PANZER DIVISION JOHN CANDY

McSatan's 'The Forgotten Spawn'

2012-01-30T11:57:00.000-08:00

Hey guys, just popping in to let you know I'm not actually dead. I've just been doing other things in other places, both university work, work where you actually work, and also some other things that I don't want associated with this name for artistic reasons *taps nose*. Thought I'd come back to show you this thing I made last night:

It's obviously based on 'The Forgotten Man', the latest in a long series of poorly conceived efforts by mediocre american god-botherer, right wing ideologue and (least of all) painter Jon Mcnaughton. The alterations reflect my personal viewpoint: that everyone who can achieve a position like president of the US is a blood-sucker out to exploit the common mass of humanity, some are just better at hiding it than others.

Woop woop, moral panic incoming.

2011-10-31T04:50:00.000-07:00

I have talked on here before, I think, about the UK's ball-achingly insane 'Extreme Pornography' laws. Well, looks like things are about to get a whole lot worse. Looks like Vincent Tabak (a man who got more press coverage than Occupy London for strangling a woman last Christmas) looked at PORN! HORRIBLE PORN! PORN WHERE PEOPLE PRETEND TO STRANGLE EACH OTHER. Can you imagine?

Of course, the idea that people with ingrained violent or sociopathic tendencies might seek out 'extreme pornography' (breathplay is about as extreme as the fucking teletubbies) as a method of release, or even in a perhaps futile attempt to control their urges, is ludicrous, despite what so-called 'psychologists' might have you believe. Much more likely that 'extreme pornography' magically transforms an extremely tiny proportion of the people who watch it into MIDDLE CLASS WHITE LADY STRANGLING MACHINES. (The papers are all ready drawing the parallels between Tabak's victim and Jane Longhurst, so I don't have to.) http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The Daily Mail is, as normal, at the forefront, breaking new ground in the field of applied shitheadics. I am particularly loving this opinion piece by Stephen Glover. I am not really sure who Stephen Glover is, but he is apparently standing in for Melanie Phillips, a foul, shit-spewing bigot with all the personality of a glass of pasteurised water, and he appears to be doing a fairly good job, complete with unasked-for appeals to Christian morals. The whole thing is hilarious from start to finish. My favourite line is this:

"The purpose of extreme pornography is to humiliate and degrade women so as to dehumanise them."

1) Google keywords. "Femdom", "Male humiliation", "Cock and ball torture", "ballbusting", "sissification"
2) The purpose is for people to masturbate to! For fucks sake!

These fucking peple!

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So, I might have mentioned (I don't think I have actually) that I have started a masters degree. Well, I have. Go me. What I am going to be doing on my masters degree is making BOOKS. I have a number of interesting ideas, but one, which looks more and more likely, rather addresses this topic. It is an idea to draw together an exploration of internet extreme pornography communities with the 'acceptable' forms of sexualised violence propagated by the mass media, compare and contrast Abu Ghraib, the Road of Death etc., bit of Baudrillard, you know the score. Gonna call it 'Eros & Thanatos', should be a blast. I'm going to post bits, especially writing, from these books up here as I work on them hopefully, so watch this space.

A Sexy Chatlog

2011-10-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from a conversation between me and a young lady of my recent acquaintance.

Me: What is it you do, if you don't mind me asking

Me: (is a postgrad student, studying Fine Art)

Her: Nothing so glamorous as being a student. I work overnights at a local convenience store.

Me: common drudgery!

Me: Let me transport you away from it

Her: Ha ha, very much so. I feel like a combination of things at my work, but I make a pretty good living doing it.

Me: with my magic peeeeeenis

Me: :3

/She rides on the magic penis like it's the enchanted carpet from Aladdin.

Me: Oh dear, my magical penis seems to have become stuck in your anus! What a frightful to do!

Her: I suppose the only thing to do is to push in deep then pull back..wiggle it about and see if it can come loose.

Me: That seems risky, what if it creates a pressure imbalance? We will have to make sure your other lower body cavities are properly sealed. Luckily, I happen to have this silicone device here. Observe how it is shaped similiarly to the penis of an implausibly well equipped human male? By grim biological determinism, that is also the shape of your reproductive cavity. You will have to stick this thing in as far as it will go before we even think about moving the cock stuck up your arse.

Her: Well, it's very kind of you to supply me with such a device. I would never question your authority on such manners and I am indeed quite grateful for such sound advice. Perhaps I may trouble you since you are already back there, to place this device inside of me to ensure it goes in quite deep. I should think that once it is in place, you will have to hold onto me quite tightly for purchase lest you fall over as you move your cock. I wouldn't want you to risk injury when you're only trying to help.

Me: That is very considerate of you. Let me see if it just...there we go. My goodness, it slips in quite easily. You must have an unusually elastic vagina, probably from having experienced the miracle of childbirth after a single act of monogamous sexual intercourse. The device fits all the way inside quite easily. Now, perhaps if you were to adopt a kneeling position, with your hands held out in front of you to support your weight? Then, if I feel myself slipping, in the direst of emergencies I can always grab hold of your hair to save myself. Hopefully it won't come to that.

Her: Well, I haven't given birth, but I find that I'm curiously moist. Perhaps that aided in the insertion, but yes, let me kneel so that we're closer to the ground in case one or both of us should fall over. There we are, I'm nice and balanced on my hands and knees. My hair is quite long, so if you need to grab a hold, go right ahead. Here, let me push back against you a bit then pull forward with my hips..are you feeling anything yet? You're in there nice and deep.

Me: Yes. I do rather fear that the only possible way to extricate my penis will be by allowing my erection to subside. The quickest route to this is probably to induce the condition of orgasm as quickly as possible. I know it's a little distasteful, but this is an emergency. If you're sure you're well balanced, if you could just reach round behind me, in to my own anus, and see if you can locate my prostate gland? Manual stimulation of the prostate gland combined with the stimulation of my phallus by being moved round inside your rectal cavity should be the key here, though just in case I shall be using my own hands to massage the fatty tissue accumulations on your chest, as this has been scientifically proven to increase both the rapidity and intensity of the male orgasm, and an orgasm of sufficient intensity may get us out of this predicament quite naturally, without having to wait for any softening

Her: A pity there isn't a young fellow here to assist us, but I would be delighted to help you. Let me moisten my fingers a bit as I would hate to make this unpleasant for you. I admit to being a novice in the area of prostate stimulation but I am a rapt and willing pupil. Tell me, guide me and I shall do your bidding. I'll keep the pace of my hips steady for now whilst I get my fingers moist. If you would gently rub my nipples, pinch them just a bit..that should do the trick. Here, let me push against you hard for a moment..searching..there we are, I have my index finger inside of you, do you require more fingers? I can put another in if it would help with the process.

Me: No, no, for simple prostate stimulation a single finger will suffice, and often be more dextrous, if you push in a little deeper, down a bit...yes, there we go. Perfect. That thing you can feel there is my prostate gland. Massage it gently, and perhaps pull your finger, or maybe two actually...no, three, yes, in a triangle...three fingers in and out of my anus a little, stimulating the sphincter on the out-stroke...that's the method. May I compliment you on your milk-producing organs, by the way? They are rather pleasing to the touch. I feel that I may ejaculate soon. it is possible I will lose control over my vocal utterances at this point, yes.

Me: UGH TAKE IT TAKE IT YOU SLUT

Me: *ahem* apologies for that. As you may have noticed, I have experienced an orgasm. I can now feel that my penis is sufficiently loosened to be removed from your anus without too much fuss. Since you have used your body to cause me to experience an orgasm in my body, I understand that it is appropriate etiquette to use my body to make you experience an orgasm, in your body. I was thinking of employing a method I once saw descrined in a book, where the face parts of a person are inserted in to urination and child production areas of the female and agitated in an appropriate fashion.

Her: I'm quite relieved that I was able to bring you to the desired and necessary orgasm to free your penis from the prison of my anal cavity. Your compliment on my breasts is quite appreciated and flattering. It isn't often that someone is polite and knows such etiquette, though I would be equally pleased with you laying beside me and using your fingers to mimic the motion of your penis. This way, we may continue to converse and I can be treated to the delightful cut of your glib. Words and wit arouse me almost as much as any sexual act, you understand. And I do so enjoy letting the other person see what their affect over me is. Looking into their eyes and getting lost..ah, but I am rambling now, aren't I?

Me: hmphulghumghghlaughlapghffathuaghlphthft?

/He removes his face parts from you crotchparts

Me: Sorry, I didn't hear what you said, I was too busy concentrating on using parts of my body more properly designed to signal emotional states to induce orgasm through the stimulation of the external parts of your urino-genital organs.

Word games..

2011-08-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

Let's play a little word game! I call it "We're in Very Serious Trouble". It's really simple to play. Here's what you do:

1: Take a headline from the Daily Express about muslims or islamists.
2: Replace the words 'muslim' with the word 'jew' and the word 'islamist' with the word 'zionist'.
3: Where have I seen this before?

Examples:

HOT-HEAD JEWS ABUSING OUR TRADITION OF FREE SPEECH
VICTORY FOR CAFE WHOSE WHIFF OF BACON ‘OFFENDED JEWS’
EU SILENT AS JEWS PERSECUTE CHRISTIANS
JEWS TEACHING KIDS OF 6 TO HATE
JUDAISM THREATENS OUR NATIONAL IDENTITY SAY FRENCH AND GERMANS
STORM OVER CEMETERY PLAN THAT 'PANDERS TO JEWS'
ENGLAND ‘IS CESSPIT FOR BREEDING ZIONIST TERROR’
'UK FACES CRISIS OVER JEWISH INBREEDING'
FURY AS COUNCIL 'SECRETLY HIRES POOL TO JEWS'
JEWISH PLOT TO KILL POPE

You can do this for hours. Of course, the subtler stuff is more insidious. The Daily Mail, for example, is never quite as blunt with the headlines, but it had five seperate articles about the number of muslims overtaking the number of catholics, and still more about a report suggesting practicing muslims might outnumber practicing christians by 2035. Why is that newsworthy.

I think islam is as bad (or good, depending on how you look at it) as any other religion. 9 times out of 10, anti-islamic sentiment isn't anything about religion though. It's about race. Right wing new sources across Europe are trying to promote fear of an exoticised alien other as a way to sell their newspapers. I know far too many otherwise sensible people who fall for this bullshit. "It's not racism..." they say. That's the point of our little word-game above. You can do it with other words too. Try swapping "immigrant" for "black", "yob" for "untermenschen", and so on. It's better than the crossword.

The Contents of a Desk Drawer, plus some other things.

2011-07-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

Well, my BA is finally over, and my MA application is being scrutinised. I should get around to posting up the other part of my final piece, but in good time eh? I don't think anyone hangs on this blog with bated breath*...though truth be told I should do a lot more with it now I'm an accredited professional. Oh me!

One thing I haven't been is being lazy, it's just the various things I've been doing aren't really displayable on this blog for a number of reasons. First, I have begun writing an irregular column on B-movies called 'Your World Will Hate This' over at a site set up by some internet friends of mine, called Pocket Jury. There's not much up there at the moment, but it's far from professional. Keep on the look-out also for some illustrations I've done for an as-yet unpublished series of film reviews someone else is doing. They're pretty good, but I won't post them here because they're commissions and it ain't my place, unless he abandons the columns, in which case screw him!

Most of the stuff I'm working at at the moment is writing actually, or ideas for writing. I've been fiddling with a few poems and a short story, which might be posted here. Other stuff is long-form and not even really for general public consumption. One project, which I've been working on for about a year now and may have mentioned here before, is a document describing a science-fiction future history I've been working on, mostly in my head, since I was a kid. This now runs to about 50,000 words, over 120 pages, with numerous illustrations. I am not sure what I eventually want to do with it, whether I want to use it as the basis for some fiction or a comic or a shared world-building thing or what. It'll come I think. I've also started sketching and plotting out an idea I have for a graphic novel, which might go somewhere or nowhere. Finally, I'm working on a pen and paper RPG ruleset, with a unique twist that I don't want to reveal at this stage in case I decide to actually do something with it. It might be interesting though! Let's see if I can finish anything!

Another thing I've been doing is tidying my room. This is a literally Herculean task. To provide some content, I have itemised the contents of one of my desk drawers, as I found its variety and inexplicability amusing. This is also related to something that I've been thinking about quite a bit in terms of self-portraits and other things through text without using traditional prose. What would Sherlock Holmes have induced from this lot?

CONTENTS OF UPPER RIGHT-HAND DESK DRAWER

One (1) Roll of black electrical tape
One (1) Pair of RNLI folding binoculars, bright red and yellow
One (1) Plastic display case containing crystals of iron pyrites
One (1) Chick comic tract 'This Was Your Life'
One (1) Small plastic bag containing 2 stainless steel hinges and 4 small screws
Three (3) Durex condoms
One (1) Business card, Paula Bailey, Graphic Design & Photography
One (1) Plastic case containing three badges for the completion of campanology tests (Happy Hunter, Artful Dodger, Champion Campanologist)
One (1) Cross with afficed remembrance poppy and the words 'In Remembrance', designed for graveyard display
One (1) Cigarette rolling machine
One (1) pack of glowsticks, unopened
One (1) Rememberance day poppy, half painted black
One (1) Folding sailors utiliy knife, with various tools
One (1) Marks & Spencers staff identity badge, name 'Linda'
One (1) Medical eyepatch
One (1) Plastic protractor
One (1) 'The George Inn, Newport' cigarette lighter, empty
One (1) pair of dress-makers scissors
One (1) plastic nit comb
One (1) passport photograph of the artist
One (1) Omega watch, broken
One (1) fake Rolex Oyster watch, broken strap
One (1) Wacken Open Air festival 'Metal Town' enamal key-ring
One (1) bobbin 'Marina Green' cotton thread
One (1) Bernados giftaid card
Six (6) black biros
One (1) Convention badge (Amecon 2004) signed by the voice actress Monica Rial
One (1) Anti Nazi League badge
One (1) spectacles strap
One (1) 3 1/2 inch floppy disk, unmarked, broken
Two (2) green rollerball pens
One (1) PS2 to USB adaptor
Two (2) loose snap-off knife blades
One (1) retractable craft knife, accepting the above
One (1) 'Hunt is a 4-letter word' anti fox-hunting badge
One (1) Gold-plated 1/4 inch to 3.5mm jack adaptor
One (1) Misfits dog-tag and chain
One (1) Battery for a Sony Ericsson phone, make unknown
One (1) Stick 'Gloy' glue, dry
Four (4) guitar picks (Gibson thin, Gibson medium, Rotosound thin, Pro-grip medium)
One (1) clay sculpting tool
One (1) pin hammer
One (1) DVD of 'Letter to Brezhnev', from a promotional offer in the Guardian.
One (1) pack of OCB black rolling papers

*or at all.

BA Final piece #1: The Emerald Tablet

2011-06-15T15:23:00.001-07:00

After such a flurry of online inactivity, it seems silly to hit with everything at once. Plus, I just get bored uploading photos! I have two pieces in my BA show, here is one:

The Emerald Tablet
2011
MDF, nails, screws, timber, wood glue, pva, emulsion paint, filler, builders sand, dirt, coffee, masking tape, wheat paste, glicee prints, xerographic prints

I wrote a 7000 word essay about the thoughts behind the meaning of the piece which would probably be too boring to repeat here. In one word, it's about communication. Materially this was a big leap for me; the 'tablet' itself is made entirely from MDF with very minimal timber supports inside. The surface was created using layers of paint, some contaminated, and applying wear marks directly with a variety of tools (linocutters, hammers, chisels etc.). There are about siz coats of paint on there; one white undercoat and one lighter coat on the top dry-brushed, plus several coats of different dirt mixtures made from soil, pva glue and flour. It took a lot of soul searching to begin distressing the glicee prints (it was like fucking burning money) but after one went on a bit weird when it was wheat pasted, and I started being deliberate, I really got into it.

