For some reason, I keep sticking my foot in my mouth with Warren Ellis. It's especially annoying because I find his work fascinating. It's one of those curses. I've had a few people that I just couldn't seem to speak to without insulting them and/or making myself look like a complete idiot.
Anyway, what I should have said in the last entry was The 4am is a really fun little podcast and a great idea. Despite his cantankerous persona, Ellis has done something genuinely magnanimous, here. Instead of going off on one of his own rants, which he seems to prefer to do in text or comics, he's given some of his fans a venue to show off their own talents. For a guy as likely to say "you can't have my job you little shits" as anything else, this might seem surprising, but the real message seems to be "find your own talents. Don't just emulate me." The 'you little shits' is implied.
See, the irony of the shit-disturbers and the satirists, the good ones anyway, is that they don't actually want you to wander around behind them like puppy-dogs. They're usually trying to get you (us) to think for yourself, and even when they get mouth-frothing angry (and I'm thinking of Spider Jerusalem, now, not so much Ellis himself), it's because they're trying to get you think. I have similar moments, though not as intense, when I teach. Please stop asking "Is it okay if I...?" Just think it through. I've already told you what you need to know to answer that question yourself.
So it's no surprise that Ellis' response to the last message was "There are times listed. If you can't sort out which song is which then you should go back to whoever gave you your degrees and give them back because they clearly didn't do it right" (quoted from memory, as I said, I lost the message). Notice that the target of his (mock) anger is actually the people who gave me my degrees. I'm not trying to psychoanalyse, here. All I have to go by is the words, so I'm talking about the words.
And for the record, I think it would be a little easier to have the times in the podcast listed as lengths for each piece, but by when they appear on the list. Or maybe toss them up as separate files that play in sequence. I'm perfectly capable of working it out myself. Just seemed like a better design.
But I'm actually quite happy with it and, without trying to get all melodramatic, quite grateful that there are people like Ellis in the world doing this kind of stuff, finding ways to use the internet to promote a sense of a creative community rather than just a place to sell books and porn.
Posted by orion at October 10, 2007 4:03 PM