Yearly Archives for 2008

REAL MISSION FINALLY ACCOMPLISHED

The New York Times – June 19, 2008

Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back
By ANDREW E. KRAMER

BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.

Sensitive to the appearance that they were profiting from the war and already under pressure because of record high oil prices, senior officials of two of the companies, speaking only on the condition that they not be identified, said they were helping Iraq rebuild its decrepit oil industry.

For an industry being frozen out of new ventures in the world’s dominant oil-producing countries, from Russia to Venezuela, Iraq offers a rare and prized opportunity.

While enriched by $140 per barrel oil, the oil majors are also struggling to replace their reserves as ever more of the world’s oil patch becomes off limits. Governments in countries like Bolivia and Venezuela are nationalizing their oil industries or seeking a larger share of the record profits for their national budgets. Russia and Kazakhstan have forced the major companies to renegotiate contracts.

The Iraqi government’s stated goal in inviting back the major companies is to increase oil production by half a million barrels per day by attracting modern technology and expertise to oil fields now desperately short of both. The revenue would be used for reconstruction, although the Iraqi government has had trouble spending the oil revenues it now has, in part because of bureaucratic inefficiency.

For the American government, increasing output in Iraq, as elsewhere, serves the foreign policy goal of increasing oil production globally to alleviate the exceptionally tight supply that is a cause of soaring prices.

The Iraqi Oil Ministry, through a spokesman, said the no-bid contracts were a stop-gap measure to bring modern skills into the fields while the oil law was pending in Parliament.

It said the companies had been chosen because they had been advising the ministry without charge for two years before being awarded the contracts, and because these companies had the needed technology.

A Shell spokeswoman hinted at the kind of work the companies might be engaged in. “We can confirm that we have submitted a conceptual proposal to the Iraqi authorities to minimize current and future gas flaring in the south through gas gathering and utilization,” said the spokeswoman, Marnie Funk. “The contents of the proposal are confidential.”

While small, the deals hold great promise for the companies.

“The bigger prize everybody is waiting for is development of the giant new fields,” Leila Benali, an authority on Middle East oil at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said in a telephone interview from the firm’s Paris office. The current contracts, she said, are a “foothold” in Iraq for companies striving for these longer-term deals.

Any Western oil official who comes to Iraq would require heavy security, exposing the companies to all the same logistical nightmares that have hampered previous attempts, often undertaken at huge cost, to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

And work in the deserts and swamps that contain much of Iraq’s oil reserves would be virtually impossible unless carried out solely by Iraqi subcontractors, who would likely be threatened by insurgents for cooperating with Western companies.

Yet at today’s oil prices, there is no shortage of companies coveting a contract in Iraq. It is not only one of the few countries where oil reserves are up for grabs, but also one of the few that is viewed within the industry as having considerable potential to rapidly increase production.

David Fyfe, a Middle East analyst at the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based group that monitors oil production for the developed countries, said he believed that Iraq’s output could increase to about 3 million barrels a day from its current 2.5 million, though it would probably take longer than the six months the Oil Ministry estimated.

Mr. Fyfe’s organization estimated that repair work on existing fields could bring Iraq’s output up to roughly four million barrels per day within several years. After new fields are tapped, Iraq is expected to reach a plateau of about six million barrels per day, Mr. Fyfe said, which could suppress current world oil prices.

The contracts, the two oil company officials said, are a continuation of work the companies had been conducting here to assist the Oil Ministry under two-year-old memorandums of understanding. The companies provided free advice and training to the Iraqis. This relationship with the ministry, said company officials and an American diplomat, was a reason the contracts were not opened to competitive bidding.

A total of 46 companies, including the leading oil companies of China, India and Russia, had memorandums of understanding with the Oil Ministry, yet were not awarded contracts.

The no-bid deals are structured as service contracts. The companies will be paid for their work, rather than offered a license to the oil deposits. As such, they do not require the passage of an oil law setting out terms for competitive bidding. The legislation has been stalled by disputes among Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties over revenue sharing and other conditions.

The first oil contracts for the majors in Iraq are exceptional for the oil industry.

They include a provision that could allow the companies to reap large profits at today’s prices: the ministry and companies are negotiating payment in oil rather than cash.

“These are not actually service contracts,” Ms. Benali said. “They were designed to circumvent the legislative stalemate” and bring Western companies with experience managing large projects into Iraq before the passage of the oil law.

