Vibrational Match

This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That

2010-10-25T23:55:00.006+01:00

So this blog has been quiet for the best part of the year, but it anyone's still interested in following my writing I'll be posting about comics as Illogical Volume at the Mindless Ones site from now on.

My first post went up last night - it's called Etched Headplate, and it's a Vibrational Match style mega-essay on The Bulletproof Coffin, and on what it is that we comic fans want from this thing of ours. The title comes from a song on Burial's excellent second album Untrue, which you should really make yourself familiar with if you haven't already. It's great, spooky dance music, just like dad used to listen to on the last nightbus home...

I've also had essays in a couple of zines this year:

The Function of the Filth is sort of an Ultimate Filth post, and is probably the piece of writing I'm most proud of right now. It was published in issue #1 of Andrew Hickey's PEP! magazine, which you can read for free here or spend a whole heap of money on it here.

Toy Stories is all about Transformers, comic books, and some of Richard Herring's recent stand-up work. It's probably the most open essay I've put out there, and it's all about the way my childish fascinations have permanently damaged the way I think about commercialism and mortality. It was in the second issue of PEP!, which you can read here.

Illogical Volume is a full-blast, all caps noise-fest which spawned my new Mindless Ones name (it's a Marnie Stern riff, natch). This piece is mostly about Brian Chippendale's comics, but it sprawls out to cover all sorts of noisy rock shit in the Lightning Bolt/Marnie Stern/Fugazi axis too. The overarching question is how loud do you need to be to be heard through the illogical volume of society, or some other such high minded pish! This essay was collected in The Prism #1, the debut zine by the Mindless Ones, who I might have mentioned I'm writing for now? You can download the zine here, if you're interested, and believe me - you really should be!

All three of these zines include great work from writers like Sean Witzke, Andrew Hickey, Plok and my fellow Mindless Ones, but I'm being selfish here so I'll leave you to discover their contributions for yourself.

So, how to finish this? Well, I think I'll write one more post to close this place down. You see, I wouldn't have come back to blogging if it wasn't for Marnie's music, which gave me a massive kick up the arse in 2007. I decided to start this blog after reading the following paragraph in Plan B magazine, which seemed to me more of a mission statement than a live review:

I want to tell you something. Until she put her lyrics online I was labouring under the misapprehension that when Marnie Stern sang the chorus of ‘Vibrational Match’ she was singing, “I near it! I near it!”, using ‘near’ as a verb. To say you ‘near’ something feels archaic or scientific and certainly not part of spoken speech, whether that’s ‘nearing’ the Celestial City or ‘nearing’ orgasm or germination or maturity. No one would really ever say that, I thought, apart from Marnie Stern. I saw her going at something, something gleaming in the distance, and saying to herself in her high-pitched voice, “I near it!” I liked how weird that would sound in the context of a modern pop song, even if that modern pop song was an insane melange of vintage prog-isms, math rock, self-help art theory cheerleader chants and Van Halen riffs. Especially if. Even when I read that the line was actually “I’m near it”, it still tickled me. “Look up now,” she says. “There’s the diamond ceiling.” I look up and there’s a low roof patchy with condensation. I near it. I’m near it.

(Frances Morgan, 'Onwards and Upwards', Plan B #25)

But that was then and this is now, and I think it's finally time to shut this place down -- what better way to do that than to write a review of Stern's latest album? About which, more soon!

Thankfully (and unexpectedly) my decision to stop blogging here has precious little to do with my parents' health. My mum is now cancer-free and back up to full strength, and my dad is back to his eccentric best - both of them are far tougher and more dignified than I could ever be, and I genuinely don't know how they do what they do on a day-to-day basis.

I want to thank you all for your kind words, which really did help me out back in December, January and the other hard months at the front end of this year. My sister gets married at the end of the week, and my family will all be meeting up in Blackpool to celebrate this together - the simple pleasure this sentence gives me is beyond my ability to convey right now, if I'm honest.

In the end, the real reason I want to shut this place down is because I can no longer pretend that the story this blog exists to tell works for me. And if it doesn't work for me, what are the chances of it working for anyone else? Most of the narratives I'd built up to romanticise and justify my life have burned away during the last few years, and I don't have the heart to keep plugging away here in denial of this fact. All of which sounds both pretentious and cryptic, I'm sure, but as a jumped up dickhead called Groucho Marx once said:

If you write about yourself, the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

Well ain't that the truth!

I want to keep writing and thinking and living and getting better at all of these things, and to be honest I reckon that if I kept this blog running I'd be tempted to fall back on the same old tricks over and over again, with diminishing returns and an ever-lowering post count. There's every chance that I'll do the same thing wherever I take my writing, but I hope not.

Still, if nothing else, we'll always have The Filth, eh?

“Look up now,” she says. “There’s the diamond ceiling.” I look up and there’s a low roof patchy with condensation. I near it. I’m near it.

Yeah, that's more fucking like it! Thanks for reading!

love,
David

This Blog Was Built To Self Destruct...

2009-12-14T07:10:00.001Z

...but that's not how it worked out.

Unfortunately, I think I'm going to have to shut this place down, maybe just for a while, maybe for good. I normally try to avoid writing too much about my personal life on here, but my Mum goes into hospital for a cancer operation today, and my Dad's MS means that he requires a lot of care, so... even if things go well, I'll still be helping to look after them for the next few months, and I don't have the heart to worry about blogging while all of that's going on.

Now you might well ask how anyone could notice if Vibrational Match is active or not, given my haphazard posting schedule. And you'd have a point, but the thing is -- I'll know the difference, and while it might not always look like it, this place matters to me.

Sorry this isn't very articulate, but I'm struggling to write a coherent sentence right now. I'll finish off my Mindless Ones article this week, and then I'll try to write something to close the year out with, because I hate the idea of my last couple of posts being the last ITEM!s on here. No promises, but I might be able to finish of those Darkseid Week posts I started working on ages ago -- we'll see.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who linked to/read/wrote about/commented on this blog or emailed me off the back of it. You've made this worthwhile, and you've shamed me into being a better writer.

I hope this isn't too melodramatic, but I'm not really in the right headspace to judge right now so fuck it.

Take care out there.

David

They Ripped His Trousers. Now Denim is his Plaid.

2009-11-26T08:56:00.000Z

Sean Collins on random music references in comic book criticism:

"Just a week or two before I wrote that piece [comparing The Dark Knight Strikes Again to glo-fi pop music], I was complaining to someone about the pieces you'll read here and there along the lines of "This issue of Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers: Klarion the Witch-Boy is exactly like my favorite Sleater-Kinney album!!!" Now, art is not made in a vacuum, and even when direct influences aren't in play, resonances can be--people can tap into similar ideas or make similar decisions. It's as valuable for critics to be aware of what's going on in multiple disciplines as it is for artists themselves, and I think making connections you can make between disciplines is a perfectly valid approach. That said, making connections between anything and everything is as useless, critically, as making no connections at all."

Hey, I resemble that statement! This is the second time I've read one of Sean's offhand disses and felt my eye twitching, but I'm not taking it personally since I'd have to be a paranoid bastard to assume it was all about me. Plus Sean was cool about me tweaking his nipples at the start of my Inglourious Basterds post, so there's no reason for me to be a dick here.

Sean makes the above comments to defend his DKSA piece against criticisms that the musical references he used were completely arbitrary, and he's quite right to do so. Still, I find myself wanting to argue with Sean here, so maybe I am feeling a little touchy on this one! So, for example: The Filth doesn't look like Beyonce, and Beyonce sure as shit doesn't sound like The Filth, but I do listen to Beyonce when I'm trying to get away from the feelings The Filth generates, and in writing about them both together I can get at why.

Sometimes this technique is a big load of juvenile nonsense, and sometimes it's a useful way to write something more interesting than "I liked it because it was good/it was good because I liked it." The same good to bad ratio exists for the sort of clear line criticism that Collins deals in -- writers like Sean and Douglas can make it work, but how many of the eight thousand comics reviews that hit the Internet every week are worth reading?

In other words, to echo a refrain Sean made good use of in that interview, it all depends on the piece!

[EDITED TO ADD: If I wasn't such a self-involved prick, I would have also taken issue with the part of the interview where Chris Allen asks Sean how he feels about snarky critics like Tucker Stone and Abhay Khosla.

Sean says that he feels "suspicious" of the validity of this kind of criticism because "the harshness quickly becomes an end in itself." In the abstract that might be a fair enough point, and Sean does qualify it by saying that "It depends on the piece," but when those two writers have been specifically mentioned? Well, then it's time to call bullshit. I mean sure, those guys take the piss A LOT, but in both cases you get the same sense that you get from TV critic Charlie Brooker, i.e. that the hatred comes from an awareness of how good this shit can be.

Also, the snark is only one part of Abhay's writing -- no one else has written anything that gets at the heart of Scott Pilgrim like this piece does, for example. And Tucker? Well, he's no one trick pony either, and it's not like he's shy about praising comics when he likes them. Only last week he gave the latest volume of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto a full on crotch rub while giving Flash: Rebirth a quick kick to the dick, and if that's not the key to cosmic balance then I'll eat my own power ring.

Still, Tucker and Abhay are big boys, and neither of them needs to hide behind my peely-wally Scottish arse. In fact, I've just got to the end of this edit, and I see that Tucker has (deliberately or otherwise) defended his style way better than I ever could. Just check out this priceless bit from the end of his latest Blackest Night review:

It's about exactly what it says it's about, which is that a whole bunch of various colored and various emotion themed magic ring wielding teams are going to team up and combine the colors of their various wishing rings to construct another, more powerful and more pure color so that they can stop the physical embodiment of death, which is a bipedal humanoid character who speaks English that used to fight Captain Atom. The best part of the entire thing so far was in an issue of Green Lantern Corps, when a big black thing tried to steal Queen Coleman from the Smurf planet, but then he was stopped by a Mexican suicide bomber.
And honestly? You can pretty much add exclamation points to those last two sentences right there, and you can add the word "Awesome!", and you'll have produced a rough approximation of every positive review that this piece of shit is ever going to get. That's how easy it is to write about a positive comic book review. Make a fucking note.

Yeah, that sums it up just nicely, I think. Saying the word "AWESOME!" 'til your mouth bleeds is easy. Making genuine entertainment out of a week's worth of shitty comics? That's pretty close to modern day alchemy.]

Time For Some Real Filth -- Johnny Ryan Gets FUCKED!

2009-11-11T23:30:00.004Z

WARNING: I'm going to pull the pants right off of this book and show you the gristly phallus that lies beneath, so this post is definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK, okay?

Okay.

I was rereading this filthy, horribly addictive comic the other day when the truth fired itself out of the page and splattered me right in the eye: Prison Pit is Birdland for kids!

The Mindless Ones have already discussed the idea that this would make a great comic for children, and while some folk might blanch at the idea of comic this full of scatological violence being FOR KIDS, I still remember what being a wee guy was like and let me tell you: I would have loved this!

Like the commenter known as It Burns said:

It is playful. I mean, yeah there’s lots, LOTS of weird gore, but it reads like a WWE-wrestling-fan getting in a knife/chair/cannibalistic fight over whether the shit’s real or not. . . I couldn’t help but giggle.

There's definitely a heavy WWE component here, but there's also a strain of weird, abitrary cruelty running through the comic that's somehow too stupid to be truly upsetting. In the world of Prison Pit you can rip a guy's guts out only to have those same guts used as a smothering tentacle weapon against you; in the world of Prison Pit, burst zits are deadly weapons and you can make a battlesuit out of your own semen.

(You know, for kids!)

It's this constant biological fuckery that makes me think of Birdland, but where the characters in that jizz-drenched comic were trying to bang their way into a post-human pornotopia, the characters in Prison Pit live by a different maxim: Fuck or be Fucked.

And so while Birdland artist Gilbert Hernandez overloads his pages with Kirby-esque money shots, Ryan sticks his crew of grotesque miscreants in a tight space and lets them take each other to pieces. Weirdly enough, the scratchy backdrops that Ryan conjures up here remind me of another Gilbert Hernandez comic, 2007's trauma-addled Chance in Hell:

Prison Pit is every bit as raw and hopeless as Chance in Hell, but I'll maintain that it's got more in common with Birdland. Why? Well, for one thing, it opens with a shot of a whole planet being fucked:

That chapter title there? That's some subtle shit. Again, it's a childish gesture, and it fits with Ryan's aesthetic. Birdland is the perverted fantasy of a freshly minted adult who's just trying to get used to the ins and outs of love; Prison Pit is the perverted fantasy of an angry kid to whom sex is just another gross joke. The prison planet that Bloodhead/Fuckface is spurted into at the start of the story is like a grotesque parody of an ovum -- it's obviously been bombarded with spermy little gametes, but there's no reproduction going on here, only brute division.

So: is it all just a load of ick and goo signifying nothing? Well maybe, but honestly, there are very few artists who can make ick and goo seem so thoroughly alien and unclean as they do here!

Which raises the question: is Prison Pit actually Birdland as re-imagined by kids? Whatever the case, it's too idiosyncratic to be tarnished banal crudeness of some of its supporters, as I'll now try to explain by way of this Angela Carter quote:

Pornography involves an abstraction of human intercourse in which the self is reduced to its formal elements. In its most basic form, these elements are represented by the probe and the fringed hole, the twin signs of male and female in graffiti, the biological symbols scrawled on the subway poster and the urinal wall, the simplest expression of stark and ineradicable sexual differentation, a universal pictoral language of lust -- or rather, a language we accept as universal because, since it has always been so, we conclude that it must always remain so.

(Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History)

Prison Pit is definitely of a piece with toilet graffiti, but it's also the WORLD'S BEST TOILET GRAFFITI because (1) It's a fucking excellent fight comic! If the crude doodles that adorn your average public toilet were this well choreographed, I doubt I'd ever leave! And (2) Veiny cocks aren't enough for Johnny Ryan, so Bloodhead's cock is covered with massive barbs too:

This pulsing chunk of meat is Prison Pit in miniature: it's immature and it's not really acceptable in polite society, but it also provides a jolt of WHAT THE FUCK! that's distinctly lacking from your average comic. Or from your average bit of hyped up and cum-sodden pornography, as Angela Carter would probably have noted.

And while there might not be any reproduction going on in Prison Pit, the story ends with the creation of strange new hybrid made possible by the sheer violence of the book. Of course this turns out to be a distinctly onanistic bit of symbiosis, but that's exactly the right note for Prison Pit to end on. The imagery in this comic has its roots in the most basic of bathroom wall scribbles, but it's far from universal, and thank fuck for that!

Fallout #1

2009-11-11T20:57:00.000Z

Being a new semi-regular feature in which I empty my head of thoughts, quotes and stray images that have been sparked off by other items on this blog.

The following quotes have been rattling around my head ever since we talked about Inglourious Basterds. I was going to write a whole post around them, but I didn't have too much to add so I've decided to post them raw:

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

(Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History)

***

That's why, though, I think it's important to recognize criticism as an artform, distinct from other forms and equally important--which is to say, not very important at all. Art doesn't have to be important to be good; what we are producing are undeniably trifles, but hey, so are most poems. Just because writing about music seems unimportant to you doesn't mean you shouldn't take it seriously, that you shouldn't work hard at it and try and make the writing itself, not the sum total of your opinions or even knowledge, the best it can be. Your duty is ultimately to your art, not your persona or reputation or even the music itself. It's to the art, and to that end it's important to recognize music criticism as inseperable from all other kinds of criticism, whether it be literary or art or social. This doesn't mean it can't be personal--some of the best criticism is, indeed, highly personal. But if you want people to read what you have to say, you have to do exactly what these fiction writers have done: be careful, be voracious, and be eternally unsatisfied.

(Mike Barthel on art as criticism and criticism as art)

***

In 1939, when it was certain that war was imminent, the Trustees of the National Gallery, headed by Kenneth Clark, decided that the whole collection was to be sent to Canada. On Churchill's intervention the plan was modified and the pictures were moved to slate mines in Wales. Civilian populations could not, of course, be provided with comparable protection and were killed in large numbers.

(John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?)

***

Worship of art made human beings expendable. Hitler welcomed the allied bombing raids on German cities because they cleared the way for his designs. After the massive raid on Cologne in August 1942, Goebbels found him studying a map of the city, and he confided that the demolished streets would have had to be razed anyway. In 1943, following the heavy raids on the Ruhr which severely damaged Dusseldorf, Dortmund and Wuppertal, and virtually destroyed the town of Barmen, he remarked that these conurbations were 'not attractive aesthetically' and had needed reconstruction. Beauty mattered more than people. In November 1943 he altered the German strategic plan, giving orders that Florence should not be defended. 'Florence is too beautiful a city to destroy,' he insisted. By contrast 'I do not feel a thing about levelling Kiev, Moscow and Petersburg to the ground... In comparison with Russia even Poland is a cultured country.' The same aesthetic standards governed his estimate of individuals. Art, and those who produced it, were the supreme consideration. 'Really outstanding geniuses,' he explained, 'permit themselves no concern for normal human beings.' Their higher mission justified any cruelty. Compared to them, ordinary people were mere 'planetary bacilli'.

(John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?)

***

Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

(Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History)

***

(Click on the above image to experience The New Adventures of Hitler! Or at least, you know, a tiny little sputtery bit of it...)

Coming soon: Darkseid Week! Just remember, it's all Plok's fault!

Revenge of the Giant Face

2009-10-19T23:50:00.000+01:00

Ah, let's indulge in some time travel shall we? Let's go all the way back to September 2009, when Sean Collins had this to say about Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds:

It is, in other words, a deliberate assault on the facts surrounding the deaths of millions and millions of people, including the systematic genocide of six million Jews in the Holocaust... It's morally monstrous and its practitioners are moral monsters.

Oh, wait, shit. That's not quite right. That's what Sean C. had to say about Nazi-sympathizing turd-monger Pat Buchanan. Sorry everyone, but problems like this tend to occur when you start to mess around with history, you know?

In order to find what Sean actually thought of Inglourious Basterds we have to go back even further, to August 2009 no less! It was a kinder time, a gentler time, a time where a man could read an essay on the cathartic, history rupturing violence of Tarantino's latest picture without any danger of stumbling onto this long winded response.

Here's what Sean actually said about the film:

...Inglourious Basterds may be the punkest movie I've seen in I can't even think how long. Maybe ever. It's about nothing less than the power of art to destroy evil. It's about how important it is to love film more than the likes of Hitler hate life. It's about how movie violence, art violence, art designed as a FUCK YOU, can help you deal with the violence that so terrified Chamberlain's cohorts and to which Hitler and his cohorts were so indifferent. It's Woody Guthrie's "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS" guitar slogan made literal. It's a lingering closeup on the bloodlust-saturated eyes of Eli Roth, the beautiful Jewish torture-porn poster boy and enemy of good taste, as he empties a machine gun into the bodies of members of the Third Reich. And it's a total fucking fantasy. Yet that's what makes it so vital.

Collins then went on to compare the release he finds in Inglourious Basterds with the traumatized euphoria of a Nine Inch Nails concert. It's a good essay -- so good, in fact, that it almost had me convinced that I felt the same way. Except that if I'm honest, I didn't find any release in Tarantino's spaghetti-western-war-punk-fantasy.

That said, Inglourious Basterds didn't bother me the way it bothered David Fiore! Still, I get where Dave's coming from, because it's a deeply strange movie -- the mix of stomach wrenching tension, goofy comedy, expressive violence and defiantly "Tarantino-esque" banter makes it hard for the viewer to know how they're supposed to react. Even the film's first chapter, which Sean correctly describes as being loaded with real danger, has at least one absurd laugh in it. It's not easy to keep a straight face when Landa pulls out his massive comedy pipe, is it?

Well, somehow he manages, but I couldn't help myself. My laughter was absurd and inappropriate, but then so was that fucking pipe!

The difference between my take on the movie and David Fiore's would be that I'm happier to take this uncertainty as part of the ride. Dave suggests that Inglourious Basterds allows us to think about the way political perspectives are formed in an "unusually visceral" way, and I think he's absolutely right! Tarantino's movie circles around a series of overlapping schemers before plunging into the heart of the venn diagram -- which, of course, happens to be located in a cinema! This is where my reading starts to look a lot like Sean's, because the unreality of the film is key to its success. Tarantino isn't exactly shy about the fact that this is a fantasy -- after all, Inglourious Basterds starts with a title card that reads "Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France" and peaks with a scene of ghostly revenge that's straight out of a Hammer horror movie. The fact that this climax is explicitly linked to the use of film as a weapon is just so much metafictional gravy, really.

So why can't I find catharsis in this process? Because as good old Dave Fiore noted in another Basterdly post, "if the movie works at all, it works in the reverse direction–as a statement about the inability of art to do anything but respond to other art..."

It should be clear by now that the differences between my take on the movie and those of my fellow bloggers are actually pretty small, but I'm going to keep on blowing them up into something big anyway. Why? Because it's more fun!

So: Dave's right, Inglourious Basterds is about art vs. art, and that's why it's so fucking good! Again, none of this is hidden -- the movie's finale sees all of its characters collide at the premier of a Nazi propaganda film, which makes the messy, blood-drenched ending seem like a triumph of aesthetics over agitprop. This is a shot to the face of those who would wield art like a cudgel, and if that seems like a paradox to you then that just means you're still awake.

