Hello internet friends... the original post and accompanying image has become obsolete. Apologoes to Big_Slikk <--- over there. As of this writing, there are 170+ pages of fake tits and comments for you to read and enjoy. About every 10-15 pages or so, you'll encounter a brief and turgid argument... more

Hello internet friends... the original post and accompanying image has become obsolete. Apologoes to Big_Slikk <--- over there.

As of this writing, there are 170+ pages of fake tits and comments for you to read and enjoy. About every 10-15 pages or so, you'll encounter a brief and turgid argument about fake tits suck and are ugly and how could any woman in their right mind want to do that to their body. Suicide Girls is a haven for women to express their beauty in any way they feel how. Many girls dye their hair, have tattoos and/or piercings. Some have gone so far as to place sub-dermal implants in their arm or chests while others have needles and wires and ribbons make a corset pattern on their back. One girl went so far to sew her mouth shut! Some girls have done nothing at all.

And, yes, some have enhanced boobs.

If that isn't your thing, I'd recommend you click your way out of this thread now because this thread is for those who love fake boobs.

FAKE BOOBS or GTFO.

Thank you,

Your Moderator.

by Alexander Hinkley for Examiner (image) [Squeak in I Am] Squeak is this week's SuicideGirl gamer of the week. She is a sweet, shy girl who not only really loves comic books, but also is into video games. I spoke with her about which games she likes most and she also shared what she believes is... more

by Alexander Hinkley for Examiner



[Squeak in I Am]


Squeak is this week's SuicideGirl gamer of the week. She is a sweet, shy girl who not only really loves comic books, but also is into video games. I spoke with her about which games she likes most and she also shared what she believes is the meaning behind the name "SuicideGirls."

What is the story behind your SuicideGirls nickname, "Squeak"?

Anyone who has ever met me in person can tell you that, haha. I have a high voice...which only gets higher and squeakier as I get more nervous or shy. (And being an introvert with social anxiety, it happens quite a lot!) I got the nickname back in High School and I guess it just stuck. I sort of embraced it eventually and made it my SG name.

How did you first get into modeling?

I started modeling when I was about 14 years old. At the time, there were no internet agencies. You had to be with an agency or have some kind of actual representation. I worked for a local modeling agency for a couple years before branching out on my own. Going independent gives you more freedom, but the money is no where as good as when I had an agency.


You have a lot of sets with different hair colors. Blue, pink, red, blonde...which is your favorite look?

Hmmmm...well I guess I like them all in their own way. I tire of hair color pretty quickly and I am always excited to try something different. Although I love doing bright colors, it is not always fun (or convenient!) to stand out. The advantage to going blonde is that I can sort of blend in a bit easier...so I always seem to eventually return to my natural blonde color. At least for a bit.

What are some of your all-time favorite games?

Well, nostalgia often plays a big part in what I pick as far as my "favorites" go. The first series I ever played were the Kings Quest games on my grandmother's Tandy computer. So I was sort of raised on RPGs. When Baldur's Gate came out in the late 90's, I really experienced my first great love. I probably played that game for two years straight; over and over again, I still compare every single RPG I play to Baldur's Gate.

I also love Silent Hill 2. I'll never forget the day I finished it and watched the ending where you find out what sort of man James really is. It blew my mind. The overall atmosphere and game play was incredibly surreal and enjoyable. Not to mention Pyramid Head! What an awesome bad guy.

Lastly, I'd have to go with Halo. I know it is sort of a cliché nowadays, particularly amongst Xbox users, but you have got to give credit where credit is due. The first Halo game had an amazing storyline and the Halo series has had such a huge impact on the younger generation of gamers. Every time I see some kids bouncing around and shooting on Call of Duty or Left 4 Dead, I immediately know they were raised on Halo. They play every FPS like they are Master Chief and in low gravity. It cracks me up.

Which system do you prefer?

I am definitely an Xbox fan. I have most of the other systems as well; Wii, Playstation, etc...but I always go back to Xbox. I think it has to do with the size of the controller; I like a big controller. What can I say? I'm a "Size Queen!" Haha!

What are you currently playing?

I've been going back and forth between Halo 4 and Red Dead Redemption. I have a stack of RPGs piled up next to my computer that I hope to get around to when I have more time.

How's Halo 4 stack up to previous games in the series in your opinion?

The storyline is great! Much more akin to the first Halo as far as that sort of thing goes. I enjoyed Halo 2 and 3 but the storylines and boards didn't grip me enough to play them over and over again. I ended up finishing them and just putting them away. But I think I will most likely play through Halo 4 a few times before moving on.

It is also visually stunning. I am usually not too picky about graphics in games other than RPGs, but Halo 4 is definitely going to be setting the bar higher in the FPS realm.

Do you prefer playing games online or offline?

Offline. I take things way too personally. When I lose against a computer, I get a bit frustrated, walk away for a while, and then come back and try again. When I lose against a person, I am angry for days and fantasize about going to their house and kicking them hard in the shins before running off into the night. I just wasn't designed to play well with others.

Are you into motion gaming at all?

A little bit. I was really into Wii when it first came out and then later got the Kinect. By then I started to lose interest. I work as a fitness instructor and aerialist, so by the time I get home at the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is jump around in front of my console. Sitting is so much better.




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Like his name would suggest, Aesop Rock is a storyteller. But instead of shrouding lessons on morality within recycled folklore, the hip-hop emcee cuts to the chase, illuminating the human condition through unfettered observations on the strangeness of people and the shape-shifting worlds we inhabit. more

Like his name would suggest, Aesop Rock is a storyteller. But instead of shrouding lessons on morality within recycled folklore, the hip-hop emcee cuts to the chase, illuminating the human condition through unfettered observations on the strangeness of people and the shape-shifting worlds we inhabit. Born and raised in New York, Aesop has never lacked for subject matter. One could say that the city chooses her storytellers, and not the other way around. Aesop's refined staccato raps eloquently around even the harshest of big city truths, and when he zigs before he zags, the wordplay is nothing short of spectacular. His detailed, non-linear narratives explore the tension that exists between innocence and the sordid aspects of human nature; the self-inflicted identity crisis that exists when one dabbles in role play -- when the virgin taunts the whore, or when the pornographer becomes the ice-cream man. As Aesop puts it, his attraction lies in what happens when "fluffy meets evil."

Aesop sat down with SuicideGirls to talk about life as an indie-rapper and about his new full-length album "None Shall Pass," a collection of apocalyptic lullabies two years in the making, out August 28 on Definitive Jux.

Erin Broadley: Let’s start by talking about the “Walleyball” short you scored for one of the McSweeney’s Wolphin DVDs.

Aesop Rock: Oh cool.

EB: I thought it was amazing. What drew you to that project?

AR: I had done a benefit for McSweeney’s that was a children’s creative writing fund and workshop here in San Francisco. I was a fan and I just walked in and said, “I want to do a benefit show for you.” So we did that and then I let it be known that I was down to get involved in whatever they wanted to do. At the time they were just starting that Wolphin series which is their new DVD magazine of short films.

EB: I saw the one with the short film where Dennis Hopper tries to blow himself up.

AR: Yeah, when I walked in that’s the first thing I saw. I walked in and this guy was like, “Look at this weird Dennis Hopper thing!” I was down with it. Basically one of the guys that runs McSweeney’s was like, “Well, my donation is this movie called ‘Walleyball’. We just got back from filming at the border.” He showed it to me and I go, “This is fucking nuts.” He explained to me that technically when you hit the volleyball over the [California/Mexico border] fence you’re importing and exporting goods illegally from Mexico. I thought it was so great. He was like, “Would you like to do some music? You would have to do it by tomorrow.” It was very quick and I said, “Yeah, I can whip up some volleyball playing music if you want.”

EB: [Laughs]

AR: I just wanted to be a part of it. I tired to make something that sounds like goofy volleyball music.

EB: Right, something a little beach-y.

AR: A little beach-y.

EB: A little scary, maybe. The narrator talks about how there are motion sensors and it’s a militarized border and all that shit -- it kind of takes the fun out of prancing around barefoot on the sand.

AR: Right! I felt like if I did goofy volleyball music it would weirdly compliment that.

EB: Are the challenges different when it comes to making songs for an album versus making music for McSweeney’s or the song [“All Day”] you did for Nike?

AR: I’ve aligned myself with independent labels and it’s allowed me to do whatever I want basically. Which is this gift and curse because on one hand it’s awesome; it’s kind of like what everyone wants. On the other hand, if you run out of ideas you don’t have anyone to blame beside yourself. Occasionally I’ll get these side gigs, like the Nike project or the stuff I’ve done with Jeremy Fish; they come to me with an idea and it’s basically more of an assignment. Like, “Can you pull this off with this little? We have a starting point; the starting point is this fisherman.” Usually I’m into it as long as they’re not steering my hand all the way through. I liked Nike’s idea of, “Hey, can you do music for athletes to train to?” I sit here and go, “Well that’s the weirdest thing anyone’s asked me to do.”

To a degree it’s refreshing for someone in my position to get a little bit of direction. Sometimes when I’m working on Aesop Rock material, if I have writer’s block I’m like, “Fuck.” You know, it’s all on my shoulders and if I don’t come up with something soon then everyone’s looking at me. Whereas [with Nike and McSweeney’s] if they have an idea it takes away some of the hard part and it turns it more into this puzzle that you have to figure out. Like, “Yeah, I can do this volleyball music.”

EB: What’s the story with the song you did for Nike’s “Original Run” series? I never heard of it until I found out you were involved.

AR: It’s a series they’re doing now but they had only done two --one with LCD Soundsystem -- up until they asked me. The basic idea was 45 minutes of continuous music. They wanted mostly instrumental stuff.

EB: I’m surprised they didn’t want you rapping over the music like, “Run the fuck faster. Don’t stop asshole.”

AR: Yeah [laughs]. It would have been fun to do that.

EB: Are you a big runner?

AR: No. But luckily my wife is. She was very much a lab rat during the whole process. Any project that comes to me that’s odd or that I don’t understand why I’m being asked to do it, I’ll usually do.

EB: Sure, it’s the odd requests that pique your interest.

AR: Exactly.

EB: How are things going with the preparation for the None Shall Pass release?

AR: So far, so good. I’m swamped but it’s better to be busy than bored. I’ve got two videos that are both started but not finished. We finally finished booking the tour. I’ve got more going on now than ever before which is good but it all hinges on whether or not people like the record. It’s all up in the air. Right now I have more little groups of people that I’m working with at one time than I’ve ever had. It’s nerve racking because I’m a bit of a control freak and I like to oversee everything. I have this chip on my shoulder where I need to be in charge. I have to figure out a way to trust. I know I drive everyone I work with completely crazy. I run myself ragged a lot and then I’ll be like, “Well, you know, I’ve got to loosen up because I’m going to make enemies this way.” Especially this time around, just because there are so many little projects going at once, I think I have to take some Valium or something.

EB: Don’t we all?

AR: [Laughs]

EB: Well, when discussing your past albums, reviewers have mentioned your ability to stand out because of your vulnerable storytelling style, as opposed to the tough-guy MC role. Do you have any thoughts about whether or not this kind of battle-culture mentality has taken hip-hop to a place where it’s more about machismo than music?

AR: Well, it’s hard to say because a lot of hip-hop does sound more like machismo and acrobatics and, to a degree, there’s nothing wrong with it. That kind of competitiveness gets people involved and increases skills at writing faster but that being said, there comes a point where you just say, “Okay, I can’t do this anymore.” There are only so many albums where I can talk about me and be braggadocios. There comes a time when you just need to talk about something else or you need to just take all these things you’ve learned and go in a new direction. A lot of people have a hard time digesting that. It’s weird because I get all these labels of being sort of “out there” or being left field.

EB: Yeah I read something that described you as an indie-rap surrealist.

AR: Yeah, yeah. It’s just so easy to be left field in rap because it’s such a small box. There’s not very many people doing something that’s hot. Everyone keeps doing a slight variation of the same thing and it’s been like that for 30 years. At some point, whether you’re going to get criticized or not, you’ve got to do something or it just gets boring. So at the risk of getting a bunch of hate, I just take things into my own hands and try something different. Whether or not it fails is up in the air but I just can’t talk about myself anymore. The way that hip-hop has grown, it’s done the opposite of what a lot of genres have done. As it ages, it gets more refined and what you’re “allowed to do” gets to be less and less. Whereas other genres kind of can…

EB: …They can leap all over the place.

AR: Yeah. Rap music gets criticized a lot for doing anything that’s against the grain or out of the mold a little bit. Like I said, it doesn’t take much to go out of the mold because rap is so self-conscious and everyone’s so aware of what the definition of hip-hop is and whether or not what you’re doing is okay within the genre. It’s stupid and there are definitely a lot of people that are pretty close-minded and consciously sort of trying to hold back what should be a natural evolution. It turns into what we have now, which is a bunch of people doing second and third rate versions of stuff that already existed 10 or 15 years ago. It’s just laziness.

EB: How does this record fit in with your previous work? What new directions did you step into, if any?

AR: When I wrap a record, over the course of making these random songs something will click and you make a discovery and you’re like, “This is the first stepping stone into what I do next.” It’s hard to put into words but there’s definitely a different overall sound. I want to be talking at people less and I want to be talking with people more. I’d rather be engaging. I want people to be pulled into a record rather than be sort of preached at or talked at. Those were conscious things that I wanted to do. I don’t know if being on the West coast changed it as much as the fact that I was out of New York. I’m not out and about as much in this city. I’m in my comfort zone in New York. I’d been there so long so moving and pulling myself out of that was a pretty major thing for me.

EB: How long have you been in San Francisco?

AR: Almost two years -- a little over a year and a half. Being out of my comfort zone was something I was scared of forever. Then once I did it I was like, “Ah, this is actually kind of more comfortable in a way.” I don’t know that many people here and I kind of like that. I don’t have as many distractions.

EB: It’s kind of an anonymous freedom.

AR: Exactly, I can just kind of get lost. I have to MapQuest going to the grocery store.

EB: [Laughs]

AR: Yeah, it’s fun. It’s sort of this strange land. Everything I feared almost turned out to be refreshing. I still have a bit of an East Coat mind state and I still struggle. The whole idea was to come out here for a while and then move back to New York with my wife at some point. That’s still the plan but for now I’m just on this extended field trip. There’s a lot of art and culture in San Francisco specifically. I’m just sort of walking around in a foreign place every day. It’s cool but everything I’ve known and learned is from the perspective and attitude that comes from New York and Long Island. When you’re in New York you’ve got this “I’m never going to leave” attitude. It’s comfortable and you think, “This is it for me. I’m here and I’m going to put my flag here.” Then something happens and you either build up the courage to leave or because of whatever turn of events, you get out of New York. Now I almost understand New York more because I’m looking at it from the outside. When I do ultimately return there it’ll almost be more meaningful. Now I know what it’s like to be elsewhere. I’ve traveled so much -- I’ve been around the world but I’m never in any one place for more than one night. So this is sort of kind of interesting.

EB: I think there are people in all cities with that “I’ll never leave” mentality. I know people who will probably live in Kentucky for the entirety of their lives.

AR: Yeah, you feel this sort of kinship with your home territory. But then there are also people who are constantly on the move. I think there’s something wrong with those kinds of people.

EB: Damn gypsies [laughs].

AR: Yeah. People that can’t stay planted for more than a few months, they’re definitely running. It takes a special person to live like that; usually they end up being tour managers or something. They’re a special breed. Someone that can stay on the couch for a couple weeks and then pick up and go on tour and the day after that tour ends get a job on another tour. It’s the weirdest job to ever have probably.

EB: I don’t know anybody that says they want to grow up to be a tour manager.

AR: No, it’s kind of something you fall into. I know a guy who’s been saying, “This will be my last tour,” for the last three years.

EB: So, Jeremy Fish, the visual artist you collaborate with a lot, also lives in San Francisco. He did the None Shall Pass artwork and you guys also collaborated on a short story called The Next Best Thing, a children’s book of sorts, right?