The titles of the prints seperately are:
Top 50 List of Lists (already posted here in an earlier form)
There's No Art
Citalopram
The Map is Not the Territory
First Principles
My Sexual Fantasies
The Lack of Meaning
Can We Say for Certain?

I may post clean digital versions, and some other digital things I've been working on, later. I will also post the other piece I have in the exhibition.

This piece will be exhibited in the show 'STEM' at the Arts University College at Bournemouth, from the 24th to the 30th of June, and at the show 'Brink', The Free-Range Gallery, Brick Lane, London from the 7th to the 11th of July, this year.

New Artist's statement

2011-05-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

I'm posting this here because the university email system is broken and I need to get it somewhere! I suppose it's mildly interesting and appropriate as well. The artist's statement is obviously the bit in italics:

As an artist, I am concerned with the imperfections of communication and reproduction. No form of communication provides perfect transmission of information; the codes, languages and structures we use are maps of the world, not the world itself. My work employs processes of appropriation, reproduction and representation to explore the gaps in meaning and understanding between different methods of communication. The art is situated in the uneasy spaces between the text and the font, the image and the mark, the words and the pictures; distorted by the cumulative entropy of reproduction that can never be perfect.

More art

2011-03-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

Blog's picking up again! I've been photographing and scanning a lot of work recently, trying to plan my piece for the degree show. Here's three images I have prepared for the catalogue.

Top 50 Lists (Top 50 Songs at the Moment, Top 50 Classic Films, Top 25 B-Movies, Top 50 Novels, Top 40 Artists, Top 40 Writers, Top 40 Thinkers, Top 25 Reference Works, Top 10 Gay Icons, Top 50 Musicians, Top 20 Metal Bands, Top 50 Poems, Top 30 Games, Top 20 Industrial Artists, Top 30 Graphic Novels, Top 20 Essays, Top 25 Traditional Folk Songs or Ballads, Top 30 Webcomics, Top 50 Science Fiction Short Stories, Top 50 Dance Songs, Top 2 Parents, Top 30 Plays, Top 20 Heavy Metal Songs About Heavy Metal, Top 35 Mass Murderers, Top 20 Meals, Top 50 Works of Art, Top 20 Evil Wizards, Top 20 Good Wizards, Top 50 Mad Scientists, Top 10 Vampires, Top 30 Confectionery, Top 10 Occult Religions, Top 20 Websites, Top 8 Family Pets, Top 40 Fictional Weapons, Top 20 Conspiracy Theories, Top 20 Pigments, Top 25 TV Series, Top 20 Space Rock Bands, Top 20 Suicides, Top 5 Pseudonyms, Top 25 Cartoons, Top 10 Norse Gods, Top 25 Beers and Ciders, Top 10 Psychopomps, Top 15 Spirits, Top 20 Giant Robots, Top 20 Non-Giant Robots, Top 20 Mythical Figures)
2011
Acrylic paint, ink, pen, correction fluid, photocopies.

Satan Rides the Media
2011
Acrylic paint, ink, pen, PVA glue, correction fluid, photocopies.

A Twitch, Boys and Girls, and That's All There is to It
2011
Woodcut prints, acrylic paint, coffee.

Given the recent massacre of the arts I'm finding it more and more important to use cheap, unregarded materials. Plus I have no money, which helps a hell of a lot!

Statement of Solidarity

2011-03-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

There were more protests against the Con-Dem governments devestating program of public sector cuts this weekend. For the first time, I wasn't able to attend (I attended the large student-oriented demonstrations in November and December, and was among those kettled and detained until nearly midnight on Westminster Bridge in a puerile show of police intimidation). Once again, there was violence, and once again the predictable response. From the right, derision and calls for harsh measures, including banning 'known troublemakers' from attending protests and banning face coverings. From the left, tutting and hand-wringing. This quote from Christopher Phelps in a Guardian opinion column is typical:

"These self-styled "revolutionary anarchists" are young and not, by and large, workers. They have at least enough money and privilege to risk a night or two in jail and to pay the fines."

Given statements like this, I feel I need to add my voice to the scant voices of support. In the process I will spell out my political position on the matter.

First, I will state that I am an anarcho-socialist. I will also say that I am young, that I am not at present a worker, and that I enjoy white and male privilege, as well as the privilege of having come from a reasonably well off background. I fit a useful stereotype to some commenters of the radical anarchist. But my experience tells me that people of my politics come from all walks of life, all ethnicities, gender and sexual orientations, all social classes: anarchism is a moral position, not an economic one. None of that affects the rightness (or wrongness) of what I have to say, and it does not affect my right to carry out direct action, nor the rightness (or wrongness) of that action. I do not view the authority of the state, which is merely a monopoly on 'acceptable' violence, as in any way legitimate. The fact that the government pays the policeman to inflict bodily harm on other people in the supposed defence of shadowy abstract concepts does not make the policeman a better person. One could easily argue that it makes him much worse*. In viewing the conflict between the protestors and the police, I take the same view as I would in any streetfight. In the last two protests, I saw people being viciously beaten, and I saw them fighting back with equal viciousness. That is how a normal person reacts to being assaulted; this time, people apparently came armed (with ammonia stink bombs, at least. Hardly molotovs.) I can hardly blame them.

So, I cannot condemn the protestors morally for fighting with the police. I also cannot blame them for their assaults against property. Anyone who balks at the sight of banks and Oxford street shops getting trashed can only be feeling sympathy for those who own them. I have very little sympathy for such people, and absolutely none for their wallets. Can I condemn them on tactical grounds? Many organisations on the far left have been subject to police infiltration by the Special Demonstration Unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit and probably other groups, as recent news stories have made very clear. These agents often act as provocateurs, heightening levels of violence, whilst making sure that violence is directed in such a way that the police can be prepared to meet it with an overwhelming response. This helps form part of a well rehearsed media play in which everyone has their role, decrying this, calling for harsher measures against that. This may have been partly responsible for events on Saturday. Does that make these events worse; are people who took part in the violence undignified dupes? Hardly. If violence is inevitable, the only practical course of action is to defend ones-self, and to make it count as much as possible. Police tactics outside of the use of agent provocateurs serve to make violence unavoidable anyway. Anyone who has not experienced the reality of kettling, baton charges, mounted charges, cannot understand the psychological pressures involved. The human mind and body react on instinct in such situations. When flight becomes impossible, one must fight. When a group of people are caught in a kettle, they try and escape. When you are pushed by a crowd of thousand from behind, and horses or policemen charge from the front, you attack them. When you are struck, you fight back. Those who come to protests ready to do serious fighting actually probably do a great service protecting those who are not prepared to defend themselves from the worst police brutality. I have seen people holding up their hands in surrender being struck in the face. I have heard a policeman call a teenager girl a bitch and threaten to crush her with his horse as she pleads for him to let her out. What did the violence accomplish? It put the story on the front page of most newspapers (The News of the World and the Daily Express pushed it to the inside, I believe). It wrecked thousands of pounds worth of capitalist gear. It made for some great pictures. It sent a continuing, powerful message of anger. It made people on the left from other countries look at Britain and express their solidarity with our struggle. The right wing press would never have had sympathy with the marchers or their goals anyway (indeed, The Daily Mail recently 'proved' that no cuts are actually occuring, which will be glad news to anyone working in education, healthcare, libraries, local councils, the arts etc.). The visible face of public discourse in this country is run by Rupert Murdoch and is ilk, who view the commodificaiton of everything as an extremely admirable goal, as it means they'll be able to buy more of everything. Ignore their prattle.

What of the much-touted dignity of non-violent protest? There is a place for non-violence, a very important place. Any moral system, any moral philosophy, minimises violence as much as possible. Yet, vandalism is not truly violence; and there are few who can stoically accept a beating. And why should they? The violence of the police (which includes arrest and detention, both forms of violence against an individual) is far greater, and is always at every protest far greater than the violence of the protestor. No one on the left should cast scorn upon the fist from below, unless they also, in the strongest possible terms, condemn the boot from above.

So let me say: Solidarity to the peaceful marchers. Solidarity to all workers, unemployed, students, teachers, doctors and every other type of person who stands against this ruinous government via direct or indirect action. But most of all, solidarity to all those who fought on Saturday. Solidarity to those who were arrested and those who were hospitalised. Don't listen to those who would divest themselves of your actions; your actions were legitimate.

Now, let's fuck up the royal wedding. Let there be pictures of the snot-nosed couple pelted with rotten eggs and buric acid, showing the world just what the people of Britain think. Let's spoil the orgy of nationalism and excess and deference. Let's ruin the olympics after that. No more bread and circuses!

*This isn't really about Phelp's article, but I find it incredibly rich for him to talk about the wobblies and say who is and isn't a worker, then turn round and say things like "[the black bloc anarchist] whacks the shields of policemen who earn less in a year than a banker does in a day." Since when has the policeman been part of the oppressed?

A little update.

2011-03-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

I got some really good stuff coming along. I am working ferociously hard: standard day is get up about 7, get into uni around 9, work till 8pm, go home, work more, sleep, repeat. I haven't been scanning or photographing much the stuff that I'm getting ready for my final piece (though I'll soon be doing wall tests, next Friday actually, and I will post some images.) But I just remembered I had a few scanned images from back in January or so that I had never put up. Big new development in my artistic practice has been making woodblock prints using linocutting tools and blocks of MDF. It's crude and expressive, just how I like it baby. I've also been working on a lot of digital stuff which I won't show here because it doesn't really make any sense just on a screen.

Ok, without further ado, some stuff:

Dead White Men
2011
Acrylic paint photocopy

Aaaaaaaargh!
2011
Woodcut print

William Blake (After Thomas Phillips)
2011
Acrylic paint, coffee

Negotiated Practice 2 Presentation

2011-01-17T17:10:00.000-08:00

Man, I had forgotten how much goshdang work was involved in university. Or rather, I hadn't forgotten, as if I'd been doing enough goshdang work previously I wouldn't have been kicked off the course. Twice. But hey!

Not too much that's very interesting to show, this post is just mainly to keep this thing alive, plus to prove that I haven't just been slacking off sulking in some pit. This is what I presented for my group critique this Thursday gone. It's basically just all the work I've been doing for the last three months blutacked on the wall of a little crappy room. Enjoy:

Apart from this, I have also been doing a bunch of writing in the last few months. Some of it is course related (ie. my Dissertation), much isn't. Something may come of it: something may not. Eets a Meestery.

Maybe I will post more things more often but come on, you know what to expect by now.

Anti-Student Fee protests 10/11 2010

2010-11-11T07:33:00.000-08:00

I was there. I am not shocked by the way things have been portrayed in the papers (except the Guardian, who have been pleasing), but have been somewhat dissapointed by the attitudes of my fellow students, especially people in the student union here at AUCB, moaning about how "The thugs ruined it for everyone" and "They weren't even all students". Of course everyone on the march wasn't a fucking student! Have these people ever heard of solidarity?

I feel it's important to publically state that I am in full support of everything that happened yesterday. Anyone who has sympathy for the poor widdle towy pawty getting some windows smashed and cocks drawn all over their headquarters is a fucking moron, especially if they're a student. These people are the fucking enemy, and they're out to destroy higher education and the arts, turn them into even more of gated communities than they already are. What happened yesterday could have been better co-ordinated and managed (the building could still be occupied if things had been done right). I'm not sure on what level it was organised and what level it was spontaneous, but I am pretty sure that if everything had gone to the dickless plan of the NUS (Nice quiet little march round whitehall, shout some slogans, go home) then we would have made page 5 of the nationals and been forgotten about instantly. I don't think we can 'harm' this cause by direct action. I think this sets the tone brilliantly for what this government should expect as they roll out draconian policies that harm the poor, women, the unemployed, immigrants and practically anyone else who's not one of their rich white friends: resistance. I am proud that some of my fellow students in this country still have the balls not to roll over and do and believe everything they're told.

RIGHT ON!

Work from Exhibition, other things!

2010-11-09T16:26:00.000-08:00

So fucking hell I got a lot of work to show you! First, here is my piece from my first Third Year show.

Koan #1
Ink, acrylic paint, charcoal, digital print

Here are the two bits:

Corpse
Ink, acrylic paint, charcoal

Imagine There's No Heaven
Digital print

You will notice that each piece has a seperate title. This is because I am playing around with structuralist literary theory and the idea of a title as a sort of metatext. The pieces can be read on their own, but when exhibited they are given one title and thus the reading is complicated! Doesn't really work at the moment because it's too ironic. I am building up two bodies of work, drawings and texts, but since the texts are just happy phrases rendered in naff garish fonts that only look semi-good printed out huge (which costs loads) I will just show drawings.

After Andreas Vesalius
Charcoal, chalk, spraypaint

Tiny Tim
Charcoal, acrylic paint, chalk, spraypaint

Another World, All Dead
Charcoal, acrylic paint, coffee, colouring chalk, spraypaint, fineliner

L'homme Armee #2
Acrylic paint, ink, charcoal

Sophie
Ink, charcoal, acrylic paint, colouring chalk

Hope it was worth the wait! See you again whenever, I'm a busy bee (bzzzzzzz)

ArtSway proposal

2010-10-20T15:44:00.000-07:00

University is tiring, hard and time-consuming! But I have some meagre crumbs to show. I had to do a proposal submission for a show of AUCB Student work at a local-ish gallery called ArtSway. Here are my proposed pieces and the supporting images I put in (I don't really expect to get in):

OI YOU! YOU THERE! WITH THE CHIN. STOP DOING THAT! IT’S VERY RUDE
Detail:
A series of four painted/printed boards, each one displaying part of the text which makes up the title rendered in solid, stencilled white on a muted abstract painted background, realized in acrylic paint and printing ink. The boards to be hung individually in a 2x2 arrangement.

Developmental work for OI YOU! YOU THERE! WITH THE CHIN. STOP DOING THAT! IT’S VERY RUDE

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Detail:
The work is in the form of a folding triptych, with overtones of an altar piece or icon, made out of simple black-painted wood. The two side panels fold on brass hinges into the central panel, and the piece should be displayed as an object standing on a plinth. The two smaller side panels contain highly rendered mixed media drawings in ink, graphite, charcoal, chalk, acrylic paint, coffee and home-made tempera paint, and each portrays a rotting corpse lying in a coffin, identifiable through their clothing and other details as Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. The larger central panel contains a drawing echoing aesthetic elements of the side panels, consisting of the text ‘THUS TO ALL TYRANTS’.

Sketches for 'Sic Semper Tyrannis'.

Untitled
Details:
An image made up of 24 smaller images, each the size of a standard piece of A4 printer paper, mounted on a board in 6 rows and 4 columns. These images are all developed from a self-portrait of the artist, using a continuous process of photocopying and over-drawing and painting, so that the images represent a sort of timeline of work, with the number echoing the 24 frames used in one second of a film. Each component image will be in the form of a print made from solar etching plates, developed separately and mounted edge to edge so that no border or background is visible.

Developmental work for Untitled

Some poems, new tumblr

2010-10-11T19:54:00.000-07:00

I know I promised artwork with going back to university, but at the present moment I just have no way to record it! I have been busy though, don't you worry.

So, here's some writing stuff, first, a new tumblr which I will hopefully update semi-regularly: Descriptions of Heavy Metal Videos. The concept is extremely simple: I describe exactly what happens during the course of Heavy Metal videos in prose ranging between dry and sarcastic. I hope I do not have to explain why this is funny!

