Wednesday, 23 December 2009
Merry Christmas To All My Reader(s)
I'll be offline for a week or so, so Merry Christmas to Steve and the random surfers who find this page by accident while surfing for porn!
Monday, 21 December 2009
Galactic Medal of Honour
I picked this up second hand a couple of years ago and finally got around to reading it (while waiting for Yellow Blue Tibia to show up from Play.com). I have friend who used to be forever extolling the virutues of this, so when I saw it I snagged it for later eading. The copy I got is an old Pan or Panther or NEL (not sure off the top of my head) paperback from the 70s but it features really ugly cover art that's been kind of putting me off reading it. Don't judge a book by its cover, I know, but if it's not Foss or Burns or maybe Frank Frazetta, then I'm not interested!
This is by Mack Reynolds and was apparently first published in 1976, but from the word go is incredibly old fashioned! Obviously, it's pre-Star Wars and pre-cyberpunk, and those two caused a continental shift in SF, but even bearing that in mind this book comes across as creaky and old fashioned. Don Mathers is a Sinatra-swinger and ne'er do well kinda like one of those guys that shows up in Harry Harrison or Bob Sheckley novels, all three martinis and pinching the waitress's bottom. At the beginning of the novel the guy breaks up with his fiancee, and it's heavily implied that she hasn't "come across" (as I bet Don would say). She leaves him for the mining corporations of Callisto because "I'm a trained secretary, you know!" Score one for women's lib!
The main thrust - the phoney war and stupid or eveil people who keep the war machine going - is very Pohl/Kornbluth, and maybe Reynolds thought the anti-war theme was topical in the 70s. I guess so, but if you compare this The Forever War, say, it really shows the dearth of wit and SF imagination at work. This one of those SF novels where the future is just like today but everything is prefixed with electro-, auto- or synth- to show that it's not just coffee but futuristic snyth-cafe.
It's structuarally rather poor as well, with a big long bit in the middle where Don goes along with the swindle (he's been convinced to be the fake hero of a fake battle with the fake aliens) and reflects on what a fake he is. Reynolds doesn't really bring his existential malaise alive in any real way, and all this looks like padding to me (this is a fix up of a story first published in F&SF, IIRC from the copyright page - I don't have it with me as I type this at work). The final worm-turns moment happens in the last ten pages or so, but it could easily have happened fifty pages earlier. It's interesting, I guess, in that the socialist arguments against war-mongering capitalists are very explicit, but really even that is probably too explicit having been put in the mouth of a character who is clearly present just to be such a mouthpiece.
All-in-all a disappointment,even though I wasn't expecting much. I had hoped for something a little more 70s scurrilous - a big tits and rock music sort of book or the kind Norman Spinrad or Mick Farren used to write, but this was very seemly and old fashioned. In the movie that ran in my head, Don Mathers was played by an aging Jack Lord in a roll neck in the sort of performance that makes you queasy everytime he gropes the starlet half his age.
This is by Mack Reynolds and was apparently first published in 1976, but from the word go is incredibly old fashioned! Obviously, it's pre-Star Wars and pre-cyberpunk, and those two caused a continental shift in SF, but even bearing that in mind this book comes across as creaky and old fashioned. Don Mathers is a Sinatra-swinger and ne'er do well kinda like one of those guys that shows up in Harry Harrison or Bob Sheckley novels, all three martinis and pinching the waitress's bottom. At the beginning of the novel the guy breaks up with his fiancee, and it's heavily implied that she hasn't "come across" (as I bet Don would say). She leaves him for the mining corporations of Callisto because "I'm a trained secretary, you know!" Score one for women's lib!
The main thrust - the phoney war and stupid or eveil people who keep the war machine going - is very Pohl/Kornbluth, and maybe Reynolds thought the anti-war theme was topical in the 70s. I guess so, but if you compare this The Forever War, say, it really shows the dearth of wit and SF imagination at work. This one of those SF novels where the future is just like today but everything is prefixed with electro-, auto- or synth- to show that it's not just coffee but futuristic snyth-cafe.
