Yes, it is I. The irregular Wow Cool link dump. Usually posted on a Monday or Tuesday, often in two parts, often skipping many weeks. We are well back from the holidays, and therefore it is time to obliterate every open tab and share the good bits that emerge.
We open with the fight song from of the original St. Trinnian’s films. As you may have heard, St. Trinnian’s creator Ronald Searle passed away a few days ago. He has been remembered far and wide. I tried and failed to find what I thought would be the perfect image to present, so I went with the video instead. If you are going to read only one obituary of the late British cartoonist, you should read the one by Steven Heller in the New York Times. And, hey, I actually liked the newer St. Trinnian’s films.
If you have a couple days to spare you really should take the time to read this interview with amigo Steve Bissette – part of the Comics Reporter holiday interview series. I could list about half of the rest as must reads too, but I’ll let you pick your own favorites.
Our late friend and inspiration Dylan Williams, of Sparkplug Comics, is being chronicled in bloggy fashion at the DYLAN WILLIAMS ARCHIVES – The life and work of Dylan F. Williams 1970 – 2011. “We are attempting to archive the life and work of Dylan Williams: Collected writings, comics, artwork, sketches, letters, stories, photos and tributes. This is an ongoing project compiled by Dylan’s friends and family. If you have something you would like to contribute, please write to tom (at) iwilldestroyyou (dot) com” If you knew Dylan, then the Amazon reviews will make you chuckle and miss him all the more. I lied a couple paragraphs ago, you also must read this Comics Reporter holiday interview with the current proprietors of Sparkplug.
I would be amiss to not give a shout-out to Sean T. Collins for giving us a Shout-out in this post-holiday roundup of amazing comics stuff. It’s part three of… how many? Does this guy ever sleep? So much goodness out there.
In related news, CBR’s Robot 6 has gone into overdrive the last few days (while most of us were relaxing) with great news, bits, previews and more. Seriously, too much to mention, just start digging.
And give special attention to this Robot 6 exclusive preview of titles coming from Koyama Press in 2012. We’ve just added a couple more Koyama titles to the shop here at Wow Cool. Snatch those up, because they are low in quantity and not likely to be reprinted.
Kid Kameleon at SF MusicTech 2009 - photo by Marc Arsenault
It’s always really nice when a thing leads to another thing and you discover a whole other world of awesome music and art that you did not previously know existed. The art and science of discovery is something that drives the marketers wild and makes us passionate ones crazy. Today saw a series of intriguing finds spurred by the usual Friday afternoon listen at Wow Cool HQ of the excellent Tom Ravenscroft show on BBC 6Music. The guest mix on the show was by local favorite Kid Kameleon (Site, Twitter), who I’d photographed and seen perform at SF MusicTech a couple years ago.
At Wow Cool central in Cupertino, CA, we will be celebrating All Hallow’s Read next week, by giving scary books to family and friends and offering it as an option to trick-or-treaters that come to the door on Monday, October 31. A big thanks to TopShelf publishing for providing many copies of their latest Free Comic Book Day tome for kids. We’re getting the jump on the plan for 2012 to offer FCBD twice a year.
I’ve been watching Lis Sladen play Sarah Jane Smith on TV since Doctor Who first debuted on PBS in the US, beginning with Tom Baker’s first story ‘Robot’ some 30 or more years ago. I didn’t even know she was sick. She will be much missed. The image above is a screen shot I took 20 years ago for possible use in a Brown Cuts Neighbors project. It is from the Doctor Who story Pyramids of Mars. BBC news story. BBC YouTube Sarah Jane playlist.
And then it all went to hell. A week ago we were locked inside here on the west coast of America dreading the radioactive plume that had drifted our way from Japan. It was a cold rainy day that did, truly feel odd. Like the radiation made your bones ache and your thyroid twitch a little. I have no idea how much the exposure was then, or now; nor do I have any clue as to what effects, if any there have been or will be. I do know I am most worried for my friends in Japan; and, I do know quite a bit about the types of reactors at Fukishima and their history with their designers and suppliers of three of them. I know this because I grew up in Schenectady, New York. Schenectady was once a major American industrial city, and they did something special there. They refined plutonium… right outside of downtown on Peek Street. And on a couple of occasions it exploded. A decade ago, the building where they did this went down in flames. That same week I was working on a documentary on the history of GE and early atomic development in Schenectady: The city that lights and hauls the world.
A few days ago, documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis posted to his blog for the BBC part 6 of his series Pandora’s Box: A is For Atom (embedded above). You absolutely must watch this film.
The film shows that from very early on – as early as 1964 – US government officials knew that there were serious potential dangers with the design of the type of reactor that was used to build the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But that their warnings were repeatedly ignored.
The film tells the story of the rise of nuclear power in America, Britain and the Soviet Union. It shows how the way the technologies were developed was shaped by the political and business forces of the time. And how that led directly to inherent dangers in the design of the containment of many of the early plants.