All of this points to why my opening Pat Buchanan joke doesn't really work, because while Tarantino messes around with history here, he makes damned sure you know exactly what he's doing! He also takes pains to show that this is violent, bracing business, but that might just be because his movies are all about violent, bracing business. So as a whole war's worth of plots and schemes crash into each other, the blood starts to flow and you start to count the casualties start to stack up. Tellingly, the characters who survive the climactic carnage do so by pushing their stories harder than the rest. For example, in the movie's first chapter, Landa acts as though he is comfortable being the "Jew Hunter"; in its last, he makes a fairly audacious play to find a new narrative for himself, and with it a pivotal role in history. And he gets all of that, but when Pitt's Lieutenant Aldo Raine carves a swastika into Landa's head he adds a little something extra to the Nazi's story. Which is oddly fitting, given that Landa adds a little something to the movie every time he wanders into a scene (seriously, every single mannerism is a like a comedy pipe pulled out at just the wrong occasion).

If you find yourself asking whether this jumble of cinematic pleasures is enough to justify a fully-fledged assault on history, well -- isn't that an interesting conversation to have? Inglourious Basterds doesn't open a can of worms, it machetes the fucker to pieces and then shouts "HEY LOOK, MORE WORMS!!"

Which is probably why Mike Barthel's take on the movie is my favourite so far. Using Inglourious Basterds as a jump-off point to discuss the US Constitution, Barthel waxes euphoric on the power of art as interpretation. He also comes out with this beauty of a paragraph:

The unfortunate reality of American political discourse is that people don’t really understand how the government works, and because of that, the smooth functioning of the government actively requires hiding certain things from the public. This is not to say these things are wrong; at least a few people in the government are smart, moral people who care about the Constitution, and they have thought through these complex issues and given them the thumbs-up. But they are complex issues, and getting through them requires several years of careful study and an ability to listen to arguments you don’t immediately agree with, all of which it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get people whose first impulse is to draw a Hitler mustache on something (anything! a butternut squash! whatever’s closest at hand!) to do.

When he starts to talk about Hitler moustaches, Barthel accidentally echoes David Fiore's point about America's obsession with swastika branding, framing it as an impediment to honest and open political process. So what's the solution? I don't have it, and Tarantino probably wouldn't care about it if he did, but I'm starting to think that this man might be on to something:

Yes, that's right, it's pedantic British comedian Richard Herring, getting his Mein Kampf on. I saw Herring's Hitler Moustache show at the Fringe in August, and while I won't subject Herring's routines to excessive paraphrase here (that dubious pleasure is reserved for my "real life" friends!), I will say that it was one of the best shows I've seen this decade. By branding himself with the Hitler moustache, Herring becomes a comedy villain. He becomes an uneasy joke, but as a joke he's free to question every statement that comes out of his mouth without ever giving up on meaning or morality.

The best example of this effect comes when Herring stops trying to provoke laughter and starts to berate members of the audience who didn't vote in this year's European elections. His rhetoric in this part of the show is as sincere as it is scathing, but there's an implicit irony at work that stops it from being overbearing. No matter how agreeable the sentiments Herring expresses are, you're still being lectured on politics by a man with a Hitler moustache. That small clump of hair, boldly brandished, becomes an invitation to not take what its wearer is saying at face value. It's a fuzzy reminder that there's always room for argument and debate, and as such it serves much the same function as Inglourious Basterds' "Once upon a time..." introduction.

In stark contrast to Inglourious Basterds, though, Hitler Moustache has an overt political agenda. Starting from the proposition that the toothbrush moustache can be reclaimed for comedy, it quickly becomes a rallying cry against prejudice and complacency. In a routine that was very poorly represented in this Guardian article, Herring uses crass racial stereotyping as a jump-off point for an absurdly clever examination of conflicted liberal attitudes to cultural differences. This isn't blank irony of the kind that gave David Foster Wallace nightmares, because Herring doesn't use comedy to disavow meaning. Instead, he uses it to reaffirm the fact that our opinions have to be tested if they're to be truly useful. Of course, being the man who got a forty minute comedy skit out of a yogurt-heavy trip to the supermarket, Herring is an expert at attacking a proposition from every possible perspective. That he manages to do so while taking on contentious subject matter, and that he creates constant laughter in the process, is what makes this show a triumph.

Plus, Herring also takes care of the nasty argument closing/moustache drawing trick in a silly and novel way. Or so you'd think, but it seems that some people still want to draw the 'tache on, even when it's already there! But hey, even that weird bit of graffiti-artistry is fitting when you look at it from the right perspective. Hitler Moustache is nothing less than a weaponisation of irony, and it's made me want to try to be smarter, funnier and more active in local politics all at once.

As for Inglourious Basterds, I'm not going to pretend that my take on the movie is anywhere near definitive. For one thing, I've not even touched upon how great Melanie Laurent is as Shosanna Dreyfus:

Seriously, some of the things Laurent does with her face warrant a separate two thousand word essay!

Still, I've got a big enough ego to think that if you read this essay alongside Sean's, and Dave's and Mike's and Geoff's etc, then you might just start to get an idea of what Inglourious Basterds is actually all about. Most likely you'll get a hint of it in the places where these pieces clash or blur into each other or seem wildly divergent. If Sean Witzke ever gets around to writing a full blog post on the film I think he'll probably get closer to the spirit of the thing than anyone else, but this post of mine? If you just read it on its own, and if you give it just a little bit too much of your time, you might just start to see a face staring up at you through the screen. It might look like Hitler's face, or it might look like Herring's, but if you look closer you'll realise that it's not really either of their faces. No, if anyone's face is peering out at you through these words then it's a blank parody of my face, beady eyes peering out from a queasy void:

And what should you do when you see this face? Well, like I said, you should probably move on to other blog posts, or better yet, turn the computer off and go out for a walk or something. Still, if you wanted to pause for a moment and graffiti my face I wouldn't be too sad. Just so long as you try to be a bit more imaginative than I've been here, which shouldn't be too hard. After all, I'm sure you can do better than this:

Well... can't you?

Growing Flowers in the Outer Church

2009-10-01T01:42:00.002+01:00

I didn't have time to get into this in my Adam Curtis post, but while Jebni was talking about the narrative possibilities of blogging he also came up with this stunning interpretation of The Filth:

Another way of illustrating the “neveryday” imaginary of blogging is through an allegory: Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s comic book, The Filth (Morrison and Weston, 2004). Their (anti-)hero is Greg Feely, an ordinary, “sentimental” cat-lover who leads a double life as Ned Slade, a transdimensional agent for the psychic police-cum-waste-disposal agency of the world, known as The Filth....

While he’s battling giant flying spermatozoa or navigating the sewer of the world, Greg/Ned will wonder out loud if he’s forgotten to feed the cat. It is truly touching, and not pathetic. What Morrison’s narrative achieves is the realisation that in the middle of struggles over the fate of life itself, “I Love My Cat” narratives are amongst the best narratives there are. And yet this touchy-feely mundanity of cat-love is neither an authentic origin for Feely, nor just a “fake” but necessary refuge for the “real” Slade, despite its proven worth. As the book progresses, it becomes clearer that the cat scenario is neither the “real” story, nor even just one valid segment amongst several, but one of several occult media dialects: the killer sperm, the cat and the zombie “anti-persons” all enunciate or channel through each other. In the end, we learn that cat-love can be generated by a sentient nanotech infestation, but is still valid.

Jebni then goes on to draw connections between his concept of blogging and the Filthy neverworld known as The Crack, which apparently "runs through everything and everyone." This is pretty fitting really, because both The Filth and the Internet are perfect conduits for the crap that runs through our lives. As two of Greg's superiors (Man Green/Man Yellow) tell him: "The rubbish has to go somewhere. And where there's brass, there's muck, they say, don't they?"

Talking about crap: at one point, I considered relaunching this blog as a static wordpress site. The ideas was to upload a series of interconnected essays which the reader would have to navigate by following embedded links to other pages. I wrote a lot of material for this version of the site before deciding that it was too gimmicky, too hard to navigate and not nearly as flashy as it should be, but I might come back to the idea one day. [1]

Anyway, one of the essays was going to use the idea of The Crack as a jump-off point to discuss the integration of social realism, fantasy, music, pulp fiction and psychology in Dennis Potter's work. I was going to focus on Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, with a particular emphasis on the way that Potter's disregard for realist unity allowed him to examine the best and worst aspects of his protagonists freely.

This sounds a little dry in the abstract, and maybe it would have been. But hey, at least when I was talking about how the Crack obliterates the distinctions between rage and embarrassment/escape and collapse/fact and fiction/body and mind, I could have shown you clips like this to liven things up:

That's Michael Gambon in the original BBC production of The Singing Detective -- none of that Mel Gibson pish for me thanks!

(And don't you just hate it when waiters offer you Gibson Pish in a restaurant? "Does sir wish any Gibson Pish with his scampi?" And they're always so snooty when you turn it down! [3])

As it was conceived, my wordpress blog would've fitted in nicely with Jebni's interpretation of The Crack. It would've been a place where my various different interests could have channeled through each other, but it would also have been a bit too "about" itself for my liking. And while I'm still fascinated by the many metaphorical possibilities of The Crack, I'm more interested in The Ink right now. Greg Feely learns about The Ink in issue #9 of The Filth, in which he's put through what amounts to a delayed induction day for his "job" as Ned Slade. True to form, this induction is not only eight months late but it also serves to make things even less clear than they were before. For example, while he's getting sailed around The Crack, Greg is introduced to the giant pen hand from which all of The Filth flows:

"The Ink brings things to life, you see," we're told, which is obviously true since without the lines on the page there'd be no comic!

We also lean that The Hand harvest The Ink for their own purposes, which echoes the Paperverse plot from issue #3 nicely, but there's more to The Ink than raw power. It's the stuff of life itself, remember, and in its own way it's as unfathomable as anything else in The Crack.

You see, as Greg's colleagues struggle to explain, there's a horrible ambiguity as to what the hand actually is:

[4]

Ah, there's the important bit: "AW WE KERR ABOOT'S THE INK." That's all I care about too, though possibly in a different way. Because while I'm all about theorising and criticising and trying to combine different kinds of discourse, all of that is meaningless unless it's an attempt to get at the un-gettable - which is to say the slippery substance of all this fiction. The raw stuff. The Ink. [5]

Like Andrew Hickey recently suggested, we might not be able to hold a complete working map of the universe in our heads, but there are many ways to bring elements of the big picture into focus. For example, the crude interactive technology of the modern comic book can make life very vivid if it's used correctly, as it is in The Filth. ~~Many~~ Most of the things that we see in The Crack are horrible, of course, but still -- The Filth is not, in the final analysis, a depressing book. In fact, it's almost sweet in its own way.

I think that this is possible precisely because The Filth doesn't hold back in its exploration of the more horrible side of the human psyche. Looking over the pages of the comic right now, I'm reminded of scenes from an earlier Morrison/Weston collaboration, The Invisibles:

There was always something slightly off about Weston's art on The Invisibles, a sense that his versions of the characters were less naturally stylish than usual. This is used to good effect in the scene I've excerpted above, in which two of our usually glamorous heroes end up coming into contact with the banal horrors in their heads. Here the lumpy everymanish quality that had previously been jarring serves to emphasise the despair that the characters find in the idea of being normal.

The shorthand used in these scenes functional if a bit obvious. Reading these pages, we understand that our protagonists (particularly vain super-assassin King Mob) can find hell in the idea of staring dependently at a TV screen that watches back. We might find this to be a dull and superficial concept of hell, but we can take this as a being a piece of snippy characterisation of King Mob if we want. The only real problem is that the imagery Morrison and Weston use in this scene is a little underdeveloped -- you can see the influence of William Burroughs and David Cronenberg in the fleshy lampshades and cyclopean bugs that populate these fantasies, but when compared to the putrid horror of those artists at their best the images we see here seem a little bit tame. [6]

When Morrison and Weston worked together again on The Filth, they easily surpass their previous attempts at horror. In addition to hiding this creepy little observer in Feely's TV...

...they also plant ears in the walls of his house, effectively turning Feely's home into an inverted skull:

Not only does that TV monster look far more convincing than anything in that Invisibles scene (it's the little scrotal brain sacks that take it over the edge, I think), it's also got a better context. By literally giving the house eyes and ears, Morrison and Weston neatly blur the different interpretations of Feely's situation. Is he being observed by his bosses at The Crack or is he just a lump of sick flesh trying to work itself out, like Michael Gambon's character in The Singing Detective?

And... oh god, I've got to be careful or I'm going to end up flapping around in circles about how attention to context and attention to detail go together like chips and cheese, but this really is a perfect example of The Crack serving as a perfect place for The Ink to flow. Greg Feely is sort of like King Mob from The Invisibles gone to seed. Feely's life would seem like a cruel punishment to King Mob, but while Greg never exactly shakes off this feeling himself, he does at least achieve a sort of battered understanding of his existence by facing up to all of its contradictions. It might all just be in his head, but even if its not then Greg's double life see's him escape from mundane "reality" into... a job. A horrible job, in which he has to deal with all the piss and shit and brutality in the world while wearing a goofy uniform, which... really, kind of escape is that? What kind of understanding could anyone find here? Well, how about the understanding of how to go on living in a world this horrific and confused? Wouldn't that be worth something?

In my last essay on The Filth I talked about how Greg ends up lashing out against his role as a Hand Officer, but I was a little shy about discussing what comes next. That's because "what comes next" is at the heart of this essay series, and it's so absurdly goofy that I don't know if I can explain it without making a dick of myself. [7] "What comes next" is realising that, like Jebni says, sometimes "I Love My Cat" narratives are the best narratives. [8] What does this mean? It means facing up to all the shit in the world, acknowledging it for what it is, and realising that if you can find it in yourself to care about something then there might be some hope after all. Like I said, this sounds stupid and soppy and banal, and that's because it is all of these things, but that's not all it is. It's a form of genuine love and appreciation, born out of the realisation that everything and everyone around you is part of the same stupid toxicoloured mess of a story -- that it's all Ink, basically!

In its own crude way, this beleaguered revelation reminds me of the incandescent poetry that Alan Moore throws out in Snakes and Ladders:

We are insensate molecules, assembled from the accidental code engraved upon our genes. Mud that sat up.

Chemicals mingle in our sediment and in their interactions and combustions we suppose we feel, suppose we love. We reproduce, mathematically predictable as spores within a petri dish. We function briefly, then subside once more to the unknowing silt.

We are a blind contingency, an unimportant restlessness of dirt and yet Rosseti paints his dead Elizabeth, head tilted back on her impossibly slim throat, eyes closed against the golden light surrounding her.

Clay looks on clay, and understands that it is beautiful.

Through us, the cosmos gazes on itself, adores itself, breaks its own heart.

Through us, matter stares slack-jawed at its own star-dusted countenance and knows, incredulously, that it knows. And knows that it is universe. [9]

In both Snakes and Ladders and The Filth, hope and self-awareness are linked, with the idea being that only by recognising the full horror of our situation are we able to work to change it. [10] This is what I meant when I said (almost 1,000 words ago now, jesus!) that The Filth is actually pretty sweet. After thirteen issues full of violence, broken dreams and grotty pornographic horror, Morrison and Weston still manages to find hope in the form of one man's love for his cat. The Invisibles found a similar value in all of our Inky little lives at the end, but The Filth manages to find hope in the life of a sad, lonely working man, which makes it kick harder for me. Possibly because I feel like a lumpy Chris Weston character called David Allison instead of the Philip Bond caricature that was bigsunnyd.

Thinking back to Snakes and Ladders for a minute, I'm drawn to the image of an Imperial Crown tumbling off George the Fifth's coffin and into the soot and spit of the street. In Alan Moore's hands, this becomes a symbol of the unification of the sacred and the profane, an indication that where there's shit there's spirit. The Filth makes this thought even more forcefully because it's far happier being part of the endless detritus of our culture. There's no real treasure here, no gold crosses mixed in with the muck, just dirty brass ones that can be polished off to reveal a faint gleam, a little light to help you find your way home:

And yes, I do consider that to be a strong enough thought to end a gazillion word essay series on!

Thanks for reading everyone.

FUCK YOU AND GOODNIGHT!

***

And now the Endnotes:

[1] And if you're wondering what kind of shit I came up with for that abandoned website idea, here's one of the pages in its entirety:

Fantastically Damaged: Mickey Rourke as Man-Made God

Don’t delude yourself, and don’t believe the hype - Darren Aronofsky is a manipulative motherfucker.

He’s never been deep. In fact, like Jarvis Cocker, he’s almost profoundly shallow. Whether he's making a movie about drug addiction, advanced mathematics, wrestling or mortality, Aronofsky's focus is always on that cut, that shot, that piece of music. What's more, on the strength of The Wrestler, this definitely isn’t a bad thing.

A lot of the early press chatter around the film homed in on its supposed naturalism, with the subtext being that it was more mature than his previous hyper-orchestrated works, because it was less fussy/more manful/more real.

Which is bollocks, of course, as Aronofsky the filmmaker must surely have known, even if Aronofsky the interview subject towed the party line. [2] The realism of The Wrestler is Oscar realism, but Aronofsky dispatches with the tragic back-story of Randy the Ram with brutal efficiency. It’s all there – the broken marriage, the non-existent relationship with his only child, the mundane day-job in a supermarket – and it’s all treated very seriously, but Aronofsky knows that this isn’t the show. It’s just a framing device, something to get you interested in that body, that performance, that face:

Who’s the good guy? Who’s the villain?

Who cares!

As soon as you’ve started to consider these questions, you’ve opened yourself up to the spectacle. And as soon as you’ve started to watch the spectacle, you can’t help but notice that body, struggling to keep the illusion alive.
And hey, some of that hyped-up orchestration is still evident! You can see it in those extended shots where the camera follows Randy from behind as he walks into the arena/the supermarket (DO YOU SEE?!). You can also see it in the way Aronofsky works the comparison between Randy and his love interest, Cassidy. She's a stripper (DO YOU SEE?!) who's struggling to keep up with the younger girls, and so she serves as both a cracked mirror for Randy and as a possible escape route -- she's there at the sidelines of his big match during the climax of the movie, but by the time she arrives he's already surrendered himself to the fantasy.Cassidy's role is slightly offensive in the standard Hollywood way, but Aronofsky's direction and Marissa Tomei's performance make this obvious manipulation work for the movie rather than against it. Here Aronofsky's focus is on his body, her body, their bodies and the mess of their lives. He shows us self-made goddesses and gods, but in doing so he can't help but show us how much damage has been done to these deities, both by the characters they've created and by the audiences these fictions attract.

The moment where Randy cries about being a "broken down piece of meat" is pure sentimental trash, but it gets to you all the same, because that mass of ragged flesh is on display. You can't ignore the meat on Randy's bones -- it's horrible, and it's magnificent, and it could break you down. What's more, looking at it for too long could break your heart.

This is manipulation that, by virtue of its sheer force, makes us question what we're being manipulated into watching, and why.

Still, if this connection -- this genuine empathy born out of showy physicality -- isn't enough to create a happy ending between Randy and Cassidy, then what does that say to the audience?

You've watched them bleed, you've found yourself moved by this, but in the end you're still just a spectator, still just part of the audience, never part of the show.

I'm just trying to give you some idea of what it's going to be like to be me as I finally go public and change the destiny of humankind forever. I'm going to expose your secret conspiracies in the name of freedom. And when I'm done, I'll step up to the microphone and say "you too can be like me: Max Thunderstone -- Man-Made God." And they'll all cheer like children, you watch...
(Max Thunderstone in The Filth #10, 'Man-Made God')

[2] On reflection, I'm actually being slightly unfair to Darren Aronofsky here. In this Slashfilm interview he makes several intelligent distinctions between the attempts at objectivity in The Wrestler and the wholehearted subjectivity his previous works. In fact, I like his comments so much that I'll quote them at length here:

I think the first two films were exercises in subjective filmmaking and pushing that to the extreme, trying to figure out every possible technique to put an audience member into the characters’ heads. Pi was constructed that way because I had a limited budget and that became kind of the strategy of how to turn that limited budget into a strength. It was to really cut back on cutting away to the bad guys and really making a whole visual language that was all about pushing the audience into Max Cohen’s head. Requiem, a big reason that I was attracted to it is when I read the novel, I realized that Selby’s a very subjective writer and constantly going into fantasy and to dream. It would allow me to kind of expand on the thing I was doing in Pi, but with a bigger budget and color and with more time and with four characters. So when I read that opening scene of the novel and I saw the mom locked in the closet and the kid stealing the TV, I instantly had this idea of a split screen sort of showing the audience, “Oh, we’re going to see two very personal stories here from two different perspectives.” Then eventually it opened up into four perspectives. They were really exercises and really pushing subjective filmmaking. When I got to The Fountain, it was kind of a transition. I was definitely done with that as an exploration and also the subject matter of The Fountain was much more– It was a romance and it allowed me to move more towards the objective, although I still kind of played a little bit with getting into Tommy’s head and into his reality. It was kind of a transition and kind of expanding my style, I guess. I think getting to The Wrestler was really just going in the completely opposite direction. Basically, the film is 98 percent objective. It’s like a documentary. I call it proactive documentary, because I think in a real documentary everything is reactive. If you’re watching Cops and a guy runs away and then a second later the camera chases after the guy and goes after him, we didn’t have that second delay. We kind of knew what the scene was about and we knew where Mickey or Marisa was going to go. So we were able to choreograph that. We kind of had this proactive style where we were working with the actor to give a documentary feeling, allow realism to happen, but we were ready for it. There’s no really internal sound stuff, except for maybe two or three times I used it, which was like during the heart attacks and when he’s walking to the deli counter and the crowd comes up. Otherwise, besides that, there’s never a personal sound beat. I kind of really didn’t want to do that, but I couldn’t resist. It’s actually a little weak. People responded to those moments, I think.

Of course, this "proactive documentary" style is still a style, but I think Aronofsky is aware of that. Besides, if I start to quibble on this point any further I might as well just reprint Roland Barthes' Writing Degree Zero, right?