It's structuarally rather poor as well, with a big long bit in the middle where Don goes along with the swindle (he's been convinced to be the fake hero of a fake battle with the fake aliens) and reflects on what a fake he is. Reynolds doesn't really bring his existential malaise alive in any real way, and all this looks like padding to me (this is a fix up of a story first published in F&SF, IIRC from the copyright page - I don't have it with me as I type this at work). The final worm-turns moment happens in the last ten pages or so, but it could easily have happened fifty pages earlier. It's interesting, I guess, in that the socialist arguments against war-mongering capitalists are very explicit, but really even that is probably too explicit having been put in the mouth of a character who is clearly present just to be such a mouthpiece.
All-in-all a disappointment,even though I wasn't expecting much. I had hoped for something a little more 70s scurrilous - a big tits and rock music sort of book or the kind Norman Spinrad or Mick Farren used to write, but this was very seemly and old fashioned. In the movie that ran in my head, Don Mathers was played by an aging Jack Lord in a roll neck in the sort of performance that makes you queasy everytime he gropes the starlet half his age.
Friday, 18 December 2009
Save A Prayer - Le Bon on Le God
So, first we get John Taylor on 40 years of email, and now we have Simon Le Bon heading off into Richard Dawkins country to prove conclusively once for all the total non-existence of god.
Clearly these hair-spray pop rockers have hidden their world-class minds beneath of facade of pastel-jacketed champagne sipping, model boffing vacuous white funk. I await Nick Rhodes's commentary on the prsopects for peace in the Middle East!
Erm, as for the topic at hand I'm a contented atheist and don't require either Simon or Richard to put my case for me. The world is empty of meaning or purpose, a pointless random ramble from womb to tomb. You've got to laugh, eh?
Clearly these hair-spray pop rockers have hidden their world-class minds beneath of facade of pastel-jacketed champagne sipping, model boffing vacuous white funk. I await Nick Rhodes's commentary on the prsopects for peace in the Middle East!
Erm, as for the topic at hand I'm a contented atheist and don't require either Simon or Richard to put my case for me. The world is empty of meaning or purpose, a pointless random ramble from womb to tomb. You've got to laugh, eh?
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
The Piano Has Been Drinking
It's late, I should be in bed, but I've got to share this live version of The Piano Has Been Drinking by Tom Waits. It's from the compilation record Bounced Cheques, which was passed to me on cassette by my friend Pete in 1981. It's the greatest thing ever!!!
Meet The Residents!
Ah, the many ways to ruin an evening's writing! One that afflicts me is the old “Hm, I wonder if there's anything on youtube from...” some half remembered show, comedian or musical act. Monty Python is a constant source of distraction (despite owning it all on DVD) as is the Alexei Sayle collection and the Muppets. Music is ever tempting, and recent work killers have included Talking Heads, the Sex Pistols, the Beatles ... well, lots of music, obviously, because YoutTube was invented, more or less, for music video. Which brings us to my latest lost evening(s) of work courtesy of The Residents.
I discovered The Residents in a about 1981 or so on Radio Pictures, a late night music show that used to run on Sunday nights on New Zealand TV. In the the gilded days of my halcyon youth RWP ran right before the Sunday Horrors, a regular horror movie slot that played anything from Universal classics, through Corman, Hammer and into early period sleaze and slasher films like Massacre at Central High and The Incredible Melting Man. RWP was where I first encountered people like The Birthday Party, Stray Cats, Duran Duran, The Tubes, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Talking Heads, ABC, Grandmaster Flash, Blondie, THe beastie Boys, Depeche Mode, Culture Club, REM, The Cure, The Fall and so on and so forth – the usual suspects of 80s alternative pop and rock, I guess. Man, Sunday night was the greatest - rock and roll followed by sleazy cheesy greasy horror. Life doesn't get better than that, at least not until you're old enough for sex and drugs.
