Yesterday I was half-listening to the radio, when Jo Whiley started playing this thing she’d downloaded off the Internet. “Slash dot dash, slash dot com”, over and over again. It sounded really cheap, some joke MP3 knocked up by one[…]

Metafiction in Astro Boy
I’ve just read Astro Boy #14, which contains some of the most remarkable and untrammelled breaking of the traditional boundaries, not just of the comic artform but of any narrative form, that I’ve encountered. Fir[…]

A LONDON SONGBOOK
The music London makes, and its relation to the city, has not been written about as much as you might think. Simon Reynolds’ excellent chapter on pirate radio in the UK edition of “Energy Flash”; the atmosphere of […]

Reports of Alan Moore’s retirement seem a touch premature. Look, now he’s writing those old gnarly IPC characters – Steel Claw, The Spider, Doctor Sin. Of course these characters mean nothing to me (where is Martin when you need him[…]

Wordcount
(via Auspicious Fish)
This site has delayed me hugely today. I love its conceit. Here for instance is the word science proof of WHICH MUSIC IS BEST:
Rock – 1,511th
Metal – 2,185th
Dance – 2,293rd
Pop – 2,753rd (next […]

ON NAMING
back when Gibson’s Neuromancer wz just out, i recall my colleague d4vid qu4ntick getting into a strop abt the fact one of its characters is called “Quine”: he argued – he may be right – that the ONLY reason fo[…]

AVENGERS DAY AFTER
(ie: I was too busy to post this yesterday)
3: THUNDERBIRDS
Oh its easy to link the Thunderbirds movie with The Avengers movie. They are both inferior versions of a televsion classic, right? Wrong. As I posited here – a strai[…]

A charming idea, finely realised: untrue London stories.[…]

Pulp It
Bob Mizer is a good photographer, an interesting formal experimenter,a master at the boring, the sexual, the banal, the aspirational, thejoyous and the all American. He isn’t really a pornographer, though his work has mostly to do with […]

Whistle while you drink — the Snow White Cafe in Hollywood was chosen as a meeting spot by a number of us in LA on Saturday pre-disco movie madness across the street at the Egyptian. The selling point is that ol’ Walt himself started the[…]