AR: Yeah. When I moved out here I was a fan of him but I didn’t know he was a fan of me. We have a friend in common and basically he got in touch with me because he got the opportunity to pitch a cartoon to Disney and he said, “Hey, do you want to do some music for this if it ever were to go through?” I was like, “Fuck yeah, that sounds crazy.” I was like, “And by the way I’m moving to San Francisco next week. So why don’t we meet up?” So, long story short, the cartoon bounced around in TV land for a while. The pitch still exists but we’ve since moved on. In the meantime we became really good friends. He’s one of the only people I actually know and have become close to since I moved out here. It just became really natural for us to work together regardless. So the first thing we did was that book and record, which is similar to those old Disney books and records that used to come out where you sort of played the record and turned pages along with the record. I was interested in trying to think of different ways to bring visual arts and music together more often. It’s kind of a crime how little it happens these days.

EB: Yeah, Jeremy’s stuff is great. Did you by chance pick up that Lost Girls series that Alan Moore did?

AR: Uh-uh.

EB: It’s a set of graphic novels about, like, what really happens with all of the female characters from children’s books like Wendy from Peter Pan and Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy from The Wizard of OZ. It’s very pornographic -- an adult book -- but there’s this children’s element as well. It’s like using these children’s stories as a vehicle for adult content. It’s fascinating. Next time you’re in a comic shop you should check it out.

AR: Right, right. I’ll check it out. That was interesting, what you just mentioned. With Jeremy’s stuff and my stuff, we both work in this little world of trying to mix cute and evil together. I’m trying to describe this evil situation using fluffy terminology or I’m trying to describe a fluffy situation getting kind of evil or pornographic. And Jeremy’s signature is this skulls-and-bunnies thing where it’s fluffy meets evil. I tend to be attracted to that stuff. It’s finding good in every amount of evil and finding a little evil in all the good, and describing any situation like that.

EB: I understand you have a visual art background as well and studied painting in college. What are some of the differences or similarities between collaborating with someone on a visual project versus in the recording studio?

AR: It’s a similar process. I only like to collaborate with people that I’m comfortable with and share a similar vision [artistically] or have a friendship. Someone like Jeremy I just knew would work because I felt his stuff looked like a visual representation of what some of my music felt like. He agreed with that so it worked out. Musically I’ve somehow aligned myself with people I was a fan of before I knew them. When it comes to a lot of my friends, I’m just fans of their music anyway so it’s easier to trust these people. I have a hard time trusting. The people I trust most are the artists that I collaborate with where I can say, “I need you to do this with me. I need it to be kind of like this but I want you to put your spin on it and I need it by this day.” I trust that they’ll pull it off. I guess the whole idea with collaboration is that you give the other person some leeway.

EB: I came across a Dutch documentary from several years back on Def Jux in general and there was one part where you talked about the rough time you were going through at that point in your life…

AR: Yeah, that was a bad era for me.

EB: You talked about shutting down and bottoming out emotionally and feeling like you weren’t able to function. I think most artists can totally relate to how you felt at that point. Do those feelings still threaten or affect your creativity? Or have you put them to bed for the most part?

AR: Yeah, I don’t know. Everyone is different. Some people can go through every day with a robotic shield up and some are more affected. It’s hard to say, but that [documentary] was a testament to a way more turbulent time with what stuff was going on for me. I was very uncomfortable with the fact that my music was making noise. I had achieved this slight degree of success and I didn’t know what to do with it.

EB: Right, people coming at you from all angles.

AR: Yeah. I just didn’t know what to do. I’m not good at receiving that kind of attention. What I do is always kind of based in the art side of things. You know, I went to school for painting…

EB: Right, which is a very solitary art form.

AR: Yeah. The fact that I was making music in this indie way was very much based on the fact that I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I like to create shit -- I like to stay up at night and create things and make something out of nothing so that when I wake up I have something to show for yesterday. That was how I always did everything. But then, before you know it, someone takes notice and it’s cool, but then more people notice. It’s a little weird because before you know it, it’s really strange and you don’t know how to react. Because you’re like, “This is just what I do.” I still have those ups and downs all the time. I guess I’m just predisposed to being that kind of person.

But I’m more grounded right now than I’ve ever been. Probably my marriage has something to do with it. That combined with cutting certain things out of my life that were negatively affecting me -- trying to grow up a little and realize that I’ve got to be accountable for my actions and in doing that, I have to focus on certain things and make some decisions. You don’t want to grow up but once you do it you realize that your life gets a lot easier. I became a little more focused on what I needed to do. I’m still uncomfortable with the publicity aspect of all this but I like to make music so I can try to find some sort of balance.

EB: Are you ever worried that at a certain point -- for example if this album were to truly blow up -- do you ever worry that the attention will make you take a step back and not want to release future albums?

AR: Yeah, totally. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but yes, I would, in a second, step back. I’ve already almost stepped back a few times. Some days it’s almost not worth it to go through the industry side when all I want to do is make some jams. I always tell this to my girl too, I’m just like, “Look, there’s going to be a day where I’m just going to snap and be like fuck all this shit and I’m going to get a job at Starbucks up the street.”

EB: I could see you in a green apron. It’s a good look for you.

AR: Thank you. There are times where I’m like, “You know what; the stress that I’m experiencing right now is quite simply not worth it.” But somehow I get talked through it all the time; I have people around me that are like, “Hey, don’t worry man. It’s going to be fine. You’re making a good record.” I’ve got this little cheerleader squad that helps me out. I’m not going to lose friends or relationships over this shit. I’m not going to fucking deal with people critiquing my lifestyle.

EB: Yeah, forget it.

AR: If it ever delves too deep into that territory, it kind of loses its fun and I’m more than happy to just step out of it. Either that or I’ll just release all my music for free.

EB: Sure, or you could just host open mics at the Starbucks you’re going to work for.

AR: There you go…I think you’re onto something [laughs].

For more information and tour dates, go to www.myspace.com/aesoprockwins or www.definitivejux.net.

HOT DAY: This weekend we convention in Zaragoza! If all goes well on Monday I will summarize these days.We are in a 4 star hotel! The room is amazing! Small gift and why only a week to get out my set, I put some pictures :3 Hope you like! Although I only look fat ... : ( (image) (image) (image) (image)... more

HOT DAY:

This weekend we convention in Zaragoza! If all goes well on Monday I will summarize these days.We are in a 4 star hotel! The room is amazing! Small gift and why only a week to get out my set, I put some pictures :3
Hope you like! Although I only look fat ... : (








Don't forget that my set out on the 9th! only 7 days! I'm so nervous! Hope you like it!


My page in FB
Page about Hopefuls Suicide girls Spain

THANKS!

EXTRA PIC:

Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.

 This week we bring you Clio!
 Clio has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 14 strikingly sexy photo... more

Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.



This week we bring you Clio!


Clio has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 14 strikingly sexy photo sets. Enjoy this gorgeous look back at the stunning Clio…



From her first photo set Moonlight Shadows shot by Cherry in 2006:





From her Soledad set shot with Lavezzaro in 2006:





She's sexy in Homestead shot by wwwmarkmnl in 2007:





Clio Loves You to Death in this from 2007 shot by Cherry:





She says her faith runs thinner than water in Downpour shot by DiazArri in 2008:





Clio draws a heart around the name of your city in Tiki Gods shot by Brooklyn in 2008:





She's smokin' hot in Destroy shot by Brooklyn in 2008:





Clio is dark and sexy in Black Heart shot by Cherry in 2009:





She gets scrappy in Fight Club shot by Cherry in 2009:



Clio is a sexy vampire in True Blood shot by Alissa in 2009:





She's one of Dracula's new brides in Killing Vampires shot by Cherry in 2009:





Clio was Born Into A Light in this sexy set shot by Brooklyn in 2009:





She says Save a Place For Me in her set from 2010 shot by Albertine:





From her most recent set Magica Sexualis shot by Albertine in 2011:







Hope you enjoyed the lovely look back at the gorgeous SuicideGirl Clio! Be sure to keep an eye out for a new set coming soon to member review!

Become a member TODAY for only $4 a month (if you sign up for a year) to see all 14 nude pin-up photo sets of Clio - http://suicidegirls.com/join/


The makers of Star Trek can thank their lucky stars that the spacetime continuum isn't thought to be very continuous these days. The new Star Trek film turns its back on everything that Back To The Future ever taught us about time, and embraces the possibilities of infinite alternate universes that... more

The makers of Star Trek can thank their lucky stars that the spacetime continuum isn't thought to be very continuous these days. The new Star Trek film turns its back on everything that Back To The Future ever taught us about time, and embraces the possibilities of infinite alternate universes that come along with the relatively recent science of string theory.

In the domain of string theory, the paradox issues created by time travel are resolved by a split in the fabric of time, with new offshoots creating alternate futures. This non-linear vision of temporal theory, which is now favored by many scientists, has conveniently allowed Star Trek director J.J. Abrams, and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who worked with J.J. on Alias and Fringe), to reboot the series and open Star Trek up to a whole new world of possibilities.

The character of Spock lies at the dramatic center of the alternate universe depicted in the new Star Trek movie, with Leonard Nimoy's original Spock traveling back in time to aid a United Federation of Planets inhabited by his younger self, played by Heroes' Zachary Quinto. In this timeline, which was created by the elder Spock's leap through time, the young Spock (and not Kirk) gets to kiss Uhura (played by Zoe Saldana).

In an otherwise utterly brilliant film, it's this one storyline that may have hardcore Trekkies and Trekkers up in arms. Science fiction fans might need to remind themselves that the word "science" comes before "fiction" in this genre, where multiple alternate timelines/universes are (quite literally) the way of the future. Fans can also console themselves with the fact that a Spock/Uhura relationship is perhaps not without precedent in Star Trek's hallowed canon -- as actor Karl Urban (who play Dr. Leonard "bones" McCoy) points out in the group discussion with Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto below.

Question: Obviously this Star Trek takes place in an alternate timeline and the younger Spock is very different from your Spock, he's much more emotional, much more human -- he has the relationship with the girl.

Leonard Nimoy: He does doesn't he? [laughs] I noticed that.

Q: How did you feel about that when you first read that in the script? Were you resistant to that?

LN: I'll tell you, I was bemused by it when I read it in the script. I was amazed by it when I saw it on screen. I thought it was incredible.

Q: Do you think it works?

LN:[/b[ Brilliantly. Don't you?

Q: Well I understand that Spock is half human and half Vulcan, and I guess it's more of a human Spock and less of a Vulcan Spock.

Zachary Quinto: I don't necessarily agree with you, I think there's a duality and an internal conflict because he's really split between those two halves of himself but I just don't think he's gained the kind of control over that duality that Leonard had when he played the character. That's the journey of this character. It's not that he won't arrive there. It's not that he possesses more humanity than Vulcanity, it's just he's juggling to define it.

LN: [laughs] That's great I love that. Write that, "Vulcanity" -- that's a new one!

Q:: Zachary, you play one of the most iconic of all the characters in the Trek universe. How intimidating was it for you to do that? And how much more so for you to do so with [Leonard] present? And Leonard, what do you think of the new Spock?

ZQ: I think all of us were faced with a certain level of intimidation stepping into these roles theoretically, although J.J. did a great job of diffusing that from step one, in terms of really dictating that we were encouraged to use the original performances as points of departure, but from there we were expected to develop our own points of view and perspectives on these characters.

And for me Leonard's involvement was only liberating frankly. I knew that he had approval over the actor that would play young Spock, so when I got the role I knew from the beginning it was with his blessing, and from that point we developed our own relationship. I was the first one cast in the movie. I got cast in June and we didn't start shooting until November, so over those months Leonard and I spent a number of times hanging out and talking about life and about the characters. Just getting to know him personally was incredibly freeing and helpful in the process.

LN: I think it's appropriate when the old timers walk on the set that everybody be intimidated. [laughs] It's classic. I used to be the kid on set and I was intimidated. Why shouldn't they be? [laughs]

Q: This relationship didn't exist at all in the series. Uhura never expressed any interest at all in Spock that anybody could see. How did you approach this relationship that was brand new to the Star Trek canon?

Karl Urban: If I may just express some of my Star Trek knowledge here, there was, I do remember, one particular episode where Spock was playing, what was that instrument?...And Uhura was singing and caressing his ears, and it was one of the most hypnotic scenes in the original series. So I think, while that relationship wasn't developed, it certainly was there in subtext.

ZQ: Snap! [laughs]...And for me the relationship really provided a great source of levity in the film between Kirk and Spock, between Kirk and Uhura. But between Spock and Uhura I think it provides a really interesting depth in that Uhura ultimately represents a canvas on to which Spock projects the emotions that he can't otherwise express.

I just think that dynamic for me was really rewarding as an actor, and the scene that Zoe [Saldana] and I played in the elevator was definitely one of the most present experiences through shooting, and that has a great deal to do with Zoe and her emotional availability and her openness, and it was such a comforting confined space that we were in.

LN: [talking to Zachary] What is it that Kirk says to you, I missed the line, when you're on the transporter and he says something and you say, "I have nothing to say about that." What does he say to you?

ZQ: He says, "Her first name's Nyota?"

LN: And you say?

ZQ:: And I say, "I have nothing to say on the matter."

Q: Leonard, did you have any hesitation going back to this after all this time? And was it the script, was it J.J., what?

LN: It was a combination of the script and J.J.'s enthusiasm, and then J.J. and the writers, [Roberto] Orci and [Alex] Kurtzman, talking about their sensibility, their sense of what Star Trek was all about and what the Spock character could be about. And frankly I had felt marginalized for a long time. I hadn't been asked to be involved in Star Trek for something like 17 or 18 years, and this felt like somebody said there's a value here that we'd like to take advantage of and do something with, and it felt good. It felt good. It felt like being, frankly, appreciated. I was happy to go back to work.

Q: What were your fondest memories of Gene Roddenberry?

LN: He was a brilliant complicated man and we had a complicated relationship. There were times when it was like a father /son relationship -- a typical, classic -- and sometimes it was great and sometimes it was really bad. Sometimes we disagreed strongly about certain issues. But obviously he was a very, very special mind.

Q: Zackary, did any of the Vulcanisms give you any trouble?

ZQ: I spent a little time actually training my hands to be able to do the salute. That wasn't something that came particularly easy, so I would rubber band my ringer finger and my pinky finger together and when I was driving around Los Angeles I would do little exercises....

Q: Somewhere in the press kit there's a quote from you, Mr. Nimoy, where you say that this Star Trek has the opportunity to go places that the original never accomplished. What are those things?

LN: When we were making the series I was always curious about what issues the writers were going to tackle in Star Trek that they could not tackle in other series, in other television. Those were the things that make Star Trek interesting for me. In this Star Trek, I think it's a question of vengeance. It's the defeatism and emptiness of vengeance.

That makes it meaningful to me. We tackled some very interesting issues all through the years, racial issues, economic issues, ecological issues, all kinds of very interesting subject matter, and I think that's what made Star Trek meaningful for a lot of people.

Writers were given an opportunity in Star Trek to tell stories about issues that they could not express in other television shows - and they did. They often came in and said, "I have a great feeling about this subject. I'd like to write a script that deals with that issue."

Q: Were you surprised that it took this long for the studio to recast the roles you guys had played before?

LN: I frankly didn't spend a lot of time thinking about that. I was busy doing other things. I simply figured that, for me, Star Trek was finished. I had done what I could and was asked to do, and it was over for me. When the First Generation's film came along I was left out of it and Kirk was killed. I think someone was sending us a message. [laughs] It's over for you guys, it's somebody else's games now, and that's the way it was for a long time.

Q: Zachary, in the film it seems that Spock has to strip himself of virtually every emotion. For this character what did you have to strip yourself of?

ZQ: I didn't really see it that way actually. I think Spock, I think he experiences deeply run emotions and I think that especially in the context of the relationship with his mother, I think there's a real depth of feeling. The only thing I feel I had to strip myself of was the ability to express it in a conventional way. I think that's really the dilemma of Spock ultimately, because if he doesn't feel emotion, then there's no conflict within him. So the conflict exists in the feeling, the deeply rooted and sublimated feeling of emotion without the opportunity to do much with it other than hold it, which is really challenging and can be painful.

Q: Zachary, you play two beloved characters, Sylar in Heroes and Spock in Star Trek. Do you foresee a backlash with either one of your fanbases?