One of those nights my mind was entirely blown by The Resident's One Minute Movies. I couldn't believe what I'd just seen and heard! This was years before I saw any underground movies or heard much in the way of avant garde music. I'd maybe heard some Stockhausen or Varese at High School music, but this wasn't anything like that noise, it was beguiling and tuneful and funny! It was immediately clear to me that it was the most important thing I'd ever heard since I first listened to Dad's cassete of Sgt Pepper'sonely Hearts Club Band when I was ten.
A couple of weeks later (I can't remember what the timeline was, frankly) I was browsing in the record shop, dreaming about having enough money to be clever and cultured, when I saw it: The Commercial Album by The Residents – that was it! That was the group I'd heard, those were the songs! I had to own it and I think my birthday must have been near (I hardly ever had enough money to buy records) and Mum and Dad bought it for me.
The Commercial Album consists of forty songs, exactly one minute long. It's perfect: each has room to develop a single musical idea, with none outstaying their welcome. While one might wish some of the more interesting ones hung around a bit longer, even the more difficult numbers never become boring. The liner notes on the CD state:
I read on wikipedia (so it must be true!) that they bought forty minutes of commercial time on a San Francisco top 40 station and played every track once over the course of a day. I wish I'd been a round to hear that!
I played and played and played this up in the spare room of the house while me and my friends played D&D or pool on a the tinny little record player Dad made me from old speakers and some junked turntable he'd picked up. My mates were mostly into AC/DC and Pink Floyd (I liked them, too) but back in those days we all seemed to have far more elastic tastes in music. There didn't seem anything odd about listening to Aqualung, say, then London's Burning then Devo. Mum and Dad – whose taste runs more to My Fair Lady and Camelot, and in their more risque moments, trad jazz – were rather nonplussed. Mum much preferred Tom Waits, and called the Residents “That plinky plonky music.”
Anyway, the second Resident's LP I got was even more spectacular, a compilation of tracks from various albums and EPs called Nibbles. THis record features some of my favourite songs ever – Blue Rosebuds, Constantinople, Santa Dog and The Spot (the latter recorded with sometime collaborator Snakefinger, who was responsible of another Radio With Pictures favourite of mine, The Man in the Dark Sedan). Over the next few years, I bought a lot of Residents LPS – the Mark of the Mole, Meet The Residents, Not Available, Tunes of Two Cities, Have a Bad Day, Wormwood, Icky Flix – and got to see them a few times when we came over to the UK (the night they played in Wellington in the 80s, part of the 13th anniversay tour, I was in a play and couldn't go).
The Residents are really important to me. They have a unique artistic vision that mixes art and satire and horror and sci fi in a bewilderingly genial mix of noise and weirdness that I find irresistible. When I was a a kid, I was fascinated by the way they deliberately obscured who they were - they were always masked in photos and performance, and they never listed personnel on their records. It's taken me a while to properly understand that this wasn't just a gimmick, but a crucial part of The Residents enterprise. It not only doesn't matter who they are, it'd be a distraction from the songs. If we knew who they were, we'd only wonder about them more, and try and project our knowledge of them inot the songs, in the way people try and interpret Beatles songs (regarding I Am The Walrus, John Lennon said "Let the fuckers work that one out"). More than a tease (though it's also an anti-op a tease) it leaves the middle of the music blank for the listeners benefit. We can put whatever we like in there unmoderated by the artist's biography or ego.
Last month I blogged about a speech given by John Taylor (of The Resident's contemporaries Duran Duran) on the value of remoteness and obscurity of an artist. I realise now how close what he describes is to my own experience with The Residents, from the life changing first encounter to the obsession fuelled by the mystery of them. The Resident played this game very deliberately, and still play it today (although it's not hard to find out who they are, they still avoid publicity, and of course the joke is that they aren't Paul McCartney or Abba or anyone else larking about, which were among the rumours that washed around when I was at Uni, they're just a bunch of obscure Californian hippies).
