2012 – Page 13 – Wis[s]e Words

An alphabet link soup

Published on October 8, 2012Leave a comment

Let’s swipe an idea from Branko, who after all got it himself from Scalzi and see what sites pop up for each lettre of the alphabet (save for ÆØÅ of course) if I use Opera’s autocomplete (other browsers are available):

A: Acesweekly, David Lloyd’s (off off V for Vendetta and Night Raven fame) new digital comics weekly.

B: the BBC radio player, tuned to radio 4, for my inner fogey.

C: Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter, essential reading to keep up with Yank comics.

D: David Willis’ do-over webcomic.

E: Every Day Is Like Wednesday; more comics blogging.

F: The Guardian‘s football subsite.

G: Girls with Slingshots, comedy soap opera strip by Danielle Corsetto.

H: the Hooded Utilitarian, completely wrong comics group blog.

I: not much here, just where I went to the Saturday before last.

J: James Nicoll’s Livejournal. Come for the science fiction snark, stay for the cats and hare raising, live threatening accidents.

K: another comics blogger heard from.

L: what I use to catalog my books.

M: Metafilter, natch.

N: Making Light

O: Oglaf, not really safe for work.

P: legendary 2000AD writer/editor Pat Mills’ blog.

Q: Jeph Jacques Questionable Content.

R: Requires Hate, which puts the boot into everything that really is bad in science fiction and fantasy, like racist and sexist kind of bad, rather than just awful writing. Is everything people who make the toen argument dislike.

S: oh look, financial analysises of football clubs. That’s interesting.

T: The Comics Journal.

U: Unfogged, a smartypants smart aleck group blog.

V: Voetbal International, not that I visited this site much.

W: Tim O’Neil’s rather good if too infrequently updated blog.

X: XKCD, of course.

Y: yes of course it’s Youtube, but what particular video would this link to? Turns out it’s a metal dude singing to his cat. As you do.

Z: Zelo Street, an UK political/newsmedia blog that does daily battle with tabloid nonsense.

Interesting, wasn’t it?

Eleven months

Published on October 7, 2012Leave a comment

Eleven months to the day since Sandra died. Time flies even when you’re not having fun. I thougt I’d keep it light today by just sharing some of the songs that would always cheer her up.

Sandra had always been a Paul Weller fan, but never more so than during his Style Council days.

From the Style Council’s Long Hot Summer it’s only a short step to Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves the Sunshine:

Roy Ayers is one of those jazz/funk crossover artists that made the seventies such an interesting musical decade. The Crusaders are another example; their greatest hit Streetlife being not quite like their other work… Here they are at Montreux in 2003, with Randy Crawford:

I’ve talked about how much Sandra liked the Brothers Johnson’s version of Strawberry Letter 23 before, but here’s Shuggie Otis’ original version:

As for the Brothers Johnson, another favourite was Land of Ladies, which always reminded her of driving through France on a family holiday with the album on which this song appeared the only cassette available and hence being played over and over.

Stevie Wonder was another huge favourite of Sandra’s. Y’all know what this is.

Not quite as sophisticated as Stevie Wonder, but certainly as funky was Johnny “Guitar” Watson, who had had a long career already before he reinvented himself in the seventies. Here he is on Soul Train:

Speaking of funk and reinvention, Chaka Khan got her start with this lot, Rufus, long before she became an eighties pop diva:

Let’s leave with another summer song by another favourite, The Isley Brothers’ Summer Breeze:

Tach-tig

Published on October 4, 2012Leave a comment

Dutch people counting to one hundred, in order of age, as filmed by Jeroen Wolf.

Eric Hobsbawm 1917 – 2012

Published on October 2, 2012Leave a comment

Eric Hobsbawm died yesterday:

Unlike some others, Hobsbawm achieved this wider recognition without in any major way revolting against either Marxism or Marx. In his 94th year he published How to Change the World, a vigorous defence of Marx’s continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-10. What is more, he achieved his culminating reputation at a time when the socialist ideas and projects that animated so much of his writing for well over half a century were in historic disarray, and worse – as he himself was always unflinchingly aware.

In a profession notorious for microscopic preoccupations, few historians have ever commanded such a wide field in such detail or with such authority. To the last, Hobsbawm considered himself to be essentially a 19th-century historian, but his sense of that and other centuries was both unprecedentedly broad and unusually cosmopolitan.

The sheer scope of his interest in the past, and his exceptional command of what he knew, continued to humble many, most of all in the four-volume Age of… series, in which he distilled the history of the capitalist world from 1789 to 1991. “Hobsbawm’s capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs,” wrote Neal Ascherson. Both in his knowledge of historic detail and in his extraordinary powers of synthesis, so well displayed in that four-volume project, he was unrivalled.

Of all 20th century Marxist and Marxist influenced historians, Hobsbawm has been perhaps the most influential, especially in the English speaking world. For me he was one of the historians I started to discover and read when I had become a socialist, back in 2001/2002, somebody who was capable of showing the grand sweep of history without losing sight of its foundations.

James at Blood & Treasure always found Hobsbawm slightly off putting for his continued support of the Communist Party long after most people had abandoned it, as well as being a bit cavalier about the suffering actually existing communism perpetuated. For me, that was largely irrelevant, coming to him long after the USSR had ceased to exist, but also because Hobsbawm really didn’t have all that influence outside of his historical work and that was always solid.

The essence of Ware

Published on October 1, 2012Leave a comment

All you need to know about what makes Chris Ware tick in one page

They’re holding their annual festival of hate over at the Hooded Utilitarian and Bert Stabler took aim at Chris Ware:

In twee there is neither humor nor horror, neither conviction nor swagger, just feelings. Feelings and nostalgia for feelings. Chris Ware was sucked into this vortex, streamlining himself into a reliable product for easy digestibility by self-styled “nerds” everywhere, and so we ended up with emo comics garbage overflowing the microcosm of craft-fair entrepreneurship and spilling into Michel Gondry, Death Cab for Cutie, and overdetermined bangs (all much to Chris Ware’s chagrin, if he has any left). True, this infantile regression might have happened anyway. Maybe it was September 11th that whetted the American appetite for saccharine melancholia, but I blame Chris Ware. What twee had to offer that was positive– androgyny, sloppiness, magic– was latent but present in his flamboyant early work. He could have made different choices, But it is lost now, lost irrevocably in the sterile, commercially lubricated navel into which his vision has apparently gone to die.

I’m not sure at all that I agree with this criticism, even if there is a kernel of truth in it, but there is an argument to be made that Ware has a limited palette as a cartoonist and keeps returning to the same themes. All of which are present in the cartoon above: the selfish and socially inept protagonist, alone in an uncaring (rather than a hostile) world, reliving childhood trauma in an atmosphere of melancholy, nostalgia and sadness. Everything else in his work is just commentary, an embellishment of the same themes.