Seven Ages of Rock

I've really been enjoying the Seven Ages of Rock series on the BBC these last few weekends, from the Who ("Won't Get Fooled Again" is still one of the most kick-ass rock songs with great guitar licks) and Hendrix (who give me my theme tune, "hey, Joe, where you going with that laptop in your hand? Gonna write my old blog down...") through the wonderfully weird late 60s early 70s stuff (Floyd and the Wall, the wonderfully androgynous Bowie), the performance rock (dear old Freddie and the boys from Queen), the Metal years (memories of my leather-clad, long-haired, headbanging times at Madison's rock club), great goddam music.

Then last week's episode, Left of the Dial, charting indy rock from the mid 80s to mid 90s, from early REM through to Seattle, Nirvanna, Henry Rollins, Black Flag, the grunge scene. Again great music, great attitude (almost punk in the DIY and fuck-it-all attitude) but for me personally that one was something more; that was the soundtrack to my student life, the music of my college years, drinking, noisy parties with various substances passing around, good friends, more drinking, doing a course I really liked (where watching movies counted as 'research') and basically having one of the best bloody time of my life (never understood the cliche that the school days were the best of your life - college was much better. It came with louder music, later night, longer mornings and drink and other pleasurable things). Somewhere along the line I also managed to earn myself a good degree in between waking up after a party and finding someone had painted 'graffiti' on our flat's walls with shaving foam or tripping over my wall mirror on the floor because someone had taken it down to snort off of. And that music there all the time. That episode just plugged me directly back into my mid 20s student life for an hour. And I fucking loved it. Might be years in the past now (scary to think how many years and how quickly they've gone past) but god that music just pulled it right out of me as if it was yesterday. And at least that era didn't end with a shotgun in the mouth for me. I love classical music, I adore jazz, but a big part of my soul is forever rock and roll, a true believer in the Holy Trinity: bass, drums and electric geetar, baby. There's a part of me that still wants to bawl out "touch me, I'm sick". I hope there always will be.

Fopp no more

Dammit, looks like Fopp has gone to the wall, probably the only music store I spend time in these days (never been mad on Virgin, not the best range plus they are too pricey and I haven't been into an HMV since I left The Bookshop Who Shall Not Be Named since it is part of the same company and therefore part of the Evil Empire. Plus their range and prices weren't terribly good either and I never liked browsing there). For those who don't know it, Fopp was became a nationwide group doing really good deals on music (and later DVDs and some books and graphic novels) and was especially good for backlist albums at very cheap prices which encouraged you to stock up on older material too. Which meant since it was cheap you thought, well, I'll just buy that and that and that...oops, just blew thirty quid... They also had a 'suck it and see' policy where you could return an album if it really sucked.

But it was also a special institution to music lovers in Glasgow where it first started and my mates and I spent many happy time having a rummage through the music on offer on the store on Byres Road near Glasgow University. In fact a couple of months back when Gordon and I were through at the revamped Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum we went for a walk in the sunshine afterwards, up towards the University towards the old stomping grounds of our younger days for a drink then into Fopp there. Sure, we had Fopp in Edinburgh (two of them actually) but going into the old Glasgow store was also a nostalgia trip for us. I was thinking in going in for a browse this weekend (downloading is fine as far as it goes, but I still like to physically own an original album) but that ain't gonna happen now. I feel especially sorry for the staff as they are not only out of a job but according to the news reports they aren't going to even get paid at the end of this month.

Jonas Moore mashups

There's an upcoming new multimedia webcomic coming up which I have been blogging about on the Forbidden Planet blog recently called the Many Worlds of Jonas Moore. Unlike most webcomics (some of which are very, very good) Jonas Moore is taking advantage of the fact it is online to used mixed media, so we we have comics panels, animation, video, music and even archive footage as we follow the actor Colin Salmon (from the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies and Resident Evil) as Jonas Moore, a character in an online game who has become sentient in a world where the British Empire never fell and the world population is kept quiet by being addicted to many online games, some of which seem very similar to our real history. Marked as defective and to be deleted JOnas goes on the run across the different games worlds. A bit Matrix, a bit Moorcock and a dash of Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright.



