Monthly Archive for July, 2009

Heavy Rotation: WEFUNK Radio

Published on 31. 07. 2009 in hype & linkage and music. 2 Comments

wefunk-itunes-300x300.jpgGood evening. We have taken control as to bring you this special show. We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving.

These last few days, I’ve been listening more or less non-stop to the great Montreal radio station, WEFUNK Radio, which has operated out of McGill University for over a decade now and is as awesome as ever.

If you dig classic funk, soul, RnB, jazz fusion, as well as the best in in hip hop — historical and contemporary — it’s the perfect place to tune in. Hosts Professor Groove and DJ Static have impeccable taste, great musical knowledge and bring to their mixes years of experience, plus they often feature quality guest DJs, guaranteeing variety with quality.

There’s a new show every Saturday morning between midnight and 2 AM Montreal time, plus over 300 archived shows from the last 8 years or so. Really, I can’t recommend this station highly enough.

W-E-F-U-N-K, or, deeper still, the Mothership Connection.

Gaea Ascendant

Published on 29. 07. 2009 in commentary and criticism and film, tv, video. 0 Comments

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Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is, at one and the same time, amongst his subtler works and one of the most blunt and, frankly, simplistic.

It’s his first movie since Europa (1991) in which the artifice of the cinematic image is explored for illusionistic effect, but that film was simultaneously emphatically Brechtian with its jarring, intellectual storytelling strategies and mise-en-scène — a creative track he has since been exploring in different ways in most of his films — so, really, the earlier work Antichrist most acutely recalls is the feature debut, The Element of Crime (1984). That film was an unabashed and visually striking, but to my mind rather pretentious and ultimately unsuccessful pastiche on the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, and it seems no coincidence that Antichrist is dedicated to the great Russian, on whose cinematic language it is a much more sensitive and independent take. Continue reading ‘Gaea Ascendant’

Picks of the Week

Published on 27. 07. 2009 in comics and cartooning and current affairs. 0 Comments

The picks of the week from around the web.

  • The New York Times: “Radovan Karadzic’s New-Age Adventure” by Jack Hitt. This must-be-read-to-be-believed article describes the former Bosnian Serb leader and war criminal’s life in hiding from Interpol as a new age-healer — complete with sperm-revivifying hands — in Belgrade. A must. (Thanks, Mi!)
  • The TLS: “Iran Votes Again”. This is a little late, but for anyone interested in what is, and especially has been, going on in Iran, this review by Rosemary Righter of three books on the Khomeinist Revolution and Iran is greatly illuminating.
  • Prisoners of Gravity: Jack Kirby. Recently uploaded to YouTube: The King profiled and interviewed on this 90s Canadian TV show roughly a year before his death. I dare you to see it without at least choking up a little bit. Parts one, two, three. (Thanks, Henry!)
  • Easily Mused: R. Crumb Makes no Apologies! Great Crumb art — some drawn from life in France, some featuring God! — from the early 1990s. Need I say more? (Thanks, Dirk!)
  • And finally, a couple more great comics features in list form — Gary Panter’s top ten comics at Vice (which now has a whole comics guide up), and Seth on classic cartoonists at AV Club (Thanks Tim! Thanks Tom!)

    • Hype: Den nye gamle stil

    Published on 25. 07. 2009 in hype & linkage and music. 0 Comments


    Just wanted to hype the release of my man DJ Carsten and his MC partner in rhyme, Paulo, on their new release, Den nye gamle stil (‘The New Old Style’). I’m obviously biased, but I still cannot recommend their work enough, if you want to get a taste of quality Danish underground hip hop.

    Carsten’s production skills have grown in leaps and bounds over the past few years, synthesizing traditional boom bap sound with a more jazzy vibe without ever sounding contrived, while Paulo has long been one of the most interesting and original MCs on the Danish scene. Although perhaps a little too mired in the classic preservationist, back-to-the roots, two-turntables-and-a-microphone themes so common in a lot of hip hop, he brings to the table a highly distinctive, often arrythmic, almost conversational flow, and when doing more concept-driven raps, such as “Animalistisk” on the new record, he shows himself as a fine writer too. Continue reading ‘Hype: Den nye gamle stil’