[3] No, I have no idea what I'm talking about here either. Here's a wee Mitchell and Webb sketch about a snooty waiter to justify the digression:

[4] Of course issue #12 of The Filth makes it pretty obvious that the hand is Greg's own, but by the time the series has wrapped up Grant Morrison has been sure to render that reading as unlikely as any other, bless him.

[5] I'm reminded here of David Fiore's claim that:

"Life" is an uninhabitable planet. Narrative is artificial atmosphere that enables us to walk upon its surface. That's why Grant Morrison's concept of the "fiction suit" (from The Filth) is so apt.

Which sounds dead on to me. The only problem is that sometimes expeditions out into the farther reaches of the planet "Life" can scramble your perceptions. Sometimes it feels like the closer you get to your intended destination, the further away from it you seem to be. That's what happens to Greg Feely throughout The Filth, which is probably why some readers find it hard to get to grips with.

Issue #9, 'Inside The Hand', is probably the best example of this. If The Filth is Chris Weston's masterpiece (and I think it is!), then the four page sequence in which Feely meets Man Green/Man Yellow is a mini-masterpiece within the bigger one.

While Feely is being grilled by his superiors the art shifts into a dazed Gilbert & George pastiche. Weston's linework, normally expressive of crude biology, is boxed in by stark, repetitive abstraction. Instead of the usual abundant absurdities, we're left a battered close-up of Feely's face, which has been drained of colour and walled in by disinterested faces of his employers:

Being typical members of the management class, Man Green/Man Yellow explain Greg's role in short, cryptic sentences which always seem to arrive in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is as close as Greg gets to a simple explanation of what his purpose is, and he's still left with his brow furrowed and his questions unanswered:

Since you're currently reading this essay, I'm sure you've got some idea of how Greg feels. The closer I get to The Filth, the further away from it my thoughts go. All I want to do is write about The Ink, about the lines on the page and what they do to me, but I can't. As soon as I start typing my mind wanders to Dennis Potter plays and Darren Aronofsky movies.

Despite my earlier protestations to the contrary, every line of this essay is about itself and nothing else. Every paragraph is a textual representation of my bright green/bright yellow face; I keep straining to match the expressive ruffles of Greg Feely's face, but I keep falling short. Still, I'll try again and fail better, and if I'm lucky maybe I'll come up with something that's almost as expressive as the pages I've sampled above.

[6] In fairness, there aren't many people who can beat Cronenberg and Burroughs at their own game. And if you disagree, hey, don't argue with me! Argue with these guys:

[7] Thankfully the creators of The Filth were less scared of making dicks out of themselves than I am. Jebni wasn't lying about the sentient nano-tech cat love that's being spread about at the end of the series -- that shit really happens in the comic!

And you know what? I'm glad that it does. It's a perfect use of the biological motifs that have run through the whole series. If, in the world of The Filth, everything repeats from the macro scale down to the micro ("As above, so below" and all that shit), then surely it can work the other way? If we're all part of the same cross-contaminating gunk, why can't positive narratives spread out from the smallest scale to the largest?

[8] Cat haters of the world, relax, I've got your backs too! Or at least, Adam Roberts does. Just check out this quote, from his review of Charles Stross' Accelerando:

Now it may be that Stross is a cat-lover; that many of his readers will be cat-lovers; and that they will coo over this fictional cat and indulge Stross in his conceit. It so happens that I am not a cat-lover. It happens to be the case that, in addition to suffering allergic asthma when exposed to the foul polluting fur of these quadruped Nazis purrers, I find it morally inconceivable that any human could waste their affection on a creature that takes such delight in torture and selfishness -- that it takes a self-deluding anthropomorphisation and a soppy moral indolence to afford these parasites space in a person's heart.

Ouch! I'm a pet person myself, but that's some harsh, funny shit! (Link via David Golding.)

[9] If you haven't read Eddie Campbell's comic book adaptation of Snakes and Ladders I'd recommend you do so as soon as possible, because it's an absolute treasure of a comic! Go buy A Disease of Language, which collects it along with another Moore/Campbell collaboration, The Birth Caul and all sorts of other goodies. These two performance pieces turned art comics compliment each other nicelt -- The Birth Caul is a thorough deconstruction of human language and perception, while Snakes and Ladders takes human cruelty and suffering as its starting place, and proceeds to literally shoot for the moon. Moore's words are mighty, as is to be expected, and Campbell matches him at every turn. He provides lived-in textures to the various scenes conjoured in The Birth Caul, and in Snakes and Ladders he comes up with page after page of beautifully startling visuals, which... actually, you know what? Forget matching Moore, I think Campbell actually beats him on his own turf in that comic!

[10] It should be noted that seeking to strip people of their own delusions is pretty much always a dick move, since delusions and fantasies are all part of the shit we breath. It's sometimes necessary, but it's almost never going to be painless, as Greg Feely discovers when he reveals LaPen's "true" nature in issue #13:

Knowing How the World Works/Is Not Knowing How to Work the World!

2009-09-17T01:01:00.000+01:00

Oooh, my last post went a bit wonky in the middle didn't it? I really like the piece as a whole, and both Sean Wizke and Andrew Hickey have linked to it, but... yeah, I think I've just proved that insomnia and clarity are not friends!

I've re-written a handful of horrible sentences and taken out a few others that were simply too wretched to salvage. I think it reads much better now, but if anyone thinks I've committed an act of hideous violence please let me know and I'll put some of those clunkers back in.

Also: you should all read Andrew's latest/final entry in his Hyperpost series if you haven't already. In fact, you should read the whole damned thing from start to end, even if you have read it before! These posts are a beautiful tangle of physics, liberal politics and metafictional musings, and taken as a whole they form a playfully knotty protest against the idea of canonical storytelling. Which, really, how often do you get to read or type a sentence like that? Not often enough, I would guess, unless your life is far weirder than mine. And if is then, hey -- well done you!

Some of Andrew's closing sentiments echo the themes of my Adam Curtis post rather nicely:

The craving for order, for simplicity, to get everything in little boxes, is a very, very, very dangerous one, because sometimes – often – the things you want to put in those little boxes are people, and then you have to cut parts off them to fit, and saying sorry afterward doesn’t really help…
I’m not saying that retconning away Superman’s time as Superboy, or not counting both versions of Shada, are motivated by fascism – that would be a reductio ad absurdem of my argument. What I *AM* saying is that the world itself is a miraculous, complex, multiplex place, and none of us little monkeys really have a clue how it really works. We should expect nothing less from the stories we tell each other – be they stories about Superman, or stories about how the economy responds to an increase in lending to the banks.

Of course, the big difference here is that Andrew can just say this stuff instead of doing a stupidly elaborate dance around it, but that's just how I work so fuck it!

In the comments to one of Andrew's Hyperposts I indicated that I might write about "the difference between The Invisibles as an interactive experience (The Bomb, the Barbelith site, the lettercols, etc) and 52/Mozbats RIP/Final Crisis as an interactive experience (the blog chatter, the Dibny diaries, the Remixes, etc)."

I started writing an essay on this topic, but I don't think I'll finish it because it was coming out dumb. You see, it looked like I was going to start making some snippy comments about how Grant Morrison used to try to change the way we think about the world, but now he just tries to change the way we think about the DC Comics Universe. Which is total bullshit, really -- just look at all the thoughtful writing Morrison's work still generates, from Andrew's posts to the Mindless Ones' annocomentations to David Fiore on Seaguy for proof!

Beyond that, look at how much good writing there is on this little corner of the Internet! Honestly, I know that there are some unforgivably stupid stories on the web -- one glance at any random YouTube comment is enough to prove this, should you need it reconfirmed -- but the good stuff almost makes up for it. Almost! And hey, you can (and should!) shout the idiots down if something important's at stake, or you can turn their stupidity into a joke if you prefer, but it's important to keep all of this in perspective. There are other, better stories out there, and it's crazy easy to find them these days.

And hey, if you read this blog, I'd just like to take the time to say thanks. I don't think I've got many readers, but the ones I do have are worryingly smart, and I'm glad that they want to make me a part of their stories, however small.

Coming soon -- more Filth!

Take care out there.

David

What's Inside Adam Curtis' Blue Box?

2009-09-13T21:59:00.000+01:00

A two part reaction to Adam Curtis' new documentary It Felt Like a Kiss, by way of the Blue Box from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

Part 1: Preliminary Results

Adam Curtis: Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they're supposed to. History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended. For example, you could say the Gulf of Tonkin was a conspiratorial action to accelerate entry into war, yes?

Errol Morris: Here’s the conspiracy argument. The Johnson administration wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam. But they needed a pretext. And so they provoked these two incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in order to get Congressional approval for escalation. The claim is: they had a grand plan. And the plan was war. I’ve never had much of an appetite for conspiracy theories. Here's my argument in a nutshell. People are too much at cross purposes with each other, too stupid, too self absorbed to ever effectively conspire to do anything.

Adam Curtis: “Just too self-absorbed” is the key element. To make a conspiracy work, you have to see it from all different angles to make sure the plan works. They don’t. Every time you ever read transcripts or detailed descriptions of what goes on at high level policy decisions - I'm sure it’s true of the Kennedy administration, I'm sure it’s true today in the Bush administration - The arguments, the self-absorption, the disagreements and the narcissism are incredible. And I'm sure the Gulf of Tonkin thing probably emerged as a compromise between lots of different people arguing as much as from a single, clear principle.
('Adam Curtis talks with Errol Morris' - link via Tom Ewing.)

Adam Curtis: I'm very suspicious of this idea of a balanced version of history, All history is a construction – often by the powerful. What I do is construct an imaginative interpretation of history to make people look again at what they think they know. I like to ask people, “Have you thought of this?” Like zooming up in a helicopter and looking at the ground, looking at the world in a new way. Because I think that so much of this interpretation of events is a deadening repetition agreed upon by certain people, a sort of collectivity of news reports. And often it’s completely wrong. But somehow, they all agree on it. People criticized my film by saying things like, “Why aren’t you balanced? What aren’t you putting in the other views?” And my response was, “What if the other view is wrong?” That’s the real problem of the balanced view - what's called ‘perceived wisdom.’ What if perceived wisdom’s wrong? What if – when you go and look at the evidence for sleeper cells in America – there doesn’t appear to be anything there? You know, that's the difficult area. And so it becomes up to you to judge whether to go against perceived wisdom or not.

('Adam Curtis talks with Errol Morris'.)

I think my jaw dropped permanently during the wordless encounter at the studio between "Betty", Adam, and "pseudo-Camilla", who is auditioning for the role of "love interest". The scene is dominated by crazy Old Hollywood closeups of intense longing and Linda Scott's maudlin/profound bubblegum version of one of my favourite Jerome Kern songs--"I've Told Every Little Star" (why haven't I told you?). But you can't tell the Other how you feel about her/him/it, and you can't even express these feelings very accurately to yourself.

So "opening the box" isn't just "waking from a dream"--it is, literally, death. Whatever's in there cannot even be thought by human beings--despite the fact that getting in there is pretty much all we think about! The way of "optimism" and the way of "despair" intersect at the abyss (although, as Camila notes, the second way is a "short-cut"!), and Lynch's vertiginous transition between narratives at the Utopian moment of expected fulfillment (after Betty and Rita have found the box together) is one of the most incredibly affecting evocations of the Sublime in the history of cinema. Without all of this preparation, the Diane scenes (masturbating, deliberating in the darkness about whether to accept Camilla's purred invitation, the walk from the car to the party, her quiet breakdown at the dinner table, and her suicide: the nightmare counterpart of Betty/Rita's lovemaking--both are the logical climaxes of their respective narratives, and neither succeeds in rescuing the dreamer from the necessity of dreaming!) wouldn't have nearly the impact that they do

(David Fiore's Ultimate Mulholland Drive Round-Up)

The Real of Mulholland Dr is not Diane’s supposedly waking world, but the paradoxically entrancing insomniac realm of Club Silencio (which, in acting as the gateway from the first section of the film to the second is like the ‘cut’ of the moebian band that when sutured together, transforms the two sides of the piece of paper into a single strip). I say ‘paradoxically entrancing’ because the scene is ostensibly demystifying. Yet only ostensibly so; like Magritte’s ‘This Is Not a Pipe’, Club Silencio, reminiscent of the Black/White Lodge in the first and final episodes of Twin Peaks and as intensely charged as anything in Lynch’s oeuvre, demonstrates film – and art’s - irreducible sorcery. Club Silencio’s scenario is thoroughly Potteresque. The entertainment is provided by perfomers who mime onstage to a pre-recorded soundtrack, much in the way that Potter had the characters in The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven lip sync to thirties’ pop. Despite the complete ingenuousness of the magician-compere’s words – ‘There is no band. What you will hear are recordings.’- we (the audience) are nevertheless unable to resist the seduction of the spectacle. So when the apparent singer, Rebeka Del Rio, collapses but the music continues, we are shocked. Something in us compels us to treat the performance as if real.
(K-Punk - 'THIS IS (NOT) THE GIRL'.)

In 2004 I coordinated Storybox, a small writing project for young refugees, using blogging as a medium. The Storyboxers experimented with ways to write about listening to dancehall pop star Sean Paul, for example, or growing up dealing with systematic abuse in a refugee camp — both types of experience were “everyday” ones for many of these people. It was a rewarding experiment, which I hope contributed a little to the participants’ capacities for autonomous expression. But when I tried to bypass the affective nature of their involvement in my first attempt to write this paper (which was originally going to be more about design and political theory), I found myself blocked. In the language of “trauma studies”, it was as if I myself faced an impossible task of representation. But following Giorgio Agamben’s insistence that just going along with the “unsayable” character of Auschwitz simply puts it on a pedestal as an object of worship (Agamben 2002: 32), I realised that rather than let my dilemma of representation freeze me in an act of genuflection, I’d have to grapple with what I’d put in the “too-hard basket”. I knew that these experiences weren’t ready to conveniently instrumentalised without a difficult kind of “accounting”— not in a way that attempted closure, but through a fragmentary, allegorical kind labour that makes suggestions.

(Antipopper - 'What's in the Box?')

The most “coherent" reading of Mulholland Drive identifies the narrative up to that point as a desperate fantasy of the mundane Diane, the “real” “Betty”, who has actually murdered her girlfriend Camilla, the “real” “Rita”. It is this violent act of sexual jealousy which apparently lies in the (vaginal?) box of repression, which resurfaces at the moment of confrontation with loss in Club Silencio. Not the most promising connotations for Storybox. But I chose the name partly because of the whiff of trauma. And what if there is another way to approach it? What if the blue box is indeed an allegorical symbol for trauma, but one which operates as a nexus for the different narratives of the film, which do not have to be organised hierarchically in such a boringly classical psychoanalytic scenario because they are actually vocabularies of a neveryday imaginary? What if the shift from Betty and Rita’s story to that of Diane and Camilla is analogous to what happens when NaturallySweet describes life at school in Sydney or under the Taliban as “soooooooooo boring” and “soooooooooo devastating”?

(Antipopper - 'What's in the Box?')

Adam Curtis has gone a bit mad. The insultingly gifted documentary maker behind The Century Of The Self and The Power Of Nightmares seemed rather quiet of late. In fact, since his 2007 BBC2 series The Trap, his only visible pieces of work were two short (and superb) mini-documentaries he created for my BBC4 series Screenwipe and Newswipe. People kept asking me what he was up to. I assumed he was chipping away at some new documentary which would be announced when he was ready.

He's ready now. He's made a new documentary called It Felt Like A Kiss. Except it isn't just a documentary. It's also a piece of interactive theatre, with music composed by Damon Albarn and performed by the Kronos Quartet. And it doesn't take place in a cinema or concert hall, but across five floors of a deserted office block in Manchester.
About now a sizable percentage of you will be thinking "that sounds wanky", and starting to back away. Don't. Because it's also ... well, it's also a funhouse. To be honest, no one really knows what it is. After a struggle, Curtis himself says it's "a psycho-political theme experience in which you become a central character. It's going to be frightening. A walk of enchantment and menace." On the official website, viewers are advised that it's "not suitable for those of a nervous disposition". "Please wear suitable footwear," it adds, ominously.
(Charlie Brooker on Adam Curtis' new documentary experience.)

Part 2: Myth or Anti-Myth?

I didn’t make it down to Manchester in time to immerse myself in Adam Curtis’ It Felt Like a Kiss, so like most of you, I’ve only got the documentary to go on.

This is a shame, because even the negative reviews of the full theatrical experience can’t help but make it sound terrifyingly brilliant:

But there was too much of the smell of conspiracy in the air, splicing together patterns of meaning with a simplistic political intent. When our descent of the five floors began the enterprise descended into melodrama with heavy-handed references to Hidden Persuaders who, having failed to sell us dreams, are now offering us nightmares from which only they can now rescue us: Pick up the phone, Don't press the red button, Take the pill, Pick up the gun, Start the chain saw.

It was like being trapped inside the set of the Sixties cult show The Prisoner with surplus fake blood supplied by Hammer Horror.

Readers, I have to confess -- I've often wanted to visit the set of The Prisoner! Which is odd, given the nature of that series, but then again this blurring of dreamlike promise and real horror is part of the substance of It Felt Like a Kiss.

It's easy to dismiss Curtis' work as having a conspiracy theory-ish vibe, because he tends to chase one idea through recent history with bloody minded determination. This concern is normally alleviated by the dryly cutting humour of Curtis' narration, which serves to remind us that we are watching a man (de)constructing history. Curtis' voice provokes laughter and invites argument, and the effect its absence has on the way It Felt Like a Kiss plays cannot be underestimated.

Stripped of voice over, It Felt Like a Kiss makes its argument using Curtis' other tools, a mix of endlessly enchanting pop music, collaged footage from the BBC news archive and bold textual statements:

It's these statements, as clear to the eye as they are in their implications, that make this feel like a conspiratorial work. In as much as it has a clear argument, It Felt Like a Kiss is an examination of the story that America tried to tell about itself in 20th Century. Naturally, Curtis includes military coups and barbaric shock treatments as part of this vision, but as his narrative charges towards September 11th 2001 and the current financial crisis it becomes obvious that he isn't going to spend too much time elaborating on the links he makes. Scenes of real life terror and fabricated wonder blend into each other, becoming one with the words that flit across the screen. This effect reaches its delirious peak in the section that deals with the movie that was made about Saddam Hussein's time as a CIA agent -- this passage plays like the brilliant dream of a madman, but its logic is irresistible and its poetry hard to deny.

Curtis layers fragmented connections upon fragmented connections, which makes It Felt Like a Kiss seem both more and less open to argument than Curtis' other works. Less open to argument because words, sounds and pictures achieve a purity of composition here that matches that of a great pop song, or perhaps even a great advert. More open to argument because, well, who takes a pop song or advert at face value?

And so, tempting as it is to treat this beautiful film like a transmission from beyond, you can't help but find yourself thinking "Is that really all there is to the story of Brian Wilson, or 'River Deep Mountain High', or Saddam?" Where works like The Century of the Self or The Trap slowly and methodically deconstruct social theories, It Felt Like a Kiss is more like a dream on the verge of becoming a nightmare.

I keep mentioning dreams here, but that's only because It Felt Like a Kiss makes its status as a dreamscape obvious from the beginning. The movie starts with a series of clean white lines on black background. The movie starts with these words:

When a nation is powerful it tells the world confident stories about its future.

The stories can be enchanting or frightening but they make sense of the world.

But when that power begins to ebb the stories fall apart and all that is left are fragments which haunt you like a half-forgotten dream.

Like I said above, It Felt Like a Kiss plays out the moment where the dream starts to forget itself, where doubt has crept in but the sense of wonder has yet to fade. It foregrounds the rhetorical power of Curtis' collaged film fragments, which condemn the senselessness of our stories while being far too inviting in their own right. You might find yourself thinking that Curtis is overselling his own narrative here, but to do so is to accept the basic argument of the piece: that all of our explanations are mostly inadequate as either blueprints or records. This is why you can't really accuse Curtis of being a conspiracy theorist -- his recent work has been staunchly anti-mythological, and It Felt Like a Kiss is no exception. It demolishes certainty, but it's too weirdly emotional to salt the ground in the process, at least not if the rapidly flowering thoughts it left in my brain are anything to go by.

This is why I can't help of thinking of Mulholland Drive when I think about It Felt Like a Kiss. As the various clever bastards I quoted at the start of this post indicate, the Blue Box at the heart of Mulholland Drive exists as more than a route from dream to reality. For me, it's the point where conflicting stories and modes of interpretation bleed into each other, the disorientating heart of a disorientated movie. Watching It Felt Like a Kiss I feel like I'm just about to slip into the Blue Box, or at least I feel like I'm staring into the box and watching conflicting stories blur out into strange new shapes. I can see Doris Day and Saddam Hussein waiting inside, and I don't know what sort of room I'm supposed to find this box in (maybe I will if the full production goes to London), and I don't know what to do next but I can't stop staring.

What's inside the box? Maybe, like David Fiore suggests, it's something far too huge for the human mind to understand, something too big for any one narrative to contain. Maybe it's too much for us to question and contextualise all the stories we hear without succumbing to nihilism, but as always I can't help but feel that it's worth a try.

Beyond the Garish Bed Sheet

2009-08-31T16:32:00.000+01:00

Ok, so let's take the theme of Saturday's post a little further. If, as I claimed in a fit of hyperbolic madness, a set of patterned bed sheets that appear on one page of Batman -- Year One suggests other stories that could happen in Gotham, what would these stories be like?

Well, I think they'd look a little bit like this:

(The above images are from: Barton Fink, by the Coen brothers and various; Ai Yazawa's Nana; Batman - Year One by David Mazzucchelli, Richmond Lewis and Frank Miller; and The Birth Caul, adapted by Eddie Campbell from a performance by Alan Moore.)

