Ready, Teddy, Go!

Well, it seems the war on terror has reached new heights (or lows?). Even small, furry, innocuous toys aren’t safe from the dastardly West’s plot to ridicule Islam.

Being two continents of hard rocking, fornicating, morally bankrupt drunkards with the kind of military muscle that makes even a Michael Bay film look tame – what did we do?

Yep, that’s right – we sent a middle-aged, female schoolteacher to the Middle East, and got her to name a teddy bear after a prophet!

Stunned silence....

I can almost imagine the FBI and MI5 sitting down and thinking this one out. But only if I smoke enough ganja to paralyse a cow.

CIA Mook: “Here’s your secret identity, passport, official documents, bank account, Walther PPK, silencer, sniper rifle, car that has a frickin’ laser beam in the headlights, oh, and one more thing – don’t forget the Teddy Bear.”
MI5 Agent: “Thanks, I’ll be back before breakfast, smoke me a kipper.”

Seriously, the West has been f*cking about in the East and destabilising bits of it (seemingly) on a whim for so long they hardly need to resort to naming teddy bears inappropriately, they’re a bit more Machiavellian than this. Right?

Of course, it’s totally permissible for people to detonate themselves on public transport.
No worries. Have a nice day (in the afterlife, with your forty virgins).

Preaching hatred against scores of dumb white people/ infidels, who’s only crime is to watch X Factor and Eastenders?
Fine. Come on in, citizenship? You got it.

OK – jokes aside, there are so many angles on this Islamic PR disaster that I can’t get my tiny mind around it. You’d think all the ‘moderate’ Islamic types would stand up and say:
“Hey, look, it’s not like she wiped her ass with the national flag, said Mohammed was a big girls blouse and played Marilyn Manson records at the kids.”

Oh no, instead we get the full brunt of the hardliners with the potential of 20 lashes.
To a woman.
Who was there to educate children, regardless of race or religion.

I’m sure there are all sorts of people that feel that Islam is under siege (and with good reason), but do you really take the conflict to the fairer sex with a tenuous, contentious issue like this, that is so blatantly just a cultural faux pas?

And would it be so terrible if more of our Saints/ Deities/ Prophets were idolised as teddy bears? The fact that the child (who came up with the idea) might associate Mohammed with hugging, as opposed to say – smiting infidels, must have filled the Clerics with dread.

Organised Religion: turning people into anything from simple idiots - to homicidal maniacs, since time immemorial.

Queens Of The Stone Age - Gig Review

Groovy!
Get your groove on.
Get into the groove.

It has to be said that the word ‘Groove’ has a habit of coming across as slightly naff in the English lexicon. However, you’ll not find many people moving to music that lacks a distinct groove, be it a great bass line or the syncopated rhythms of a good break beat. QOTSA boast the sort of grooves that never fail to set feet a-tapping, but you’d hardly guess it at first, due the barrage of psychedelic, discordant, unashamed rock that first assails your ears.

Fronted by the towering presence of Josh Homme, the band proceeded to tear through a set boasting solid tracks such as:
Sick Sick Sick, Do It Again, Burn The Witch, Battery Acid, Little Sister, Avon, No One Knows, 3s & 7s, In The Fade, Turning On A Screw, Hanging Tree, Make It Wit Chu, Misfit Love, Tangled Up In Plaid, If Only, Feel Good Hit Of The Summer, which lapsed into Amy Winehouses Rehab to comic effect – Homme really turned on the performance for this one and had the audience chuckling. The rest of the thunderous set comprised of You Think I Ain’t Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire, Go With The Flow and Songs For The Dead.

With the very ferocious Joey Castillo on drums it’s hard to imagine the live set getting any better (even with Dave Grohl!). With a good dash of audience interaction and requisite references to bad behaviour, (‘I love getting drunk in this city’, boasted Homme) the band clearly rocked the room from the barriers to the bars with their achingly cool tunes.

Viva la QOTSA!

Ironhide Goes Ape!

So, I find myself writing the copy and hunting down prizes and images for TRANSFORMERS Comic: UK #8. Publishing schedules are strange things, as you work so far ahead it’s easy to lose sight of what is actually occurring in the here and now.

At time of writing Issue #5 is on the shelves, boasting a kick ass cover with Ironhide squaring up. Naturally we’d like sales figures to be a bit higher, (Issue #3 sold about 38k copies) but with the almost non-existent Marketing the title gets I guess you just have to take the licks. Oddly the online marketing – such as it is, we have a MySpace page – has done us a world of good. Never underestimate a well-developed fan base with Internet access.

So far, I continue to cut my teeth on the merchandise pages and the letters pages. After consulting the fans we’ve decided to have that darstardly Decepticon, Starscream answer the fans letters – which is basically an excuse to be mean and call them all ‘pathetic human’ or ‘meat sack’. My Editor, Steve White (Marvel UK veteran and Dinosaur illustrator extraordinaire), added some touches to my copy that increased the tone and chuckles 100%. It’s very satisfying to write stuff that makes people laugh, if you can make yourself laugh, then so much the better. Writing in character is one of the most fun elements of the job (and not just restricted to TRANSFORMERS).

