Mindless Ones

• Still thoroughly brain-blown by last week’s viewing of Adam Curtis’ latest film, ”It Felt Like a Kiss’, I’ve gone a bit doolally and found links for a whole Curtisathon. Old hat, good hat:

• First, two recent bites from Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe/Newswipe shows. This one covers the abasement of  TV journalism as a career path for people who like to bear the sight of their own reflections; and this one on the geldoffisation of event politics. When people say Live Aid killed Rock ‘n’Roll, previously the world’s last best hope of cultural salvation, this is what they mean, and why it matters. (b)

• And going back a bit further, The Living Dead from 1995 (Parts One, Two, Three), a haunting three-hour tale of WWII necromancy and voodoo propaganda, a political Zombie fest of the lowest order. (b)

All that and some links to comic related stuff too!

Hey you! Go check out my blog.

When he woke up he thought he’d dreamed about a movie he’d seen the other day. But everything was different. The characters were black, so the movie in the dream was like a negative of the real movie. And different things happened, too. The plot was the same, what happened was the same, but the ending was different or at some moment things took an unexpected turn and became something completely different. Most terrible of all, though, was that as he was dreaming he knew it didn’t necessarily have to be that way, he noticed the resemblance to the movie, he thought he understood that both were based on the same premise, and that if the movie he’d see was the real movie, then the other one, the one he had dreamed, might be a reasoned response, a reasoned critique, and not necessarily a nightmare. All criticism is ultimately a nightmare, he thought as he washed his face in the apartment where his mother’s body no longer was.

– Roberto Bolaño, ‘The part about Fate’, p.234, 2666

This was originally notionally a piece called ‘Justify yr pull-list’, but I can’t seem to think of a more absurd enterprise than that, on reflection.

Hobbies include: pitying fools

Watch out ’cause we’re back! Actually there’s no need to watch out.  The  whole disagreeable affair can be preemptively avoided by not choosing to listen to Tymbus and I talk for around 36 minutes about Wednesday Comics and the first volume of Prince Valiant from Fantagraphics.

Click to download VOT#9
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Further pictures of Prince Valiant are available should you wish…

A weekly strip by Fraser Geesin

The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

• Sean Witzke recently wrote a piece on this, a Dr Strange screenplay written by the odd couple paring of Stan Lee and Alex Cox. For those of you who don’t know, Cox is about as idiosyncratic a creator as cinema has ever seen, known for dirty, profoundly unconventional films like Repo Man, and Walker (director), and his screenplay for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and as such is about the unlikeliest candidate for this gig that I can imagine, and yet somehow someone somewhere thought that it might just work. Personally I would love to see what Cox could have done with this material – at worst his weird-ass synthetic approach to storytelling would have produced something very interesting indeed, and at best, well, who knows? What’s for certain is that it wouldn’t look much like the deeply conventional blockbuster pap that we’re served up today. (z)

Linkblogging continues after the jump

Check out my blog. That’s an order! And look through the Terminus archives. OK?

God, that’s an annoying title.  I’m sure we’ll do something about it like never use it again.  Here we go with our regular Tuesday reviews of fairly recent comics.  As you may know, I am more of a space traveler and podcaster rather than a writer so I’ll apologize in advance for not writing in that eloquent, insightful style you’d normally expect from a Mindless post.  As a consequence of this paucity of writing finesse I won’t be skirting around plot lines and such so…
Spoilers!

or Crisis? What Crisis? (part one)

This one:

Think of him as 2000AD’s awkward cousin. He and Tharg used to get on great for a bit, but while The Mighty One went into his teens still drunk on the heady surge of Thrill Power, Crisis was always a bit serious. Self consciously so, you could say. You know the routine: went veggie. CND badge. Amnesty membership. Morrissey lyrics sung at high volume to that face in the bedroom mirror. Didn’t make friends that easily, and sometimes seemed to try hard not to be noticed at all, but on rare occasions he’d come out with something that would really be worth paying attention to.

You’d get such a shock you’d probably jump in the ocean