One of the things I really like about the concept isn't just the mixed-media format but the fact that Howard Webster is encouraging readers to take the material and remix it into their own mashups - so far some indy bands have remixed some of the viral videos they have created to go with their own music (such as the one above). With so many big studio comics-based movies using the bands on their soundtrack as a marketing gimmick to get folks to go I like the fact that Howard is doing this remake-your-own approach; they're also hoping if people remix material later on to create sidebar stories that the best may be incorporated into the ongoing story. Apparently this sort of approach is really pissing off the professional marketing folks and ad agencies, which, in my book, makes it even better. And doesn't Colin Salmon look bloody cool on that bike (Lili, stop drooling over him!)?

When Penguins Ruled the Earth

For years I've made jokes about gigantic prehistoric penguins, from millions of years ago - Penguinosaurus Rex, tall, with a huge, long, sharp and deadly beak, from the Time When Penguins Ruled The Earth and Doug McClure had to rescue buxom women in fur bikinis from them. Then today I read that actually there is a little truth to my penguin-obsessed nonsense. I just love it when real life is almost as weird as fantasy.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe"

Adam Savage of top geek show MythBusters (one of my favourite bits of factual viewing and not just because I look a bit like Adam, especially when I have my hat on) has written a piece in Popular Mechanics in praise of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner as it celebrates its 25th anniversary (link via Boing Boing). I'm totally with Adam on this one - like him I have to re-watch the film every year or so; its one of the most visually ravishing films of all time and easily up there with Lang's Metropolis for stunning images of a future city. The opening scene of LA in 2019, towering buildings with video walls mounted on them, flames shooting into the night from industrial towers and hover cars flying between them all set to Vangelis' music ranks as one of the most stunning visuals in movie history. It still sends shivers down my spine no matter how often I see it, the impact made all the more sudden by being prefaced by a very quiet moment as an explanation of Replicants and Blade Runners is scrolled across the scene before suddenly boom! Future LA.



Adam argues that despite massive advances in effects and digital manipulation which can now create almost anything a director imagines the film's effects remain astonishing: "I worked on Star Wars Episodes I and II, on the Matrix films, on AI and Terminator 3; yet 25 years later there are ways in which Blade Runner surpasses anything that's been done since." He's right, it still looks amazing, which is a tribute to the legendary Doug Trumbull and his effects colleagues but also to Ridley Scott too, a director who has a real flair for visuals. The film, like another now-classic, Citizen Kane, wasn't a commercial success when first released, but (again like Citizen Kane) has gone on to gather a cult audience, critical plaudits and inspire generations of later artists.

For visualising a future cityscape it has to be up there with Lang's Metropolis; both also owe much to photographs and film of New York in the early 20th century (imaginary cities and the real meeting, but then all 'real' cities are also partially imaginary, made up as much of our memories and dreams as they are what our eyes take in). The themes (very Philip K Dick, appropriately) of alienation, individuality, identity and what it is to be human and what is real and what is dream add to the lush imagery. No wonder it is still one of my personal top ten movies of all time.



Some great visualisations or descriptions of imaginary urban spaces: Blade Runner, Metropolis, Carlos Ezquerra's concepts for Mega City one in the original Judge Dredd back in '77, Otomo's Akira, Bill Gibson's Sprawl (see Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive), Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris (see City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: an Afterword), Alex Proyas Dark City, Kafka's work, Borges, Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan... I'm sure you can all suggest other good examples from books, movies and comics or any other artforms. A final bit of movie-comics trivia, Ridley cites the legendary comics artist Moebius' Long Tomorrow graphic novel from the mid 70s as a key reference for Blade Runner's visual look. The graphic novel was written by a young Dan O'Bannon, who would later write Alien, which Ridley would direct (one of his first big successes); Dan would later adapt another Philip K Dick tale, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale for the film Total Recall. I'm sure I could add more here, but it's time for Heroes :-)

Dig for victory

I noticed in the news that the Bevin Boys have been belatedly honoured for their efforts during the Second World War. Some were volunteers, some drafted, but instead of the army, air force or navy they were drafted into a service just as dangerous (although a lot of folk simply don't realise how dangerous) and even dirtier - they were the guys who had to man the coal mines to keep the home fires burning (literally). And it reminded me of my papa on my mother's side, who was a miner and who trained many of those boys. A couple of years ago I bought a book on the history of mining which covered the region back home for my mum and dad; we were surprised to find inside a bunch of grinning Bevin Boys with the senior miners who trained them, one tall, broad, strongly built man standing out.

