W O R D S 1

I finished reading Eastern Standard Tribe , by Cory
Doctorow, a few days ago. I started reading on Sunday and finished on Monday. I rarely, if ever, read 200-page
books in two days, if that gives you any indication as to how well I
liked it, and it also attests to its ease-of-reading. Doctorow writes
the kind of science fiction that is a future just beyond our present. I
mean, it seems nearly here, in fact. One of the quotes on the books
jacket reads: Cory Doctorow doesnt just write about the future - I
think he lives there. Its quoted from someone named Kelly Link, of whom
Ive never heard, but she sure is eloquent, if not a bit hyperbolic.

The story, aside from the great future prognostication, was pretty
decent, as well. His format was slightly Memento-like, in that we had
two simultaneous time-lines going on back and forth and the end of the
one was drawing nearer to the beginning of the other with every
progressive chapter.

I wouldnt exactly call Doctorow a poet, at least not in any sense in
which one might traditionally use the word. Hes fairly descriptive, but
no in the dense, emotive visceral sense. But he captures a cultural
idiom pretty well (i.e. the way people communicate on the Internet):

Trepan: Any UK solicitors on the channel?
Gink-Go: Lawyers. Heh. Kill em all. Specially eurofag fixers.
Junta: Hey, I resemble that remark.
Trepan: Junta, youre a UK lawyer?
Gink-Go: Use autocounsel, dude. L{ialwayer}rs suck. Channel
#autocounsel. Chatterbot with all major legal systems on the backend.
Trepan: Whatever. I need a human lawyer.
Trepan: Junta, you there?
Gink-Go: Off raping humanity.
Gink-Go: Fuck lawyers.
Trepan: /shitlist Gink-Go
##Gink-Go added to Trepans shitlist. Use /unsht Gink-Go to see messages
again.

It goes on to where everyone in the chatroom puts Gink-Go on their "shitlist,"
which causes Gink-Go to storm out of the chatroom and be all offended.

It's little technological innovations like this that pervade Eastern Standard
Tribe and make it interesting.

The book is available for free downloading via the authors website, an
event of which I was first apprised by Mr. Warren Ellis via his Bad
Signal serial e-mailings regarding all things new.

Not one to be left behind in the dark ages of the past-like present, I
am typing this with my butterfly keyboard into my phone. Tomorrow
(today, when it happens), I will use the secure digital card in my
phone to transfer this text to my computer at work to in turn relay
this information to the site from which you are now reading. See, I get
to be in bed and speak to you tomorrow yesterday. All through the
wonderful world of electronics. [As it turned out, the wonderful world of
electronics has consistently failed me in terms of meeting my expectations.
Firstly, my phone won't save the text in a format that my computer recognizes
unless I sync the phone, so the SD card becomes useless. Secondly,
the many extant viruses on my home computer, which is set up for
synching with my phone, have prevailed over Microsoft Word's opening
of said files so that they're uneditable; as soon as a doc off my phone
opened, Word freezes. Great. Ultimately, I had to cut and paste all
of the text from the Pocket Word document into a email directly into
Yahoo from the dial-up connection to the Internet that actually does
work on my phone. Sadly, this resulted in some funky formatting of
text and now i have no idea what it will look like in it's finished state.

Oh well]

Speaking of Mr. Ellis, Ive been meaning to talk about the latest issue
of Planetary, which is Ellis stab at meta-superhero comic book writing.
The latest issue is one of the best things Ive read by him in a while.
Not to say that the other things have been bad. Its just with this past
issue, it was really really good.

Certainly the teamwork/collaboration between Ellis and John Cassaday
has something to do with it all, though. A fact to which Im sure Ellis
will attest. In fact, theyve been nominated for best artist/writer team
in this years, um, is it Eisner? Awards? Anyway,

Brian posted at 10:22 AM.

I picked up a comic by an up-and-coming artist/writer named Tyrell Cannon. It was his exhibition piece for the undergrad show for the School of the Art Institute. It consisted of three parts. I wouldn't really call them stories, more like graphical essays.

The first, Cyborgs Are Not Our Friends, was my least favorite. I seemed a little too purposely esoteric and I felt like he was trying to say something that I had to decode. And furthermore, that whatever "it" was was personal enough that only he could figure it out. I think it was vaguely about self-hatred and misogyny, but I didn't get the cyborg thing. I think it was either Susan Sontag or Donna Harraway (both feminists who pontificate a lot about future and robots and stuff, thus the confusion [plus I can't find either of the books I have by them and I'm not about to google it just for this entry]) who first talked about women being cyborgs in the purest sense of the word (at least by her definition) and I've never quite been able to remove that association from my head, which may have something to do with the fact that I didn't quite understand Cannon's first part.

The second piece, entitled Simon: Combat, was very cool. I think that Cannon's strength lies in his artwork, and he shines in this part because it is entirely a graphic piece - no narrative. It's basically an elaborate fight scene that looks like it could have been off the story-board of the film Kill Bill. You can even purchase merchandise for the character Simon here.

