CYMANDE. STILL ROCKIN.

yesterday, as every thursday with my partner in crime dj Feet, i played some records in our local headquarters, Le Se7en bar, in Besancon. and as usual, i've tried to display hip hop, broken beat, old soul-funk, and other various shit. in the end of the night, 2 guys went near the turntable and told me that they loved a track i've played, the classic "Bra" from the mighty Cymande, back in... well, back in time. the guys told me they recognized the track cause they were astonished by it when seing the last Spike Lee movie, which was exactly the reason why i took the lp with me yesterday nite. ;)

WORK UPDATES.

- i almost finished the cutting and the page-setting of Seb 's story.
it will be probably a 16 to 24 pages story, and the more i work on it, the more black and white feels natural. at first, the idea of doing a (nearly) all indoor story made me think about the utilities of working on colors of the differents rooms, etc... but b&w will probably help to capture the tone of the story. we cannot talk about a real 200% collaboration here, as i just work on one of his stories and not work with him on the writing of it, but i can't wait to try something deeper with him... hmmm, well, it ain't exactly what i wanted to say, you porno oriented lazy people !

- i think i'll get the pictures that we need to use for Zo record sleeve this weekend, thanks to Jay.
my old friend do some photography since a couple of times, and Zo and him decided to go for a photo cover, with a few graphotizm effects that I'll work on later these next weeks.

- the cover for the program of Mulhouse's "Le Noumatrouff" (a cool place for concerts and events) is done and thanks to Dyotte (the man behind Le Nouma's visual mess), i received some of it, wich are billions miles away from what i think it could be ; of course, i don't like it that much (for many many good reasons), but in the inside cover, Dyotte said a few nice things about it and gave away my blog URL, and guess what ? i already got some feedbacks about what some call my "art". ;) more news soon.

- i finished the pencils on the first part of my little sized untitled child story (a la Warren Ellis, let's call it "Child Thing One", eh eh eh). 36 pages done (or so), and i still wonder how i'll manage to finish the ink process and the colors before july (the deadline).
as usual, finishing one step of some artwork always show me what's wrong in it. and as usual, i've seen nothing but tons of wrong things in it. in the story, in the page-settings, in the characterisation... anyway. i'd tried to rework some of the main elements but it's not this easy. argh. countdown to july. what to do ? reload it all ? yes. it will be the more professionnal choice of it... and so i'll be late, once again !

- IEPLB? number 15 is up and coming, thanks to Thierry's brand new computer. eh eh eh.

- IEPLB?-the-website is still something that we gotta talk with the crew, but i already got some ideas about how building it, and about its look, too. i started working on its iconography and will try to get a better version that the current one, which really, really sucks.

- while in the IEPLB? topic, i got a email of somebody who asked me if i did the little green drawings in the backside of it.
heck, i wish that it was me !
Frederick Peeters, the up and coming talent behind "Pillules Bleues", "Lupus" and so on, answered us that it was ok to use some his art as a backside art (we just have to tell our families that one day we'll all have to pay the full price for it - Fred is a real, real nice guy !) (which reminds me that i got to publish here the nice little drawings he did to me and Thierry while in Angouleme 2003), when we asked him for it (of course, we make thanks in IEPLB?14 to him and his publisher Atrabile).

MOOCH SAYS : THANK YOU !

first, a big thank you for all of those who wrote me about Mooch ! the little fucker was quite afraid when i refound him, really near my sister home ; he was outside for the first time of his life for less than 36 hours but he looked like he was in jail for 3 months. at least he was totally glad and run amok when gone home. i think he ate twice his own size and will sleep for something like 4 years.
thank you, cat lovers. and Mooch says Hi, too.

WHY I SUCK (part. 2148942).

as i got to quit my last flat a few weeks ago, my little sister told me that she was ok to take care of my stupid young cat, Mooch. i was so fucked up at the moment that i was glad of this, as my life of squatter right now isn't compatible with a cat's life, uh. she lived in a little town, pretty quiet and all, near from the hundreds cars that pass by the streets of Besancon. well.
and yesterday night, my lil' sis phoned me to tell me that after one month of watching birds and other cats from the window (my sis live at the first floor of a big house), Mooch leaved.
it reminds me far too much my last cat, Nestor, which i discovered by myself on the side of the road, nothing but hard, cold, and dead, a few years ago, when i was "between" 2 places and that my cat was at my parents place, in the same town as my sister.
so here i am.
i'm going to this very town right now, quite sure that my not-already-1-year-old cat is somewhere around...
.. and of course, i cannot stop thinking about if i spent my life doing the good choices at the good moment, i shouldn't be here, going from some friend's place to another, thinking about where the fuck my cat went. this cat is cool as fuck. really.
that's it.

