Waffle

Staff Cutbacks starts today on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website. It almost didn't make it there. It wasn't until last Friday that I found usable source images for it, in the master copy of the zine it was originally published in. Staff Cutbacks originally ran in the 21st issue of Impuls, a tiny magazine that I was editor of from 1994 to 1998. Issue 21 was the "Devil" special issue so it contained a devil story by Geir and Daniel, and The Wife in the Hole, Geir's adaptation of a Saami folktale with art by me. It was also to be the final issue of Impuls, at least until contributor Filip Remkes resurrected it a year or so later. By 1998 I had become terribly disillusioned with zine editing. It's something you have to do for only a few years, because eventually your sense of perspective will kick in and you realise that you're not accomplishing much with putting out a publication with a print run of about a hundred. Even a modestly succesful webcomic can easily reach ten times as many people, without all the legwork involved in schlepping paper to smelly comics conventions. And giving the contributors an unpaid print run of a hundred copies isn't really much better than not publishing them at all. So I quit. Interestingly, looking at the material in Impuls 21 again seven years later, I find that many of the contributors are still working in comics or illustration, and are doing so on at least a semi-professional basis. Mark "RayMan" Horemans, Robby van der Meulen, Tommy A, Roy Spraakman, Robbert Damen, Maaike Hartjes (who was already quite succesful at that time, but I'm still proud to include her among the lineup of that final issue), Steven De Rie and myself - we're everywhere now. And Daniel's still doing his mix of sculpture, painting, multimedia, music and comics; I wouldn't count him as a professional cartoonist, but when he puts his hands to it he's quite good at it, which is why I'm still trying to help him break through.

I had no understanding of the French riots until today. What was going on and especially why, I had no idea. Just about all blogospheric writing on the matter that I've seen, if it offered any analysis at all, was of the "the riots prove my politics are right" variety and pretty useless even as that. But today, Daniel Davies posted this comment to a post by himself at Crooked Timber:

I love the French and I think that smashing things up and setting fire to them is an excellent way to pursue your grievances against the French state. If these young chaps stick to it for long enough, maybe they will be as pampered and looked after as French farmers.

Game, set and match, folks. The riots are now Explained. Daniel's post on his own blog has a good quote as well:

These young men have got a political grievance, and they're expressing it by setting fire to things and smashing them up. What could be more stereotypically, characteristically French than that? Presumably they're setting fire to cars because they don't have any sheep and the nearest McDonalds is miles away. "French society is threatened by anarchy and lawlessness". I mean really. Everyone would do well to remember that this is France we're talking about, not Sweden or perhaps Canada.

In forthcoming weeks, I shall be applying similar analytical techniques to topics like "root and branch corruption is threatening the essence of Italian democracy" and "Muslim immigrants cannot fit into British society because they are insular, bigoted and sexually repressed".

Meanwhile, Andrew Rilstone dissects a "Political correctness gone mad" story from the Daily Express:

"NOW CHRIST IS BANNED"

[...]

Four words.

NOW

"In addition." "On top of everything else" "We knew things were bad, but this is really the last straw." The word drags us into the conspiracy.... we all know, it's so obvious it goes without saying, that many things have been banned recently, we can't think of any actual examples, but we're sure they have, and now this!

CHRIST

The person? The religion? Or just the word? I think there is a little wordplay going on here. We have just had the annual "local council abolishes Christmas" stormover. [...]We are supposed to infer: "Yesterday, they banned Christmas, and now, Christ is banned."

IS

The journalistic present. We are not reporting an event which has happened. We are informing you of a state which now exists. You have woken up in a bad new world where a new thing has been prohibited.

BANNED

A key tabloid word. It's meaning is ambiguous – it doesn't been prohibited by law, necessarily, or censored, or abolished – but it implies that Someone is telling us what to do, and we don't like it.

NOW. CHRIST. IS. BANNED.

Who is the evil authority figure doing the banning? The Curator of Cheddar Gorge geological museum. What has he done? Removed the letters "B.C" from the dates on some of his exhibits.

So in fact CHRIST IS NOT BANNED AT ALL [...] THE FIRST LETTER OF THE WORD "CHRIST" IS REMOVED FROM THE LABELS IN ONE MUSEUM.

That's it. That's the whole story. Main headline, front page, inside page and leading article in a tabloid on sale in every shop in the land, predicated on "Small Museum Re-Labels Its Exhibits."

Read the whole thing; it's a good analysis of the "political correctness gone mad meme". I'll add that I'm not looking forward to Christmas this year. On top of the normal suckitude of Christmas, I expect another crop of transparently made-up stories in which shopkeepers are prevented from wishing customers a merry Christmas with some bullshit "what's this country coming to?" moral tacked on to the end. I'm looking at you, Lileks.

Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now by Mitch Benn and the Distractions. Dig the song, dig the URL even more. (Via one of the miscreants at Tapelounge)

Kate vs. Tori with photographic comparisons between the two. The winner gets to fight a bear.

