March 20th, 2010 | music, researchmaterial
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.
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March 20th, 2010 | brainjuice
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March 20th, 2010 | music
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:
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March 20th, 2010 | station ident
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March 20th, 2010 | researchmaterial
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.”
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March 19th, 2010 | researchmaterial
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.
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March 19th, 2010 | music
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 viewerâ€, before fizzling out into static. Part two is comprised of nine beautiful and intense tracks (particular stand-outs including “The Psychic Circle/Uchroniaâ€, “The storm of resurrectionâ€, and “Solar flaresâ€). 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!

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March 19th, 2010 | researchmaterial
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March 19th, 2010 | Work
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March 19th, 2010 | station ident
Ben Templesmith is making new friends on tour.
Good morning. This is warren ellis dot com.

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March 19th, 2010 | music
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March 19th, 2010 | knock john
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."
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March 18th, 2010 | Work
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.
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March 18th, 2010 | comics talk
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March 18th, 2010 | comics talk
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.

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March 18th, 2010 | brainjuice
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 )
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March 18th, 2010 | music
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March 17th, 2010 | station ident
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.

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March 17th, 2010 | people I know
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.

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March 17th, 2010 | received goods
From those nice people at Domino Records
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fposterous.com%2Fgetfile%2Ffiles.posterous.com%2Fwarrenellis%2Fn1E5Qxzby5lA0VhyXVUARnAlTGCkRNuBMQyJ0ijWgi3dOyq87vzyy7E1v38a%2Fphoto.jpg.scaled.500.jpg)
Sent from my outboard brain
Posted via email from warrenellis’s posterous
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March 15th, 2010 | brainjuice
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March 15th, 2010 | daybook
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.

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March 15th, 2010 | Work
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.

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March 13th, 2010 | daybook
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.
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March 13th, 2010 | researchmaterial
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.
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March 12th, 2010 | brainjuice
Amnesty report condemns US death rates of women in childbirth
" Death rates among women in pregnancy and labour have doubled in the US from 6.6 per 100,000 in 1987 to 13.3 per 100,000 in 2006. Although some of the increase is due to better data collection, there is no doubt that deaths have risen while the technology and know-how to prevent them has improved."
(tags:med pol death crime ) Orange Dwarf Star Set to Smash into The Solar System
"A new set of star velocity data indicates that Gliese 710 has an 86 percent chance of ploughing into the Solar System within the next 1.5 million years."
(tags:dooooooom well+no+actually ) A Disastrous Year: 2010 Death Toll Already Abnormally High | LiveScience
"In comparison to previous years, the number of casualties from natural disasters in 2010, which is already well above 200,000, is outside the norm."
(tags:dooooom dooooooooom ) What the devil is going on at the Vatican? – Telegraph
"… the chief exorcist claims the Devil is lurking at the heart of the Catholic Church…"
(tags:cult occult ) BBC News – Weymouth ridgeway skeletons ‘Scandinavian Vikings’
"Archaeologists from Oxford believe the men were probably executed by local Anglo Saxons in front of an audience sometime between AD 910 and AD 1030."
(tags:history )
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March 12th, 2010 | Work
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March 11th, 2010 | brainjuice
We Made This: Pearson does McCarthy
"Our studio-mate David Pearson spent a large chunk of last year working on a frankly fantastic series of covers for Cormac McCarthy's books, which have recently been published. They're a distinctly visceral set of typographic designs, reflecting the novels' frequently dark content."
(tags:design covers ) Augmented Reality: Metaio?s in town
Not at SXSW? Relax. (((No! Don?t relax! Fear! Be paralyzed with fear! They are creating your future without you! You?re outside the social-media loop! Soon you will die.))) – Bruce Sterling
(tags:funny ) NASA Launches Interactive Simulation
NASA today unveiled an interactive computer simulation that allows virtual explorers of all ages to dock the space shuttle at the International Space Station, experience a virtual trip to Mars or a lunar impact, and explore images of star formations taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
(tags:space ) Australian archaeologists uncover 40,000-year-old site
Australian archaeologists have uncovered what they believe to be the world's southernmost site of early human life, a 40,000-year-old tribal meeting ground, an Aboriginal leader said Wednesday.
(tags:history ) US military developing geolocation system for underground
The US military is studying the feasibility of a system that could allow them to accurately navigate in enemy underground tunnels, an environment in which GPS does not work.
(tags:tech war )
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March 11th, 2010 | daybook
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.
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March 10th, 2010 | music
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