From Manga News Service:

In a landmark ruling in the Japanese court system, the first judgment stemming from obscenity charges has come down against a manga.

The key figure in the case is Motonori Kishi (54) who first started his publishing company Shobunkan in 1968. He was arrested pending the release of his manga Honey Room, the charge being distributing obscene material. Tokyo’s District Court found Kishi guilty on January 13, sentencing him to one year in prison and suspension for three years. The verdict has the adult rich comics industry in Japan in quite a nervous state. Ashita No Joe mangaka Tetsuya Chiba appeared in court as a defendant side witness. According to the testimony of A Tokyo Metropolitan Police inspector, the investigation was started based on a memo from LDP Diet member Katsuei Hirasawa. The defendant’s side argued that charge violated the constitution that secures the freedom of expression. An appeal is currently underway and a hering is scheduled for March 17th.

Japanese bothered by an unforgettable romance that later soured and continues to niggle need never worry again, because the wasuresaseya are there to help them forget their lost love…

Wasuresaseya, which literally means “professionals who make you forget,” exist to help people get over — or get out of — relationships they may once have wanted to remember forever but have now developed a change of heart.

“Rehabilitation of the mind” is a process that usually takes about one to two months. The period for forgetting is decided during the initial psychological counseling session. Severe cases, however, can take up to half a year. Wasuresaseya are expected to rush to the client’s side no matter where they are or what time they call for aid…

Saturn’s small snow-white moon, Enceladus, has revealed a turbulent past, according to the latest images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

The moon is covered in snaking ridges, chasms and scratches, which probably means that the moon has been repeatedly squeezed and stretched.

Cassini passed within 1200 kilometres of Enceladus on Thursday, taking detailed pictures of its surface, resolving details as tiny as 60 metres across. The landscape revealed is remarkably complicated for such a small moon – only 500 kilometres across.

“Enceladus is a geologist’s paradise,” says William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis, US. “It has endless sets of closely-spaced fractures and faults.” He adds there are also blocks of high terrain and a variety of rifts.

This is all evidence of a tumultuous past, according to Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, US. “It has been pulled, stretched and compressed in multiple episodes of deformation and relaxation.” The gravity of Saturn and another moon, Dione, are probably combining to disturb the interior of Enceladus, causing these upheavals, he says.

The same processes may be destroying old craters, heating the surface so that it slowly slumps – even causing floods of icy lava. “I’m betting that liquid ammonia-water is involved,” says McKinnon. He also points out what seem to be volcanic ice ridges.

And Enceladus’s bright surface suggests there may be even more energetic volcanism at work. It is the brightest body in the solar system, so close to pure white that it must be covered in fresh ice – or snow – fired out of ice geysers. These geysers might blast some of that snow into orbit around Saturn, forming the planet’s tenuous E ring, suggest scientists. They are looking out for volcanic plumes on the moon’s horizon, where they would be easiest to spot against the inky blackness of space.

Silicon breast implants could be replaced by tissue grown from a person’s own stem cells within a decade, suggests new research.

Jeremy Mao of the University of Illinois, in Chicago, US, took human stem cells and used these to grow fat tissue using a biologically compatible scaffolding. He then successfully implanted the tissue into mice with an immune deficiency to prevent them from rejecting the implants. The implants had maintained their size and shape after four weeks.

Implants grown from stem cells could provide a safer alternative to silicon or saline implants, which can rupture and also interfere with breast cancer detection. They could also be aesthetically superior, keeping their shape and size for longer than artificial inserts, which typically shrink by 40% to 60% over many years, through spreading…

See the one with the fishnets and the grin? That’s the illustrator of QUIT CITY, that is — and you can still buy it here. Just barely — we’re at the end of the printrun on all the Apparat books now.

QUIT CITY, that is. Not the girl in the fishnets. But you can throw money at her anyway. Go on.

Have you ever wanted to just drill someone to the spot and make them gasp, with nothing more than what came out of your head?

Ever heard “Telstar”? Instrumental from the Fifties, created and produced by Joe Meek. Inspired by the launch of the first telecommunications satellite, of all things. And it’s one of the most purely joyful things you ever heard. I knew a guy who seemed to spend half his life collecting versions of “Telstar.” I’m listening to a live recording of a band called Laika And The Cosmonauts covering it at the moment. Joe Meek was Britain’s first independent record producer. His later stuff, with the Blue Men, still sounds weirdly contemporary. The best Joe Meek songs, like “I Hear A New World,” are like sitting in an alien church. Music that imparts joy and glory from another planet.