ZQ: A fan war? Fan reaction doesn't tend to be something I attach myself to very much. I mean, I care deeply about the work I do, I'm grateful on so many levels for these contrasting and challenging opportunities that I've had in the past couple of years, but my focus is my work and people's reaction to my work falls under the category of things I have absolutely no control over. I would certainly love to invite my Heroes fans to join us on this journey and, don't be pissed, it's all good.

Q: Zachary, at the end of the original series it's perceived that Mr. Nimoy tried to distance himself from playing Spock -- he even wrote a book entitled, I Am Not Spock...

ZQ: I read it.

Q: Are you concerned at all about now being too associated with Spock as an actor?

ZQ: Well I think that was a different time. There was a stigma attached to science fiction that doesn't exist anymore. It's become so much more mainstream. I think also people's attention spans, for better or worse, have diminished significantly since that time. I feel like really it's incumbent upon myself to define what kind of career I want -- and for me that's a career of longevity and diversity. So now it's my job to hopefully utilize this exposure as a platform to do other kinds of work and enrich myself with other genres and to invite the avid fanbase of science fiction, of Star Trek specifically, to come with me on that kind of a journey now because that's the kind of actor I want to be...So...No!

Q: Leonard, how did [William Shatner] react to you being cast in the movie?

LN: Oh, I think he had mixed feelings but it's all worked out fine.

Q: Did you guys talk about your return to...

LN: ...No. We didn't talk about it.

Q: You got to talk to your young self in the movie. What would you want to say to your young self in real life?

LN: I think the scene with Zackary was a very good father/son scene, really. He's sort of been through it and is giving the best advice he can in a very brief scene. Not a lot of opportunity for that.

Q: Leonard, as well as staring in the first Star Trek series and the first six movies, you also directed. Would you like to go behind the camera again?

LN: No. No, I'm done with all that thank you. I never set out to be a director. After Spock had died, sort of, in Star Trek II, they brought me in for a meeting and asked if I'd like to be involved in Star Trek III, in the making of it, and I had been told that I should be directing. I took it as an insult because I thought what's wrong with my acting? But I thought maybe now I should do that and I said I'd like to direct the movie, and I suddenly found myself with a directing career which I had enjoyed and I had enough of it. I directed I think five or six films -- I had a good time.

I would like to say this that over the years one of the questions that I've often been asked is what contributes to the longevity of interest in Star Trek, and what makes it successful and so forth, and I think one of the things that's easily overlooked is the fact that all of the people on this Enterprise crew, all of the people involved in these various characters within Star Trek are highly educated and highly professional people. They're for the most part scientists, and they really know how to do their job and I think people admire that.

People may not be consciously aware of it, but you somehow sense that these are very professional people that know what they're doing and each makes a contribution to a solution of a problem. And while I have the opportunity to say that here, I would like to point out that there's a great authenticity in this movie, I think that you believe these characters, you believe that these people are professionals and that, I think, has something to say about the quality of the professionalism and talent of all the people that are playing these characters, that are portraying these characters -- there's a brilliant cast put together here. I'm an admirer of all of the cast in this movie. I think they've done a great job.

Hollywood nearly killed Tank Girl. Dodgy movies have a way of doing that to people. Tank Girl's creators, writer Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, would be the first to say the 1995 big screen incarnation of the cult comic strip character, which they had zero control over, wasn't all that... more

Hollywood nearly killed Tank Girl. Dodgy movies have a way of doing that to people. Tank Girl's creators, writer Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, would be the first to say the 1995 big screen incarnation of the cult comic strip character, which they had zero control over, wasn't all that it should have been. Indeed they might even say it was a "shit sandwich" (well, actually, Martin did). Fortunately, Tank Girl's superhuman, and her fuck you spirit would never allow a bunch of scummy film execs and industry cheese weasels to have the last word. Down but not out, after a hiatus of over a decade, she put her Tank Boots back on, and kicked, screamed and farted her way back from near oblivion, with a little help from Martin.

In the process of documenting Tank Girl's past for a best-of book called The Cream of Tank Girl (out October 2008), Martin found a renewed passion for his foul-mouthed, mutant kangaroo-humping friend. Original draftsman Jamie Hewlett may have moved on to pastures new with Damon Albarn and their virtual Gorillaz band, but Tank Girl has found new pen pals to roughhouse with.

With a slew of fresh Tank Girl adventures already in print, in the bag, and on the horizon, Martin and his badly behaved progeny are smashing ("Sleesh! Plock! Glump!") their way into one of their most prolific periods ever. We sat down for a long distance chat with Martin, and took a gander at what the future holds for Tank Girl.

Alan Martin: Where are you calling from?

Nicole Powers: Los Angeles.

AM: What accent is that? It doesn't sound very American.

NP: No, you've got me there, I'm actually from Sheffield.

AM: Are you? That's just down the road from me then.

NP: So where are you right now?

AM: Well not just down the road, I live in Berwick-Upon-Tweed just on the border with Scotland.

NP: That's along way from where Tank Girl started in Worthing.

AM: It is, yes, thankfully.

NP: How did you end up there?

AM: My wife started a business with her mother running a shop, so we now live here and started our family here, a long way from Worthing. It couldn't be further in fact without going into Scotland.

NP: So are we going to see Tank Girl painting her face blue and going all Braveheart on us?

AM: [laughs] That's a good idea actually. I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, we could take it in that direction.

NP: When you created Tank Girl some twenty years ago, what was the original concept? What did you have in mind?

AM: Nothing really. It was just a hotchpotch of ideas, of things that we liked. There was no real formula to it. Everything that went in just had to tick the cool boxes, you know. Did it look good? Did it sound good? Did it taste good? If it did, then it was OK to go in our comic. So pretty much everything that we were into, the style of clothes we were wearing, and all our friends were wearing, whatever band we were into. And as far as formulating story lines or plots, it just never happened. There was no high-brow construction. It was just what do we like? Brilliant, we'll put it in. That was as far as it went.

NP: You mention the clothes, and I have to say out of any comic book character Tank Girl has the coolest wardrobe.

AM: Yeah, well that's all entirely down to Jamie. I just dress like a tramp basically.

NP: If we opened up your closet doors what would we see?

AM: Mould. [laughs] Mildew and mould. No, I'm not that bad really, but Jamie is a real clothes horse, he really loves his clothes. He always did, even when he didn't have much money he was very, in a way, sharply dressed by going to charity shops and thrift shops, if that's possible. But he always had a very idiosyncratic style that was all his own, so that completely carried through to the comics. But the gang that we were all in, we all dressed very similarly in the current styles that were around, we all had leather jackets etc., etc.. So that all filtered through into the original Tank Girl, and then, as time went on, hippy influences came in as crusty and grunge reared its head and everything mutated slowly right the way through to Brit pop, when it all just went down the pan.

NP: That was one of the things that shocked me with the Tank Girl book, I never realized that she had a psychedelic, flower-powered, hippy-dippy period. What was that about?

AM: [laughs] I think it was a lot to do with us smoking too much pot really, and watching Easy Rider whilst we were drawing comics. There was definitely a few months where we were getting very stoned and watching Easy Rider or Woodstock the movie or whatever else was made in that era, you know, anything with Jack Nicholson in from the mid-sixties, so that all just filtered through, and then the same as all the original influences, they just sort of disappeared as we moved onto something else with our limited attention span.

NP: She has changed over the years. I guess if she was in her mid-twenties in 1988 that would put her in her mid-forties come 2008.

AM: Yes. Well, I guess the only mention I ever made of her age in the comic was at the beginning of one of the early strips when she says, "I'm 23," and that was when I was 23. So, yes, she'd be exactly the same age as me, and I was 22 ten it all started and I'm 42 now on her 20th anniversary. You don't need to be a mathematician to work that one out, but yes, she would be in her forties.

NP: Would she be wearing sensible shoes by now do you think?

AM: Some of the time, some of the time with her tongue firmly in her cheek. We did actually, when Ashley Wood, the artist who did the comeback series last year, The Gifting, he did the initial publicity poster for it and he drew her looking like a librarian. The picture came through to me and it was just a complete shock. I looked at it and went, "Oh my god. That is truly upsetting because everyone is going to say, 'why isn't she dressed like a punk anymore.'"

Then I thought about it and I remembered a line form the beginning of Darling with Julie Christie. In the movie she [talks] about not rebelling being the new rebellion, and so I wrote a blog about that and put it out, and the backlash was phenomenal. People were so upset. They thought that Tank Girl had changed into this sort of normal working girl, a nine-to-fiver dressed in middle class clothing, and we were almost lynched for it. Absolutely no one had a sense of humor about her. I was sat there going, "this is great," because it got us so much more publicity than if we'd just drawn her wearing what she was wearing when everyone last saw her.

NP: You really know how to ruin people's days.

AM: I know, but originally, like I say in The Cream of Tank Girl, that was what happened first time around, we were always battling other people's preconceived ideas of what she was. If anyone came up to us and went, "Brilliant, she's so much like me," we'd look at the and go, "Right, we're going to make her so much not like you the next time she comes in a comic." So we just kicked back against everything that tried to assimilate her, that tried to claim her or dominate her.

And it worked again with Ashley. I don't know whether he was actually thinking that, or whether he just doodled away and that's what came out but, yes, the backlash had started even before the comic came out. I was just laughing because, you know, it's a comic character, people need to get a bit of perspective really.

NP: Obviously Tank Girl had her Hollywood period. I always knew Tank Girl was going to go Hollywood because she had really white teeth. She was destined to go there. And I was watching the film last night, and what struck me was I couldn't understand what Gwen Stefani was doing running around in a tank. Lori Petty has the Gwen Stefani look, voice and...

AM: Or perhaps the other way around.

NP: I think so, I think so.

AM: Which came first, yeah. Yes, well, you know, people have their influences, however perverse they might be.

NP: In interviews you talk about how you would have liked to put Grange Hill and Benny Hill references into the Tank Girl script...

AM: Well, we were never actually really allowed to touch anything to do with that film. It was actually written into our contract that we weren't to have anything to do with it, but they did sort of wave the script in front of us. I think that quote came from Jamie, and I think it was a bit of artistic license there, but we did want to include references to the stuff that was in the original comic, but, obviously, ninety percent of it would have been lost on a worldwide audience because it was purely Brit stuff. The children's TV shows that we referenced, and the seventies pop bands, would have been lost on an American or even Australian [audience], so yeah, any idea like that we put forward to them was vetoed instantly, and so we soon thought that we wouldn't bother so...

NP: You say that, but since the success of shows like The Office, Ali G, and Little Britain, which is now in the USA, American's have become a lot more tolerant of us Brits twittering on about shit that means nothing to them, and they kind of get a kick out of it on some level, so do you think if it had been written today, you'd have been able to get away with a lot more?

AM: I still don't know. They focus grouped it in front of sixteen year olds. I think with The Office, and stuff like that, you'll get a more high-brow audience, even though it's quite a daft show it will be more lenient. But with your average MTV crowd, probably they'd look at it and go, "sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. This is absolute nonsense, I can't understand it," and they'd maybe be less tolerant of it. But, that said, I didn't think that was the audience we should have been aiming for. It shouldn't have been MTV, it should have been a much more cult film, it should have been much lower budget, and it should have had me writing it.

NP: Would you go for it again if you had the opportunity to do it right?

AM: We don't own the rights. MGM own the rights. We sold the rights. "In perpetuity" I think it says on the contract. MGM/UA own the rights, but I think it's actually been sold on to Sony. Anyway, whoever's got it probably doesn't even know they've got it, and I think the idea of doing another movie might be like throwing good money after bad, but you never know, you never know. I never thought I'd write the comic again -- that happened.

NP: What inspired you to revisit Tank Girl?

AM: What happened was, about seven years ago, Titan, the U.K. publishers, came to us and they said, "we'd like to have a bash at reissuing the Tank Girl stuff," because...there was obviously interest still out there. They said they'd like to reissue all of the original books. I wrote introductions for them and for one of them, because it was a bit of a thin book, I wrote a fake script supposedly that hadn't been used back in the early nineties, just to fill a few pages. It was an unused script with no images or anything, and I wrote it in about a day, and I just sat there and thought, "Well, that was easy." Then I looked at it and thought, "Well, actually I think that's quite good as far as Tank Girl scripts go."

So I suggested to them that we generate some new stuff, and then I started writing some more prosaic stuff rather than scripts, just short stories etc., and that formed the basis of my novel in inverted commas, Armadillo, which came out earlier this year. From then on it all just sort of spiralled. After that I wrote The Gifting, the series, and then punted that around looking for artists, and eventually came up with Ashley Wood, and it all grew from there.

NP: And now you have Rufus Dayglo doing some of the art.

AM: Rufus is pretty much doing all of it now. He's a comic drawing machine, and my savior.

NP: So how did you bump into him?

AM: Well actually, when I first wrote the Armadillo book, I was having trouble getting it published, so I published it myself and sold it on eBay. I was just printing to order. People would order it from me, I'd print it off on my home printer and just package it up and send it out. I sent it out around the world, to Japan and America and Kuala Lumpur, and various places, and Rufus in London, being an avid Tank Girl fan from back in the day, and also a comic art dealer, so he's always looking for stuff like that, he bought a copy off of me. Then he just got in touch with me, and he said, "This is great, what else are you doing?"

I told him that I'd written some comic scripts, and he said, "Well, why don't you do it with Ashley Wood, 'cause Ashley's a big Tank Girl fan." So he actually put me in touch with Ashley. At the time Rufus was working for an animation studio, but eventually he just ended up being the artist. It just seemed so natural. Ashley brought him in to do some layouts on the first comics, and from that we could just see that he had the sense of humor, and he had the style, and it all worked very well. We haven't looked back really. Rufus is just doing so much, he just has so much output. He's a very fast artist, he does two pages a day, so I'm having trouble keeping up with him because I don't write that fast.

NP: Stylistically what do you think Rufus brings to the page?

AM: I mean it's a whole different Tank Girl from what Jamie used to do, but Rufus is like an original punk. He knows loads of punks, not just punks on the street, he knows lots of actual punk bands etc.. He was very good friends with Dee Dee Ramone, who's going to be making an appearance in one of our comics actually, in Skidmarks.

He's a spikey-haired chap. His arms are covered in tattoos of Mick McMahon's Judge Dredd, and you just need to look at him and you know he's got style that is just sort of oozing out of his pores. In the same way Jamie had his particular style, you can tell instantly just by looking at him. He's a very impressive look, and he brings that to it, and his own peculiar sense of humor etc.. He brings the full kit. Everything I need, and also empathy with my scripts and my sense of humor.

NP: What can we expect in the future from you guys?

AM: Well at the moment we're just concentrating solely on standard comics. We're doing a strip in the U.K. in Judge Dredd Magazine, which is called Skidmarks. That's just eight pages a month, but that will be put into comics which will be come out as a mini series which will come out next year. That will be available in the States. Then that will come out in a graphic novel.

Next year we're doing another series with IDW, who did the stuff with Ashley Wood for us, called The Royal Escape. That's scheduled for around late spring I think. Also, we've got a whole new series that we're doing with Titan called Bad Wind Rising, which will be lots of little stories. So really, just a complete blitz on comics.

Also, it's taken a long time to manifest, but with original 200 AD artist Mick McMahon, were doing a six part comic called Carioca which is a whole complete departure from what Tank Girl usually looks like, and usually sounds like. It's a strange hybrid, but all very interesting stuff.

NP: Does Tank Girl appear in all these strips?

AM: It's all Tank Girl. Everything I said, it's all Tank Girl, that's what she's up to until, pretty much Christmas 2009, and maybe a bit beyond that.

NP: You have this book, The Cream of Tank Girl, coming out. Was that a trip to put together? Because you've got early sketches and bits torn off someone's jacket. How was it pulling all that stuff together? Was it all organized? Or did you have to rip the house apart?

AM: Well at lot of it was in my mom's loft, a lot of it was in Jamie's plan chest, and the rest of it was on eBay. I spent about a year just gathering magazines. I had a few copies of Deadline, where it was all originally produced from back in the day, but I've now got a full set of them. I had to get all that together, and I had to rifle through my mum's loft and rescue bits and bobs that were just buried in trunks from 20 years ago. Jamie's stuff as well, I had to go through his archive, if you can call it that, and scan all that in.

