Chris Lowrance

The latest Framed is on the streets, and now, online. This month it's Cosmic Castle, local gaming and anime shop and childhood love of mine. A bit of news about the store is revealed, so check it out.

I know a lot of Triad gamers have mixed feelings about the store, and I'd love to hear your side of it.  Drop me a line at spookishness2000.  It's a yahoo address (must baffle the bots!).

I just had a three-headed hydra commissioned to watch over my baby-skull brandy sniffers.  One head can speak only truth, and the second only lies.  It's a riddle, you see. You have to rightly identify which is which in order to pass..."

"Of course, the third head immediatly eats you, regardless..."

"Perhaps I should have gone with the one-headed hydra."

In honor of the birth of our sovereign Lord and Savior, Santa Claus, I give you the latest Framed.  Like it?  Why don't you tell the paper that pays for it?

Christmas is full upon us, and this one is particularly special.  ( Click for over-sentimental story-time. )

The latest Framed is online and on the streets.  Those dolls mess me up, man. 

The semester is winding down, so expect a lot of activity on the website soon.  I've got a ton of new art to post, and I'd really like to replace that moldy old navagation bar at the top.  Fun Fact:  That's a repurposed graphic from the website I had in high school.

(For those of you reading this in a friend's list, with no clue what I'm talking about, click here.)

"Money is the grease on the shaved guinea pig of life..."
"I, Sir... am a well-greased pig."

"Certainly if writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for some time past in painting, music, and film-Mr Lawrence Durrell has led the way in developing a new form of writing with time and space shifts as we see events from different viewpoints and realize that so seen they are literally not the same events, and that the old concepts of time and reality are no longer valid-Brion Gysin, an American painter living in Paris, has used what he calls “the cut-up method” to place at the disposal of writers the collage used in painting for fifty years-Pages of text are cut and rearranged to form new combinations of words and image-In writing my last two novels, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, I have used an extension of the cut-up method I call “the fold-in method”-A page of text-my own or someone else’s-is folded down the middle and placed on another page-The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other-The fold-in method extends to writing the flashback used in films, enabling the writer to move backward and forward on his time track-For example I take page one and fold it into page one hundred-I insert the resulting composition as page ten-When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forward in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one-the déjà vu phenomenon can so be produced to order-This method is of course used in music, where we are continually moved backward and forward on the time track by repetition and rearrangements of musical themes-"

     Burroughs seems to describe what is actually a common-place technique within narrative-especially modern narrative.  The use of separate timelines, or restructuring a single timeline non-chronologically, is now an accepted and frequently employed device, especially in film.

     As for appropriating the works of others into your own, or into one another:  look no further than pop music.  “Sampling” is now so common, and it’s implications so profound, that the magazine Wired claims we are now a “cut and paste” society. 

One could argue that this is nothing new; it has simply become more explicit.  After all, no idea is an immaculate conception; thoughts occur in response to other thoughts.  Nothing I create is purely of me; it’s always a response to previous stimuli.  In this way all art is a “remix” of all previous art; we are all experiencing the same world, filtered and re-filtered through an endless chain of perceptions.

Burroughs’ proposed experiment, then, is simply a partial removal of those filters; of directly reproducing another’s work, rather than producing a new work influenced by it.  This thinking is more and more common in the digital age, and it’s implications are wide-reaching and extremely aggressive towards preset notions concerning content ownership and copyright, not to mention creativity in general.  Both the battle, and its final implications, are no where near a resolution.

GSO, pour into the streets tomorrow and snatch up every copy of Yes! Weekly you can find!  There are two, count them, TWO spectacular works by yours truly!  Then barrage their offices with fan-mail, praising my cartooning skill and further inflating my ego, like some kind of huge oily boil!  Or don't!

A full-color pull-out poster!  Perfect for wrapping Halloween fish!

Also, a comic about something that isn't real!

Huzahh!

"A diamond as big as the Ritz?  Pish pish.  I just purchased my own transcontinental railway, built entirely out of human bone."

My second journalist-comic for Yes! Weekly is on the streets today.  This month it was Industries of the Blind.

For now, look for a new one every fourth week of the month.  In the meantime, I'll try to pull together an organized site for them, and maybe some downloadable PDFs, because I know that text is tiny.