"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Shitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."


William Gibson

Working on my comics today i had a good laugh. I work with media playing in the background usually, today I watched The Passionate Eye's [CBC] presentation of a mock doc about the faking of the moon landing, caled Dark side of the moon. Perfect!

• "How could the flag flutter when there's no wind on the moon? During an interview with Stanley Kubrick's widow an extraordinary story came to light. She claims Kubrick and other Hollywood producers were recruited to help the U.S. win the high stakes race to the moon. In order to finance the space program through public funds, the U.S. government needed huge popular support, and that meant they couldn't afford any expensive public relations failures. Fearing that no live pictures could be transmitted from the first moon landing, President Nixon enlisted the creative efforts of Kubrick, whose 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968) had provided much inspiration, to ensure promotional opportunities wouldn't be missed. In return, Kubrick got a special NASA lens to help him shoot Barry Lyndon (1975). A subtle blend of facts, fiction and hypothesis around the first landing on the moon, Dark Side Of The Moon illustrates how the truth can be twisted by the manipulation of images.
  
  With use of 'hijacked' archival footage, false documents, real interviews taken out of context or transformed through voice-over or dubbing, staged interviews, as well as, interviews with astronauts like Buzz Aldrin and others, Dark Side Of The Moon navigates the viewer through lies and truth; fact and fiction. This is no ordinary documentary. Its intent is to inform and entertain the viewer, but also to shake him up - make him aware that one should always view television with a critical eye."

its a great satirical take on both the conspiracy theory itself, the media, and a prank for viewers who don’t watch critically and take this shite too seriously. It has just enough fact to it to come off as plausible fiction, like so many conspiracy theories.

Its funny. I wonder how many of the interviewees were interviewed specifically for it, seems like, from the credit sequence, a good number where in on the gag.

So, to give the basic plot, NASA & the Pentagon starts the space race to develop ICB missile tec – this is basically true – but they are also very aware of the need for a positive media spin and public approval to allow for the gross expenditures of money it takes to do it. So the decide they need to cover their asses, and make sure that if the moon landing fails, they have a happy ending pre-shot to feed the public. Apparently Kubric is contacted because of his history with NASA from producing 2001, a film partly meant as a PR vehicle for the space program – this is also basically true as I recall, NASA did work with him to help excite the public about the space program.

But here he’s supposed to have helped them despite misgivings to fake the moon footage with a secret CIA crew on the set of 2001 just after they finished up main production of the shoot. By the way, even this foe-Doc says they landed on the moon, just that they faked the photos cus’ the cameras didn't work in the extreme temperatures. Sweet twist. All goes well and Kubric earns himself a great mob style debt with NASA, which is supposed to explain the way he got use of a special one of a kind Zeiss lens used to shoot Barry Lindon.

It gets better. All goes well and no one is the wiser, the film crew disappears into the wood work and Kubric says ‘I don’t know you people’ and hides out at home for the rest of his life in fear. But Nixon bugs out on a bender afraid he's going to get busted, and orders that the CIA film crew, now hiding out in Hanoi Vietnam. Everyone ignores him, figuring he'll think better of it when he's sober. But one crazed CIA man takes the orders and runs with it. His sloppy covert attempt to take them out fails, so the army rolls in to clean up the mess and starts the Viet Nam war.

There is the great joke line from a supposedly insane CIA man hiding out in NY Jewish community, he calls himself a 'Acidic Jew', I’m going to have to adopt that one for myself :) from now on I am officially an Acidic Jew. ….and later in the credits the rabbi says, looking up from reading his script for his ‘interview’, “this acidic Jew joke doesn’t work in Hebrew” [he’s talking in Hebrew] Perfect.

Good watch. You can find it at some of them torrent sites I believe, if you go looking around for it.

For the record, if you do watch the real moon footage, nothing you see really defies physics at all. The flag, flaps, marks in the dust, the stars or lack of them, any of it. Only wacky toons and hard core sceptics too willing to believe them ever assert that they do.

Wow, this would be a good article on Comic in any context, but that it's in Newsweek...well.....cool. Notable here is that they even got the historical facts right, and rather than claiming that the medium was invented in the US as mainstream American mags have been prone to for years, they came up with this well vetted paragraph...

• "The rise of serious graphic literature is less a new phenomenon than a return to a forgotten one. Rodolphe Topffer, a German illustrator who made Europe's first interdependent combinations of words and pictures in the early 1800s, was admired by Goethe. Charles Dickens's first works used pictures. As with so many things, Europeans invented modern comics, and Americans commercialized them. By the early 20th century, comic strips had taken off in U.S. newspapers, snapped up by hordes of new immigrants who used the universal language of images to learn English. Comics remained high art on the Continent, but in the Anglo-Saxon world they became mass-market pop fare, read, discarded and used to wrap fish. The rise of the sci-fi/superhero comic books in the 1950s did little to clean up the reputation of graphic literature. "

Not to shaby!

My buddy Mr painter pants and fancy dance, Peter Ferguson is having a group-show with some other local heavy hitters...



…he promises "loads'a funky artiste chiquitas", and I know the art will be worth a gander at least ;-)

Finished up 16 pages of layouts this weekend and went down to check out Camille at the Franco Follies Monday. aj stayed in and nuked her computer again. ~:(

Show was super crowded, nice bopping vibe as Camille talked a crowd full of macho Montreal men - well a few of them anyway - to sing "je suis une fille" [ (((clip))) ].

She's a fun performer to watch; goofy with her string strung across the stage - cut to end the show, she's extremely playful, unconventional and very sexy. Also extremely good at what she does, her vocal gymnastics and playful report with the sunny afternoon audience were masterful and effortless seeming. Flanked by two cohorts who are equally talented musicians and performers, they put on a really great spectacle of a show. Very high and positive energy [ (((clip))) ]- had there been room I’d have been dancing. I’m in love, you can keep your brooding sad sacks, I want me a bouncy happy wacky girl. :P

Nice afternoon. Some free music downtown all week for the festival, plan to walk down for a few more myself, missed the jazz fest totally, arg...

local [MTL] floor & spectacle, a few flyers of note, my likely spots for this week’s R&R...