He looked like the Comrade, who we lost the other year, but it couldn't be him back then... Papa, his dad. I only new him as an old man, semi-crippled from the work in the pits and missing fingers, speech damaged (of course he never got any compensation - slip on a wet towel and sprain an ankle today and you sue for ten grand, crippled in mining accidents then, tough) and we just don't have a lot of photographs of him when he was in his prime. How like the Comrade in his prime he looked, grinning for the camera, strong, confident, young, smiling out at us in this book from across six decades. These men took the 'dig for victory' slogan literally, tearing out fuel for the war effort from deep under the bedrock of our islands, its a bloody disgrace they had to wait sixty years for even this tiny amount of recognition.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness."

Mark Twain.

Twain/Sam Clemens has been a favourite author since I was a boy. In the bus to work a few days ago I looked up from my book when it was picking up passengers and saw someone had written this quote on the window of their flat facing out into the street two stories up where only the occasional person in a double decker bus would be high and close enough to read it. How lovely. Of course, I tend to include reading as 'travel' because it is travel for the mind...

Happy solstice!

The longest day of the year today, with the old druids out around Stonehenge - not sure they are druids really, since the druids didn't leave written records so I'm not certain they have much in the way of authentic information to base their 'traditions' on, but hey, they enjoy it and they don't cause anyone any harm so why not. Anyone wishing to greet the rising sun in Edinburgh this morning would have been a little disappointed though, not to mention soggy, since a fine mist lay over the whole city - one of those mists that wrapped itself around the Castle until it almost vanished; look down from the bridge and you could see tendrils of it curling around the low-lying streets, like something from a 19th century Gothic novel. Somehow I always feel I should have a cloak and top hat on when the city is like this.

Walking through time: Holyrood Palace



The Palace of Holyrood with Arthur's Seat in the background, viewed from Calton Hill in Edinburgh, by James Valentine, thought to date to around 1878.



The Palace of Holyrood, the ruined Abbey and Arthur's Seat from Calton Hill taken by me, spring 2007.

I found this online recently as I was sorting out some of my photographs to upload to my Fotolog and Flickr sites. Despite the history Edinburgh isn't changeless, but obviously it has more than its share of places which do remain almost the same than most cities and sometimes you find photographs of buildings and streets which are almost the same today.

Imagine both pictures as portals to two different spots in history; imagine you could use them as the travelling points between those periods, to walk from the picture from now to emerge from then, to find yourself standing on Victorian-era Calton Hill, caressed by the wind, local worthies enjoying a peramabulation past you, lots of smoke rising from buildings in those days, a mix of tall masted ships and new fangled steamships visible down on the Forth an at the Leith docks, and perhaps Hill and Adamson, the great pioneers of early photography setting up one of their experiments with this new camera device, using the 'pencil of nature'. How lovely would it be if you could do that? I suppose I will have to make do with living and working around the sites, which is, in its own way, walking through time every single day.

Iran outraged shocker!

In a move which surprised many those laid-back lovers of multiple viewpoints and open debate that are the wacky guys in the Iranian government/religious police (hard to tell them apart) have been deeply offended by something. This time not newspaper cartoons from neighbouring Saudi, not the film and comic of 300 (and before that Alexander) or the film and comic of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or... okay you get the point, they are a bunch of whining twonks who declare everything they dislike is deeply offensive to their nation and obviously the Prophet, blessings be upon his name and all of Islam (which naturally they feel entitled to talk on behalf of all). What are the daft smeggers upset about now?

Well Salman Rushdie was awarded a knighthood in the Queen's birthday honours list (sadly there was no such honour for me), which the Iranians claim is a deliberate attempt to insult them and Islam because Rushdie wrote the Satanic Verses several years ago. You may remember good ol'e Krazy Khomeini, that laugh-a-minute mullah with a twinkle in his eye and a song in his heart declaring a fatwah against it and offering a huge reward to any of the Faithful who murdered one of the most respected novelists in the world for insulting Islam in a work of fiction which he hadn't actually read.