Joe Meek was a Mind Gangster.

I think either Chris Sebela or Matt Fraction introduced me to the term, talking about Phil Spector. The term derives from something Brian Wilson said during his craziest period: he believed that Phil Spector was telepathically stealing all his ideas, and called him “a Mind Gangster”.

Go grab a copy of, say, “River Deep Mountain High,” which a critic once described as the sound of God hitting the world and the world hitting God back. Possibly the apotheosis of his Wall Of Sound technique, that immense wave of presence. He was way ahead of his time. When he started out, the Hollywood recording studios he strived in didn’t have the capacity to contain his sound — the mics couldn’t cope with the vast surge of information being thrown at them. But when the apparatus caught up with him, my God, Phil Spector could drill people to the spot. He almost single-handedly invented teenage angst in music.

Mind Gangster.

Andrew Loog Oldham invented thievery in Western music. When people talk about “pop Svengalis”, they’re talking about Oldham. He managed, produced and essentially invented the Rolling Stones, at age 21, a feverpitch criminal brain showing Jagger and Richards how to creatively steal from the blues and their contemporaries and any other damn thing that was laying around, and making their every breath into a Media Event. (And, on the side, pretty much signing Brian Jones’ death certificate.) In the days before miniature tape decks and dashboard CD players, Oldham was the guy who had a record player in his Rolls Royce. Unlike Spector, he barely touched the production board. He created the ambience. He had the Knowledge. He was conducting, his head out in the Superflow, waiting for the sound that’d make the world skip a beat under its needle.

Mind Gangster.

These are all stories from the days when rock and roll was new, the music business was small, everyone knew everybody but no-one knew anything. There was space.

Joe Meek killed himself. Phil Spector went crazy. Andrew Loog Oldham fried himself with money and drugs and now lives quietly in South America. Because, you know, crime doesn’t pay, and even Mind Gangsters come up hard against natural law in the end.

But isn’t it worth it, for those blazing years when you can control someone’s breath and take them somewhere they didn’t know existed?

( (c) Warren Ellis 2004. Another piece from last year that I feel like preserving. Since the writing of it, I believe Andrew Loog Oldham has moved to sedate Vancouver.)

New STREAMING column, mostly about flipbook comics, with a bit about the cover to “London Calling”, is up.

Also, if you go here, you’ll find the archive of previous editions.

William Patrick Butler at the Jackson Free Press covers DESOLATION JONES:

So, what is “Desolation Jones” all about? You probably can’t say it better than Ellis himself:

“‘Desolation Jones’ bears a ‘Mature Readers’ advisory, which means, in the world of comics, that it is Not For Children because it contains such elements as Satanic Language, Marijuana Use, A Bit of The Old Ultra-Violence, and Hitler’s Porn.”

Yes. He’s not lying. There is indeed Hitler Porn in the first issue. We never see it, but it is the catalyst that starts the story moving. The Hitler Porn, made and occasionally acted in by Hitler himself, has been stolen, you see? It must be found. It’s considered priceless to true connoisseurs in the porn community. To find this prize, the owner turns to Desolation Jones…

…a tight script filled with Ellis’ trademarked wit and brutal detail of non-sanitized ultra-violence, “Desolation Jones” is a comic to watch.

“What’s holding up our milks?”

Colored Shadows: gliding, widescreen indiedelica, guitar washes, textures out of the Bristol Sound and Air.

A test of the controversial US missile defence system failed on Sunday – the second time this has happened in recent months.

An interceptor missile sited on an island base in the Pacific Ocean was meant to obliterate a test ballistic missile in mid-flight, but it failed to launch, officials from the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) revealed on Monday…

The target missile, carrying a mock warhead, did launch from Kodiak, Alaska at 0922 local time. But the interceptor missile – a rocket carrying a “kill vehicle” that detaches and homes in on the target – failed to get off the ground at the Ronald Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Island in the central Pacific.

The US defence shield was to go live in September 2004, but the programme has fallen months behind schedule. A test in December 2004 also failed because the interceptor failed to launch.

The MDA revealed on 14 January 2005 that this was caused by the interceptor’s internal safety system preventing lift-off…

Tracking the future.