A clause in the draft contracts would allow the companies to match bids from competing companies to retain the work once it is opened to bidding, according to the Iraq country manager for a major oil company who did not consent to be cited publicly discussing the terms.

Assem Jihad, the Oil Ministry spokesman, said the ministry chose companies it was comfortable working with under the charitable memorandum of understanding agreements, and for their technical prowess. “Because of that, they got the priority,” he said.

In all cases but one, the same company that had provided free advice to the ministry for work on a specific field was offered the technical support contract for that field, one of the companies’ officials said.

The exception is the West Qurna field in southern Iraq, outside Basra. There, the Russian company Lukoil, which claims a Hussein-era contract for the field, had been providing free training to Iraqi engineers, but a consortium of Chevron and Total, a French company, was offered the contract. A spokesman for Lukoil declined to comment.

Charles Ries, the chief economic official in the American Embassy in Baghdad, described the no-bid contracts as a bridging mechanism to bring modern technology into the fields before the oil law was passed, and as an extension of the earlier work without charge.

To be sure, these are not the first foreign oil contracts in Iraq, and all have proved contentious.

The Kurdistan regional government, which in many respects functions as an independent entity in northern Iraq, has concluded a number of deals. Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, for example, signed a production-sharing agreement with the regional government last fall, though its legality is questioned by the central Iraqi government. The technical support agreements, however, are the first commercial work by the major oil companies in Iraq.

The impact, experts say, could be remarkable increases in Iraqi oil output.

While the current contracts are unrelated to the companies’ previous work in Iraq, in a twist of corporate history for some of the world’s largest companies, all four oil majors that had lost their concessions in Iraq are now back.

But a spokesman for Exxon said the company’s approach to Iraq was no different from its work elsewhere.

“Consistent with our longstanding, global business strategy, ExxonMobil would pursue business opportunities as they arise in Iraq, just as we would in other countries in which we are permitted to operate,” the spokesman, Len D’Eramo, said in an e-mailed statement.

But the company is clearly aware of the history. In an interview with Newsweek last fall, the former chief executive of Exxon, Lee Raymond, praised Iraq’s potential as an oil-producing country and added that Exxon was in a position to know. “There is an enormous amount of oil in Iraq,” Mr. Raymond said. “We were part of the consortium, the four companies that were there when Saddam Hussein threw us out, and we basically had the whole country.”

James Glanz and Jad Mouawad contributed reporting from New York.

Saturday – Alvin Buenaventura, Sammy Harkham on Saturday panel at Heroes Con in Charlotte

SATURDAY, 12.30 PM

THE NEW ART COMICS

Room 219A

From critical favorite hits like MAGGOTS and POWR MASTRS, to prominence in influential anthologies like KRAMER’S ERGOT, “art” or “abstract” or “out” comics are pushing the boundaries of the avant garde in comics. Join Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter as he sits down with Picturebox publisher Dan Nadel, KRAMER’S ERGOT editor Sammy Harkham and publisher (and Arthur’s comics editor) Alvin Buenaventura for a frank discussion of this leading edge of art in comics!

MORE MORE MORE MORE INFO HERE

Universal Mutant & Arthur Magazine Paradise DVD Celebration –

DVD RELEASE CELEBRATION

 

Universal Mutant & Arthur Magazine Present
Paradise Now: A collective creation of the Living Theatre DVD ANTHOLOGY

 

*****

 

In remembrance
Hanon Reznikov, 1950-2008

 

Sunday June 22, 2008 @ Zebulon Cafe Concert
258 Wythe Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211 USA

 

L TRAIN TO BEDFORD AVE
J,M,Z TRAIN TO BROADWAY

 

*****
Readings
*****
 Steve Ben Israel
Ira Cohen
Allan Graubard

 

*****
Films
*****
PARADISE NOW: THE LIVING THEATRE IN AMERIKA (1969)
A film by Marty Topp, produced for Universal Mutant by Ira Cohen
http://www.arthurmag.com/store/dvds.php

 

International Premiere: The Permanent Revolution: Change! (2008)
A film by W. C. Swofford and Georg Gatsas

 

*****
Improvisation
****
Kevin Shea, drums
W. C. Swofford, swaramandal + electric organ
Daniel Carter, saxophone + winds

 