    Reads: Challengers of the Unknown

    Published on 24. 07. 2009 in comics and cartooning and commentary and criticism. 0 Comments

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    I’ve been reading that Showcase collection of 1950s Challengers of the Unknown comics by Jack Kirby intermittently over the past months. The stories are pretty dreary — although large parts of them can probably be ascribed to him, Kirby was still working with a pretty pedestrian writer in Dave Wood — but the art is just fantastic! Continue reading ‘Reads: Challengers of the Unknown’

    Livlige døde

    Published on 22. 07. 2009 in comics and cartooning and commentary and criticism. 2 Comments

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    Jeg har haft den her til at ligge et stykke tid og skriver som Bunkerens læsere måske vil have noteret kun sjældent anmeldelser, men den fortjener alligvel et par ord. Jacob Rask Nielsen er manden bag den noget ujævne, men grafisk stærke “Klovn!” i Free Comics og var vinderen — med striben Carlo & Co. — af Berlingskes dubiøse tegneseriekonkurrence 2006. Siden har han udviklet sig betydeligt, både rent grafisk og fortællemæssigt, i en række charmerende, selvudgivne børnebøger, og dette kan mærkes i Exodus, der mig bekendt er hans første forsøg udi en længere tegneseriehistorie. Continue reading ‘Livlige døde’

    Picks of the Week

    Published on 19. 07. 2009 in comics and cartooning, culture, current affairs, history, hype & linkage and pictorial arts. 0 Comments

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    The picks of the week from around the web.

  • London Review of Books: “The Rome-Tehran Axis”. In his typical perambulatory fashion — segueing from Iran to Berlusconi to Kung Fu Panda — celebrity philosopher Slavoj Žižek makes a somewhat off-the-cuff, but nevertheless compelling and disturbing argument about the current evolution of Western democracy.
  • Comics Comics: Dave Sim/Neal Adams on Color. With permission, Frank Santoro publishes a section of Dave Sim’s mammoth interview from Following Cerebus #9 with fellow cartoonist and comic book legend Neal Adams, in which they discuss the comic book colouring techniques of the 1960s. Fascinating for people interested in the more technical aspects of comics history. (The interview itself is well worth seeking out, if nothing else for the revelatory portrait of Adams it draws).
  • The New York Times: “One Giant Leap to Nowhere”. Marking the 30th Anniversary of Apollo 11, Tom Wolfe ponders why the space program subsequently never really took off.
  • Fecalface: interview with Ben Jones. Interviews with the Boston cartoonist and post-pop artist are pretty rare, and it’s a pretty good one, but the real treat here are pictures from a gallery show of his.

    • Roskilde Graffiti at 10!

    Published on 16. 07. 2009 in documentation, hype & linkage and pictorial arts. 0 Comments

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    For ten years now, my man Lars has run the graffiti project at the Roskilde Festival — every year, they gather writers from around the world, who come at their own expense to decorate the walls and barriers around the festival area and parts of the camping grounds, and the quality of the work has long been top notch. It’s a great partnership between the festival and the writers, which gives everyone some great work to look at, instead of the random tagging and throwups of earlier times. A veritable, if discrete, annual arts festival.

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    Rapspot and Molotow have documented this year’s walls, while Lars himself has run a bunch of videos from the street art area, as well as a couple of spots, one from the festival’s own web TV channel and one from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The festival itself also has a write-up in both English and Danish. Also, here’s the Bunker’s post from last year.

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    Here’s a drink, *ting!*

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    The Cage Stands as Before

    Published on 12. 07. 2009 in comics and cartooning, commentary and criticism, letters and pictorial arts. 2 Comments

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    The English illustrator, painter and comics artist Martin Vaughn-James passed away last week (obits here and here). Perhaps this will be an occasion for comics world to take greater note of this significant artist and innovator in the medium. Owing to his influences and probably especially the fact that he lived in Brussels for the latter part of his life, he is much admired by critics and scholars, if not the comics-reading populace at large, in the Francophone world. In America, however, he lamentably remains largely unknown.

