Druillet. Warped my mind at a sensitive age. Bought a copy of the LONE SLOANE/DELIRIUS Anglophone volume from 1973 out of a cheapie bin in the early 80s. Formative influence. Druillet, Talbot, Moore, Campbell, Moorcock, Burroughs, Kerouac, Dick. Eight core sites in my creative genome. (A few more, at random: Lessing, Dax, The The, Kneale, Potter, the Kennedy Martins.)

Big Comics were good.

• Spotify: David Stutz – Lolet :: Music From The Wor..
  SPOTIFY-ONLY LINK: stream of "IOLET – Music From The World Of Anathem." Inspired by the ANATHEM novel, obv. Gregorian/Tuvan fusion. If you have mp3s, email me at warrenellis@gmail.com!
  (tags:music )
• Fringe Biology Recordings
  "Synthetic Biology is a soundtrack to a synthetic biology film in outer space. This album travels through sci-fi jazz, avant rock, electronic soundscapes, ambient textures, and nightmare industrial collages. Synthetic biology is the artificial introduction of DNA from different organisms into a host organism to program cells for a particular function. The music emphasizes this juxtaposition of natural and artificial elements that are in competition with one another and continuously evolving. This album uses the following musical instruments: Kaossilator, Mandala percussion, Buddha Machine, Kaoss Pad 2, 3-stringed zither, MIDI instruments, sampler, electronic drums, and natural recordings. The artwork includes colorful stills from this imaginary synthetic biology film."
  (tags:music )
• The Grande Armée Invades Russia
  "Charles Joseph Minard was a mathematician, a civil engineer, and a pioneer in the field of information graphics; his most famous work is the above chart, which he created in 1869. It tells the tale of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812…"
  (tags:history dataviz )

Brian Eno, via Geeta Dayal, via Jones:

If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted – they have these wonderful things in their head but you’re not one of them, you’re just a normal sort of person, you could never do anything like that – then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of like, where you say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much and start from unpromising beginnings. And I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

The return of Magdalene Veen:

This is warren ellis dot com, having a quiet weekend because there is much brainwork to be done.

Here is a nice photograph by Simon Crubellier.

More later.

• Unenumerated: A very brief history of the space program (pt. i)
  "President Dwight Eisenhower wanted the Soviet Union to set a legal precedent that flying satellites over foreign territory without permission was fine. Traditionally land ownership and sovereign territory had been deemed to rise to infinity… Sovereign permission is generally required for airplanes, including (or especially) for the spy planes the U.S. military was already flying over the Soviet Union. As crucial as these flights were for U.S. security, they were also a violation of international law, and the Soviet Union shooting them down was justified under that law. The flights were thus a major propaganda loss for the U.S. in the eyes of other countries. Eisenhower could not win the legal or propaganda argument for spy satellites unless he let Soviet actions make the argument for him. The Soviets, in their own propaganda quest to exaggerate the state of their otherwise mostly backwards technology, obliged…"
  (tags:space history )
• The Road to Eleusis republished
  "Originally published in 1978 ?The Road to Eleusis ? Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries,? by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck, was only reprinted as a paperback in English for the first time in 2008, for its thirtieth anniversary edition. The work of an amateur mycologist, a chemist and a classicist, the text attempts to solve the mystery of the Eleusinian rites of ancient Greece by hypothesizing the use of an ergot-derived hallucinogen."
  (tags:books )
• Conversation – Land of the Flying Stones
  "The stone city of Nan Madol, in Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), consists of 92 man-made islands built on a coral reef at the edge of a mangrove swamp. The buildings of this mysterious 1,000-year-old site, which was the ceremonial and political seat of an ancient dynasty, are made of stacks of cut stone "logs," each weighing up to 50 tons."
  (tags:history cities )
• BLDGBLOG: The Switching Labyrinth
  "…McElhinney introduces us to movement-diagrams, Space Syntax, and other forms of architectural motion-analysis, asking: would a detailed study of user-behaviors help architects design more consistently interesting buildings, spaces that "might evoke," he writes, "a sense of continual delight"? Pushing these questions a bit further, we might ask: should all our buildings be labyrinths?"
  (tags:architecture )
• Frameworks for citizen responsiveness, enhanced: Toward a read/write urbanism
  "In order for anything like this scheme to work, public objects would need to have a few core qualities, qualities I?ve often described as making them ?addressable, queryable, and even potentially scriptable.? What does this mean?" Adam's been tearing it up this week.
  (tags:design cities comms )

Big Space:

Dave Eggers:

I don’t want to wake up and look at a screen. I feel like as a society, we try to put everything on that same goddamn screen, and pretty soon we’re going to be eating on the screen or, like, making love through the screen. It’s just sort of like: ‘Why does everything have to be on the screen?’

Some beardy druid from the oral tradition, a few thousand years back:

I don’t want to wake up and look at paper. I feel like as a society, we try to put everything on that same (Brythonic swear word) piece of paper, and pretty soon we’re going to be eating on paper or, forsooth, making love through paper. It’s just sort of like: "Why does everything have to be on the paper?"

Twinsistermoon’s "Spells," off the album THE SNOWBRINGER CULT that they were lovely enough to send to me the other day (Twinsistermoon and Isengrind are aspects of the wondrous Natural Snow Buildings).

G’night.

My brain wanders a lot. (Project Blacklight didn’t get funding and returns to the Maybe One Day box, which obviously freed up a square inch of space somewhere in the frontal lobe, and brain custard flowed into the gap.) I wrote a thing on Whitechapel today that had been occupying my mind yesterday, after I tripped over some old JEFF HAWKE strips. Which reminded me of Travis Charest’s SPACEGIRL. And I got to thinking about what kinds of strip survived evacuation from newspapers, and, well, off I went.