Also, big news at Titan Towers ©, is that IDW, the comic book publisher in the States who hold the Licence for TRANSFORMERS, have given us the green light to print an alternate UK TRANSFORMERS-verse, written by the ever popular Simon Furman. This basically allows us to commision new comic strips and stories, rather than just keep reprinting strips from the US of A.

Equally exciting is the discovery of a new colourist who made the comic book guys at Titan drop their collective jaws. We were suitably impressed when the pencils (by Gary Erskine) came back from the inker – however, when the new colourist, Chris Sotomayer, had done his work the picture was amazing, check it out!

Out From Out Where – Album Review

A friend of mine was good enough to take me to see the mighty Amon Tobin at the Kentish Town Forum last week. The gig didn’t really deliver as I was expecting a lap top based set, accompanied by lush visuals a la Coldcut –

it was actually little more than a Drum N’ Bass DJ set. And a freaking intense one at that. Watching one guy, tweak the dials of a series of grey boxes is hardly entertainment but there were some great moments in the first half, reminiscent of a reconstituted Prodigy.

Amon Tobin, for those of not in the know, is a Brazilian born DJ and Producer who mixes jazz, drum and bass, samba, atmospheric weirdness, tweaks and glitches. To say Tobin uses samples would be a massive understatement. He fearlessly uses reverb and resonance as well as an army of effects to create huge textural sounds.

Not since Massive Attack’s Mezzanine has electronic music been so darkly sexy. The music’s sombre tone is often dramatically lifted with sharp stabs of heavy percussion. That’s not to say he’s shy of a melody or too either, many tracks featuring distinct grooves and bass lines.

Tobin’s work conjures up (for me at least) the frenetic comic book ultra violence of anime, or, in his quieter moments, the soundtrack to a Bladerunner sequel – although god forbid it should ever be made. This is dark, futuristic territory, with punishing moments of break beat or South American rhythms – overlaid by distorted and frequently mutated soundscapes.

Personally I’d have to say Out From Out Where (Ninja Tune 2002) is my favourite album for such treats as Rosie’s, Saboteur, Verbal and Proper Hoodidge. However, starting out on the more jazz infused Bricolage (Ninja Tune 1997) might be a safer bet for those of you unaccustomed to such a fearlessly experimental sound. 2007 saw Tobin release Foley Room (a Foley Room is the studio where they create the sound effects for movies). Whilst Foley Room lacked the opening impact of previous albums it soon finds it’s stride and makes it’s mark, adding to a great back catalogue of work.

Other albums to check out:
Permutation (Ninja Tune 1998)
Supermodified (Ninja Tune 2000)
Chaos Theory (Ninja Tune 2005)

Remember, remember the 5th of November

People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.

It seems the thorny issue of ID cards rears it’s ugly head yet again. And remember, the next time you hear about a school closing down, just think of the 5 billion pounds of tax payers money being spent to effectually slap a bar code on your forehead.

It seems the The Sunday Mirror have erroneously reported that Labour have put lowjacking, er, I mean ID cards ‘on the back burner’. This has since been denied by Tony McNulty, the Home Office Minister.

With broadband and wireless technology becoming increasingly advanced the prospect of an Orwellian future isn’t so difficult to believe. After all, a portable device that could test if you were drunk would have been Science Fiction in the forties and fifties – this year the Breathalyser celebrates (with a diet Coke no doubt) it’s fortieth Birthday. Is it so hard to imagine another portable device that has a finger print reader and a DNA analyser? Could said hypothetical device be plugged into a laptop and bring up a personal file on you that may (or more likely) not be correct?

Let’s face it, most energy suppliers have a hard enough time processing a close of account and subsequent change of address, do we honestly trust the Police or our oh-so-competent Government to keep their records in order?

In short – ID cards won’t protect us from Terrorism because they can be tampered with just like any other card (Credit card fraud anyone?).
Why spend (a generously underestimated) 5 billion on a bunch of measures that can be so easily circumvented by today’s more technologically adept terrorist. The fact that Al-Qaeda recruits through the Internet tells you volumes about where their expertise lies.

Mid-life Crisis

So, here I am, a week away from turning 32 (ack!) and I’m buying myself a Japanese battle suit kit. Some men buy Porsches and date women 20 years their junior, me, I’m on the road to Otaku-hood

What the hell am I talking about?! Let me explain.

Firstly, a game called Armoured Core arrived on the Playstation way back in 1997, and gave rise to a whole host of sequels. Being Japanese in origin and featuring huge, heavily armed robots (piloted by humans), it was only natural that model kits be released of the various war machines in the game.

This being Japan though, the kits have upwards of 320 pieces, and are so well designed you don’t even need glue to assemble them. Well, mostly. Alas, the model is 1/72 scale* so I won’t be bidding for world domination just yet.

Otaku is a Japanese term that is akin to Geek, Anorak or Nerd in our own lexicon. In Japan there are many types of Otaku: those obsessed with manga, anime, console games or computers (and more besides).
In William Gibson’s 1996 novel Idoru these fanboys are described thusly:
'pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit'
While I think my interests are spread too wide to be a fully paid up Otaku I still know way too much about Star Wars and other geekery to be considered a normal member of society. And I don’t like football, so I must be weird.

So, with that explained: I can neither afford the Porsche or the counselling bills for a full-blown mid-life crisis, and besides, wouldn’t you rather have a huge Japanese robot on your desk instead?


*This amounts to 6-7 inches tall. Meh.