Of course just last week two Batman comics came out that made Gotham City seem like a freakishly exciting theater of the mind, which is how I normally like to imagine it. First, there was Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Batman and Robin #3, in which two young men escaped a ride through a Lynchian fairground and one young woman wasn't so lucky:

Then there was the third issue of J.H. Williams III and Greg Rucka's run on Detective Comics, which showed how easy it is to mix baroque, monstrous horror...

...with scenes of dancefloor romance that suggest a particularly goth-friendly Disney movie:

So it's not like I'm actually desperate for DC to start publishing comedy-romance-horror stories about young people trying to make a mark on that particular fictional city, because honestly, those stories would probably be better without the constant threat of wonky Bat-cameos. But still, the pleasure of finding such ideas suggested (however obliquely or implicitly) in a Batman comic is one of the reasons I still bother to read comics. Quitely and Williams aren't quite doing that in their respective works, but I still love the way they amp up the theatrical madness implicit in the best Batman stories.

Hmmm... you know, looking back over this post it occurs to me that Sean Witzke really is a lot better at this sort of thing than I am. If I had the skills I'd make him the Liquid Swords/There Will Be Blood mashup album he imagines here, because (A) the battered hubris of Daniel Plainview's "I have a competition in me" speech makes perfect sense in the 'Cold World' that Liquid Swords documents, and (B) Sean's There Will Be Blood: Babycart to Hades post demonstrates just how fitting the substitution of Daniel Plainview for Ogami Ittō actually is.

Will There Be Blood on the Sheets?

2009-08-29T11:15:00.000+01:00

The first thing I think of when I see the cover for Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter...

...is this page from Frank Miller, David Mazzuchelli and Richmond Lewis' Batman - Year One:

The scene is nothing new in itself -- you've got the lonely noir hero and the inert woman, trapped in the space between domesticity and dark adventure -- but the difference in staging makes me think of something Dan Nadel said while he was tearing The Hunter to pieces:

When I think of this work I think of what Mort Meskin would have done, with his vibrant, almost ecstatic brush marks; what Toth might have done with his sense of page design and the figure in space; or what the younger Mazzucchelli might have done with his figures weighted in space and rooted in fully imagined environments. I think of all that and wonder at such a missed opportunity. Those guys used cinematic set-ups, but they never allowed style to overtake content. Krigstein, for example, was a master of adapting filmic rhythms into comics. But at the heart of his experimentalism is a drive for clarity.

Now I enjoyed Parker: The Hunter way more than Nadel, but I can't deny that he has a point. While I like Darwyn Cooke's work, I've never enjoyed it on anything other than a surface level. When David Fiore panned New Frontier, some people reacted like he was crazy (hi ADD!), but you know what? I think he was on to something!

For me, New Frontier was pretty but boring. The Hunter is more exciting, but it's still a brutally functional work. Which is fitting, given that the title character is basically revenge machine. Tucker Stone riffed on this in his review of the piece:

Feelings--unpredictable, messy and useless when it comes to control fantasies--wouldn't it be nice if one could just turn them off when they get in the way? For Parker, the answer resounds as an unequivocal "yes", and that's what The Hunter circles around. A man who can do anything, as long as he doesn't make the mistake of loving a woman ever again. He tried it out. Didn't fit.

This nicely captures the thrill of reading the book while underlining its essential emptiness. As Stone notes, Parker spends most of the book in action, off-panel and in the shadows. Where Dan Nadel finds the character's generic blankness disappointing, Stone seems to perceive it as another indication of the character's brute efficiency, as encapsulated in this image:

All of which makes Parker: The Hunter sound like a Frank Miller story with a veneer of smoothness and sophistication, which seems about right to me.

Since it's scripted by Frank Miller, Batman - Year One is every bit as obsessed with tough men and tough choices as The Hunter. It's the art team of David Mazzuchelli and Richmond Lewis who provide the book with its extra luster, and the reasons for this can be found in that picture of Detective Jim Gordon perched on the end of his bed.

Both pictures set up varying levels of reality -- on Cooke's cover you've got Parker in the foreground, solid and real, and the dead woman beside him. The two characters seem to exist under spotlights, but while this makes Parker and everything around him seem darker and more defined, the light that bounces off of the corpse's head whites everything out into nothingness. The page from Batman - Year One establishes a similar dichotomy - you've got the bed, with its preposterously textured patterns, and the darkness outside of the bed, in which only tough-guy noir talk can exist.

It's the otherworldly weirdness of the Year One bed sheet that really takes that image over the edge though:

The situation is cliched, but the Gordon family bed is of another order to anything else in the comic. Sure, there are moments where Richmond Lewis leavens the purply black hues with dazzling hints of yellow and orange, or where one or two dashes of Mazzuchelli's linework give his characters a battered flexibility that's unmatched in Cooke or Miller's work (his Jim Gordon in this image approaches this state without quite reaching it). But seriously, what the hell is going on with that bed pattern?

According to Dave B Cooper in this dusty old Barbelith thread, this effect wasn't present in the comic when it was originally serialised:

The colouring’s probably a subject of some variation – as Dan says, the subtle colouring’d be lost on newsprint, and indeed there was some recolouring done for the collected version, I believe – I don’t think it was entirely redone, but (for example) the bedsheets at the end of (I think) chapter three (Gordon sitting on the edge of the bed while Barbara sleeps, the gun heavier in his hands etc) was just a solid colour in issue 407 of the comic, but becomes a rather nicely painted patterned set of bedclothes in the book. Not knocking at all, but there were some changes made, IIRC – possibly to play on the upgraded paper stock and production values of the TPB, I guess.

This is amazing to me, and I'd really love to see a scan of the original page since I can't imagine the page (or, indeed, the comic) without this image as I know it. Which is interesting, because I think that this scene shows Gordon struggling to keep the family bed in mind, and tending away from it, towards the harsh action his story demands from him:

But -- maybe he should have paid more attention to the bed he was sitting on, in the collected edition at least...

But -- this page, like the comic it exists in, isn't built that way. The narration tips towards the bed and then slides right back off it again, returning to the hard black that makes up the rest of the page, just as Gordon's mind slips back into the noir stuff, the dark stuff, the words themselves becoming less important than their direction:

But -- still, for a moment that's either long or short depending on how long you spend looking at that page, that image, Mazzucchelli and Lewis open up the possibility of other stories happening in Gotham. The Gordons' bed is strange enough to survive and to generate its own narratives without the help of Batman or his enemies and derivatives.

But -- truthfully, I'm not sure how much of this work is done by Lewis and how much of it is done by Mazzuchelli. The shifting haze of greens is Lewis' work, and the body language of the two main characters is Mazzuchelli, but who's responsible for the patterns on the bed? I'll take a guess that it's Lewis and let a more technically astute commentator correct me, but even if that's the case I wouldn't downplay Mazzuchelli's contribution. Just look at the way the covers twist through Barbara Gordon's legs and back under her arm an over her chest:

She's not just a part of the scenery, but she is tangled up in these patterns, rather than the ones that her husband is currently debating as he sits on the edge of the bed.

But -- you might fairly object that I've just spent a thousand-odd words comparing a piece of sequential storytelling, a mix of words and text, to an image that was intended to work as a cover and nothing else. And you'd be right, up to a point. Because there aren't any pages in Parker: The Hunter that I would want to write about to this extent, while there are many panels and pages in Batman - Year One that point me in this direction. And I like that Darywn Cooke cover, as much as I like anything in the book -- it expresses everything it needs to express via starkly defined iconography, and I enjoy that, but I enjoy what Mazzucchelli and Lewis do with Frank Miller's work more.

But -- it would probably be fair to say that I'm just re-writing my Panel Madness essay on Criminal here, and what can I say, I've got a thing for these sort of moments. I like to get caught up in the crushing gravity of a good crime story, but I also like to get hints that this gravity might not be as indisputable as it initially seems. Speaking of that old Panel Madness piece, let's compare Sean Phillips' lively city streets...

With Cooke's equivalent:

But -- again, you might say that this is an unfair comparison, or that we're looking at two different types of intent here. Which we are, but that's exactly my point -- the image from The Hunter serves to break up the narrative, while that Criminal panel does the same thing while also suggesting a variety of other narratives, stories that we'll never get to see. The page from Batman - Year One has the same sense of added life to it, and it's this life that Mazzucchelli has taken to exploring on the page since he abandoned the world of corporate comics.

(A page from the Mazzuchelli/Karasik adaptation of City of Glass, chosen for the most highbrow of reasons)

I've not read Asterios Polyp yet, but I'm about to order it, and I can't wait for it to arrive!

Still, much as I love the mature Mazzuchelli, there's something to be said for the strange thrill involved in finding a page like this in a macho adventure comic. Maybe it replicates the excitement of hearing a pleasantly discordant note in a piece of music, or maybe it's got something to do with stumbling into a moment that seems ripe with forgotten possibilities. Maybe it's got nothing to do with anything! I don't know, the only thing I'm sure of is that it's moments like this/images like this/stories like this that keep me reading, watching, looking, listening. Ridiculous as it might seem, I might even go so far as to say that it's unexpected pleasures like this that keep me living, and as long as I keep finding these feelings I know I'll never want to stop.

But -- there's always another page to turn, isn't there? And who knows what that's going to lead to: new richness or mechanical precision or both or neither? Only one way to find out -- stop talking -- stop narrating -- stop rationalising. Just flip forward -- to here knows when!

"In my day, if a cat tried be a doctor we'd have had it shot...."

2009-08-21T11:12:00.000+01:00

Off the back of yesterday's Bruno post, here's a very balanced and insightful Stewart Lee essay on political correctness in comedy.

If you'd rather watch Lee tackle the subject on his home turf while attacking Richard Littlejohn, please check this youtube clip:

Me and my pals are going to see Stewart Lee at the Fringe on the 27th August. The blurb for the gig is a little vague, but as this clip shows, Lee's a master at circling round a point until it collapses in on itself so I'm sure it'll be good. My friends and I are also going to see Lee's former comedy partner Richard Herring this Sunday. The theme of Herring's Hitler Moustache show is hard to ignore -- it's sitting there, right in the middle of the comedian's face, just daring you to look:

Reclaiming Chaplin's moustache for comedy, 'Headmaster's Son' star muses on iconography, the positive side of racism and why an innocent square inch of facial hair took the blame for Nazism.

Interestingly, Herring ended up having to defend himself in the Guardian recently, after an article on "the new offensiveness" in comedy made his current routine sound like a cheap shlock-fest. "You're taking what I said out of context!" is often the first defense of the weasel, but Herring makes a convincing case for himself:

I think that most reasonable people might assume from the article that I am racist, or at least pathetically confrontational. Indeed, some reasonable people did assume that. One blogger wrote: "Richard Herring is currently putting on a show called Hitler Moustache, where (and I haven't seen the show) he apparently dishes up straight-faced endorsements of racist ideas."
It is true that the phrase "maybe racists have a point" is in the show. It's an interesting moment: the awkwardness in the room is palpable; a core belief has been challenged (by a man with a Hitler moustache) and people are uncomfortable about where this might be leading. But the statement is followed by what is possibly the standup routine I am most proud of, one which examines our attitudes to ethnicity and questions whether the way humans choose to divide themselves is obfuscating their essential similarity. It challenges racism, but also liberal assumptions about cultural identity. It's funny, too. Comedy, it seems, can cover some complex issues much more effectively than someone blankly stating these truths.

Sounds good to me! I can't wait to see how it comes off on stage, because I have faith in Herring's ability to make something out of these questions instead of simply saying something "shocking" and chuckling away in (relatively) safe company.

Clown Autopsy #435 -- This One Just Won't Shut Up!

2009-08-20T19:20:00.000+01:00

Or: This essay is so 1998!

Hey, I've just figured something out!

Bear with me while I do the maths:

Sacha Baron Cohen

(EQUALS)

Cady from mean Girls (aka Li-Lo at her best)

No but seriously, let's check my working here.

When he's trying to pretend he's an actual comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen is one of the least funny human beings on the planet. I don't want to start a clown autopsy here, but seriously -- if you can watch him ham it up in either Talladega Nights or Sweeney Todd without throwing up in your popcorn then you've got a stronger stomach than me!

The bits of Brüno that are obviously staged generate a similar response: BRUNO'S SO GAY HE FUCKS MEN! HE'S SO AUSTRIAN HE LIKES HITLER! AND BY THE WAY, DID YOU KNOW THAT THE FASHION WORLD IS, LIKE, TOTALLY SILLY AND SUPERFICIAL?!

Fuck me! It's not that I'm particularly offended by Cohen's shtick, it's just that I have no idea how a supposedly hot shit comedian gets away with peddling this fifth rate 'Allo 'Allo nonsense in 2009. The only explanation I can see is that we're all stuck in a high school neverland where gay people and foreigners are so implicitly funny that merely exemplifying cliched assumptions about "those people" will earn you a round of applause.

This high school humour is Part (1) of the Mean Girls connection, though I should point out that Mean Girls is significantly funnier than any of SBC's attempts at conventional humour -- it's the teen comedy that looks like candyfloss and tastes like barbed wire, you know?

Also: "Danny DeVito I love your work!"

Part (2) of the Mean Girls connection comes through in the parts of Brüno that are actually funny (or at least half-funny), i.e. the bits where Sacha Baron Cohen stays in character and annoys or tricks people into amusing situations. Now sometimes this ends up being so "what the fuck?" that you can't help but laugh, like when SBC/Brüno tries to come on to Republican Congressman Ron Paul, but as Tucker Stone said in his review of the movie:

...it seems like a waste of Sacha Baron Cohen's time considering that any of the reactions he got out of his dopey victims could have been just as easily achieved by running up to them and screaming "fuck you stupid asshole fuck you fuck you" while somebody else pointed a camera out them.

Which is where my dopey Mean Girls comparison comes in. By infiltrating a series of traditionally masculine settings and camping it up within them, Sacha Baron Cohen ends up looking like a shrill asshole amongst shrill assholes. His broad humour draws its power from the very attitudes it seeks to mock and expose, and watching him can't help but make me think of Cady in the middle section of Mean Girls. For those of you who aren't familiar with the movie, it's all about a previously home schooled girl who is dropped into an American high school full of all the usual cliches. Oblivious to teen relationship dynamics, Cady finds herself both befriending the "freaks" and becoming a pet project for the popular "plastics". After being burned by the head plastic, Cady agrees to embed herself in their group in order to destroy it. Of course, Brüno style, she ends up embodying most of the things she's out to undermine, but... actually, I've just spotted a couple of places where my points don't quite add up.

Firstly there's the fact that Cady is subject to the moral mechanics of Hollywood film making, in this case embodied by a big yellow school bus:

The vague gestures towards story that punctuate Brüno are so perfunctory as to be completely ignorable. Mean Girls, while snarky enough to literalise its machinations for all to see, still obeys the Hollywood laws that state that lessons must be learned and characters must grow.

Secondly, there's the fact that -- in Brüno, anyway -- Sacha Baron Cohen is a far less efficient operator than Cady. Sure, he convinces people that he is Bruno rather than Sacha, but what does he do once he's pulled this off? He crouches outside a hunter's tend with some condoms and pretends that he's covertly trying to sleep with the guy.

One of my favourite writers, Mike Barthel, wrote an excellent essay on Borat from which the following paragraph is taken:

This is why it's such a perfect political movie. Instead of creating fictional scenarios in which he can insert himself and create a comic meaning--which would of course be too easy, and make the meaning seem unreal itself--Borat is thrust into these real situations where he has to either work with their rules or ignore them completely. The process of finding out those rules is, of course, what produces the comedy. Borat--and please note here that I am explicitly talking about Borat the character, not any motivations that Cohen the creator might have had--genuinely thinks he is being as respectful as he should be with the feminists, and when he's at the rodeo, his escalating rhetoric about Bush and Iraq isn't a satirical attempt to provoke, but actually a rather careful probing of exactly what it is and isn't polite to say in praise of the President, whose power and strength Borat really respects. All in all, it's not so much the wrong way to go about it, it's just that Borat's image of America is so off-kilter that he fails to become part of it. Still, he's getting inside the joke and rooting around, trying to find a place where he fits, and it's that willingness to engage with his subjects rather than yell at them from outside that gives the film its power.

Now I'm no Sacha Baron Cohen fan, as is surely obvious by now, but could anyone honestly make any of these claims for Brüno? Seems to me that all Cohen does in this movie is stand outside and yell.

So, with these minor mathematical faults corrected, I once more present you with my findings:

Sacha Baron Cohen

(EQUALS)

Cady from mean Girls, only slightly less efficient and without the ability to learn

And now we say the forbidden sentence: Ah, isn't maths fun? Well, maybe not, but blathering on about Mean Girls in public is a laugh, for me anyway.

Your Hypothetical Questions, Answered

2009-08-18T08:09:00.000+01:00

Q: Given a relatively level playing field -- i.e. an environment spooky and harrowing enough for a ghost writer to operate in but not so creepy as to cause a comics critic to freak/geek out -- who would win in a fight between Abhay Khosla and Bram Stoker?

A: Well, thanks to the wonders of modern science, we're finally close to obtaining an answer to this ancient brain-boggler:

ABHAY KHOSLA'S BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA!!!

Frightenend? Intrigued? You bloody well should be!

Go check it out:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

The fifth and final part of this epic saga is still to come. Maybe Stoker will bounce back to shock victory, but right now Khosla's got him on the ropes and he doesn't look like he's going to let up...

Would you believe...

2009-08-18T00:58:00.000+01:00

...I'm still just clearing my throat right now?

With any luck I should be able keep posting regularly for the rest of the week. After that I'm going to slow it up a little in order to finish a couple of bigger pieces. Hopefully you'll stick around to see what's coming, but if not then please take the time to enjoy Marnie Stern and her band blasting the hell out of 'Steely' live:

"I'm hoping it's true/ I'm hoping for you, you you!"

A Real Deep Peek Into One Man's Crack...

2009-08-18T00:53:00.000+01:00

If anyone was wondering what the hell I was blathering on about at the end of last Thursday's post, I bring you a very inward-looking kind of hell: Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.

(David Allison, looking at his notes for his next Filth essay)

Kaufman's scripts have always tended towards solipsism, but before Synecdoche this had always been partially offset by the showmanship of his director-collaborators Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. Allowed to direct his own material, Kaufman plunges deeper and deeper into his protagonist's decaying mind and body with little regard for either plot or audience.

("What's this say? 'Self disgust is self-obsession honey and I do as I please' -- what does that even mean?")

This is a good thing, in some ways. I've never seen a movie which takes you quite so far up one man's back passage, which... wait, was I supposed to be complimenting the movie here?

Seriously though, it works, or it worked for me anyway. It's the kind of project that'll either win you over on the strength of its details or completely alienate you on the same terms. The high concept is very high concepty, as has always been the case with Kaufman's films -- Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a hypochondriac theater director whose sense of hearing/reality might be slightly suspect. He wins a massive wad of grant money and sets about losing himself in an ever-expanding and perpetually untitled play, a mini city full of muted drama and decay. As in Morrison/Weston's The Filth, the decomposition of mind and body are linked in this environment, which ends up functioning as a sort of Ballardian inner space.

What's the point of all of this? Well it's all about death, innit, or at least that's what Cotard says:

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That's what I want to explore. We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't.

I realised that I was genuinely enjoying the picture, as opposed to just appreciating it, when Caden's mother turned to him at her husband's funeral and said: "There was so little left of him, they had to fill the coffin with cotton balls to keep him from rattling around." Did I say that Kaufman showed no regard for plot or audience? Maybe I overstated a little. There's a lot of dark humour on display, and the movie is deliberately constructed to take the viewer down the rabbit hole with Cotard, which is why it sometimes seems like it has no regard for time or causality.

Like I said, if it works for you it really works, as Jog noted in his review of the movie:

It seemed to work on the audience I was with. By the time the city-within-a-city becomes a ruined wasteland, as a metaphor for an old man (so worried about an early death!) outliving all his friends and acquaintances, left with nothing but memories and shadows of old loves, actors playing people, don't ya know, and Wiest, now likely dead and fused completely with Caden's soul, launches into another knock 'em out monologue about how we're all essentially the same useless, ineffective bits of walking nonsense in the face of universal time, the crowd became totally rapt, sitting in shock through the closing credits.

So, if it's good movie why have I been circling round it like I want to take a piece out of it? Well, I guess I feel like Kaufman has taken us down this rabbit hole in pretty much every script he's ever written, and I was hoping that he'd do something beyond show us quite how far into ourselves we can go.

On that note, I can't help but think that the ending of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind was a lot more cutting than Synecdoche's finale precisely because it pushed its protagonist out of his solipsistic panic and back out into a more socialised reality. Here's what I said about Eternal Sunshine back in 2004:

The final section of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is nothing short of spectacular. It's a headlong rush of uncomfortable awareness for the two main characters, and, in an odd way, what it reminds me of more than anything else is Donnie Darko. Now, before anyone shouts "what the fuck", let me unpack that one a little. While I know that stylistically and thematically there's a lot separating the two movies, what it seems to me that Donnie Darko captured so well was a feeling of confusion that gradually transformed into some sort of weird mixture of knowledge and acceptance in the face of overwhelmingly deterministic forces. Something similar happens at the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Joel and Clementine facing up to the reality of how their relationship is likely to work out, and deciding to go with it anyway.