The last part was pretty cool, too, and seemed to follow his "mission statement" about the comic book artform, which he included on the inside back cover of the book:

My artwork explores the medium of comics formally and contextually as an art form. The comic is a rich ground for artistic exploration in that it is capable of communicating in complex ways that other mediums cannot. The comic book is a mixture of many other mediums and possesses the unique ability to simultaneously exist as drawings, stories, poetry, paintings, books, sculptures, etc. A comic itself is comprised of line, time, space, composition, language, expression, texture, and much more. Comics do not have to be restricted to linear narratives involving characters, but can exist as the artistic expression of thoughts and ideas. The focus of my comic book work is to explore personal and social aspects of the human experience. I hope to uniquely address life in a way that speaks to the individual on a more personal level while also challenging what the comic book medium is capable of achieving artistically.

Given the SAIC's reputation for being a conceptual art school, I half-wondered if he threw that in to justify his work. This is the kind of snobbery to which my acquaintance was referring when he said "I've
known some great people that have gone there, but if you could find some way to harness the *attitude* from that place and turn it into energy, you could solve the nation's energy problems."

However, the piece I was talking about in the first place sort of backs up his thesis. The title is When. It starts out looking almost like a space story, just blackness and white spots. But by the 5th or 6th panel you see the familiar iconography for sperm and egg. Cannon illustrates the progressive development of a human foetus--presumably his own--and posits questions about the nature of being using sparse, poetic language. Whether this is a truly ontological essay or more of a anti-choice statement on abortion, I wasn't sure. Again, it seemed profoundly personal, but didn't present the same sort of intellectual quagmire that the first piece did.

The last two panels beg the most questions, though. First there is an image of the infant sort of hatching from an egg that looks like it could possibly be positioned within a human female's birth canal. It's very confusing. Since there was this context of mistaken space in the beginning and also the first story talking about cyborgs, I almost took it as alien imagery. Who's to say? Well, he is, I suppose. The last panel is of the artist, peering through blackness, fully grown, with a bit of text: "Peering through flesh fingers into darkness / I realize I am more than my cell. / I am more than the sum of my parts. / I am."

The style of artwork in the third piece was more free-form than the first two pieces. It was moody and made use of negative space more freely. All in all, I thought the three pieces complemented one another pretty well, but again, that the first part seemed a little weaker in terms of what it was trying to say, if anything.

Brian posted at 5:25 PM.

I just read an op-ed piece, by Nicholas D. Kristof, in the NYTimes online thingy. It was about abortion in Portugal and how there was just a mass trial of women who had abortions. All the women were acquitted, but they all had to go through a trial, which was degrading. Also, one woman, a nurse, was sentenced to 8 and a half year in prison or something for performing abortions. It goes on to say how medieval the whole thing is for Portugal and that popular opinion was very high against the criminalization of abortions. But what stuck out for me was the last few lines, which read:

"As one sensible woman put it in her autobiography: "For me, abortion is a personal issue — between the mother, father and doctor." She added, "Abortion is not a presidential matter."

President Bush, listen to your mother."


It seems like the New York Times hates Bush as much as the rest of us.

__________

I'm on page 58 of The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is pretty good so far. Right now it's in back story, but it's supposed to delve into the world of the first comic books.

Brian posted at 10:35 AM.

On the bus on the way to work, I read the first half of a quarterly art publication called Coterie. So far it seems pretty strong. I am impressed with its bravery in terms of unabashed intellectualism, but unfortunately, I'm also just a bit turned off by it. It, at times, seems a bit dry, devoid of emotion or, especially, awe. While the authors can at times be lauding an artist, there still seems to lack a certain emotional attachment, which for me, seems to undercut any rational argument in the first place. At any rate, I'll finish reading the paper and definitely pick up further installments. More than anything, I'm proud of Chicago for producing something so serious and wonderful and I hope it enhances the Chicago arts scene (and not, God forbid, do the opposite).

Brian posted at 7:46 AM.

I finally finished Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire. As I predicted, it culminated in a very tie-it-all-up way. I was very pleased with the ending. It was pleasant in its surrealism even if that's not entirely what he intended. I knew that I would be seeing a lot of the recurring imagery in the final chapter. I was surprised (and a little skeptical) by the "girlfriend's" mention of a shagfoal in her dream. The romantic in me wanted to believe in it. Interestingly, I dreamt this morning of a huge dog. It wasn't black, but grey. In any event, quite creepy. You can find the full context of this dream on my DREAM blog.

About 80 pages into Bass Guitar for Dummies. I think I'm going to give finger striking a whirl (as opposed to picking). It's been over ten years that I've played bass and I've never seriously given it a try.

This morning I read an article about a new liberal talk radio station in the New York Times. In Chicago, it'll be at 950 AM, I think, starting broadcast at noon going until I think 6pm or something. They are raising money to buy radio stations, but since deregulation, no one wants to sell. Fucking Clear Channel bitches. Sorry about the language. HATE HATE HATE Clear Channel.

Brian posted at 9:16 AM.