across the documentary Excellent Cadavers about the Sicilian Mafia. Luckily, it's available on DVD, so I can check it out. It will be a good companion film to Gomorrah (from my 2009 Top Ten).

Off to work I go. See you soon with my review of The Messenger. I'm also going to finish my KDD Movie Review Catalog this week. I use it all the time. I still have about three years to add to it!

Here's an excellent slideshow of Battaglia's work:


[info]warren_ellis

Me At Marvel Digital

Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, which is where you can read a shitload of Marvel comics for between five and ten Yanqui dollars a month, is sorting their inventory by creator.

Which means there’s a Warren Ellis page on Marvel Digital.

A lot of it is, of course, appalling shit that I was hoping might disappear forever. But, on the other hand, you can spend ten bucks on joining for one month and read all of NEXTWAVE and all of my THUNDERBOLTS run (which was quite funny in places, and apparently my having the Green Goblin give monologues while naked was somewhat influential on the development of the Marvel universe or something)…

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

It Looks So Warm

What’s that? Cold? Snow? Ice? Not where Meredith Yayanos is living. She’s down in New Zealand, and the weather is apparently fine.

This is warren ellis dot com and I want to go back to bed please.

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(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]jj79

New on TMR

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Jan. 5th, 2010


[info]kdotdammit

Untitled


Finished another collage in the B&W series. I have no idea what to call it. I'm very blank. Suggestions or words of any sort welcome. Very. Please.
Tags: ,

[info]warren_ellis

Notebooknotes: Writing DO ANYTHING

DO ANYTHING was mostly written in a Moleskine reporter’s notepad with a propelling pencil. The page reproduced below — cranked up in GIMP to make it visible, if not legible — appears to date from late May 2009. It’s written in block caps because I needed to be able to copy-type from it, and as we know from earlier posts, my handwriting is shitty.

Pretty much every page of DO ANYTHING in this notebook looks like this:

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If you’ve read DO ANYTHING, you know a lot of it is pretty densely layered with connections. The column was written in a very specific way to maximise the information. It always, always started out as longhand, early in the day. The longhand was always about the forward thrust of the column — the column meanders a lot, but it doesn’t wander, it’s constantly following a channel. As I go, I’m signposting things I need to check later, or need to remember to tie in.

Later, I sit down and copy-type the thing into Notepad, with a browser open, because I’m fact-checking as I go. The longhand draft is all mental, and that includes working in information from memory. Since I often can’t remember what I did yesterday, it needs to be checked.

I’d write the longhand version in intense two-hour stretches, and usually had way too much for a single column. After 003, in fact, I just kept writing without thinking about column breaks, and found those breaks later after the copy-typing.

Once I’d typed the column up, the real draft started. Because I’d then spend an hour plugging names from the column into Google, looking for more connections, as well as following my signposts, and layering that stuff into the piece. The Notepad draft after an hour or so on Google was the actual first draft, and that’s what’d get pasted into OpenOffice to get edited and cleaned up.

Really, an incredibly complicated and time-devouring process for a column no-one read. But it was fun, and it taught me things.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

DO ANYTHING: Jack Kirby Ripped My Flesh

The serial version of the first DO ANYTHING book concluded today. It’ll be out in print in April, and it’ll look something like this:

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(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

Links for 2010-01-05

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

Launching The Burj

Curzon from Coming Anarchy took some photos of the opening of the Burj Khalifa, the new top medieval folly in Dubai. The thing about criminal lunatics who live like God’s just keeping their chairs warm is that, well, they do know how to put on a show:

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More at the link.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

Stuck In The Middle

Of a 300-word column on comics for SFX. 300 poxy words. This usually means I’m going to have to scrap it and start again. It’s not due to file until the 11th, but I want to get it out of the way today, because I need to be producing some comics pages by the end of the week. Of course, at the end of the week, I’m planning to be in London to consult with a few people on a few things, so…

Provided London hasn’t been cut off by snow, of course. Extreme weather warnings are popping up all over the country today, and both London and Southend are pegged for "heavy snow" tonight — about a foot of it, by all accounts. People in other parts of the world are laughing their arses off at the very idea of that being "heavy snow," I know. But you can confidently expect this shambles of a country to fall over and play dead after a foot of snow.

Today I had a very, very strange job offer.

This turned up in my inbox the other day, from artist Sam Haney.

(Larger version)

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You too can send me dirty pictures at my "dump" email address, which I check every day or two, at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

On Whitechapel Today (5jan09)

At my internet cave today:

* The Katie West Residency

* The Brian Wood Residency

Both here until end of Friday. Go and meet them.

* REMAKE/REMODEL: Ace Of Space – return of the artists’ challenge thread.

* Free Paper Science newspaper from We Are Words + Pictures – oh yes. We do free stuff now.