It was a labor of love. It took about a year and a half, even though it doesn't look like it, just to actually get enough stuff that was of good enough quality to make a book and then sit down and make notes on all of that, and chronologicalize it. It was a work.

NP: In that process of rediscovering your own life, what did you discover that you'd forgotten you knew, or forgotten you felt, or forgotten you did?

AM: I don't know if I'd forgotten any of it to be honest. I think because I'd spent so long not writing, and doing jobs that I didn't want to do, I dwelt on the stuff that I did love to do, and those memories maybe sort of became larger than life. I don't think any of it was buried in my memory, it all came to the fore very easily.

NP: Did the process of looking back bring back the enthusiasm? Because right now you're probably going through one of your most prolific periods ever.

AM: Yes, I was a lazy sod back in the day. I really didn't do a lot for my bread and butter. Yes, it did, it definitely rekindled my love for the character. Because the last thing that we did, the movie, not that we did it, but it just left such a bad taste in our mouths. We didn't even discuss it, we just knew we had to leave it behind, so that rekindled my enthusiasm, but also becoming a father has made me pull my finger out.

NP: How many children?

AM: I've just got one at the moment, just a little two-year old. A little boy, Rufus.

NP: It's going to be interesting as a dad, because obviously Tank Girl was quite a controversial character, with a potty mouth and some interesting sexual peccadilloes. At what point would you want your son reading this?

AM: It's funny...my nephew had an argument with this kid at school. He said, "My uncle writes Tank Girl." And this other kid, who'd obviously never even heard of Tank Girl, said, "Yeah, well so does mine." He had this big argument with him over whose dad actually wrote Tank Girl. So he told me that, and I though I could just give him a copy of Tank Girl and like sign it and he could take it along.

Then I thought, no, all of this has got swearing in it. So the last series has no swearing in it. Visions of Booga, it has a "bastard" here and a "bitch" there, but it doesn't have any F-words or C-words. So I'd given him the whole collection of that and he's sort of proudly taken it to school to show his mate and say, "Look, there you go." And we name checked him on one of the pages as well, just to really sort of rub it in. So I'll probably show my son that one first to break him in, then wait until he's eighteen and say, "Look, this is what it's really about."

NP: Do you think that's going to influence you as you're doing the Tank Girl stuff moving forward? Are you going to make it more PG-13?

AM: I don't really think about it to be honest. I know that so many people are going to be reading it as well that he just has to join the fray really.

NP: At least he'll learn some decent swear words reading your stuff.

AM: Exactly. He's going to go to school, he's going to learn how to swear, he's going to learn dirty jokes and read pornography behind the bike sheds and do everything that everyone else has done, so really I'm not in denial that a fifteen-year old boy might actually come into contact with some of the nastiness of the world. I'm just hopeful that he'll have my sense of humor about it all.

NP: And swear well.

AM: Well, yes, that's the dream isn't it. You can always hope. [laughs]

NP: So one of the other things I noticed about the book is that it's got a lot of bloody pirates in there. It's a good job I'm partial to pirates post-Johnny Depp. What's that about?

AM: Well there's only two strips. Really, that book, it isn't just Tank Girl, it was all about everything that me and Jamie did in that time, but the majority of it was Tank Girl. We slipped in everything else that were collaborations that we did, like the Ginsberg, Stipe & Kerouac strip that went into ID Magazine, and various other ideas that went nowhere like The 16s, and good pictures. It was just trying to compile everything that was mine and Jamie's collectively because it just hasn't been seen in a long time. The main thrust of it is that Jamie has a lot of people who are very interested in his art, and there's nowhere to see that stuff, how it all manifested, how it all evolved. So I thought it would be an interesting anthropological exercise to put all that in -- plus it fills up the pages.

NP: Are you and Jamie likely to do anything in the future?

AM: Well, Jamie's main collaborations are with Damon and his music now, so probably not, but never say never. He's just off on a different trajectory at the moment. I know he doesn't want to draw comics, but I'm very much into writing comics, so I wouldn't say anything in the near future, but who knows.

NP: Is he cool about you carrying on with Tank Girl?

AM: Absolutely, he's really supportive. He just let me go wild with it. Said get in there and do whatever you want with it really. I think as far as he's concerned he's sort of washed his hands of Tank Girl. Unless somebody actually came along and said, "Right Jamie, do an animated movie of Tank Girl, here's a hundred million," I doubt whether he'd have any interest in it, and he might not even then.

NP: But it still smacks of a generous spirit doesn't it?

AM: It does, yes. He's been very generous indeed, just letting me run wild with it. I can't imagine many other people doing that, but, because Tank Girl was always such a free-for-all in the first place it would be difficult for him to try keep a tight rein on it, or just say no completely. The spirit of Tank Girl runs like a wild horse. It's untamable. I don't think anyone could try and nail it down.

NP: Did Jamie have anything to say about the return of Tank Girl when she was dressed like a librarian?

AM: He laughed at it all basically. That's one of my criteria, my goals with everything I do. My target audience is Jamie. I'm always thinking, "Will Jamie like it? Will Jamie think it's funny?" Usually I keep on a sort of even keel because that keeps her where she always was, because that's how we always used to work. He was thinking, "Will Alan like this?" We were both sniggering at it together. So when I write, I'm always thinking of my old mates and various Tank Girl fans, and predominantly Jamie. Will he think it's funny? And now Rufus as well, because Rufus has to sit there and draw the damn stuff.

The other thing that Rufus loves is the fact that I'm always a little bit behind with my scripts, so he never knows what's going to happen in the next episode. Whereas with a regular job he would get a synopsis, he would get all the scripts up front, he'd read the whole lot, and he's be bored before he was half-way through the first episode. But the stuff we're doing at the moment, he says he loves it because each month he just does not know what's coming next. It's like reading a comic, but very slowly because he's drawing it.

NP: It's funny you say that you get things in late, because I went to the new website and it said, "Coming Summer 2008," and yet it's autumn.

AM: We did have it up by mid-September I think, which is late summer. It's up now though. It's full-fledged now. It hasn't got the animation and stuff that we're planning to do on it but it's definitely there. So go and have a look, because it's blossoming into a nice site.




Thanks to the rather wonderful Rufus Dayglo for the exclusive Tank Girl illustration. Love n' pencils right back at ya!

Alan and Rufus will be doing an exclusive page a month of Tankie for Suicide Girls. The first installment will run November 2. Check back the first Sunday of each month for more.

Hey lovelies!!! First blog of 2013 and i wish you a great year!! This first month went really good and I hope it’s gonna get even better: i wanna finish university, get a job and make some good changes in my life!!! i started with going from vegetarian to vegan and i feel great!!! i fell in love with... more

Hey lovelies!!!

First blog of 2013 and i wish you a great year!!

This first month went really good and I hope it’s gonna get even better: i wanna finish university, get a job and make some good changes in my life!!! i started with going from vegetarian to vegan and i feel great!!! i fell in love with Ashtanga Yoga a few months ago and it is giving me strenght, phisically and mentally so i know i can get my life back together after a few years of wandering with no clue...

Changing the subject, did you get yourself a copy of Lavezzaro Photography book? i was featured in it!!!!

I wanna say thank you to everyone for the birthday wishes! <3

That's all for now, i need to sleep, tomorrow i have to get up early for work ...

Next time I’ll post pics! I promise!!!

xxx, M.

I was 11, my sister snuck me into an Oingo Boingo Holloween Concert, to this day I feel thankful to her for that. Haven't seen anything big in the past few months, I just saw Order of the Fly play at a club here in L.A. -C-

I should admit this right off the bat: I’m not a huge fan of Travis Barker’s music. The only work of his I’ve really gravitated to is The Transplants; I'm still spinning that disc ever since I interviewed Skinhead Rob nearly a year and a half ago. But Barker’s new band +44 is good and a lot of... more

I should admit this right off the bat: I’m not a huge fan of Travis Barker’s music. The only work of his I’ve really gravitated to is The Transplants; I'm still spinning that disc ever since I interviewed Skinhead Rob nearly a year and a half ago. But Barker’s new band +44 is good and a lot of fun. He’s teamed up with another former member of Blink-182, Mark Hoppus, as well as former Transplants touring guitarist Craig Fairbaugh and the lead guitarist of The Nervous Return, Shane Gallagher. I had a very open and honest conversation with Barker about the new band and his trials and travails with the paparazzi and various famous blondes.

Check out the official website for +44

Daniel Robert Epstein: How long have you and Mark wanted to do this?

Travis Barker: It actually wasn’t that we were seeking out to do it. After Blink broke up, we decided we wanted to keep playing music and we just started writing and writing and writing until we had this big collection of songs. Craig [Fairbaugh] was in The Transplants so I got him. Shane [Gallagher] was in this band called The Nervous Return that I had grown up with. We just started playing music together. We wrote a record and it’s coming out in a couple of weeks and we’re going on tour.

DRE: Was there an overall concept behind it?

TB: It was just Mark and I continuing where we left off in a sense.

DRE: Is it impossible to avoid comparisons to Blink-182’s music just because two members of the band are in +44?

TB: We’ll probably never escape that, but it’s not even something that I disown. I loved being in that band. It’s probably natural if 2/3 of that band is in +44 for there to be some similarities like Mark’s voice or something like that.

DRE: What does +44 mean?

TB: It means absolutely nothing. It was just a number that I really liked, like how Blink meant nothing. It was just Blink. It’s for anyone else to interpret. You can’t hear the band name and say “That’s like a death metal band or that’s a rock band.” We decide what it means.

DRE: +44 is a little poppier than I thought it was going to be, was that something you guys were looking to do?

TB: Thank you. No one’s ever said that. Since I’ve started doing press on this record, everyone always says “It’s dark.”

DRE: It’s darker than Blink-182, but it’s still poppy.

TB: Yeah. Totally. You wouldn’t expect anything aggressive or sickening because Mark Hoppus isn’t going to sing like that. That’s not what this band was meant for. We’re never going to get too ill or anything.

DRE: Is it much different doing something like this as opposed to The Transplants?

TB: Oh yeah but it’s supposed to be. If everything was the same, it would suck.

DRE: Is it a different mindset?

TB: No but everything is different. In The Transplants, we’re talking about people getting killed. There are people getting robbed. There are a million things happening in The Transplants. +44 is more like real life situations that we experienced or that we went through. All these songs mean something, but it means something in a different way. For The Transplants, Rob is really doing all that stuff that he’s talking about, just like Mark’s singing about what’s he has experienced.

DRE: I was told you’re recording today, what are you working on?

TB: I’m actually producing Skinhead Rob for his hip-hop record called Warfare. I’m just doing all the production on it. I’m also working with this other artist named Eddie RapLife who’s a rapper and a skateboarder from Rhode Island.

DRE: When is Skinhead Rob’s hip-hop album coming out?

TB: Probably next year on [Cypress Hill member] Mugg’s record label.

DRE: How do you like producing?

TB: It’s amazing. It’s different. Producing in the rock world and producing in the hip-hop world is different. I’m a drummer so at the end of the day, that’s what I do. I play beats and I make beats and I’m moved by beats. It made sense.

DRE: Do you rap at all?

TB: No, I don’t rap. I play the drums.

DRE: I know. You just never know who’s a rapper nowadays.

TB: I think we all know who should and shouldn’t be a rapper nowadays.

DRE: What’s the writing process in +44?

TB: Mark can come to the studio with a whole song tracked with guitars, drums and everything. I come sometimes with ten different beats and I’d leave on tour with The Transplants and Mark would just write to those songs. In the beginning, I played a lot of keyboards. I did a lot of like chord progressions and stuff. Mark was programming drums. We were playing instruments that we hadn’t played before so it’s really wide open. I think that’s the only way to really get people’s ideas out and really collaborate.

DRE: How’s it going since you have to drum with one arm?

TB: It’s amazing. I’m not going to say I like or I enjoy it but I’m used to being dealt with fucked up situations and overcoming them. I guess that’s part of why I continue living and have a smile on my face because I like getting past shit like this.

DRE: Does your drumming sound a lot different?

TB: No. The only thing that I can’t do is like a 32nd note. But I’m compensating by playing another part instead. I basically taught everything that my right hand did to my left hand. Then I taught everything that my left hand was doing to my left foot. I put a pedal down there and it triggers the sound of a snare drum. So every time I push the pedal down, you’ll hear the sound of a snare drum. That’s my left hand now.

DRE: I know the way you broke your arm is a little bit different than the average way someone breaks their arm. How is that going?

TB: I went and saw a nutritionist recently and I’m in the best condition I could be health-wise. I have eight percent body fat. He said there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s actually turning into more of a bone issue like brittle bones, maybe something on the lines of osteoporosis. I have tests and stuff next week.

DRE: Oh damn. Are you nervous?

TB: Yeah. But I’m ready to fight it and move on. I don’t want to dwell on it. If that is what I have, I know that I just have to kick it in the butt and take care of it.

DRE: Are you going to be touring all over the world with +44?

TB: Well, I’m doing five weeks because I have to come back and get MRIs and x-rays. Then we’re coming back for a couple weeks just so I can get my tests done and then do some Christmas shows.

DRE: I know it’s going to be difficult to sell as many albums as Blink-182 did, but is that very important to you?

TB: I think you have to earn it just like anything else. I’d feel like I was getting over on everyone if people just bought our records because we were in Blink. I want to earn everyone’s respect and I want people to actually really love the band and that’s why the band has to stand for something. It has to make great music and we have to be good to our fans. If we sold a million records, cool. But when Blink first started we weren’t expecting to be the biggest band in the world. You just let it be a symptom of making good music and touring.

DRE: As a music fan yourself, when you were younger there must have been bands you just hated because teenage girls liked them or they were “too” popular. There are a lot of people who don’t like you just for those reasons. What’s your opinion of that?

TB: I think that was Blink’s heyday. But that’s not the only kind of music I play now and that’s not the only type of music video I’m in now. I design shoes. I design clothes. That’s one-dimensional. Yeah, in 2003 or whatever when it was crazy and All The Small Things was out, of course you’re going to have people that go “I don’t like Blink anymore. I don’t like them because they’re all over the radio. I don’t like them because girls like them.” But you’re just jealous. Get over it. Man up. If you don’t like the song we made, write a better song.

DRE: Did you hear about what Tom DeLonge said at a concert?

TB: No.

DRE: I’ll quote it to you “I do not want to be in a bullshit pop band with some bullshit pop songs while you drive your fucking bullshit car and sing along to it like you’re some 14 year old girl.” Is that a slam on the music you guys made?

TB: Yeah. It sounds like he’s trying to disown himself from who he was in Blink or something. That’s his personal issue. I would stand up for it in a minute. Was I a trashman? Yeah. Was I in the Aquabats? Yeah. Did we look like Devo? Absolutely. Did I play in Vandals tours? Yes. I played drums for The Vandals. Yeah, I ran naked in a Blink video. I don’t disown any of it. Man, those are some of the greatest times of my life because I was playing music. I think maybe he’s jaded or something or maybe he doesn’t know who he is or maybe he doesn’t like who he is.

DRE: Why did Blink-182 break up?

TB: We were playing a benefit concert and Tom, Mark and myself had different views on the next six months of our band. Like whether or not we were going to make a record, how we were going to make it and then Tom didn’t show up to the tsunami benefit. He had his manager call an hour before. So he left a bunch of people who paid to help the tsunami victims hanging and he didn’t even call. It was just like, “Whoa, man. There’s a way of doing things and that wasn’t the right way.” That’s all it is. I don’t hate, dude. I don’t wish him any bad. I just go, “Man. Sucks that you handled yourself like a little girl when it came to saying you don’t want to play music no more.’”

DRE: Years in the future or probably even sooner, someone’s going to try and get you guys back together. Any interest?

TB: I never say never. I don’t think things went down well but I don’t hate and I don’t hold grudges. I’m down for whatever. I would never do a reunion with any of the bands I’ve been in unless everyone was like brothers again. You hear these stories how bands are on stage getting paid ridiculous amounts of money and they hate each other. I won’t even entertain something like that. I’d rather be poor.

