Rather than field sixty emails a day about the fate and status of ill repute, I might as well lay things out here. While there have been no new posts since approximately 1983, the future of the project is very much established and fixed and all such similar things. What we are experiencing at the moment is the usual summer hiatus, which is slated to last until the full summers’ quota of proper decent weather has been fulfilled. This was a negotiated stipulation in Mr Fournier’s contract from the beginning of the outset, and one we are determined to respect. In any event we can’t particularly complain, as Eli has much of a similar outage lined up for the coming winter evenings, during which time he is in the court-mandated habit of distributing hot port to homeless Asian sailors (or in their absence, redistributing the bottles into more personal avenues).
Despite all this there is between little and no reason for anyone to fret about a lack of reading material, as manifold other projects are underway. While many of these are behind closed doors at the minute and will probably remain so for the forseeable, cash settlements notwithstanding, the mere fact of their existence is expected to be of great comfort to the average reader. Should it turn out that the marketing gurus have miscalculated on this point, feel free to pick the nearest convenient billboards and assume they are part of a vast and thoroughly entertaining viral marketing campaign, the oblique and succulent mysteries of which will doubtless occupy you for weeks on end.
In the more immediate meantime, be sure to stay tuned for news of my upcoming sitcom project. It’s a bold and genre-bending opus that will fry your tiny little minds with its sheer unfettered twelve-gauge 40-proof five-alarm wit and sparkle; think of it as Saved by the Bell meets Grey’s Anatomy meets Shaft in Africa. Ladies and gentlemen, I call it Hippo Campus.
An interesting day overall. I made the crucial error of getting on a bus right after downing two pints, and by the time we hit the venue I was in physical pain to the point of only being able to shuffle along in a hunching limp. And bless my soul if I didn’t accidentally sass a Garda shortly afterwards. She was on a bike though and apparently didn’t feel like stopping to dispense Mighty Justice.
There was a delightful Freudian slip from an MCD announcer before Muse came onstage: “In the unlikely event of a concern for public safety…”
It was a great show. An awful lot of jumping around, but paced nicely enough so that you never quite collapsed. And I love how where other bands might say “This is a new song we’re working on,” Muse tend to go for “Yeah, so this is a badass riff we wrote, we’re gonna play that for the next minute or so. Also, I’m going to make lasers come out of my guitar.”
I’m still not remotely recovered. I’m going to trail off now if that’s all right with you.
I’m thinking give it 30 years or so, then get this kid and Old Man Bale and lash out The Dark Knight Returns. Magic.
Oh god… in getting that TDKR link, I found out that Frank Miller is writing a prequel called Holy Terror, Batman!
The plot revolves around Batman defending Gotham City from an attack by Al-Qaeda. According to Miller, the comic is a “piece of propaganda” in which Batman “kicks Al-Qaeda’s ass.”
The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.
It’s a nifty idea. At the moment he’s mooching around a sanatorium, and apparently he’s going to start Getting Political on the 7th of September. Exciting stuff.
I remember journeying home from France as a child, being awake for around 18 hours, and my brother saying how he wasn’t tired because he’d “passed the wall”. There does seem to be some kind of backup generator that kicks in at a certain level of exhaustion, because I wasn’t tired at all for (most of) yesterday. I was practically hyperactive in the morning and cruising nicely in the afternoon.
On the other hand I’m properly banjaxed today. I would have typed this post earlier but lifting my arms seemed like too much effort. The decent enough amount of sleep I got last night pulled me up out of whatever wild-eyed rockstar mode I was pounding along in and replaced it with… well, you know that way you feel like you’ve been injected with lead sludge (as opposed to molten lead, which would be much too exciting).
In certain tipsy corners of the world there exists such a thing as a “hogbomb”. This is a cheap and somewhat less tasty alternative to a jaegerbomb, assumably served on a base of Red Hog rather than Red Bull. It is perhaps the case that you should avoid such things.
Surprisingly spry this morning. No doubt this will change when the last of the alcohol leaves my system. I shall keep you posted.
from banging my noggin against the Free Rice game. It’s one hundred levels of vocab-testing madness! And for a good cause.
Actually, I don’t know how many levels there are. I’ve never made it past 49 (which still makes me pretty smart and handsome if you ask me) and it gets damn punishing. I hope the skinny bastards know what I’m going through here just so they can have their leisurely brunch in the sun.
In other news I remain superlatively tired, having never gotten around to a proper night’s sleep since Batman Weekend. Or long before, for that matter. Still: no time. There’s celebratory Antics to hit tonight, podcasting tomorrow and whatever’s going on on Friday on Friday. I shall trust in jaegerbombs and ProPlus to get me through.
I posted yesterday about an interview with Alan Moore (which is still terribly interesting and worth reading). It’s a long one – partially because it’s a direct transcript of what both parties said.
Now it seems to me that that’s not the usual way interviews are published. You open a newspaper and find some guy talking about how he’s going to meet some musician and he has certain preconceptions, and then he describes the hotel room/café/whatever he’s meeting him in and discusses whether this mildly reinforces or mildly challenges said preconceptions, and then you get something like this:
I asked him what he thought about the Irish weather.
He looked out the window. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s all right.”
There you go, you got your pull quote. Now, for the edification of the reader, you should summarise the guy’s career to date, mention what some people thought about the live show and point out that there’ll be a new album out soon. Job’s a good un.
Which is to say, there seems to be very little interviewing going on.
I love reading transcripts because there’s a real sense of the person’s character, and not just whatever aspect of said that the journalist wants to play up. Plus you get proper, thought-out answers.
On that note, I heartily recommend that anyone with an interest in writing read The Paris Review Interviews. They’re interesting, useful, inspiring and surprisingly funny, and demonstrate nicely why smart and enthusiastic people need more airtime.
Neil Gaiman links to a long, long interview with Alan Moore in which Das Beard talks about the craft of writing. It’s pure gold – he’s not at all shy about going into detail. Plus he comes across as a charmingly down-to-earth sort:
DW: I feel quite awkward doing this ‘cos I’ve never really interviewed anyone before…
AM: Well I’m a doddle for interviewing ‘cos I’m completely infatuated with the sound of me own voice…you just have to say a few basic words and I’ll talk for the next hour or two.
I especially love his description of how the plot and premise for Lost Girls came together. I don’t know how any writer could read that and not want to run off and start maniacally filling notebooks.
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