Susannah Breslin, mildly dislocated by jetlag, perversion and the London chill, grimaces at the elderly Vauxhall Bridge Road locals staggering around the smoky little pub in beer-smeared football-fan facepaint. Susannah’s a writer, over here in her occasional role as a presenter for the Playboy Channel’s SEXCETERA to cover an English bukkake shoot. Bukkake is a Japanese innovation in porn video wherein groups of men masturbate en masse over a single girl. A successful bukkake concludes with one brain-damaged woman looking like she’s had a bucket of cake icing upended over her head. It transpires that most of the male participants pay to attend. Ninety pounds sterling to jerk off like an ugly ape in humping season along with a dozen other fellow middle-aged married businessmen who’ve probably all told the wife that they’re off on a salesman training course in Slough. Bukkake made it to America a few years ago, and now it’s here in Britain; the cutting edge in depersonalised, heartless, gutless sex. Which is why it fascinates Susannah. But Susannah tracks the future of commodified sex. In her head, she’s already moved on.

She gleefully tells me of Rob Black, an American pornographer already in trouble with the law and facing an obscenity charge. He was apparently instructed by his lawyers to keep a low profile and behave himself. But he’s a second-generation porno guy, and has the family honour to uphold. He has therefore invented what is termed The Ass Milkshake. This involves several men ejaculating into one woman’s rectum, and then introducing milk and cream into the cavity with the aid of a speculum. The mixture is then decanted out of her backside into a glass, and presented for her to drink.

And you know that, somewhere, Rob Black is wondering how he’s going to top that before his court case.

In Japan, of course, bukkake is history. Susannah describes to me the new fetish video craze there, which I can only term Dizzy Girl Spinning Eye Movies. A girl is set to spinning around on the spot in a bedroom. Around and around. Soon, she’s too dizzy to stand up. She falls down on a bed. And the camera zooms in hard on her eyes, to see her eyeballs spinning around in their sockets, circles within circles. That’s the money shot, in porn terms. Spinning eyeballs.

Susannah grins and takes another sip of German beer.

In Germany, of course, courts were coming to the conclusion that inviting cannibalism fetishists to your home, killing them and eating them does not constitute murder. Armin Miewes got an eight-year sentence for picking up a man on the internet with seductive enticements to (quoting from his Usenet posts) “eat your horny flesh.” The victim came to Miewe’s home, where Miewes hacked his penis off. They ate it together. And then the meal got into a warm bath and waited to bleed to death while Miewes sat in the kitchen and read a Star Trek novel. After a while, Miewes decided dinner wasnt dying quickly enough. So he stabbed the silly bastard in the neck and ate him.

“Eat Your Horny Flesh” is going to be a band name inside three years, I swear.

Sometime after Miewes decided it’d be too much like hard work to grind dead boy’s bones into flour, the police came to visit. Being German, they came right out with it, and asked him directly if he had eaten human flesh. Miewes gave the classic answer: “I might have done.”

Turns out that if you want to be eaten, the diner is, at best, guilty of manslaughter. And will be out on the street in four years, tops.

Welcome to the future. It’s the world you’re living in.

People are disappointed with the future they’re living in. Since 2001, the refrain has gone up, louder year by year: “This is the future. Where’s my flying car? Where’s my fucking jet pack?” Pre-millennium, we were living in an unprecedented density of imagined futures, and we assumed it was all waiting for us around the corner. And here we are, around the corner, and none of it is standing here.

All that means, of course, is that 98% of our predictions have failed us. Which shouldn’t have come as much surprise. We treat science fiction as predictive fiction, which it isn’t and should never have been. William Gibson’s NEUROMANCER loses none of its fictive power for failing, as Gibson himself recently said, to predict mobile phones. Mobile telephony has proved a technology of massive change — not least of which has been in the field of fiction itself. Possession of a tri-band handset makes about a hundred years’ worth of thriller plotting irrelevant. My own GLOBAL FREQUENCY graphic novel has fallen foul of the future. It’s currently being adapted for American television, and we’ve run into an unexpected problem. When I developed the mobile phones that the members of the Global Frequency extreme rescue service carry, I was working at the hard edge of available technology — two years ago. Today, a Treo 600 smartphone from Palmspring does pretty much everything the GF Phone does. So I’m having to consult with a futurist at Nokia to ensure the TV version of the phone does more than something you can pick up at the supermarket.