They're still going strong of course, and in the way of things that endure against the odds, have garnered a degree of respectability. There's no such thing as rarity these days, and You Tube is packed with videos and tracks from all stages of their career so go have a poke around and discover them for yourselves. Check out this fantastic version of For the Benefit of Mr Kite performed with the London Sinfonietta in 2007. The Residents plus Sgt Pepper's – magic!
PS - Uh oh! I just searched for Tom Waits. Curse you, You Tube!
I discovered The Residents in a about 1981 or so on Radio Pictures, a late night music show that used to run on Sunday nights on New Zealand TV. In the the gilded days of my halcyon youth RWP ran right before the Sunday Horrors, a regular horror movie slot that played anything from Universal classics, through Corman, Hammer and into early period sleaze and slasher films like Massacre at Central High and The Incredible Melting Man. RWP was where I first encountered people like The Birthday Party, Stray Cats, Duran Duran, The Tubes, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Talking Heads, ABC, Grandmaster Flash, Blondie, THe beastie Boys, Depeche Mode, Culture Club, REM, The Cure, The Fall and so on and so forth – the usual suspects of 80s alternative pop and rock, I guess. Man, Sunday night was the greatest - rock and roll followed by sleazy cheesy greasy horror. Life doesn't get better than that, at least not until you're old enough for sex and drugs.
One of those nights my mind was entirely blown by The Resident's One Minute Movies. I couldn't believe what I'd just seen and heard! This was years before I saw any underground movies or heard much in the way of avant garde music. I'd maybe heard some Stockhausen or Varese at High School music, but this wasn't anything like that noise, it was beguiling and tuneful and funny! It was immediately clear to me that it was the most important thing I'd ever heard since I first listened to Dad's cassete of Sgt Pepper'sonely Hearts Club Band when I was ten.
A couple of weeks later (I can't remember what the timeline was, frankly) I was browsing in the record shop, dreaming about having enough money to be clever and cultured, when I saw it: The Commercial Album by The Residents – that was it! That was the group I'd heard, those were the songs! I had to own it and I think my birthday must have been near (I hardly ever had enough money to buy records) and Mum and Dad bought it for me.
The Commercial Album consists of forty songs, exactly one minute long. It's perfect: each has room to develop a single musical idea, with none outstaying their welcome. While one might wish some of the more interesting ones hung around a bit longer, even the more difficult numbers never become boring. The liner notes on the CD state:
Point one: Pop music is mostly a repitition of two typs of musical and lyrical phrases: the verse and the chorus.
Point two: These elements repeat an average of three times in a “top 40” radio hit.
Point three: Cut out the fat and a pop song is only a minute long.
Point four: One minute is also the length of most commercials, and therefore, their corresponding jingles.
Point five: Jingles are the music of America.
To convert the jingles to pop music music, program each song to repeat three times.
I read on wikipedia (so it must be true!) that they bought forty minutes of commercial time on a San Francisco top 40 station and played every track once over the course of a day. I wish I'd been a round to hear that!
I played and played and played this up in the spare room of the house while me and my friends played D&D or pool on a the tinny little record player Dad made me from old speakers and some junked turntable he'd picked up. My mates were mostly into AC/DC and Pink Floyd (I liked them, too) but back in those days we all seemed to have far more elastic tastes in music. There didn't seem anything odd about listening to Aqualung, say, then London's Burning then Devo. Mum and Dad – whose taste runs more to My Fair Lady and Camelot, and in their more risque moments, trad jazz – were rather nonplussed. Mum much preferred Tom Waits, and called the Residents “That plinky plonky music.”