* Comics on Sale This Week (Jan 6) – For people with a local comics store.

* SHUDDERTOWN; March 2010 from Image/Shadowline

* GHOST PROJEKT: Coming in March from Oni Press

Preview material for two new comics by creators who visit Whitechapel

* DJs lets post some mixes thread!

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

DO ANYTHING 026

Concluding the first volume.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

Radio Masts

Clayton "Siege" Cubitt’s notebook is probably a lot nicer to wake up to than mine, you know.

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Good morning. This is warrenellisdotcom. I write things here.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]jj79

New on TMR

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Jan. 4th, 2010


[info]warren_ellis

Post-Industrial Broadcast

Broadcast and network culture. (And Atemporality, which, like the term "post-industrial," you’re likely to hear a lot about this year.)

In my part of the world, in the 1960s, you’d come home from work — as my mother did, as Niki’s mother did — and the first thing you’d do is put the radio on. You’ve already selected the broadcast channel you want. You’ve found out the frequency from friends, from a magazine, or just twisted around the dial ’til you hunted it out and left it there. Radio Caroline, or Radio Essex, broadcasting off the Maunsell Sea Fort called Knock John. These are pirate radio stations, outside the control or mandate of the BBC. And you’ve left the dial locked to that frequency because it’s the only way you can hear the music you like. It’s music the BBC doesn’t play, and the BBC’s pretty much the only game in town, if your town is ashen, brick-faced Sixties Britain. Broadcast technology has gotten to the point where nutters like Paddy Roy Bates can lash together a kit on a concrete plug sticking out of the Thames Estuary and blanket the area in modern music. It’s on the verge of a consumer-society democratisation.

My RSS feed reader is tuned to several broadcasters. I’ve found out the web addresses from friends, from magazines, from twisting around a search engine until I found what I was looking for. These broadcasters send music directly to my main daily listening device, which is a X61 Thinkpad (as opposed to an ITT transistor radio). And, even though I live in 2010 Britain and have a few more options than three or four BBC stations, it’s still often the only way I can hear the music I like.

(My daughter comes home and puts on YouTube, clicking around playlists. YouTube is in fact the radio for her and her friends, right now to the shitty sound quality.)

We’re in the depths of the consumer-society democratisation of the relevant technologies. It is really not hard to be a broadcaster now.

There’s obviously going to be a rush of tablet technologies this year. These are largely going to be about the broadcast of magazines. This is going to be kind of a new thing: over-the-air simultaneous delivery of post-print journalistic/design digital objects to handheld devices. Without immediate democratisation. This is a thing that large publishing corporations would presumably be intent on controlling access to. This will, equally obviously, not happen.

This is something I’m going to be kicking around for a while.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

Lex Machina

Recent work:

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(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]kdotdammit

HAPPY HAPPY


Happy Happy, Roger Ballen


Amazing what 14 days of sleeping in late can do for the psyche. Today was my first day back in the frying pan, and holy shit did someone crank up the temperature. I started with a run on the Rillito, knowing that once I hit the office, STRESS would slap me in the face. And it did. Straight from the frying pan into the fire without stopping at Go or collecting 200 dollars. Same story. Different day. Except that I’m RESTED, so I’m handling it. Yeah, no time to breathe today. I was slammed at every turn with MORE MORE MORE MORE to do, but I got through it smiling. Why? Because I took fourteen days off work, stayed home, slept in, did not paint my house, and did not stress out for the whole14 days. Remind me to do that again sometime.


Happy Time, He Sen


Right now I’m running out the door to go see The Messenger, but in the meanwhile, I want to share with you some HAPPY HAPPY since a Well Rested KDD is a Happy KDD, even when I’m spending my day banging my head against a brick wall.

Here's a Big Choking dose of HAPPY. For the record, I thought about using one of Damien Hirst’s Happy Heads, but let’s face it. These things are BUT ASS UGLY, so they’re not allowed here. No ugly's gonna fuck up my happy.

Off to the movies I go . . . "


Happy Happy, Choi Jeong Hwa


Happy Life, Yang Shaobin


Can You Smell The Happy Days To Come?, Sean Bluechel


Relaxed and Happy, Bai Tao


My Happy Baby - Mermaid, Zeng Lingxin


Off to the movies I go . . .

[info]warren_ellis

Mangal City

Speculative architecture from design team Chimera:

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our vision is to define an urban ecosystem which supports housing and cultural programs and has the ability to adapt, transform, mutate and adjust according to the specific urban and social character of the site and of manhattan. this urban ecological system is taking as a model an organism in nature, specifically the mangrove plant. the mangrove plant and its collective the mangal, provide examples of social associative principles as well as structural capacities and hybrid responses to environmental and contextual conditions.

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Interview and more images at the link.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

[info]warren_ellis

Links for 2010-01-03

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

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