DRE: All the reality show couples’ marriages are breaking up. Does doing a show like that put extra pressure on a marriage?

TB: Oh absolutely. I think people start behaving differently and whatever else and then when the cameras are gone and your husband doesn’t want to do the show no more, you’re looking for this extra attention or something. There are a lot of crazy things that can happen as a symptom of doing a reality show if you’re not staying grounded during the whole time.

DRE: Do you feel like you and Shanna weren’t grounded during the reality show?

TB: Yeah, but at the end of the day, Shanna’s awesome. I love her. But she’s an actress.

DRE: They’re crazy.

TB: That too at times, but they don’t even feel themselves turning it on or turning it off. Me, I don’t have shit to hide from anyone. I think within the last couple years everything that I am has been exposed or whatever. I’m comfortable with it because that’s who I am, but other people have smoke and mirrors in this big front. That only lasts so long.

DRE: Do you feel like you guys would still be together if you hadn’t done the show?

TB: No, not necessarily. I think you can fall madly in love with someone and move really quickly like we did. We fell in love. We had children. But I never had the conversation with her like “Hey. How do you plan on changing after we have children? Do you plan on reevaluating some of the things you do now or maybe the amount of days you work a year? Now that we have children, are we going to step up our roles and stuff?” I should’ve had that conversation and I didn’t. So I’m partly guilty for that or whatever, but at the end of the day, I just have a different way of raising children and a different way of prioritizing things in my life. My children come first and then my work and then everything else. With Shanna it was that Shanna comes first, then her work, then the children fall way down the line. That’s not something that I can wake up to and live around. I’m madly in love with her, but you can’t compromise something like that. Family and little humans are way more important.

DRE: When I told a friend that I was talking to you, he sent me this flyer for some divorce party Shanna is throwing.

TB: Yeah. What do you do? She’s having a party because she’s getting divorced. It’s crazy. It’s classy. That’s all I can say. Classy. I’ll be real honest with you. I’ll be real bold and blunt. I think it would be okay and it would be acceptable if she wasn’t a mother of three. But as you are a mother of three, your children are old enough that their friends are going to be talking about you having a party because you’re getting divorced. You know what I mean? That’s kind of ill.

DRE: Since you are someone who’s very much in the public eye, will you not go do certain things because you don’t want it to be in the tabloids?

TB: Nah. I live my life, man. There’s only certain things they’ll want to cover. They want to cover you making out with someone right when you get divorced or whatever. But I haven’t changed anything I do. I haven’t compromised a bit because I think if I do, then I’m going to turn into some weirdo and I’ll stop being me. Half of the things they’re not even interested in. They’re only interested in something they can flip and turn around and use to their advantage.

DRE: What happened with Paris Hilton?

TB: I’ll be absolutely honest. So you’re asking me if I made out with her at a club? Yes. I made out with her at a club. I’m sure you’ve gone to a bar and just been crazy or wild and having fun that night and you just shamelessly kiss somebody. But she happens to be photographed by a million people when things like that happen. So it was weird for me.

DRE: Do you know exactly why Shanna attacked her?

TB: About a couple months ago it had been shared with me that Paris and Oscar [De La Hoya] had an issue a long time ago and I told Shanna, “Man. That sucks. I don’t know why you still get down with Paris or why you even talk to her.” Then she had told me the story right afterwards and just bashed Paris real ugly, saying awful things about her. I was like, “It’s crazy that you even can look at her in the face and be cool to her then.” Shanna was like, “Aww. Well I can just use her for networking and for press.” Then after this all went down, I had been separated for like three weeks and I was in Vegas for the grand opening of one of my buddy’s restaurants and we had a Famous Stars and Straps party that same night. We went out afterwards and Paris Hilton comes up to me and says hi to me and she’s super friendly. I’m sitting there going, “Gosh. Shanna told me she’s so hard to talk to and that she’s a cunt. She’s this and that.” I was like, “Paris is actually super nice.” So we ended up being friends and we ended up kissing in public.

DRE: Are you interested in a free SuicideGirls membership?

TB: Absolutely. I just want all the SuicideGirls to come to all of the shows that we play whether it’s The Transplants or [DJ] AM and I or anything. They are always welcome to have free passes to just hang out, listen to music and enjoy themselves.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

Hello! SuicideGirls finally has a beta version of our mobile site m.suicidegirls.com We are super excited to finally bring you your SuicideGirls fix on the go! Check it out, surf around and let us know what you think. Please report any bugs or feedback below. Can you let us know what type of phone and... more

Hello!

SuicideGirls finally has a beta version of our mobile site m.suicidegirls.com

We are super excited to finally bring you your SuicideGirls fix on the go!

Check it out, surf around and let us know what you think.

Please report any bugs or feedback below. Can you let us know what type of phone and what browser you are using when reporting bugs?

Thanks so much!

xoxo
-missy

A.J. Focht The biggest news of the month is that J.J. Abrams, director of the recent Star Trek films, is now set to take us to a galaxy far far away. Disney has signed Abrams on to direct the 2015 Star Wars: Episode VII. While many fans were thrilled to hear this news, there are those who fear this move... more

A.J. Focht

The biggest news of the month is that J.J. Abrams, director of the recent Star Trek films, is now set to take us to a galaxy far far away. Disney has signed Abrams on to direct the 2015 Star Wars: Episode VII. While many fans were thrilled to hear this news, there are those who fear this move crosses the streams. Either way, the internet is already being plagued with bad jokes about light sabers and lens flares.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation was abruptly delayed last year, but you can now catch a four minute preview of the movie in theaters. There’s a four minute 3D preview at the start of Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. The teaser is just a taste of things to come when the movie releases on March 29.

More information is coming out about the 2015 Justice League movie. It looks like only five members have made the final cut, and it’s just about who everyone would expect. Superman, Batman, the Green Lantern, the Flash, and Wonder Woman are rumored to be the core group of heroes. There is still a slight chance Aquaman or the Martian Manhunter could make an appearance, but most likely only as cameos. The one hero with the least possibility of making a cameo appearance would be Hawkman.

The Batman franchise is DC’s hottest property, and there has been talk of rebooting the series since before Christopher Nolan had a chance to even wrap up his trilogy. Now that Nolan’s Batman series has ended, DC and Warner Bros. are working Batman into their upcoming Justice League movie. Whispers of a series reboot haven’t gone away, though. Batman On Film speculates that the Batman series reboot could be in theaters as early as 2017.

Sequel to X-Men: First Class, the X-Men: Days of Futures Past will be following one of the most famous X-Men comic story arcs. The comic storyline involves an older Kitty Pride from a dystopic future transferring her consciousness to her past self to stop the events that lead to the Sentinels hunting down the mutants. This being the case, director Bryan Singer has the opportunity to combine the characters from the 1960’s storyline in X-Men: First Class with the original X-Men trilogy. Both Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart signed on to play the elder counterparts of Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. Now, Singer has announced that three more members from the cast of the original X-Men trilogy have joined the fray. Appeasing comic fans everywhere, Ellen Page as Kitty Pride was one of those three. The other two returning characters are Anna Paquin as Rogue and Shawn Ashmore as Iceman. Days of Future Past is set to hit theaters on July 18, 2014.

Possibly the oddest gossip to fall into the rumor mill this month is that both Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey have been asked about their availability for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy project. They may both be in line for the role of Rocket Raccoon, or one may be in line for the gun-toting raccoon and the other for his partner the sentient tree, Groot. Guardians of the Galaxy is set to hit theaters August 1, 2014.

Marvel may just be entering their ‘Phase 2’, but they are already planning for the future beyond that. Guardians of the Galaxy is the only new title being released during Phase 2, the rest being sequels. Marvel plans to expand their properties during ‘Phase 3’ and have confirmed that both the long awaited Edgar Wright Ant-Man movie and the Doctor Strange film Stan Lee has been pushing to have made for years are on the docket. Kevin Feige noted that Phase 3 is when things are going to get strange, which means who knows what else Marvel has in store for us once they wrap up their current cinematic ventures.

The CW’s Arrow keeps adding classic DC icons to the show’s lineup. To make things even better, many of the actors they have chosen to go with have other sci-fi and nerd roots. John Barrowman who plays Malcom Merlyn on Arrow and Captain Jack on Doctor Who and its spinoff Torchwood is now being joined by another former Doctor Who cast member, Alex Kingston, who played the Doctor’s wife, River Song. Kingston will be playing the part of Laurel Dinah Lance’s mother on Arrow. Kingston isn’t the only new addition. Spartacus actor Manu Bennett has been cast in the major role of Slade Wilson. Wilson’s alter ego, Death Stroke, has already appeared on the show, but it looks like Manu Bennett will be the man behind the orange and blue mask.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that we could replace some of these teenage vampire shows on television with more zombie action. Walking Dead is one of the best shows on, but it alone doesn’t satisfy my craving for brain eaters. Well it looks like we may all be in luck. After being passed up by CBS and Syfy, Amazon is in negotiations to distribute a Zombieland TV show via its streaming platform. Better yet, director of acclaimed B-movie Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Eli Craig is in talks to direct the series.

Finally, Doctor Who fans can now get back to their roots, since BBC America will being airing classic episodes of the show. They are going through the Doctors in order, airing a serial special each month. They have already begun with the four-part serial, “The Aztecs” that aired last weekend.

Ghost towns have a bad reputation: Shop doors creak, saloons swirl with phantoms of unloved prostitutes, rotting jail cells are haunted by remorseless outlaws, and the dusty streets are patrolled by spirits of hardened deputies. For some, ghost towns are merely creepy roadside attractions; for others... more

Ghost towns have a bad reputation: Shop doors creak, saloons swirl with phantoms of unloved prostitutes, rotting jail cells are haunted by remorseless outlaws, and the dusty streets are patrolled by spirits of hardened deputies.

For some, ghost towns are merely creepy roadside attractions; for others they are American landmarks brimming with history's shadows and latent inspiration. The abandoned mining settlement of Jerome, Arizona is one of the oldest and largest American ghost towns. Until recently, its roads lay ruined and its doors were boarded up. It quietly waited for some headstrong thrill-seeker to dust it off and polish its potential. Now a vibrant artist community, Jerome is the place that Maynard James Keenan calls home.

In 1995, after having his fill of the endless white noise and wayward temperament of Los Angeles, the enigmatic Tool frontman bid the city adieu, packed his bags, followed his intuition and headed for the desert. After settling in Jerome, Keenan soon began his adventure into the art of winemaking. Today he is the proud owner of Merkin Vineyards and Caduceus Cellars, which he runs with partner Eric Glomski in Cornville, Arizona. To our delight, Keenan invited both Avalon Suicide and myself over for a tour of the grounds, a lengthy chat, and rare glimpse into his world.

As we meandered through the rows of grapevines, I asked Keenan why he chose to leave Los Angeles for Arizona. He waved his arm at our surroundings and matter-of-factly replied, "Just look at this place!"

For an afternoon, armed with a video camera, we walked the vineyard as Keenan spoke in detail about his craft – both as a musician and a winemaker – and also about his latest project, Puscifer, a multifaceted, multimedia, multi-artist, multi-personality project that takes shape in myriad ways like film, music, digital video, clothes, feminine hygiene products, pet supplies, and more.

The debut album from Puscifer, titled "V is for Vagina," is in stores now. And yes, Keenan's wine is fucking delicious.


SuicideGirls: So how did your adventure into winemaking begin?

Maynard James Keenan: We’re located in northern Arizona and there have been several wineries here in the past. But when I say “the past” I mean like 60 or 50 years ago. Because of the mining community up here, there was a demand for wine so Italian wine makers made their own wine [though] there was no infrastructure for an industry. Now, as time has gone on, people have realized that the country up here is suited for grapes so there are wineries and vineyards popping up everywhere. I'm one of those people who realize the potential.

SG: Winemaking runs in your family, doesn’t it? Was that something you knew about before you began the vineyard?

MJK: No, I discovered that after I had already planted vines. It was kind like finding your way back to the family… there’s a classic love story of winemaking in my blood.

SG: You’ve said before that winemaking is a process like writing a song and starting with an original idea, you hear it evolve over time. Is winemaking a refuge for you away from the music world or do they parallel each other?

MJK: Creative processes in general come in many forms. This is just one of those many forms. It's parallel in a way. There’s no real separation. It’s the same process; starting from scratch. The difference with winemaking, in general, is that the ideas don’t necessarily come from you… they come from [the land]. That’s one of the largest challenges we have here in Arizona is to try and get out of the way and allow this area of Arizona to express itself and just be the catalyst [for the wine] and get it in the bottle. We don’t know what this area is actually going to taste like until we make a few decades worth of wine here and it will really start to become clear. We have an idea of what we would like to make and we have an idea what this area [might produce] in terms of other parts of the world, but no real solid idea of what its going to taste like.

SG: What is your favorite type of wine?

MJK: Mediterranean… Italian varietals… Southern Rome… I like some of the winemakers using Bordeaux style grapes to make Northern Italian wines.

SG: Let’s talk some more about your winemaking roots and the differences between old world and new world wine. How do you feel about old versus new world?

MJK: Sure. It’s like anything else. It’d be like sticking to your guns on vinyl. Yeah, vinyl sounds better in many ways but there are some limitations to it. And there has been some amazing music that’s only been made available on CD. Embracing new technology and combining it with old technology is always important about living in the moment and embracing your particular time. But there are some beautiful things about the old school wine making processes just like the old school music making processes of analog tape and vinyl and turntables. There’s a way to have both, and what it really comes down to is that human interaction and making sure that you’re telling good stories. [With] the evolution of winemaking, there are certain things that we wouldn’t have been able to correct in the past. If something went wrong with one of the batches and there was a problem, well, that’s what the wine is going to taste like that year. Now we have ways we can get it back on track and correct those problems. [Now] I think larger wineries that are doing insane numbers of amounts of wine each year -- although it’s great wine -- some of them lost touch with that human interaction that really makes a great wine. They might get lucky now and then with an incredible year and an incredible press that they stumble on, but overall it really is about that human interaction, paying attention, being conscious with the process and being present throughout the whole [wine making process].

SG: Is it similar as with a musician and the importance of a live interaction with your audience?

MJK: I've never really had an interaction with my audience, so I don’t know. I’ve always maintained my interaction with my band mates and maintained my interaction with the process of making music. If I listen to what the audience has to say about the making of the music then I would have [made] a lot more different decisions based on what they had to say. It’s the same with winemaking; you have to focus on what resonates properly with you and pay attention to the landscape and see what it has to offer and express that as best you can, rather than taking suggestions from a grocery store chain with what they would like to taste.

SG: So how did you get your vineyard up and running and what sets it apart? Also, where did your interest in alchemy begin and what was the transition like into winemaking?

MJK: Initially, I planted some vines and looked around [locally] for someone that was [already] doing it so I could get information and at least not end up going down the wrong path and costing myself a lot of time. Especially with the winemaking, you plant the vine and you wont know what’s happening with it the first four or five years. It’s an investment in time. You have to have a lot of patience and learn that pretty quickly.

As far as the transition from making music to wine, there are of course a lot of differences. There’s as much chaos in planting vines and harvesting grapes as in any other art form. I think there is a calmness that comes with it and there’s a rhythm that is absent from most of the entertainment industry. There are a lot of sycophants in [entertainment]. I don’t think you have quite as many here… and generally speaking, you’re dealing with adults that are fairly rational.

Every industry and every profession has its share of irrational people but I think the music and film industries have a large portion of those people running the whole show. This is a little easier transition as far as making rational plans and just dealing with adults. [Laughs]

SG: How did you hook up with your partner Eric Glomski?

MJK: As I mentioned earlier, I needed some direction and there’s a gentleman who had already started a vineyard several years before and he had been working with Eric Glomski who is from the area but who is a winemaker who actually worked at vineyards in California for a while and has a wealth of knowledge. He comes from a family of overachievers. He and his brother both are chemistry whiz kids. There’s a whole background of chemistry involved in winemaking and there’s a reason that winemaking, vineyards and wine show up so much in mythologies. It has to do with longevity and just a healthy environment.