Anyway, the second Resident's LP I got was even more spectacular, a compilation of tracks from various albums and EPs called Nibbles. THis record features some of my favourite songs ever – Blue Rosebuds, Constantinople, Santa Dog and The Spot (the latter recorded with sometime collaborator Snakefinger, who was responsible of another Radio With Pictures favourite of mine, The Man in the Dark Sedan). Over the next few years, I bought a lot of Residents LPS – the Mark of the Mole, Meet The Residents, Not Available, Tunes of Two Cities, Have a Bad Day, Wormwood, Icky Flix – and got to see them a few times when we came over to the UK (the night they played in Wellington in the 80s, part of the 13th anniversay tour, I was in a play and couldn't go).
The Residents are really important to me. They have a unique artistic vision that mixes art and satire and horror and sci fi in a bewilderingly genial mix of noise and weirdness that I find irresistible. When I was a a kid, I was fascinated by the way they deliberately obscured who they were - they were always masked in photos and performance, and they never listed personnel on their records. It's taken me a while to properly understand that this wasn't just a gimmick, but a crucial part of The Residents enterprise. It not only doesn't matter who they are, it'd be a distraction from the songs. If we knew who they were, we'd only wonder about them more, and try and project our knowledge of them inot the songs, in the way people try and interpret Beatles songs (regarding I Am The Walrus, John Lennon said "Let the fuckers work that one out"). More than a tease (though it's also an anti-op a tease) it leaves the middle of the music blank for the listeners benefit. We can put whatever we like in there unmoderated by the artist's biography or ego.
Last month I blogged about a speech given by John Taylor (of The Resident's contemporaries Duran Duran) on the value of remoteness and obscurity of an artist. I realise now how close what he describes is to my own experience with The Residents, from the life changing first encounter to the obsession fuelled by the mystery of them. The Resident played this game very deliberately, and still play it today (although it's not hard to find out who they are, they still avoid publicity, and of course the joke is that they aren't Paul McCartney or Abba or anyone else larking about, which were among the rumours that washed around when I was at Uni, they're just a bunch of obscure Californian hippies).
They're still going strong of course, and in the way of things that endure against the odds, have garnered a degree of respectability. There's no such thing as rarity these days, and You Tube is packed with videos and tracks from all stages of their career so go have a poke around and discover them for yourselves. Check out this fantastic version of For the Benefit of Mr Kite performed with the London Sinfonietta in 2007. The Residents plus Sgt Pepper's – magic!
PS - Uh oh! I just searched for Tom Waits. Curse you, You Tube!
Friday, 11 December 2009
Doll by Ed McBain
This is the other book I picked up at the Amnesty International sale for 20p a couple of weeks back. I've been interested in crime and detective fiction for a couple of years now, mostly as a model to use in my own writing. Solving a crime provides a nice set of plot pegs to hang everything else on, after all, and I've noticed that a lot of my fiction rather naturally gravitates towards this sort of mystery story shape anyway.
I've not read any of McBain's 87th precinct novel (of which this is one) but I've heard of them, so I was interested to give it a whirl (and at 20p, you can't complain). Rather than a series of plot pegs to hang other stuff on, the crime is everything here. Characterisation is pared back to absolute minimum. McBain seems to forget about it entirely for large stretches of the novel, and then suddenly remember that these are real people and so chuck in a few paras about one of his detectives worrying about being fat or another one who goes on a similar tangent about going bald.
A degree of sympathy is required for Steve Carella, who's kidnapped and hooked on junk by a strange sexy villainess. So we get a little about his wife and kids and some scenes where other detectives think he's dead and dwell on what a stand up guy he was. The reveal that Carella's not really dead is nicely done and fitted in with another minor plot step on the way quite well. The more I think about the plot elements, in fact, the more I appreciate this novel. Sure, it's somewhat dry in terms of character, and amusingly lurid melodramatic for a PoMo hipster such as I, but it's solidly constructed with some nice suspense.
I've not read any of McBain's 87th precinct novel (of which this is one) but I've heard of them, so I was interested to give it a whirl (and at 20p, you can't complain). Rather than a series of plot pegs to hang other stuff on, the crime is everything here. Characterisation is pared back to absolute minimum. McBain seems to forget about it entirely for large stretches of the novel, and then suddenly remember that these are real people and so chuck in a few paras about one of his detectives worrying about being fat or another one who goes on a similar tangent about going bald.