Those early plants in America were the Boiling Water Reactors. And that is the very model that was used to build the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Three of them were supplied directly by General Electric.
In 1966 the US government Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards tried to force the industry to redesign their containment structures to make them safer. But the chairman of the committee claims in the film that General Electric in effect refused.
When it comes to mischief-making with a porpoise, the Yes Men have no equal! Mike Bonanno is bringing never-before-seen footage and behind-the-scenes insights from the latest Yes Men hijinks to launch the Spring 2011 season at Troy, New York’s Sanctuary for Independent Media… and he’s ready to share some secrets, too!
How did the Yes Men derail Chevron’s latest multi-million dollar greenwashing campaign? Are they worried about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lawsuit against them?
Go to 3361 6th Avenue in North Troy, New York at 7 PM on Tuesday, March 8, 2011 for this and more! Admission by donation ($10 suggested, $5 student/low income).
Fantagraphics Books’ long running magazine of comics news, criticism and whatnot, The Comics Journal, officially handed over the curation of it’s interwebs iteration TCJ.com to the motley band at Comics Comics. Re-launched on Sunday, March 6th, 2011, with a brand new look and an opening editorial from Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler, TCJ.com is the nicest and freshest it has looked in years. We will see in the coming weeks what kind and frequency of content we can expect from the new stable of columnists, which includes the whole Comics Comics team and a host of others. I expect great things from Sean T. Collins in his new interview series Say Hello and am curious what novelist Tom DeHaven will be bringing to the show. No word on if Brian Chippendale has been enticed to bring his Marvelous Coma blog over to the site. Granted he hasn’t had a new post in over half a year, but I remain optimistic. In related news, Lightning Bolt starts it’s Spring tour in just a few weeks. Go check that.
In the meanwhile, it was also announced on Sunday by Jay Babcock that “Arthur, such as it is, is set to close March 15, 2011.” In the weeks before the announcement, the Arthur site had been posting a great deal of content from its mid-decade print version including a number of comics that hadn’t been seen since. The Arthur comics pages were edited by Jordan Crane and Sammy Harkham, then Tom Devlin, then Alvin Buenaventura. In the last two years as online-only, Jason Leivian of Floating World Comics has been the comics editor. Among the artists presented are David Lasky, Megan Kelso and Souther Salazar. Some kind of an incomplete history is on the Wikipedia. Arthur was a very influential magazine during it’s few years run in the mid-00s. It was sort of a bold fusion of 80s fanzine* and new journalism sensibilities fused to whatever was going on in the middle of the century’s first decade. Good stuff. We can now officially miss it.
UPDATE: For further reading, I direct you to Tom Spurgeon’s The Comics Reporter for his interview with Dan and Tim about the TCJ.com take over. Tom also covers Arthur closing and notes in this post that the Comics Journal’s notorious message board has been shuttered. I salute his professionalism and restraint regarding any mention of a certain cartoon figure who also is known for having a portrait of him by Sam Henderson.
*For the curious, I’m thinking of 80s fanzines like Forced Exposure, No Mag and Chemical Imbalance. Thanks to Jay Babcock for checking in here and correcting some of my Arthur facts (you know, like placing it in the wrong decade)
There used to be a great feature in the magazine The Comics Journal called the swipe file, where a classic piece of comic art was held up next to a more recent piece that usually resembled it a bit too much to be mere coincidence. The best know modern version is, of course, the You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice, But We Did… blog. Here’s a classic I stumbled across today while digging through a library sale trying to complete my collections of John Le Carre novels and Speedball Pen calligraphy manuals:
Some vital recent cultural moments you may have missed.
The multi-talented Mark Sunshine (singer of Monster Magnet splinter faction Riot God and an artist most awesome) has updated his site again. Minimal, bold, and links to greatness.
Sam McPheeters of Vermiform/Born Against/etc. fame has released a collection of his early 1990s Hardcore Punk Zine Dear Jesus, as a velo-bound collection. Wow Cool still has a few copies of the first of his Shooting Space zine available.
Dear Jesus was a hardcore punk fanzine I produced between 1989 and 1992. There were four full issues, and a mini-issue I made 50 copies of and sold at one show in 1990. Everything is included in this collection. The anthology totals 140 pages, with a new intro, color cover, and sturdy velo binding. More work by Sam is available on BuyOlympia.com.
These five issues include interviews with Jello Biafra, Richie Birkenhead (of Underdog & Youth Of Today), Doc Dart (this is the piece that led, 17 years later, to my Vice Magazine profile “The Troublemaker”), Econochrist, Lifesblood, CBGB owner Hilly Kristal, Ian MacKaye, Maximumrocknroll, Mike BS (of ABC No Rio), Mykel Board (of MRR), Nation Of Ulysses (pictorial), Nausea, Neanderthal, No For An Answer, Revelation Records, Rorschach, Soulside, Supertouch, artist Seth Tobocman, Swiz, and Tit Wrench. This collection also includes articles on the first Gulf War, punk in Latin America, an extensive Born Against tour diary, and many, many painfully opinionated reviews. Dear Jesus was one of the most consistent hardcore punk zines to document the early 1990′s ABC No Rio scene in New York. If this is a historical period that interests you, then this is perhaps something you will want to own.