Vineyards in general, if they’re successful in an area, create an entire little industry that ends up fostering a community like no other industry I've come across. It just crosses the whole gamut of humans. If you’re really good at chemistry and you’re also a hands on kind of person and you like to get your hands dirty, you’re the perfect candidate to be a winemaker because it requires all of those things. To be a completely well rounded wine maker you have to understand what’s happening on the vineyard. A lot of winemakers in California have never been on their vineyards. Of course, the best winemakers have. They understand that goes hand-in-hand. There’s an old saying that, “Wine is made on the vineyard and not in the winery.” There’s some truth to that. Certainly watching Eric navigate in the winery and watching him spin six plates on several fingers and juggle and nothing ends up dropping… it’s quite a sight to behold. He definitely can save a wine that’s headed for disaster. That’s the true sign of a great winemaker. Anybody can make a great wine out of great grapes and a great year. It’s a truly gifted winemaker that can make wine on a bad year with a bad batch of grapes. He’s that guy.

SG: So with Puscifer, the first video for the album V is for Vagina is called “Queen B” and features a crazy chess game played between two beautiful women, sipping wine in one of your cellars. Let’s talk some about that video and the way Puscifer is about more than just a band and rather a combination of sensory elements that come together as a truly unique experience.

MJK: That’s a lot to bite off.

SG: [Laughs]

MJK: It seems in general there’s a lot of falling apart of what we used to think of as given. We’ve come to expect a certain way of life and expect a certain amount of infrastructure in place in our country and our world. I think a lot of that is falling apart [with the] changes going on. Part of that change is people really having to become conscious of the things that they took for granted and stepping up on the most basic level. People need to start getting involved in other aspects of [life] that they’ve just come to accept as somebody else takes care of. Puscifer is that process for me. The record industries are folding. They can no longer rely on these big fat checks, big budgets, advances and huge record sales. Nowadays, you really have to be your own manager and your own marketing team, as well as be creative. Of course I'm speaking just in general terms of music, but there are always also life situations where you have to step up and really learn how to survive on your own.

In small communities, like I was speaking about before, small wine communities, all of a sudden people can now do focused things and actually survive doing it. With music, now it’s the digital age and with the way things are going, people don’t necessarily have to take on the world. They don’t have to break out and be successful globally; they can sell a few albums off of their website or iTunes or do a limited run of vinyl and actually survive comfortably without having all the middle men involved trying to take it to some other level where all of a sudden budgets go up, everybody else has their hand out, and all of a sudden you have to sell a million records just to make a buck. That’s just crazy volume; warehouses full of crap no one wants. It doesn’t seem very sustainable. Being involved in the winery and being involved in Puscifer, to me, is about collaborations. It’s about smaller amounts of collaborations so you don’t have to spend three million dollars on a record, a video, and get advances for touring. There’s got to be a better way, and I’m going to make a lot of mistakes trying to figure out what that is but hopefully my mistakes will lead to somebody else’s successes.

SG: Do you feel like you have more creative control with Puscifer as a project?

MJK: As a project I have more control over it but, on the whole, I have no control over where it’s going to go. I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next couple years. And that’s a pretty good place to be as a creative person. That chaotic state is really fresh and creative. The way things happen on accident and happen naturally -- you really have to trust your intuition to make those things work. And really interesting things come out of it. To try and force it and say, “This is where it’s going to go”… that ends up being stiff; that ends up the Backstreet Boys path.

SG: The character and image of the Queen B has become synonymous with Puscifer as a whole. How did the concept originate?

MJK: It initially started because of a digital animation 3D artist that I met through Adam [Jones] named Meats Meier. He did a bunch of the live footage that we used for the Tool tour. He’s an amazing artist; he totally understands the new world of what’s going on, that you don’t need super huge budgets to do things. He’s got his own little studio, he’s very creative, and all he needed was a symbol idea to add a visual aspect and a visual element to the music. So I came up with the idea of the chess game in the wine cellar and he went with it. He took a few months to make it on his own with the concepts and I think it came out really well, especially considering what that video would have cost someone five or six years ago when the industry thought that it could just throw money at everything. I didn’t spend a hell of a lot of money comparatively on that video. He’s happy because he’s got a small studio and his rent is paid. I’m happy because I got a cute little video to play on YouTube. It plays into what I spoke about earlier about being able to afford to create stuff without having to have huge budgets to do it.

SG: What were some of your expectations with the album release?

MJK: I don’t expect it to do really well. I’ve kind of shot myself in the foot with my tongue in check, dry humor. Calling it V is For Vagina I thought for sure [laughs] people were gonna just laugh. I’ve said before, it’s kind of like when your uncle says pull my finger [laughs]. It’s not really like that but…

SG: Well, you did name your vineyard “Merkin Vineyard.” I mean, come on!

MJK: [Laughs] I know. I thought people would just giggle and think [it was] bad sophomoric humor. But its been met with crazy resistance and censorship every step of the way for the most ridiculous things. Like, somebody recently asked me for the video if I could blur out the nipples on the Queen B. And I’m like [laughs], “It’s a three-inch tall, cartoon alien! What nipples? [Laughs] It doesn’t make any sense! Are you kidding me? It’s a cartoon; it doesn’t have nipples, first of all. And it’s just nipples!” Whatever.

SG: We don’t have a problem with nipples.

MJK: Yeah. But people are really wound up about it. They want to blur out the name. It’s like, there’s a dog in the video too and when the dog leaves do you need me to blur out his butt hole? Do you have a problem with his testicles? No? Okay, well then the nipples stay.

SG: What does the character signify?

MJK: Comedy, tragedy -- all those elements. The most important word to remember in this entire process is “creative.” If you understand that word then you understand the name of the album, the shape of the figure, the entire process of the creative energy. Then it all kind of starts to make sense. But of course, I’m a dickhead and an asshole so I like to have my little sense of humor and push people’s buttons a little bit. At its core, it is about a creative process. And that feminine character… It’s the fertility figure. It’s the Venus. It’s the temple at Newgrange. It’s the Pentagram. It’s all those things. But not just feminine; it's everybody’s creative flow… everybody’s tapped into that creative process. In this particular instance and this particular project, I'm attempting to push more of that easy going, go with the flow, embrace your creative juices type process.

SG: You’ve referred to Puscifer before as your “island of misfit ideas” and called it the space where your “Id, Ego, and Anima all come together to exchange cookie recipes.”

MJK: Yeah. The first piece that I did for Puscifer that I remember was the “Free Francis Bean” T-shirt in 1997. I didn’t sell it; I just basically gave it away. I made a couple dozen of them. And Courtney [Love] hates me. I thought it was funny. [Laughs] I think she hates me even more because at some point her daughter said, “Hey! Can I get one of those shirts?” And she had to explain to her daughter that Maynard’s an asshole. [Laughs] Woops. I think a little tongue in cheek shock value is definitely part of my M.O. [laughs] but in general it’s about desensitizing yourself to things that shouldn’t really matter that much.

SG: People talk about Puscifer like it’s a new project but you’ve been developing it for nearly a decade. You mentioned before your interest in small collaborations and on this album, everyone from Danny Lohner [NIN] to Tim Alexander [Primus] to Satan make guest appearances. Did you know in the beginning that it would grow to include such a range of influences?

MJK: Yeah [Puscifer has been around] since ’94 or ’95. It seems newer to people because I’ve taken it more into the musical direction as of lately, but it’s always kind of been just a random creative process. Back in the mid ‘90s it was a comedy project. I was doing little songs and things here and there at the end of a comedy variety show. I would close the show some nights and Tenacious D would close the show other nights. Many of the “Mr. Show” sketches were all kind of worked out in this venue. You had people like Andy Dick doing stuff, Kathy Griffin, Greg Aton, Tenacious D… apparently Simpatico used to perform on the set as well and Will Farrell was in Simpatico and I didn’t even know because he was wearing a chicken mask and black tights – I couldn’t recognize him. Who would? Janeane Garofalo did a few. Laura Milligan was the main one that did the show and she’s in the video for “Cuntry Boner” – she’s the one with the big blonde wig. We had a lot of fun doing that.

SG: How did Satan make an appearance on the album? Was he just there in spirit?

MJK: Um, he’s an investor.

SG: [Laughs] Let’s talk more about how you got involved with “Mr. Show” and how you hooked up with David Cross. How does he feel about Puscifer?

MJK: I haven’t really talked to him about it, honestly. It’s been awhile. Probably the first time they heard the name Puscifer was when we did it as a tribute band for Ronnie Dobbs in Season One of “Mr. Show.” But he’s a creative person so I’m sure once I present this thing to him he’ll take all of three minutes to dissect it and tear it apart, call it crap, but make it sound very funny.

SG: Why did you feel the character of Ronnie Dobbs needed a tribute band? What was the name of the song Puscifer did for that film Run Ronnie Run, again?

MJK: Oh, that was “Ass Kicking Fat Kid.” Actually I think that song was written by Brian Posehn.

SG: We love Brian Posehn. He and one of our old editors for SuicideGirls, Gerry Duggan, did a comic book together called The Last Christmas which is really taking off.

MJK: [Laughs] Excellent.

SG: You keep a blog [Maynard] on SuicideGirls and I was reading over some recent entries. You have an amazing job that allows you to travel the world and really soak up experience. You recently went to Egypt and saw the pyramids, which must have been amazing. How much of this has affected what you do with Puscifer and what other kinds of life experiences lately have you been able to draw from to create new material?

MJK: [Egypt] is a huge space to step into. It’s a very powerful place to visit. I think with anything, if you’re presented with the chance to see things other than your normal everyday life, you’re presented with an opportunity to grow and learn things. I think sometimes people get a little comfortable and they don’t reach out and experience those types of things. I was in the military for three years and most people’s reaction to that is, “Oh that must have been dreadful.” But I actually took advantage of it. I learned a lot about human nature; I learned about how people deal with each other; I learned where I did not want to have a career [laughs]. Rather than just putting my time in and going home, taking my college fund that was useless and running, I actually learned quite a bit.

You know, I’ve been on the road with a lot of bands and they get kind of caught up in the “band lifestyle” and they don’t really broaden their horizons. And I think it’s a little depressing because you see people like Peter Gabriel or David Bowie and they’re really inspiring to me. They’ve stepped outside, they’re creative people; they’re not just musicians or rock stars. And they’re not even rock stars; they’ve played one on TV for a moment. Like with Ziggy Stardust, Bowie was definitely a rock star. But he’s more than that. He’s a really creative individual, as is Peter Gabriel.

If you’re a creative person in general, I think you have an opportunity -- like you said -- you get to go to Egypt! I mean, come on. Who gets to go to Egypt? It’s an amazing place. We went to Istanbul and all these different places and you really have to recognize that there’s an experience waiting to express itself to you. You have to take advantage of those things and let them sink in. And as a creative person, you reinterpret what you’ve seen and you express it in some way. I think it’s disappointing that a lot of people don’t take advantage of those things. It’s weird. [Laughs] [You shouldn’t] pass out drunk in Istanbul and forget you were even there like, “Dude, WASP was in Istanbul and we got fuuuuucked up!” “Did you see the sights?” “No! We were drinkin’!”

SG: [Laughs]

MJK: Snore... [Laughs]

SG: Let’s talk more about the humorous aspects of what you do. Charlie Chaplin once said something along the lines of, “Humor is an engine for survival.” Would you agree?

MJK: Absolutely. I think humor is absolutely essential. I think a lot of times -- especially in my past work -- it’s been kind of missed. But it's there. Anybody who saw Tool play in the late ‘90s with the wig and lipstick and fake tits, if you can’t look at that and laugh, because I was laughing, I don’t know about you but I thought it was ridiculous and would just horrify my band mates. Every time I was about to step on stage, I could barely keep a straight face. One of my favorite outfits was the one that just made my friend Camilla just cringe… she had to get therapy. It was this orange Victoria’s Secret outfit with this big Peg Bundy wig and fake tits and some platforms, and whenever she sees the photos of it, she has to go get therapy.

SG: [Laughs]

MJK: It was funny. So the humor is definitely an essential element to this project and [laughs] I think there’s been some -- I don’t know if they’re Tool fans or just have some expectation of what I’m supposed to be doing here -- but they’re hostile and upset that there’s no math involved [laughs]. I’m just having fun and doing what I want to do and just kind of seeing where this goes, [but] they’re getting a little angry at me. I guess they missed the sense of humor in the other stuff because there’s a hell of a lot more here. Maybe I’m just not very funny. Humor and art are inseparable. Even the most serious forms of art, if viewed by someone else, they’re actually comical. That’s as essential as the introspection and the picking the scabs and dissecting it. Giggling at it is just as healthy and just as therapeutic. You can’t take yourself too seriously; life’s too short.

For more information go to Pusicfer's YouTube, MySpace, and buy Keenan's wine here.

(video) Cover me and my buddy did. You are a runner and I am my fathers son; Wolf Parade

Who are the sexiest women in rock??? ATTENTION Fuckers! I mean ROCK! NOT Britney or Madonna, any pop, hip hop, nothing. ROCK N ROLL!!!! I MEAN WOMEN PERFORMING WITH LIVE INSTRUMENTS!!!!!! My ultimate vote is of course Debbie Harry and then Meg White. Thank you!

I was recently fortunate enough to spend some quality time with Cory Doctorow, discussing topics related to the plot of Homeland, the thrilling follow up to his contemporary classic novel Little Brother (which serves as a primer on civil rights in the digital age). Our conversation spanned 90 minutes... more

I was recently fortunate enough to spend some quality time with Cory Doctorow, discussing topics related to the plot of Homeland, the thrilling follow up to his contemporary classic novel Little Brother (which serves as a primer on civil rights in the digital age). Our conversation spanned 90 minutes and ran into excess of 17,000 words, so the need for brevity dictated that I had to edit our interview heavily. However, Doctorow has an avid following, and rightly so. Hence I figured those of you that enjoyed the first installment of our interview might appreciate this second bite at the apple.

In the first part, we discussed Burning Man, which is where the action in Homeland kicks off, and the student debt bubble, which serves as a backdrop to the book. In part two, our conversation delves further into the post-Occupy politics of Homeland. In Doctorow’s book, our hacktivist hero Marcus Yallow, having been forced out of the education system due to financial pressures, gains a position as a tech guru for an independent political candidate. Our discussion therefore naturally turns to the limitations of two party systems, the potential social media has to transform the political landscape, the pros and cons of clicktivism, and the perils of online activism, which is especially poignant given that Aaron Swartz contributed an afterward to the book.

Nicole Powers: It does seem like we’re living for the first time in recent memory in an era where politically and socially things are regressing rather than progressing.

Cory Doctorow: Regress and progress are not uniform…We have the access to the organizing tools now that we didn’t have access to when I was younger. I’ve said this many times when I was an activist in the 1980s, 98% of my job was stuffing envelopes and 2% was figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today we get the envelopes for free and the address books for free. That’s just a giant qualitative change and it does make it possible for us to do things that we weren’t able to do before…

One of the criticisms that Occupy consistently received was that it refused to center in an ideological program. It’s very hard to find out what Occupy was for. In general we knew what Occupy was for. I mean Quinn Norton in her eulogy for Occupy said that Occupy’s manifesto was: Things are fucked up and bullshit. Clearly that was the underlying message of Occupy. But turning that into a program was something that they were very reluctant to do, although elements of it emerged.

I think one of the reasons that political movements have been so concerned with constitutionalizing early on and setting out a program is because group forming is expensive. When it costs a lot of time and energy to get married, you want to make sure that you’ve got something in common so that you don’t end up getting divorced right away. When it’s cheap to form a group, to all show up, when you get the envelopes and the letters and the stamps for free and the envelope stuffing doesn’t take any time, then it makes sense to all go hang out together for a while and see whether you have enough goals in common to go on – to march together. Because it’s not a big deal to have a divorce a little while later, and then reform in some other configuration...

I think that the willingness of Occupy to do what programmers would call late binding of a program was its real strength. It was one of the things that made it possible to go on, because you never had to decide whether or not you were on or off the Occupy program. You never had to check a list of tick boxes to decide whether you were there for the same reason as everyone else. You could all say well you were more or less here for the same reason.

