my ‘read’ shelf:

So I found this site that I am having a lot of fun with the widget for it being above this blurb — go check it out.

I am what is called a meta-textual reader — I just read the book I am reading, I read every single thing that is associated with it and then continue outwards and ever outwards from there. So a fair while back now I found this story called Lazarus Churchyard and through that discovered this guy named Warren Ellis, maybe you’ve heard of him? Anyway, cut to the present day and with an intense interest in everything Mr Ellis has written in print and online I have been tracking back through all his archives. And to the point he comes: so I found this column on Artbomb and through that I found Justine Shaw and this wonderful piece of work Nowhere Girl.

I know I’m late to the party but I am sure I won’t be the only one so what was a revelation for me will surely be a revelation for others. This is one of those seminal pieces that taps into a frame of mind, a sense of place, and an emotional core that many people will understand. The characters are charming, the stories are compelling, and the artwork is beautiful. Humanity is the beating heart that typifies all the work that I am interested in at the moment and this story has that in spades. I read the whole thing, or the two parts that I could find, in a really short span of time, and it left me wanting more. Makes me wonder why I had never heard of this before — made me feel stupidly ashamed, and proud that I had eventually found it all at the same time. I can’t recommend it highly enough. You’ll find it at www.nowheregirl.com do yourself a favour and get over there now!

So, today there was something a little different being offered in stead of the Freakangels webcomic which is on a one week hiatus. Today Warren Ellis offers us some thoughts on his preoccupations with disaster fiction and the very British influences which have filtered into the story which we are logging on every week to read.

It comes in the thirteenth week, which struck me as interesting and may prove to be so. A breather before something big happens next week? A chance to re-cap? Or just a much needed break in the work schedule as is said? Probably or rather possibly all three. Anyone who follows Mr Ellis, and there are a fair few of them out there, will know that he has a pretty punishing work schedule — one he seems to constantly be working hard to make even more laden down with work. If there is one writer out there who you can see indisputable evidence of a work ethic with it’s Warren Ellis. And of course Mr Duffield is turning out six pages of the best looking comic I have seen for an age every week. That art work zings — it is alive, has slipped out of the two dimensional realm. This is like not seeing a friend for a week and not being able to phone them — I miss the characters and the world. I appreciate the musings though, as stated — Ellis is always readable; always makes you think. I am catching up on years of online archives I never really had access to until now — there is a lot of it.

Who knows, the interlude could be the perfect touchstone for someone to enter the story through? If I read it I’d want to see where the thought processes outlined there came to fruition, but then I’m a curious one.

From the moment I saw that first advert for Dragon’s Teeth, as this series was originally to be called I was hooked on the idea. Back when marvel actually had an interest in a unique British market Dragon’s Claws was a stand out title. There was some great stuff that came out of that small boom: Death’s Head, The Sleeze Brothers, Knights Of Pendragon.

Most of the British titles steered away from any connection with super heroes, the usual staple of comics at the time. I was always a sucker for a dystopian future and Dragon’s Claws explored territory that at the time was only really being covered in 2000ad, at least as far as I knew. I mean the way in which I bought comics back then was radically different from the way you buy them now — you could actually walk into your newsagent and pick up the latest copy of a story. I have been confused for a long time as to why there is only a very small British comics industry when most of the writers who are of any merit in the International comic scene tend to be from the UK. Is it just that the buying public is too small? I find that hard to believe given the number of British voices I have witnessed on forums and the like.

Anyway, at the centre of this story you have Dragon, Mercy, Scavenger, Digit and Steel — the best game players in the world. The year is 8162 and the Claws are reactivated to help deal with the number of ex game teams that are running riot. Initially it seems that the main thrust of the story concerns the Claws and their arch rivals The Evil Dead but it is just as much about what is going on behind the scenes.

NURSE, the big organisation that runs the country, is moving people around like chess pieces, everything framed within the Machiavellian machinations of Matron the head of that group. If ever a story was ripe for revisiting — if ever a world deserved to be more fleshed out than a mere 10 issues allowed then it is this. it stands up to repeated readings — the art has aged really well and so has the story, which you can’t always say of these kinds of stories. Things about the future tend to oddly be very much of their time — I think this story is flexible enough to allow someone the room to move around in its skin and say what they need to say about the world in which we live today.

So, the first two parts of this massive project I am undertaking is up for your enjoyment — I hope you’ll all support me and leave me loads of comments to let me know what you think. I have something like a hundred and sixty characters to introduce you to and each story will be both interconnected and self-sustaining just in case you only want to follow one character.