It occurs to me that the garbled theories I've just spent several paragraphs constructing may not immediately seem like the best argument in favor of the idea that this is, above all, a simple movie. But... well, lets just put it this way; the ability every one of us has to accept the distance between what we feel we need and what we know that we will end up getting from any given person is both sad and wonderful, and I can think of no more eloquent and poetic expression of this than the final looping segment of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

If I remember correctly, quite a few people found the Donnie Darko reference in that post a bit confusing at the time, but I stand by it. The movies are miles apart in terms of subject matter and theme, but I made the comparison because the last act of ESotSM had a Darko-esque sense of bewildered discovery to it. Anyway, what makes Eternal Sunshine more engaging than either Donnie Darko or Synecdoche, New York is the fact that it applies its mopey philosophy to a "real" human relationship. Also, Michel Fucking Gondry, but we'll come back to that another day. Synecdoche, New York makes a good case for us being a species of lonely, disconnected minds trying to make sense of the chaos around us; Eternal Sunshine shows two people trying to maintain a relationship in full knowledge of the fact that they'll never truly get it to work like either of them want it to. Like the honorable Mr Attack said to me in a 2004 email:

In some ways, I can't help shake the feeling that they've managed a brilliant job of making everyone think it's this sweet, romantic movie, and it's actually this terrifying psychological horror movie. Job's a good un!

And like I said response: actually, it's a sweetly terrifying romantic horror movie, and that's why I love it!

Because seriously? Sometimes this relationship shit is scary hard work, but I still think that it's worth every brain-frazzling second -- or at least, it bloody well can be!

Let's Call it Love

2009-08-15T17:50:00.000+01:00

Amazing footage of Sleater-Kinney playing at the Big Day Out festival in 2006:

Sleater-Kinney -- 'Jumpers' (live at the Big Day Out 2006)

Sleater-Kinney -- 'Wilderness' (live at the Big Day Out 2006)

Sleater-Kinney -- 'Rollercoaster' (live at the Big Day Out 2006)

Sleater-Kinney -- 'What's Mine Is Yours' (live at the Big Day Out 2006)

While we're talking about Sleater-Kinney, I really should point you all in the direction of Tim O'Neil's epic posts on Sleater-Kinney's last album, The Woods. You can read part 1 here, but it's the 2nd essay, with its copious samples from Jack Kirby's New Gods that's really got me excited. This is exactly the kind of silly/wonderful juxtaposition that this blog is built for, and I truly wish that I'd got there first!

Now, thinking about it, the pre-Woods Sleater-Kinney strike me as more of an old-school Marvel comics proposition -- their songs were sometimes bombastic, sometimes angsty, frequently agitated and often humorous, but they always felt like part of an ongoing indie punk story. The Woods, meanwhile, is definitely more like a solo Kirby comic -- the drums and guitars and vocals all rumble and howl with the brute force of a pure Kirby creation:

(Big Barda in action in Mister Miracle. Is Barda the only person other than Janet Weiss who could have played drums on The Woods? I think so.)

That said, I wouldn't have invoked quite the same Fourth World material that O'Neil does in his piece -- instead of the apocalyptic cleansing of the New Gods story O'Neil riffs on, I would have probably went for something from Mister Miracle. I think the root of this (minor) disagreement can be found in the penultimate paragraph of O'Neil's second post:

Even after everything has fallen apart, there is still life enough to fill a universe, hope enough to rage forever against the brutality and ignorance of the worst evils. The Woods is both life and anti-life, the will to fight and the desire to die. It's everything nasty and gorgeous, beautiful and scarred. You can't hope to escape unscathed, but you can't escape without feeling wonderfully alive for every harrowing minute.

Now this is stirring stuff, and it's almost right, but it doesn't quite match what I get from the record. The stuff about harrowing escape is dead on, but I just don't hear "the desire to die" anywhere on The Woods. Even when the band channel Black Sabbath via Joy Division in the brutalised rumble of 'Steep Air', I can't hear anything in the music which makes me think that the band actively desire this state.

O'Neil discussed this song back in his first post on this album, and here's what he had to say about it:

...unlike most examples of dark pop music, there's nothing theatrical or histrionic on display here. It's real, it's earned, it's heartbreaking.
I booked my ticked
Packed my bags
Flight is leaving
Our time has passed.
I'm tired of knocking on a door that just won't budge,
Locked out of the engine, It's a wheel that you have spun
But who's to say I don't have wings?
The problem is that the "wings" which present the only glimpse of hope at the end of "Steep Air" fly for the briefest of durations - that is, the four seconds it takes to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in "Jumpers".

What O'Neil fails to take into account is that sometime four seconds of hope is enough. Sure, it's the time it takes for the speaker in 'Jumpers' to hit the ground, but in that song as in 'Steep Air' the vocals strain towards the escape O'Neil mentioned, towards something better than the world they exist in. Anti-life is invoked constantly, but only so the band can show how to beat it, which is why Carrie's frantic screams of "You're not the only one" in the middle of 'Jumpers' are more important than either the blanked-out devastation of that song's verses or its final destination.

The desire for death? Creation through destruction? Nah, that's not what The Woods is all about, not for me anyway.

(A young Mister Miracle escapes anti-life to "find the universe!!!" Sorry for the crappy scan -- those big Fourth World books like to play rough, you know?)

What is it all about then? What do I hear in the mighty fucking racket of 'Let's Call it Love' if I don't hear universes collapsing? Well, it's a raw/sweaty/exhausting celebration of life, isn't it? It's all about working up the desire to face the horrors of your political, personal and musical history and live to do so again another day. That's what The Woods sounds like to me, and that's what Mr Miracle's all about, one ridiculous escape at a time:

(Ah, now that's romance! Image via Chris's Invincible Super-Blog.)

Strange Transmissions from Planet X

2009-08-14T19:26:00.000+01:00

Weird -- I woke up this morning and found the following mini-essay blinking away on the computer screen, just waiting for me to find it:

In/on Planet X, Grant Morrison began his work on Wildcats, The Authority, 52, All Star Superman, Batman and Final Crisis, but never managed to complete any of these projects for reasons both personal and editorial. The Planet X Morrison completed one issue of Wildcats, two issues of The Authority, eight issues of All Star Superman (four of them set on Bizarro world), thirteen issues of Batman (ten of which starred the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh), and five issues of Final Crisis. The book reports that Morrison used these works to explore his obsession with creating a “state of permanent crisis” in which everything and nothing mattered all the time — a striking if unsubtle comment on the nature of modern living.
The book on Planet X describes how this style was so unpopular that it led to the Morrison being kicked off of 52 after twenty issues, though it also concedes that his contributions to that title were maybe a little too obviously disruptive. Apparently, in every issue of Planet X’s hypothetical 52, Morrison asked the artists to draw Animal Man ogling Starfire and mumbling on about “groovy space tofu” while Adam Strange pondered some sort of cosmic absurdity in the background. Strange’s dialogue was largely interminable, apparently, but book notes that this very quality occasionally hinted at a queer sort of transcendence: "The glazed melons of Yeown5: how ripe they smell… how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe how ripe…” being one of the stranger examples cited.
Planet X’s author remains highly enthusiastic about these indulgences, however clumsy they might seem. The book’s final chapter focuses in on the last page of Final Crisis #4 (which is, of course, the same final page that graced issues #2 and #3 of the title, though most fans agreed that it felt much more poignant on the third time round). With the multiverse in ruins, the golden Superman at the heart of the sun blows his noses, blasting what’s left of “reality” to pieces in the process. Looking at the abyss and feeling its non-existent eyes staring back at him, Superman forces his body to explode, restarting the universe in his own image. The problem being that the “better yesterday” he imagines ends up being much the same as the one he’s just destroyed. Indeed, Planet X explains that issues #2-4 of Final Crisis are almost-indistinguishable — apparently this gave the series an “uncomfortable sort of zen glamour which the fanboys hated and the comix fans loved”.

Looks like we've got a mild Borges infestation round my way. The question is do I call in pest control or let the little buggers be?

Your Weekly "What The Fuck?!"

2009-08-14T01:04:00.000+01:00

* Ever wanted to see the lyrics to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'Two Tribes' framed in Jack Kirby-style text boxes? Me neither, but I'm glad that these pictures exist anyway (images created by Al Ewing and brought to my attention by Tom Ewing):

* Related: Tom Ewing covers 'Two Tribes' as part of his ongoing attempt every UK number #1 since 1952.

* Meanwhile, over on This Recording, Brian Deleeuw writes a nippy wee piece on Vibrational Match's favourite satirist, Chris Morris. While he's at it he also brings this bit of immortal tabloid hypocrisy to the Internet:

That's the Daily Star at its finest, folks, reacting to Morris' 2001 Brass Eye 'Paedogeddon!' special and underlining Morris' point in fine style.

* Anyone who hasn't already checked out David Fiore's new fiction blog really should do so as soon as possible. My favourite story so far is 'Le-charme-discret-de-Madame-Bourgeois', which erupts off the screen in a haze of champagne bubbles that dissapate before you have the time to taste them:

“The world is so beautifully mysterious,” Madame Bourgeois sighed.
Yes, I thought to myself, and mysteries are so much more beautiful when the plumbing works.

The other stories on the site are pretty great too -- there are no little epiphanies here, just brief but vivid accounts of Montreal life from a narrator who's apparently not Dave.

* Have you ever wanted to watch Radiohead cover Joy Division's 'Ceremony'? Well now you can:

(Thanks Sean!)

* Your crazy Quentin Tarantion quote/pic for today:

"Suddenly it was like, what the fuck? Am I too big for movies now? Are movies too small for me? I mean, what's that about?"

That's old QT there talking about his post Jackie Brown hiatus with the Observer magazine, which... is it just me or does this seem like a strange comment for a man's who spent the past decade publicly exploring his own trashy genre-fetishism? Please bear in mind that I ask this as a man who has a lot of love for Death Proof.

* Did you ever wish you could watch Marnie Stern and her bass player talk about John Cusack, Kill Rock Stars, AC/DC, coffee and romance while they do their laundry? Well now you can, through the magic of the Internet:

Oh yes!

Déjà Vu

2009-08-13T08:05:00.000+01:00

If I was going to write another one of my Filth essays, it would start like this:

Issues #7-8 of Grant Morrison and Chris Weston's deranged sci-fi series The Filth don’t tell a story so much as they show one wearing itself out. Events from the first two issues recur on a different scale and no one seems particularly unsettled by this queasy, stuttering duplication. Let's watch the gears grind down: Spartacus Hughes hijacks a pocket utopia and subjects it to his kinky shock doctrine... Greg Feely is dragged from his shameful little life to stop his former co-worker... Comrade Dmitri 9 ends the show by blowing Hughes’ head smooth off... Yeah, we’ve been here before.

The problem is that, yeah, we have been here before – as anyone who's read my first six essays on the topic would surely have noticed. The repetition in the story was provoking laziness in my writing, with each echo suggesting its own shortcut. I managed to incorporate this into the end of my essay on issue #6, but when I started writing about issues #7-8 the temptation to say the same damned things over and over again became a little too powerful.

Know that I can't get over you
'Cause everything I see is you
And I don't want no substitute
Baby I swear it's Déjà Vu
Know that I can't get over you
'Cause everything I see is you
And I don't want no substitute
Baby I swear it's Déjà Vu

(Beyonce, ‘Déjà Vu’)

So I've chosen to do something different, as you already know. I'm sorry if this has disappointed anyone, since these essays were always one of the most popular features on my blog, but much as I love The Filth I needed to get away from it for a while. I’ve definitely typed my way to a much better perspective on Grant Morrison’s comics, but that issue by issue thing? It certainly works, but that's the problem – there was no excitement in it for me anymore, just a slow, semi-analytical slog. It had started to feel like a job to me, basically, and a pretty goofy one at that.

That’s enough about me for now though -- let’s get back to The Filth, for the last time until the next time!

Repetition haunts the book, particularly in its middle section. As the checklist of replayed moments starts to stretch out, the dialogue draws red circles around these blatant repetitions (‘Bastard! He always deliberately misses first time.’) – just in case you thought that this breakdown signaled a failure of the imagination. That said, even once you accept that this is deliberate, you’ve still got to work out what Morrison and Weston are actually doing with this technique. It isn’t an attempt to take the reader down the information saturated autobahn with Kylie and Kraftwerk, though anyone who’s read Paul Morley’s Words and Music could probably create an alternate history in which Grant Morrison’s comics explore the degradation of pop culture by breaking up an recombining pop icons over and over again in the same but different ways. [1]

It's not repetition like Beckett used it either, though there’s something of Beckett’s sensibility in the sense of exhaustion that permeates the story from the start. [2] Which is unsurprising, really -- The Filth is all about the shit and waste of our lives, so it makes sense that it would have a sirt of bloodied weariness about it.

What stops The Filth from being an example/full-blown examination of cultural decay is the effect that this repetition has on the story. Greg Feely spends the first half of the series stumbling through a hall of mirrors, but when it becomes obvious that the mirrors are reflecting themselves, he bugs out and smashes the whole thing. [3]

For the reader, the sheer brazenness of Morrison and Weston's recycling is jarring enough to make you want Feely to trash the mirrors. Superhero readers are used to following formulaic stories, but even the most addled fanboy would do a double take at the start of issue #7, in which we watch a young woman buy tampons in a convenience store. The context and characters are different, but it’s such an overt replay of Greg’s embarrassing attempts to buy “specialist” magazines in issue #1 that you find yourself jarred right out of the narrative -- in a good way! [4]

As is made clear in 'SCHIZOTYPE' (aka issue #12 of The Filth), there's every chance that Greg's fantasy adventures are exactly that -- Greg's fantasy! Of course, Morrison being Morrison, this "twist" is instantly undermined by the last and final issue -- or is it?!

Either way, the sense that we've just watched Greg Feely spend far too much time staring at his own filth is hard to shake, particularly when artist Chris Weston literally rubs your face in it:

("Oh my god... it's full of shit!" You really need to click this one to see it at full size!)

Just before Feely falls over into a pile of rubbish, he writes a suicide note of sorts which includes the following passage of extreme self-doubt:

...they're coming to have me sectioned now.

I tried to explain about The Hand but all I got were blank stares and frantic scribbles in Department-issue notebooks.

They've got psychiatrists to say I'm the type who turns violent at the drop of a hat and I have to admit that, following the incident with the firearm at the chemists, they might be right.

They say I killed Tony with neglect and came up with the hand as an excuse for being an alcoholic pervert deep inside. I couldn't stand it if that were true... I'd be so ashamed of myself...

If Greg Feely's eye really has been so distant and inward turning (and seriously, just look at that fucking image, just look at that fucking eye!), isn't it a good thing that he starts to rage against Status Q, and that we're there with him?

Imagine if Beyonce finished singing 'Déjà Vu' only to realise that it wasn't about Jay-Z or anyone else except her. [5] What do you think she'd do then? She could Sasha Fierce it, of course, and she's certainly got the right a(r)mour to make a go of it (that glove!). But sometimes that's not enough (see lena on Beyonce in this post), and sometimes your 'Freakum Dress' is no good either, so you've got to try something a little bit different.

What does this mean for Greg Feely, given that even his best armour turns rotten against his skin? Well, it means kicking against the pricks, for better or worse. It's only a start, but that counts for something, because the alternative -- continuing to stare at your own shit for all eternity -- is a particularly ugly way to let the fear win.

[1] This attentive reader of Morrison and Morley would write a book on the subject, which they would call Planet X. This book would imagine a Grant Morrison very similar to the one we know, except that once he’d completed Seven Soldiers of Victory, this fictionalised Grant Morrison would never complete another comic book story again. Weirdly, this means that the Planet X Morrison never wrote Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye, which is a shame because it has a lot of that Grant Morrison's key themes in it.

[2] You know, I really can't pass up this opportunity to ask you all to watch Beckett's Play again and again and again and again and again and again.

[3] For all my bluster, I'm still repeating myself here. I started talking about The Filth using broken mirror metaphors in a post I wrote back in December, where I said:

Why put the reader through the hall of mirrors at all?

Preparing possible answers, dot dot dot:

* Because there's always a bigger, stranger picture hidden somewhere in the smaller one.
* Because there's always a mundane root to even the craziest fantasy.
* Because escapism is always tainted by the exact things it seeks to escape from.
* Because it's not always about us, you, him or even her.
* Because something is wrong with all of this.
* Because none of this is true, except when it is.

Sometimes it's easy not to see any of this, to get stuck in one (un)reality. That's why you need to read something like The Filth every now and again... to see clearer, creepier and more unlikely truths, even as the possibilities narrow down around you. What do you do with this vision? Well, I don't know about you, but most likely I'd feel the urge to start smashing some mirrors. And what do you do with all that broken glass? Well, that's a question that's half-answered in the latter parts of this series.

My justification for this? Well, you've got to set the mirrors up just right to get the most out of trashing them! Why else would issues #9 and #10 of The Filth take such strange diversions before the full-on assault on Status Q that is issues #11-#13?

[4] Thankfully, artist Weston always keeps his eye on the needs of the story, so you don't have to.

Seriously though -- for all its occasional stiffness Weston’s work is full of the right details, the artist’s efforts well applied rather than squandered on meaningless squiggles. Take, for example, the two corner shop scenes I previously mentioned. The first one introduces us to Greg, the main character of the piece, but it paints and uncomfortably creepy picture in which our protagonist is more of a suspect than a hero:

The scene which mirrors this introduction is carefully constructed to align our sympathies with a doomed background character called Peri:

The contrast in the staging is simple but effective, from the choice to frame Feely in CCTV-vision onwards. Instead of tittering school children, you’ve got masked men in the doorway. Instead of pornographic “essentials”, you’ve got basic sanitary products. And instead of an almost archetypal creepy, middle-aged bachelor, you've vague but inoffensive young woman.

Still, this vagueness is the key to the real distinction that’s being set up here: no matter how much effort has been put into making Greg look gross, even more effort has been put into defining him. Those thick, inky crags on his face are practically half the story, and not matter how dodgy the story makes him look, Weston never stops inhabiting every line of Greg’s face:

The importance of this sort of basic attachment can’t be understated. Morrison’s fantasies trend to overwhelm the reader with quick changes of perspective and wonderfully absurd details, but when he's on form he never takes his eye off of the emotional details. It helps when the artists help the reader do the same, instead of hindering the process like some of Morrison’s lesser collaborators do.

[5] If you're wondering why the hell I keep mentioning hyped up pop starlets, try thinking about it this way: a little bit of Kylie, a little bit of Beyonce and a whole lot of alcohol and I'm convinced that I'm invincible until my body decides to remind me that I'm not.

Required Reading: Andrew Hickey on the NHS

2009-08-13T00:18:00.001+01:00

Because someone needed to make these points and Andrew Hickey has made them very well:

An Open Letter To My American Friends About The NHS
By Andrew Hickey

...
Many of your politicians and journalists have been saying things like “Ted Kennedy wouldn’t get treatment for his brain tumour in the UK because of his age” (a Republican senator called Chuck Grassley said that). Sarah Palin said that in the UK babies with Down’s Syndrome would have to go before a ‘death panel’. And so on. I’m sure you’ve all heard many claims like this yourself.

These claims are lies, pure and simple. They’re not ‘opinions’ that people can disagree about, they’re not things that can be debated, they’re not honest mistakes, they’re out-and-out lies.

Please go read the whole thing if you haven't already. Unlike most of the things I talk about here this issue is actually important.

"Oh shut up Owen, you hot mess..."

2009-08-12T21:14:00.000+01:00

Final Fantasy live @ the Classic Grand, Glasgow, Wednesday 5th August 2009

Ten steps to achieving Final Fantasy with Owen Pallett:

Accept that these things take time. Like Pallett says, his one man + violin + keyboard + looping pedals show is “50% preparation, and then 50% money shot; just one of the ways it’s like a porno.”
Understand that the build-up is often every bit as good as the payoff, which is why Pallett’s joke doesn’t quite ring true.
Acknowledge the fact that, actually, Pallett is a bit of a tease, and that his habit of cutting off his songs just as they peak is cheeky but cute.
Watch ‘He Poos Clouds’ come together in front of you and realise that Mike Barthel severely underrated Pallet’s music in his otherwise excellent review(s) of the second Final Fantasy album.
Hear the connection between the sawing climax of 'This Lamb Sells Condos' and the overwhelmingly specific combination of arrangement and emotion that characterises songs by artists like Joanna Newsom and Marnie Stern.
Stop yourself from thinking about how the He Poos Clouds material is all about the way we use pop trash to understand our lives. Stop comparing Pallet's obliquely literary treatment of this theme to the relative naturalism of Scott Pilgrim or the more bullish approach of Phonogram. Music is magic, just like Jem said, but this ritual won't work without an attentive audience.
Appreciate the many new songs that Pallett performs, which are “Experiments in extreme polyphony,” apparently.
Laugh when a violin loop recorded during one song is accidentally activated during the next.
Understand that chaos is part of the magic tonight, as Pallett all but admits when he jokes that his ultimate fantasy is to be described as "hot mess" on stage.
Watch a member of the audience jokingly throw Pallett's words back at him (see: the title of this post); watch him request suggestions for an encore only to debate the quality of his own songs with a woman in the front row ("I actually think that 'The Butcher' is secretly a terrible song," he claims); watch all of this and realise that Pallett has made his low-key geek music seem far sexier and sillier and more charming than you would ever have imagined possible.

If you want you can even watch some videos of the performance in glorious side-on-vision afterwards, but don't mistake that for part of the ritual. You really did have to be there to get the full effect, as is so often the case with these things...

Dirty Thoughts from Plok's Comments Section

2009-08-12T11:20:00.001+01:00

Okay, so I've not quite got back into the swing of this whole blogging thing yet. Right now I'm still clearing my throat, so when Plok put out a call, I just had to respond!

