And people will be talking about new comics later, I suppose.

I will no longer be writing online about body modification

Which suggest the terms of the settlement include a non-compete clause. Rachel says

First of all, Shannon Larratt will no longer be an employee of BME, and has
willfully relinquished his interest in our site to me — we were co-owners of
BME, and I am now the sole owner. We truly believe this was in the best interest
of both parties, and this was a decision to which Shannon and I both agreed.
There was no force, no coercion — nothing of the sort.

Shannon, however, in the preceding post, said:

After a personally difficult legal dispute over BME, I’ve had to face the
potentially insurmountable reality of being massively in debt, and I have chosen
to transfer the business to Rachel (the details of this deal are sealed, so
please don’t ask).

Making it fairly clear what brought the settlement to its conclusion.

While Shannon was and is plainly crazier than a snake-fucking rabbit, it was his great skill, love and humour that glued BME together and made ModBlog such a riveting (and sometimes purely revelatory) daily read. Rachel is clearly committed to BME, but has never shown the same facility as a writer as Shannon. It’ll be interesting to see her next moves.

I’m wishing Shannon the best of luck in his next venture, of course.

Cyberdine: Fred Harper & Christopher Conte

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 17th, 7:00pm-11:00pm.

Show runs May 17th thru June 29th, 2008.

511 W. 33rd St, New York City

Last Rites Gallery

(Sepia Tweakery Composite)

This is from the album INFECTED. In fact, this video is from the “video album” for INFECTED — they shot a video for every track on the album and released it as a videotape, the first time this had been done (at least by a mainstream recording artist). I used to have it. INFECTED was an interesting album not only for its frank anti-American bent, which you didn’t see much of in the pop charts of 1986, but because it was a clear breakpoint for Matt Johnson. The troubled romantic balladeer of “Uncertain Smile” can be clearly seen to go stark raving mad on INFECTED, and he was never the same afterwards.

I’m tempted to link half the album: “Heartland” is a swaggering excoriation of British life of the period, “Angels Of Deception” has a beautiful refrain, and “Slow Train To Dawn” is a poisonous duet with Neneh Cherry.

Anyway. This was the cover. And I loved this album in 1986. It reminds me of the pure philosophical hate only a teenager can really summon, and of walking to my girlfriend’s house with a cheap Walkman-knockoff on…

So I’m tired, suggestible and on half power. If you’ve got anything good, are hellbent on tampering with my pliant brains, or just wish to pay homage to a dying man, drop me a note at the blogdump - degaussing at googlemail com.

In the meantime, I’m going to find some food and wait for the dark, because I have a new head full of things to think about.

So last night I was at the hauntology gig. Kode9 and the Spaceape were just as good as I expected them to be — their “Memories Of The Future” has been an aural touchstone for me since its release. The surprise was Philip Jeck — the recorded material I’ve heard was just interesting, but live it’s absolutely thrilling. Working with old turntables and seven-inches, he turned the venue into a truly haunted space. The ambience was utterly supernatural. Jeck is an intense figure as he works, an acoustic scientist bent to his experiments.

In contrast, Kode9 and the Spaceape actually made me laugh when they pulled a The The cover out of the electric fog. They should also be credited for not losing their stride when something set the fire alarm off, sending everyone outside for ten minutes while the fire brigade took a look around and the local bishop phoned the venue to find out if the electrical devil music really had summoned up the infernos of hell.

I only caught half of the preceding presentations. Paul Devereux’s piece was fascinating, introducing me to the concept of “archaeoacoustics.” He’ll flood an area of archaeological significance with pink noise, identifying the resonances to determine, for instance, how ritualistic sites were used. There’s a site in India whose seven stone columns ring with the seven basic tones of Indian classical music — a cave that might hold the birthstones of the raga. This presentation was interrupted by some idiot who appeared to be complaining that the presentation was in English.

I spoke to Kode9 for a little while after his gig — we have a mutual friend in Steven Shaviro, and it turned out he checked this blog yesterday because he couldn’t remember where he was supposed to be playing. Afternoon, squire.

And now I go to this meeting.

As a presenter at this conference, and viewing Steven (Shaviro)’s presentation (on DOKTOR SLEEPLESS), I can firmly say that Warren Ellis’s blog post attracted asian goth ladies from the surrounding area. Well, at least one.

Taken on the grounds of Sutton Manor in Essex (with a Nokia N95 8GB) earlier today.

(thanks, Bill)

It’s worse than you think. Don’t look.

You should look at this one, because it’s kind of romantic, really. In an indescribable WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THAT kind of way.

OMODAKA is the name of the project developed through a trial and error process of mutational fusion of music and motion graphics. It will knock over your existing image toward a music video by a beautiful trajectory.

(via Mez, thanks)

Features Steven Shaviro’s presentation “’You Will Never Own a Jetpack’: Warren Ellis’ Science Fiction Comics” (on the Saturday, 3A, 1:30pm):

This paper looks at the science fiction comics of Warren Ellis: Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, and the currently ongoing series Doktor Sleepless. These comics are about the social effects of new technologies. They bring us a wavering and uncertain vision of a highly technologized future, and ponder the possibilities of change in a world pervaded by a sense that the future itself has largely been played out.

Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism (1997), and Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003).

I would have bought an awful lot more from ZTT Records in the 80s if there’d been no records in the sleeves.

On 23 May, I’ll be speaking at the Norwegian Film Institute. (Also appearing during this seminar are the major European comics figure Igort and the brilliant Killoffer.)

I will also be appearing at the Oslo Comics Expo (fuck-all details on website at present) on Saturday 24 May at 17:00, doing an onstage Q&A. No plans for a signing.

In real terms, this means that I arrive in Oslo airport tired and confused at 11 o’clock at night, attempt to get to central Oslo on my own without getting mugged or raped, locate my hotel, confirm that it’s not a crackhouse or a knocking-shop for backpackers, fail to sleep because I’ve timeshifted an hour, pass out around dawn, wake up five minutes later, jabber incoherently for two hours to a room full of filmmakers who don’t actually speak my language anyway, spend the next 24 hours staggering around town using the only two words of Norwegian I can remember ("thankyou" and "beer"), throw up over a small group of people at Comics Expo who were only standing there because they were looking for Killoffer, and then get myself conveyed back to the airport by ambulance on Sunday.

WIN.

See you there?