Bad Signal:Night Noises - Warren Ellis

From Warren Ellis' Bad Signal:

bad signal
ME

* It occurs to me that, should you imagine a black-and-white
comic book without ever having seen one, you would not
imagine it having a colour cover.

* Hauntology on paper: at the ends of long corridors,
black-and-white illustrations from pulps and penny dreadfuls,
distorted by age and photocopier to emulate crackle in
audio. Ghost stories haunted by the ghosts of old ghost
stories, 21st Century London haunted by woodcuts of
19th Century London reflected in windows and puddles.

* I'm sorry, small beady-eyed insipid man with a baby
hard-on for Marxist theory, but I'm pretty sure that when
Burial recorded "Raver" he wasn't conducting a critique
of modern capitalism. Not everything is a market. To
attempt to capture the ghost of a scene is not an
expression of the chains of the dominant ideology,
and neither are field recordings of London at 3am. Also,
you have the voice of a eunuch meerkat, the physical
presence of a sparrow fart at dawn, and you have
cunts for eyes.

* The creative commons is all around us. Any creative mind
reaches a point where it realises that its work is part of an
ongoing cultural conversation.

* We are all the product of -- at the head of the notional
genestream of -- generations upon generations of culture.
We all take from what's around us to make our art. We
engage in the conversation. Raise our voices. And we
identify our voice with a copyright mark. That isn't some
hideous, stultifying lock on the culture. The commons
*is* the cultural conversation. You want to join in? Get
up on your hind legs and do it. Get your own copyright
mark. So the next person along knows that they have
to speak for themselves and identify their voice, rather
than using your words and pretending it's them.

* If the fact that Mickey Mouse will be under copyright
control for the next thousand years really bugs you?
Kill yourself. You're no use to me or anyone else.
It's fun when things drop out of copyright, sure. But
it's not *important* to the process of creation. I could
easily cause to be created illustrations in the styles of
penny dreadfuls and woodcuts to achieve the same
hauntological effects. It's just a way to instantiate
an idea. I'm not going to roll on the floor and curse
Western society for a cultural jailer because it turns
out someone still has the rights to the illustration for
an old MR James story or something. The world is
not broken because you can't make your own Mickey
Mouse cartoons (and frankly, if you could, YouTube
would already be broken under the weight of LOLMickeys
and Mickey Mouse Buttsecks and WineMickeyMouse
videos).

* If you really need some legal language to help yourself
feel good about the state of being a 15 year old in an art
class making a collage out of newspaper clippings... well,
great. That was great fun when we were 15, right? But
listen. The mark of being an adult is to internalise our
influences and express them through our own personalities
and filters. The last thing our culture needs is a licence
to be 15 forever.