MORE ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY

 

 

NEW FROM ARTHUR: PARADISE NOW: THE LIVING THEATRE IN AMERIKA DVD

LIMITED EDITION OF 1,000 – ORDER NOW!Order direct from ARTHUR using PAYPAL

“Life, revolution and theater are three words for the same thing:
an unconditional NO to the present society.” – Julian Beck

“Paradise Now … more relevant now because we’re closer
to now than we ever have been.” – Hanon Reznikov

Arthur Magazine proudly presents our newest release PARADISE NOW: The Living Theatre in Amerika DVD featuring rare, never-before-distributed films and a bacchanal of revolutionary multimedia documents from The Living Theatre’s historic and influential ’68-’69 American tour. A fulminating art-meets-life installation as collected by Will Swofford and brought to you in collaboration with The Living Theatre and Universal Mutant, Inc.



 

PARADISE NOW ANTHOLOGY DVD direct from ARTHUR using PAYPAL – ORDER NOW!
PREVIEW ON YOUTUBE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF7_BdHi_NA

WHAT IS PARADISE NOW?

In 1968 The Living Theatre, led by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, triumphantly returned to America from years of self-imposed exile in Europe with their theatrical breakthrough Paradise Now. The play introduces the practice of collective creation, dissolving the boundaries of human interactions and forging a harmony between the actors and audience. Of this process, Julian Beck writes, “Collective creation is the secret weapon of the people… This play is a voyage from the many to the one and from the one to the many. It’s a spiritual voyage and a political voyage, a voyage for the actors and the spectators. The play is a vertical ascent toward permanent revolution, leading to revolutionary action here and now. The revolution of which the play speaks is the beautiful, non-violent, anarchist revolution. The purpose of the play is to lead to a state of being in which non-violent revolutionary action is possible.”The result of this shared voyage is the spontaneous creation of a temporary anarchist collective- free from the enslavements of war, violence, the State, money and the self.Order direct from ARTHUR using PAYPAL

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR MARTY TOPP’S PARADISE NOW

“Paradise Now is possibly The Living Theatre’s greatest achievement … unsurpassable!” — Ira Cohen”This past spring, in a group art show at New York’s Swiss Institute, an old black-and-white television played a grainy print of bodies writhing to the tune of distant drumming. ‘As long as you have people working for money and not love, there will be violence,’ intoned a tall, angular man on the screen. The bodies- women in scant bikinis and men in what looked like loincloths-piled together in an orgiastic tribal dance, some simulating (or perhaps actually having) sex as the voice continued: ‘Psycho-sexual repression is impeding the revolution.’ What looked like an underworld-of the 1960’s counter-cultural variety, in this case- is the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now, as documented in the 1969 Ira Cohen-produced film Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika … soon to be released on DVD from Arthur Magazine.” — CAN THEATER STAGE A REVOLUTION? – Traci Parks, Fall ’07 Preview, V MAGAZINE”Joyous, brutal, exploding with the kinetic energies of psychic catharsis… Marty Topp’s PARADISE NOW: The Living Theatre in Amerika has captured the essence of this extraordinary theatrical experiment. It is unquestionably one of the finest artistic documentaries to come out of the United States cinema. It’s heartfelt sincerity should be sheer inspiration to the many young people throughout the country who are struggling to make meaningful and influential work. It is the reverberation of a crucially important message that must not be neglected, for the consequences are too terrible to endure. Marty Topp’s achievement is not just in the making of a great film, but in making us remember again, Paradise as a reality.” – PARADISE ON FILM – Don Snyder, July 1970, East Village Other

“Like an astonishing portion of the country’s popular music, the spectacles of The Living Theater proved to be in content and form outside the social system- not structured by it nor, except as outlet, implementing it: liberated territory.” — Revolution at the Brooklyn Academy – Stefan Brecht, The Drama Review number 43: Spring 1969, The Living Theater Issue


MORE ABOUT THE LIVING THEATRE

Founded in 1947, The Living Theatre has staged more than 80 productions performed in eight languages in 25 countries on four continents – a unique body of work. Visit their new space on Clinton St. in NYC – more info:www.livingtheatre.org

DYLAN AT NEWPORT DOUBLEHEADER THIS THURS IN L.A. AT CINEFAMILY, OH YES

Thursday, June 19th @ 8pm
SERIES: FOLK AMERICANA
Sponsored by Arthur Magazine

“Festival” shown with “The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan At The Newport Folk Festival”

