Tag Archives: allan moore

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out #2

Posted by on 19 Αυγούστου 2011 No comments

Pardon my english but this will be a series of posts in the language of the Island. It’s an essay I wrote sometime back concerning comic books, street-smarts, history, Dostoyevsky, Warren Ellis, Allan Moore, Junot Diaz and Bakhtin. It was quite experimental in form but succeeded in it’s purpose nonetheless. I will break it down in thematic sections and use the capabilities the internet provides me with to give it some extra spin, something I couldn’t do in it’s original printed form and which significantly limits an internet auteur such as myself. Here we go, and please enjoy and send feedback my way.
(This is also for all of you my ever-complaining English speaking friends).

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

Taking one point out of every example i mentioned up till now, i went from a piece of literature i liked, to British History, to a family story, to a piece of popular culture and on to contemporary events that although took place in Greece, seem relevant and real to most readers.

These ideas reproduced, right here. And someone down the line might take these loosely connected showers of information and make some good use of them.

See, as i said before, i read this collections of essays, three times already.

The book has turned yellowish from the amount of highlighting i’ve performed on it.

Essentially, this piece of literature has become a part of my voice, long before i even read it and loosely connects with the idea of Bakhtin that truth is generated through «a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically inconsistent, statements».

In this sense, logically inconsistent stories and ideas of historicallity, form a polyphony that is intertextual and runs through several decades of popular culture but also draws from very different sources and cultural backgrounds.

What i find interesting with the concept of the «shared» idea and how it spreads throughout my reading on popular culture and it’s extension on my reading of my own experiences, is how it applies in terms of traveling culture, polyphony and in a way with tourism and the quest for originality (but only if we can accept that tourism in our times can sometimes be purely cultural and remote, in the sense that new technologies have allowed us to become cultural tourists without the need to visit the place where this cultural incident is taking place).

To start pulling in all the threads, let’s start with why I chose to begin with a mix and match of those «random showers of information». In Bakhtin’s Idea of polyphony the truth is not synthesized but it is contained within the existence of the different voices and arguments, it is itself polyphonic.

An argument is essentially an idea, synthesized by other ideas, just like a material thing is composed by various other elements. When I talked about the concept of the street finding it’s own use for things, I had ideas in mind.

Reading through a collection of essays, spanning almost a decade, has turned me (the reader)  into a cultural tourist. A tourist of the authors mind and the themes of his writing. I could not be a tourist if this wasn’t a non-fiction read. It is the specific range of themes, the family history, the idea that’s running through the authors head at the moment he was writing and his social commentary which (although without me being aware of it) related directly to my social condition at that very moment of writing. The voice he used though, to transmit his thoughts in a non-fictional narrative, also inhabited the protagonist of his then still running graphic novel, Transmetropolitan, thus rendering it part of the popular culture domain.

When popular culture preceeds real life events, i find that distant suffering becomes more easy to relate to. I find that in a sense Bakhtin is right to claim that truth is contained inside a plethora of voices.

When popular culture takes on the role of social commentary, it creates a precedent within the receptor that helps identify and more importantly articulate the message in thinking terms. In a way, culture substitutes for the loss of empathy taking on how people perceive the creator as a spiritual guide and a replacement to the role religion used to hold (and still does to a certain degree).

 

End of part 2

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

Posted by on 18 Αυγούστου 2011 No comments

Pardon my english but this will be a series of posts in the language of the Island. It’s an essay I wrote sometime back concerning comic books, street-smarts, history, Dostoyevsky, Warren Ellis, Allan Moore, Junot Diaz and Bakhtin. It was quite experimental in form but succeeded in it’s purpose nonetheless. I will break it down in thematic sections and use the capabilities the internet provides me with to give it some extra spin, something I couldn’t do in it’s original printed form and which significantly limits an internet auteur such as myself. Here we go, and please enjoy and send feedback my way.
(This is also for all of you my ever-complaining English speaking friends).

essay reading and how ideas fuck each others brains out

 

Recently, an iPad came to my possession. Just because i am a raging hipster, i found nothing more suitable  as a first read to check out if iBooks is indeed readable, than a collection of essays, blog posts and cooking recipes written by Warren Ellis, a collection named Shivering Sands.