Now I got some poems what I have been writing. Actually the first one I wrote like a year ago, but hey ho. First two short ones, then a whopper. No one reads this shit anyway!

After the Clocks Stop

There will be singing and laughter
There will be fires and dogs
There will be strange vortices
And black dust
And our fingers will be wreathed in silver
After the clocks stop

There will be revolution
There will be great upheavals
There will be embers
There will be flags
There will be fucking in the streets
And our bodies too will undergo many changes
After the clocks stop

Black Metal For Life

How I miss purity of intent
How I miss certainty of purpose
Photographs taken at night
And oversaturated
Leather studded with nails
Corpse-painted faces
And clothes that have been buried

The happiest moment of my life:
Held aloft above a crowd
In a German field
Drunk, sunstruck, bruised and hoarse
With unfiltered cigarettes
And screaming for Christian blood

I Saw the End of the World on Bournemouth Beach

I saw the end of the world on Bournemouth Beach
Just earlier this evening
And I thought I might as well write something down about it

I was in my room
It was about half ten in the evening
I did not fancy sleep just yet
(I could not achieve sleep)
I rolled three small joints and two cigarettes
I put them in my tin
I filled a bottle with water
I had an mp3 walkman
Loaded with Looking For Europe,
A selection from Current 93,
Andrew King’s The Amfortas Wound,
Panopticon’s Collapse,
Much of In Gowan Ring,
Some Sieben, Down in June,
Ulver, Laibach and
The Legendary Pink Dots.
Poets music, alright
For a certain sort of poet
I had spent the evening reading Lovecraft
I suppose you’re getting some idea
Of how these thoughts come about.
Some people go looking for trouble:
I go looking for some insular, bleak experience
I have looked for it on the hills and woods of my native island
I have looked for it on streets, on mountains
And found it a few times.
I think I found it yesterday evening
(for midnight has now passed)
When I saw the end of the world on Bournemouth beach

Two men had built a fire in a pit
They were Polish, or somewhere east of there
Incredibly well prepared
Bottles of vodka
Glasses
Stools to sit on
Charcoal for the fire
(The younger’s hands were black)
They were singing some raucous, melancholic song
And making frequent toasts
From behind, standing on the promenade
Only the finest orange trace of their outlines is visible

And beyond them there is
Nothing

You see, the beach of my mind
Is the beach on the north coast of the Isle of Wight
Where we used to drink and smoke when I was a teen
There the sea is narrow and expensive
A definite northern horizon in the lights of Portsmouth and Southampton
(Sometimes the fog or rain came down
And it became a ribbon of soft light
In a grey haze)
But here, there is no horizon
On one side the stubby, half-hearted pier
Projects out, it’s decking pulsing with coloured light
To starboard, the beach curves round, comes to a point
Then dips back toward Poole
Between these two points one cannot, at this hour
Discern the boundary between the sea and sky
Just an inchoate darkness
With a strip of surf across the bottom and
Far above, constantly being obscured by shifting clouds
Some of the brighter stars
Polaris maybe, Sirius, Algol…
I always mean to learn astronomy properly.

And I remembered once some years before
I might have been sixteen, seventeen.
(I think it was the summer before my first trip to Germany)
All my friends had gone to the Festival
But it did not interest me, and I hadn’t bothered finding tickets
It was a beautiful day I remember
Shimmering with heat
And I had gone down to Ryde on my own
To those rocks on the sea-break at the end of the harbour wall,
With an eighth, some 20x, amyl butyrate and 35cl of the red label
With a vague idea to achieve some sort of
Strange shamanic state
And I had seen what I can only describe
As some pretty weird shit

I saw the Spinnaker towers lights shake and begin swaying
Swinging as if on the end of vast marching arms
And suddenly it took human shape
And it wrestled its legs from the ground
And began to slide around the Pompey skyline
Till I looked away
And it was just the tower again.
So I concentrated on the repeat show:
Once it disappeared entirely
Once a passing oil tanker cut under its feet
And it was suddenly on top of it
In the middle of the Solent
(It sank through the deck)
And one time it even did a sort of dance
Assuming an almost human shape
But by that time I was pretty far away
I got out a thick permanent black pen
And drew the scene from the harbour entrance
On the actual rock
And then I wandered off and did some graffiti
In the shelters on the sea wall up by Appley
Skulls smoking cigarettes, rainbow spitting
Devil women with fucked up eyes
Symbols from Thelema and Wicca, Asatru,
Older things
For back then I still had some vague belief
That there was something beyond ordinary life
(Though I’ve since realised that, thankfully,
There isn’t)

But despite that digression, I don’t want you to think
That the drugs really had anything to do with my
Apocalyptic fancies on Bournemouth Beach
I had no true hallucinogens,
And it was only three very small joints
They were not visions
The sky did not crack
Angels did not unfurl their wings like
Six dead crows in a blender
And fling forth turquoise hellfire.
And nothing rose out of the sea,
Euclidean or not,
And the dead stayed in their tombs
As they inevitably will
For all of time to come
It was just a feeling.

One of the men got up laughing,
And went to piss in the sea

Not even that strong a feeling.
I had a religious experience once,
Me who believes in no gods, no souls.
And I do not discount it.
I was on the curtain wall of an old castle
And I looked out upon the countryside
And I looked along the wall, and there was a flower
Growing inbetween two stones
And I got to thinking of the men who had built this castle
Or rather, ordered it built.
Cruel men, powerful men,
Right bastards probably.
And how barely anyone now remembers their names
Except the old dear in the castle museum
And how their mighty, oppressive fortress
Crumbles gently into flowers.
And I felt infinitely small,
Adrift in oceans of time and space.
And yet I felt valuable,
Essential, a crucial component in a vast
Mysterious machine.
Utterly insignificant
Utterly important
Completely at peace with the world
And in that one moment,
I could have gladly accepted death.

Off to one side a group on the promenade in shadows
Illicit teen drinkers I think
I remember their lot well
Big bottles of cider, tiny bottles of vodka
Injury, sickness, embarrassment,
Police harassment,
Desperate furtive sex
Ill advised experiments
With some of the harder drugs
A desperate, pugnacious longing
To be adults and to be free
(Not knowing yet that freedom
Is just something they made up to sell perfume).

And doubtless down along this coast there are other groups
And perhaps other men round even other fires,
North in the town proper the panda cars circle like vultures
As the first round of fighting begins
And perhaps there are even others like me.
A bearded oddity finishing his last cigarette
Flinching from the searchlight stabs of the teens camera flashes
And desperately wishing he’d bought his sketchbook.
So that he could note down his vague impressions.
Of the end of the world on Bournemouth beach

The drugs are just a poetic metaphor, mum and dad. Honests. I am a good boy.

A quick sketch to mark the historic occasion of the visit of His Holiness Benedictus XVI, Episcopus Romae, to the British Isles

2010-09-16T17:07:00.001-07:00

Flakhilfer Ratzinger...
Pens and digital colours

As an aside, I will not that I don't actually believe the pope is a closet nazi, but the visual vocabulary of fascism is much more direct than the fairly vague visual vocabulary of slimy, bigoted, fuckbag enemies of reason, so I went with nazis.

EDIT: I just googled it and FUCK, it's 'flakhelfer'. Wrong both times!

Franz de Byl is still insane

2010-09-13T15:03:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, I can't leave this off. I'm kind of obsessed by this guy. Here is a google cache of a post from a blog he has since deleted (why? Why does this man do anything?)

Lesson # 2:
Using s.b.'s name and trade mark with the intend and purpose to sell commercials or in any other way gain profits is not allowed. Unless the owner gave allowance to do so.
.
Here are "my" personal parasites hiding behind russian servers or so called community members:
.
Franz de Byl – Free listening, concerts, stats, & pictures at Last.fm
Listen free to Franz de Byl: Birthday (The World's Gates), I Got Trouble & more. ... People who like Franz de Byl also like ARCANE V, Albrecht D, Banten.
www.last.fm/music/Franz+de+Byl
.
PANZER DIVISION JOHN CANDY: Franz de Byl
3 Feb 2010 ... Having another nose around, I found that one of the most obscure of the artists,Franz de Byl, had just recently put up some tracks on his ...
panzerdivisionjohncandy.blogspot.com/2010/02/franz-de-byl.html
.
This Mr. Panzerdivision John Candy probably is exactly that fraud who started this "last.fm" site and its "tags" and "similar artists" informations. He might be the head of the group "Arcane" or at least of all of the groups what are listed under "similar artists" - but none of those groups have something in common with me or are in any way similar...
.
It is just using my name to publish own shit.

So now I am a member of a french psychedelic rock band from the 1970's, and I am hiding behind Russian servers. This is fantastic. Here is a quote from one of the comments (by the man himself) which seems to shed light on the root of his mania:

What do you think Discogs and Last.fm and all the other fucking pirates in the net are wanting? Gain some fucking money, or help out and sponsor all the good and legendary musicians? You are to blame and I don't need to have better lawyers then Barbara - I can do it myself: It's MY NAME, MY TRADEMARK, MY LIFE, MY HOME, MY MUSIC, MY PERSONALITY, MY PICTURES - everything concerning Franz de Byl BELONGS TO ME!! And I give permission or I don’t give a permission.

The reference to 'Barbara' comes from someone trying to explain the Streisand Effect to him, whereby attempting to censor information on the internet generally leads to this information being deliberately sought out and exchanged. This little rant also dramatically expands our understanding of the gulf of Franz De Byl's misunderstandings about how the world functions. The reason I'm interested in this guy, I should add, is because he makes a fascinating case study for the internet age, and for information theory. He's basically engaged in some quixotic battle against the entire way the internet works. The way he's doing it is so muddled and clueless it makes you feel kind of sad for him. For example, Franz does not seem to realise that last.fm sites are generated procedurally from the listening habits of last.fm users: when people with the last.fm plugin listen to music, it creates sites for the artists they are listening to and generates the charts, playlists and connections automatically. He says, wonderfully:

Last.fm had to erase my music data for 10 to 20 times now – but some members are uploading my music again and again...

People are listening to his music. This is what he actually hates them doing. He can't seem to understand that this is why his last.fm site keeps reappearing. But yet he says

So the whole story about "The similar artists shows the bands people listening to the most who have been listening to you" is nothing but conman's work. I know very well what kind of music my fans are listening to...
I resume, as all those frauds and Lewandowskis don't let me change or erase "my sites" I will never allow them to use my name, my trademark, my life and at least: ME!

It's fabulous. He thinks he knows better than the truth. Most people who listen to his music discovered him via the NWW list. He hates this. But he can't change it, he can't destroy the list and he simply doesn't understand. The impotence and purity of his rage his quite staggering, really. Lewandoski is I believe one of the people who flatly refused to remove the data about the bootleg release he is so upset about from discogs.com. It's worth re-iterating here that Franz De Byl believes that people that are not him writing about, reviewing or keeping record of his music constitutes identity theft.

Another great comment rant:

Jason, you’re nothing but a lemming. I don’t need Last.fm – Last.fm needs me. You believe in what Last.fm is declaring and affirming – I don’t. You probably believe in BP and that there is no oil in the gulf of mexico, it just looks like it – I don’t. You probably believe in your english football team – I don’t. And you probably believe in your politicians and preachers – I don’t.
Like you believe in this curious nww list – I DON’T! I stop this now and make Google remove Last.fm from the search result site for “Franz de Byl”. Habe die Ehre!

This is in response to someone trying to patiently explain to Franz how the last.fm similiar artists system works. Franz appears to believe that last.fm are lying about how the similiar artist system works, that the entire website is somehow a scam used to defraud him, and that last.fm is some vast multinational conspiracy. Franz de Byl is an INCREDIBLY obscure musician. The idea that someone would be bothered to do this is astonishing, It also plays somewhat in to the theory that Franz may have fanatic type narcissistic personality disorder. The guy certainly needs some sort of medical help. I cannot provide him, but I love analysing him. Maybe I shouldn't, maybe it's cruel, but this is the Streisand effect at work, I think. I want to expose and somehow excise Franz's censorious mania. Also he's a fucking quote mine and no mistake.

Final bonus rant:

http://nww-stevenstapleton-a-roadie.blogspot.com/

The best bit BY far about this rant is that Steven Stapleton's wife is called Diana Rogerson. A google search for "Candice Iverson"+"Steven Stapleton" returns exactly one result on google. I'll leave you to figure out what that result is for yourself.

Fun with Highlighters

2010-09-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

Been doing a little doodling at work. Pretty much all I got is fineliners, ballpoints, coffee and highlighters, so that's what I'm working with.

Before we begin, Highlighters really, really do not scan well. Which is a bummer. Ah well.

Cowboy Killer
Fineliner, ballpoint, highlighters, coffee

This Shit Will Fuck You Up
Ballpoint, fineliners, highlighters, flipchart pen, coffee

Golden Skull
Ballpoint, coffee, highlighters, flipchart pen

Fantasy Castle
Ballpoints, highlighters

The last one loses the most, I think.

I'm going back to uni soon, and I plan to update this blog with the artwork I'm producing there, so it should suddenly get a LOT more happening. Though knowing me probably not. Ciao!

Some more comics

2010-07-12T04:26:00.000-07:00

Sequels to 'Cat Science' from the last post:

Normal service to resume when the moons are united in darkness, and the dead shall walk the earth once more.

Let's go art!

2010-07-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

Damn, It's been a long time since I posted anything. Life has been like a whirlwind. For anyone who follows my life news: I got a place back at art college so I can finish my BA. Fantastique. In other life news, I have spent the last four weeks on a mandated course for the long-term unemployed. It is transcendentally dull, but I've met some fun people. To stave off the boredom, I've been doing a lot of doodling. I still haven't solved my 'problem' of when I sit down to draw just wanting to draw space aliens and robot knights and other such 'low art' shit. However, I will have to very soon start pounding forward with some very 'serious', conceptually bold, highly finished work if I ever want to get a 2/1 (and spend at least another year outside the hellish real world doing a masters degree).

Okay lets put some meat on these digital bones. I apologise in advance that many of these images are poorly rendered in cheap, naff biro, supplied to us free (along with bountiful printer and photocopier paper).

First, some general odd images:

Next some general sci-fi/fantasy/horror bits. First a picture of some demon:

Now other stuff:

Here are some sketches from an idea of mine for a comic/roleplay setting/some nerdy shit called 'Hell Patrol'. It is about mad max style officers of the titular organisation fighting zombies (and the electricity hating, mind-devouring entities from beyond time and space who create them) in post-apocalyptic Britain. It makes about as much sense as any intellectual property whose conceptual basis rests on the titles of Judas Priest songs should be expected to.

Also over the past month or so I have been putting together design documents hashing out my concepts for literary science fiction, that I have been developing in my head since I was about 8. This document is becoming truly monstrous (34,000+ words, 91 pages with illustrations) and is only about three fifths done. It may appear on here at some point in the future, I don't know. I have been toying with the concept of taking my various speculative fiction ideas and expounding them in some sort of website form with a many-worlds conceit. Like most of my ideas this will probably come to nothing.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here is a little comic to send you on your way.

FUSSBALL, FUSSBALL, UBER ALLES...

2010-06-12T17:12:00.001-07:00

First, let me apologise for the paucity of updates. A combination of life circumstances and the death of my computer have made these events hard to come by. I make no promises for the future.

Now, on to my purpose.