I had made a brain fart in my lettering of the punchline to Thousandstab, reducing it to nonsense. It's corrected now. In the future, I will send the lettered files off to Geir and Daniel for proofreading... Sorry, again, for my recurring scatterbrainedness and incompetence.

...but Bustertheclown on the Comicgenesis forums beat me to it:

The [manga] being imported these days, for the most part, isn't classic stuff. It doesn't even have the makings of classic stuff. A huge percentage of it is trite pop fluff. That's understandable, since publishers like TokyoPOP are in the game to make a healthy profit, which they are. The part I don't like is that now the trite pop fluff is the stuff that's influencing people. ... I see a trend of clueless youth shunning the old hat title of cartoonist for the perceived glitz and glamor that is manga-ka.

Believe me, the tactics are there. "Read it backwards! Pretend you're Japanese!" Sorry folks. When I'm reading English, I want to read it from left to right. It gives me a headache otherwise. If I read it in Japanese, I'll read it Japanese style. "Big eyes are more expressive!" Yeah. Bullshit. Big eyes, small eyes, no eyes; if you don't know the rules of caricatured expression, all your characters are just going to look like mannequins. "The page layout is so much more open and fluid!" Fluid, to me, means having a readable narrative sequence, i.e. looking at a given page or strip, and understanding what the hell is going on. I'm sorry, but when it comes to forming a sequential narrative, I'd pick American cartoonists over Japanese manga-ka any day of the week.

The stuff in quotations are all arguments I've heard being fed from publishers and purveyors to readers for the past few years (and, of course, my responses to those arguments). When you dispute them, the standard retort is "you just don't understand Japanese culture!" Well, I understand it well enough to know that I'm not Japanese!... I don't understand why, in manga, when a young man sees a girl scantily clad, he either starts crying or gets a gushing nosebleed, because an American comics, when a young man sees a scantily clad girl, he usually starts wrestling with her.

These are cultural differences which have been developed over generations! As a man who's interested in the cultures of the world, enough to try to learn many different languages, and enough to surround himself in the last six months with dozens of new friends form all over the world, I'm very concerned that the cultural sampling that's taking place in the instance of cartoons is not terribly healthy. In bringing in so much manga and anime in so many venues so quickly, and almost ignoring other forms of cartooning, a truly American artform is being diminished at it's core.

I don't agree with Bustertheclown in every particular, because I see comics as an international art form, but the wasted potential in American and European pseudo-manga irritates me as well. There's so much that Japanese comics can add to a cartoonist's expressive vocabulary, but instead, western imitators latch on to the lamest aspects: the stupid clichés involving big nosebleeds, sweat drops, blood types in character profiles, giant hair and giant eyes. It's dull and turns the less knowledgeable reader off the great work that has come out of Japan because they are trained to expect nothing but that rubbish.

So the album is out, and European fans in particular have been all over it as a Technorati Search will reveal. But is it any good? Is it really, as some fans have gushed, Kate's best since Hounds of Love?

I've listened to it a few time and my preliminary judgement is that Aerial just about manages to be her best since The Red Shoes. I can't stress enough that this is preliminary: I've lived with her other albums for over a decade, in some cases two, and there are many tracks on them that took me a long time to learn to appreciate. But after half a dozen listens, it seems to me that the album suffers from the same problems that its 1993 predecessor did: a lack of urgency, focus and strong melodies.

What I'm hearing on both records is some very pretty, well-recorded music, influenced by jazz, electronica, reggae and latin in equal measures. The singing is often jazzy as well, especially in tracks like "Pi" from the first disk and "Sunset" from the second.

Ah, yes. It's a double CD. I think that was her first mistake. Rather than compressing all her ideas into concise, poignant songs, Kate has allowed each individual composition to stretch to the point where most of them wear out their welcome. A version of Aerial cropped to 50 or so minutes still wouldn't be my favourite Kate Bush album, but it would be a much stronger one.

The reason such a hypothetical cropped version still wouldn't be my favorite is more due to Kate's direction than anything else. It is in this area that my opinion of the album is most likely to change over time. Kate has chosen to write and sing mostly quiet, meditative material about the beauty, contentment and romance of everyday life, and right now, that's not what I want out of a Kate Bush album - or indeed any album. But who knows what I might want in a few years' time?

Even keeping that in mind, though, Aerial could have made its case more convincingly. The best art in any medium draws the observer into the creation, compelling the observer to "get it". There are few such moments on either of the two disks. "Sunset" with its steady pace, simple melody and lyrics sung so as to emphasise the dead stops at the ends of each line, comes closest. After a few tense silences, the joyous Latin section at the end provides release. For all its seeming simplicity, the song is a tour de force. For the most part, though, the album sticks to the background, prettily washing over this one listener just like much of the previous record did. There is, on the whole, more to pique the interest in the first disk, the collection of Kate songs, than in the second, conceptual one, but in both, there simply isn't enough. I find myself at the end of either record wondering what I just listened to.

In another few years, though, who knows?

