JEREMY HARDY VS THE ISRAELI ARMY ? WAOH.
BEST MOVIE TITLE EVER. 8)

"Jeremy Hardy v. The Israeli Army, a feature documentary about the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine as experienced through the eyes of British comedian Jeremy Hardy opens July 18th at the Prince Charles cinema then throughout London and Nationwide."
(from the official website)

" 'Jeremy Hardy v. The Israeli Army’ is both quirky and important. It gives a better idea of conditions on the ground in Palestine than a thousand news reports - the absurdity as well as the tragedy."- Toby Litt.

MIND THE CRAP.

well, the quite subversive in his corner of art, Banksy, the graffiti and stencil UK maestro seems to get involved in some bad news, as Turf War, his last exhibition, just shut down for some interesting reasons. maybe doing some cover for Blur doesn't help luck to stay near... 8)
"Turf War included pigs painted in police colours, sheep painted in concentration camp stripes and a cow covered in images of Andy Warhol's face."
let's face it, i'm not into playing with animals, at all.
i don't give a shit about doing stuff with them through numeric means, but seing Banksky coloring animals for this very exhib quite kick me ; i knew that it was all animal-friendly and all, and even if the results were pretty good looking, it was hurting my animal-love-affair feelings. anyway, the exhib is shut untill the artist find some places to get his art-farm in cold and stress-less conditions.
"He has previously painted the Queen as a chimpanzee during her Golden Jubilee and sprayed "Mind the crap" on the steps of the Tate Britain before the Turner Prize ceremony."
ahhh... Banksy, you're still in my heart, even after making pigs sweat. 8)

QUICK SHIT.

got no time for hanging around this much, but got to blog this :

- first, some Jim Woodring toys ! woo-haaaa !
"Introducing DORBEL, STRANGEco’s first vinyl figure! Designed by Jim Woodring, whose vibrant and lurid imagination is responsible for the alternative comic Frank and Sony’s Crazy Newts capsule toys. Dorbel stands a terrifying seven inches tall and features six points of articulation..."

- secondly, i went to see The Hulk with Dude & Sophie, yesterday.
well, i cannot say anything against Ang Lee terrific work. it's nothing but brilliant, and it definetely ain't no some kind of Matrshix shit. the green goliath is pretty cool, and i think that all the bad press i've seen about its visual effects are quite overated. it's beautiful, enough for seing it without saying "yuk". the only fact about other negative shit i've read that i agree with : maybe a little bit too long. you cannot muzzle the lil' fan inside me, waiting for some "die you puny humans" moments... ;)
>>> take care as i go SPOILERS here <<<
the story was cool untill Banner's dad become some real bad 70's absorbing-man super badass type of guy, and even if it's quite ok from the graphic point of view, well, the story and the dialogs from the last 30 minutes just sucks. but i cannot even tell that i disliked this movie !
the interpretation from Eric Banna (who already got the name for doing Bruce, uh) and Jennifer Connely (who looks like a nearly Kate Moss sick girl) are great, Nick Nolte was hum, not at his place, and pretty uncomfortable in Bruce's dad seat ; the sequencing and cut are brilliant (as for the however heavy use of the split screen), and the first apparition of the big bean, is pretty cool too.
this is what Daredevil missed : pure entertainment, done by somebody who knows how to do a great movie, who got ideas and technical skilz, and how to direct his actors.
the photography is beautifull, the weave is nearly perfect... i liked what i've seen.

- Charles Burns, who just got some greeeaaaat french translation these last weeks ("Big Baby" and its Hergé special insert... arf), did some advertising for Altoids. read the full story, and more, on Altoids site, and discover why this author is unmissable.

eurockeennes 2003 report : coming soon
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Sage Francis, Sole, Dose One, Jel, Blackalicous, The Roots, Mike Ladd, Radiohead, and many more...)

MY OH MY, WHAT A BIG DESK YOU GOT HERE...

guess what ? among tons of others, some Warren-Ellis-is-the-man shit posted through his mailing list bad signal. worth the read, believe me.
and as i'm not a hi-technology buddy, it's always nice to read other things than Warren's stories about how using this planet ' best technology at its very best...
so here what the man do the best : telling mad shit.

"Even in summer, the English sky's the colour of a dead body left out in the cold. Grey light, grey buildings, grey people, grey lives.

The expensive new car on the corner was supposed to be silver, but it's just grey. The man in the grey suit writhes against the grey fabric of the driver's seat and pounds the wheel with little grey fists. Human fingers lay between his feet, leaking over the little grey plastic mat under the pedals. He starts to cry, lips twisting back from little grey teeth with fingermeat stuck between them.

There's a girl who's almost beautiful, standing by the roadsign watching, wreathed in grey cigarette smoke. She leaves cheap lipstick on the filter, watches the man in the car with dead eyes. When she inclines her head to get a better look, her chin disappears and she looks like a child's painting.