Trouble is, I ended up singing along to a slightly different tune! Plok imagined a bunch of comic book collaborations made possible by sinister technology and asked people to fill in the details; my response was sort of in line with the premise, except when it wasn't:

I was going to hold off from doing this, but it’s too much fun!

Let’s take this too far, shall we?

Ditko/Morrison – a psychotic early 60s New York period piece starring a lousy, fourth rate Jackson Pollok rip-off artist. Ditko would think of it as being a brutal morality tale wherein his protagonist’s gloopy, technicolour amorality is crushed by a series of encounters with the AA-Agents, who break him down and make him see the world AS IT REALLY IS (i.e. in harsh, jagged black & white). Morrison’s scripting would subtly amplify the horrific absurdity implicit in this premise — the queasy nature of which is already clear in every line of the artwork.

Unfortunately, Ditko would soon clock Morrison’s agenda, and the work would most likely remain unfinished, never to be reprinted again.

Gaiman/Kochalka – this requires a little bit of that “what if?” flavour, I think.

What if Gaiman’s post Sandman career had been one slow trip round the u-bend?

What if his attempts at becoming Neil Gaiman: Gentleman Novelist had been if not a complete disaster then something close to one? And what if his return to comics had been even less successful, to the extent that Marvel and DC were unsure if they wanted to touch his work, Image were weary of him, and even Avatar were starting to feel burned after a couple of quiet failures.

This is fantastical stuff, I know, but bear with me while I make it even more fantastical!

Let’s say that while all of this has been going on, James Kochalka has become a genuine, massively unlikely SUPERSTAR, and that his TV show (James Kochalka Superstar) is pulling in Hannah Montana numbers. Yeah, madness, I know, but let’s all just keep going and see where it takes us. (Count yourselves lucky that I’ve not described the Richard Linklater directed feature movie — which would be the missing link between School of Rock and Waking Life, naturally!)

Despite his newfound fame, Kochalka’s still churning out those sketchbook diaries, and he still has some pals in the comics world, including Eddie Campbell, who lets him know about Neil’s plight.

Kochalka’s sympathetic, but there’s an evil whimsy in him, so this is what he proposes: Marvel will publish a comic written by Gaiman and drawn by him: this comic will be a potential big seller, due to his name and fame, but it will also be a hard sell, because Kochalka will insist that it’s called CUNTS!.

The story itself will be pretty fucking Gaiman, but with a twist: it takes place in a city within a glass bottle that’s tucked into the back pocket of a Glasgow youth, a magical world of freedom and possibility, where everyone poos out sentient clouds of purest hate. It will star George Bush and Tony Blair in exile, but will eschew direct political satire in favour of scatological excess.

Every issue will end with one of the two exiles saying of the other: “Fuck me, what a CUNT!”

Biggest comic of all time? I think so.

Shame I needed to push past the guidelines to make it happen!

These next few are a little less filled out, because my batteries are draining fast today:

Veitch/Steranko – these chaps could collaborate on creepy modern spy story called Ghost World, in which a cute, disaffected young woman carries out vicious, horrible acts in the name of her masters and tries (half-successfully) to stave off the rapprochements offered by friends and family members from her previous civilian life. Think Grosse Pointe Blank crossed with Spook Country, but with lots of unnecessary formal pyrotechnics going off all over the page.

Byrne/Sim — yeah, I think this pair could have a blast disrespectfully adapting China Mieville’s Iron Council. Or, shit… could I handle their version of The Left Hand of Darkness? Could I handle Dave Sim’s post-comic essays on the topic? Probably not, but the evil part of me would like to see how it turned out.

Englehart/Adams — I’ve got to admit, this one has me stumped, probably because I’m not too familiar with their work.

Can I suggest that Steve Aylett and Duncan Fegredo’s Kafka biography instead? Or how about Mike Allred and Ursula LeGuin’s Wonder Woman? Too obvious? Maybe, but I’d still read ‘em!

Miller/McCarthy/Conway — this trio could happily butcher Moorcock’s multiverse of fantasy characters, I’m sure. It’d be a mess, naturally, but it would have waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more life in it than any comic book universe out there at the moment.

Plus the existence of a Miller/McCarthy Elric would echo back through time and make an eleven-year-old David very, very happy indeed!

There are lots of other good responses in that comments thread -- go check it out, if you haven't already.

More Gillenism (plus a little bit about Owen Pallett)

2009-08-10T12:24:00.000+01:00

From the Mindless Ones' excellent interview with Phonogram writer Kieron Gillen:

My favourite thing about Scott Pilgrim, and it’s my favourite comic of the millennium, is that it’s about how humans process culture. The idea that how we perceive art is how we reimagine ourselves. The bit that I find transcendentally beautiful in Scott 4 is the bit where he gets the Power of Love.. the way it makes perfect, perfect sense that the sword comes out of his chest, obviously that’s where he’s gonna get the sword from. And that only makes sense if you’ve processed that many video games…

On a similar note, does anyone remember this Mike Barthel piece on Final Fantasy's He Poos Clouds?

...not only do individual songs productively tease out the metaphorical implications of the individual [Dungeons & Dragons] schools, but over the course of the album a lot of parallels are drawn between the fictional settings of not only D&D itself but nerd culture as a whole, and the reality in which those geeks live, a juxtaposition that can be roughly summed up as "going to a sci-fi convention." That Pallett is as interested in nerd culture as he is in D&D itself is probably most blatant in "I'm Afraid of Japan," since, after all, Japan technically has not a damn thing to do with D&D, but it has a lot to do with modern nerd culture. But the exploration is everywhere, from the semi-ironic casting of anti-gentrification efforts as an epic struggle in "This Lamb Sells Condos" to the melding of dates at the shooting range and Anne McCaffery in "The Arctic Circle" to the application of magical language to dieting in "Do You Love?"

What about this one?

Pallett's poetry (intentionally) transmogrifies Dungeons & Dragons imagery ("And then as an apprentice/He took a Drowish mistress/Who bestowed upon his youthfulness a sense of Champagne Chic/Oh seduction, his seduction to the world of construction/Now his mind will start to wander when he's not at a computer") into Chris Ware's closely observed bathos crossed with Stephin Merritt's wittily theatrical realism. The result modernizes nerd mockery into a literary sincerity: best lyrics of the year.

All of this will be important if I ever get around to writing about the (excellent) Final Fantasy gig I saw last week.

Is This the Best-Worst Joke or the Worst-Worst Joke I've Heard All Year?

2009-08-10T09:46:00.000+01:00

From this Barbelith thread on the Eleventh Doctor and his new assistant:

I'm just wondering how Karen Gillen is going to find the time to keep writing Phonogram whilst acting as the Doctor's companion. Then again, Gary Trudeau did keep up with Doonesbury while he was Prime Minister of Canada, so I suppose it's not impossible.

Jack Fear, ladies and germs -- he's got a million of 'em. Just don't ask for them all at once, you don't deserve it!

(Just in case there's any confusion: Jack Fear's obviously a smart, funny guy, and I'm not having a go at him here. It's just that this particular bad joke is so almost-kind-sorta-genius that it makes my head hurt!)

The Real Question is: Can the Internet Still Handle My Salty Foot Stench?

2009-08-09T14:53:00.000+01:00

Another way of saying what I was trying to say here, via Arab Strap's 'There Is No Ending':

If you can love my growing gut
My rotten teeth and greying hair
Then I can guarantee I'll do
The same as long as you can bear

Yeah, it's a love song for saps with smelly feet, but it's pretty amazing for all that. Especially the bit at the end which invokes a familiar parade of bogymen only to dismiss them with ease:

Bullies, burglars, paedophiles
Bird flu and passive smoke
(They're coming!)
Volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves
Heart disease and strokes
(They're coming!)
Terrorists with homemade poison
And factions everywhere
(They're coming!)
They're drinking in the street
And they could steal your home
And I don't care!

This is one of those songs which says, "Fuck fretting about the end of the world, we've got each other for as long as you want that to last", though it does so with a considerable amount of gruff charm. In some ways this is a soothing antidote to the constant panic and blathering 'Oh Dear-ism' of the press, but it also reminds me of the way Seaguy walks into a series of ever-smaller frames as he walks into romance at the end of Slaves of Mickey Eye.

Of course, David Fiore is right -- the decision to drop your defenses and team-up with someone is an important one, whether you're a comic book character or not. What's more, Cameron Stewart's art sells this idea in a page in which action poses are dropped in favor of battered intimacy:

On the page that follows this image, the panel barrier between these two characters disappears and the story comes to a halt. But given that this sequence occurs just after a sinister authority figure has asked Seaguy "what must we do to make you happy?!", the question remains: is this also the end of Seaguy's engagement with the outside world?

Well, maybe, but it doesn't have to be -- the important thing is that we don't lose sight of why our connections matter to us, why right now matters to us. It's not enough to guarantee anything big, but it's a decent place to start so long as you're willing to extrapolate. Remember: this isn't the end, of Seaguy or of this blog. That's in the future, sure, but for now we move on, to new adventures.

That little guy? Don't worry about that little guy. He's waiting, but you can't spend all your time worrying about Death if you want to get anything done.

(The above images are from Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #3, by Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart et al. 'There is No Ending' is the last song on the last Arab Strap album, which was called The Last Romance, fittingly enough. Personally, I prefer to hear it at the end of their posthumous Ten Years of Tears collection, but maybe I'm just weird that way.)

This Blog is a Lie!

2009-08-09T12:33:00.000+01:00

("And so we return and begin again," from issue #1 of The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, Steve Yeowell and co. Click the image to fall in and begin again. Pull the pin.)

This blog was built to self destruct, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Instead of going out with a bang, it just stopped while I spent months trying to salvage a plan I came up with in July 2008.

Here's the thing -- instead of helping me, this plan ended up curdling my thoughts as they formed. I've spent a crazy amount of time this year writing and rewriting my "final" Filth essay, spilling tens of thousands of words on the screen, almost none of them worth the effort, almost none of them fit for even the least polite of company.

This leaves me with 2 options: (1) ditch the plan and start writing online again, or (2) kill my blog and stick to writing fiction that no one reads.

I've decided to go with option (1), with all due apologies to anyone who was looking forward to reading the next few entries in my This Blog Was Built To Self Destruct series. I'll explain the rational behind this in more detail soon, and I do still intend to write more about The Filth, the old Simon Furman Transformers comics, Mogwai etc, but I need to loosen up a little if I'm going to get any of this done.

So... yeah, I'm sorry, but if you can put up with my awkward writing style, haphazard scheduling, rampant egotism and puerile love of footnotes then I'll try to make sure there's something worth reading on here at least once a week. No promises, but I'm still game if you are?

Los Campesinos! -- 'Death to Los Campesinos!'

2009-03-16T10:25:00.000Z

(Via Crackle)

Pantheon Weekend -- Roots Manuva

2009-03-15T17:31:00.001Z

Taskmaster burst the bionic zit-splitter/ Breakneck speed we drown ten pints of bitter
We lean all day and some say that ain't productive/ That depend upon the demons that you're stuck with

Pantheon Weekend -- Will Ashon

2009-03-15T17:24:00.000Z

Our secession, it should be immediately apparent, is a secession
like no other. Not only do we have no territory, we deny
our very physicality. And we secede not from a State but
from a whole set of social relations. Still, we claim it as a
secession, a rejection of all authorities. The ghosts of your
conscience, you fight us, we haunt you.

Pantheon Weekend -- Dave Gibbons

2009-03-15T17:10:00.000Z

I was a Mod, I did have the clothes, I did have the scooter, I did have the hair.

Pantheon Weekend -- Battles

2009-03-14T19:47:00.000Z

It’s a Connecticut thing...

Pantheon Weekend -- Marnie Stern

2009-03-14T12:15:00.000Z

And the heat/ and the beat/ It was good/ It was good
And the beat/ and the beat/ It goes on as It should

Pantheon Weekend -- Sleater-Kinney

2009-03-14T12:05:00.000Z

I'd set your heart on fire but arson is no way
to make a love burn brighter.
(When you saw me, on that first day
said I'd blossom under your care).

Lust For Life

2009-03-14T00:37:00.000Z

(From the bigsunnyd archive!)

I can't believe that life's so complex
When I just want to sit here and watch you undress
I can't believe that life's so complex
When I just want to sit here and watch you undress

This is love, this is love
That I'm feeling
This is love, this is love
That I'm feeling
This is love
That I'm feeling

Does it have to be a life full of dread
I wanna chase you round the table, I wanna touch your head
Does it have to be a life full of dread
I wanna chase you round the table, I wanna touch your head

This is love, this is love
That I'm feeling
This is love, this is love
That I'm feeling
This is love
That I'm feeling

I can't believe that the axis turns on suffering
When you taste so good
I can't believe that the axis turns on suffering
When my head burns

Love, love, love
That I'm feeling
This is love, this is love
That I'm feeling
This is love, love, love
That I'm feeling

Even in the summer
Even in the spring
You can never get too much of
A wonderful thing

You're the only story that I never told
You're my dirty little secret, wanna keep you so
You're the only story that's never been told
You're my dirty little secret, wanna keep you so

Come on out, come on over, help me forget
Keep the walls from falling as they're tumbling in
Come on out, come on over, help me forget
Keep the walls from falling on me, tumbling in
Keep the walls from falling as they're tumbling in

This is love, this is love
That I'm feeling
This is love, this is love
That I'm feeling
This is love, this is love
That I'm feeling
This is love, love, love
That I'm feeling

(PJ Harvey -- "This Is Love")

Musically 'This Is Love' is almost ridiculously direct. The chundering, distorted guitar part (a couple of chords strung together with ridiculous swagger and panache) and thumping drums combine with Polly Jean's booming vocals in a way that--to my ears at least--recalls some of lggy Pop's earlier material. But it is only almost ridiculously direct because (as with a lot of those old Iggy tunes) there's more going on than immediately meets the eye, or ear, as the case may be. Witness the piano part and second guitar line that weave through the song as it goes on, adding sonic texture without getting in the way of the brute kick of the main guitar and vocal parts.

The lyrics function in a similar way, being joyously charged and conveying an absolutely dead-on sense of being lost in a rush of lust and emotions while simultaneously acknowledging the fact that this always seem hard to reconcile with the complexity of life in general (it's all in the first line I guess!). There's a sense of something that's not that far away from desperation around the edges of the song, but the key to 'This is Love' is that there's still a sense of utter invigoration here. Just check out the line "Come on out, come on over, help me forget/ Keep the walls from falling as they're tumbling in". That's a pretty anxious lyric, but it's blown away by that last chorus where the second guitar circles around the rest of the tune and everything just sounds really huge and amazing. These kind of moments, experiences, and relationships can be utterly transcendent -- they won't make everything go away, but they can put some fucking spring in your step*. Harvey has written many more complicated lyrics, but it doesn't matter because this song nails something that is both simultaneously obvious and nuanced in its own punchy way. It feels genuinely triumphant, and I love it for that.

*And I'm not just talking about being in love or having great sex here. Don't get me wrong: this is a great big sexy bastard of a tune and sex and love are obviously what the lyrics are about, but there's more to joy than that, and I think the way the exultant thrill of the song wins out over the more difficult elements is applicable all over the shop.

The Sea

2009-03-14T00:30:00.000Z

(Via Carrie Brownstein)

Also: that Kevin Shields/Patti Smith album was awesome, wasn't it? I've got to spend more time with that sometime soon.

PJ Harvey -- 'You Come Through'

2009-03-14T00:24:00.000Z

From this distance, Uh Huh Her looks like an unusually blurry and unsatisfying PJ Harvey album, but there are a couple of tracks on there that still sound frighteningly intimate live. This is one of them. I can't say anything about it that isn't already there, in the tiny cracks where drums and voice and guitar fail to meet.

You come through for me
You come true for me
You be well for me
You come through for me

Sometimes it really is that simple.

A Simple Distinction

2009-03-13T23:52:00.000Z

Journalists of the world: PJ Harvey and Patti Smith are not really all that similar. I understand that you're lazy, and that they both have dark hair and striking cheekbones and strong artistic personalities, but this needs to stop.

For future reference:

Patti Smith's best music sounds like the work of a beat poet on a rock'n'roll rampage. Your obvious reference points would be Blake, Ginsberg, and any number of classic/excessive sixties rock acts, but feel free to go deeper than that if it's not too much trouble.

PJ Harvey's best music is far more constrained and brutal than all that -- whether she's playing the piano, vamping like a cabaret she-devil, or beating the shit out of a guitar, her performances are always far more sculpted than Smith's work. Even at her most elemental, Harvey never sounds like she's pushing for rock'n'roll transcendence; instead, she forces her intense performances into very specific spaces, twisting her intensity into startling new forms every time she takes to the stage. I could understand the confusion if every PJ Harvey album sounded like Stories From The City..., because certain tracks on that record share a sense of joyous abandon with parts of Smith's ouvre. That Stories... isn't hugely representative of Harvey's aesthetic only enhances my sense that journalists who make this comparison are not trying very hard.

Thanks for your time.
Love,
David

Who Watches The Watchmen? And Who Really Still Gives a Damn?

2009-03-13T18:34:00.000Z

Or -- "Disappointingly clean thoughts from other people's comments sections!"

Ok, so that final Filth essay still needs some work, and I was going to avoid talking about Watchmen -- The Movie! but I seem to have spent a good thousand words publicly thinking about the film already so fuck it.

David Fiore posted a short piece praising two of the more controversial aspects of the Watchmen movie: the casting of Ozymandias and the altered ending.

Here's what I had to say in response:

Hmmmm... not sure I can agree with you on the ending of the movie Dave. I mean, it is more politically interesting than the book's finale (just!), but like you say, Watchmen was never worth reading for the politics.

To me, the "clean", bloodless nature of the movie’s finale contrasted a little too harshly with the hyped-up, 300-esque gore of the preceding action sequences, throwing the whole story's momentum into reverse.

The comic's Veidt definitely is "a ranting lunatic with a squid bomb", but that works in context because I think he's supposed to look stupid and terrifying at the end of the story. I've never felt like his scheme was supposed to be plausible -- quite the opposite in fact. I think it’s supposed to look like a desperate, temporary fix that ended a lot of lives, a reality that the opening splash pages of issue #12 just plain won’t let you escape. (Dave Gibbons, you are a hero – never forget it!)

Like the big blue guy says, “Nothing ever ends”. Or, hey, like the fetish model says in the movie, but whatever.

Taken this way, the comic is very firmly on the side of the minor, human characters + Dan & Laurie. Its formal intricacies are more than just displays of cleverness – they’re there to generate a sort of ornate, preposterously intricate soap-opera framework in which all of these little lives are connected and all of them matter. It’s an invitation to see the potentially kinder end of Dr Manhattan’s perceptive spectrum, where human life is so damned unlikely that you have to form an interest, even an attachment to it.

Never mind “who watches the watchmen?” – the real question is “who watches? And why?” Thinking about it this way, Dr M’s real idiocy (murdering aside!) is in his inability to comprehend his own role in observing all those martian landscapes, and to extrapolate the importance of his feelings beyond his own path in space/time. In fact, come to think of it, this is also why he’s shown killing people so freely at various points in the book and the movie – he’s an intellectual giant but he lacks the basic understanding of other people's perspectives that's necessary to form a moral code (“the morality of my actions escapes me”, etc).

Anyway, like you said, the Dan/Laurie stuff definitely needed to be expanded in the movie (and you are so, so right about the coffee scene!). Still, the ‘Hallelujah’ sex session aside, the film’s soapy treatment of their interactions didn’t strike me as being too “off”. Soap operas are all about ridiculous attachment, after all, and this is where those characters look “stronger” than their colleagues in the comic – they’re just far more interested in actual, real stuff you know? They seem genuinely fixated on people, animals, and kinky costume funtime, and I can get with all of that! They’re far from perfect, but their dysfunctions seem less psychopathic than, say Rorschach/Jon/Veidt’s to me. Dave Gibbons needs some major props here again, because he sells D&L’s body language in a way that the actors in this film just can’t – this is true across the board, of course, but in the absence of the many minor characters, I feel it most here.

Which takes me back to the film’s 300-style action – it makes the movie Dan & Laurie look a bit more wantonly brutal than they did in the book, what with all the slow-mo neck stabbing and limb-snapping. Given the kinky nature of their coupling, it ends up seeming like they get off on maiming people, which… maybe there’s a bit of that in the source material, but the movie renders violence as pornography right up until the final massacre, and I find that weirdly unsettling.

You could probably argue that the ending is bloodless because it’s beyond such fetishised fun, but I don’t know that this makes the movie any better for me. In fact, it might make the sense that the movie is built to support Ozy’s plan seem all the stronger...

As for the actor who played Ozymandias, I can see how he fits your reading of the film, but I didn’t get much genuine remorse from him… just a toned down, slightly sleazy arrogance. I found that slightly less interesting than the comic Ozy’s mixture of bland charm and idiotically hateful planning, which (again) is reliant on my reading of the ending as an indictment of Veidt’s presumed superiority. Without the blandness, Ozymandias just seems like a creepy savior, which… I’d agree that this is slightly less boring on a political level, but the comic’s Ozymandias seems to think he’s way smarter and more grown up than he really is. I don’t get that from the movie, and as a result the whole thing ends up seeming a lot more in thrall to our bloody-handed saviors than I’d like it to be.

All that said, I think I enjoyed the movie, even though I know it was terrible in places. I’ll see it again, if only because I’m infinitely fascinated by things that don’t work in big, pointy ways.

Since I wasn't sure if I'd rambled on enough already, I made sure to re-iterate my points a couple of minutes later:

The short version of my previous comment:

I'm not sure that the ethical question the movie poses is...

(a) well set up

or

(b) more interesting than what I take to be the argument in favour of life that exists in the comic.