A degree of sympathy is required for Steve Carella, who's kidnapped and hooked on junk by a strange sexy villainess. So we get a little about his wife and kids and some scenes where other detectives think he's dead and dwell on what a stand up guy he was. The reveal that Carella's not really dead is nicely done and fitted in with another minor plot step on the way quite well. The more I think about the plot elements, in fact, the more I appreciate this novel. Sure, it's somewhat dry in terms of character, and amusingly lurid melodramatic for a PoMo hipster such as I, but it's solidly constructed with some nice suspense.
Rolling in filth!!!
The Guardian asks its readers what were the worst books of the decade, and book blog commenters fly from the wordwork like borer beetles on the wing to chew and feed on delicious edginess! Seven hundred comments and they're still frothing out like rampant spittle.
Compare with the various best of the year things they're running - forty or fifty posts per year, at that rate they'll get four or five hundred comments (and many of them are coming from the same people). I understand it's fun playing at being David Mitchell (not the obne that wrote the much derided Cloud Atlas, the other one) and squeezing out your hilariously scathing bon mots at the expense of easy targets (Ian, Zadie, the other Dave) but I'm still amazed and disappointed that so many supposed book lovers long for the chance to fart out these clouds of bummer gas. And Guardian readers to boot! I mean, I could believe it of the Mail, but come on guys, don't let the side down!
As some of you (note ironic use of plural - hi Steve!) may recall, I used to review books for The Zone (an online SF fanzine). One of the reasons I gave that up was the number of poor or average books you had to slog through and then spend time enumerating their problems. One of the reasons I started reviewing was as a way to focus my thoughts on what does and doesn't work in fiction to feed in to my own writing, and as time went by I realised that it was only the good books that had something to teach me.
Mulling over bad books is like mulling over bad relationships, dying a little more with every reminder. Bad books aren't like the unhappy families that Tolstoy tells us about. Bad books tend to bad in the same ways: wooden characters; murky, cacophonic prose; lumpy lurching plots; a poverty of ideas. They are, ultimately boring. By contrast, every great book is great in its own unique way. Every great book has it's own perspective, something exciting and new to show us (cue Love Boat theme). Every great book is a revelation and it astonishes and humbles me to realise the incredible variety and passion of human life and expression that's revealed by great fiction...
God, I can't believe I just typed all that. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Hudson, a fool and a hypcrite!
Compare with the various best of the year things they're running - forty or fifty posts per year, at that rate they'll get four or five hundred comments (and many of them are coming from the same people). I understand it's fun playing at being David Mitchell (not the obne that wrote the much derided Cloud Atlas, the other one) and squeezing out your hilariously scathing bon mots at the expense of easy targets (Ian, Zadie, the other Dave) but I'm still amazed and disappointed that so many supposed book lovers long for the chance to fart out these clouds of bummer gas. And Guardian readers to boot! I mean, I could believe it of the Mail, but come on guys, don't let the side down!
As some of you (note ironic use of plural - hi Steve!) may recall, I used to review books for The Zone (an online SF fanzine). One of the reasons I gave that up was the number of poor or average books you had to slog through and then spend time enumerating their problems. One of the reasons I started reviewing was as a way to focus my thoughts on what does and doesn't work in fiction to feed in to my own writing, and as time went by I realised that it was only the good books that had something to teach me.
Mulling over bad books is like mulling over bad relationships, dying a little more with every reminder. Bad books aren't like the unhappy families that Tolstoy tells us about. Bad books tend to bad in the same ways: wooden characters; murky, cacophonic prose; lumpy lurching plots; a poverty of ideas. They are, ultimately boring. By contrast, every great book is great in its own unique way. Every great book has it's own perspective, something exciting and new to show us (cue Love Boat theme). Every great book is a revelation and it astonishes and humbles me to realise the incredible variety and passion of human life and expression that's revealed by great fiction...