Her kid's about three feet away, eating dogshit.
The girl's mother is in the pub, taking a call on a stolen mobile phone.
No, this is 'is mum. I took 'is mobile off 'im. No, I ain't seen 'im in three month, since 'e came round my 'ouse with that bitch. I punched 'er in the face and 'it 'im with a frying pan, and they don't come round no more. You got DVD players? I'll 'ave eight. I said I'll 'ave fukkin eight. You come round with 'em.

The bloke with the DVD players needs the money. His car was stolen and the police won't give it back, because it was found with a junkie driving it and a crack pipe and soiled baby clothes in the back seat. It's material evidence in the mimed "fight" against the thousand crack addicts in town, forcing Yale locks and kicking out cat doors in the search for goods to feed two-hundred-pound-a-day habits. Everyone says they should be in hospital, but everyone knows they're safer on the street, because the hospital is rotting in its foundations. The plasterboard the new wing was put up with is festering on its hinges, and disease breeds in the wall cavities. The nurses ruthlessly jerk off the old men in the cancer wards to make them sleep through the night, and palm bottles of Vicodin on the
way out the door in the morning. A little soma-holiday for people who reasonably expected to be working in medicine and helping people.

Blank stares at the ground as they walk home down blank streets, past the mothers doing the school run in the grey morning light. Remembering how they used to walk to school with their friends, laughing and joking and inventing whole new ways to look at their bright little worlds. Despising themselves and everything around them for being afraid to let their children walk anywhere alone. Any one of these people could be a paedophile, a child killer, some kind of sex monster that will steal their baby off the streets and do something unimaginable to them. She remembers walking home from school through the woods, making magic out of strange tree stumps and odd rocks and ancient clearings, dark copses and paths never taken, and wants to cry, because her child will never have that in this grey world she stupidly birthed them into.

These are all true stories.

To be in England, in the summertime."

Warren Ellis

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRIMMY !

SOUNDS GOOD.

Some friends of mine told me that my sunday track/playlist was curious and/or interesting. well, i gotta admit that there's some reasons if I speak MORE about comics than music these last months :

- my usual "musical" pals around me have disapeared, more or less. Some shit happens sometimes, but everybody's got its ways of dealin with (and sometimes, it ain't easy to forget about miles between friends and you, too). if you forget about Feet, Alcor, or Farid, who are probably the "real world" closest-music-oriented from me, I got plenty of friends listening to real cool shit or sharp stuff, but none of them are walking on the same little road than me.
Feet and Alcor are more drum'n'bass oriented (even if both of them are on 2 differents kind of d'n'b, Feet is more on massive and hard breakbeats, while Alcor is more on rollin' and twisted breaks and loops. Not enough interesting shit for me, or not enough stuff which talks to me, for calling it better. I'm a dooooowntempo guy, for godsake... ; )
Farid is maybe too into the groovy stuff. I really love what he dig, but it doesn't gives me the abstract and breaks quantity I need on a daily basis.
there's of course a few break heads around, but none of them on the june brain schema.

- so, playing only in bars (I don't have my own home at the moment, so of course I don't have turntables...) isn't satisfaction, happyness and happy happy joy ; in fact, if I forget about 3 or 4 friends comin each and every week (god bless Flo, Nico and Brice from the Lykill constellation...), I'm trying to spread the right vibes for people with kaki clothes, 458 piercings per face, and asking for nervous hardtechno just after 10 pm...
...talk about staying quiet... I got to deal with these clowns nearly every week. I'm so glad that David, the boss from the bar where I spin each week, got a few interest for the vinyls I greb with me ; the guy is openmind enough for asking for more each week, talk about RARE in this baaaad techno town called Besancon...

- so, playing in bars, i said, isn't cool as playing in radioshows. I really miss my little sunday show. I really loved to play whatever the fuck I want to, it was relaxing and there, nobody's gives a fuck if you play some Anticon-affiliated abstract japonese hip hop from Neutrino alongside some Charles Stepney psychesoul classics, neither if you play Kit Clayton neo electro-dub with some of the last Bugz in the Attic west london broken beat shit.
do I have to stop playing in bars ? maybe. it ain't places for ambiance selectors like me. These places are for dancefloors fillers or binary LSD eaters. eh eh eh, how's that, "june you music fascist ?". yes sir. 8)

OKAY, OKAY.
(things typed on monday evening, about music, comics, and friends. and life.)