Oddly they don't mention how insulting it is to all civilised people to burn books and threaten the life of writers you haven't even bothered to read; as a devout follower of the church of freedom of speech and a disciple of the Tower of Books I find their attitude highly insulting to my beliefs and I declare literary jihad on their infidel arses. Of course, our form of literary fundementalism is more civilised - we don't place death sentences on their heads, we want to capture them, tie them to a chair and force them to read books. That will teach the bastards.

Photography then and now

In among all the ballyhoo about spoiled and talentless rich socialite tart Paris Hilton going to jail, getting out then being sent back in tears (in contrast to her earlier cockey attitude) I missed something - see this picture which went all over the news of the silly girl weeping?



Imagine my surprise to find out the photographer behind that snapped image is Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Nick Ut. If you don't recognise his name you will recognise this photograph Ut took of Kim Phuc, a tiny wee lassie running screaming down a road in Vietnam, her clothes burned off and her skin roasted by napalm dropped by US aircraft (yes, I know, hard to believe the Americans back then thought it was perfectly okay to invade countries thousands of miles away and didn't care too much about civilian casualties; thank goodness we live in a more enlightened time, eh?).



As if that isn't a surprise enough as this article points out Ut shot the photo of this dreadful scene - which became not only one of the defining images of the Vietnam War but one of the most influential photographs of the 20th century, a moment of humanity's inhumanity frozen in time - on June 8th 1972. He shot the picture of a wailing Paris on June 8th 2007. What are the odds? There is a strand of thought which holds that the Americans lost the Vietnam war partly in the livingrooms of America, as people were exposed to photographs and TV news film of the atrocities going on leading a huge slice of the population (and not just the Love Generation) to turn against the government and the war - this is one of the images which probably contributed to that.

Little surprise that in the first Gulf War and subsequent ill-advised military adventures overseas the US military (and UK and pretty much all others) have kept a very tight reign on what the journalists can see, bribing them with the offer of 'embedding' them with active units to get good shots but subject to military approval and control or else go freelance and have a good chance of getting shot up not just by insurgents but by allied forces as happened to the BBC's John Simpson among others (all accidental of course, just as US armour shelling the hotel where foreign journalists were in Baghdad was accidental...). Hell, the control and spin extends as far as trying to stop images of flag-draped coffins coming home - supposedly out of respect to the families but if you are cynical (and since authorities are reticent about exact casualty figures I think you'd be right to be cynical) you could be forgiven for thinking it is to stop the home front losing faith.

New lifeforms

Two of my friends in different parts of the country both welcomed new lifeforms onto Planet Earth recently - the Silvereel and Mrs Silvereel welcomed their second child (which means by law they now have to get a puppy and probably a kitten as well) while my mate Paul and his other half Gemma had their first after a long latent labour (poor Gem, that kind of thing makes me very glad to be male and not to have to worry about that). Paul's just set up a new blog The New Dad's Diary - be interesting to see if the demands of new parenthood leave him enough time to keep it up! Suitably enough little Niamh Louise, after much delay, arrived on the 6th of June - D-Day!! Big hugs and congratulations to them all.

Playing statues

The latest Doctor Who was a cracker, a nice, tight little haunted house story which had a lovely, creepy atmosphere (well, as much as they could get away with at 7pm on a family show). Weeping angel statues which are actually aliens who can only move when no-one is looking at them - blink and they cross the space between you in a heartbeat only to turn back into stone as your eyes open again... Coming on the back of Paul Cornell's two-part Human Nature story which managed to mix up elements of 'If..' with World War I, a very touching romantic subplot and a look at the emotional cost it takes to be the Hero, verging onto Joseph Campbell territory - add in a great performance from David Tennant (his anguished 'normal human' persona demanding to know why he has to give up his life and love to go back to being this brave, heroic but lonely Doctor who saves the day was brilliant) and Martha proving to be pretty much his equal and taking charge when she needed to and you had a great story. Just a shame Human Nature was set in 1913 Britain and not France, then she could have been in a French Maid's uniform instead... Three great episodes on the trot and this weekend sees the return of Captain Jack! Yay! Still on the Who theme, we added some brand new action figures to the FPI webstore in the last week with characters from the current season of the show, including a Martha Jones figure. I may need to make some more space on my desk.

