The Magic

“Someone once asked me if there was such a thing as magic.

Only if you want there to be.

Only if you want it.”

– Hellblazer #141, by Warren Ellis & Tim Bradstreet

Not Really

Been trawling through FFFFOUND, everyone’s favourite image bookmarking site, (trying) to get ideas for Christmas. Which also kinda explains the lack of enthusiastic posting the last few days.

It wasn’t so long ago that the finance industry was the place to work in. Now with the global economic recession/depression/full-scale anarchy already beginning its ominous steps to reducing our way to life to post-war conditions, people might prefer choosing something else for a career then?

But there’s no need to worry. Know what you love doing, do it, and you will always be rich.

Warren Ellis: Stealing Your Internets

via Dharbin

“For those who don’t know, Warren Ellis is probably the most well-known figure in comics on the Internet. I know that’s marrying chocolate and peanut butter, but let’s face it: chocolate and peanut butter are delicious. An enormously prolific writer, Mr. Ellis also somehow finds time to be extraordinarily active on various message boards, discussion threads, and his own network of sites, Often imitated, never duplicated: Warren Ellis is as close to an iconoclast as you’re liable to get these days, at least in comic book circles.

APOLOGY: This comic will make no sense to most people unfamiliar with Mr. Ellis’ work and persona, as well as to many people who are quite familiar with both.”

Warren Ellis is in your computer, stealing your internets. I always knew it. Now his evil scheme has been exposed.

There Is No Charge For Awesomeness

Next time when I have a pet, I am going to do the exact same thing in my neighbourhood.

Warren Ellis’s Ignition City

via that evil bastard/genius Ellis, by Gianluca Pagliarani

“And I’m watching DEADWOOD, the American cable tv series that eviscerates the Western genre, mixing history with fiction in its imagining of the last days of the Wild West. And it suddenly occurs to me. Where did the space heroes go when they weren’t in space anymore? I found myself looking at the clapboard and pine of the Deadwood camp and seeing it made out of bits of abandoned 1930s sci-fi rocketship, and a fifty-year-old Flash Gordon calling people ‘c*cks*cker’.” Read the rest here.

I Need A Healing Factor

Nothing to post today as I convalesce from a particularly stubbon sore throat and blocked nose, which I might add, makes me slur my words (which are already projected in a nasal whine) and sound like I’d been hit in the head too hard.

It might actually be funny, if I wasn’t the one actually experiencing it..

The Original King Of Foxes

Hellblazer#97, written by Paul Jenkins, cover by Sean Phillips.

Great story, great cover. John Constantine – the original.

KIOSK NY: Gems From Around The World

KIOSK is a shop in SoHo filled with lovely little things carefully curated from all around the world. Just think: a place constantly reinventing itself, that embraces change and reimagination, an aesthetic that amalgamates shifting cultures, different flavours, inviting you to try and peg it into neat and finely divided groups and categories and know that it will not be easy.

KIOSK has garden tools, kitchenware, stationery from Germany, notebooks from Japan, American lottery tickets and reindeer hide from Sweden, 信箱 from Hong Kong; a continually changing catalogue that stands by a simple credo that says, “Hey, even the simple, everyday stuff can be beautiful, too”.

I think KIOSK would delight wanderlusting travellers or those who yearn after the simple design aesthetic. A personal favourite of mine has to be the deceivingly simple-looking yet intricately-crafted Black Cross Skateboard.

REFERENCE LIBRARY apron

by Andy Beach of REFERENCE LIBRARY

shop display: boxing styrofoam

shop display: postcards and photographs

german chalk

lj peretti’s ebony tobacco: custom

arizona’s finest sweet & spicy cactus candy! (that’s a mouthful)

gift set #1 for Christmas

custom tape

The Brill Kate Beaton

I simply love Kate Beaton‘s work. Inspired by history, Canada and the quirks of her Scottish heritage, her work can be nonsensical, laugh-aloud hilarious, witty and just plain fun, sometimes even all of that at once.

Her blog has the latest updates of her work.

Musashi and his rival, Sasaki Kojiro

Anthony Bourdain Loves Singapore Shark’s Head

BR brought to my attention this old article (2 years ago, in fact) in the New York Times that Anthony Bourdain wrote when he went foodhunting with KF Seetoh, or perhaps more well known as the Makansutra man, in the streets of Singapore.

Focusing their attentions on hawker stalls and the grimy-floored food centres that seem more than adept at making your eating experience as hot and sweat-drenchingly unpleasant as possible in our tropical humidity, now I feel like trying out the shark’s head at Tian Jin Hai Seafood, which is now located at Punggol Marina Country Club (no longer at Jackson Centre.)

“Ten years ago the chef-proprietor of Tian Jin Hai had made a remarkable discovery. “Every day he goes to the fish market. And every day he sees shark,” Seetoh said. “For the Chinese, shark is very popular. But where are the heads? So he asks them: ‘You sell fins. You sell the meat. You sell the eggs. Where are the heads?”’ This simple question led, as so often happens in the annals of gastronomy, to discovery: that the typically discarded head of the reef shark, when steamed with ginger, red pepper and garlic and served with soy sauce and spring onions, is in fact a divine mosaic of tender, subtly flavored fat, skin and cartilage. Since introduced at Tian Jin Hai, what was once considered trash has become a rare treat.”

I’m sold!