So I’ve been thinking about the newspaper adventure strip, that superquick blast of art spectacle and an idea. Which, as I said on Whitechapel, didn’t seem to convert to the web so well because it’s a form that finds it harder to capture eyeballs than the humour form.

And then I thought, on the other hand, if something like that was nested, as it was in a newspaper, inside a blog that already had a daily audience…

And then I thought, well, a proper and useful newspaper-width strip is actually a bit wide for a blog, which tend to containerise inside 600, 700 pixels or so. And maybe it’s the concept and intent of the thing that matter, not slavish replication of the physical object, because this is after all the web and we don’t have no laws or wear no stinkin badges and all that. Maybe your "strip" is the size of a card CD sleeve, or a horizontal half of a manga page, or (name your own).

SPACEGIRL, in some ways, is a pure descendant of the likes of FLASH GORDON. A single beat of plot or action in a beautiful science fiction illustration. And on a daily basis that’s really all you need to provide in a single instalment — something lovely, that frames a nice little idea. Makes pleasant electrical things happen in your brain for a moment. So you come back tomorrow to get that button pressed again. And, if the creator(s) is (are) lucky, you stick around long enough to see that this cascade of little sparkles are actually strung together with auctorial intent, and it assembles into something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

It’s also important to remember that things like JEFF HAWKE were a long run of complete story sequences. And, you know, it’s the web. Want to do a hundred numbers then take some time off before the next sequence? Why not? Hell, if you just wanted to do a hundred numbers and then call that story told and never come back… why not?

(Of course, as with most of my ideas, it requires creators who hate money. But still.)

A lot of the above thinking does come down to shapes. FREAKANGELS is the shape and style it is because I designed it to work on screen and in print in the simplest and most efficient way. That was the brief. But if you’re just doing something to fucking do it… it can be any shape you want. And if someone wants to put it into print afterwards… they’ll conform to your shape, if they want it bad enough.

• Embracing the digital book ? Craig Mod

  (tags:books )

Via SNOW: "Horosu."

* Notes From Warren 23apr10 – (newspaper strips and what the web didn’t take)

* The DO ANYTHING Book Thread – (please please buy it)

* T-shirts Of The Week: Mid-April Post-US-Tax Resurrection Blowout – (ends on Sunday)

* WEBCOMICS WEEK (April 19-25 2010) – (incredible new list of fine webcomics for your attention)

* Solipsistic Pop 2 Launch – (28 April in London)

* UK General Election 2010 – Voting for Change? – (I dread to think what lurks in this thread)

Pitchfork describe this new piece by M.I.A. as "a punk rock rebel anthem." Which kind of tells you a lot about Pitchfork, and less about what is actually a bit of mutated acid rock. With probably the best opening of any record I’ve heard so far this year. The rest of it doesn’t live up to the opening so much, but that weird Sixties acid throb carries you through.

M.I.A. – Born FreebyTheProphetBlog

"Magazine & compilation about the renewed use of the cassette on the 21st Century." Details, including links to free pdf and audio download, right here at Alice Rabbit.

Last.fm describe Sturmast as: “Hungarian martial industrial/neofolk/military folk band. Sturmast plays a unique kind of folk influenced martial industrial music. Far from being an instrumental one-man computer band putting some classical loops and battle sounds together, Sturmast is a collective fronted by Varga Gabor. Here real musicians play real instruments, thus introducing the good old band-feeling to the martial industrial scene. The music contains powerful, eruptive live drums (toms, snare, bass drum), haunting violin and cello, acoustic guitar, and a selection of traditional folk instruments (e.g. kaval, jaw harp). Even the keyboards are “live” recorded in some ways, and a considerable part of the samples and special effects are made by the band itself. Absorbing atmosphere links the compositions which vary from hypnotic monotonous to marching repetitive, from moody experimental to beautiful, melancholy-filled delicate. The lyrics, portraying the fight of the historic and modern, spiritual and secular, uplifting and ill-fated, are mostly in Hungarian.” This is “Kraft,” off the album “Ibis Redibis Nunquam In Bello Peribis.”

NOTE: if you approach people, especially women, on spurious work-related matters in the hope of getting a personal meeting with them, and claim to be "a close friend" of mine in an attempt to seal the deal — those people are going to check with me first. And then I’ll end up with your email address.

It’s Friday, it’s gone noon, it’s FREAKANGELS time.

• Aladdin Sane Called. He Wants His Lightning Bolt Back: On Lady Gaga – Mark Dery – Doom Patrol: Annals of Our Age – True/Slant
  Mary Dery works Lady GaGa over with a bit of two-by-four, basically
  (tags:writing music theory )

Not so useful a day in the end. Meeting postponed then finally cancelled/vanished due to some nebulous family trouble. Life In 2050 was maybe twelve pieces, mostly obscured by hipsters and way too many staff members (to the point where you had to ask them to move to see the art) in a tiny venue (though Tom Muller’s piece was fantastic). Arrived early at The Social for the Tapebox gig, hoping to catch a bit of what was happening there, to discover that nothing was happening there except a DJ playing Black Lace-esque 80s summer novelty pop. Went on to Koko at invitation of Amanda and Neil, to essentially be told to fuck off by security. Came home. And now there’s an episode of FREAKANGELS to be written. I have a very large mug of very strong coffee with good whisky in it, I have a fine playlist on the speakers, and I have a fun piece of story to write.

How you know you’re a writer? When sitting down to write at midnight is the good part of the day.

Join me.

Am at http://www.life-in-2050.com this evening, Tapebox are playing at The Social on Little Portland St at 9 (free) but I may have to skip that as Amanda Palmer has ordered me to show up to see her and Neil at her gig at Koko in Camden tonight. They just saw Malcolm McLaren’s funeral procession, will capture her twitpic of it tomorrow.