Two from documentarian Murray Lerner, best known today for his work in music films. First up is Festival, Lerner’s priceless document of the whole Newport festival scene from ’63-’65. Alongside clips of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Donovan are many performances by veteran blues musicians of the day like Howlin’ Wolf and Son House, who received at the festival their first exposure to white audiences outside of their respective home bases. Next is “The Other Side Of The Mirror,” a deeper examination of Dylan’s performances at the Newport Folk Festival from the same period covered by Festival. Early on, Dylan captured the imagination of the Newport crowds, but his infamous ’65 appearance in which he “went electric” earned him the wrath of some of the more vocal members of the crowd, and he left the stage after three songs. The Other Side presents footage from this incident, as well as great renditions of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Like A Rolling Stone”.

Festival Dir. Murray Lerner, 1967, 35mm, 95 min.
The Other Side Of The Mirror Dir. Murray Lerner, 2007, 35mm, 83 min.

TICKETS, INFO HERE HERE HERE

GRANT MORRISON interview by Jay Babcock (Sci-Fi Universe, 1996)

(This article was originally written for Sci-Fi Universe magazine. After it was published there, a revised version was housed online at the now-defunct CrashSite. Here, pretty much, is the original SFU text. — Jay)

INVISIBLE(S) MAN

Or, Grant Morrison: The Man With the Post-Hypnotic Trigger Finger on the Throbbing Pulse of a Millennium-Long Battle for Control of Your Mind

by Jay Babcock

“The idea of comics is like sitting in front of your TV with a channel changer… Perception is a cut-up,” Grant Morrison said once.

As if to lend credence to his own statement, Morrison has been playing with our preconceptions of what comics published by the House of Superman could be about since he burst on the American comics scene with the hallucinatory Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum. As part of the late- ’80s, post-Alan Moore new wave of British mainstream comics writers that included Sandman’s Neil Gaiman and fellow neo-psychedelicist Peter Milligan (author of DC’s Shade, the Changing Man), Morrison quickly made a name for himself by following up Arkham Asylum with several miniseries and one- shots, and an acclaimed, controversial run on DC’s Animal Man.

But it was with Morrison’s radical revamping of DC’s Doom Patrol that he really hit his stride, explicitly incorporating ideas historically foreign to mainstream superhero comics. Influenced by the work of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Maya Doren, mathematician Douglas Hofstadter, Morrison took what had been previously been billed as “the world’s most bizarre superheroes” at its word, giving the “heroes” real mental disabilities and sending them into strange new dimensions and situations that included encounters with the painting that ate Paris; evil Scissormen who speak in cut-up (“Defeating breadfruit in adumbrate” was a typical Scissorman sentence); the villainous Cult of the Unwritten Book; the Pale Police, who spoke exclusively in anagrams; the unforgettable Danny the Street, an extradimensional, sentient location with the spirit and sensibility of a transvestite; the Men From NOWHERE, “normalcy agents” whose mission was to “eradicate eccentricities, anomalies, and peculiarities wherever we find them”; and The Pentagon, which was seen, as one critic noted, as “headquarters of a bizarre supernatural conspiracy aiming to institute worldwide standardization and puritanical repression.”

It was a beguiling, bravura headrush, a seemingly improvised work of genius that spun further out of control each month. Morrison’s most amazing, hilarious creation in his three-plus years on Doom Patrol, though, was the Brotherhood of Dada, a villainous group that “celebrated the total absurdity of life” and campaigned against “consensus reality” in favor of “liberation, laughs, and libido.” The Brotherhood of Dada was headed by Mr. Nobody, a hilarious hipster prone to taunting the book’s heroes with statements like “There! We have now taken over the world. What are you going to do about THAT?” and asked, pointing to his team, “Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense?”

More than one Doom Patrol reader caught him or herself thinking the Brotherhood of Dada should have been the good guys. And, with his next major project, The Invisibles, Morrison essentially granted those fans their wish.

The Invisibles are a secret society devoted to subversion in all its forms, a group of revolutionary mysticist secret agents that includes characters codenamed King Mob (a bald assassin into the “fetish subculture”), Jack Frost (a teenage hooligan the group’s newest member, who is able to tap into a devastating psychokinetic power), Fanny (a transvestite witch), Boy (a female martial artist and former cop) and Ragged Robin (a psychic).