It’s not the future we expected, being able to shoot video with a telephone and wirelessly beam it into someone’s hand on the other side of the world. I don’t know that anyone predicted that people could be driven to orgasm by images of a girl’s spinning eyes. Evan Bataille would have looked twice at the Ass Milkshake. Somewhere, there’s a mouse with a human ear growing out of its back, and a rat that produces monkey sperm. Mars is being explored by two motorised skateboards. Wernher Von Braun, who designed a Mars expedition for a crew of two hundred using available technology in the 1950s, would have shat blood in anger. Space, in his conception, was a heaven to be reached with power and glory. He would have sneered at the rocket sticks the rovers were launched on — where were his mighty chariots, to shake the ground in their passing? — and blanched to discover that his great machines and two hundred heroes had been dropped to make way for a couple of glorified rollerskates. He would have concluded that something evil had happened, and that this was not his future.

No nuclear space arks, no jetpacks. Robot skateboards and butterflies that glow green.

We all forgot that the future is yet to be written. No-one knows how it’s going to turn out. The best we can do is track the future as it happens, and use our fiction as a tool with which to understand where we are.

By the time you read this, everything in it will be history. The future’s a moving target. That’s why it needs tracking.

Warren Ellis
Southend, England
March 15 2004

(© Warren Ellis 2004. Written back then for a magazine, pulled from them when they wanted all the rights, never published. Since the time of writing, Rob Black has been acquitted, the Japanese have moved on to countless other things, and Susannah’s hip deep in her next novel, PORN HAPPY)

A radio presenter has been suspended from Kerrang! radio after staging a mock burglary at the home of the station’s programme director.

The management allege Tim Shaw and his producer broke into the house causing substantial damage and painted obscenities on the wall.

….Programme director Andrew Jeffries and his wife returned home to discover the break-in and believed they had been the victims of a burglary, before Shaw and Pebble jumped out of a cupboard to reveal it was a joke.

Mr Jeffries said: “The window was smashed and there were obscenities on the walls. They had hidden the TV and other items to make it look as if we had been robbed. They emptied the cupboards and our clothes were strewn all over…”

For those interested in mainstream commercial American comics, John Rogers explains why you can basically ignore the last year or so.

You know how you wake up in the afternoon and you can’t move your legs? And there’s a huge swollen lump of flesh where your legs used to be? And you think, shit, it’s a tumour, it’s all caught up with me and I’ve developed massive leg-cancer tumours in the night? And you give the tumour mass a shove, and it moves? And you shove it all the way off on to the floor? And you think, I’ve beaten the Big C. Fuck John Wayne. I am The Duke now. And you lay there, suffused with superhuman power. And then the tumour on the floor makes a noise. And you think, do tumours have heads? And arms?

Did I have sex with that tumour sometime during the night?

And you loll over the edge of the bed, because there’s still no blood in your legs, and you think, well, it’s quite an attractive tumour, actually. I wouldn’t blame myself for having sex with this particular tumour. Though I’m not going to make a habit of it. No-one must know. Because you know that you’re going to walk into a bar one day and someone’s going to yell, there’s Tumour Fucker. That’s the Cancer Fancier, that is. You don’t need that in your life. It’s best that no-one knows that you not only beat cancer, but possibly also fucked cancer’s brains out during the night.

You become aware of a need to urinate.

Your legs aren’t going to carry you to the bathroom. And, you know, it’s not your fault, you just prised more than a hundred pounds of malignancy off them. And the tumour seems to have some kind of open orifice. And you think, it’s just a tumour, right?

And you think, it’s probably okay that my urine is blue. I mean, red would mean trouble, but blue, hell, I probably just ate something bad.

And you think, I can hear the jacuzzi running. But you don’t own a jacuzzi, do you?

No. The tumour is attempting to breathe through the pint of smoking blue urine you just poured into its open mouth.

But then, it’s not otherwise attempting to move, so fuck it.

It’s only then, of course, that you remember that the tumour’s name is Jeremy.

( (c) Warren Ellis 2004 all rights reserved. Written March 2004. Sometimes you just have this kind of idea out of your head, or else it rots and festers and you have to get the cleaners in and no-one wants their brain steamcleaned. It would hurt.)