Let me be abundantly clear first of all that I had already formed very strong opinions about the World Cup, mainly because of this. Indeed the world cup belongs to that special class of international sporting events, along with the olympics, that I especially love. Apart from the common theme in all major professional sports (that they are pointless corporate sponsored orgies of shit designed to do absolutely nothing but part people from money and take their minds off how shit their lives are), these events also have a consistent history of human rights abuses; Vancouver 2010 and Beijing 2008 made particular headlines, but people still watched them and spent money on their merchandise, which is why this shit is allowed to continue; these events are associated with human rights abuses simply because the hosting governments know they're going to get away with it, because people just want to see whatever treasured collection of overglorified playground games they want to watch.

The second reason for my detestation of these events is that they are facist. This is something I had thought before, that was cemented by attempting to watch a world cup game. Here's some leafs from my sketchbook to brighten the scene before we begin:

I really can't be bothered to recap about the aesthetics of fascism. Susan Sontag's masterful essay about Leni Reifenstahl, 'Fascinating Fascism' is probably the best summation I know. Right. Let us consider world cup football. The will of the nation is subsumed into an elite force of chosen men, hand picked by remote economic and social elites. We are asked to support these elite men unconditionally, simplhy because we happen to be born on the same arbitrarily defined portion of the earth's surface as them. Many attach themselves to the group identity by the wearing of uniforms and symbols. The most fanatic even obscure their faces beneath the flag of the nation, destroying all individuality in an ecstatic communion with the mystical, mythical national essence. It all comes together in a great festival, where foreigners and domestic outsiders are shunned, and all come together to give up their individuality, their personal goals, for the greater good of the tiny, elite group of men in their matching uniforms. There is athletic triumphalism, the glory of the body is celebrated, the intellectual component of life is cast aside. People join together to sing special hymns to the glory of the nation and the elites, to celebrate myths of the triumph of our nations elites against the elites of other nations, and so on and so forth.

What I'm trying to say is

Bread and circuses. If you're watching the world cup you're a fucking corporate tool who's supporting the direct and indirect oppression of thousands or millions of people so you can watch a load of fucking millionaires kick around a fucking ball. Fuck you.

(Addendum: This post is mostly a joke, but it contains an uncomfortable core of truth).

I won a prize.

2010-05-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to say. I never got anything like this before. I feel blessed.

The citation in full (original here):

All words below are copyright

Franz de Byl
musician & music teacher
Goethestrasse 16A
10625 Berlin
49-30-8611000
http://www.franz-de-byl.com

(You should note that this quote is a serious infringement of Franz De Byl's rights to privacy, sanity, dignity, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I publish his words under the principles of fair use, with the above proviso.)

Franz de Byl: Panzerdivision John Candy

I created a new award for NWW suckers and internet wannabe vicious pirates - the name of the award is:
.
The Major Bedwetter!
.
And the winner iiiiizzzz:
Mr. Panzerdivision John Candy!
...whoever that is. Look at his blog
.
http://panzerdivisionjohncandy.blogspot.com/2010/02/franz-de-byl.html
.
If you're also wanting to gain this award some lovely day, you will only have to meet the following conditions:
.
1. Search yourself a code name in using the name of a well known figure, actor, artist, cuban politician or DJ in combination with a term of the 2nd world war, Hitler or the SS, star wars or World Trade Center.
.
2. Start a blog and create a profile about your pipe dreams to blow up your virtual person or avatar until you accept it as a reality yourself.
.
3. Start boring the community with platitudes and commonplaces. You will get a lot of banal comments and grow up and get famous very soon...a star will be born!
.
4. Enlarge your virtual life - register with new names like under 1 explained for any kind of internet communities, especially those who collect other people like you (last.fm, discogs, rateyourmusic etc.). Feel free in all united assholes forums.
.
5. Try to piss on real people or muggles. Nobody can debar you - because you are and remain as nothing but an anonymous motherfucker at least. Nothing is more fun for a major bedwetter like pissing on s.b. with a real name and existence! Like a fucking dog or a fucking graffiti sprayer do on a fucking wall..
.
6. Feel like what you are: a hero! You won't have much time left.
.
Mr. Panzerdivision John Candy (...what a drag-name!) does all that with a maximum of quality and advance!
.
Congratulation!!
.
By the way: Last FM receives a DMCA complaint through Google at this time. So also this issue will soon be forgotten. To be real and to have a real name can be convenient sometimes, Mr. Anonymous Asshole! You will only enter the history books as THE MAJOR BEDWETTER - awarded through
.
Franz de Byl
.
musician & music teacher
Goethestrasse 16A
10625 Berlin
49-30-8611000
http://www.franz-de-byl.com
.
By the way: Please feel free to write a comment but notice: I will only publish comments what are sent to me by real persons with a real and legal name and address - thanx
Posted by Franz de Byl at 4/21/2010 01:45:00 AM
0 comments:

Some digital paintings, just dicking about.

2010-04-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

Just having a play around with a internet based tool I found here. Weird shaped canvas and no erase or copy/paste. A lot of fun though.

I really like the quality of mark. I could see myself incorporating stuff from here into other digital works.

Maybe those promised drawings will surface as well. Maybe soon. Maybe.

Artists Statement, First Draught

2010-04-13T18:01:00.001-07:00

Yeah I know I said I'd upload some stuff. But I've been real-world busy. How does this sound:

We, as human beings, tend to think that we are the highest form of life on this planet. In this, we are sadly mistaken: the dominant life-form of our world is the idea. Capable of reproducing itself without a physical body, of evolving in the blink of an eye to fit any environment, immortal and ever changing. The interaction of ideas, their organisation, their mutation, their reproduction, and their attempted enslavement by human beings is the space where my art exists. I explore how ideas and images can become deformed, how they can be organised and put in zoos by the gawping explorers of culture. I play a game of definitions wherein I attempt to deconstruct the tedious dualisms that plague our understanding: art/not-art, good/bad, clever/stupid, dramatic/melodramatic, inspiration/theft, erotic/pornographic, legal/criminal. My approach is undirected, more alchemy than science. A fuzzy, chopped up, low-fidelity, tenth VHS copy sort of art, where every glitch and malfunction is a happy little accident. Draw a straight line, and observe the jerks and meanders. The body resists all attempts to impose order. From these seeds, the genetic errors in the reproduction of the idea by the human pantograph, further chaos grows, as the results are encoded, transcoded, sent through wires, displayed upon screens, redrawn, and sent on. Braver men than I have taken up arms against the mounting tide of errors, but the process by which order becomes disorder is a physical law, immutable as gravity. Must we all be so quixotic? Would it not be better to accept the inevitable, and bow out gracefully to the new age of the pure, useless idea?

Stupid, right? Well, it's an artists statement, and I've got about a month left. I'd also like to let you know that, obviously, this is not the first draught, it's more like the eightieth draught. At least one of those draughts was largely quotes from Cryptic Wintermoon songs.

Jesus Christ, it's 5 paintings, get in the car!

2010-04-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

I have managed to gain brief but glorious access to a scanner. I will release some new stuff slowly over the course of this week (perhaps in three posts) rather than just splurge it all at once.

First, some paintings.

Of Course it Doesn't Taste Good It's Just Been In Your Arse
Acrylic paint

I Wish Your Fucking Mother Could be Here to See This
Acrylic paint

The Figurehead of HMS Warrior
Acrylic paint, black rollerball, coffee, ink

Fire + Ice
Acrylic paint

First Murder (after Argento)
Acrylic paint

The first two quote from Sutcliffe Jügend songs. Little more needs to be said about them, except that the second is much better than the first. The third one is just a little working on a sketch I did during a family trip to the Portsmouth historic dockyard a while back. The fourth is just some fantasy crap that arrived out of playing with colours. Dreadfully sorry about that. The fifth is the first in a planned series. As you can see, it is based on a screenshot from the film 'Suspiria', showing the first of that films brutal murders. I didn't get the colours quite right. The colours in Suspiria are so gorgeous

On Wednesday, I'll post some drawings, then on Friday the properly scanned versions of Bedlam Boys and L'Homme Arme, plus some photoshop stuff.

The Bradford Exchange

2010-03-17T20:44:00.000-07:00

The Bradford Exchange is a website and catalogue company. They may have one or more physical outlets (possibly in Bradford?) but I doubt it: such a place would warp time and space around it to such a degree that one might enter it on tuesday and come out sometime in the upper mesozoic era on Mars. The Bradford Exchange claims to offer 'Innovation, artistry and design of enduring value', which is a lie worthy of the great tricksters of mythology. Their definition of the above phrase encompasses such wonderful gems as The Faithful Fuzzies Military Wall Clock ('Inspired by the Defenders of our Li’bear’ty Collection') The Elvis Presley Jailhouse Rock Musical Doll ('the cutest little jailbird you ever did see') and Adoring Eyes Westie Cradle Figurine ('Features a Swaronski crystal!'). Their entire catalogue is an assault on the senses comparable to seeing a Throbbing Gristle gig in a wheelie bin; not content with mere visual assaults, the Bradford Exchange wastes no opportunity to have their products play music or talk to you. The breadth is astonishing as well. Not content with one mere brand of kitsch, they do their best to bring everything to the table: Elvis Presley, Thomas Kinkade, maudlin militaria, So Truly Real dolls, Disney, native american kitsch that would make a single tear roll down the face of any noble chief, and on, and on, and on. Naturally, this felt like a ripe target for my photoshop, in lieu of being able to provide decent digital versions of my drawings and paintings at the moment.

This was my first stab:

Yes, yes, I know. Obvious you say. The more pertinent and wicked among you might suggest that a black metal version of The Bradford Exchange would, in fact, be Alchemy Gothic. This may very well be true, and offers up the interesting possibility that Luis Royo is the flipside of Thomas Kinkade, and that the two men might annihilate each other in a blast of pure energy if they were ever to touch. Also extremely obvious, though, I fear, worryingly close to the knuckle as regards the sensibilities that underly this website, was my second attempt:

I couldn't resist, however. This is a field rich for exploitation; though I am by no means the first to draw the connection, Kinkade (or Bob Ross) style images of the Wolfs Nest or the Nuremberg Rally, in the spirit perhaps of Ron English, might be something fun to do.

For my third, and unfortunately, final attempt (seriously, most of this stuff is beyond parody), I changed tack entirely from the tired formula of 'shove demons and nazis into it' that I so tediously exploit, and, I think, hit the jackpot. I present...TINY PONY KNIFE:

"At the far edge of the paddock, a tiny pony's soulful whinny cuts through the darkness. Its sound touches the souls of all who hear its mournful strains. Now, you can heed the call of the gymkana in a collectable tiny pony art replica knife with a faux bone handle that showcases powerful tiny pony portraiture by renowned wildlife artist Si Spew.

Witness the power and passion of the majestic tiny pony with this Si Spew tiny pony art replica knife, available only from The Bradford Exchange. This collectable replica knife has a custom-pierced blade crafted of fine artist's resin that bears sculptural low-relief tiny pony art. Makes thrilling wall decor or collectable tiny pony art gift. Very small demand is expected, and you won't want to miss out. Order now!"

Seriously, fuck wolves. Falabella's are where it's at. When I am a rich and famous artist, jet-setting with the rich and famous, I will have a tiny field, with a tiny stable, and a tiny tack room where I will store the tiny stirrups and tiny saddle and tiny reins and tiny bit and tiny halter and tiny bridle and tiny girth strap for my tiny pony, and I will hire a little person jockey to ride him around a tiny racetrack whilst I sit on my veranda in a pristine white suit drinking Laphroaig from the skull of St. Francis of Assisi.

OH. YEAAAAAAH.

Two drawings, poor quality

2010-03-15T18:47:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the longish (though not by my standards) absence. My scanner has become unavailable, which I find frustrating as I have been producing work at a fair old lick. In order to try and show something, I have resorted to that bad old standby, my shitty digital camera, which some of you may remember from this blogs earliest days. I improved my chances slightly by blu-tacking the pictures to the wall, but they are still inferior quality reproductions, and you will (all things being good) see much better quality versions of them in the future.

There was a time, when every single drawing I did was inspired directly by a song. I have returned to this theme slightly of late, and here are two of the results:

L'homme armé
Pastels, black fineliner, coffee, pencil, biro

"L'homme, l'homme, l'homme armé,
L'homme armé
L'homme armé doibt on doubter, doibt on doubter.
On a fait partout crier,
Que chascun se viengne armer
D'un haubregon de fer."

In english:

"The man, the man, the armed man,
The armed man
The armed man should be feared, should be feared.
Everywhere it has been proclaimed
That each man shall arm himself
With a coat of iron mail."

Or more lyrically:

"Oh, the Man, the Man-at-arms
Fills the folk, fills the folk with dread alarm,
With dread alarm.
Everywhere I hear 'em wail
Find a good strong coat of mail
Perhaps you'll then prevail."

Bedlam Boys
Biro

"For to see my Tom of Bedlam, 10,000 miles I'd travel
Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes, to save her shoes from gravel.

Still I sing bonnie boys, bonnie mad boys,
Bedlam boys are bonnie
For they all go bare and they live by the air,
And they want no drink nor money.

I went down to Satin's kitchen, for to beg me food one morning
There I got souls piping hot, all on the spit a turning.

There I picked up a cauldron, Where boiled 10,000 harlots
Though full of flame I drank the same, to the health of all such varlets.

My staff has murdered giants, my bag a long knife carries
For to cut mince pies from children's thighs, with which to feed the fairies.

Spirits white as lightning, shall on my travels guide me
The moon would quake and the stars would shake, when' ere they espied me.

No gypsy slut nor doxy, shall win my Mad Tom from me
I'll weep all night, the stars I'll fight, the fray will well become me.

It's when next I have murdered, the Man-In-The-Moon to powder
His staff I'll break, his dog I'll bake, they'll howl no demon louder.

So drink to Tom of Bedlam, he'll fill the seas in barrels
I'll drink it all, all brewed with gall, with Mad Maudlin I will travel."

Students of the history of art will notice that the faces in Bedlam Boys are an allusion to the last engraving in William Hogarth's series 'The Rakes Progress', which portrays a scene in Bedlam Hospital, in which Hogarth expounds the belief of his time that dissolute morals and insanity were intrinsically linked, with one rising inevitably from the other.

It is also worth noting that though both these songs are (roughly speaking) traditional, the versions I specifically had in mind when drawing these pictures were not particularly so. I was thinking of Camerata Mediolanense's version of L'homme armé and In Gowan Ring's version of Bedlam Boys. Both of these songs are absolutely fantastic. So fantastic, indeed, that no one has uploaded them to youtube in their entirety. A crying shame.

The two steps to successfully updating this blog more often

2010-03-06T04:58:00.000-08:00

Step 1: Draw stuff
Step 2: Get round to scanning it

Catland, Sometimes Called Pussydom
Pen and ink, fabric paint

Self Portrait #8
Blood

(Possible step 3: draw better stuff)

Another poem. Some images to follow later.