I’ve already read it three times and made dozens of notes, but more on that later.

Shivering Sands is the name of a floating fort, built right where Thames ends down at Southend-On-Sea, as Mr.Ellis explains in the last chapter of said book[1]. Built initially to keep Nazi planes from reaching and bombarding London, Shivering Sands (and other ships built in the same fashion and for the same purposes) was later used to host pirate radio stations late in the 60′s, after they fell out of use for military purposes.

The Shivering Sands in all their glory.

 

Southend-On-Sea also happens to be the place where the author resides and is also a theme to which he likes to come back to talk about this peculiarity of standing and gazing at the river meeting with the sea, on the same spot where your father and grandfather have stood before you.
But more on that later.

Going through the book, I came across a quote from another futurologist writer, Bill (William) Gibson, who in a discussion on future technology, body modifications, computers and other things not yet conceived, was quite keen on «how smart people out in the streets will take them, the street finds it’s own use for things«[2]. It’s a very interesting concept, how the street, this living breathing organism takes a thing made for entirely different purposes and aspirations, and finds it’s own use for it. Like shivering sands, a machine built for war, that was later used and conveyed by the spirit in charge of the streets of an era different than the one it was built in to transmit messages of piece, love, revolution and change.

It’s very interesting even how from draining from just one book i could take on information from one story, a non-fictional story by warren ellis on how his dad (a drummer in his youth) was approached one night by two Liverpudlians who were trying to put together a band and promised a few gigs in Berlin (an offer that his dad refused and lived to regret) and go on to talk about the Beatles and how impossibly entangled they are with modern British culture in an impossibly personal way. See, I already found another use for something as simple as a text, and these things have been around forever. Or i could use this element to go back and quote another part of Warren Ellis’ writing, from his seminal comic book series «Transmetropolitan» and how, while writing a piece on the student demonstrations in London for a Greek news website, I went back to it, to use this quote:

“There’s a jungle rhythm beating out below me; the sound of truncheons hammering on riot shields, police tradition when the street’s get nasty. I’m In Angels 8, above what will doubtless be called the Transient Riot. History’s only written by the winners after all, and if the cops want it called like the Transient Riot, than that’s how it will be. Because there’s going to be transient blood all over this place. And you know something? It’s not their fault.

… But no-one checked to see if their silly claim for secession was feasible. Civic Center just decided to stamp on them instead. They paid a few transients  to start some trouble, deliberately marring a non-violent demonstration/ Spontaneous violence, the only excuse civic center would have to send in the riot cops. These people are bleeding for a scam. It’s a show of power… I can see a blatantly unarmed man with half his face hanging off, and three cops working him over anyway.”[3]

I should have said quotes, but that’s not the point. My point was that i could replace the word Transients, with students and have a fairly accurate account of my experiences in Athens (and it’s massive riots in December of 2008) and the student riots in 2010 London.

Popular culture, a graphic novel in this case, is another thing that can be put to new uses in the street.
Maybe to tell people that what’s going on now was cooking right under their noses, and people told them about it, yet they now act surprised.

What’s common in these examples, is the concept of the idea. I like to think that ideas creep away somewhere when we’re not looking and reproduce like rabbits.

And you can never be sure what you’re going to get when two of those crazy things get it on. And furthermore, you can never, ever, be sure what “the street” will do and how it will make use of the outcome.

 

[1] In the afterword, p. 140
[2] Bill Gibson’s quote is in p. 70, lines 18-19. Bill Gibson is the Canadian writer who coined the term “cyberspace” in his short story “Burning Chrome” and is the writer of the now classic cyberpunk novel “Neuromancer” (1984).
[3] This is in the first volume of Transmetropolitan, p. 59 to p. 63.
 