God, I can't believe I just typed all that. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Hudson, a fool and a hypcrite!
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Tom Waits in the Hobbit?
Well according to the Guardian, who got it from AICN, who got it from the dairy maid in the eternal game if web-based Chinese whsipers that passes for entertainment news, Tom Waits is being considered for a role in The Hobbit.
I think that's cool and all (being a Tom Waits lover from the beginning of time, more or less, if we assume that time began when Waits launched Swordfishtrombone, and some physicists theorise exactly that) and it's not generally the the kind of news I feel the need to comment on (it's probably bullshit anyway) but I was struck by:
"Waits has acted before, in films such as Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law. But he has never played the kind of character you would expect to find in a JRR Tolkien's novel."
Uh, hello? Bram Stoker's Dracula? Singing spot in Shrek?
I wish the Guardian had comments on so I could be all outraged and nerdy. NERD RAGE!!!
Also, while Smaug's a good call, it could also be one of the trolls that gets turned to stone, or the voice of a dwarf. A dwarf would be kind a fitting, actually.
I think that's cool and all (being a Tom Waits lover from the beginning of time, more or less, if we assume that time began when Waits launched Swordfishtrombone, and some physicists theorise exactly that) and it's not generally the the kind of news I feel the need to comment on (it's probably bullshit anyway) but I was struck by:
"Waits has acted before, in films such as Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law. But he has never played the kind of character you would expect to find in a JRR Tolkien's novel."
Uh, hello? Bram Stoker's Dracula? Singing spot in Shrek?
I wish the Guardian had comments on so I could be all outraged and nerdy. NERD RAGE!!!
Also, while Smaug's a good call, it could also be one of the trolls that gets turned to stone, or the voice of a dwarf. A dwarf would be kind a fitting, actually.
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
Monty and Me
Do you ever feel old? I feel old all the time these days. Nothing makes me feel old like watching my idols wither and decay, their bodies losing definition, their talents dwindling as the sun sets on the lives and careers. So, pondering Python has been making me feel old since at least the first Secret Policeman's Ball movie. They've been out and about this year celebrating their 40th anniversary, and every time they stagger, stumble and wheel out for one of these things they look more disturbingly ancient and unfunny.
The age I am, Python have always had the slight allure of the forbidden and the “grown up”. I was a bit young to be aware of it first time around, but by the time repeats were showing on TV in the seventies I had two older brothers who were fanatics about it and a bedtime curfew that prevented me from seeing it most of the time. I recall one summer's day with the Perkins family in Raumati (maybe they had a summer batch or something, because I seem to remember they lived in Wadestown) staying up late and an episode and I'm pretty sure I saw the episodes Party Political Broadcast (I remember The Most Awful Family in Britain) and Mr Nuetron from series at some stage. I might have even seen them while living in the UK.
Back in these ancient times, before videos and goddamn YouTube, we used to get our Python fix through their amazing records. My brothers (again!) owned them, and listened to them avidly at every opportunity and it's these versions of the sketches that burned themselves onto my impressionable, malleable pre-pubescent mind. [NB There's a doco about these on Radio 2 tonight presented by the Mighty Boosh Guys. Don't groan that way, maybe they'll play it straight! It'll be on listen again for a week, so go listen to it!] I was startled when I saw the Cat License on DVD and it didn't end up with the wonderful Eric the Half A Bee song, and neither does the Michael Baldwin sketch end up with the Philosopher's Song. I think that the versions of the sketches on the records tend to be a little than the original broadcasts, too, the rhythms are hit a little harder and the scripts are a wee bit sharper. Plus you don't have to sit through some of the ... er... weaker items.