2010-03-02T17:47:00.000-08:00

Mountjoy

The town has roofs of slate
And the town has roofs of felt
There's a line between environments
Both natural and built
From the bench upon the hill
Between the graveyard and the ditch
You can peg out the domains
of the poor and of the rich:
You can see the towns arteries
You can see the towns veins
But you can't see the towns heart
And you can't explain
How the lives of all the people
Combine and interact
Because the lines in the ground
Are just empty facts
And when you get down on the street
All the order dissapears
And the smell of authority
Is the reek of fear
And the fire in the ground
And the fire in the stars
Sends invisible radiation
Through the people and the cars
And it cuts the strands of DNA
Inside the mortal cells
And what edits it is making
Only time and science will tell
And we could torch the naval dockyards
To fix a record of our time
But we're not the greatest villains
Merely amateurs at crime
And the chemist's selling curatives
For STDs and lice
But the medicine is lying
Because life is short and imprecise

You can polish up the tabletop
And repaint all your walls
You can try and clean up every stain
No matter what befalls
But every contact leaves a trace
And living at a modern pace
To build a solid airtight case
The camera eyes are all in place
The fields of view all plotted out
(The blind spots slowly blotted out)
Remember that Old Bill's about
And look before you walk

And I find that I must sing the blues
Because I've got so much to lose
And I don't know when I'll lose it
But I know I surely will
So I scribble petty tragedies
Make mountains of my maladies
And titans of my enemies
And bastards of my friends
I view the world in monochrome
With brightness dialed right down low
And locked into low gamma mode
A stream of utter bollocks starts to flow:

"There's scum in the current
And a breach below the waterline
The rivers flowing backwards
And the fish are drowning in the brine
The rains are coming down like a hail of liquid lead
And the black eyed girl takes rubbings
From the headstones of the dead
The ink is clogging up the pen
The paint won't ever dry
The good are lost to entropy
The bad won't ever die
The tide it keeps on coming in
The cliffs are falling down
And the law of the claw
Is the law of the crown
And the lyrics don't mean anything
The music even less
And the statement was signed
In extreme duress
And the streets look sick under sodium light
And David whispers sweetly of the inmost night
And the horror of the empty space is rising like a flood
And I must fill up these walls with spraypaint or with blood"

But I'm not a violent man
Indeed I'm something of a coward
And though quick with my opinion
I am easily overpowered
And I take offence too easily
'Cos I've had far too much practice
And even I don't know what's really me
And what the clever act is
So I'm not sure what is genuine
And what is for effect
But I'm fairly sure it's true to say
There's nothing I respect
Not the spirit or the letter
Not the graven epitath
Not the image, not the word
Not the monolith or cenotaph
For speaking from black dog depression
(With nature's court in bloody session)
Life holds many savage lessons
And every stone is an expression
Senseless of the senseless deeds
That they cannot remember
Of the wedding in the summer
And the funeral in December
And though the ghosts thus felt aren't literal
They are umbral; They are limnal
And they cannot hear the hymnal
And they cannot see the tears
They are the root of all my fears

The town has walls of concrete
And the town has walls of brick
The town is full of honest folk
The town is full of pricks
And on the bench upon the hill
Between the graveyard and the ditch
I neither know, nor do I care
Which of us is which

If you can't get the metre try semi-singing it to the beat of 'King of Hate' by Snog. I got some images to scan as well, which might turn up later.

New favourite wikipedia page

2010-02-27T17:52:00.000-08:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tables_of_vampire_traits

Just look how much effort has gone into this. Also consider that it is perfectly reasonable to imagine that every single edit to this page was soundtracked by Cradle of Filth, thus making it the best page ever of anything.

Seriously, think how much effort has gone into this. It puts your life in perspective.

Budgies!

2010-02-20T23:08:00.000-08:00

Two Budgerigars
Rollerball, dip pens, black ink, fabric paint, coffee

Twee as fuck but I'm proud of it.

New favourite sentence on wikipedia.

2010-02-20T20:42:00.000-08:00

From Food Play:

"Yeastiality - A sexual activity in which bread or bread dough is the focus of erotic desire."

I am the ham.

Hottt.

I'm drawing a budgie for a birthday present for my aunt. A little twee, but I'll slap it up in a couple hours when I'm done.

2 Paintings

2010-02-18T19:12:00.000-08:00

Well, loosely.

Only Rebel Art Must Be Allowed to Exist,
Acrylic paint, bodily fluids

See whole picture (if cropped on your screen)

Terror Assassins
Fabric paint, biro, black fineliner, felt tips, spraypaint, fragments of newspapers and political pamphlet

See whole picture (if cropped on your screen)

Art is coming out of me thick and fast now. It's crazy.

Decoding American Apparel adverts.

2010-02-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

I've been playing round with some American Apparel adverts in photoshop to see if I could make them less ambiguous. I think I've made some progress.

American Apparel Remix 1
Photoshop

American Apparel Remix 2
Photoshop

American Apparel Remix 3
Photoshop
(click for full image)

Yeah, I'm pretty confident I've got to grips with the underlying metaphor here.

Metaphor For the State 1

2010-02-14T15:52:00.001-08:00

Fairly self-explanatory, I hope. Came to me whilst I was in the gym, funnily enough.

Some Images, Happiness

2010-02-11T16:10:00.001-08:00

Self-Image February 2010
Permanent marker, black nail varnish, correction fluid, blue fineliner on cartridge paper

Who Will Deliver Me?
Permanent marker on cartridge paper

Fuck De Boere
Permanent marker, black nail varnish, correction fluid on cartridge paper

Speliology
Parcel tape and correction fluid on cartidge paper

Untitled (Unintentional Image of a Disgruntled Cartoon Man)
Correction fluid and black nail varnish on cartridge paper

I feel like my life has suddenly, and without any warning, turned a corner. A great big sickening black pall of depression, which has hung over me for over a year, has suddenly vanished. With it has vanished my apathy. Apathy is the worst thing about depression; it seems so easy to overcome, and yet you just, well, can't be bothered, somehow. This should be an awful time for me: I first got together my lover of three years, who I split up with (permanently this time) about ten months ago, on valentines day five years ago. But it's not! I feel great! I've started going to the gym again, and this evening I just sat down and grabbed whatever I could find and made art just for the sake of it.

Fuck the citalopram, I'm cured.

A poem

2010-02-07T13:45:00.000-08:00

I can't do shit with this cartoon. In lieu of some sketchbook stuff, here's an obscene poem. A reading of this with some musical accompaniment should be appearing on a compilation somewhere soon. Also I need to probably listen to less Sutcliffe Jugend.

Extreme Pornography

Part 1: Masturbation Fantasy

I am a sadist
I derive pleasure from the pain of others
And they derive pleasure from my cruelty
I can be very cruel when I want to be
And I want to be cruel very, very often
I have no control over my own life
So I crave control over the lives of others
I want to control your life
I don't care if you have a cock
I don't care if you have a cunt
I only care that you obey
Without thought
Without question
I want to hurt you
I want to turn you into Extreme Pornography
I want to use you as a pincushion
I want to use you as an ashtray
I want to punch you in the face
I want to fuck you the arse
I want to fucking degrade you
I want to fucking humiliate you
I want dominance
I want dominion
I want to use you as a toilet
I want to use you as a candelabra
I want to objectify you utterly
I want to use you as a canvas
I want to create a new art form
The medium will be the message
The work will say 'suffering'
It will say that we are meat
It will be etched into your meat
It will transform your flesh
And your flesh will transform the world
We will clean the world with blood and vinegar
We will make all the chains real, finally
Life is Extreme Pornography
Unsafe
Insane
No Consent
Life is a rape/revenge film that never ends
They will see their hypocrisy
Mirrored in my boots
They will wash it away
With roman showers
They will be forced to understand
We will fuck them back to sanity

And they will hate us for it
And they will love us for it

They will beg us to stop
Their despair will be erotic
We will clean away their tears with torn flags
We will take scalpels to their uniforms
We will mask them and take whips to their flesh
Calling out contradictory demands
As they heave desperately on ropes
Attached to the gates of the asylum

Part 2: Consequences

And it will never stop
And it will never get better
It will always hurt
It will leave marks
It won't grow back
No matter how much you want it to
Because that's life
A self-balancing equation
Input pain
Output pleasure
That's how it works
So you can eat others must starve
So you can laugh others must cry
There are no victimless crimes
There are no free lunches
Every second another rape
Every second another murder
With one bullet to load each gun
We could kill everyone
Sons lashed to fathers
Daughters to mothers
Pitched off the bridge
Into the frozen water
Like a chain for the world
Like a chain for the mind
We draw circles
But there's nothing outside
And nothing inside
Except us
And Extreme Pornography

I am an Anonymous Motherfucker

2010-02-06T06:03:00.000-08:00

I have an idea in a sketchbook for a collection of photographic self-portraits featuring signs showing all the nasty things people have called me for little reason. Many of them are pedestrian. I obviously need a fair few colourful ones. Thankfully, FdB has a google alert on his name and has found this blog. So I'm hopeful. Franz, darling, I want you to try and top 'Anti-Isreali venom dog' which is the best thing anyone has ever called me. 'Anonymous Motherfucker' is a definite keeper as well. I am not sure why it is worse being an anonymous motherfucker (I'm not really anonymous of course) than letting the whole planet know exactly where you live:

This is the apartment block of a lunatic.

Later this evening, I will post a cartoon. Joy!

I know this blog has been kinda weak for the last six months. I'm still very sorry about that.

Franz de Byl

2010-02-03T03:42:00.000-08:00

It's story time!

The internet is kind of like a field of stones. Start flipping them over and you'll find all sorts of strange and fascinating things. Also, a whole mess of nutters.

Like many vaguely pretentious music lovers, I have spent quite a while working my way through the Nurse With Wound List. I've made some pretty good progress, but some of these artists are mind-bogglingly obscure. Having another nose around, I found that one of the most obscure of the artists, Franz de Byl, had just recently put up some tracks on his last.fm radio. Hurrah!

Then I discovered that Franz de Byl is balls-out crazy. I enjoy this sort of craziness so much that I just have to document it before it dissapears.

http://www.last.fm/music/Franz+de+Byl

His last.fm wiki description:

"Franz de Byl strikes back now! If you can’t beat them, join them…
Franz de Byl joined Last.FM now – for only one reason: To define and dominate “his” Last.FM-site by only himself, this site what Last.FM did not want to erase or remove.
Until Google and others are executing this Last.FM “company” because of copyright abuse and so on FdB sees the only chance to absorb this homepage of Sony for his own intents.
Berlin, Dec 30, 2009-12-30
Franz de Byl
Musician & Music Teacher"

THINGS TO NOTE:
This is the first indication that Franz de Byl does not understand the internet at all. Note that he has signed and dated his own wiki entry. He always signs himself 'Musician & Music Teacher' or 'Musiker und Musiklehrer' depending on what language he's writing in. You will also notice mr. "De Byl" really likes putting "things" in inverted "colons". Part of this is obviously to do with a certain lack of familiarity with casual english. I'm not sure what he means about Sony: I suppose there must have been a Sony ad on the page (last.fm is owned by CBS). I am also not quite sure what he means about the copyright. I think, looking over other dialogues between De Byl and discogs.com, that De Byl seems to think that websites displaying the titles of his songs or images of his album covers is copyright theft. It's worth noting that as of the time of this writing, De Byl had under 200 plays total on last.fm, which makes him almost as obscure on that site as me.

Here is the only comment on last.fm site, left by...him:

"Hello Last.fm Music Team I want to inform you about the fact that this so called "Nurse With Wound List" is nothing but a self-fulfilling gratification of Mr. Steven Stapleton who "collected" all these artists names on a "list" for only this reason to become a member in this famous club of stars himself. He created this list of lots of important people just to put his own name in the round. The "NWW list" is a list of bad music. That's why I never wanted to be named in this bullshit list. I told this to Mr. Stapleton but he doesn't want to remove my name. This is what I will sue him for very soon. Every man must have the informational self-determination to decide in what link he is trapped and what "prize" he is given. Mr. Stapleton did never ask me if I would agree to his decision to put my name on his ridiculous and illegal list. So I am asking you to please remove this link. Franz de Byl Take a look at my blog http://franzdebyl--nww-and-discogs.blogspot.com"

Again we note "FdB's" habits. And here, the most fabulous thing. Let me repeat that again.

"This is what I will sue him for very soon. Every man must have the informational self-determination to decide in what link he is trapped and what "prize" he is given. Mr. Stapleton did never ask me if I would agree to his decision to put my name on his ridiculous and illegal list. "

This is fantastic! I really hope I don't have to explain how frothingly crazy this is. This would be like sueing someone for giving you an oscar. 'illegal list'. Oh my.

Another inscrutable habit of de Byl is that he seems to make a new blog every time he makes a new thread. Here's another one:

http://franzdebyl--nww-and-discogs.blogspot.com/

"To me it seems more than incredible and unbelievable that parasites, criminals and pimps like this dare claiming to force something very pure, good and exceptional (Jesus!) - isn't it like Scientology or the Taliban - not to forget: Mr. Steven Stapleton, the hugest idiot and inventor of the so called NWW list?

Barf!"

The best thing though? This is what I saw at the bottom of the page when I googled Franz de Byl. This is pretty incredible. I don't think I've ever seen one of these before:

"In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 3 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org."

Holy shit. What is this guy on?

I would appreciate it if any German speaker could translate this for me:

http://franzdebylsblog.blogspot.com/

As my German only extends as far as being able to order beer and ask where the toilet is later.

Anyway, just thought I'd share this bizarre trivia. There's more to dig in to with this (and probably more great quotes to uncover) and I'll post again if I turn up anything else. Or probably I'll just lose all interest in this whatsoever. Whatever.

Psychedelic Warlords

2010-02-02T12:34:00.000-08:00

Felt tip pens, acrylic paint, fabric paint, ash, black ballpoint on paper.

I would like to apologise for the poor image quality, amateurish stitching, and the general god-awfulness of everything I turn my cursed hands to. I would like to use this very important blog post to remind you that winners don't do drugs*.

*Apart from the inumberable great musicians, artists, writers, philosophers, thinkers, athletes and scientist who remain honourable exceptions.

A note: when thinking on the last paragraph, I googled up a list on Erowid of famous drug users, which was arranged into columns of person, drugs, source, etc.

Aleister Crowley's drug column just says 'Many, Heroin'.

Yessssss.

A digital painting

2010-01-26T20:55:00.000-08:00

I was doing some research on the topic of the odious 'Extreme Pornography' act. Apparently, whilst the act does not cover BBFC certified films, it can cover screenshots from them. This is just too fantastically fucking stupid for words. It inspires me maybe to see what happens when I take one remove; if I were to paint stills from films that have sections which contravene the act (this includes plenty of famous and well respected films, for example The Exorcist).

I feel very strongly that the draconian and insane attitude of the British state towards the kind of imagery covered by the act, it's ludicrous double standard definitions of what constitutes pornography and what does not, and its criminalisation of simulated acts that cause no harm to anyone is deeply worrying. There has been some resistance, but few mainstream organisations seem to give a shit about it, which is no surprise. Anti-censorship campaigners have historically shown an unwillingness to get engaged in the really dirty fights, and have let the simpering, paternalistic legacy of Mary Whitehouse and her spawn pervade the national discourse. If the state can tell us what we are allowed to watch, listen to etc. then it can quite literally tell us how to think. We already live in a society where capitalistic forces highly restricts the content of much of the media (through the glorious free market). Censorship of any form is anathemic to a free and rational society.

Man I like ranting.

More Ministry of the Occult

2010-01-25T11:49:00.000-08:00

Two illustrations from Ministry of the Occult leaflet #24894, "Your Pranic Body and You"

The idea of telling a story through lots of small documents and artifacts is not something new to my art, but not something I've ever really pulled off before. I kinda want to actually make up a few official looking Ministry of the Occult leaflets (or propaganda flyers from their enemies) and leave them around in various places. Sort of a guerilla Alternate Reality game. This links in to an idea I have been developing on and off for about two years now, involving creating my own hoax conspiracy theory, and using it to discredit other conspiracists. I've grown kind of worried with the ethical issues surrounding that idea though: what if someone were to really come to believe it, and you couldn't convince them it was fake? There's a lot of nutters out there.