As someone who grew up among Communists whose movements have consistently been ridden by ideological differences that are literally incomprehensible to people who are not in the movement, people who seem to have so much more in common with each other than they have with anyone else in the world, and yet who can’t stand to be in the same room with each other, I understand this. I mean, devoting your life to a political ideology that’s not mainstream is an enormous expense. It’s a huge sacrifice to make. It’s something you can only make if you’re really sure you’re right. If you divert some of your energy to trying to form a group that you know is just going to fall apart, and if that energy is a lot of your energy, a lot of what you’ve got left over from this big sacrifice that you make when you devote your life to political change, you end up with a net deficit. You end up spending more money or more energy recovering from fissioning, from fracturing, than you get back out of the system in terms of coherent political action.

But if you can make the cost of organizing low enough, you can do lots of things that you couldn’t do before, you can all show up and decide later whether you’re all there for the same reason. And that’s great. It points us to a future where we stop characterizing our politics in terms of left and right, which are a silly way to characterize your politics because left and right don’t make any sense. Left and right leaves you with Evangelical Christians and certain feminists on the same side of pornography. They are bedfellows, to use an unfortunate term, on that issue, but they’re not on the same side of a left-right spectrum.

We have other spectrums –– authoritarian / anti-authoritarian, materialist/spiritualists, centralist/decentralist –– and if it’s cheap enough to form a group, we can start to add more nuance to our politics than just left or right, and maybe we can stop having to hold our nose and support politicians and political movements that when we look at them, we go well, Obama, is technically a Democrat and he’s not Mitt Romney, but he does believe in extra judicial drone assassination of American citizens far from the field of battle, nevertheless he is the left wing candidate, so I guess I’ve got to vote for him. If we can have a more nuanced political discussion than left and right, maybe it’s the beginning of something much better than what we’ve got now.

NP: Right. That’s what I’m seeing with Occupy. From the outside people aren’t seeing the numbers on the street anymore so their perception is that it’s failed. But from the inside what Occupy did was help us all find each other. Now we’ve all figured out who’s into what and who we can work with on particular issues, there’s no need to be a homogenized mass.

CD: And it politicized people, it politicized people who hadn’t been politicized. There is a lot of cynicism about clicktivism and the idea that if it’s too easy to be politicized, if all you need to do to take action is click an online petition, then it siphons off energy that could be used to change the world. It’s probably true that some people go, I’ve done my bit, I clicked that petition. But other people who never would have taken any political action start with that one click.

The height of the barrier to entry has to be correlated with the overall size of the movement. If it takes an enormous affirmative step to start your journey, then a lot of people will never start. If on the other hand it’s cheap to try, then a lot of people will try. And the more people you have trying, the more people you will have who will find that it’s what they want to do. That’s the upside of it. This is why I’m not cynical about clicktivism. This is why I’m glad to have a spectrum of ways that people can engage. The shopkeeper understands that the first requirement for selling things is getting people in the door; a political activist has to understand that the first requirement for building a movement is to have people take some step to want to be involved in a movement. And the smaller that step can be, the easier it is to get them involved.

I think of it like a church…It’s a tiny minority of people who join the clergy, but all of the people who join the clergy started by showing up on Sunday. If step one is eschew all material things, take a vow of silence and a vow of chastity and wear a hair shirt for the rest of your life, your clergy will be thinly populated. You need a step one that isn’t total engagement for the rest of your life, right?

So one of the things that having cheap group forming does is it makes it possible to have a cheap step one, a cheap entrée, a thing that you can do that makes some difference –– and it does make some difference. A lot of people spreading links about SOPA led to a slightly smaller number of people calling our senators about SOPA, and that made a huge difference. That actually changed the world. But if it wasn’t for all the clicks that started it, including the people who just clicked once and never did anything else, that movement wouldn’t have gone to the visibility that it had gone to where people started calling senators, and the overall number was the thing that shifted the political debate.

NP: I think too that the sign of success with regards to clicktivism is the amount of resources that the government is putting into social media. One of the things you cover in the book is the use of “sock puppets” [fake social media accounts that respond to posts from the accounts of legitimate activists with negative comments and misinformation].

CD: …When we had the HB Gary leak we saw that the Air Force intelligence arm was tendering bids for software to help them run astroturf campaigns, to allow individuals to run up to 20 sock puppets on the internet and keep their identity separate so that they could poison political discourse. One of the worst things about this, about astroturfing is that, like an agent provocateur, it makes it very, very hard for people within a movement to know whether they can trust each other. It is totally corrosive to dialogue, to discourse itself, because it means that you don’t know when you’re talking with real people and when you’re talking with imaginary people or people who are being paid to espouse a point of view. Ultimately it actually, I think. ends up deprecating dialogue as an alternative to violence or civil unrest, because if you can’t talk, you’re left with just anger. If you can’t actually talk out your differences, all that’s left is anger.

I think that a horrible example, we’re seeing this right now in Pakistan. The CIA used false vaccination campaigns as a way to go door to door to find Osama Bin Laden. Pakistani militants are murdering Red Cross vaccination campaigners now who are actually trying to eradicate polio in Pakistan.

When you take a thing that is itself a net good, which is people talking to each other instead of killing each other, and you poison that, what’s left is whatever is left behind. You actually end up voiding it as a legitimate means of advancing an agenda, and then people end up doing whatever else is left behind. It’s a very, very short-sided tactic to engage in this…

NP: I guess this is one of the reasons why the National Lawyers Guild win recently was so important, that protesters have the right to sue army infiltrators.

CD: That’s one of the things that has made the story about the coppers who infiltrated the environmental movement here so poignant, apart from the fact that they sometimes impregnated activists and had children with them, but that you know on both sides, it’s so corrosive right? They acted without personal integrity, they destroyed their lives, they destroyed the lives of the people they are charged with surveilling. What they did poisoned our ability to actually have social change groups that work for social good, because you spend all your time trying to figure out who’s an agent and who isn’t.

I remember my parents were politically involved with someone who it turned out was clinically depressed and committed suicide. His behavior was erratic and some of his political friends thought that he might be in an agent provocateur, and they maybe didn’t extend to him the empathy that they could have because they had lived through an agent provocateur within their movement. The Canadian government had used agent provocateurs with left wing groups in Canada, and his erratic behavior, one of the things it gave rise to was that suspicion. What a tragedy, right? What a tragedy to socially isolate people who have problems by poisoning the well. It really is a real evil…

NP: In the book you have a character called Joseph Noss, who’s a “good” politician. Do you think there’s such a thing as a good politician or is it an oxymoron?

CD: I think there are lots of real good politicians, absolutely. One of the things about politics is that it’s small-p political, because the only way to attain the level of organization necessary to win a big campaign is to form a party that’s in coalition with a bunch of different interests, as you see with the Torys, for example, in this country. Are Tory’s pro or anti Europe? Are Tory’s pro or anti gay marriage? Are Lib Dems copyright reformers or are copyright maximalists?

Well, the Business Secretary just announced that the City of London is going to have an independently funded copyright police that will be actual police officers whose job it is to enforce copyright. Although copyright violations are not a crime, they’re a civil matter…It’s like having contract police who are out there enforcing contracts. Or real estate police who make sure that people aren’t misreporting the square footage of their house. These are civil matters and yet we suddenly have police. That’s the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary who has imposed it, but the Liberal Democrats are also the party that passed a resolution saying that national censorship regimes should never be an effective remedy for policing copyright. So which one are they? Well, they’re both. They represent a coalition of different kinds of interests.

Just like the Republican Party in the US contains fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Some of them are both fiscal and social conservatives, but there’s a lot of people who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. And there are a lot of people where social conservative is code for young earth creationist. There are a lot of people on the fiscal conservative side where that’s code for investor class, who would be broke if they only bought interests in oil wells that would be where they are if the earth was 5,000 years old. I mean, you can’t be a real fiscal conservative and a social conservative. Social conservative means investing in oil wells where they would be if the earth was 5,000 years old and not believing in dinosaurs, right? There are fractions and fractions within these parties. So in order to be a politician you have to be someone who’s capable of first being political within your party, which is to say, convincing all the different wings of your party that you can serve their interests equally –– which is to say that you have to marginally inoffensive. You have to be part of the status quo.

Nowhere is this more visible than places like Singapore. Singapore is a really interesting example of how you can talk to the rhetoric of social equality and use it to maintain social inequality. Singapore’s origin story is in race riots and racial discrimination between and among Chinese, Malay and Tamil people. Those are still the three major ethnic groups, although the ethnic divisions as always are very, very artificial. In the same way that you were a Tutsi if some distant male ancestor was a Tutsi, even if all your other ancestors were Hutu –– or even you were a Tutsi if the Belgium authorities had written the wrong thing on your great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s identity card –– by the same token, there are people who are technically Chinese, who all of their ancestors are Malay except for some distant Chinese male ancestor.

In Singaporean politics, one of the things that they do, whenever it looks like there’s an effective independent political campaign in one of the electoral districts, they will announce that in the interests of ethnic harmony they will convert the single parliamentary seat into a triple parliamentary seat that will have one Tamil representative, one Chinese representative, and one Malay representative, which on its face looks incredibly egalitarian. There have been proposals to require every electoral district in the UK for example to elect one woman and one man in the name of equality. But the thing is that only the state in Singapore has the organizational capacity to field three candidates in any one political district. Whereas the independent parties are necessarily far less organized than the 30 or 50 year incumbents who run for Singapore. So not only do their votes get diluted, they can’t put a candidate on the ballot, because while they can get the signatures necessary for one candidate, they can’t get them for three.

What this exploits is the fact that organizations used to be expensive and are expensive wherever you don’t have the internet because it’s hard to canvas around to find the right candidates. So the theme of Homeland, in part, is how you can run a political campaign without necessarily having to use a party to back you. Parties are necessary evils, right? They’re not good unto themselves. They’re actually the least worst way to organize candidates in all 50 states or in all of the political districts in the UK or whatever. But parties by definition require representatives and representative governments do sometimes vote against the interest of the people that they represent. That’s what a three line whip is. But we tolerate them because how else could you get a voting bloc that would manage to have some coherence in leading the country across all the different areas where we have representatives.

The Lib Dems traded their political future for the next 20 years for a referendum on alternative voting, which they were then betrayed on by the Torys and which we didn’t get. As a result, we are going to still have essentially a two party system where most politics is governed by wealthy influence brokers instead of by the representative interest of people. But with the internet, you could imagine it being possible to field candidates in 50 electoral districts, or 100 electoral districts, without having a formal party or having a much more lightly construed party, a party that’s just fragmentary relative to the kind of monolithic parties we have now. A party that looked a lot more like a coalition then a party.

NP: In the run up to the election I was thinking about how I would use social media tools to promote a candidate. And, yes, you could run a candidate with almost no money, however, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to that is Facebook, because they are now charging you to connect to your own base.

CD: Absolutely. Facebook is one of those things that succeeds very well and fails very badly…I could tell that their business model was the drug dealer business model; The first taste is free and then after that you pay. Then the more dependent you are on it the higher the cost. That was totally obvious to everyone who’s ever seen internet services come and go. I saw that coming a long way off. There are more social media alternatives and we can hope that there will be more still. At least one of the things about Facebook charging is that you know what it costs. But ideally what you do is you reserve that money for something better than paying for stamps and envelopes again, because that’s the game changer, not having to pay for stamps and envelopes.

NP: It’s particularly obnoxious when it comes to politics because it yet again means that the special interest groups and the traditional parties have the advantage over the independents and the grassroots candidates, and because of the sheer volume of people on Facebook, to some extent it’s taken away the democratization of the internet.

CD: Yeah, I agree. There’s something interesting that happens with the social networks and their desire to be integrated into government that gives me a little bit of hope. Obama, when he was running in 2008, used YouTube to do these fireside chats. After he took office, he wanted to continue, but the federal government has limits on its ability to collect data on people. They couldn’t set a cookie for you when you were looking at Obama’s fireside chats once he was in office, once he was president. Also it has to be downloadable and nonproprietary. So YouTube built an entire parallel backend that any video can be accessed through that allows for downloads and doesn’t set a cookie. So you can watch any video on YouTube anonymously and download it. Which is pretty cool.

Facebook at one point, the NHS [British National Health Service] put ‘like’ buttons on all the disease pages on the NHS online portal. Which is a terrible idea because every ‘like’ button sends a beacon back to Facebook, so they would know if you were looking at chlamydia or cancer or HIV, things that you might not want to have widely known or facts that you might not want to have sold about you. The NHS immediately removed those buttons after going through a palaver. But what if instead the NHS had negotiated that Facebook has to provide two ways of embedding a ‘like’ button: one is the normal way that gives you a beacon every time you land on a page with a like button, and the other one only gives them a beacon if you click it. So if you wanted to like something about alcoholism so that your family would see it because you were worried about how much they were drinking you could, but merely visiting a page on alcoholism wouldn’t send any information to Facebook, well then we might have had a Facebook that was a little more useful to all of us, right? Where all of us who have web pages, where we put Facebook like buttons, would’ve had those web pages not send information to Facebook unless our users chose to send information to Facebook.

And again, I wonder if there isn’t some leverage to force them. If for example they want to be used in political referendums or in some other political context, where charging for reach would be inconsistent with being used for some public purpose, if we can’t in fact use it as a bit of a stick to beat them and say, all right, we will use you for public purpose but you have to do so in a way that, for example, allows free interchange with Twitter and other social networks, uses some standard defined mechanism for getting information in and out of Facebook, and that allows deterministic reach to everyone who’s liked, who’s opted into some social group on Facebook. At which point, we might have more broad access to it all around.

NP: I would love to see that and I think that that is possible, especially given what’s happened in with Instagram.

CD: Well, I’m not a market doctrinaire, but I think that this is where having a market matters…The reason YouTube created all of this parallel infrastructure to keep Obama there is because of the cache of having Obama there and the cost to them if Obama had decided to do his fireside chats on Vimeo instead. This is how we get this stuff out of them.

To return to regulation, it’s one of the reasons that copyright wars are so dangerous…and other kinds of bad speech wars, libel, pornography, whatever — stuff that I don’t actually approve of. I don’t like people who libel other people. I’m not a fan of child pornography. All these things I would prefer to have the world without. But when we make things like Facebook or YouTube or Twitter responsible for them, copyright infringement, whatever, when we make them responsible for it, what we do is we say, okay you giant corporation, you have to divert some of your resources, your prodigious profits to policing users for this and to setting up some kind of response team and takedown whatever. On its face we go, all right, mission accomplished, but what that ends up doing is saying if you want to start a competitor to YouTube, you would also have to have access to those prodigious resources that would allow you to affect those takedowns for libel or for terrorism or for copyright infringement or for pornography or what have you, if you have some extra special burden in the law. What we then end up doing is we end up saying nobody will ever be able to compete with YouTube. Because YouTube could’ve never have grown to where it is now, where it can actually afford all the infrastructure, content ID or any of the other things that it does to police the content that it gets, if from the start it had been required to have all of those automated systems. So then you end up with just YouTube.

Again, competition doesn’t solve all of our problems. Markets don’t solve all of our problems. But if our regulation of Facebook’s behavior is not cautious in that it makes it much more expensive to found a Facebook competitor, then we will only ever see Facebook growing and growing. Because the thing that will starve Facebook is competition. The thing that will ultimately cause it to offer better deals to the people who use it is the fear that people who use it will defect to a rival service. That’s always going to be a much more effective curb on its behavior than the fear of a regulator. We’ve seen what regulation looks like with big corporations. Again, HSBC, you know? If you launder drug money, you get a slap on the wrist. If Facebook knows that it’s regulators are its pals, then it will continue to behave badly. If Facebook fears someone who is as big and as awful as it, that has grown just as quickly as it has and is challenging its longevity the same way that it beat the shit out of MySpace, then I think we have a real chance of getting Facebook to behave itself.

NP: But do you see any serious competition coming up?

CD: No, and I’m worried about that. I mean, Twitter, obviously, Google + a little. It’s funny because Google has historically been willing to eschew profitability in one line of its business to gain profitability in another. They give Android away to keep the mobile market open so that they can sell search ads in the mobile space, which is a huge source of revenue for them. But they really, really seem to want to keep a high CPM in Google +, a high advertising rate, and so they want everyone to use their real name. They want to be as Facebook-like as possible. Obviously real identities give you higher CPM.