EUROCKEENNES DE BELFORT 2003.

ok, so the press conference is scheduled to beginning of april, but there's already a few news about it : Radiohead on friday night, Massive Attack on sunday, and also The Roots, Cypress Hill, and... some Anticon artists ? Boom Bip ? Dose One ? who else ?
more news soon : i'll have a conversation with the people of the programmation real soon... :)

BIG DADA BLOG, TOO.

the infamous Ninja Tune inprint dedicated to hip hop (well, another view of what hip hop is) launched its own kind of blog...
"It's like a mutant cross between a blog and a bulletin board, with artists and label-folk able to post up items on the left and site users able to add their two penny's worth on the right. It ain't a whole new forum, cos Ninja have kind of got that locked down, but it is a place where people can go and read or write whatever they feel like. Or, if that sounds a bit worthy, a place where misfits can gather and talk shit".
there's already artists from the label who wrote on it, like the unmissable Teki Latex from TTC who talks about girlzz (Ellen Alien, right now) and some various other shit :
"(...)and i just watched the Goonies DVD with the infamous octopus scene at the end, it's really a must see (especially the Cindy Lauper video for "goonies r good enough", the theme song that was used later on in the NES video game "goonies 2", which clouddead sampled on "jimmybreeze") (...)"
'nuff said ! ;)

STUPID NEWS FROM THE WORLD.

- Get your war on ! the best strips are here. well it ain't a real "news", but it deserve the click, really.

- "National guardman changed his name to a toy". i got serious doubts about this guy being a huge fan of Mike Ladd's projects, but seing how stupid this guy just made me laugh. so this is it.

- at last, the Beastie Boys are around, ready to fill our hope. :)

- but the best one is of course this (make your own choice !!!) : here ?this one ? or maybe this point of view ? that one ? your prefer another vision ? .
but you already knew that, so it's no big deal, uh.
let's keep it clear and simple (a la Ed Norton speech to himself in Spike Lee's "the 25th hour") :
i fuck Georges W Bush, master of the universe, self proclaimed saver of real good peoples, arrogant and disturbing person who don't have 1% of the abilities for being in his fuckin' white house leather armchair, his so-called belief in god (his god, uh), and his fuckin high self esteem, for himself and his bunch of deadly assholes, US defence secretary Donald "the best defence is attack" Rumsfeld, Vice (really, really) President Dick Cheney, secretary of state Colin "pigface" Powell, UK prime minister Tony "shame on you little sheep" Blair, and all their Norman Schwarzkopf wannabes too glad to use their little toys away from home. Fuck also Bechtel, Kellogg, Brown & Root, Fluor and whatever firm that inject money in these stupid, stupid bloody thing. i'll continue this list this afternoon, the public CPU place is closing now. more later.

NEWS FROM THE RUSSIAN PERCUSSIAN TOUR.

dj Vadim, Yarah Bravo, dj First Rate and others people from the hip hop live act called the Russian Percussian Tour are currently doing a north american tour, where they do loads of gigs in many towns from US to canada. i think the tour will be finished soon, and i suppose it was cool as shit, as usual ; anyway.
Vadim and the crew send some kind of journal of their life through the US roads, every week or so, where they talk about the shows, the crowds, the artists they met, and, least but not last, their acts and their conversations with people they see/meet in each town. this 5th installment of their weekly diary talks about many things, but i post it there for one reason : Rachel Corrie.

"...Tue 18th March - Seattle
Before driving to Seattle we got some breakfast at Whole Foods, that's the best supermarket we have found out here. All organic, and the choice of food is great. Salads, sushi, lentil soups etc... I wish we had that in London where we live!
Gez wanted to visit the Adidas original store (as if he didn't have enough shoes already) cause there's only 2 like this one in the world, one in Nuremberg /Germany and one in Portland/US. But we got the the wrong directions and ended up at the Nike Outlet store, which we piss all over. And  unfortunately we did not have enough time to look for the real spot, so we got on the road to Seattle. And Gez shed a tear...
The Seattle show was probably the strangest and most emotional show we have ever done.  Before the show Dj Vital (the opening DJ) came backstage and he told us a  very touching and hurting story. He told us about his good friend Rachel Corrie. She was an American citizen who was murdered 2 days previously after being run over by an  bulldozer while she was trying to stop it from tearing down a building in Rafah, Palestine. The Bulldozer ignored her outcry and ran over her - twice. She was protesting against the occupation, the inhuman, insulting, humiliating and degrading conditions put on the Palestinians.
While Dj Vital was telling us this story he was crying, it was a very emotional moment and we started crying as well. He told us that Rachel Corrie was a big Ninja Tune fan, and a big fan of my music, and if she would've been there tonight she would've stood at the front dancing. This was very real!
At the back of the club all her friends  had made a shrine laid out to her with letters, flowers , photos.... And it almost felt like we were about to do a show for a funeral audience, since everyone in that room seemed to know her. We started the show with a minute of silence and Yarah said a few words. Later in the show Yarah invited Dj Vital on stage to share a few words with the audience. He spoke a painful heartfelt message and at the end of the show there was a lot of people very emotional and tearful. We dedicated the show and the rest of our tour to Rachel Corrie and all other Freedom Fighters who are no longer with us. And the show ended up being a celebration of her life and what she stood for. If you would like to read her story check out WWW.MICHAELMOORE.COM..."