Best known for creating the cover to The Beatles album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, Peter Blake is, for me at least, one of the most accessible of the pop artists. He is someone else I found through the Pop Art exhibition back in the nineties at the Tate Modern.

I don’t know if to say that there is something uniquely British about his vision seems too limiting? Because I don’t see it as a limiting thing. His work has character and part of the character has a national flavour. There are not many people as high up the food-chain in the art world that are ploughing the same furrow as Blake and that in itself makes him unique. His uniqueness is obviously not purely derived from this fact but it could be said to amplify it. How many figurative painters that are British can you name from the modern era? Not many I’ll warrant. Shit I could be wrong; could be my skewed view of the art world, but I don’t think so. There is of course Lucien Freud, who is great, and Jenny Saville.

Amidst all the abstracts, and pieces seemingly more concerned with the idea behind them than the end product Blake might have been seen as an oddity. His concerns in his paintings make him relevant though. He has forged connections with more than one musical genre by doing covers for people. He is a great argument against people who say portraiture is dead and done with.

Jim Morrison is often dismissed as a poet — his lyrics are often ripped apart. Sometimes he was a dick, a drunken clown and a buffoon, sure, but that doesn’t mean all his work was worthless. I owned Lords & the New Creatures, American Night and Wilderness and hey there is work in there that stands up to anything Bukowski wrote. I will probably get bashed for saying that but sometimes I read Bukowski and wonder at what I am reading — when he’s great he’s great and when he sucks he sucks — Morrison is the same. There are some memorable lyrics, some iconic images and some interesting ideas.

This album takes the readings and dresses them up with music that is as perfectly tailored to his poetry as it was to his singing. If you believe some accounts it isn’t what Morrison wanted for his spoken word but the fact that it is listened to and appreciated  as something other than the music of The Doors might have  made him happy. But it under-appreciated — it is something that turns up only after a bit of digging. People who find it get a lot out of it and sonically there aren’t many better settings than within the music  on display here  for what Morrison wishes to talk about. The band let his words breathe and never try to steal the show; they were very respectful I think — very creative. This is, the two Doors-sans-Morrison albums not really there sonically, the last real example of The Doors unit functioning in perfect harmony — regardless of the fact that it was recorded after one member’s death.

The Lizard King couldn’t do everything but he had the balls to try at least — gotta give him kudos for that.

Of the people who went in and out of the doors of The Factory she stands out perhaps most of all. Why? Because she is the woman who shot Andy Warhol. Which bring me neatly to how I heard of her — the film I Shot Andy Warhol. That film was a great portrayal of someone who felt she belonged within the world of the great artist who was briefly taken in and then cast aside (not an uncommon it seems in Warhol’s world).

I think the other route a lot of people may take to her is via the album Holy Bible by The Manic Street Preachers which had a song called Of Walking Abortion which is named after a line from S.C.U.M Manifesto the text for which she is primarily known.

She had ideas and she had written them down in an erudite if confrontational manner. The Society For Cutting Up Men was never going to be something that was going to go down well with many people and would people even be reading it if she hadn’t shot Warhol? Probably not. But because of her ideas, because of what she did, because of who she did it to, she is an endless source of fascination for me, and I know I am not the only one. Check the film, try and find a copy of the book — see something that might qualify as the antithesis to The Factory, something that nestled close to it’s breast like a viper.

The film by Julian Schnabel delivered the tragic yet charming story of Basquiat to me before I found it, which I eventually would have through my exploration of Warhol and the world of The Factory.

His art is unlike anything else that I have seen before or since — it has a musical quality to it; a physicality that shouts at you from the canvas. To say that it is vibrant and quirky and captures something of the artist in it is to say something that is not true of a lot of artist’s art — their art exists apart from them and has more the quality of an object. Basquiat reflects the process, the jazz of the art, it encapsulates it — that is the art. I don’t mean to speak as if I know the artist, which I obviously don’t — I wish to speak purely of the feeling it creates in me and the thought processes that it triggers.

Again, as with his friend Warhol, you can focus on the life that went on behind the work, but do you need to know about it or understand it in order to appreciate the art? I don’t think that you do. The art is beautiful, evocative, and still fresh despite its age. Great art creates its own time bubble — its own continuum: that is where Basquiat’s pieces dwell. He is one of my favourite artists, check him out — you’ll see why.