Moore's Eno interview

An interview of Brian Eno by Alan Moore for BBC Radio 4 is available here until next Thursday.

Also, last week's interview of Alan Moore by comedian Stewart Lee is now available as a transcript here (link via David Simpson).

Eno: [...] this is a big interest for me, lyric generators. That’s something I’m working on at the moment.

Moore: Really?

Eno: Yeah, I think that’s... Lyrics are really the last very hard problem in music. Software -and hardware- have changed the rest of music dramatically in the last thirty, forty years. It’s very very easy to make pretty good music. I could take anyone in this room and within two hours we could make a pretty good piece of music. I mean, pretty good isn’t very interesting, but pretty good is possible.

But writing songs is just about in the same place it was in the days of Chaucer. Apart from hip hop: hip hop is the only sort of breakthrough in a way -rap. Because it breaks away from the strict adherence to melody and beat structure and so on. But the problem of how you write a song that is in any way original is a really interesting one, I think. [...]

Moore: I’m fascinated by this idea of a lyric generator, because it’ll probably just, like, make me completely redundant and ruin my plans for a contented retirement. How far are you along with it? [laughs]


(transcript by moi)

Trollop trio

Sequential Tart has recently uploaded, among other items, the following three interviews: Jessica Abel on La Perdida, Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson on travelogue A Few Perfect Hours, and Sean Bieri, Trisha L. Sebastian and Carla Speed McNeil on mini-comics porn anthology Smut Peddler.

[Smut Peddler] is a controlled group effort. It evolved out of a lot of grumbling from some talented folks: most porn, especially in comics, is lame. What do you do if you don't like what's out there? Get busy.

Link via Thought Balloons.

Four profiles

Time profiles Paul Hornschemeier, Marjane Satrapi, Rieko Saibara and Joann Sfar here.

After her series about losing $500,000 in illegal mah-jongg became a hit, she went on to cultivate her personal style of manga (the Japanese term for comics), which now has many imitators. Says Saibara: "People who can draw well are too proud to do anything, and many of them are still starving artists."


Cover to "Bokunchi" by Rieko Saibara.

Link via Thought Balloons.

Art Spiegelman documentary

Franco-German arts channel "Arte" broadcast a documentary on Art Spiegelman two weeks ago. Two short clips from it -one on part of his creative process and another on comics' place in the US' culture and its possible usefulness as a "gateway drug into literature" for children -are available here. Click on the "Extrait video" 1 and 2 links, "haut-debit" for high speed or "bas-debit" for low. Both clips are in English with French subtitles.

Thanks to FuFu.

Alan Moore interview

Alan Moore will be interviewed tomorrow by comedian Stewart Lee on BBC Radio 4. The interview will then be available on the site for one week.

Link via Mikal/BugPowder.

David Mamet, cartoonist

Not content with being a filmmaker, playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer and poet, David Mamet is now also a cartoonist.

As a cartoonist, Mamet trades in sick jokes and truly terrible puns. Example: "Dean Martin at the Aquarium": A male figure seen from behind, facing a toothy, snakelike water creature behind glass, thinks, "That's a moray."

Probably the only thing that Mamet's film and theater works have in common with his cartoons is an interest in making us wince or guffaw or roll our eyes involuntarily. They offer him, besides distraction, one more way to reacquaint us with our own unwanted visceral knowledge of the world.



Link via The Comics Reporter.

Johnny Ryan interview

Johnny Ryan is interviewed by G4techTV here.

Have you ever pulled back on a comic that you thought might be going too far?

Usually, when I’m drawing something and I’m thinking, “Gosh, maybe I shouldn’t do this,” that’s usually when I think, well, I guess I should do it. Because if I'm thinking I shouldn't do it, then I should actually do it -that’s sort of what makes it fun. After you do something like that, you’re thinking, “Wait till people get a load of this. There’ll really be a big stir.”

Link via Jenny Nixon.

James Sturm and the Center for Cartoon Studies

The Boston Globe profiles James Sturm, founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. See also its profile of the Center from three weeks ago.

Sturm's school will take its lead from "cartoonists who consider themselves artists rather than just craftsmen," he says. "I see it as an Iowa Writer's Workshop or New York University Film School equivalent to cartooning. We're geared more towards the auteur."

Links via Thomas James Appel and Jeff Mason.