Announcing SOLIPSISTIC POP, "a biannual anthology designed to spotlight the best in alternative Comic art from the UK" organised by Tom Humberstone:

It features diverse, beautiful, twisted and peculiar Comics that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. Comic artists old and new are encouraged to contribute. Solipsistic Pop intends to provide a support structure and outlet for UK alternative Comics.

Each book of Solipsistic Pop will be a boutique, tactile product. An interactive, unique artefact designed to suit the content of each edition with an extremely limited printrun.

The website will be updated with previews of artwork from the first book, essays, news and related live events.

Book one arrives November 2009.

(above: example of the brilliant comics of Stephen Collins, to be featured in SOLIPSISTIC POP.)

The harbour, such as it is, at Battlesbridge — more of a watery lay-by — is littered with sailing barges and houseboats that have been run aground. Some abandoned, some inhabited, one or two actually moored for a temporary stop. I believe the new lock gates, on the other side of the bridge, are due to be hooked up to a tidal power generator at some point. But on this side of the bridge, slumped in the mud and grasses of the shoulder of the River Crouch, it’s all 20th Century. In four decades, I’ve seen Battlesbridge go from grey dying shithole to thriving antiques/crafts/country centre, a busy Sunday destination… but this bit of the river here doesn’t seem to have changed since my grandad used to drive me past in the 1970s.

Warren Ellis dot com. Good morning, internet.

Photo by Meredith Yayanos.

• The coming days: The week ahead | The Economist
  "A GENERAL election is held in Norway on Monday September 14th. Opinion polls suggest that the race is wide open, although a change of government is the more likely outcome, with a coalition of centre-left parties giving way to a coalition of centre-right ones. Particular attention will be paid to the success of the populist and anti-immigrant Progress Party, which has fared well in recent years…"
  (tags:pol )
• Merlin in Rags: I Belong to this Band – 85 Years of Sacred Harp Recordings
  "Can music be simultaneously overwhelming, terrible and truly beautiful? Yes it can. Sacred Harp is the term that represents a traditional American way of singing that is transmitted from generation to generation and which only occurs in small village communities of fundamentalist Christians, who sing songs of terrible texts from the Old Testament, preaching Hell and Damnation…"
  (tags:music history )
• Silence is Subjective – Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect
  "At what point can we 'hack' what is spoken/heard in real time so that the speaker hears their voice, but the listener hears a hacked version of their voice?"
  (tags:tech audio speculative future )

1. #13092009, 2. Ghost Lights of the Twin Towers Over Lower Manhattan, 3. gogbot10, 4. Like I said before, I love Chicago, 5. Red Without, 6. sky bound spirits

Thought for the night, from the great Ivor Cutler.

Good night.

• BBC NEWS | World | Europe | French unease at telecom suicides
  "French Labour Minister Xavier Darcos is to meet the head of the country's main telecommunications company to discuss a number of suicides among its staff. Twenty-three employees of France Telecom have killed themselves since the beginning of 2008."
  (tags:crime )
• InfraNet Lab: Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling
  "Coupling argues, through a body of design/research proposals, that infrastructures behave as artificially maintained natural systems. Future models of infrastructure lie in embracing this condition in a more inclusive manner by bundling processes with spatial experiences. The intention is to counter the tendency to deploy infrastructure as a hard system, instead seeking the performance of soft, multivalent systems." Gorgeous, slightly insane informatics and graphics
  (tags:design future )
• The Daily Star – Opinion Articles – Religion is not the primary motivation of suicide bombers
  "The Suicide Terrorism Database at Flinders University in Australia, the most comprehensive compendium of such information in the world, holds details on suicide bombings in Iraq, Palestine-Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which together accounted for 90 percent of all suicide attacks between 1981 and 2006. Analysis of the information contained therein yields some interesting clues: It is politics more than religious fanaticism that has led terrorists to blow themselves up."
  (tags:war pol cult )
• A List of Maps Available
  old maps of London. Lovely.
  (tags:maps London history )
• Disquiet: Lunar Rambles MP3 by Terry Fox
  "These slowly cycling sounds, rich in overtones, were made not by visiting UFOs but by an artist working ?a metal bowl and steel plow disk.? But even with that fact sheet, it?s informative to take into consideration the date of the recording: April 1977…"
  (tags:music )
• Book Covers – Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
  clever, minimal, effective
  (tags:design )
• How to short-circuit the US power grid – tech – 11 September 2009 – New Scientist
  "worked out how attackers could cause a cascade of network failures in the US's west-coast electricity grid – cutting power to economic powerhouses Silicon Valley and Hollywood."
  (tags:crime war )
• India’s generation of children crippled by uranium waste | World news | The Observer
  "And if a few hundred children ? spread over a large area ? were contaminated, how many thousands more might also be affected? Those are questions the Indian authorities appear determined not to answer. Staff at the clinics say they were visited and threatened with closure if they spoke out. The South African scientist whose curiosity exposed the scandal says she has been warned by the authorities that she may not be allowed back into the country."
  (tags:med crime )

