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.

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:

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):

"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:

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:

This is warren ellis dot com. I am Warren Ellis. I write things. The world has been weird of late and I’ve not been broadcasting here as regularly as usual. Things should settle out for a couple of weeks now. This is a photo of "a faceless minion" by Veronika von Volkova. Good evening.

My friend the antifuturedoomstrategist Jamais Cascio has been visiting the space people.

This, apparently, is a "floating sensorbot." This being Jamais, I find myself wondering how many they gave him and where he’s deployed them. I’m keeping one eye on the window at all times.

Video Village is the place on a film set where they set up monitors hooked to the cameras and herd all the producers, visitors and other persons extraneous to the actual making of a film. Therefore, Video Village is where I end up. They hand you an audio rig so you can hear what the mics are picking up, and basically experience the shooting of a film from enough distance that you cannot possibly fuck anything up for the people who are working there for a living.

This is Video Village on the RED shoot in Toronto, first unit. Technically, I had permission to wander anywhere I wanted. (In fact, the DVD crew begged me to, so they could get b-roll of me strolling around the set.) But I’m always horribly conscious of being the only person not working, so I tend to stay around the village, or sneak off for a cigarette.

Or something.

For the sake of being different (and saving time that neither of us have right now!), this week there’s no t-shirt. Instead, Ariana and I offer you a whole bunch of mugs at the IEU store.

These include:

and

as well as a few other new ones, and the ones you may already know.

Still kind of off in the clouds, taking care of some off-piste work but mostly devising things in my head, or at least letting things grow like stacks of bacteria in the corners.

Flickr is fucking dead these days.

This is the London hotel sitting room/honesty bar in which the last few details of Project Drill were beaten out, the other week.

It has one of these in the lobby. It has an aura of religious fear about it.

What I need to dig this comics idea out of my head is another brilliant colour artist who can do 20pp a month and hates money.

TREME is the new tv series from David Simon, creator of THE WIRE. THE WIRE aficionados will recognise a couple of familiar faces, including Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters — in the latter case, I hope people get the mirror of the cognitive dissonance I got when I saw Peters in THE WIRE, because I remembered him as a song-and-dance man from way back when.

Anyway. Kind of looking forward to this.

BOOM.

I’ve got masses of heavy thinking to do today, so most levels of internet machinery are getting switched off.

(My secret: I engage with the internet in levels, mostly using desktop apps, and switch down as I require more braincycles, until I’m just running a Gmail notifier — and sometimes that goes too, and I simply leave Gmail minimised and toggle it at will. Sometime it seems like I’m everywhere at once, and I am; sometimes it seems like I’m everywhere at once, and I’m just spooking around on realtime desktop apps while doing actual work.)

Back tomorrow. Which is FREAKANGELS day. In the meantime, laugh at our t-shirt.