End of part 1

lazy sunday links 24/7 («what happened to the future?» version)

Posted by on 24 Ιουλίου 2011 No comments

Καλησπέρα σας αγαπητοί. Δε θα σχολιάσω ούτε τη πανευρωπαϊκή συμφωνία για να σώσουν την Ελλάδα οι Γερμανοί οι Ευρωπαίοι, ούτε το τερατώδες έγκλημα στη Νορβηγία, ούτε το οτι πέθανε η Amy η Winehouse. Όλα αυτά, ότι συμβαίνει στον κόσμο μας, ο συνεχής αγώνας για να σώσουμε οτι μπορούμε, ο σκοταδισμός που πλησιάζει και ανταγωνίζεται τον απόλυτο διαφωτισμό που επιδιώκαμε όλο τον πρηγουμενο αιώνα, όλα ειναι εκδηλωσεις ενός και μοναδικού πράγματος: Επικράτησε ο κυνισμός. Ξεχάσαμε τα διαστημικά μας όνειρα. Τα παραδώσαμε στα υπερ-κέρδη των τραπεζιτών. Ξεχάσαμε οτι για να προχωρήσουμε χρειάζεται αγώνας και ιδέες για μεγάλα μηχανήματα, ένδοξες κατασκευές, όχι groupon και ακόμα ενα κλώνο του facebook. Φακ δατ σιτ μαν. Τι απέγινε το μέλλον που ονειρευόμασταν; Και που στο διάολο ειναι το jet-pack μου;;;

Αφού με αυτό διάλεξα να ασχοληθώ σήμερα, ας ξεκινήσουμε απο δώ, με ενα κείμενο που εξηγεί πως απο το επίπεδο των επενδύσεων ακόμη, η ανθρωπότητα έχει χάσει το όραμα της. Εταιρείες που φτιάχνουν ηλίθια ιντερνετικα γιατροσόφια παίρνουν χρηματοδοτήσεις εκατομμυρίων. Εν τω μεταξύ, δημόσιες βιβλιοθήκες κλείνουν. «What happened to the future?»

In the late 1990s, venture portfolios began to reflect a different sort of future. Some firms still supported transformational technologies (e.g., search, mobility), but venture investing shifted away from funding transformational companies and toward companies that solved incremental problems or even fake problems (e.g., having Kozmo.com messenger Kit-Kats to the office). This model worked for a brief period, thanks to an enormous stock market bubble. Indeed, it was even economically rational for VCs to fund these ultimately worthless companies because they produced extraordinary returns – in fact, the best returns in the industry’s history. And there have been subsequent bubbles – acquisition bubbles, the secondary market, etc. – which have continued to generate excellent returns for VCs lucky enough to tap into them. But these bubbles are narrower and the general market more demanding, so VCs who continue the practices of the late 1990s (a surprising number) tend to produce very weak returns. Along the way, VC has ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead has become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances. In large part, it also ceased making money, as the bottom half of venture produced flat to negative return for the past decade.

So my actual feelings about the ’60s are that, yes, of course we had limitations. We talked a lot of shit, and we didn’t have the muscle to back it up. For the most part, we had good intentions. However, we were not able to implement those intentions. And when the state started to take us seriously and initiated countermeasures, the majority of us folded like bitches.

Action Comics #1, 1938

Action Comics

This was the first ever superhero comic. Not only did it start everything off, the first image of the story is incredible. It’s Superman – who was an unknown character at that time – leaping through the air with a tied-up blonde under his arm,
with absolutely no explanation of how he got there, or why. What I like about it is that, as a piece of storytelling, it’s very modernistic, and having always thought about it in terms of nostalgia, when I was researching it for the book it was great
to go back and see it for what it was.

From the first panel on, it sets up everything for the next 70 years.

και μαζί μ’αυτό, και ενα εξώφυλλο (ίσως το καλύτερεο κετ’εμε) απο τους Invisibles, του ίδιου.

και έτσι για να κλείσω σε πιο ελαφριούς τόνους, αυτό το βιντεάκι προβλήθηκε στο comic con χτές.
True Blood σε όλο του το μεγαλείο.

καλό βράδυ σε όλους. Δροσιά έχει σήμερα. Μιας και δε θα χρεοκοπήσουμε για κανα εξάμηνο ακόμα, μπορεί να το πιούμε και ενα ποτάκι.

Την αγάπη μου.