I'm typing this while the rain is nearly finished, on my pal Laulau's cpu ; another week is beginning, and even if today was filled with constructive stuff, I feel like i'm reaching the limit of these last months situation. first, the fact to live at other's places is going to its end, and even if my friends were cool enough for helping me on this (thanks to them), I'm quite fed up of the squatt time. it reminds me too much of my 20's, which are more a big pack of bad memories than anything else.
hey, does this blog looks like a personnal diary ? fuck. thanks for tellin' me.

so, I guess it's like a circle. I don't know if "snakes eating its own tail" means something in english, but it does in french, believe me.
so there's this money thing, uh. personnal problem with money or childish state of mind, call it as you want to, but the thing is that when money falls on my account, I CANNOT do anything else than run to records or comic shop. really. 8)
so these very last days/weeks, i'd read Pyongyang by Guy Delisle ; it's a big book published by L'Association in french, and it's a huge read. Guy Delisle delivered some amazing analysis of North Korea 's horrible situation, with his own funny style, and that's working, perfectly, period. when working on our little comics fanzine with the IEPLB crew (ok, are 3 people could be called a crew ? anyway), reading Pyongyang mades me love my country, this old France.
well, nearly.

I loved a french translation of some Joe Matt book, something called "Peepshow" in french, which is "the poor bastard" in its original version. I saw it at Everland's place before he moved and i was just realizing that I'd never read some Matt in french. Charles Berberian (yeah, him) did a pretty cool work with the translation ; I know what you think, people.
"How can somebody like this June gives his opinion about translations ? if it's some good work or not ? does June only know how his english sucks ?"
hey. wow. and yeah.
but as for any languages, it's such easier to read and understand than trying to express yourself. hum.

anyway, this french translation is a 2001 production from Les Humanos's imprint "tohu bohu", the same collection of another great book i'd read last week, Pierre Wazem & Tom Tirabosco's "weekend avec premeditation". in this one (which shows how great Tirabosco is when it's time to handle pens and pencils...), the authors tells a nice story about a trio of friends who miss one of them ; yeah, pretty strange to tell it this way, but i don't want to spoil anyone here, uh... ;)
Frederick Peeters told me that he got some stuff with Wazem waiting somewhere... I can't wait for it.
oh yeah, speaking of Berberian, i saw that Dupuy and him will be at the San Diego comic con this year (july 17-20), alongside Sal Buscema, Will Eisner, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Terry Moore, Grant Morrison... well, maybe it's a little bit too far away from here, hmm.

on the mainstream corner, Marvel France finally published "Spiderman : Blue", from Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale. "Spiderman Bleu" (yeah, loads of brainstorming on the title, uh) is a correct book, but it's definetely not the best from the Loeb/Sale pair ; the art is really cool but not the best that Sale does, and Loeb tells a classic story with his so personnals twists ; nothing really new, an entertaining read, but not the ultimate one.

I re-read "Blonde Platine", the second french translation of Adrian Tomine, recently published through Vincent Berniere's collection at Le Seuil ; Berniere knows what he does cause he's probably one of the most habited comics critic this side of europe, and deciding to publish some Tomine stuff is definetely some cool move ; this very book is "Summer Blonde" french version, and "Summer Blonde" was some collection of Tomine's shit from his world famous "Optic Nerve", ish 5 to 8), and i was very afraid at his first page : 2 BIG FUCKIN MISTAKES on the translation on the very first page. Gosh. but finally it's okay ; all the book is perfectly translated and the result is worth the 15 euro tag.
everything was already told about Adrian Tomine, so i won't blabla anymore : Tomine rules, dot, period. this guy is awesome, i'm so much in his work, since the first time i saw some shit from him, while my little USA 94' trip. Everything look so unfinished aside his work, which is pretty disturbing cause he don't tell anything but moment, excerpts of full stories. the moments he decide to share with us is only this, moments, really. no sagas or 258 pages stories. just stollen moments, but how great they are.

Did I say that today (monday), Thierry, Seb and I finished the 16th issue of IEPLB? we talk about Delisle's "Pyongyang", Tomine's "Blonde Platine", Jiro Taniguchi's "Quartier Lointain (tome 2)", Jeff Smith's "Bone" and some other stuff ; I wish we got more space, as some little books comes to our hands, and I think that some of them really deserves more audience, more promotion.
For example, the really emotionnal content of Aurelia Aurita's "Angora", published for the second time by "le neuvieme monde". I only knew Aurelia Aurita from a litlle story she did for french monthly big humor magazine called "Fluide Glacial", a few months ago. I really loved the art and the story, and I almost forgot about her. So when i saw this little "Angora" book, I was glad about it. black and white and ultra sensitive ideas through its few pages, I hope others publishers will see the whole little world that Aurelia Aurita has created.

more comis stuff SOON : our little structure is going to its real administrative starting point, and so is the studio ; I can't wait for it.

GAIMAN INTERVIEW HERE.

thanks, mister Ceransky.

argh this fuckin' new blogger system just ate my post...
arrrghhhhh....