dj Vadim isn't just one of the best hiphop producer/dj/label owner/etc... not only he's one of the best for these kind of shit (which always redefine the term of hip hop and help breaking its own boundaries), but far away from cliché of "classic" hip hop headz, the hairy dj got a real conscience. he got strong beliefs in many things that many people don't even care, and more vadims would help to live on this planet, i suppose. mmh... i wonder what the sweet Yarah Bravo (one of the finest lyricist this side of the universe - check out "cum shots", produced by this very Vadim and just released on Ninja Tune) thinks about that... :)

WARREN SAYS...

come on, i know that this blog's go to be more personnal oriented and all. but these last weeks had been such boring for me that i cannot imagine speaking about it to you, thousands of readers. :)

Warren Ellis, some disturbed guy, wrote.
in fact, he does many things, but cannot stop to write. tons of words, billions of sentences, posting them to its mailing list or sending them to the artists he work with, for licensing some of the best comics worlwide, through many publishers.
what did i say ? oh, yeah, Warren wrote this (all above text was sent on Warren' Badsignal mailing list - badsignal-subscribe@lists.flirble.org - that i recommend to all of you) :

"French people, please stop emailing to guess what French Film Thing is. I'm not going to tell you, because it still may not happen. I'll update this at the end of the month.".

the man don't wanna talk about his Albator movie project, produced by Jean-Pierre Dionnet and done by Oliver Dahan ?
heck, with all this noise around this project, i really hope it will works. and that Olivier Dahan will really do a REAL movie, this time. don't fuck with Warren, Olivier...

"No, I'm not getting hate mail from America about working with French people.
And I wouldn't care if I did.".

tell me that Warren' readers ain' t this stupid, uh ?

"However, I have had comments relayed back to me about Reload #1, one person reporting that his retailer, upon selling him the book, commented that if I were in America I'd be deservedly hanged for writing that book.".

... damn...

"I've signed a deal with Sci-Fi Channel to develop a concept I created for a TV movie and possible back-door pilot. They came to me to talk about creating something in the mode of the currently popular comic-book licenses. What I gave them back was something action-based but more grounded and science-fictional; more in common with Sturgeon, Pohl, Zelazny and Silverberg than Spider- Man. And they bought it anyway, bless them. It's called SUPERHUMAN, and it's about the confluence of physical change and transhuman technological approach bringing on superhumanity. Right now, I'm the originator and a producer. None of the next steps are set in stone right now, and obviously there are no guarantees past my authorship of the development document. But, yeah. I'm being paid to create and develop a movie for Sci-Fi Channel. The deal was brokered by manager Aaron Michiel and agent Angela Cheng Caplan with Carel Cutler at Writers And Artists. And I owe Larry Young a beer. That's all I'm saying for now.".

if you told me this a few years ago, i'd probably said something like "shut up you funny liar". but Ellis is going more than a Media Engine #<5000, by now...

on a heavier topic, he also wrote this :

"I remember when Gulf War One kicked off. We'd all been waiting for it for days. That night, I was down at the local all-night burger place, writing LAZARUS CHURCHYARD; working longhand in a notebook in those days, sketching out the pages so I didn't ask for anything impossible to draw in the scripts. Sammy, the owner, would tell my friends that I'd been in there until 4am, "making his little drawings and taking tablets with his Coke." The little TV was on in there, but he wasn't turning down the radio or the bloody fruit machines.

I looked up, and the balloon went up and the cruise missiles banged off and we'd gotten our war on. I stood at the counter, watching a war start on TV, with a fruit-machine background of bingbingbingbing bloopbloop chakkachakkachakka you're a winner!