NP: I hate this idea of forcing people to use their real identities. It’s a basic tenet of internet security that you don’t want your real life personal information out there in the universe. Germany has actually just ruled that Facebook’s practice of requesting people use their real IDs violates their citizens’ right to use online services anonymously, and I think that’s a step in the right direction. I actually think it’s irresponsible of a social network to demand that you use your real name.

CD: Especially given how many fuck ups Google has had with Buzz, where they’ve inadvertently done things like expose people’s identity to their stalkers. Basically, requiring people to use their real names in services where they often regret their disclosures, it’s like requiring people to wear flaming trousers around the gunpowder barrels. We know that people make inadvertent, over disclosure with social networks and that they often regret their disclosure after the fact. Forcing them to use their real name increases the likelihood that their over disclosure will have some real world cost.

NP: I’ve had to move because of a stalker. I’ve had a restraining order too. Demanding that I use a real name online is downright dangerous, and could potentially disenfranchise me from the online world to my detriment.

CD: Google argues that people will be politer if they use their real names, but we’ve seen so many people who are perfectly capable of being impolite when they use their real names, and we’ve seen so many people that are capable of being polite. It’s clear that real names are not the whole story of politeness. That a lot of it has to do with system design and some of it has to do with scale and some of it has to do with other stuff. It’s not merely politeness. Everybody knew Muammar Gaddafi’s name. It didn’t stop him from doing what he did. No one knows the name of the guy who braked and let me cross the road with my daughter this morning, and yet he was very polite. It’s not merely a case of the greater internet fuckwad theory. It’s not merely the case that anonymity plus the internet equals flaming, equals trolling.

NP: We’re all so worried about pedophiles, but then you’re demanding that kids use their real names so that the pedophiles can find them.

CD: The answer is that they don’t let kids on there. They claim cop-out compliance. In the US 13 year olds really aren’t supposed to use online services. They have to have official permission from their parents and it’s a real palaver. That’s why you often have to enter a birth date that’s more than 13 years in the past to use a bunch of services. It’s for cop-out compliance. It’s totally ineffective at keeping kids off social networks. It also means that social networks can’t design systems that are safe for kids. It’s a complete lose-lose rule.

NP: Finally, the one thing that I’d like to talk about which you touched on earlier is the criminalization of copyright.

CD: Yeah, one of the biggest differences between civil and criminal statutes is how easy they are to parse out. The corollary of ‘ignorance of the law is no defense’ is that the law should be easy to understand. So criminal law tends to be a lot more straightforward to understand than civil law. I mean, if you by accident happen to wander on to a trading floor and inadvertently bought $20M worth of securities, there’s a pretty good chance that you violated security law, because it takes a lot to learn how to trade securities legally. You would never accidentally wander onto a security trading floor and accidentally put $20 million worth of orders for exotic derivatives. Whereas, on the other hand, you know in your soul that punching someone in the nose is wrong. It’s very hard to accidentally assault someone. It’s rare that if you assaulted someone you would’ve done so on the misapprehension that what you were doing was allowed, right?

Copyright is an arcane body of law that most people, including people who work for the entertainment industry, are unfamiliar with, and it’s very easy to get wrong. To give you an example of how easy it is to get wrong, a Dutch composer who wrote the theme song to the anti-piracy commercials that are put before videos discovered that his composition had been used without correct licensing and had been pirated by the people who make anti-piracy videos. So if the people who make anti-piracy videos sometimes get it wrong, then you and I are going to get it wrong all the time. There is no copyright law that is simple and straightforward enough for a 13 year old girl to get right when she makes her Harry Potter fan site while in her parents basement in Brighton and still complex and nuanced enough that Warner Brothers can use it to successfully license Harry Potter to Universal for a Harry Potter theme park.

What we are creating when we criminalize copyright is we’re creating a system where all of us will be violating not just civil rules that might cost us a fine if we get it wrong, but criminal rules. We have a system that is as arcane as finance law, but that is expected to be followed by everybody and when you get it wrong, you go to jail. That’s just a fucking disaster. And the reason everybody has to obey it is because unlike finance law, where it only applies to things people in the finance industry do, copyright law, which used to only relate to something the people in the copyright industry and entertainment industry did, which was handling copies of creative works, is now something that we all do a million times a day because the internet only deals in copies. Every time you click the mouse you make copies…

Where we’ve ended up with copyright law is that everybody violates it all the time, and the penalties keep getting more and more harsh because we have hyperinflation in copying. And rather than deciding, we’ll only apply copyright law to people who are in the industry, even though copying takes place inside and outside of the industry now, we said instead, everybody who copies needs to be governed by industry regulation. I’m here to tell you, nobody is going to be able to obey industry regulation. It’s too complicated for any normal civilian to get right.

NP: I love the story that you had on BoingBoing recently about the 9-year old Finnish girl who had her Winnie the Pooh laptop confiscated by the police.

CD: Yeah. Her laptop was seized because she listened to music the wrong way. The family could show you that she literally did listen to the single the wrong way. Instead of listening to it on the radio, she listened to it on the Pirate Bay. Having listened to it, the family bought the CD, bought two tickets to the concert, bought a t-shirt and so on. And they literally came in and took away her Winnie the Pooh laptop because she listened to the single the wrong way in deciding whether or not to buy the CD.

Before you got here, I just finished a column for The Guardian about this. It’s about the fact that piracy numbers go way down when you can buy the works legally. For example, when there’s a major release like Wreck-It Ralph, that’s a new Disney/Pixar movie that comes out in the US two months before it comes out in the UK, as has just happened, in the UK there’s a lot more piracy of that movie because people can’t buy tickets to it and yet they’ve seen adverts for it, and their friends are talking about it on Facebook and Twitter. All the research shows us that if Wreck-It Ralph were in the cinema at the same time in the US and the UK that piracy on Wreck-It Ralph would go through the floor in the UK. But whenever a study shows this, the industry goes into overdrive to tell you that watching the movie at the wrong time without paying for it is totally wrong and theft. Regardless of whether not piracy numbers go up or down, its theft and it’s just wrong and you shouldn’t be allowed to do it.

And it’s a bit weird; why would they be defending their right not to sell you a ticket to the movies? The reason for that is that there’s two different pipelines for cinematic exhibition. In the US it centers around holidays that are observed in the US, like Thanksgiving when all the blockbuster movies come out. Here it’s centered around holidays that are not observed in the US but are observed in the UK, like bank holidays and half-terms. They want Wreck-It Ralph to come out at half-term here and they want Wreck-It Ralph to come out at Thanksgiving there. They make more money if Wreck-It Ralph comes out that way.

Now, there are lots of profit maximization strategies that look like this. Cinemas charge more for fizzy drinks then you would pay at a grocery store, but the limit on how much they can charge for fizzy drinks is set by the point at which they start to lose more money from people who sneak the drinks in because the prices are too high than they make when people are willing to pay for more for this. You can see that a cinema could actually reduce the number of people who sneak drinks in by paying for more security, but eventually they’ll always hit this limit where the cost of insuring compliance is higher than the profits that they’re making from the profit maximization strategy.

But one way that they can offset that is by convincing us to pay for it. What if instead of the cinemas deciding to hire their own security to stop people from bringing in their own drinks, they instead claim successfully in the halls of power that bringing your own drinks to a movie theater was a form of a theft and that the police should be set outside of the cinemas to stop people from bringing in their own drinks and that the public should pay for huge jail sentences for people who brought in their own drinks…In that case they could actually raise the cost of drinks much higher, right?

That’s essentially what the entertainment has found is that it’s cheaper to pay lobbyists to wander around Whitehall beating their breasts and crying about piracy then it is to bring movies out on the same day and date all around the world, because they can realize those extra profits from delaying release. So this is what they’ve done. They have basically pursued this PR strategy of calling people who would actually buy this if they were willing to sell it to them thieves and then convincing the public to pay for the enforcement…

I get that, but we hear a lot of talk about scroungers. We hear a lot of talk about people who enrich themselves at the public expense. Well, copyright comes at the public expense. Enforcement actions, a city police force locking people up, clogging the courts, all of those things represent an enormous public expense, and when they’re not about protecting your property interests but instead maximizing your profits by creating artificial interventions in the market in the form of the willingness to stop people from availing themselves of entertainment products that you’re not willing to sell them, well then it’s up to us to actually say, okay the free ride stops here.

Because they will continue to take the free ride for as long as we offer it. Corporations are externalizing entities. If a corporation’s duty is to maximize its shareholder revenue, then a corporation that doesn’t pay fines for polluting the water system and doesn’t have to pay money to purify it’s waste, it should, in order to maximize its shareholder value, pollute the water supply, because it’s duty is to not spend one penny more than it has to.

So we need to set up negative incentives. We need to have fines for pollution that are bigger than the cost savings that you get from dumping your waste in the water supply, otherwise these externalizing rational actor corporations will dump their waste in the water supply. Likewise, we need to say to the entertainment industry, our willingness to publicly subsidize your profit maximization strategy goes this far and no further. And I think this far should be not very far, otherwise they will continue to figure out ways to maximize their profits by externalizing their enforcement costs to us.

NP: But what kind of lesson has that taught that 9-year old girl about respect for authority and for respect for the law?

CD: Well, that’s true, but remember the entertainment industry’s job isn’t to maximize worldwide respect for the law, it’s to maximize their profits. If you have a coercion based business model, you can’t individually coerce everyone. You can’t put an enforcer in everyone’s house to stop them from doing it. You have to convince them to police their own actions, and we’ve known for as long as there have been heads on pikes that one way to convince them to police their own actions, especially when that policing comes at their own expense, when they have to issue doing something that would otherwise make them happy is by terrorizing them.

In North Korea, if you deal in the black market and take food that’s above your horrible meager ration you get sent to a prison camp and you’re sent to what’s called a three generation sentence where you, your children, and their children all have to live in the prison camp. The idea there is that it’s impractical to police everyone’s every move. Instead what you do is you terrorize them so that even when they’re starving they don’t buy black market food.

The entertainment industry’s strategy is you make examples out of people. You make examples out of the people that you catch so the people that you can’t catch modify their own behavior because the consequences are so cruel and horrible. Your 9-year old has her Winnie the Pooh laptop taken away. They’re not interested in instilling respect in that 9-year old for the entertainment industry. I think they quite rightly understand that that 9-year old will hate the entertainment industry forever. What they’re interested in is all the other parents of all the other 9-year olds going, ‘Honey, we need to police everything you do with that laptop because otherwise the entertainment industry is going to beat our door down and is going to have the police come and seize your computer.’ They don’t care that they lost her as a customer. They don’t care that she was buying tickets. What they care about is the broader message that they send to everyone else. That is the same message that a head on a pike sends. It’s what every bully does to keep their seat of power. They don’t terrorize retail, they terrorize wholesale. They make examples.

NP: They terrorize on one end, and on the other they’re enforcing compliance with the new three strikes policy.

CD: Well, that’s the same thing right? You don’t disconnect everybody from the internet with a three strikes rule. You disconnect a million people from the internet and the other 69 million people go, ‘We better not do it.’ From the entertainment industry’s perspective, taking 1 million people out of the economy, which is what taking them out of the internet does, is a small price to pay because the rest of us pick up the cost of one million people being taken out of the economy, not them….It’s worth it to them to take a million people out of the economy if the other 69 million can be terrorized into doing it. The same way that a feudal senior who puts one pheasant’s head on a pike loses a pheasant working in the field but gets more work out of all of the pheasants who remain.

NP: I can also see, with the ISPs being forced to snoop on us, that they’re going to have algorithms to filter the footprints of copyrighted movies and throttle them, in the same way that YouTube can sniff the footprints of copyrighted music and have a bot automatically take content down.

CD: Well, this is what Japan has proposed…Because now there’s criminal penalties on copyright, two years in jail for downloading, 10 years in jail for uploading. The entertainment industry has found some untried and unproven technology that’s literally a black box that the ISPs have to install that monitors all traffic and drops any connection that looks like it matches a copyright fingerprint. And again, this is the difference between a system that works well and a system that fails badly. It maybe that content match works really well for figuring out who to give money from ads to, the content ID on YouTube, but it works really badly for randomly disconnecting people who are conducting all of their discourse online. And the most indigent part of this is that the entertainment industry expects ISPs to license this technology from them and pay them an annual licensing fee –– for having a black box that they operate on their network that disconnects their customers from the internet periodically. But again, this is about externalizing costs, right? They’re not bearing the costs, the costs are being born externally by third parties, by the ISPs in this case.

NP: Attached to the copyright issue is the attempt to criminalize links, which affects you and I as journalists. We’ve seen this with the Richard O'Dwyer case, even though that fell apart, and with the Barrett Brown indictment.

CD: Yeah. The best response I ever saw to that was from a guy here in the UK named Chris Raettig...He maintains a personal website that links to horrible corporate anthems. A lot of corporations have songs that they’ve commissioned songwriters to write about them. He linked to the KPMG corporate anthem. Because he humiliated them, KPMG sent him a lawyer letter saying we have a policy on our website that says you are not allowed to link to us without our permission –– can you show us the letter our lawyer sent you giving permission to link to our website? Instead of answering, he went and stood near the KPMG office which I think is in the Docklands with a sign that said, “KPMG this way,” and took a picture of himself and said, I didn’t need anyone’s permission to tell people where your offices were, I don’t need anyone’s permission to tell people where your website is. I mean, describing the factual existence of a thing should not be a tort or a crime…All a link is is a statement about a thing that exists somewhere on the internet. It is not the thing. So regulation of links, mistakes the map for the territory.

NP: And it’s terrifying.

CD: It really is. I mean, it’s an enormous curtailment of speech. It really, really is.



Read part one of my interview with Cory Doctorow. Homeland will be available online and in bookstores on February 5, 2013. Catch Cory on the Homeland book tour (February 5th thru 26). Visit us.macmillan.com/ for a full list of venues and dates. For more on Cory visit craphound.com/. A free copy of Little Brother can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license here.

(image) HIII!!! I´m so happy because and in this time i know very people very interesting, my sweetest Spanish hopeful and the espectacularSaria is a sg finally!!!!! And soon i will give you a pleasant surprise Some ppictures of my first set that never came to light, you think that i could try whit... more

HIII!!!
I´m so happy because and in this time i know very people very interesting, my sweetest Spanish hopeful and the espectacularSaria is a sg finally!!!!!


And soon i will give you a pleasant surprise

Some ppictures of my first set that never came to light, you think that i could try whit it?

Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.

 This week we bring you Clio!
 Clio has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 14 strikingly sexy photo... more

Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.



This week we bring you Clio!


Clio has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 14 strikingly sexy photo sets. Enjoy this gorgeous look back at the stunning Clio…



From her first photo set Moonlight Shadows shot by Cherry in 2006:





From her Soledad set shot with Lavezzaro in 2006:





She's sexy in Homestead shot by wwwmarkmnl in 2007:





Clio Loves You to Death in this from 2007 shot by Cherry:





She says her faith runs thinner than water in Downpour shot by DiazArri in 2008:





Clio draws a heart around the name of your city in Tiki Gods shot by Brooklyn in 2008:





She's smokin' hot in Destroy shot by Brooklyn in 2008:





Clio is dark and sexy in Black Heart shot by Cherry in 2009:





She gets scrappy in Fight Club shot by Cherry in 2009:



Clio is a sexy vampire in True Blood shot by Alissa in 2009:





She's one of Dracula's new brides in Killing Vampires shot by Cherry in 2009:





Clio was Born Into A Light in this sexy set shot by Brooklyn in 2009:





She says Save a Place For Me in her set from 2010 shot by Albertine:





From her most recent set Magica Sexualis shot by Albertine in 2011:







Hope you enjoyed the lovely look back at the gorgeous SuicideGirl Clio! Be sure to keep an eye out for a new set coming soon to member review!

Become a member TODAY for only $4 a month (if you sign up for a year) to see all 14 nude pin-up photo sets of Clio - http://suicidegirls.com/join/