• Obsidian Wings: When the Power Runs Out, We’ll Just Hide
  "This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric. More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops ? dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled. The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter…."
  (tags:pol )
• Simple Justice: Dying To Get Out of Buffalo
  "What's wrong with the Erie County Holding Center that people would rather kill themselves than remain there? Since December, there have been 5 suicide attempts, three of which were successful. That's an extraordinary number, both for the number of people trying to commit suicide as well as the correctional facility's inability to stop them. The problem is that no one can say what the cause of this is, because the sheriff won't let inspectors into the facility…"
  (tags:crime law project-m )
• Simple Justice: The Defense Commitment
  "… those of us who practice criminal defense… are not welcome in their clubs. Our voices are not sought on issues of substance. When a new regime comes to power in our quadrennial peaceful coup, we are not invited to join their ranks. Indeed, when I once tried to offer my services during a fit of naive optimism to a new administration who claimed a sincere interest in justice, I was privately informed that, talking points aside, criminal defense lawyers were not wanted. We are the lepers of the legal system."
  (tags:crime law project-m )
• Simple Justice: Information Left Behind
  "The travesty of New York City Police Department's "stop and frisk" practices and statistics are well known, with well over half a million people stopped for no good reason…"
  (tags:crime law project-m )

New serial by Brit-comic veterans/spectres David Hine and Shaky Kane. This makes me happy in my bits, so it does. It starts in June.

Preview material.

And a Flickr slideshow.

Hard to tell when. Some places say it was last Wednesday, others say it’s next month. But presumably, sometime around now, the quickie miniseries I did for Marvel with artist Steve Kurth will be released as a HC. I would expect a paperback to appear sometime before the IRON MAN 2 movie.

I quite liked bits of this book. There’s a few pieces of business in there that are very NEXTWAVEy.

I really do lose track of the collections, sometimes. I’ll be catching up with those over the next few days.

I do love a good BBC music documentary. PROG ROCK BRITANNIA was repeated on BBC last week, and it’s still on iPlayer. Also, lo and behold, someone slung it on YouTube last time it was on. The first bit is below, click through to get at the other parts.

• FOXNews.com – Evidence Found Rotting in Closed Ill. Police HQ

  (tags:crime project-m )

Spent most of last night listening to recordings of these people (again – I seem to come back to it every year or so) – and look, there’s YouTube stuff too:

Commando X teaches us about weapons and death on YouTube. He is an educator. It says so on YouTube.

His videos are peculiarly fascinating. And I like how he thanks the viewer. The first instinct is to laugh a bit. But some of this stuff is actually interesting.

I would be okay with Commando X teaching at my daughter’s school. For “remove sentry” read “kill boy.”

Simon Reynolds:

What I get off even the most inventive and energised nuum-not-nuum stuff is a sense of these potent musical intellects struggling to find exit routes to a beyond, to terra incognita. Hence the peculiar quality of hyperactive evasiveness to things like Untold: the music shuttles back and forth within a kind of grid-space of influences and sources, never settling into genre-icity, yet remaining a long way short of being limitless (there are areas that are off limits to it).

The word that springs to mind for this restless sensation — for this Moment in music — is hyperstasis.

A new double album by one of my favourite discoveries of the past couple of years, made available as a free download at this link right here. Looking forward to giving this a listen tonight.

This release comes from Vulpiano Records, who announce it here (with further details):

VULP-0013 is Natural Snow Buildings’ first release of 2010, the free-for-download double LP The Centauri Agent! On part one, the 41 minute “Our man from Centauri” sets the stage, a cosmic, sprawling opener with themes that continue on into “The accidental remote viewer”, before fizzling out into static. Part two is comprised of nine beautiful and intense tracks (particular stand-outs including “The Psychic Circle/Uchronia”, “The storm of resurrection”, and “Solar flares”). Lovely and intricately woven as ever, while frequently heading off into new and challenging sonic territory, Mehdi and Solange have created yet another very special work of musical art with The Centauri Agent!

"Toronto author Peter Watts has been found guilty of assaulting, resisting and obstructing a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer."

In which there is a ruck.

Ben Templesmith is making new friends on tour.

Good morning. This is warren ellis dot com.

"Just For You." G’night.

First he broadcast the white-faced puppet Stooky Bill — a "stookie," in Glaswegian, is a plaster cast — and then grabbed a kid called Bill Taynton and put him in front of the machine. I like to think that Taynton got a look at Stooky Bill and felt a shot of the Fear, because the light and heat of the machine had blasted it into a cracked yellow ember of its former self. Perhaps the master of the machine, John Logie Baird himself, thought of the day when the Trinidadians of the Santa Cruz Valley thought him a white Obeahman and attempted a terrified assault on his house of strange lights. Perhaps he thought of the night he blacked out Glasgow while trying to make a diamond with electricity.

John Logie Baird put Taynton in front of the machine, the spin of his altered Nipkow Disc growling in the small hot room, and worked his mechanical magic, making him the first man broadcast on television.

When Baird tried to tell the news editor at the Daily Express what he’d done, the hack got the Fear and hissed to his staff: "He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless. Watch him– he may have a razor on him."

DO ANYTHING: Jack Kirby Ripped My Flesh, collecting the first run of the eponymous column at bleedingcool.com, will be on sale from 28 April. In the first instance, you’re probably only going to find it in comics stores, so call your local and ask if they’ve ordered it. If they don’t, I believe you’ll find it available for pre-order by the usual online suspects.

This is the solicitation text:

From Warren Ellis, the award-winning author, comics creator and popular columnist (and who is currently writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of the comics series GRAVEL, also published by Avatar Press), comes a collection of the most mind-bending columns you’ve ever read: DO ANYTHING.

DO ANYTHING VOLUME ONE: JACK KIRBY RIPPED MY FLESH collects the first 26 chapters of Ellis’ text masterpiece and is a grand tour through comics & culture as seen through a burgled robot head. The robot head of Jack Kirby lives on Warren Ellis’ desk. It knows everything and is connected to everything. You must obey the robot head of Jack Kirby.

There are many ways to look at comics. In this book, we see the medium through the hazy android eyes of Jack Kirby (actually the stolen and repurposed head of the missing Philip K Dick robot, which Mr. Ellis confesses to swiping off the back of a plane), taking a rattling ghost-train ride through the history of comics.

David Bowie, the CIA, mad architects, Will Eisner, Frank Zappa, Tintin, the designer of Skylab, a train station in Paris, Arthur C. Clarke, the circus, the Black Panther Party and William S. Burroughs: all of these things are connected by Jack Kirby, all part of the secret history of comics, and all illustrating the special nature of the medium as the place where you can do anything.

And this is what it looks like, as designed by Ariana and complete with robot head by Jacen Burrows:

For print, the book has been corrected and tweaked a little bit to flow better.

At my internet cave today:

* New Comics Talk (17mar10)

* ECTOPLASMOSIS: We Hunger for Fresh Blood (gimme writers)

* Life After Death Magazine

* CHINESE WHISPERS UCHRONAL COVER REMODEL: Amazing Adult Fantasy #15

A new webcomic by Jon Munger and Krista Brennan:

Virtuoso is an alternate history of an Africa that never existed, one run by steel and springs, commanded by vast matriarchies and past the height of its culture.

Virtuoso is the story of Jnembi Osse, a professional weapons manufacturer for the most powerful empire in the world, and how her private rebellion becomes a full scale international incident.

• First quantum effects seen in visible object – physics-math – 17 March 2010 – New Scientist
  "The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed."
  (tags:sci )