Singin' in the rain

TCM is screening Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds in the classic 1952 musical Singin' in the Rain and for a couple of hours I just sit there with a big grin on my face and a strange look from the cats as I give in to the urge to sing and dance along. Generally speaking I don't care for musicals and never have, but I have a soft spot for Gene Kelly because he's just such an incredible dancer (he also buries the stereotype of a male dancer as effeminate, clearly strongly built, well muscled and fit, as many dancers have to be - it isn't for weaklings!) in general (the dance around the fountain in An American In Paris is another amazing scene by Kelly) and for this movie in particular. Much as I generally find musicals annoying and trite I simply can't dislike Singin' in the Rain; it is one of those films which transcends all genre barriers, probably why it has become embedded in popular culture for half a century.



And then there is that scene, the titular song, a smiling Gene Kelly in the pouring rain dancing because he is in love and even raindrops and puddles seem beautiful. Its exuberant and a classic movie marriage of song and dance that never fails to make me happy. It is a scene that is what I normally refer to as a Triple M - Magical Movie Moment. That's the scene which , regardless of the rest of the film, the genre, the period, simply works to transport you for a few moments to an utterly spellbound world. Singin' in the Rain has it, the duel in verse in Cyrano de Bergerac has it, the opening scenes to Blade Runner and the original Star Wars have it, the Big Blue is littered with underwater scenes which do it, A Matter of Life and Death and the Red Shoes are similarly replete with scenes which take me to another world, while a few movies like Casablanca, Amelie and the Wizard of Oz are almost entirely full of such Triple M scenes.

Every time the crowd in Rick's Cafe Americain sings the Marseilles in the face of the Nazi troops I want to stand and sing - I'm there in that moment. Dorothy and her friends dancing down the Yellow Brick Road? I want to tap along to them. Singin' in the Rain? Yes, I have a few times, actually - pouring down, brolly in hand, you can either get infuriated at being drenched or you can think, sod it, smile and start whistling that tune. I know which I prefer to do and I'm pretty sure its better for me from a psychological point of view (even if it gets me odd looks, but to hell with those folks!).



And if it makes you happy and puts a grin on your lips then who cares what anyone else thinks - let the stormy clouds chase them all from the place - I've got a great big smile on my face. Of course, its even better in the cinema; the lights go down, an enclosed dark space full of people in a shadowy, enchanted theatre of fantastic delights, the glowing screen and one of those movies with one of those scenes, pure and magnificent Magical Movie Moment, they just make life so much better...

"Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo
Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo-doo
Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo-doo
Doo-dloo-doo-doo-doo-doo...

I'm singing in the rain
Just singing in the rain
What a glorious feelin'
I'm happy again
I'm laughing at clouds
So dark up above
The sun's in my heart
And I'm ready for love

Let the stormy clouds chase
Everyone from the place
Come on with the rain
I've a smile on my face
I walk down the lane
With a happy refrain
Just singin',
Singin' in the rain
Dancin' in the rain

Dee-ah dee-ah dee-ah
Dee-ah dee-ah dee-ah
I'm happy again!
I'm singin' and dancin' in the rain!

I'm dancin' and singin' in the rain..."

Whatever happened to Sony

Sony seem to be capable of nothing but making themselves look like right arses these days. There was the massive scandal of the anti-copying rootkit their music CDs secretly installed without permission onto hundreds of thousands of user's computers, causing a lot of damage, then exacerbated by their initial denials of this, then a half-hearted attempt to rectify it which was an insult to users (they ended up with government departments suing them for damage to their machines). They had huge problems with the PS3 launch. Now they have shot themselves in their own public image foot twice within days - distribution of the first Official Playstation magazine has been delayed while offensive pages from the launch part of their God of War II featured a large picture of a slaughtered goat (yeah, I mean no-one, even a non veggie, will be disgusted at a large pic of a slaughtered animal being used to promote a fucking game, eh? What retarded PR agency have the got????).