Speech to be made at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park

2010-01-21T03:56:00.001-08:00

"Speakers corner is a tool of social and political oppression. It is a cultural space designed by the state to corral and contain dissenting opinion. It is an Orwellian memory hole for marginal or minority opinions. All speech here is rendered safe, and thus rendered meaningless. By speaking here, you have automatically given up any possibility of affecting change; you have made yourself into a circus exhibit for tourists. In a truly free society, dissenting opinion should be, no, must be everywhere. I urge all the other speakers here, and anyone else in attendance who is thinking of speaking; if you truly care about your message as anything more than socio-political theatre, then leave this place at once. Go find another corner and speak there. Speak on every corner. Carve your message into walls, write it on leaflets and shove it through peoples letterboxes, scrawl it on billboards, shout it from rooftops. Make your speeches outside parliament, and every time the police drag you away, go back and start speaking again. Anyone who speaks here might as well be speaking inside a soundproofed box, for all the impact your words will have. It is shameful that we have swallowed the idea that the state is somehow doing us a favour by letting us speak freely in one tiny corner of a park. It is unbelievable that people can seriously hold this up as evidence of a free and tolerant society. This is not tolerance. This is a ghetto for ideas. This is where protest comes to die. I urge anyone who’s willing to repeat this message, I will leave copies here. This shameful intellectual prison has existed for too long, and information wants to be free. Death to speakers corner!"

If anyone in London feels like going to speakers corner and delivering this speech, preferably as many times as possible, that would be wonderful. I plan on doing it myself within the next month or so, funds permitting. The idea is to hand out plenty of copies of the speech and also maybe leaflets and hopefully create some kind of memetic virus that seriously disrupts the safe little loony pen/theatre of cruelty that is speakers corner, which is to free public discourse as a single stale crumb to a starving man.

Newspaper doodles

2010-01-20T15:22:00.001-08:00

These are all taken from a Guardian pull-out I left lying around because I wanted to mutilate it, '10 Icons of the Decade'. I was thinking of maybe doing a whole series and planning something bored but I just got bored and doodled on peoples faces. Everything is black ballpoint, blue biro and tip-ex.

Although, as the inclusion of Bin Laden might suggest, they were casting the net a bit wider than just nice people, it was pretty incredible how much I hated almost everyone in this pull-out.

Vampires

2010-01-18T13:16:00.000-08:00

Some more fiction concept sketches. My years at art college seem largely to have been dedicated to pursuading me that speculative fiction related material is silly, childish or not real art. My life is far too short to think shit like that. Obviously this ain't gallery stuff, but all too often it's what my imagination starts chewing over when I let it rip, and I can't deny that.

One side effect I've noticed of three years or 'serious' art is that I've lost whatever meagre ability I had to draw hands. Hands are the Final Boss of the human figure for most artists: just getting their scale right can be challenging enough, even without all those fucking fingers. When you add foreshortening into the mix it just becomes horrible. Seems I am going to have to very much sit down with my copy of Anatomy for the Artist and have a couple of sessions of straight up just drawing fucking hands. Yay.

THE NIGHT LAWS
Ministry of the Occult leaflet no. 48952

Firstly, whomsoever, being ungodly, killeth a christian without due cause, he shall be put to death.
Secondly, whomsoever, being ungodly, killeth one of his own sort without due cause, he shall be put before the mercy of the special courts.
Thirdly, whomsoever, being ungodly, createth more than one like unto himself, he shall be put to death and his illegal protege also shall be put before the mercy of the special courts.
Fourthly, whomsoever useth ungodly powers against the government of Great Britain or her provinces and dependencies, the Sovereign thereof, or the established church of England, or shall use such powers against nations allied with or friendly to the above, he shall be put to death.
Fifthly, whomsoever belongeth to any group or order declared treasonous to this nation by the special courts, or who knowingly carry out the orders or plans of such a group, he shall be put to death.
Sixthly, whomsoever shall reveal, or conspire to reveal, the nature of his ungodliness or that of others to persons not suited for such revelations, he shall be placed at the mercy of the special courts.
Seventhly, whomsoever useth ungodly powers for the purposes of fraud or deception of christian folk, or unduly useth the knowledge gained by unnatural years, he shall be placed at the mercy of the special courts.
Finally, whomsoever, being ungodly, breaketh the other laws of this land, he shall be placed at the mercy of the special courts.

The night laws were written in 1695, following the pattern of similiar continental laws. Still in force, and forming the core of the UK's secret laws, they have remained unchanged ever since, and some of the legal jargon might be unfamiliar to less antiquated readers, and may appear offensive to some. The implications of this language no longer necessarily reflect the views of the British government. The term 'ungodly', used throughout, means anyone who is defined as 'differently human' by the Definitions Act (revised) of 1995. Christian, conversely, means anyone who is defined under the above act as 'normally human', and has nothing to do with an individuals religious background. Being put 'at the mercy of the special courts' means that the punishment is not fixed, and can be any which it is in the power of the special courts to give out, including fines, imprisonment, curses and the death penalty. The 'due cause' mentioned in the second laws covers mostly self defence, and actions which have been given prior legal sanction (ie. killing an enemy of the crown during wartime, an executioner conducting his duties). Killing in hot blood is NOT considered a mitigating circumstance under the Night Laws. The complexities of the third law, especially with regards to witchcraft, are detailed in the pamphlet 'Paranormal Reproduction and the Law'. For a list of organisations that have been outlawed by the special courts, please consult the pamphlet 'Combating Supernatural Terrorism'. 'the inhuman nature of others' is identical to 'state occult secrets', as defined by the Occult Secrets Act of 1932. Under the Rotterdam Treaty, the Night Laws have primacy over the European laws on human rights, but do not otherwise affect your statutory rights as a British citizen. For further information about the Night Laws or other secret laws, please refer to the other publications of this department or to the secret section of the British Library. All publications issued by this department are available in Large Print, Braille, Audiobook form, Welsh, Punjabi and other languages as and when available.

This second sketch showcases a technique I have been experimenting with whereby if I get the picture wrong I hack it to pieces and put it back together with masking tape. Not entirely effective

Twirly face

2010-01-16T08:19:00.000-08:00

Et plus de twirl!

Just a sketchbook page. Looks Like I might be getting a new computer of my very ownsome tomorrow, so I will hopefully start posting maybe some more complex stuff and of course everyone's favourite WRITING (not like that stupid massive brainfart I posted before, though I am glad I posted that as otherwise I would have lost all that bullshit with my old computer).

BACK

2010-01-14T19:01:00.001-08:00

I was holding out till I got my computer fixed but that's just making excuses. Here I am, back again, on borrowed computing power and borrowed time, a man alone etc. etc.

First let me say a big 'ol RIP for Jay Reatard. He was a rocker, and now he's dead. He was also less than ten years older than me which is worrying. He also may have been murdered! Guess I should try not to piss anyone off.

On that note, here's some massively self-indulgent sci-fi bullshit to get this show on the road again.

This is a preview because the actual whole thing is WAY too fucking big. Find the whole thing, notes etc. HERE

You might have to download it to read all the text I dunno. Get a bigger screen you fucking hippy scum.

And yeah it's a little sketchy but fuck you this is MY blog and I'll do whatever the fuck I want on it, except say I'm going to post every day and then only post like an average of ten things a year OH SHIT.

EDIT: Hopefully you can actually go and read and see it all properly now

The State of the Metal Address pt. 1

2009-12-15T02:19:00.000-08:00

I apologise for the lack of new art content. I am building up a buffer of work to start posting in the new year. Until then, I hope to offer you a few articles in the style of my older attempts at blogging. Working through various issues that have been on my chest, etc. First, an issue close to my heart: HEAVY FUCKING METAL.

The New Elitism

The evolution of heavy metal can be seen easily as a Hegelian dialectic. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. New genress and ideas are met with, and tempered by, reactionary elitist tendencies. From these emerge the synthesis. We have seen this at least twice before in the history of metal, as seen as a distinct subculture. First there was the hair metal crisis. Then there was nu metal. Now, metal is undergoing its third great crisis. This time a combination of factors are at work, not just musical but social. The effects of the digital revolution on metal culture are being worked through, at the same time as a raft of new pretender genres, most particularly post-metal and deathcore, have risen up. In response, elitism is now stronger than it has ever been.

Once again, this is a long, bloody, drawn out struggle. And once again, it is primarily a contest between Europe and America.

The Degeneracy Thesis

One thing you will notice about every widely criticised and reviled permutation of metal is this: it is american. Hair metal, nu metal, groove metal, deathcore, post-metal, sludge, thrash revival, slam death and USBM. All have been (or are being) actively reviled by one section of the metal scene or another, some universally, some more selectly.

Part of this is racism, conscious or unconscious. Whilst metal traditionalists have broadly tolerated (or actively embraced) the inclusion of such un-metal elements as folk, prog, classical and (to a certain degree) industrial and ambient music into the metal milieu, they often remain strongly opposed to any metal band attempting to inject, say, funk, reggae or hip-hop into the metal sound (this in wilful defiance of metals late 60's origins as the heaviest possible form of electric blues). Limited exceptions have been made for jazz (in the form of death metal fusion acts such as Cynic and Atheist) and the hardcore heroin blues of sludge has been making steady inroads (often to much protest) for a while now. Some of this is explicable. There are startlingly few examples of a successful rock/rap fusion of any sort, and rap metal normally manages to combine turgid, bargain basement hardcore riffing with lyrical parts that scarcely ever advance beyond embarrasing. Much of it should at least be questioned.

Beyond this though, is simply a general strand of anti-americanism that has existed in European thought for centuries. This, often nowadays unconscious, assumption is that all American cultural products are somehow weaker than European ones. It is very hard for American metal ideas to really make any headway in Europe*. This, as well as a fundamental difference in attitude among many American metalheads on the ground has led to a large degree to the ghettoisation of American metal culture, which is another reason why it often provides the boldest challenges to the metal status quo.

Fuck [Your Band Here]

Elitism and bizarre feuds are nothing new in the metal scene. Previously, however, feuds were generally geographic; the most famous (and patently stupid) ones probably being the 90's feuds between the Norwegian and Swedish black metal scenes, and the Norwegian and Finnish black metal scenes. The changing nature of the way metal is consumed has rendered these localist squabbles rather anachronistic, whilst opening wide new opportunities for every form of elitism and insularity imaginable.

First, you have to remember that not so very long ago extreme metal in particular was really underground. If you lived outside of a few particular cities on either side of the Atlantic, your opportunites for gigs were rare, and the only way to hear new bands was through mail order samplers, magazines, tape trading and friends. Labels and distros built their customer base on an almost personal, one to one basis. Cameraderie was high; almost everyone was a committed fan, and everyone was involved intrinsically in keeping the scene alive, whether it was by being in a band or writing for a zine, or just by buying records and t-shirts and telling your friends about your latest discovery.

What changed this was the internet. Old timers often moan that online record shopping and band websites have destroyed much of the mystique and allure of being a metal fan. More importantly, it made being an extreme metal fan easy. it was no longer necessary to dedicate time and effort writing to bands and labels or tracking down obscure releases. Anyone could have anything that was in print on their doorstep within the week, and the more unscrupulous, once filesharing took off, could have it on their computer at the click of a button. This, in particular, is a game changer. It is now possible, in the eyes of many, for people to harm the metal scene just by listening to the music. With no barriers in place to keep out the interested amateur, and literally tens of thousands of metal bands only a few clicks away, it is now a free for all.

A Way of Life

At this point it may be a good idea to try to explain to the average reader why these issues are important to the average metalhead. If you've never been seriously involved in a subculture it can be hard to understand the feelings one has for it. Once you go past the stage of the teenage phase, and become a dedicated follower, you have generally invested a large amount of resources, both emotional and financial, in the subculture in question. I myself have spent thousands of pounds just attending festivals, not to mention all the CDs, vinyl, t-shirts and other gear. Very nearly half my life has been soundtracked by metal. To the committed metalhead, whether something is metal or not, however ridiculous this may seem, is not just a question of semantics. It is a serious issue. Metal is very important to some people, me included, and casual fans, false metallers...yes, POSERS. have always been the biggest threat to its continued existence as a cohesive concept. This was the issue at the root of the hair metal and nu metal problems. Both were populist genres, beloved of casual fans who contributed little value to the metal scene, whilst diluting its very meaning. The threat now is that these weekenders can infiltrate essentially every part of the metal scene. Although there are very visible genres**, such as deathcore and post-metal, seemingly designed just to taunt the dyed in the wool denim and leather crowd, there has been an influx of new fans across the board. Some of them have started bands, and not all of them are welcome.

...PART 2 COMING SOON

*Often they must first pass through the intermediary filter of Britain. This is not just something that is true of metal; most of the oldest European punk groups cite the influence of The Clash and The Sex Pistols and never mention the Ramones or the New York Dolls, and for a long time European hardcore owed far more to London and Leeds than it did Washington or LA.

**One of the main signs for spotting a metal genre that is worryingly out of place is wardrobe that doesn't chime with the rest of the metal milieu. Whilst recognisable (though perhaps, to the untrained eye, subtle) differences of dress according to taste and geography are part of the regular diversity of the metal scene, problem genres tend to stick out like a sore thumb. The standard metallers uniform (male and female) is jeans, trainers or boots, a band shirt (normally black) and long hair. Against this, genres such as nu metal, with its dreadlocks, parachute trousers and wallet chains, or post-metal with its earthtones, often short hair and ear plugs, stand out a mile. Hair metal, which required everyone to, where possible, dress like transexual space hookers from a bad acid trip, is a particularly egregious example.

Achewood Characters as Real People

2009-11-02T08:53:00.000-08:00

I got pretty buzzed last night and decided to try drawing Achewood characters as real people.

This is Roast Beef and Lyle. I'm fairly happy with this one.

This is Teodor and Pat. I think Pat is on the right track, but I am not 100% sure about Teodor. Also, this serves as an announcement that I finally saved up enough dole money for a new scanner woop!

If you don't understand this post I suggest you thump yourself and then get your arse over to Achewood.com, the best comic in any medium.

The Technonomnicon

2009-10-13T03:57:00.001-07:00

A few pieces from a digital series I've been working on. No comment.

I'm sorry about the lack of updates. I am a terminal sad-sack, unfortunately, and lacking in resources. I also can't find a sketchbook with about a months work in it that makes me barely even want to try and get my scanner working. a bloo bloo bloo.

More later.

Fred Basset

2009-09-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

I am addicted to newspaper puzzles. Crosswords, Sudoku, Blankout, Word Wheels, Kenken, Navigati, Logic Grids, Codewords. I care not. I can but puzzle.

Which brings me on to a certain cartoon dog.

The one redeeming feature of the Daily Mail (apart from the way it induces blissful, nay, orgiastic fantasies of smashing Richard Littlejohn's head in with a brick) is it's quite excellent puzzle section, which includes my absolute favourite daily fix, Scrabblegrams (I used to play Scrabble at tournament level, in my wild youth). Thankfully, there is almost always a copy left lying around in my local pub, so I never actually have to buy the cursed thing. Also part of the puzzle page are the comics. The Daily Mail runs Garfield, I Don't Believe It, Odd Streak, The Strip Show and Fred Basset. All of these are almost painfully unfunny. Fred Basset, however, is in a league of its own.

To illustrate what is special about Fred Basset, let us compare it to Garfield, another dreadful comic strip with which it shares similiarities both of format and concept.

Garfield:

Fred Basset:

You will notice that, unfunny as it is, the Garfield strip does, in fact, contain a recognisable joke, whereas Fred Basset is simply a pictorial representation of about fifteen seconds in the life of a middle class dog. In an ideal world, it would be the perfect dadaist artwork. It probably is.

Fred Basset has been in continuous publication since 1963.