After about forty-five minutes, the initial bombardment paused, and I ran home. My housemate was waiting at the stairs. We both yelled at each other, "It's started!" Stayed up til dawn watching the first war to be fully televised.

Last night, I had the BBC News 24 videostream open on the right hand side of my screen while I wrote in the left, AOL open in the bottom quarter of the screen so I could trade email with Fraction and Peter Rose, both channel-surfing in the States. And we thought watching the first one on TV was creepy.

There's a webcam in Baghdad, but it's down.

The crump of bombing distorted out of my speakers, as I looked down on Baghdad at dawn through the BBC camera. They had a reporter on the phone in central Baghdad, and he couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice: I'm in the centre of the city and they're not bombing me. Anti-aircraft fire cracked over his voice.

Imagine being in one of those houses. With your family. You never got to dissent. This war's got nothing to do with you. You can hear the sound of the world's big dog scratching and booming outside your door, and you never did anything wrong but to be born there.

Regime change could have been effected twelve years ago and very few people would have argued the toss, the tangle of America's fickle affections aside. In a different phase of American geopolitical manipulation, Saddam Hussein was the lesser of two evils, and no-one wanted to see crazy Iran win a Middle East war. That Saddam is a little bastard is almost irrelevant now. The real needs of this war have little to do with Saddam being a basket case who shouldn't be allowed to run a bath, let alone a country. The instances where there were actual justification for going in, taking him and putting him in front of a court are long gone.

There were other ways. There were always other ways. And now we, able to dissent, made complicit by democracy, will wear the stink of a para-legal war of oil and Robespierrean guillotine politics for a long time."

'nuff said. i love this guy.

25TH HOUR.

..does Spike Lee did the right thing, once again, with something that could be his best movie ever ?
more comment soon. waiting for it, 2 words : GO SEE THIS MOVIE. yeah, i know, it makes 4. anyway.

IL EST PAS LA BRUNO ?

well, finally it's done. We just released the "new" (eh eh eh...) issue of Il Est Pas La Bruno ?, our little information sheet dedicated to the up and coming comics we love. IEPLB? is a full color, free 'zine, available at Thierry's bookshop, and we tried to did something cool and interesting to read, doing promotion of what we love to read, or what will be released that deserve to be checked.

Of course, we went through problems while print processus, and IEPLB? looks pretty bad, but heck, we'll try to keep a monthly schedule on it, so i suppose it's just a matter of time for IEPLB? to be more complete, more good looking, more... well, more "professionnal" ! and more professionnal will be the future look of the IEPLB? webpage, which is, at the moment, nothing but a kind of beta-informative-test-version... plenty of work on it, too, so maybe you can wait before to visit... :) oh yeah, the people under IEPLB? can be reached through ilestpaslabruno@fr.st

Right now, we got nothing but enthousiastic echoes about ish 14 (Le Combat Ordinaire by Manu Larcenet, Lupus by Frederik Peeters, but also Wolverine/Hulk, Ibicus, Gargouilles, Octave...), even if the high amount of informations in it make it hard to read... so it's cool, and it's filling us with motivation for the next issues.
issue 14 was released this last saturday, so i think that we can say that our monthly shit will be available around the 15 of each month ; next one will feature more infos, and for the number 16 of IEPLB? (due in may), we'll already do a double-sized issue. yeah, pretty into it, i know... ;)

oh yeah, did i say that it's in french ? :)

GLOBAL WORDWIDE VIRTUAL COMMUNITY CYBER SHIT.

a nice little word from this Ellis guy, the only man who's parano enough to be afraid of some Biro ink...

"At Bruce Sterling's house in Austin,Texas, Howard Waldrop beams Cory Doctorow an mp3 of some swampy old rock'n'roll from the dawn of time. The next day, across town, his powerbook scorching the flesh off his legs, he beams it over to me in England. I put it up on a private server for Fraction in Kansas City and Laurenn in San Francisco, while reading the first few chapters of Cory's new book, which he sent to me from an airport a few days before, squatting by the power outlet next to the public toilets. I put down Charlie Stross' next book for this, shot down the phone from Scotland, presumably before he had to go out with his pear to hunt dinner. Make a note to send the mp3 to Deon Maas in South Africa. Bára sends photos from her balcony in Reykjavik while Andy Cosby threatens my screenplay with substance-challenged 80s TV stars from LA. Jean-Pierre Dionnet says hello from somewhere in Asia, which reminds me I need to speak to Olivier Dahan, who by now is probably in the depths of France, shooting a film with Jean Reno. M Shakti, somewhere between 2003 America and 1920 Paris, lets me know she has audio-blogs up at anaiscam.com. Cory's document goes in the file with the short story Kenji Siratori sent me from Tokyo.
In 1988, I was living in a room that was six feet long and six feet wide, with no phone, nothing but a record player with tape deck and a portable manual typewriter.
I remember waking up one afternoon and reaching for my last cigarette, that a girl had written "Good Morning" on with a biro before leaving, and thinking: Christ, the world's got to be bigger than this.
I also remember thinking she was trying to poison me with biro ink."