I remember people complaining, around the time of STREET HORRRSING, that Fuck Buttons were a dilute noise band, an accessible noise band, a noise band doing wrong by Noise and somehow needing to be punished. And I remember thinking, I’ve listened to all their recorded stuff, and I know they’re said to rip it up a bit live, but… they’re a fucking pop group using noise, not a noise group going pop. No better illustration of that than the new single SURF SOLAR, which is basically the sound of someone repeatedly smashing Jean Michel Jarre’s ZOOLOOK into a wall and then dancing on its exposed brainmeat while old Bentley Rhythm Ace records play two doors away. It’s not noise, it’s not as seductive as (say) COLOURS MOVE, it’s not going to feed hipster rep accounts and it’s not going to change anyone’s lives, but it is a great volume of stomping fun. It’s pop, sharp and bright. Perhaps it’s the sort of pop some of us once thought, hoped, dreamt music of this kind would be treated as, one day.

I would have thrilled, as a kid, to see Simon Bates on TOP OF THE POPS having to choke out the words "and now, Fuck Buttons with SURF SOLAR." And see the camera dissolve to two gurning blokes in bad t-shirts from Bristol stabbing computers and toy radios until they made this shining crunching noise for three and a half minutes.

Sort of. Had a few problems yesterday with things like passing out at the keyboard a little bit and not being able to breathe or see occasionally…. but otherwise, I think I’m on the downhill slope to recovery. Or the morgue.

This is a lovely photograph by Ellen Rogers. It is here because it is a lovely photograph, and also to remind me that I owe her an email and must buy her a drink in London soon.

"Intense widescreen slomo techno" is how Highpoint Lowlife describe it. One track for download at the link. Excellent cover:

Interesting notes here on how one of the tracks was built:

A while ago I was sent a link to this amazing YouTube video which features an audio recording of the space shuttle taking off. The sound is incredibly visceral and the idea of basing a track around it was irresistible. This became Gravitationskraftens stilla vrede. The melodies here are crafted out of the launcher sounds with the help of some resonators… Because I felt the jam-packed finished version didn’t give enough exposure to the launch recording in all its grandeur, I also made an ambient version where the launch and the force of gravity take centre stage.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s my favourite piece on the release.

• Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: How to Create Quantum Superpositions of Living Things
  "First photons, atoms and molecules. Now physicists want to create a quantum superposition of a virus, which will allow them to perform Schrodinger's Cat experiment for real."
  (tags:sci mad )
• Archaeologists Discover Oldest-known Fiber Materials Used By Early Humans
  "A team of archaeologists and paleobiologists has discovered flax fibers that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibers known to have been used by humans"
  (tags:history )
• Ananova – Missing Link found in church
  "A Catholic who believed his prayers were answered when he was rescued from a lift was killed when he went to church to give thanks and the stone altar fell on him."
  (tags:cult idiots darwin+award )
• Women duped into appearing in fake ‘Big Brother’ – Telegraph
  "A group of celebrity-hungry young women in Turkey were conned into frolicking naked and engaging in cat fights after being tricked into believing that they were appearing on a Big Brother-style reality show."
  (tags:crime tv retard+parade )
• The Nixie Concrete Clock
  "The vintage Z560M Nixie tubes, used in former East-Germany in the mid 20th century as numeric displays, were the inspiration for the design of Daniel Kurth's (www.kurth.lu) Nixie Concrete clock."
  (tags:design )
• Macumba – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "Macumba is a word of African (Bantu) origins. Various explanations of its meaning include "a musical instrument", the name of a Central African deity, and simply "magic"."
  (tags:magic culture )
• improbablecog
  making weird accessory things from metal stuff
  (tags:art xmas )
• core.form-ula
  "core.form-ula is the academic wing of form-ula. Our goal is to provide a platform, be it physical or virtual where architects, artists, designers, engineers, scientists, and writers can come together in collaborative space."
  (tags:art design )

