AAAAA DO NOT WANT AAAAAA

And archaeologists are rushing to excavate before a new dam in Sudan drowns the entire site:

From deciphered Egyptian documents and modern archaeological research, it is now known that for five centuries in the second millennium B.C., the kingdom of Kush flourished with the political and military prowess to maintain some control over a wide territory in Africa.

Kush’s governing success would seem to have been anomalous, or else conventional ideas about statehood rest too narrowly on the experiences of early civilizations like Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. How could a fairly complex state society exist without a writing system, an extensive bureaucracy or major urban centers, none of which Kush evidently had?

Simon Reynolds, possibly the best rock journalist still working, discusses JG Ballard, brilliantly:

SF, like rock writing, had this mixture of inferiority complex and superiority complex. SF writers loved to see SF as the one really crucial, relevant, truly contemporary form of literature. A literature of ideas, which was exactly what drew me to, the element of speculation, as well as the estrangement effect. Rock critics are just the same: they both crave that validation from the mainstream of arts criticism but they also kinda like being the renegade form.

Warren Ellis: @laurenn: you Hollywood types are so cheap.

Warren Ellis: @laurenn: buy me a pony with your filthy Hollywood dollars now. Keep the change.

Warren Ellis: is fascinated by Orson Welles’ concept of the “electric dissolve”: dimming the set lights in sequence to emulate an optical dissolve.

Later this year (we’re in the middle of #9 right now):

(her first professional commissioned work)

• Francis Schaeffer Chair of Cultural Apologetics , Nancy Pearcey – World Journalism Institute
  what the hell is Cultural Apologetics?
  (tags: wtf)

Raw Believer

(via the Merce)

PULPHOPE, a monograph by Paul Pope, is officially released on June 25. I got hold of a PDF of the book a couple of months back.

You need this book. It is Pure. It manages to be a complete statement and a work in progress all at once: a report from the borders of comics, Paul Pope’s view of the territory before he plunges on into the bush, hacking his way through the dark in pursuit of the new and the beautiful. It’s a million pages long and it’s going to take me years to understand it all. And that’s what I want from a book. And so do you. So buy it.

Laurenn McCubbin – prints and illustrations:

Warren Ellis: removed Facebook from webcrap list. 16710 MySpace “friends.” 212 people “following” on Twitter. 3556 people on LJ. Am cyberstalkbait now.

Storing this here before I forget it: Fell: Feral City reviewed by Steve Duin:

It is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

My message board.

“Hearts On Fire” – Rumskib: because, in Odense, Denmark, it’s still some magical imagined bubble of 1988-1991. Are they calling it nu-gaze yet?

(For full effect, the first minute or so needs to be played really fucking loud.)

“Hawaii” – Lord God

(mp3 provided for review purposes only, deleted within 7 days, contact if removal required)

(Samples)

* ConceptENGINE: On An Oaken Spaceship

* Stan Lee Does Paris Hilton

Amiina: made in Reykjavik. You know what I’m like about Icelandic music by now.

Anemones: out of Montreal. Velvets/Spacemen 3 axis.

(No, I’m not convinced about this either, but it’s a striking image, so in the research-material dump it goes. From Modblog, of course.)

According to (a really badly written article at) The Register, my friend Natasha Strange just blatantly stole the show at the recent Sex Hacks expo:

As she beckoned “Pet,” a naked, smooth-skinned stud walked out and lay on his back on the head table. “Pet is not nervous at all, is he?” “Yes, mistress.” She fitted him with LED relaxation goggles and headphones – “Spread ‘em Pet!” – and inserted a massive metallic butt-plug connected to an electro-stim box. The current turned on; he turned on; people applauded his visible response.

“I think the humiliation will keep this erect,” she mocked with a silvery laugh, turning up the juice.

(Squid lab…)

(“…this old 1950′s era Solar Enlarger i use…”)