I’ve been accumulating these for about a year. Various books that were picked up at garage sales and library sales because the cover art was just so great. On all but a couple of them I have to admit that the initial thrill faded over time… Here’s some hoping that the initial response was valid and these are great (and maybe, more significantly, different) cover designs. Enjoy.
This book is an endless source of wonder and speculation. I can spend hours imagining the adventures of the Easy Wizards. I saw this little sticker book randomly in one of those little over-priced toy stores that inexplicably thrive in the strip-malls of central California. “You gotta be kidding. I mean, you know who this is, man? This is Captain America. I’m Billy. Hey, we’re headliners baby. We played every fair in this part of the country. I mean, for top dollar, too!” -Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.
2010 really is the year sound art broke. I predict that Susan Philipsz will be the ‘next Susan Boyle’; and her sales of Scottish folksong CDs will make that £25,000 Turner prize money look like small change. Currently her recordings are only available to listen to in the environments they were created for. There are no commercially available disks.
Video: ‘You are not alone’ by Susan Philipsz, commissioned by Modern Art Oxford for the Radcliffe Observatory, Green Templeton College, Oxford, 2009. The piece is based on radio interval signals that have been played on a vibraphone.
Interview at the Guardian: Susan Philipsz: Sonic boom Susan Philipsz has won the Turner prize – using just her own voice. So was her night marred by the student protests? How did she get into sound art? And what’s this about a run-in with Stephen Fry?
A photo essay with minimal commentary. Mostly taken in Brooklyn during the week of CMJ 2010. You work as a graphic artist for 20 years and this sort of stuff drives you crazy.
There are certain things that are constant to Brooklyn. Egg sandwiches are easy to come by, coffee is served with milk, not cream, and the best places all serve Boars Head meats. This place on Prospect Park West is extra special… they have Board’s Head.
Underwear Goes Inside The Pants. I played the hell out of this when it came out four or so years ago. No idea if this is the Lazy Boy project of Rob daBank’s or someone else. It’s still pretty damn funny. As reported in The New York Times today, Greg Giraldo has died at age 44.
We are now officially in that future world
where you gladly pay for
the 3D animated corpses of rock stars
to dance on your face forever.
Today was a sad day for me. Today was the last we would hear Mary Anne Hobbs on BBC Radio 1. I imagine there is just a week to listen again on the iPlayer as usual… No fears, she has plenty going on, as detailed on her new website MaryAnneHobbs.com. I’ve been listening to Mary Anne every week for as long as she’s been on the BBC’s internet stream… previously with the Breezeblock show and in the last few years the Experimental Show. I have a hard time imagining any kind of replacement on radio for this kind of steady sequence of electronic musicalawesomeness.
An further installment in the series of clearing out thee interesting tabs from thee browser before thee coming several weeks of much excitements and announcements of profound import.
Missed it Dept.: Bryan Young at Huffington Post has an exclusive eight-page preview of Mat Johnson and Simon Gane’s Dark Rain graphic novel about New Orleans during Katrina published by Vertigo. Dark Rain was released on August 24, 2010 (the preview is from the 22nd) Here is a choice paragraph from his review:
The book doesn’t just tackle the heist story, though, it captures a taste of the horror and confusion of the days after the hurricane and the immense sense of depression and loss that must have been present in the Superdome while residents waited far too long for aid. In fact, there were more than a couple of moments in the book set in the Superdome that almost brought tears to my eyes.
Jimmy Page has a website… well, he has a hint that a website is coming. You can sign up for updates. We expect great things.
Music and art powerhouse Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt, Ninja) has started a web comic on PictureBox’s site called Puke Force.
I’m looking forward to seeing Stanley Donwood’s exhibit of new paintings – over normal – at Fifty24SF Gallery when I get back to the Bay Area next week. They are very much in the style of the art he created for Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief and its singles.
The much loved Betty Davis talks about her life with Miles and inspiring Bitches Brew‘s creation in today’s Guardian on the event of a deluxe re-issue of that classic record, that, for better and worse, gave us fusion.
And, last, we have this interview with Upstate’s Favorite James Howard Kunstler about his new novel The Witch of Hebron, which is to be released on Tuesday, September 7th.
Sadly, The Asian Music network not so lucky. BBC Trust says that ‘the case has not been made’ for digital station’s closure. Read the full story on the Guardian’s site. This is the best news ever this year for independent music. 6Music has been very nice to Wow Cool’s artist’s and we have written about the campaign to keep them flowing here and here. Yay! More Stuart Maconie’s Freakzone! More of the excellent Tom Ravenscroft! More and More and More of original and classic indie music!
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dedicated to GE’s nuclear history that you should read.