Also: the movie made me miss the pirate comic, probably because it supports my reading! Pesky runtime sapping fight scenes...

This prompted David Fiore to rejoin the discussion and clarify his argument with grand style:

absolutely David!

the film deeply deeply violates the spirit of the book (which is a horror story about human impotence, in all of its forms) in its final reel

and there's no question that Gibbons delivered that horror in a powerful way that almost redeems Moore's (to me) knee-jerk reluctance to confront the realities of political foundation (by making Ozymandias--and the Black Freighter guy--into Poe-style madmen who rip out the world's eyeball because they can't face it any more)

it's just my good fortune that I always felt that Watchmen's take on superpolitics paled in comparison to Squadron Supreme's--and that Snyder appears to have fused the latter's decisionist ethics onto the body of the book (while jettisoning pretty much all of the psychological complexity of the Moore/Gibbons' truly human characters)

Even aesthetically, I think it was the right thing to do, because I don't think the film could have done the things that the book does to give us the human-eye view of the power struggle that provides the majority of its plot points (although they COULD have taken a little more trouble to complexify the Dan/Laurie sex stuff--and my guess is that Snyder didn't want to do THAT either... he's clearly a typical fanboy in that regard)

ah well--at the very least--the film is providing a lot of fodder for discussion... to me, the two texts work wonderfully in dialogue with each other--Moore/Gibbons give us real people at the mercy of the "Lords of Life"... while Snyder gives us those Lords (idealism, objectivity, "deontological ethics," cynicism--aka Veidt, Manhattan, Rorschach, Comedian) straight up, and places each of them in collision with themselves...

Realising that I was already in too deep to pretend I had nothing to say, I opened my mouth and let the words tumble out:

Damn you for making me write about this film - I fully intended to hold off until the smoke had cleared, but you seem to have sent my brain into action prematurely.

I'm a big Squadron Supreme fan too – it's always struck me as being a far more "intellectual" comic than Watchmen in some ways. At the very least, SS is a lot more committed to its political ideas than the Moore/Gibbons comic, but it uses the Marvel house style to explore them so it seems a lot less sophisticated at first.

Moore is very clever in the way he constructs Watchmen, but as ever his smartest move is to identify the strengths of his collaborator – Gibbons is the hero of the book, and it is his perspective (rather than Dr Manhattan's) that gives an objective sense of weight and importance to even the book’s smallest characters and motifs.

Compared to these very tactile pleasures, both Watchmen – The Movie! and Squadron Supreme risk seeming a little airy, but you could argue that Snyder uses the current 300/Sin City derived “comic book movie” to stage his ethical play, just like Gruenwald adapted his normal writing style to sneak Squadron’s big questions out there. The problem being (from my POV, obviously!) that Snyder’s current style is both tiresome and not particularly suited to these aims.

Still – it is interesting to consider the movie as some sort of grotesque Moore/Gruenwald/Miller/Gibbons/Snyder hybrid… it’s the revenge of the 80s, Frankenstein style, and now it WONT STOP ATTACKING MY BRAIN!

Good times.

And I'm spent, or at least I'm done making chicken kievs with bullshit where the chicken should be...

Lest anyone think I'm a moaning fanboy, let it be known that there are far less faithful versions of the movie that would have been way more exciting to me.

Also: David Hayter is a turd.

Pantheon Weekend -- Cameron Stewart

2009-03-08T15:16:00.000Z

I hate to see you like this, but my sympathy is only going to last as long as you keep your mouth shut.

Pantheon Weekend -- Michel Gondry

2009-03-08T14:12:00.000Z

We were overwhelmingly outnumbered by beautiful muscular and sexy communist girls.

Pantheon Weekend -- Chuck D

2009-03-08T11:19:00.000Z

Impeach the president/Pullin' out the ray-gun
Zap the next one/ I could be you're Sho-gun
Suckers/ Don't last a minute
Soft and smooth/ I ain't with it
Hardcore/ Rawbone like a razor
I'm like a lazer/ I just won't graze ya
Old enough to raise ya/ So this will faze ya

Pantheon Weekend -- David Fiore

2009-03-08T11:09:00.000Z

You leap from the mirrored stage, to conclusions: "If this plot hangs together, so do we..."

Pantheon Weekend -- Kathleen Hanna

2009-03-08T09:13:00.000Z

I'm a self-fulfilling porno queen -- yeah
I mimic out your every fucking fantasy yeah! yeah!
And now, and now, in my head I'm on my knees
Oh baby, why can't I ever get my! sugar?

Pantheon Weekend -- Fugazi

2009-03-08T08:26:00.000Z

And I won't make the same mistakes
(Because I know)
Because I know how much time that wastes
(And function)
Function is the key
Inside the waiting room

Pantheon Weekend -- Samantha Morton and Kathleen McDermott

2009-03-07T14:09:00.000Z

It's the same crapness everywhere, so stop dreaming.

Pantheon Weekend -- Angela Carter

2009-03-07T13:28:00.000Z

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

Pantheon Weekend -- Roland Barthes

2009-03-07T12:27:00.000Z

tel / thus
Endlessly required to define the loved object, and suffering from the uncertainties of this definition, the amorous subject dreams of a knowledge which would let him take the other as he is, thus and no other, exonerated from any adjective.

Pantheon Weekend -- Steve Albini

2009-03-07T11:55:00.000Z

This is a sad fuckin' song
We'll be lucky if I don't bust out crying

Pantheon Weekend -- PJ Harvey

2009-03-07T11:06:00.000Z

You're the only story that I never told
You're my dirty little secret, wanna keep you so

Pantheon Weekend -- Mclusky

2009-03-07T10:52:00.000Z

Stolen from Sean Witzke, this is a tumblr-baiting catalog of people who kick my ass. Regular feature!

All of your friends are cunts/ And you mother is a ballpoint pen thief

"In the end/ Everybody wins/ As long as we remember there's a reason for incredible wealth/ Incredible luck"

2009-03-06T21:11:00.000Z

(From Seaguy, by Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart)

In case anyone hasn't read it yet, here's an excerpt from Charlie Brooker's recent rant about the state of British politics:

It's all over. The politicians have finally shut us out of their game for good and we have nowhere left to turn. We're not part of their world any more. We don't even speak the same language. We're the ants in their garden. The bacteria in their stools. They have nothing but contempt for us. They snivel and lie and duck questions on torture - on torture, for Christ's sake - while demanding we respect their authority. They monitor our every belch and fart, and insist it's all for our own good.
Straw wrote, "If people were angels there would be no need for government . . . But sadly people are not all angels." That rather makes it sound as though he believes politicians aren't mere people. Maybe they're the gods of Olympus. Maybe that's why they're in charge.
Thing is, they could get away with this bullshit while times were good, while people were comfortable enough to ignore what was happening; when people were focusing on plasma TVs and iPods and celebrity gossip instead of what the politicians were doing - not because they're stupid, but because they know a closed shop when they see one. But now it looks as if those times are at an end, and more and more of us are pulling the dreampipes from the back of our skulls, undergoing a negative epiphany; blinking into the cold light of day.

There's more righteous anger at the link above.

Also well worth reading is Millennium Elephant's response, which I found via Andrew Hickey. The Elephant moves beyond Brooker's perfectly expressed rage and starts pondering what this means for those attempting to do something different from within a political party (for the Elephant, the Lib Dems).

The Elephant also takes a shot at Brooker for expressing these concerns in the pages of a newspaper that supports the Labour government. This is a sticky question for me, because I do agree that the media are complicit in maintaining the fantasy of THE WAY THINGS WORK*, and this complicity makes me groggy with rage. That said, for all that the comparison between dissenting media types and dissenting backbenchers is brutal and cutting, I don't find it entirely convincing in the end. In both cases, I can certainly empathise with people trying to work against the dominant pull of the organisations they work in. It's easy to mock those who claim to be "fighting the system from the inside" (Ghost World does this so well that I feel no need to compete), but (1) I'm Scottish, and I know far too many bewildered Labour supporters who're still trying to comprehend how far their party has strayed from their values, and (2) I think the responsibilities of a published essayist and a politican are by necessity different. The country would be far healthier if those disillusioned Labour supporters & politicians moved beyond the Labour/Tory binary (and a great many Scottish voters have, hence the election of an SNP government in the Scottish Parliment!), but if anything I'd rather more essays like those written by Brooker and the Elephant appeared in newspapers that generally support the British Labour Government. Indeed, as far as I'm concerned this sort of dissonance in the mainstream media could potentially increase the perceived feasibility of SOMETHING DIFFERENT, which seems to me to be a potentially worthwhile endeavor. (See, also: K-Punk on Channel 4's adaptations of David Peace's Red Riding novels.)

I've went on about this more than I meant to, and I don't want to give the impression that the Millennium Elephant's post made me angry as hell or anything. The point of view I've spent the last 200-odd words articulating is brought up and dismissed in the Elephant's post, and I simply found myself thinking that there might be more value to it than that piece let on.

*Which is to say the belief that only two British political parties are electable, that none of the various lifestyles and attitudes the Elephant mentions are permissible for "serious" politicians, and that politicians are free to work free of public inquiry because these other two points make them the only players in town.

While we're venting about THIS MESS WE'RE IN, I really have to point you to RAB's blog, which is currently hosting both the above image and a reprinted Philip Pullman essay on modern liberty. It's a great piece, as lofty in style as it is in sentiment and all the more affecting for it:

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:
Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity
Whatever your opinions are, we don't want to hear them
So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are
And we do not want to hear you arguing about it
So hold your tongue and forget about protesting
What we want from you is acquiescence

Once you're done reading that, be sure to give Future of the Left's 'The Hope That House Built' a blast, just to keep you nice and focused. While most FotL lyrics read like punked-up Pythonisms, this song comes off like an art metal protest song. Shit, actually, it sounds like an art-metal protest song as written by Ringo Starr, which basically means that it's too unlikely to ignore.

Finally, as a counterpoint to all the doom-mongering in this post, here's a clip from Armando Iannucci's In The Loop. The movie is a shaggy spin-off from The Thick Of It, the TV show that made the correlation between petty office politics and national politics painfully clear, and it looks brilliant. NOTE: do not watch this if you have an aversion to nonstop, grade A swearing!

If this just makes you even more depressed, then try to think of King Mob's speech in volume 2 of The Invisibles:

That's why they can never hope to win. Chaos sneaks in every time.

They can cover the world with cameras, but they can't stop the guys in the monitor rooms from jerking off or playing the fifteenth sequel to "Doom" for the hundredth time.

Which is to say: the problems with the dominant media and political systems are very real, but it's important to remember we're dealing with stupid bureaucrats here, and stupid bureaucrats are anything but unbeatable.

"All good people can waltz"

2009-03-06T08:15:00.000Z

Fight Like Apes, live @ King Tut's 03/03/2009

Stepping into King Tut's is like stepping into a grubby space/time wormhole -- am I 16 or 26? Am I a shy, cocky teenager or a brashly humble English Lit graduate? Am I talking about Destiny's Child with the bassist from ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, or am I spotting Noel Fielding lookalikes at the bar?

These questions become easier to answer when the support acts start to play. Paisley's Marvel Heights are perfectly competent, but they're also basically the reason I stopped paying to see every young group in town. There's nothing wrong with them, but after forty seconds it's painfully clear that stop start bits and chugging choruses don't make for great songs on their own (note: this is also why I stopped playing music).

Still, it's not in my nature to be too hard on a group of wee kids playing kind-sorta-okayish music to 30-odd people. Maybe someone needs to tell middling bands to give up, but it's not going to be me (Tucker Stone would probably be good at it, but he's a black hearted comedy genius and I'm not). And hey, who knows, maybe Marvel Heights will really rock one day. The teenage David would have taken that view, but the more shop-worn model isn't quite so sure.

Right now, it's probably more fun to be part of their posse of local supporters than it is to hate them, but I'm a dick so whatever.

Paris' Underground Railroad inspire a similar level of shrugging in your ever-lovin', green-eyed correspondent, but at least they've got the courtesy to vary the quality levels a little. Two or three sputtering electro-drone experiments kill any sense of momentum, but there are also moments of solidly realised meh-ness. These tend to occur when the band acknowledge two important facts:

1) that their drummer likes to hit things hard, and 2) that their guitarist used to play along to her Sonic Youth records when she was a little girl (Tim Robbins: "When she was a little French girl?"). They get some shtick from the punters, but they handle it well enough -- when their drummer kicks one of his sticks into the crowd and has to spend a few minutes fumbling to find a replacement, someone shouts "JUST STOP PLAYING!" and I briefly feel bad for the band. They don't seem fazed though -- "No, this is very fun for us," says the drummer. "We'll keep playing... you can call it torture if you want."

Dublin's Fight Like Apes aren't so easy going, but that's okay because they've got skills to back it up -- huge tunes, ace lyrics and a total willingness to intimidate the audience into enjoying themselves.

"Well, that's the most underwhelming response I've ever seen," grimaces bearded keyboard-fiend Pockets as his band take the stage to muted applause. By the time the first song is over, the crowd are genuinely buzzing, but he's still not happy: "I don't know what gig you were at last night, but we require a bit of audience participation. It's really fucking easy, as it turns out -- you just have to put your fucking hands together!"

To reinforce the point, shock-haired frontwoman MayKay looms out over the audience, plank of wood in hand, pointing out individual crowd members and demanding that they clap along. It'd all seem a bit much if Fight Like Apes weren't "so hot right now!"in the best and most Zoolander-ish way . But, truthfully, when the snarky stadium pop of 'Jake Summers' kicks into full effect I'd forgive the band if they started making Kanye-esque pronouncements about their greatness.

Also: the Mclusky cover!! How many bands would be smart enough to play 'Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues', and how many of them could make it not shit?

Fight Like Apes' music has all the built-from-the-bass-up simplicity of the Pixies/Nirvana/Mclusky axis, but there's a hint of something bigger and poppier in their twin-keyboards setup... something that suggests a future rocking bigger crowds, maybe not arena-size, but Barrowlands size at least.

Listen to the slow-build of 'Tie Me Up With Jackets' and tell me the opening of this song couldn't lead into some sort of anthemic, Snow Patrol style monster dirge if the vocals and keyboards didn't spray the whole thing with colour:

Maybe one day I'll get to scream the words to 'Lend Me Your Face' with a few thousand other people (and I've seen Meadowbank Stadium belt out every word of the Pixies' 'Hey', so stranger things have happened!), but right now Fight Like Apes are a ragged, all-swearing, all-shouting riot of a band. And that's great!

Watching MayKay tear apart an idiot who shouted "Show us your tits! " (sample putdown: "God, what a boring little pervert you are! Couldn't you at least have went for 'Please display your bosom'?"); wondering what the wooden plank was actually for (comedy percussion, naturally); giggling as Pockets gets his beard stroked by an over-zealous audience member; feeling the bassline from 'Do You Karate?' bounce back off the wall behind you for double effect... these are all things that are best experienced in a tiny venue near you. I'm sure Fight Like Apes will translate all of this to bigger rooms (they've played with The Prodigy and the Ting Tings, so they've no doubt been getting some practice in), but while the David of the future's keeping quiet on this the Davids of the past and present agree: this is one noisy brawl you don't want to miss.

Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues

2009-03-03T18:55:00.000Z

Fight Like Apes -- 'Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues'

I'm going to see Fight Like Apes tonight, at least partly because they've got the good sense to cover Mclusky songs. Like this one, from the epic Mclusky Do Dallas. Fight Like Apes' singer Maykay doesn't give the lyrics quite as much venom as Mclusky yowler Falco did, but she turns the whole song into a hysterical, drunken rant so it still works. Also: props to the bassist, drummer and keyboard player, who do manage to match the visciousness of the original, without the aid of guitars.

Mclusky -- 'Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues'

The Mclusky version is still the best though, if only for the way Falco delivers that final "I'm fearful I'm fearful I'm fearful of flying/And flying is fearful of me!"

Speaking of the great man himself, it's good to know he still finds time to play this song with his new band:

Future of the Left -- 'Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues'

Future of the Left are a harder and more precise group than Mclusky, for the most part. Or at least, they seem to take their cues from the more brutal and riffy material from the last Mclusky album, rather than from the earlier, punkier material. Still, the way FotL rip through 'Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues' shows that they've got the same spiteful pop spirit as their predecessor band, and their use of the keyboard as a hateful instrument brings us back round to Fight Like Apes.

Ain't life grand?

Anyway, food now, then out. More later in the week? Maybe.

From the Wasteland to Under Construction

2009-03-01T23:02:00.000Z

Ok, so I'm in the middle of my seventh and final Filth essay, which has expanded to cover issues #7-13 of the comic. I hadn't initially planned to finish writing about the series this way, but when I started to write about issues #7 & 8 it became obvious that the last half of the series demanded to be considered as a whole. The original idea was to have the essay posted by the end of February, but I'd rather make it good than timely, so check back on Monday if you're interested.

There might be one or two short updates this week, but if that's not enough to keep you occupied then there's always this excerpt from David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King. I have mixed feelings about this -- there's always something ghoulish about the business of releasing an dead artist's unreleased work, but I can't even begin to pretend that I don't want to read this. Especially since it promises to really dive into the themes covered in DFW's Kenyon Commencement address, which... yeah, look: all squeamishness aside, I'm going to be obsessing over this book until it comes out in 2010.

(Via Gawker)

Panel Madness Week, Day 2: Criminal Intentions

2009-02-16T16:35:00.004Z

(In which David invites the reader round for dinner, then begs them to steal a second helping!)

Staring 'til your eyes squirm

Hey readers, howsit going?

This Panel Madness week is shaping up to be quite a spectacle isn't it? Plok's post on "Edenic Fracture", Steranko and the labyrinth of stories to be found in a single sci-fi cover image has sent the ball waaaaaay up into the air. And now I'm supposed to catch the thing? Damn! Well, let's just say that I've managed that already. Let's say I've caught the ball, and I want to invite y'all back to my place for some good, old-fashioned Glaswegian hospitality?

(Try not to laugh, Duncan. Try not to feel full just thinking about it Scott.)

But what have I got to offer, you ask. Well, for one thing I've got this:

As always I'd recommend that you click on that image to view it at its full size. This isn't a case of emphasising the size and impact of the image, as it has been with various Kirby pieces I've posted here. Instead, the important thing with this panel is to take in its textures, from the little smudges of black ink from which Sean Phillips creates figures and buildings to soft changes in lighting that Val Staples colours bring to the frame. These are the sort of details that are best taken in up close, so please give the image a good, hard eye-fucking. Better yet, if you've got comic this panel comes from (Criminal volume 2 issue #5), hold the page up to your eyes, cos that's the effect we're trying to simulate here.

Establishing the borders

Now that we're done with that business, it's time to talk a little bit about context. This might seem counter-intuitive, since the whole point of this exercise is deal with the image itself, but I think it's useful to get a taste of the bigger picture before spitting it back out on the curb. Just so you understand what's not for dinner, you know?

Criminal is noir-as-fuck, of course, and as such its pages are generally full of brooding antiheroes and naked, out-of-control women. So far so Sin City, but even though 'Bad Night' (the story from which this image is taken) is possibly even more reliant on the genre cliches than any previous Criminal yarn, it's still capable of finding sophistication within these boundaries. Partly, this comes from Brubaker's use of a (pretty damned cliched) modern-lit ending, which wouldn't be worth much if it didn't add to the story rather than reducing it to something even simpler.

Like Jog said in his review of this story's finale:

This issue's the one that kicks, and it puts some weight behind it. Even the structure of the storyline gets knocked around, as Brubaker basically stops the plot at two points to back up and present scenes from the point of view of the detective and the femme fatale, with an omniscient narrator suddenly provided to free them from Jacob's skewed perspective. In less assured hands it could have come off as a clanking mechanism for filling out the backstory, but Brubaker seizes the opportunity to present these characters as slightly more complicated than the simple archetypes Jacob (who hears the voice of a fictional noir detective in his head, remember) has fit them into via the plot that is his life. Too much time alone drawing crime funnies, I think!

Damn if that man doesn't prove his rep as "The World's Finest Comic Book Reader!!" every time he finishes a post. Still, while Jog is correct to highlight the little narrative twists that make Criminal worthwhile, there are also moments where the art provides something even more complicated and unusual. Like our panel of choice, for example: what the hell is that doing in a self-avowed pulp magazine?

Way back in the early days of this blog, I had a bit of fun comparing apples & oranges (and what a wonderfully ripe old cliche that is!), or in this case, Frank Miller & Eddie Campbell.

My basic point was that the two artists had almost diametrically opposed techniques and priorities, with Miller focusing on stark, brutal contrast...

...while Campbell worked hard to catch every zip-a-toned, commonplace detail:

Comparing these two images gives me a bit more of an insight into why this Criminal panel jumped out at me so much... or rather, why it makes me want to bring the page up closer to my face every time I read the issue in question. Normally, Criminal's art is bursting with raw, crude life... like Miller's Sin City, but with a broader pallet of both colors and emotions. The panel we're discussing, however, is far closer to something from one of Eddie Campbell's autobiographical works. There's an absence of drama in the image -- it's completely lacking in windswept heroes, crazy dames or latent violence -- but there's something else going on in there... an unexpected resonance with the hundreds of stories going outside of the one we're following in 'Bad Night'.

I'm a little weary of sounding like I'm praising this image for being 'adult' or 'serious', which isn't what I'm trying to say at all. I'm also emphatically not claiming that moment like this help Criminal to 'transcend its genre', because I have absolutely no time for that kind of strained blather. Instead, what I'm trying to say is that Criminal is a good, lively example the versatility of its genre. It shows that good crime stories can mix pulp caricature with an attentive eye for the baffling, poetic details of everyday life. Of course, all you smart people out there already knew that (as did Eddie Campbell favourite Raymond Chandler), but it's good to have such a perfect example within this precise intersection of medium and genre.