have a nice weekend. i'll try to have some rest after the 4 hours per night i got these last days... and after the whole mess the first paper issue of IEPLB? took : hours of Illustrator/photoshop treatment, thousands of words, and at last, a nice little project done with people who are really into it. call it motivation, bit it worked good ; now, to bed. unnhhhh.

RETRO FUTURE VISION OF FUNK.

or something. Black Joy, some long time dj/producer/beat head of my favorites, finally got some his first 12" ("untitled/paloma") at your local record shop. retro future vision of funk (taken from the artist's bio page) is one of the many definition of the guy's music, but as usual, it's not this easy to describe feelings when it comes to name it, maybe you got to check it by yourselves, you lazy people ; anyway, Black Joy is available through Project Recordings, some french record label that we got to watch.
Chronowax take care of its distribution, so i think that finding it must be quite easy.
so this is it. check it, buy it, and if you want, buy 2 and send me one... :)

NEWS AND UPDATES.

so, once again i don't have much time these days, but at least i've done a few updates on the best blog ever, this one. :)

- Akroe, this goddamn Akroe, finally updated his site. you'll find plenty of graphics wonders, tons of funny wall paitings, and all this stuff result on a really interesting website, even if it's quite sad to see all this 2d magnificent shit in a simple pressbook format. meanwhile, it's quite simple to check all of his artwork, and if you don't have the best computer ever, it will be ok for you, too, so i guess it's okay.



- i'm not this alone in my lost eastern (and sometimes forgotten) France, being too much inside comics ! this saturday, Thierry and I finally meet Matthieu and Everland, and Everland's wife ; both of these 2 guys are making their way into this medium, and if they're spending probably too much time on bulledair.com (you can find them 24/24h here), they also save time for some personnals projects that really make me wanna keep an eye on it.
Matthieu, between other things, do some work in "Pavillon Rouge" (Delcourt publishing monthly magazine), he's also the man behind Christophe Blain's "Submarine" website (any update here ?), while Everland, Prince of the Potatoe Kingdom, is well knowed for his potatoidesk approach of illustrations, as seen in some fanzines, in "Grosbill" (some new french comics magazine), between other stuff...

- at last, i've finished a cover for next months' program of Mulhouse greatest place for concerts and events, a place called "le Noumatrouff". I will post it here as soon as i'll be able to do it. but nobody miss anything, believe me. ;)

- "le Combat Ordinaire" from Manu Larcenet (Dargaud publisher) and "Lupus" from Frederik Peeters (Atrabile publisher) are the 2 main french comics that deserve to be read, quickly, quickly. 2 differents styles, 2 differents creators, but 2 great stories to read, indeed. plus, both of them are really great guys, and for sure there's tomorrow top creators.
well, my humble opinion, uh.

oh yeah, and we spent this whole sunday afternoon drinking cokes under the sun !
yeah, yesterday ! in march ! under THE SUN !!! too godamm cool...

AAAAHHHH... WORDS FROM FRIENDS. 'FEELING BETTER.

so i got these ideas about a new trip to our dear ol' USA ; and i'd a talk with friends from there, asking them if any possibilities of catching them while in NY, Philly, or even (why "even", hotammit ?!...) Minnesota.
and one of them answers me, which was great to read. and yes, i know that you don't give a shit about my personnal stories, but it's a BLOG, after all so i felt like i got the right to post it here :
Heya!
Awesome! I can't wait. No matter where you show up, I will find you and we will meet. I am only about three hours away from D.C., four hours from NYC, and 3.5 from Philly!!! Plus, I might be going to Minnesota. So we will meet up for certain!
I'm glad you are coming over here. It should be good for you to get out of Europe and see some decadent American culture. Get your mind off all the shit back there in Besancon.
At any rate, please keep me informed of when you will be coming and any future plans. I hope you are doing better and life is becoming more stable again over there.
Be content and I will write more soon. Now it's off to school... merde, it's damn cold out there!
Be well, Ju. Be well.
Cheers, I.
P.S. I just read a review of a new APC album. I wonder if they released it after breaking up or something. Know anything about this? :)