Halo halo

Age doesn’t matter, backgrounds don’t matter, nothing matters. You have four teammates, they can be anybody, and you either know how to click with them or you don’t. 

— Bill Simmons

PHOTOGRAPH OF JANEY SMITH BOOK: 
Ty Melgren

OTHER PHOTOGRAPHS:
Leonid Tishkov

all I needed to know about bodies I learned from looking @ lines on paper

Michelangelo?  … The guy is just like glorifying the male body. It’s all about writhing, muscular male bodies. And even the women, they have male bodies with tits pasted on. The guy’s not into women, you can tell. He’s not into feminine at all. He’s not interested in the round, elliptical charms of the female form. No, he’s interested in the lumpy, muscular male body. And the whole Chapel is nothing but that. And I couldn’t find… there wasn’t much of a humanistic element, it’s just so mannered. And Pete pointed out, as I was talking to him about it, he said, “It’s all about the expression of romantic, religious ideas. It’s not about real human beings.” So for me, there’s no subtle humanity about the expressions or what’s going on. It’s a very deeply Italian thing. A lot of that Renaissance art is like that to me. I prefer the Flemish and German stuff of that period, you know, it’s got much more to do with real life and real human beings.

                — R. Crumb

DRAWINGS:
01.  Xaime
02.  John Buscema
03.  Jonny Negron
04.  R. Crumb
05.  Jim Rugg
06.  Richard Corben
07.  Michael Deforge
08.  Eleanor Davis
09.  Jesse Moynihan
10.  John K

Take the spider, which generates a different silk for different purposes: building a web, creating trailing routes, capturing their prey, wrapping their eggs. Oxman believes that in a way, spiders are like a multi-material 3-D printer. “One cannot separate the spider web’s form from the way in which it originated,” she says. “Nature doesn’t divide between the architect, the engineer and the construction worker…”

— “The woman who wants to ‘print’ buildings”, CNN, 4 Dec 2012

COMIX:
1.  James Stokoe
2.  Martin Thierry

The fact of the matter, make no mistake, is that I am on the side of the perplexed and mystified. Most comics today are visually unintelligible except to a few.

It could well be that you are one of the few, that you feel that comics publishers should not be pandering to the general public and that comic books are just how you like them, with their forty plus years of stylistic inbreeding and complicated continuity. Perhaps you are a kid and, like me, you think kids owe it to themselves to keep loads of stuff secret from their parents, and the secret language of comics is a part of that. Great. Comic book publishers love you. However, with the shrinkage of the market for comics, these same publishers are trying hard to get back that general readership they lost a long time ago.

— Eddie Campbell, “Campbell’s Rules of Comprehension”, The Comics Journal, 20 Feb 2013

PHOTOGRAPHS:  New Orleans Arena, 20 March 2013

A normal person nowadays takes in so many pre-digested stories (still on holiday, I think I inadvertently watched four movies yesterday) that rearranging the normal running order of events becomes a way of pumping some fizz into the flat drink.  There can’t be anybody who doesn’t know how stories go.  Sometimes I come into a movie ten minutes late just to make it more interesting.  I tried it with Inception yesterday and it still didn’t work.  We are a society that is weary with it all.  We get more complete stories daily than ever before in history.  We shuffle the pack to stave off boredom.

— Eddie Campbell

The mountains that have been destroyed still exist in the mind of God …  I said that as a way of addressing my own grief about what we have lost.  Perhaps the most disheartening thing in this struggle against mountaintop removal is not the power of the coal industry.  It is that if President Obama should issue a proclamation this very afternoon saying that mountaintop removal would no longer be allowed, we would still have lost five hundred mountains that aren’t coming back.  And yet.  And yet I said that years ago, and I repeat it today.  Those mountains still exist in the mind of God.

— Denise Giardina, memorial service for Judy Bonds, excerpted from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco

photographs:  Moss Beach, CA, 4 March 2013

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die out, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

                — Max Planck, The Philosophy of Physics (1936)

DRAWINGS: 
1. Russ Heath
2. Uno Moralez
3. Dave Gibbons

“I shall be glad to leave England. Everything is so meagre and paltry, it is so unspiritual—I hate democracy.”

He became angry to hear her talk like this, he did not know why. Somehow, he could not bear it, when she attacked things. It was as if she were attacking him.

“What do you mean?” he asked her, hostile. “Why do you hate democracy?”

“Only the greedy and ugly people come to the top in a democracy,” she said, “because they’re the only people who will push themselves there. Only degenerate races are democratic.”

“What do you want then—an aristocracy?” he asked, secretly moved. He always felt that by rights he belonged to the ruling aristocracy. Yet to hear her speak for his class pained him with a curious, painful pleasure. He felt he was acquiescing in something illegal, taking to himself some wrong, reprehensible advantages.

“I do want an aristocracy,” she cried. “And I’d far rather have an aristocracy of birth than of money. Who are the aristocrats now—who are chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for money. It doesn’t matter what else they have: but they must have money-brains—because they are ruling in the name of money.”

“The people elect the government,” he said.

“I know they do. But what are the people? Each one of them is a money-interest. I hate it, that anybody is my equal who has the same amount of money as I have. I know I am better than all of them. I hate them. They are not my equals. I hate equality on a money basis. It is the equality of dirt.”