Warren Ellis's Blog, page 149
March 17, 2011
March 16, 2011
Electric Eden
[image error]Finally finished this wonderful book on the flight back from Galway. I'm a sucker for BBC music documentaries, and this scratched exactly the same itch.
It's the story of British folk music over the last hundred years or so, essentially. Which sounds dry as dust. Except that Young convincingly positions British folk as our visionary music, the true sound of mad Albion. From William Morris and song collector Cecil Sharp, through Vaughn Williams and Peter Warlock, Seeger and McColl, scattering through the explosion of the Sixties and out to the complex obituaries of the Seventies (taking in The Wicker Man and hauntological touchstone The Changes), it's an absolutely fascinating journey. There are some confusing gaps towards the end – I'm still unsure how you spend so many pages on Talk Talk (the drummer used to live down the road from me when I was a kid) and manage not to address, say, XTC or Billy Bragg. But that's an entirely personal caveat (if I played Devil's Advocate I could probably see an argument against including Billy, but I think Mr Young may have missed a trick in not using him to unify and tie up so many of his themes) and doesn't deserve to be held against an immensely impressive, clever and thoughtful piece of work, superbly researched and very well written. If you have any interest at all in British music, native musics or mad people, then you want a copy of this.
People are telling me that Mark Waid is taking over the w...
People are telling me that Mark Waid is taking over the writing of the venerable Marvel title DAREDEVIL, and are assuming that Mark will be writing it in a mainline superhero-comic way, with lots of brightly-lit Silver Age swashbuckling and normal straight spandex-fiend tropes.
And I'd just like to note that Mark Waid is a very intelligent man, despite his taste in shirts, and so NO of course he won't. The last time an approach like that was tried on DAREDEVIL, the book crashed so badly that the Marvel powers-that-be just handed it over with a what-the-fuck shrug to the production pod of two ambitious artists-turned-editors named Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Quesada. Which led to things like Kevin Smith writing comics, and then the career of Brian Michael Bendis, and the ascension of Joe Quesada to Marvel EIC and then Chief Creative Officer And Olympean Presence or whatever the hell his title is now.
The time before that? Way back in the dim and distant past? The book was so crocked that they tried out a new guy called Frank Miller.
So, no, comics fans, don't start railing about how Mark's going to do a happy bouncy daylight Daredevil who hugs other superheroes and shit. Mark has some really terrible shirts, but he's really not that stupid. If Mark knows anything, he knows his comics history.
oh good god YES GOOD MORNING LAURENN THANK YOU
So my friend the artist and teacher Laurenn McCubbin had a cast made of her face, and today she has posted to her tumblr the photo explaining why and yes this WAS the first thing I saw thank you very much.
Warren Ellis dot com: spreading the pain over the interweb since the 1990s.
March 15, 2011
Everything Is Always My Fault
So I found this on Facebook.
So now the demise of Western civilisation is my fault. Great.
(It's a book partially about my work, apparently. In which I imagine it's explained in detail how everything is my fault.)
Inside The Saif House
We drink stewed tea from Saif's best china and eat cheese sandwiches using his silver cutlery, while the young man, Abdulla, tells me about how his uncle was "disappeared" by Saif's father. "In Libya, people disappear all the time. There was a prison massacre where 1,200 people died. They poured cement over the bodies." Abdulla nervously adjusts his glasses. "It's important that people know we're not creating a civil war for no reason."
The Minister Of Chance
THE MINISTER OF CHANCE is an audio serial – a "radiophonic drama," in the creators' term. They let me listen to the prologue the other day, and it was actually terrific. There was the friction between two very different cultures that put me in mind somehow of Iain M Banks' science fiction. The acting was great – as you'd expect from a wonderful cast that includes Paul McGann and the sainted Jenny Agutter — and the production values were inventive and pin-sharp. You can get the prologue for free on the iTunes, and the first full episode goes on sale via the iTunes on the 17th. Check out the site and give it a listen. I was honestly impressed.
Wil Wheaton Knows The Score
(link)
Heavy work day for me today – I have a new bathroom, a new downstairs ceiling and a new house's worth of plumbing to pay for — so today the site is just going to be a tumble of links and photos and things. Friends and neighbours should take this as a cue to send me anything they want people to see.
March 14, 2011
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