And Sony are also in trouble for using the interior of Manchester Cathedral without permission for a violent shoot-'em-up now. They say they sought permission where required, but the church points out not only did they do no such thing they now refuse to answer calls from angry church officials who, strangely enough, don't want to see an important place of worship as the venue for a violent game, especially in a city that has suffered its share of gun crime. Once again Sony's response seems to be to pretend there is no problem at all. One of the few Sony spokespersons to comment offered the following pathetically inadequate explanation: "It is entertainment, like Doctor Who or any other science fiction. It is not based on reality at all. Throughout the whole process we have sought permission where necessary." Yes, it is a game, it is fantasy and I don't agree with the moral outrage brigade who hold that games are corrupting youth any more than the ones 20 years ago who blamed violent video films, or 20 yeas before horror comics or before that rock and roll... But you can't use a space like this without permission - a show like Doctor Who, to stick to the Sony Apparatchik's farrago of an excuse, would seek permission well in advance and show some respect to the location. Sony didn't do either and now refuse to talk about it to the church - I hope the church sues the arse off them.

More lameolympics logo nonsense

The London 2012 dog's breakfast that is their dreadful logo continues to be the laughing stock of the world - it turns out now that the animated version had to be pulled from the official site because the animators didn't do a standard check to make sure the flickering wasn't in the danger zone that can trigger epileptic fits, with the result a number of people complained about being made ill by it. The arse they have made out of this simple job really doesn't speak well for the prospects for the actual organisation of the Olympics themselves.

Look before you leap

I was trying to work out why

Look before you leap

I was trying to work out why the bus I was waiting on didn't come down to the stop but turned off up the wrong street. Then I think, hold on, it is rush hour and there are no buses, no-one else waiting at the stop - oh, what's the commotion just over the junction of the Royal Mile? Walk up a bit and find the approach to North Bridge is sealed off by the police, ambulance and fire engines sitting there too.



Hmmm, surely it must be a fire or bomb scare? Can't be another potential leaper, surely? We've already had one of those this week, shut down the area for hours. Take another route down to Princes Street and everywhere is a logjam of buses and cars, everything totally fubared. I look up and yup, it is indeed another person threatening to jump from North Bridge - sadly not an unknown act from that spot.



Luckily as with the woman earlier this week he didn't actually go through with it, although he was there for hours and really messed up the city's traffic. Since he was walking round the pillar with his hands in his pockets it looks like he was really doing a cry for help and attention (you can see a policeman's head just over the parapet trying to talk him down) - caused a lot of hassle but you have to feel sorry for the poor sod if he felt he had to go to this extreme.



Now there are folks calling for safety nets to be placed under the bridge because it has been used a number of times for suicides (there's a Samaritans sign on the bridge because of this) which seems pretty pointless to me (as well as ruining a landmark) since the city is built on several hills with plenty of tall spots. Heck, if someone wanted to leap they could go up Arthur's Seat and jump off Salisbury Crags, are we going to put a giant net all round the extinct volcano? Then again, I think anyone who was planning to jump off the Crags would probably be pretty serious about it and of course they wouldn't have the big audience they'd get on the bridge (yeah, I know, cynical, but also probably true since such a public act usually is more of a cry for help - still makes you feel sorry for the guy that he was driven to it though).

Since the traffic in the city was totally messed up by the bridge closure and diversions he caused for hours I looked at the jam of buses and gave up, buggered off to the pub with my friend who was just coming out of his work. Maybe a relaxing pint would have been better for this poor bloke too instead of standing around over a huge drop.

Overlord

The 6th of June; on this day in 1944 thousands of ordinary men did something extraordinary and stormed the enemy beaches in a landing now as legendary as the thousand ships of the Greeks beaching at Troy; the bad guys were finally going to be pushed back inch by bloody inch. Before they made that monumental charge how many others had been there secretly before them? How many agents, resistance fighters and Commandos died silently in the dark scouting those beaches to get the information needed to make D-Day work? I wonder where my old childhood hero wee George was that day with his Commando mates and again I wish I had known him as an adult and had the chance to record some of his memories. Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah; a huge endeavour and an enormous gamble, even with the massive naval and air superiority the Allies had built up, but it worked. I remember seeing a photograph years ago in a history book - I think it was some airborne troops preparing to get into the wooden Horsa gliders; someone had chalked on the side "the Channel stopped you, but not us." I do wonder, as time passes, in the distant future will people think that this enormous armada and legions of brave souls are just a poetic exaggeration like the Iliad? What a price was paid for our freedoms.

