A series of questionable statements

90 Minutes of Mayhem!!

The new On The Way To Podcast is out!! Nothing beats a day in a library, especially when it's all about comics. Publishing, things to do with presentations, how to do things with your local library, being a parent into comics, and more!

Podcast Available from http://www.raggedyman.net/podcast/2015/11/19/on-the-way-to-cambridge-comics-art-festival-2015

With inspiration from my wife and apologies to Sniffin Glue

Listen now for wild tales of comics, hidden cinema, droid-bots on the loose, cape peril, sci-fi chocolates, Amazons on wheels, and how conventions get started for the strangest of reasons.

The podcast also has a new website at http://www.raggedyman.net/onthewayto/

Over the course of 17 years, Penelope Spheeris has created arguably one of the greatest and most influential music documentary series ever. Set in Los Angeles and covering the punk scene of the late 70s, the heavy metal scene on mid 80s, & the gutter-punk scene at the turn of century, it explores the sound, performance, politics and business, that exist around each of these worlds and times. It's style was naturalistic, inquisitive, unobtrusive, and at times brutally honest, which was eloquent and effective enough to eventually become part of the DNA of everything that has followed - with clear impact on Reality TV and the rockumentaries of MTV & VH1.

At the core of each film is, fittingly, live performances which are used as showcases for the scenes by giving equal focus for those on stage and off. The style is naturalistic, observational, and intriguing as anthropological documents. They also sound great, even if not all of the bands presented are actually that good. Interspersed with this are interviews with a broad range of individuals involved: musicians, fans, promoters, businessmen and police/authority figures giving the scene outsider/"every-man" view of it all. The iconic set of the blank wall with a single, bare light-bulb hanging at head-height is used extensively, evocative and beautifully simple as it allows the focus to be directly on the individual and their words. Being set in LA it also has plenty of car-based drive-along interviews, which provide the bulk of representation of the city outside of the venues or scene-controlled spaces, giving impressive visual insight into the urban environment that helped shaped the action of the piece. It also demonstrates how super-imposed the scenes are, hyper-stylized worlds pushed up against the realities of everyone else's everyday lives