Thousandstab has started over on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website. It's only two pages so it'll only run for two days, but I still thought I'd mention it. We won't be going through the whole promotional rigamarole for this week's two short stories, though. Art by Daniel Østvold; script by Geir Strøm; dialogue editing, lettering and web editing by Reinder Dijkhuis.

I may need something like this: Oh no Robot

If you've got a webcomic, you probably know how it can be difficult for both you and your readers to find a particular comic. What was the one where your characters were all, "WHAT"? It would be great to have a way to search these comics.

That's where we come in! By adding a small bit of code to your comics pages, you make it possible for yourself and your readers to transcribe each comic, quickly and accurately building your own personalized comic search engine! There is no catch.

As a comic reader, you can help out your favourite comic with a transcription or two - it takes very little time, and the result is totally worth it. As a comic creator, you can let your readers help you out in the task of transcription, getting the job done quickly. You can approve and edit each transcription before it appears on your site - nothing shows up that you don't approve.

...

How it works: Step 1: You, as a comic owner, add a few lines of copy-and-paste Javascript code to your comics display pages. This will make a customizable 'click here to transcribe this comic' image appear on the pages of comics that require transcriptions. Step 2: You and your readers transcribe comics at your leisure. Step 3: Every time there is a new transcription submitted, you can check it for content, spelling and grammar, and make alterations if you want. Nothing goes online that you don't approve! As each new transcription is approved, your search engine becomes more and more complete. ...

There's a few comics that already have their own search engine but would also like to be included in our search results. This is not only possible, it's pretty easy! You can import your comic's existing transcription information onto our site through a simple API, and keeping this information up to date is just as easy. Drop us a line, and we'll hook you up!

I need more findable text on my comics pages - I would probably publish the transcripts on the archive pages somewhere unobtrusive. But I dread the very thought of doing the data entry. So I'll have to look into this.

There's a strong critical consensus that Kate's seventh studio album is her weakest. The consensus is not wrong, but I'm not sure the reasons for the record's failure are well understood. The Red Shoes is not at all a bad album. If it had been awful, it would have been better. If Kate had gone out on a limb and failed heroically, creating a memorably rubbish album, she would at least have gone out on a limb with memorable results. Instead, the only innovation we get is a few tracks on which she attempts to make danceable, funk- and Latin-inspired music, and sort-of succeeds. The album has few actual faults. A few tracks, most notably "Eat The Music", could have done with a serious trimming and her collaboration with Prince, "Why Should I Love You" falls rather flat through no obvious fault of either artist, but on the whole, The Red Shoes is listenable. It gets the odd spin at the studio, from people other than me, even. It just... doesn't grab, doesn't irritate, doesn't connect. Again, there is the ponderousness creeping in. Many fans single out "Moments of Pleasure" as an exceptionally strong, emotionally convincing composition; I find it awkward and over-wrought although the piano and orchestration work are nice. Highlights for me on the album are "Lily" with its urgent beat and vocals and Kaballa-derived lyrics (yup, Kate practised Kaballa before Kaballa was cool) and "Big Stripy Lie" in which Kate plays deliberately crude guitar and bass parts over a rudimentary beat. The mood is lifted in a few places within songs: by the Star Trek pastiche in "Constellations of the Heart", Gary Brooker's organ work on "You're The One" and Kate singing "I don't want your bullshit" on "Song of Solomon" which has the Trio Bulgarka backing her again. But for the most part, The Red Shoes just goes right through me. Postscript: It benefits from playing it louder. Still not her best.

Why oh why couldn't John McCain become President in 2000? If it had to be a Republican, I mean.

McCain vows to add torture ban to all major Senate legislation

WASHINGTON - Girding for a potential fight with the Bush administration, supporters of a ban on torturing prisoners of war by U.S. interrogators threatened Friday to include the prohibition in nearly every bill the Senate considers until it becomes law.

The no-torture wording, which proponents say is supported by majorities in both houses of Congress, was included last month in the Senate's version of a defense spending bill. The measure's final form is being negotiated with the House, and the White House is pushing for either a rewording or deletion of the torture ban.

On Friday, at the urging of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, the Senate by a voice vote added the ban to a related defense bill as a backup.

Speaking from the Senate floor, McCain said, "If necessary - and I sincerely hope it is not - I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. Let no one doubt our determination."

The ban would establish the Army Field Manual as the guiding authority in interrogations and prohibit "cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment" of prisoners.

The Bush administration has sought to exempt the CIA from the ban.

McCain's stature in the fight is enhanced because he was tortured while he was a prisoner during the Vietnam War. When the Senate voted to include the ban in the defense spending bill last month, it was approved 90-9.

They took 7 years of his life and most of the use of his arms, but they couldn't take his cojones away. There's one guy left in the Republican party who knows right from wrong and understands that America's leadership should include moral leadership. How many Bush administration officials have to be impeached before McCain can become the top man?

(long quote because that nag screen that the AZcentral site shoved in my face irritated me and would probably irritate others)