From DiscoveryOn:

A rare parasite which burrows into host fish before eating and replacing their tongues with itself has been found off the Jersey coast.

Ready?

In which shit kicks off.

1. Untitled, 2. birds hood, 3. You Say It’s Your Birthday, 4. inkpoint, 5. 0909091657.jpg, 6. Lenora in pigtails by Austin Young

• Some Indonesian adulterers &squo;to be stoned&squo; | The Courier-Mail
  ""Unmarried people who commit adultery will be caned one hundred times and married persons will be stoned to death," Raihan Iskandar, a provincial lawmaker from the Islamic-based Prosperous Justice Party, said."
  (tags:cult crime )
• A skull that rewrites the history of man – Science, News – The Independent
  "The skulls, jawbones and fragments of limb bones suggest that our ancient human ancestors migrated out of Africa far earlier than previously thought and spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia ? before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man."
  (tags:history )
• 4 women in lover’s gluing must stand trial | National News | Comcast.net
  "A man whose penis was glued to his stomach testified Tuesday that a motel tryst with a girlfriend involving a bondage fantasy turned painful and humiliating after his wife, a second girlfriend and another woman burst into the room and harassed him because of his cheating ways."
  (tags:crime )
• BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Israel organs claim row deepens
  "Issa Qaraqae said Israel was hiding the bodies of dead Palestinian prisoners to disguise evidence of organ trafficking."
  (tags:crime war med )
• Mice Levitated in Lab | LiveScience
  "Scientists have now levitated mice using magnetic fields. Other researchers have made live frogs and grasshoppers float in mid-air before, but such research with mice, being closer biologically to humans, could help in studies to counteract bone loss due to reduced gravity over long spans of time"
  (tags:sci space )
• Teenager invents £23 solar panel that could be solution to developing world’s energy needs … made from human hair
  "A new type of solar panel using human hair could provide the world with cheap, green electricity, believes its teenage inventor."
  (tags:sci weird )

Still in recovery from this evil sickness. Have an Annie Wu drawing to look at while I try to write more than two pages today.

Am still sick as a dog. Am going to pub anyway, in case any of you doubt my commitment to (insert here).

Below, Zoetica Ebb’s true head.

Good morning. This, I’m afraid, is warren ellis dot com.

And while we’re on rhetorical television and while I’m watching stuff in the hope my head will clear enough to work…. here’s a clip from the great leviathan of British rhetorical television, Jacob Bronowski’s ASCENT OF MAN. And a great moment from the great teacher, discussing the real worth of science while standing at Auschwitz. He would have died about a year, eighteen months after shooting this scene.

He once wrote: “It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests.”

The first few seconds are silent. Stick with it.

Every time I sneeze I dislodge another internal organ, I swear.

Since we’re going "Warren’s televisual life flashes before his eyes," have an episode of one of my favourite tv programmes as a kid. The late-Seventies state-of-the-art from the BBC Features Department, the true home of the epic rhetorical documentary television form and a formative influence on me. If it were up to me, I’d spend the next several years trying to perfect the form for comics. However, my daughter would like food and shelter.

Anyway.

James Burke. CONNECTIONS.

I believe the DVD collecting the six episodes of the original television serial (not the perfectly fine film remake starring Andrew Kier, mind you, but the television original, starring Andre Morell) is currently out of print. Also, I can’t find my own copy of it. Which is pissing me off, as I am sick as a dog and I just want to sit around and watch DVDs while drinking water like it’s going out of fashion and eating random medications I’m finding in drawers around the house.

So let’s watch a bit of Quatermass. Until the BBC politely ask me to take it down, anyway…