I have more experience with this dog than most. My paternal grandmother, being an elderly middle class lady who liked dogs (Fred Bassets core demographic, without a doubt) possessed an alarmingly large number of collected Fred Basset cartoons: whole books filled with literally nothing except Fred Basset. They are still in a box somewhere up in my parents spare room. They are strange, frightening things. Reading a whole book full of Fred Basset cartoons is exactly like sitting in a large, comfortable armchair, where a morbidly obese woman with no face slowly drips pentobarbitol into your eyes. If anyone were ever to managed to read every single Fred Basset cartoon in a row I have absolutely no doubt they would achieve absolute oneness with all things, becoming able to levitate and live only on air and sunlight. Unfortunately, after little more than a decades worth of exposure, horrified onlookers notice that a strange, coal black fluid has begun to seep from every orifice in the readers head, a fact of which he is unsettlingly unaware. This liquid has the consistency of warm honey, and smells faintly of phosgene and charred meat. It is in fact a by-product of the rapid necrotisation of the readers higher mammalian mind. Death or permanent catatonia are inevitable by this stage; there is no cure.

In the spirit of free enterprise. I decided to see whether I could use photoshop to improve upon any Fred Basset cartoons. Grabbing a selection at random from the internet, I set to work.

Fred Basset with Possible Daily Mail Headlines

HUNDTFUHRER FRITZ BASSET

Fred Basset with Transposed Heads

Fred Basset Takes the Game Too Far

Fred Basset Will Tear Us Apart, Again

Alright in their own way, but these were just stabs in the dark. I decided to break out of the comic strip format and go to the old visual comedy trick of combining two things that are complete opposites.

Still not quite there. I refuse to believe there is not some simple trick that can be performed on Fre Basset strips to render them more amusing.

Hmmn.

Let me go smoke a few pipefulls of Extract of Salvia Divinorum and ruminate on this further.

hmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

[i]fffffffffffffffffbasteetfffff[/i]

g o t t o l e a v e r o o m s o t h e l e t t e r s c a n b r e a t h e

e'HEGEFHE'FHE'HFHFE'WFEHHEFWHFEHFEHIFEIHFEHIEFFHIEIFEHII'I'I'HIIII

HUUGGGG

Right, now, I was going to keep going, but, unfortunately, I have just found something that I did not know existed when I started writing this post. I found this:

http://fredbasset.livejournal.com/

It is essentially, what I have just been fucking around with, only much better. The creator has struck the nail on the fucking head; the trick is to leave the art intact and re-write only Freds balloons to portray him as a psychopathic sexual deviant. That was so obvious I want to cry, though I am glad I didn't try because it would have been unintentional plagiarism.

Some of these are pretty fucking funny though, so at least I have a few hours good entertainment out of this. That said, CURSE THAT HOUND! Always one step ahead.

Scanner should be fixed soon, till then, artniks.

Finally, some stuff.

2009-09-21T19:04:00.000-07:00

Between commission work, work work, illness, a fucked up scanner and a camera that has suddenly decided not to charge itself up, it has not been a good time for transferring stuff from paper to the computer. Gods damn, it's been nearly a month! What I've got for you today started on the computer anyway; a few abstract/text photoshop experiments I've been putting together over the last couple of days.

Digital Abstract #1

Digital Abstract #2

Flesh Field 1

Who Will Deliver Me From Myself?

Remember to click on the horizontal pictures for the whole thing!

Once I do get the ability to put stuff onto a computer again, I will have a good backlog of stuff: I've been playing round with geometry and so forth of late, and have about half-filled a moleskine notebook with interesting stuff. Unfortunately, for the moment, it's all mine.

A hand-painted black metal shirt

2009-08-25T16:38:00.000-07:00

Diabolical Masquerade was an awesome project. Blackheim from Katatonia (ably assisted on many occasions by Dan Swano) making proggy black metal a la mid-period Borknagar. I'll probably paint a few more shirts over the next couple of days, it's been ages.

Here's how it's going to work.

2009-08-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

It is fairly obvious I cannot keep to one update a day. The main current reason for this is the amount of commissioned work I have recieved. So, rather than try and pull something out my arse every day, I'll just post stuff whenever I finish it, so it'll probably end up as more like three or four posts a week (or it may end up being ten! who knows?).

Also, this will be the last ever post with no art content.

Day 5: All sorts of problems.

2009-08-17T16:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry about no update yesterday, my internet was out. Whole (local) ISP had gone down for a day for some sort of maintenance. Anyway, I STILL haven't finished the thing I'm working on. Sorry. It is taking ages; also there is a lot of commission stuff (ie. stuff I get paid good money for) that I am doing atm that makes this blog hard work. Here is how far I have got with the current digital piece I am working at atm.

Obviously, it is a digital overpainting of a Vesalius illustration. It is barely even half finished and taking me ages. I am working in 300 dpi, with a mouse, to give you some perspective.

Maybe it will be finished tomorrow? Maybe it won't. Who knows. I will try and have something else for you if it's not.

Day 3 (A little late): A Mere Preview

2009-08-15T03:31:00.000-07:00

Sorry chaps. I've been working a lot on commission work, which I can't really post here. The thing I did want to post I was unfortunately unable to finish last night. I will hopefully finish it today. Here is a sneak preview:

Tantalising, no?

To make this post a little more worthwhile I've been digging around on my photobucket for some older stuff to show.

A nice picture of my home town I took.

And some old t-shirt designs. The middle is a ladies shirt, of course.

Day 2: Black Ships Ate the Sky

2009-08-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

Exactly what it says on the tin.

Pen and ink on cartridge paper.

Day 1 (New Calendar): Lets HIT the FUCKING road!

2009-08-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, back in business again, and now I have a working scanner! YES!

First up, a little bit of sci-fi art.

Geologists...IN SPACE!

(or they could be space pirates burying their space treasure if you like everything to be extremely silly).

Sorry, people, especially you three followers.

2009-08-04T02:44:00.001-07:00

I essentially chose the worst time ever to do this. I just moved house, then I went to Wacken Open Air Festival and now I have come back and everything is in boxes. Next Weekend I depart again for Bournemouth. Aieeeee. What I am going to do is build up a buffer of work, sort out my fractured life and then restart this shit wednesday next, and see if we can't seriously do something. If it all falls apart this bad again, well, ok, but if it doesn't, woop.

Where have I been? What have I been doing?

2009-07-24T04:16:00.001-07:00

To cut a long story short, my dads scanner is broken. Also I have just moved back in with my parents, and have spent most of the week packing, cleaning, loading vans and unloading vans. I will resume this blog service as soon as I have some method of getting images onto this sodding computer, though I will also note that I am going to Germany on Wednesday.

Terribly sorry about all this. Basically, what I am saying is, totally mucked up the start of this blog all to hell, it will probably not be back on its feet for two weeks.

On the other hand, the job situation on the Isle of Wight at the moment is utterly appalling, so I'll probably have a lot of time this summer.

Day 15: Another fucking missed update, fuck and bugger it all to fuck.

2009-07-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

Man. It's been a busy couple of days. I'm currently filing an appeal about being kicked out of art school, and I'm preparing to move house, which has meant tidying and organising my sty of a room. I would promise a double update today but unfortunately I seem to have managed to pack away my camera cable, and I ain't got an SD card, so I'm currently without any way of putting stuff onto my computer. I guess I'll have to do a bit of writing or something this evening. I have always fancied myself as kind of a writer. I am really, really good at writing the first three pages or so of books. I figure if I can just expand that talent forward I may have something. Maybe I shall polish up some of the first pages or so I have of books and post them up. Watch this space (actually the space above it once you actually need to watch it).

Day 13: Some serial killers

2009-07-12T16:22:00.000-07:00

I'm still watching serial killer documentaries. Todays art, two chalk and charcoal portraits of serial killers, touched up a bit in photoshop. I deliberately tried to go for a loose, courtroom artist kind of style, which might have been a bit precious of me. I'm not really happy with the likeness of either subject, but I quite like the second one just as a picture. The first one is a little overworked; I didn't want to ruin both of them completely, which is why I stopped.

First, Ted Bundy:

And now, Jeffrey Dahmer:

I've also been working on some music today, and tidying my room. And now I am tired. :3

*zzz*

Day 12: Lets get this show back on the road.

2009-07-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

Okay. Right. Lets get back in business. Lets make up for this shit.

First off, two paintings. Acrylic on canvas, based on webcam shots. I tried slightly different approaches with each of these with regards to palette and brush technique. The third I am still very unhappy with, and I've now run out of white acrylic paint (always the white) so I won't be rectifying it very soon. The photographs are both slightly crooked, but without the advantage of a gallery space to hang pictures like this in it's the best I can realistically manage.

I don't know which I like best. The first one has a more realistic feel, much more worked, but the second is looser and more vibrant; I decided to try eliminating brown from my palette, which always gives a picture a little more zazz. Both capture the distorting effects quite nicely, in my opinion.

As a bonus, here is a quick self portrait, executed in charcoal and human blood:

I get nosebleeds semi-regularly, due to the fact that I have compulsively picked my nose since I was about two, and sometimes when I get one when I'm painting I try to do something with it. Normally something stupid. The blood doesn't really mean anything, obviously. It's quite a shitty material to work with, actually, especially mixed with snot, but it does have a few advantages. I like the subtle, rusty tones you can build up, plus you get the interesting time-based thing as the blood turns more brown as it dries and ages. Smells nice as well.

Also, whilst I am providing evidence for the prosecution, I have been watching a pretty good series of youtube docs on serial killers. It's your usual suspects kind of line-up: Gein, Gacy, Dahmer, Manson, Ramirez (I always preferred more indie, underground serial killers like H.H. Holmes and Peter Kürten), and they're presented in the style viewers of late night Discovery Channel crime shows will be familiar with, complete with little bits of artifice like photographs of the killers where the subject has been clipped out the background and each elements moves at a different rate of zoom, like a sort of ghetto vertigo shot. Two things to note. One, returning to the Realdoll thing, I was struck by suddenly thinking how similiar the obsessions of some serial killers (Gein and Dahmer in particular) are to some of the subjects of the rather touching documentary 'Guys and Dolls' (which everyone should watch, though not all the parts are up on youtube anymore due to a surfeit of latex vaginas). Some things are obvious: one of the doll fanciers kept his mothers room the exact way it had been at the time of her death, in the same manner as Gein, whilst others expressed an inability to connect with living humans that could easily be seen as being linked to the necrophiliac urges of some killers. What I'm trying to say here is not that the kind of people who are really serious about realdolls are dangerous psychopaths, but it's an interesting correlation. Actually, it's quite a positive thing. One thing that's very obvious, when you look at serial killers, is that the truly dangerous thing is not 'deviant' sexual urges, but the suppression of sexual urges, which seem to have lead to the crimes of many of these killers. If Dahmer had been able to be open about his sexuality and meet up with subs on craigslist for a little edgeplay, would he have killed and eaten all those dudes? in my opinion, fantasy is an extremely important outlet. If the internet proves anything it is that a tremendous amount of people are perverted as all fuck, and that, actually, the expression of unusual sexualities, as long as it is, to quote the maxim of every S&M practicioner 'Safe, Sane and Consensual', is always healthy. This is one of the reasons I am so opposed to the new UK laws on 'extreme pornography' (apart from the fact that they are ludicrously widespread, effectively criminalise completely harmless people arbitrarily, and would seem to apply to quite a lot of mainstream, non-porn movies and art) is that they are completely arse-backwards. It is infinitely more dangerous for people to repress violent or unusual sexual urges than it is for them to explore them and understand them, which is the only way you can control them. Anyway, I'm rambling and not making any particular sense. Here's the youtube link to the serial killer bios playlist:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=65C50D3FDD57317E

Now, I'm going to go and drink wine and listen to The Birthday Party and feel tortured as fuck.

A Stupid Musing

2009-07-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

Okay. Here is the thing I have been considering. It is very stupid in a way. It concerns virtual worlds, and images produced from them. So we have a case in point, let's take an image from my World of Warcraft Screenshot folder:

Ok. Now the issue I've been considering is: 'Whose work is this?'. Is it the work of Blizzard, or is the work of me? Sure, Blizzard made everything in the picture; from the character to her clothes to the environment, but I controlled the Camera, and decided when to take the shot. And it's not like the average photographer taking pictures in the real world has any control over the content of his images apart from arranging and posing objects and people. Now, this question seems to have been answered somewhat with regards to moving images and sound; machinima is a thriving little industry, and I don't think games companies are exerting any ownership over that (are they? This might bear research). Arising from this query, another. Could screenshots ever be considered a valid artform? You could probably play with such an idea in an interesting way. Imagine taking screenshots from videogames, printing them out as negatives onto acetate, then blowing them up into enormous large format photographs. It also opens up other ideas. If one was to make paintings from screenshots, would that just be glorified fanart, or something else entirely? These are ideas that have been brimming up from extending my paintings based on webcam screenshots into other directions. Those are coming along to various degrees by the way. I have one finished that I am extremely happy with, but having called shenanigans it can wait for the morrow. The other two of my planned triptych have been less successful. I may transfer back to painting on cartridge paper for a bit, as I am burning through canvases at a stupid rate, and you can't really scrape acrylics. The screenshot idea also plays into a series of paintings I have been thinking about based on stills from the film 'Suspiria'.

Ideas bubbling away! Got to keep making.

I'm calling shenanigans on this whole week.

2009-07-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

Dreadfully sorry, three followers (hello there!).

To explain. I have recently started taking a form of medication called Citalopram. For some charming reason it makes you feel a lot shittier before it makes you feel better; it takes about two weeks to get good, I am exactly one week in. I have been working, but I have nothing in a condition I feel comfortable showing. Hopefully I should be able to make it up on Saturday with a whole damn TRIPTYCH. That's right. Three whole damn paintings. And they'll be a lot better than the last one. I may also try and do some sort of writing thing tomorrow. There's a really stupid but also kind of intriguing art philosophy poser I've been turning around in my head I might like to chuck out there.

I could have chosen a better time to start this blog. Ah well! We must accept lifes travails. Or in my case we must lie in bed being overcome by waves of nausea, weakness and despair.

Mood: D:
Music: Marilyn Manson*

*Not really.

Another Missed day.

2009-07-07T23:48:00.000-07:00

Daaaamn. Anti-depressants are serious business people, serious fucking business. I'll see if I can't raid the archives again for tonight. To tide you over I offer, with absolutely no explanation whatsoever, this image:

It is a 'mash-up', if you will, of 'The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife' by Katsushika Hokusai, described by Wikipedia as the first ever piece of 'Tentacle Eroticism', and Damien Hirst's 'For The Love of God'. I had my reasons, but ye shall not know them.

Day 7: Oil Painting + List of things to do with a Realdoll

2009-07-06T15:50:00.000-07:00

Ok the first thing I have for you today is an Oil Painting. I thought I would give oils another try as it's probably been about a year and a half since the last time I tried working in them, and I've basically remembered why I don't like them. This is a preliminary study*, perhaps, for a series I am planning based on a series of glitched screenshots of sadomasochistic cybersex sessions I have engaged in via webcam. This didn't come out quite how I planned it. It needs to be much closer to the original image, to really enhance the creepiness. Unfortunately, I ran out of white paint. Also, my mother can never find this blog.

Also, here is a list, deriving from a chatroom conversation of things that I think would be good to do with a Realdoll, if I could afford one.

List of fun things to do with a realdoll:

Sit it on your sofa wearing nothing but fishnets and a strap-on and never mention it or even look at it. See how long it took various visitors to your home to mention its malign and sordid presence.

Buy a tandem bicycle and attach the naked realdoll to the second set of pedals and seat.