“Although we have a core group of characters, anyone can belong to or oppose the Invisibles,” Morrison explained in an introductory outline of the series. “Various ordinary and extraordinary folks [will be] drawn into a web of conspiracy that extends from the back streets of your hometown to the dark blue-green planet circling Alpha Centauri and beyond, out past the horizon of the spacetime supersphere itself, giving me the opportunity to tell stories ranging across time and genre, stories that will eventually come together and be revealed as one large-scale, shimmering holographic tapestry. This is the comic I’ve wanted to write all my life-a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs,religion, UFOs… you can make your own list. And when it reaches its conclusion, somewhere down the line, I promise to reveal who runs the world, why our lives are the way they are and exactly what happens to us when we die.”

Ahem. Whatever his intentions, Morrison’s opening story arc was a stunner, chronicling the initiation of Jack Frost into the Invisibles by Tom O’Bedlam, a streetbum/magician who imparts wisdom like “There’s a palace in your head, boy; learn to live in it always” to Jack. In an interview with Sci-Fi Universe, Morrison talked about the source of inspiration for the pivotal sequence in which Jack is taught to “see” differently.

“When you’re a kid or teenager, you go on these long walks,” the Glasgow native says, “you just kinda drift off and wander through the city, and make these sort of mythological connections in your head. I’d been doing that, and I think most people do, but the Situationists [a loose group of ’60s radical intellectuals and artists] identified that as a revolutionary act, and that feeds straight into The Invisibles: the idea that you can make a ‘temporary autonomous zone,’ by impressing the imagination on the world in such a way that you create [it anew]. You’re walking through the city and if you want to see it-as Raoul Vaneigem says in The Revolution of Everyday Life, my favorite Situationist text-as ‘some fabulous city of dreams,’ all it takes is a way of looking.”

For Morrison, this act of imagination is intensely political. “I really think the ‘political process’ doesn’t work and always leads to the same thing, which is the mountain of heads in the Enlightenment, which we explored in the first book of The Invisibles,” he says. “I think that there’s not much in the world that I can actively, effectively change, except what happens within the boundaries of my own skin [which I do] through whatever, by following magical processes or obscure therapists like Wilhelm Reich.

“I really believe if you do change yourself, then it has a vital effect. If you put out good ideas instead of bad ideas… good connections instead of bad ones.

“I get kinda of evangelical about it, sometimes,” says Morrison, laughing, “but it can work.”

Despite the anarchist underpinnings of The Invisibles, the series’ opening story arc attracted the attention of BBC Scotland, who have commissioned Morrison to adapt that arc into a six-part, three-hour TV series intended for broadcast on network television in late 1997 or 1998.

Meanwhile, The Invisibles comic has continued in typical Morrison style. Plot and stylistic twists seemed to issue from the writer’s fevered brain in torrents. If the stories seemed to run on a logic of their own, becoming an occasionally indecipherable catalog of ’90s zeitgeist with a plot that was almost a meta-deus ex machina, we didn’t care-we were just happy to be along for the dizzying, delirious ride. Allusions to The Prisoner, A Clockwork Orange, and the work of transgressive Italian filmmaker Pier Pasolini and techno-pagan-neo-Learyite theorist Terence McKenna came fast and often; historical figures like Lords Byron and Shelley and the Marquis de Sade appeared-and co-starred-with the team; and the stories were filled with voodoo priests, reform houses, magical signs of the “dark emperor Mammon,” the enemy’s special agents called Myrmidons, “psychic early warning systems,” post-hypnotic triggers, cyphermen and gnostic engineers.

With a radical storyline and even more radical storytelling, The Invisibles was bound to be a challenging read, and eventually the series found itself at the brink of cancellation due to dropping sales.

“We confused a few people with the first book,” Morrison now admits. “Also, it seemed to turn off the American readers because it was set in Britain for most of the time.”

So, The Invisibles-Volume One ended, and on Christmas, 1996, Volume Two debuted, complete with a new cover artist, fan favorite Brian Bolland, a new interior art team (Phil Jiminez and John Stokes), and, at least for the opening story arc, a new setting-the American Southwest-and a more straightforward storytelling style.

