Top Cat

I've been a fan of the wood engravings of Anatoly Kalashnikov (no relation, as far as I know) for several years, and have what seems to be the only collection of his bookplates in print, containing several hundred powerful modernist designs. I keep an eye out on eBay for them, and there aren't more than a few a year. I just got one there for what still seems a steal, especially as it's more than usually bonkers, and both cats and vodka are a few of my favourite things.

Here kitty kitty kitty...

Mod out and off to the picture framers.

Tramline 3 Smells of Pee

And other complaints from the Helsinki Complaints Choir...

Dude!!

That's, like, a totally rockin' tshirt you've got on...

And just in time for the Tenacious D film, too.

Powerstanced Mod out.

The Time is Right for Dancing in the Street

"The Republican beast is fuckin' dead! Twelve years of that rampaging Republican fuckin' elephant-beast finally brought to its knees. Yes! You're dead, you fucker! You fuck! You fuck, you're dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! We hate you! Hate you! Now do you know it? Now do you feel it? Feel the fuckin' hate. Feel it. Call off your dogs. Call your little Vietnamese pot-bellied Rush Limbaugh back to your fold, you demon fuck! Bring Pat Buchanan back! Call him back, you lost! Finally...the Republican beast-elephant brought to its fuckin' knees. 'Cause I feel like me and my friends and all the artists in the fuckin' country were like little pygmy tribes shootin' darts at that elephant for twelve years, and finally [elephant trumpeting, then crashing noise]. Do our little pygmy dance: [singing] Na na na na na na na! Na na na na na na na! Na na na! Yes!"
- Bill Hicks, 1993.

What he said.

Back to my Future

I've just discovered that 2000AD have all their covers scanned in. The one above is my all time favourite, from the beginning of the second "Bad Company" story. It was on the wall by my bed until I was about 22. (This one is my second favourite).

A few years ago I sold the four Bad Company graphic novels on ebay, and of course re-read them before doing so. It's an astonishing piece of work, drawing on many Vietnam movies as well as Conrad (and so of course Apocalypse Now), and a lot more complex that people would imagine. I found it too violent and slightly sick at 31, when I was 14 it was simply cool. Go figure.

Looking back at 2000AD, it was way more than a bunch of aliens or futuristic cops speaking in bubbles. The first time I read "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot I realised that a picture I'd cut out and had had on my wall for about 2 years featured a quote from it (from a strip called "Shadows" where a privileged woman loses her identity chip and thus her access to everything from hospitals and banks to her apartment building, all because the machines don't know who she is. Not so far-fetched these days...).
The last Strontium Dog story was basically the Holocaust set in a neo-fascist Britain, and warned of the dangers of having a set idea of "Britishness" that people (in this case mutants) could be excluded from. It referenced the KKK and Mosley and invented an entirely plausible set of icons for the state to champion, like Stonehenge and King Arthur. It probably helped me become the sceptical internationalist I am today.
Of course there was pap like Chopper, the sky-surfing champion, but even there his death was for me a moment of real shock. I still remember the series of wordless panels closing in from above onto his stationary board, inches from the finish line.

I'm glad it's still going, even though I haven't read it in about 15 years. We need sci-fi to tell us what to build next, and to illustrate that the future is just the past with fancy gadgets, so we'd better get thinking harder and knowing more.

Judge Mod.

When t'Internet breaks

I couldn't connect to the net last night. So I tidied up, cooked about 2 hours earlier than normal, drank beer and watched the Liverpool game, laughed at lot at The Secret Policeman's Ball (Sarah Silverman is a genius) and compiled a cd for Ford.

It was terrible. Thank god I'm back online staring blankly at this thing. mmm. Pixels...

Sedentary Mod.

PS El Reg reports that BT had a server problem last night. All over Britain people were tidying up, doing jigsaws or playing board games (maybe). Perhaps they could do it deliberately once a month to help us with our addiction...