Birds a go go

The changing of the tides at Cramond just by the edge of the rivers Forth and Almond on the edge of Edinburgh, bringing out a huge number of birds from graceful swans to howling seagulls (ye gods, what a racket!) and some ducks.In the 2nd century AD you'd have seen Romans moored hereabouts on their way to the Antonine Wall.





To the right of this picture is a causeway which is submerged by high tide, leading out to an island which still has the shells of hastily constructed buildings for gun emplacements to protect the Rosyth Naval Base just up the river a bit further. I used to cycle out here with friends when I was a student (and fit!); I still remember going out to the island at low tide one day with my friend Leonie. As we walked over to the far side we heard music - live music, not a stereo brought by someone having a beach party. We cleared some bushes and came down the far side to see a group of old WW2 buildings on the edge, each one with musicians in a doorway playing away while a friend filmed them with a video camera as yachts sailed past and further out in the deep channel tankers sailed slowly by; quite a surreal experience.



We went off for a good walk past the harbour and up the Almond, past the weir and into the gorge - I'll probably post some more pics from that bit later on, but when we came back down the way the tide had all but gone out and you could walk to the island again.

The Lameolympics, Lisa Simpson and fellatio

Following on from the mountain of ridicule heaped on the godawful London 2012 Olympics logo (see the other day) I see many online are now referring to the jagged shape (supposedly inspired by the old Tiswas logo, but I think that's cobblers) as a silhouette of Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob. Well, the year spent designing that was well spent... Oh, wait, the idea was to promote the Olympics, not fellatio by comics characters, oops... Oh well, if they make cartoon bukkake an Olympic sport perhaps it might work out.

Stormy weather



Ferocious storm in a nearby river or stream swollen from rain? Nope, this is right outside my work in a sudden huge deluge a few days ago, enormous droplets bouncing off the pavement, turning the road into a river so quickly that cars going past caused a wave which washed right up over the pavements to the edge of the buildings. Then hailstones, thunder and lightning. Ah, Bonnie Scotland in the summer! Didn't last long, but while it did it was torrential. Later on when it was simply drizzling I passed a couple of Canadian girls (you can tell them my their maple leaf flags almost all Cannucks stitch to their backpacks when touring abroad so people don't mistake them for Americans), poor souls over for a summer trip in light tops, shorts and flip-flops walking through the puddles while I had my trusty John Steed style umbrella. Not as summery but much more practical for the Scottish weather.

Modern history

I've been really enjoying Andrew Marr's Modern History of Britain - this week's episode was the late 60s dissolving from Flower Power into riots, demonstrations and dreadful national debt into the early 70s, fuel crisis and mass strikes. It's quite fascinating not only to see how dreadfully racist and bigoted we were then - 'decent' people objecting to the decriminalisation of homosexuality (between men anyway, there was no such legal injunction against lesbianism, supposedly because years before Queen Victoria refused to believe lesbians existed, which is a shame, because there was a dour old queen who could have seriously used some clitoral stimulation), jokes about coloured people being 'different' on prime time TV shows, panic about immigration and the older generation convinced all young people were terrible. Alongside this mass marches of people protesting the British prime minister for being too close to a war-mongering US administration, demands for 'Americans out' and 'end the war' (Vietnam here of course) and Northern Ireland going from tricky to bloody with the introduction of interning suspects without trial and violent action by troops among civilians leading to terrorist strikes on mainland Britain.

Gee, I'm so glad we're beyond all that now, eh? We've learned so much from our mistakes in the intervening decades. Oh, hold on...

Does anyone else ever get the idea that anyone who stands for government should be battered around the head with several volumes of history books and forced to produce essays on them to prove they have learned something before they are allowed to run the country? The BBC site has the whole second episode (from last week) up for perusal.