“I’d planned to do this anyway in the second year, but when we came to it, I thought we should take this opportunity to start a second volume,” explains Morrison. “The first four issues of Volume Two are this complete ironic version of The Invisibles for America. Because they’re in America, we’re getting a whole different version of the Invisibles. But in issue five, we actually see the reality of it. There’s a big time-travel story that’s going on within this… and that leads into more of the stuff that people are familiar with from the first book. I think hopefully if we can drag in some more of the casuals with the sex and violence at the start, then we can lead them up to the more sophisticated stuff.

“I can’t really do The Invisibles the way I did it before because ‘Arcadia’ [a complex, time-travel story arc involving the Marquis de Sade and the French Enlightenment] just didn’t work. That’s when everyone jumped off the book. And I had to be forced to admit that there’s certain things that the general comics audience just can’t handle. I have to downscale from that, slightly, so there won’t be those same kind of complex historical things again.

“Still, starting in issue seven, there will be a three-parter which explain all the things that came up in Paris in 1924…and so that will be the whole Futurist thing and Dada. So hopefully, I’ll be able to sneak more of the historical stuff in.

“And I’m still into some real, real, real weird far-out stuff being done by some of the magicians in America. I’ve got something called The Voodoun Gnostic Workbook and it’s by a guy Michel Bertiaux, he’s the head of this cult in Chicago. It’s science fiction stuff and they’re doing it, they’re living it, y’know, they’re doing all kinds of things to mutate themselves into a post-human species. It’s the furthest out stuff I’ve ever read in magic and I want to get into a bit more of that. But I do have to keep [everything] a bit more straightforward, I think, because I lost everyone.”

“The core thing everything comes back to, again, is that if you change yourself, you can change reality. And that’s a stupid ‘New Age’ idea, but…[it’s also] ‘as above, so below’-the hermetic philosophy thing. The character that runs a thread right through The Invisibles-who’s the core of it-is Jack Frost. He starts off as a completely rough kid, he’s nothing, and we follow this guy as he develops into a future buddha, and we see how that affects the entirety of everything.

“I’m trying to do something with a kind of fractal, holographic effect, and even the tiniest parts of The Invisibles refract the whole shape of it.

“I have it all mapped out. I know what happens in the last one. It will finish in the year 2000, which is where it was meant to, maybe a little later in the year than I expected. I think that after that, it won’t work. I’m tapping into all of these currents [aliens, conspiracy, paranoia, mysticism, millennialism], but I think once we get past that year 2000 threshold, and even slightly before it, I think we’ll be where the modernists were at the end of the last century. And what we’ll get is a completely different spirit and these apocalyptic, millennial spirits will transform really quickly into something else. So I don’t want to still be doing the apocalyptic digest paranoid conspiracy book when there’s a new current out in the world. I want it set up so The Invisibles will end, so I can come up with something new that will hopefully embody or whatever the forward-looking spirit we start to get.”

As anti-conventional as Morrison’s comics are, sometimes they seem to pale in comparison to the very public lifestyle he has led over the last few years-one marked by world travel, partying with Britpop bands like the Boo Radleys, massive hallucinogen ingestion, self-education in the arts of various magics, and, last year a frightening brush with death involving blood poisoning, a severely infected lung, and a (temporary) stress-related giant abscess on the side of his face. All of these experiences have made their way into his adult-oriented comics work.

“The last issue of the Doom Patrol was written on mushrooms,” Morrison says proudly,” and I did an entire 64-page story for 2000 A.D. on Ecstasy. I did it cuz it was kinda what the strip was about, it was a ‘two people getting off and taking drugs and going to a rave in the future’- sort of thing. And I thought I wanted to get into that a bit, so I took a couple of Es and just wrote the whole thing out.

“There’s a trip scene in issue two of The Invisibles where they’re up on a mesa. That’s actually real and the dialogue is taken from a tape-recorded conversation.

“And I’ve done automatic writing, trance writing and I always write down my dreams,” he adds. “But I don’t do it as much now. I think I’ve just gotten better at shutting down the conscious personality and letting the comics write themselves, so it’s become even more fun for me. I can take a backseat and know that this stuff generates itself almost. I’ve been doing it long enough now that it’s kinda easy.”