    From what little I’ve seen of his work as an illustrator and painter, I would hazard the guess that his work in comics, although comparatively limited — consisting as it does of a mere half a dozen books — is nevertheless his most significant. His approach to the form, both in terms of narration and, more concretely, his blend of words and images, remains unique in the medium, all the while prefiguring important later innovations by direct progeny such as Schuiten and Peeters and Marc-Antoine Mathieu, as well as by such less directly related figures as Richard McGuire and the Fort Thunder cartoonists, different as they are. Continue reading ‘The Cage Stands as Before’

    Out of Time

    Published on 09. 07. 2009 in commentary and criticism, culture, current affairs, film, tv, video, music and performance. 1 Comment

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    I owe Michael Jackson a huge debt. In many ways, he gave me a music I could call my own. Thriller hit at just the right moment for me, opening a musical path different from that of my parents. Youngsters were already popping and locking on the corners around my neighbourhood and tags were being scrawled on the walls on the way to school. I didn’t have a tape recorder myself, but friends would play the album when I was over, and we would imitate the bigger kids on the block with our own interpretation of the uprock and electric boogie.

    Of course, Michael wasn’t hip hop, but he came from the same place, and he related directly to the culture and of course influenced it considerably—the moonwalk, for example, is intimately related to dance steps first taken on concrete. Before moving on to the Rocksteady Crew, Run DMC, and the Fat Boys—and eventually more broadly the music of Black America, including his great paragon, James Brown—he was the voice of the streets for me. Continue reading ‘Out of Time’

    Er Roskilde stadig Orange?

    Published on 08. 07. 2009 in articles and essays, commentary and criticism and music. 0 Comments


    Så er denne signatur atter kommet hjem fra Roskilde Festivalen i god behold. Som sædvanligt med følelsen af at være totalt mørbanket efter dage med musik og fest i overdådige mængder, og med farvelråbet ”vi ses til næste år!” Continue reading ‘Er Roskilde stadig Orange?’

    AWOL på Roskilde

    Published on 06. 07. 2009 in journal and music. 0 Comments

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    Emmas og mit bryllup havde den uheldige konsekvens at vi glippede Roskilde i år. Det ville ellers have været undertegnedes 15. festival og den 10. i træk. Vi ville gerne havde kunnet klone os selv og have haft det skægt på to kontinenter samtidig, men sådan spillede drejebordet ikke denne gang.

    Nåmmen, pointen er såmænd bare, at Rapspot som sædvanlig var på pletten med Danmarks bedste hip hop-dækning og at I bør checke for deres updates, der hvis jeg kender proceduren ret vil fortsætte i en jævn strøm de næste par uger.

    Foto v. Rapspots Kenneth Nguyen. Her er sidste års Bunker-rapport fra festivalen.

    Picks of the Week

    Published on 06. 07. 2009 in comics and cartooning, current affairs, hype & linkage and music. 0 Comments

    “Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.”

    – Joseph Stiglitz

    The picks of the week from around the web.

  • The Economy. New York Times columnist Frank Rich in true form on the US government bank bailouts, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in a short, pointed piece for Vanity Fair on the world economy and the international perception of US policy and excerpts from Matt Tabibi’s attack job on Goldman Sacks in this month’s Rolling Stone, probably to be read with some skepticism, but nevertheless thought-provoking.
  • Michael Jackson. Amidst all the post-mortem accolades and fawn, Maureen Orph’s articles on Jackson for Vanity Fair over the years provide a sobering, if also at times excessively muckraking tonic.
  • Wood/Frazetta. A blogger has posted paste-up images, with text, of Frank Frazetta’s version of the EC story “Came the Dawn” (1953), which Wally Wood drew for Shock SuspenStories #9, that I linked to earlier. Check it out — it’s still awesome.

    • Back from the Road

    Published on 06. 07. 2009 in comics and cartooning and journal. 0 Comments

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    It’s been a long time. I shouldn’t have left you. Things kind of went out the window as Emma and I went off to get married (a big thanks to Henry for throwing in his update here!). After the wedding itself we went on the road through California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. It was a magical month, even if reality crept in and reminded us that the world don’t stop. Thanks especially to motel cable and cranky wi-fi, our thoughts were in Iran a lot of the time. Fingers still crossed here for a sensible outcome of the crisis there.

    In the coming days I’ll share a few thoughts and such from the trip, but will mainly concentrate on getting the blog up and running again. Unfortunately, this is also crunch time for my PhD dissertation, so expect erraticism. Continue reading ‘Back from the Road’