Remove the realdolls head and replace with: Stuffed moose head, goldfish bowl, giant Residents eyeball, the head off a childs baby doll, a dead squid stuffed in a cheap Nixon mask, etc. etc.

Nail the realdoll to the ceiling and then invite a friend over. Talk to him normally for hours then suddenly remark "Wow! Look at that!" and point and look upwards.

Half use a roll of film for innocuous bank holiday snaps, then take a series of deliberately lo-fi art photos of you burying your real-doll in the back garden at night, with very low light. Then send the film to be developed at Boots.

Produce heartbreaking stop-motion animated shorts that make it appear that you believe the realdoll to be speaking to you in the voice of your dead mother.

Dress the realdoll as Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager, stand it by your door and every time you enter the house ask "Permission to come aboard captain?"

Take it to a tattoo parlour and instruct the tattooist to tattoo my name onto its arm

Take it to a tattoo parlour and instruct the tattooist to tattoo their name onto its arm

Employ it as a hood ornament.

Install a device in the realdolls vagina for uncorking bottles of wine, insist on using it at the very few upper middle class dinner parties you will subsequently attend.

Cast the real-doll as Bela Lugosi in a remake of Plan 9 From Outer Space

saw off the tips of each of the dolls fingers and replace them with the top halves of barbie dolls.

Install a mechanism in the doll allowing it to give birth to Chucky/That thing from Riget/the Eraserhead baby/easter eggs.

Mother never read this ever.

*ie it didn't work.

Days 6&7: Abstraction and material from my archives.

2009-07-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

Ok, sorry about all that, imaginary readers. First up for you today (or two-day!) I have got a couple of abstract pieces:

This one is called, with startlingly originality, "untitled"*

This is a return to an older theme of mine, which involves writing out my most depraved sexual fetishes as a stream of consciousness in such a way that they are impossible to read.

And now to spice things up, some stuff from an older sketchbook (only a few months though). First, a sketch I did at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the most bleak, despair inducing place I have ever been in my life. The inset stone was one of many placed on top of the concrete pillars that marked the remains of most of the huts. I believe Jewish people place them at graves. It somehow seemed to sum everything up better than a wider view:

and lastly, to throw a spanner in the works, an alien.

I could tell you all sorts of wonderful detail about this guys civilisation and so forth but I won't because it would bore you shitless.

*Unfortunately necessary now I have run out of Black Metal instrumentals to name my abstracts after.

Missed update

2009-07-05T06:21:00.000-07:00

Less than a week in and I already missed an update on account of accidentally going out and getting hammered last night. Poo! I shall do a double update later tonight.

Day 5: Some Martial Industrial Music

2009-07-03T17:52:00.000-07:00

I don't just work in visual media, unfortunately. I am also a musician and 'sound artist'*. I work mainly in the area of industrial music, which has nothing to do with Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, and a lot to do with Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Einsturzende Neubaten, etc. My new thing today is three (3!) new demo tracks for my new Martial industrial/apocalyptic folk/dark ambient project 'Le Morte D'Arthur'. Martial Industrial is just like normal industral except people pretend to be nazis even harder. These tracks are "The Great Equaliser", "On Seeing a Piece of Our Heavy Artillery Bought Into Action" and "Black Ships Ate the Sky", which is a Current 93 cover! You lucky people. Unfortunately none of them are very good, but it is a demo, and I have little in the way of microphones. It is music best listened to as loud as you possibly can.

Listen to them here

*a name you use when you can't actually play any instruments.

Day 4: Sluts of Hell, Slaves of Satan

2009-07-02T09:45:00.000-07:00

Damn I really need a new camera. I just can't get any of the detail in these larger pictures, plus it's really hard to get things straight.

Here we go! 'Sluts of Hell, Slaves of Satan'. Images and text taken from the Sun Newspaper, collaged and overdrawn with black and red fineliners, chalk, charcoal and black enamel paint. Does it mean anything? Yeah, it's about like, capitalism and shit*.

Also because I am one of the good guys, here is a page from my sketchbook, trying to design some album art for my next planned album, 'Radio Crowley'.

Oh yeah, the music! Well, I'll tell you all about that some other time. Also I see on the monitors in Der Blogbunker that I have a follower. Hello follower! Watch that you do not become the followed.

*Rupert Murdoch is Satan in this reading.

Day 3: Dawn Over Bournemouth, From Poole (A Photographic series)

2009-07-01T19:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday night I cycled down to the coast and took photographs of dawn coming up over Bournemouth from just across the border into Poole. Here are the results, selected out of about 200 photos.

What a nice trip to the beach! I even made a sand castle. Sand castles are very hard to photograph.

These are all raw, completely unedited digital photos (putting my half a photography AS to good use!). I'll probably play with them in photoshop later. A little touristy and twee I know. Don't worry! Tomorrow should see me uploading a painting/montage entitled 'Sluts of Hell, Slaves of Satan' which will push this shit all the way through NSFW and out into NSAA*

*(Not Safe At All)

Day 2: Charles Byrne

2009-06-30T11:26:00.000-07:00

Charles Byrne (1761 – 1783) was an Irishman with pituitary gigantism, standing just over 7' 7", based on skeletal measurements. He found some fame as a circus freak, however, one day his considerable (for the day) life savings were stolen from him. He slipped into a spiral of alcoholism and eventually drank himself to death. In his final days he developed a morbid fear of anatomists, and requested his body be buried at sea. However, against his wishes, John Hunter purchased his remains for the sum of 500 pounds and boiled his skeleton for the Hunterian collection at London's Royal College of Surgeons. Drawn from a photograph in Armand Marie Leroi's excellent book 'Mutants'. Original drawing in pen and a homemade stain made from boiling liqourice flavour cigarette papers. Photographed and then tweaked in photoshop. I prefer the relative subtlety of the original drawing, but my photography facilites at the moment are completely inadequate.

Day 1: XKCD Parody and a drawing of Hendrix.

2009-06-29T07:27:00.000-07:00

Okay first off is an idle and somewhat vicious parody of XKCD what I drew today (click to see the whole thing):

And so there is also something a little less dumb here is a WIP shot of a drawing of Hendrix I am working on.

A new concept

2009-06-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

It looks like I just basically don't have enough rantin' left in me anymore, so I have figured out something else to do with this blog. Basically, from now on, I am going to just post creative stuff, but I am going to post at least one a day. Thing is, I am an artist and a musician, but I need to stay creative, and this blog is gonna help me do that. Every day I will post a drawing or a comic or a bit of writing or something. And maybe also I will post rants. Who knows? Bookmark this spot, anyone who is reading this.

RIP David Carradine

2009-06-05T10:02:00.000-07:00

Oh man this is too tragic.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/world/carradine+died+during+sex+act/3194822

To think that a great cult actor was reduced to such a low state that he could not even afford hookers to choke him in Thailand is something that should sober us all.

I would never have expected him to be in to anything kinky

Groogh

2009-05-29T05:15:00.000-07:00

Blogs are hard. First, you make one. Then you most two articles in it, zipping along like crazy. Then the next day your significant other ends a three year relationship with you and you forget about your shiny new blog.

You know, what with all the drinking and such.

Now I've remembered, but bugger me senseless if I know what to write about. Damn, I'm beginning to remember the problem with these things. I suppose I will just have to be ruthless.

Why are big American comics such arse?

2009-05-21T00:37:00.000-07:00

I like comics, why shouldn't I? I'm an emotionally stunted white male in his early twenties, who enjoys graphic violence and craves escape from his almost unbearable life but is too afraid to take the mans way out. Comics are the perfect medium for me. However, my love of comics, through kindled in early childhood with plentiful Beanos and Dandys, took a while to develop, mainly because of one simple factor: Marvel and DC are both pretty much utter wank. With the exception of a few decent Batman graphic novels not under Vertigo, they may in fact be total wank. Why am I saying this? Well, partly for hilarious angry comments, and partly because it's true.

Let me explain my position.

My favourite publishers of comics, and my favourite comic (in the sense of something that come out weekly or biweekly and costs far too much) is 2000AD. What is the difference between, say, Marvel, and 2000AD. Let's take a look at some of their more popular creations. For example, Marvel have Spiderman, an emotionally crippled geek who shoots epoxy resin out of his wrists. 2000AD have Judge Dredd.

You see where I'm coming from?

You see, the thing about superheroes, is that they are, for want of a better word, retarded. Firstly, the costumes. Really, if you were an alien superbeing who could fly, shoot lasers out his eyes and bend steel with his bare hands (along with fuck knows what else) would you really wear your gold spandex y-fronts on the outside of blue spandex tights? Maybe it's a good way of starting fights? Has Superman ever fought interstellar fashion police? Okay, yeah, so, he's an alien and he can play snooker by headbutting the moons of Jupiter. But what about, to pick a random example, Captain America? As far as I understand it, Captain America was a frail man who was transformed into the ultimate soldier with drugs to fight the Nazis. This is an American soldier in world war two:
And this is Captain America:
The urge at this juncture to say something that could be construed as homophobic in the wrong light is almost devastating. It also brings me on to suspension of disbelief. Now, both Marvel and DC comics, I believe, take place in alternative universes, so that's not my particular gripe. It's more about internal self-consistency and just having things make SOME sort of sense. I mean, in one early Strontium Dog story, Johnny Alpha and Wulf go back in time to arrest Hitler. This is arguably much more insane (and bold) than anything ever attempted in mainstream American publications, but it does make sense. Johnny Alpha is a time-travelling, dimension hopping bounty hunter, and it's not even the most bizarre thing he does (he goes to hell at one point, and kills the devil*). This is more remarkable because Johnny Alpha exists in the same timeline as us, since 2000AD's universe is consistently portrayed as our future**. Yet all the Marvel and DC superheroes, despite living in worlds which seem to have definitely had Hitlers, did sweet fuck all. OK, fine, it wouldn't have been politic to have superheroes defeating Hitler back in the actual forties, but it's all been retconned to fuck now anyway. Yet these superheroes seem to make bugger-all real impact on the world around them, not in the way you might actually expect at least. To be honest, I am kinda covering dead territory here, as everything I've just said is one of the subtexts of Watchmen, expressed with infinitely more crudity. The truth is, I'm kind of in danger of shooting myself in the foot. It's not like I'm an expert on this shit. I was going to go into the political aspect. Political and social content within American comics, apart from obvious exceptions such as the 'insert minority here' undercurrent of the X-Men, seems generally right wing. Apart from the most blatant examples (Frank Miller's Batman), just the basic idea that all someone needs is to dispense justice with not just deadly but often apocalyptic force is a spandex suit and a laser powered orifice or two is somewhat suspect. Then we have that recent 'fighting against superhero registration' plot in Marvel. I wonder what superheros stand for there? I'll give you a clue: they're both good at killing people quickly, but Charlton Heston only liked to fondle one of them (as far as we know). Then there's all those 'very special comics', in which social commentary is obtained by having Captain America teach a diverse group of children that drugs are bad (despite, you know). And I've had people actually tell me they don't like Judge Dredd because it's 'Fascist'. Way to miss the point.

Anyway, what was I saying? Ah yes, American comics are full of dull people in tights, British comics are full of magnificent bastards in black leather who kill a lot. I should have done a degree in Media Studies.

*It's much more complex than this, but no spoilers.

**To be fair, Hitler is only nabbed after he has faked his suicide.

Oh, conspiracy theorists

2009-05-20T23:29:00.000-07:00

So, I've been meaning to create a new blog for a while, but what actually inspired me was one of those NWO conspiracy documentaries on Youtube.

Yes, I know, but I have a real, unhealthy obsession with such things. I suppose it's a bit like those people for who used to spice up their sex life with fluffy hand-cuffs and now can barely get aroused unless they are dangling from the ceiling of a German warehouse with a meathook through their genitals. But enough about my DVD collection. The video in question was this, in all its interminable parts. Now, I freely admit I haven't watched the whole thing, mainly because, given the fact that the first ten minutes mainly consisted of footage from Prison Planet and The fucking Matrix, I highly doubt it has anything particularly earth-shattering to impart. The thing that got me thinking though, was the part where it quote from a speech by JFK, in the first segment. You can find the whole speech (predictably paranoided to all fuck) here.

Now, I've heard this speech before, both in conspiracy contexts and otherwise, but its use by conspiracy theorists has always glossed over me before. Really, I don't think I should have to explain it. It's an interesting window into the world of conspiracy nuts that when they hear an American president, at practically the height of the cold war, say "we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy, that relies primarily on covet means for expanding it's fear of influence" they say "BILDERBERG GROUP SKULL AND BONES MASONS ILLUMINATI OMG" rather than any other powerful, secretive groups with enormous power that happened to be around at the time.

Which got me thinking. I've read a few articles and seen a few youtube videos exposing the dishonest use of quote mining by creationists (The TalkOrigins Archive is, as normal, bang on the money). But I've never really seen someone attempt to dissect conspiracist screed this way. Oh, likely it has been done. This is the internet after all, and nitpackers and paranoid sociopaths cross paths hundreds of times a day. So, lets have a crack at this video. Moving on to part two, which is confusingly titled part one. Apparently this guy sells this on DVD. Presumably in case Annunakis vampire lizards and big pharmaceuticals ever start using youtube to subliminally control the minds of an unwilling populace. Trying to imagine the kind of person who buys this stuff is depressing and a little frightening, like photographs from Victorian textbooks on developmental biology. ANYWAY. Part two. 'The Global Elite'.

First up, we have William Pitt (the older one), advising us in 1770 that:

"There is something behind the throne greater than the King himself."

Well, why, yes, of course there is. It's called 'Parliament'. Pitt may have been referring to the citizenry in general either, but given that 1770 was the year he re-joined the House of Lords, I think that this is a safe bet, as well as making perfect sense. Britain was well into the century and a half long process of reforms that stripped the monarch of all remaining power and established parliamentary sovereignty by this point. And why is power behind the throne such a bad thing? Is this man advocating absolute monarchy as a good alternative to the NWO? Or does he think Pitt was the king?

Also, what is it with the music in these films? There's practically a genre of this stuff. Electro-Paranoid. Lots of simple drum loops straight off some charity shop sample CD, with bad reverb splashed everywhere. You'd think if this guy has the balls to rip scenes from the Matrix and sell it on DVD he could be bothered to infringe the copyright of some decent music.

Next we have Roosevelt informing us that large financial institutions have a lot of leverage in government. Well, of course. One of the most annoying abilities of conspiracy theorists is their capacity to take a lot of things that are basically true and mould it into something utterly retarded.

Damn, I thought this quote run would be longer. Instead we segue straight to a sort of pseudo-documentary bit. Apparently the American Revolution was fought against central banks. I'm sensing that we're about to see a stream of incomprehensible graphs badly cropped from GIS and a lot of bollocks about Adam Smith. Fucking libertarians. Because I can't be bothered to learn once again how money like, doesn't really exist man and we're all like, totally in debt to the Rockefeller Group and doubtless how the way to fix it is to put us back on the chuffing gold standard, I'm going to skip ahead.

Oh fucking hell. Twenty minutes on the fucking Bilderberg group? "What are these rich and powerful people doing behind closed doors?" What do you think? They're smoking cigars, drinking brandy and getting expert blowjobs, of course. Damn, when I started this article, I thought I was going to get more play out of the central premise, rather than just swearing at a badly edited video which is trying to get me to believe rich people and politicians need to control the world with conspiracies, rather than, you know, openly. Like they actually do.

Bilderberg...Bush...Icke...oh sod this. This post is over. I'll get you next time, you dastardly fiends.

A New Beginning

2009-05-20T23:27:00.000-07:00

All other blogs have now been rendered historical curiosities.

Stand by.