Morrison’s interest in music -“I listen to music all the time when I’m working, and I even put lines in if I happen to hear a line and I’m writing a script”, he says-was combined with his love for comics, musclemen and hallucinogens in 1996’s Flex Mentallo four-issue DC miniseries, a work of probable genius that weaved multiple mobius loops of narrative logic involving superheroes, has-been rock stars, nostalgia, creativity, mythology and mind-altering drugs, beautifully rendered by Frank Quitely.

“That was one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done, it sorta summed things up for me, but no one bought it,” says an obviously disappointed Morrison. “It didn’t sell, no one knew about it, it was really badly promoted, no one got to see the art before it was released. It was a whole catalogue of disasters, really, cuz I think it was a great comic, but it was one of those great comics that no one really has a feel for. So that kind of put me off from doing that kind of thing. That was as far out as I’m likely to go with superheroes.”

Of course, Morrison is still doing superhero comics, but, like Alan Moore, Morrison now segregates his “adult” work [The Invisibles] from the “kids” work [DC’s Aztek and the phenomenally successful Justice League of America] he does that actually pays the rent.

“What I’m doing with JLA and Aztek is going back to the kind of stuff I liked when I was a kid and trying to do an updated version of it for kids’ now,” Morrison explains.

“But my main focus is The Invisibles. I’m not really trying to do anything for the ages,” he says modestly, “I’m just trying to reflect the immediacy of these times and put it out to other people and make that connection and hope that then maybe they’ll do something and send it back to me, and create a network of good ideas.”

Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080612_taking_back_the_republic/

Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment

by Gore Vidal

Jun 11, 2008

On June 9, 2008, a counterrevolution began on the floor of the House of Representatives against the gas and oil crooks who had seized control of the federal government. This counterrevolution began in the exact place which had slumbered during the all-out assault on our liberties and the Constitution itself.

I wish to draw the attention of the blog world to Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment presented to the House in order that two faithless public servants be removed from office for crimes against the American people. As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment—he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials—we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it.

Although this is the most important motion made in Congress in the 21st century, it was also the most significant plea for a restoration of the republic, which had been swept to one side by the mad antics of a president bent on great crime. And as I listened with awe to Kucinich, I realized that no newspaper in the U.S., no broadcast or cable network, would pay much notice to the fact that a highly respected member of Congress was asking for the president and vice president to be tried for crimes which were carefully listed by Kucinich in his articles requesting impeachment.

But then I have known for a long time that the media of the U.S. and too many of its elected officials give not a flying fuck for the welfare of this republic, and so I turned, as I often do, to the foreign press for a clear report of what has been going on in Congress. We all know how the self-described “war hero,” Mr. John McCain, likes to snigger at France, while the notion that he is a hero of any kind is what we should be sniggering at. It is Le Monde, a French newspaper, that told a story the next day hardly touched by The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or, in fact, any other major American media outlet.

As for TV? Well, there wasn’t much—you see, we dare not be divisive because it upsets our masters who know that this is a perfect country, and the fact that so many in it don’t like it means that they have been terribly spoiled by the greatest health service on Earth, the greatest justice system, the greatest number of occupied prisons—two and a half million Americans are prisoners—what a great tribute to our penal passions!

Naturally, I do not want to sound hard, but let me point out that even a banana Republican would be distressed to discover how much of our nation’s treasury has been siphoned off by our vice president in the interest of his Cosa Nostra company, Halliburton, the lawless gang of mercenaries set loose by this administration in the Middle East.

But there it was on the first page of Le Monde. The House of Representatives, which was intended to be the democratic chamber, at last was alert to its function, and the bravest of its members set in motion the articles of impeachment of the most dangerous president in our history. Rep Kucinich listed some 30-odd articles describing impeachable offenses committed by the president and vice president, neither of whom had ever been the clear choice of our sleeping polity for any office.

Some months ago, Kucinich had made the case against Dick Cheney. Now he had the principal malefactor in his view under the title “Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush”! “Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate.” The purpose of the resolve is that he be duly tried by the Senate, and if found guilty, be removed from office. At this point, Rep. Kucinich presented his 35 articles detailing various high crimes and misdemeanors for which removal from office was demanded by the framers of the Constitution.

Update: On Wednesday, the House voted by 251 to 166 to send Rep. Kucinich’s articles of impeachment to a committee which probably won’t get to the matter before Bush leaves office, a strategy that is “often used to kill legislation,” as the Associated Press noted later that day.