Lameolympics

I haven't been much of a fan of the idea of the London Olympics so far - frankly it is going to cost a fortune and a lot of hassle and I can't see it giving much to the rest of the country outside of London. Admittedly I'm not a big sports person to begin with, but since all the major new facilities (if they are built in time and work) will be in London they aren't going to be much use to trainee athletes around the rest of Britain, are they? And since they look certain to siphon off huge amounts of Lottery funding from arts group, local charity volunteers organisations and even local-level sports intitiatives to pay for this fiasco it looks like it may well hurt the encouragement of sports training in the UK, which is a huge own goal. Now they announce the lamest logo I have seen in years - it looks like something an amateur would have done around 1986 for smeg's sake. Given the millions the chancellor (soon to be Prime Monster) has indicated he will steal out of other much needed lottery funds to pay for all of this perhaps instead of this dire logo they should have an image of Gordon Brown's hand going into the collective wallet of the nation? I notice the BBC's poll of reader's views shows over 80% thinking it sucks like a hungry anteater.




I wonder how much money they wasted to come up with these pathetic designs? Never mind, perhaps Putin will have nuked us all before then. Assuming any of Russia's nuclear weapons he's threatening us with actually still work or even actually have a warhead inside since half of them aren't accounted for, probably because they sold them to rogue states and terrorists... Funny though, a dictatorial madman with a highly questionable human rights record, a history of aggression abroad, using fossil fuels to bully and intimidate others then threaten civilians with weapons of mass destruction - haven't we imposed sanctions and even gone to war for less than this in the recent past? Yet here we are with a few Western leaders just saying something weak such as "oh we'll have a talk with him at the G8..." and comments that his speech was "unhelpful." Unhelpful is refusing to co-operate with police to extradiate a suspect in a criminal case, telling millions you will point nuclear weapons at them is rather more than that; in fact its an act of terrorism.

Going down the rabbit hole

We had one of the top talents in Brit comics in the Edinburgh FPI yesterday in the form of Bryan Talbot, creator of Luther Arkwright. Bryan has spent several years researching and working on his new work Alice In Sunderland, a large, hardback graphic novel with Lewis Carroll's Alice books at its core, but going off onto all sorts of related tangents which influenced Carroll and his work, from local history in and around Sunderland, folklore, the family history of Carroll and of Alice Liddell's family and some of Bryan's own personal life. There can't be many creators who can work in Lewis Carroll, the Venerable Bede, smugglers, naval heroes, the Jabberwock, mass murder, cholera, the Civil War, white rabbits and the ghost of Sid James and make it all work.



I've been dying to read Alice in Sunderland since I interviewed Bryan last summer and I haven't been disappointed. Sure I am biased since Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are two of my all-time favourite books and have been since I was a boy; as an adult I still adore the sheer dreamlike imagination of them but also came to admire the incredible intellect behind them, Carroll's astonishing use of immensely clever word play (and number play too, for that matter - check the Annotated Alice to see what I mean). No wonder Alice has been such an incredibly influential work, re-interpreted endlessly in more books, films, animations (despite liberties with the books I do like the old Disney version because of the richness of the animation, but my favourite animated version is by Jan Svankmajer - the Prague Alchemist of Film and one of my favourite animators), songs, games and, of course, comics.



With such a mixture of local history and literature and folklore I think Alice in Sunderland is one of those graphic novels which can easily crossover into the mainstream - if you don't normally read anything in comics form and assume it is pretty much all capes and tights, ignore your preconceptions and have a look at Alice; there are many different and wandering routes through the rabbit hole and this is one of the more scenic ways. I posted some pictures from the signing on the FPI Flickr stream and also tried shooting a couple of very brief video clips as an experiment to see how it came out:

Crossing the Forth

Just a brief experiment with me sticking the camera out the window to capture crossing the Forth Road Bridge - even on a warm day my hands were chilled to the bone by the time we got across because of the wind and the slipstream, but it seems to have worked reasonably well so probably worth it. The much more impressive Forth Rail Bridge (often simply referred to as 'the Bridge' because it is so iconic) is off to the side, a fantastic piece of Victorian over-engineering.

Painted faces

How lovely is this brief trip through the history of Western portraiture: 500 years of female portraits, from Da Vinci to Pablo Picasso, morphing into one another, accompanied by a cello suit from Bach.