Dealing with that noir talk

Speaking of what's not for dinner, what about that caption? It's a little gristly, isn't it? Gristly, but full of chewy, noir goodness, for sure:

As part of the 'Bad Night' story, this panel serves as a glimpse beyond the main character's ever-narrowing horizon; taken on its own, it does much the same thing in a more universal way, with no noticeable loss of flavor. We're all educated enough in crime stories to make sense of these words on their own, and there's a play between words and image here that is simple and powerful.

See all this life? All this space? All of these different stories bustling off in different directions? None of that can save you. You'll never find out where any of these people are going, or what's going on in any of these side streets, 'cos you've made your choices, swallowed whatever poison was foisted upon you, and now you're fucked.

Shit, I think maybe we better turn this panel into some form of "Get Well Soon" card and but soon! That'll lift the public mood in no time!

Thinking about this caption and its context, I'm knocked flat on my ass by how good pulp fiction is at creating these startling sensations using the crudest of ingredients. Sure, I could freestyle on this sentence for ages, but there's no need. It's all there! Just like it is in a line like "the key was glass and shattered in our hands just as we got the door open" ('mon the Dashiell Hammett!). Combine it with the picture, and hell, I think I sold the results short a few paragraphs ago when I said it was simple and powerful!

Taking in the still life

Let's take a look at that panel one more time, before we finally get around to considering it on its own terms:

This image manages to be very clear while being very, very abstract -- it establishes its parameters (a city street at night), and then pushes at the limits of cartooning shorthand within this basic set up. And you know what? It's a wonderful simulation of the way we take in these kinds of scenes!

Looking at, say, the building fronts, there's this wonderful trailing off, with the solidity of the image disintegrating into the distance:

It's not all as simple as that, however. Right below the more "solid" and "realistic" end of the street-front is this clutter of cars and street signs and canopies that come together more as an expressive clash of shapes and colours than anything else:

Except... except that it's still recognisable, just. Like I said above, Phillips is playing at the edges of cartooning shorthand here, but he's still playing with shorthand. If you were to try to place this panel on Scott McCloud's Big Triangle, you'd probably end up placing it dead in the middle of the three points (language, reality and the picture plane), with perhaps a slight inclination to the top right:

In truth, the image is too varied and changing for that sort of categorisation. Which isn't surprising, really -- Scottt McCloud's theory work is normally best considered as a jumping off point rather than a definitive statement. (And yeah, it is kinda fun to invoke Mr Sequential Art as part of a series on the power of individual images in comics, isn't it?) Still, getting back to the image, I'm increasingly certain that it's these clashing levels of realism that make this image so enticing. It's like when you're strolling down the sidewalk and you watch laborers feed their dirty, glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on, you know? No? Me neither!

What I'm trying to get across here is that more often than not there's too much going on in the world for us to take it all in -- whether you're walking through a busy street or reading a bundle of comics, chances are that you'll let some of it blur out into a crazy haze, and quite right! Who could be bothered to try and compartmentalise all this stuff? Still, it's worth paying attention to this process, and trying to think your way through it sometimes. It might not save you from whatever clunking machinations you've got yourself caught up in, but it'll definitely provide opportunities to better understand and appreciate the vibrant mess of the world.

And if that's not enough, then hey, fuck it: at least you're not a character in Criminal!

Making your getaway

If that comfort seems a little too cold for you, then why don't you stop staring so hard at the image and have a wee think about it reminds you of. Stop worrying exactly what it is you're tasting and ask yourself -- where have you encountered these flavours before?

Plok has a damned fine palate, by the way. When I was discussing this post with him he was able to fire out a fistful of fine comparisons without even flunching. He mentioned 'the cars slowly slipping forward in "Touch Of Evil"', which got me excited!

This sequence plays with some of the same themes as our panel of choice, but the way it conveys these themes couldn't be more different. While the Criminal panel flashes a whole world of life and possibility in front of our eyes in a single image, Orson Welles uses this opening scene to tease and taunt the viewer in a more drawn out fashion. We're presented with a portent of inevitable carnage for a brief moment, and then we have to sit uneasily as this literal explosion-in-waiting winds its way in and out of a whole world of life and people and stories and cars. It's hard to say which is crueler, the slow wait for the inevitable conclusion or the vague glimpse of a life less closed off, a life less defined by the borders that frame it. If anything this comparison makes me like Sean Phillips' work even more, simply because of how much he is able to suggest in such a succinct image.

Is this what Plok was talking about yesterday when he discussed how single picture can contain...

the glimpse of the sublime that organizes our reading, and keeps us coming back for more. The moments of static motion and of sudden improbable silence, that give our reading many centres…many seedings.

Hell, it certainly seems that way to me!

And while we're talking about the organiser of this week of blogging festivities, I'd like to mention another one of the reference points he suggested: Hieronymus Bosch.

This comparison tickles me for a number of reasons. For one, it was an excuse to bust out the Bosch! Beyond that cheap thrill, there's definitely a connection there in terms of the energy of the image, the sense of life teeming beyond the any preset boundaries. Except, wait, isn't there a strict, sequential composition going on in this triptych? Isn't that part of the form? Shit. For all the life of the piece, I feel like the boundaries of Bosch's orgiastic scenes are more definitive than the borders that frame this image from Criminal. (Quick! Someone make sure Scott McCloud's still strapped down, cos if that dude's escaped again he's gonna start making some grand claims about our humble art-form!) What this really highlights is the very precise amount of abstraction involved in this panel -- Phillips and co hint and suggests where Bosch depicts with manic detail. Again (always and forever?), Phillips' panel ends up seeming both more and less hopeful for its vagueness. It doesn't need to depict histories, heresies or hellish fantasies any more than it needs to provide us with fully realised Edenic escapes -- it's a perfect fleeting moment, every bit as compact and powerful as the text that hovers over it. Even if you linger on it in obscene detail (as I've done here), it still refuses to resolve into anything more comforting or more damning.

Ha -- and here was me trying to find a more reassuring way to end this post! So much for that. Best to just make a run for it, if you haven't already.

Speaking of which, shall we make our getaway? Yes, let's. But before you leave, make sure you've loaded up on the image. That's the loot, you know -- that one tiny, haunting image. This text here? All those other pictures? That's all just part of some crazy caper. Take the loot, and do what you want with it: forget it, study it, scrawl crude imitations of it on the wall of a public toilet, turn it into a lego diarama, whatever. Think it over and tell me I'm talking crap, or tell me I'm exactly right. While you're at it, please feel free to call me on the amount of mixed metaphors that I've tossed into this post, paying special attention to the fact that I've made dinner into treasure during this frantic closing paragraph. (Dinner is treasure, by the way. Just make sure you bring your own tupperware, or at least a doggy bag, and I'll look the other way while you take your fill and run!) Actually, forget me -- just blow this panel up and tac it to your wall, make it into a crappy Lichtenstein rip-off, cut it out of the comic and mail it to a relative, set the whole damned book on fire and see what survives, stuff the panel down your pants to confuse your beloved in the heat of passion...

Do whatever you want with it, do whatever you can.

And hey, when you're done with it, be sure to head over to the The Time Bulleteer , whose essay on a panel from Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown is up now! And, unsurprisingly, it's both brilliant and way more concise than my entry. Go check it out, if you haven't already!

After that?

Wait and see, dear readers! Wait and see!

[This post is dedicated to Prisoner star Patrick McGoohan, who died on January 13. In his best performances McGoohan always seemed to be raging against whatever borders he found himself in, and it's with great sadness that I now contemplate a world in which he's not out there constantly pushing against the wall. As Sean Witzke stated at the time, McGoohan was also painfully aware of exactly how complicit we can all be in creating out own prisons. As such I'm going to start trying to pay more attention to the right things and to apply my own anger more purposefully this year.]

Chimera Lucida: Is Go!

2009-02-14T14:14:00.001Z

I meant to post this earlier, but I forgot (sorry Dave!). David Fiore's novella/prose poem Chimera Lucida is now available on Amazon! As I've said before, I've had the good fortune to read this book, and it's a real explosion of mental shrapnel! Go set it off -- you'll be struggling to get all the pieces out of your brain forever!

Marnie Stern: Is Fun!

2009-02-14T13:53:00.000Z

Daytripping with Marnie Stern, Pitchfork style!

Part 1 is all about Sly Stallone and the Steve Vai Presets:

Part 2 is all about The Aristocrats:

(Via Matthew Perpetua)

"You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything."

2009-02-14T13:46:00.000Z

Phew, that was a close one!

For a while there, I had the feeling that time had been compressed down into a constant yesterday. And brothers, sisters, I have to say -- I was getting tired!

And yet... somehow, I don't think I've quite escaped the feeling yet. There's still a little bit of it left in me (in all of us?). Time to fight? Yeah, let's.

So -- it's my contention that Grant Morrison and co's Final Crisis is a better event than it is a comic. It's certainly not a better "event comic" than its direct competitor, in terms of brand unity and marketing, but who gives a damn?! [1] Final Crisis seemed like a strange alien singularity from which the comics Internet would never escape -- suck it, Secret Invasion! Only Abhay Khosla cares about you! [2]

Back to Final Crisis: you want annotations? Why we've got several varieties for your reading pleasure. Mindless bitching? Check. Sour, witty takedowns? Why not! For a while there we were blessed with both articulate essays on the series' faults and equally well-reasoned defenses on a daily basis. And then just when I thought I was done thinking about the damned thing, Sean Witzke posted a Unicorn-slaying critique of the book, and Plok wrote a brilliant analysis without even reading a page of it!

I have neither the skill nor the inclination to work out whether or not this comic has been good or bad for DC comics -- the sales seem to have been solid, but people have expressed concern about reader burn-out. What I do know is that the comic has a weirdness to it, and that people get really caught up in the book, regardless of what they thought of it.

Now, as so many people have pointed out, a lot of this comes down to Morrison's elliptic storytelling style, but the way this style is used in Final Crisis bears closer attention. Tom Spurgeon took the book to task for poor deployment of fractured, neo-modernist storytelling:

Compare Morrison's use of disjointed narratives in Final Crisis #7 to something similar like the panel to panel leaps in Jaime Hernandez' "Tear It Up, Terry Downe." In Jaime's story, everything you need to understand it is there in front of you; what you'll see if you give yourself over to it isn't a nefarious plan of some fake cosmic bogeyman but a story of emotional betrayal and how quickly our positions can change vis-a-vis the people we love. When a narrative technique is most effectively used, it tends not to bring to mind another use of that technique but some sort of gut-wrenching effect based on the content being marched through its paces. I just didn't get that here.

I'd say that Final Crisis achieved this effect at points (i.e. during Turpin's disjointed fall through the first four issues, in Batman's triumph in his own title, and with the self-constructing myth that was issue #7), but that Tom is probably right overall. The funny thing is that Morrison has been using these techniques brilliantly for years, so what went wrong here and in his recent Batman run? [3] Well, shit, it's gotta be because these are big, tentpole event books, huh?

Maybe not. Maybe it's just that Morrison's still making an argument that he'd already won by the time he wrote Animal Man #26 back in 1990. Maybe it's just that after seeing the man make a demonstrative call for kinder, more imaginative escapism in All Star Superman, it's tiring to see him write about this kind of story instead of just writing it.

Except... except that's not quite true. Because there are elements of the story that do seem new, even if they end up being all the more frustrating for it. Take the Super Young Team, for example. Sure, there's a lot of cliche in their conception, but there's also genuine energy to the group from the designs on up. Which just makes it slightly maddening that they DON'T REALLY DO ANYTHING IN THE END!

Two more examples of the ways in which Final Crisis does/doesn't work, one an obvious example of "big event" corporate re-prioritising, the other a truly idiosyncratic touch:

1. The Return of Barry Allen

Ok, but honestly, why bother? What's the point of dredging up this old corpse? To give forty-year-old men a mild, illicit boner? Fuck that: he doesn't do anything in the story that the current Flash couldn't do equally well.
Except, hey, if that's your thing then fair enough. Are you looking forward to reading Geoff Johns' take on the character? Cool. Johns' writing doesn't do anything for me, but whatever.
And maybe there is something to the way Morrison reintroduces the character -- the idea of the man reforming himself from pure cosmic information to save the day is kinda curious...
Or it would be, if it hadn't been presented in the collection of mangled trailers that was DC Universe #0.
Oh, and also: all three Flashes spent far too much time standing around. This does lead to one or two nice touches ('We have to save everyone. We start with family', for example), but it also feels like a waste of time and space. [4]

2. Superman Sings His Way To Victory

This idea is goofy and cute, if anti-climactic (seriously, I've linked to Marc Singer's review already, but it's worth another look).
I suppose this scene is also kinda stupid, if you look at it from a certain point of view. Except why would you want to do that when it's, y'know, pure superhero poetry?
Also, you guys all know this plot point has started one hell of a meme, right?

[5]

Now, the fact that this scene started a meme doesn't mean that it's great art, or great comics or whatever. Indeed, if anything my argument would be that the aims of the two plot points I've just discussed butt against each other so that neither plot element feels properly aligned. But what I would say is that there's something to this misalignment that makes Final Crisis fun to riff on or write about. Maybe that's what's going on with the choppy storytelling that Spurgeon bemoans -- maybe it's not so much there to generate an aesthetic effect as it is to provide the reader with the raw materials to create one. This approach might drive Geoff Klock up the wall, but it also provides the Mindless Ones with ample space in which to work their magic.

The last time a Grant Morrison comic felt this big and messy and open and interactive was probably at the end of volume three of The Invisibles. The conclusion to that story was frustrating, but I have a lot more time for those comics, partly because the stakes were higher, and partly because the build-up was better (The Invisibles was one of my favourite comics of the 90s, while Final Crisis follows on from/contradicts a fuckload of terrible comics)[6]. I mean, sure, you can mock The Invisibles for being drug-addled and hippyish (because it is!), but it was a genuine attempt to make sense of the Universe through a broad mash-up of 20th Century pop culture. You can find similar meanings in Final Crisis, for sure, but there are too many other priorities in the mix, which means that its interactive nature is annoying as often as it is invigorating.

In trying to be a big, dark superhero comic that reflects the times while also providing a sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis and Jack Kirby's Fourth World books, Final Crisis sets itself a lot of contradicting expectations, so maybe it's no surprise that it's a mess. But mess has always been Morrison's medium, so it's equally unsurprising that he makes something out of all of this. What that something is... well, as both Steven Grant and Tucker Stone have already said, that's pretty much up to you.

Me? I'm done thinking about the book, at last! I'll check out whatever Andrew Hickey has to say about it, because his enthusiasm for the book is always entertaining, but... yeah. It was a big event, lots of people had interesting things to say about it, but it's over now and I don't feel like much has changed.

Right now I'm thinking about Criminal, Seaguy, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard, All Star Superman, Pixu, The Umbrella Academy, I Killed Adolf Hitler, Empowered, Scott Pilgrim, The Education of Hopey Glass, Or Else, Finder and I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets and I'm thinking yeah, that's it. There's a whole world of different stories out there, and isn't savoring them what Final Crisis is supposed to be about? It's ironic that in putting forth this argument Final Crisis ended up acting just like its villains Darkseid and Mandrakk, at least so far as the comics Internet was concerned:

So hey, here we are, the comics blogosphere -- changed forever/forever the same! Who cares: I'm just glad that I got to read everyone doing their thing, and I look forward to another year of madness, hopefully with the same energy of these FC posts but with a far broader scope.

Then again, I'm one to talk, given that I've been publicly r eading The Filth till the staples come out (about which, more at the end of the month).

Oh, and DC comics? Yeah, I'm looking at you. Next time you ~~publish a comic where the bad guys want to make all stories their story~~ publish a comic, please make sure you don't colour a black man white before having him disappear from the narrative:

(Image via the ever-awesome David Brothers)

Yeah, I know it's Grant Morrison's fault that Mister Miracle's big moment is narrated rather than seen in Final Crisis #7, and I'm holding him responsible for that disappointment. But the colouring fuck-up? That's on you, DC, and that shit will not stand. [7] Fucking idiots.

[1] Lots of people, apparently. Hey, whatever floats yr proverbial boat!

[2] Though that said, his very best pieces on Secret Invasion (i.e. all of them!) are almost enough to tip the scale on their own!

[3] Three examples of Morrison using these same techniques far more effectively would be The Filth, Mister Miracle #4 and Seven Soldiers #1 respectively.

[4] Really, if any comic character deserves relentless storytelling, it's the Flash.

[5] I'm also very fond of Andrew Hickey's discussion of this topic, and Sean Collins' Animal Collective riff captures where my head is at right now in some inexplicable way. Also, how cool is the 5th World remix of 'Losing My Edge'?!

[6] I'm talking about Countdown here, rather than the previous two Crisis books, Seven Soldiers, Batman: RIP and Jack Kirby's New Gods stuff, though the fact that Final Crisis sets itself up to follow all of those books doesn't help, as I note a few lines later. Sean Collins had a good discussion of this over on his blog, didn't he? Ah, here we go. And for the record, I don't actually care about Countdown, but the lack of a solid lead in to Final Crisis does make it less powerful than, say, The Invisibles, or Seven Soldiers #1. I know that Morrison has talked the comic up as the culmination of his superhero work, but it feels more like a reiteration to me, so... I guess I'm not really buying that argument either. Wait, have I ended up claiming the there's both too much and too little build-up to Final Crisis? I guess I have! Well, there is such a thing as the wrong kind of build-up, and wouldn't it be just typical that you'd have to employ such an odd term to describe Final Crisis? Yes, it would.

[7] Yeah, I'm aware that DC comics could care less what I think, but it's fun to let the angry out every once in a while. And, seriously -- THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN!

This Blog Was Built To Self Destruct

2009-01-28T19:23:00.000Z

Being a series of essays on a theme, which will eventually lead to this blog stopping dead/reformatting/finding a new groove.

Previously on This Blog Was Built to Self Destruct:

1. Faster than The Speed of Wall (tabloid reality and issue #1 of The Filth)
2. Like a Puppet on a String (The Filth #2, bad taste and emotional manipulation)
3. How to Manage Your Own Personal Concept Farm (morality and metafiction in issue #3 of The Filth)
4. This is a Low (self-deception and scale in issue #4 of The Filth)
5. Beware -- Cosmic Architect at Work (genre-fiction, self-expression and cosmic awe in issues #1-2 of The Eternals)
6. Remembering The Men of Tomorrow (on kindness & perspective in All Star Superman, and the death of David Foster Wallace)
7. Twisted Brainwrongs and One-Off Man-Mentals (sexism, pornography and black comedy in issue #5 of The Filth -- also, peep this addendum)
8. Success in Circuit Lies (giganticism in issues #3-6 of The Eternals)
9. OMAC, What Is Best in Life? (on the joys of Jack Kirby's OMAC; also, doing vs explaining)
10. (Man-)Meat is Murder (The Filth #6, escapism and the broken mirror)
11. Darkling I Listen -- Commonplacebook (David Fiore on the limits of scholarship)
12. Mercury Rev -- 'The Dark Is Rising' (more on escapism and its uses)
13. Andrew Hickey on Grant Morrison and Entropy -- Commonplacebook (in which the relationship between entropy and freedom is made poetic)
14. All You Need Is Fuck? (in which the relationship between black holes and pearly white semen is made poetic in Birdland... well, sort off!)

Coming soon on This Blog Was Built to Self Destruct:

15. Self Portrait in a Broken Mirror (on the the failing of the body and the limits of self-reflection in issues #7-13 of The Filth)
16. Clone Cycle (on text and meta-text in Superman Beyond and The Black Dossier)
17. Time Wars (blame this one on the Falconer: I'm gonna talk about shitey old Transformers comics, Elric, and how it's all my dad's fault that I give a damn about any of this in the first place)
18. Spaceships Over Glasgow (Vibrational Match: The Scottish Connection)
19. Welcome... to the World of Tomorrow! (getting 'Rock of Ages' in perspective)
20. Fuck This Blog! (Paul Pope's 100% and life beyond pulphope)

Also: more footnotes!

Note: Post titles and concepts may change! Fresh entries may be improvised! Nothing is certain in the current economic climate!

Feel free to ignore the existence of this series if it annoys you; I'm trying to complete a couple of thoughts here, but I'm not gonna stress out about tying it all together. This isn't a big superhero crossover, after all! Though now that I think about it, I do kinda like the idea of announcing the death of my blog in Plok's comments or something...

Alec - The King Canute Crowd - 'A funny notion...' -- Commonplacebook

2009-01-27T23:14:00.001Z

(As always, make with the clicky to see this image at full size.)

It's hardly news that Eddie Campbell has a rare gift for capturing very specific thoughts and feelings on the comics page, but did you know that he'd already anticipated my current Birdland-derived musings? Seriously though, the fact that Campbell can bring pages like this together so elegantly, and with so much good humour, still amazes me to this day.

Music: Response

2009-01-27T20:48:00.000Z

Readers, I've got a question for you.

Does

=

????

I'm only asking because my general excitement about the upcoming Seaguy sequel has got me thinking crazy thoughts. Thoughts like "if Mark Miller had created Seaguy, would it have been less Prisoner and more Demolition Man?"* Imagine: the same longing for excitement and adventure, the same hints that there's something shady going on beneath the seemingly peaceful streets, the same panic over surveillance culture, only dumber, sweatier, and with a genuine hard-on for gun fights and fist fights. Is that what it would have looked like? Sandra Bullock says yes, and I say maybe. What do you think?

*In this hypothetical comic book, Sylvester Stallone = Chubby Da Choona.