In addition to the records are the completely brilliant books, the Monty Python Hardback Bok and Monty Python's Big Red Book. My brothers owned these, two and I practically memorised them as a kid. I picked them both up second hand quite recently (on the Isle of Wight!) and they are a real delight. The design is fantastic, using different types of paper and cut outs to add a whole other dimension to material from the show. They could probably have just printed the scripts and walked away with the cash, but instead the material has been solidly re-worked for the new format, giving it a whole new dimension.
I saw the films in my early teens, first the Holy grail and then The Life of Brian when i was fifteen or so (it was an R16 in New Zealand – those were different days!). I can vividly recally seeing it in the old majectic Cinema on Willis Street (now the site of an ugly skyscraper) and feeling exhausted with laugher before the end of the credits. The Meaning of Life was a disappointment, of course, and it's probably instructive to ponder why that is. I guess it seemed like a retrograde step after the wonderfully unified (in the Aristotelian sense, in fact) Life of Brian and, for that matter, after Time Bandits and Brazil, Gilliam's great first flowering and nearly Python movies in their own right. I'd say that by the early 80s the show was over for the Pythons and it's been annoying cruft like Spamalot ever since.
Ah well, who can complain when the originals are so marvellous? Watching the TV shows now (via the wonders of DVD, but it's nearly all up on youtube if you want) them now they are still amazingly funny and fresh. The first couple of episodes of series two, for example, are nearly faultless, including the Ministry of Silly Walks, the Piranha Brothers, Meet the Press (“I'd like to answer that question in two ways....”), and the Spanish Inquisition. They have the reputation of being “clever” with jokes about philosophy, art and literature, but what really strikes me is the amazing gleeful silliness of it all. There's so much wonderful slapstick and word play, grotesque costumes and simple clowning about – what are the Gumbies if not drolls? Some of my favourite sketches are based on such simple premises, like Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson or the whole “No Time To Lose” sequence, which ends with the brilliantly stupid gag about “No Time” Toulouse, the Fastest Impressionist in the West.
The other key element is the quality of the performances. They weren't just wonderful writers, but brilliant comic actors. On the one hand they are brilliant clowns and physical comedians but on the other they can play straight to provide the correct leavening to the wackiness, notably Graham Chapman's wonderfully straight performances such as the army Colonel in series one and later in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Life of Brian. Terry Jones also had a nice line in stuffy middle class types, like the guy in Nudge Nudge that could also break in wonderful silliness. These two elements combine most memorably in Cleese's performance in the Ministry of Silly Walks – while the top half of his body expounds on government funding, the bottom capers hilariously around the office.
Python has been a huge influence on me creatively ever since I started acting out and writing and everything. When I was nine, I goaded my friends at Greenacres School in Tawa to perform the Lumberjack Song for the Friday performance assembly. Who knows what Mr Swan made of me pulling aside a plaid shirt to reveal one of Mum's bras? His thoughts were never recorded. My “funny” writing leans heavily to the Pythonesque. I sometimes wonder if I've fallen into a Douglas Adamsy/Terry Prathcetty mode (who also echo Python pretty heavily) but... hm, well, I don't know. I try and be a little meaner than those two, who I admire technically but I find a little good natured for my own tastes. I worry about the age of it all, too – is it too old hat in this age of rock star comedians playing stadiums and hosting every flavour of programme on TV ever (how long can it be before Jo Brand joins the team on The Today Programme? Or – worryingly realistically – Russell Brand?)
So, there's two posts in a row about what are probably my foundational creative elements. Marvel comics and Monty Python - no wonder I can't sell anything!
The age I am, Python have always had the slight allure of the forbidden and the “grown up”. I was a bit young to be aware of it first time around, but by the time repeats were showing on TV in the seventies I had two older brothers who were fanatics about it and a bedtime curfew that prevented me from seeing it most of the time. I recall one summer's day with the Perkins family in Raumati (maybe they had a summer batch or something, because I seem to remember they lived in Wadestown) staying up late and an episode and I'm pretty sure I saw the episodes Party Political Broadcast (I remember The Most Awful Family in Britain) and Mr Nuetron from series at some stage. I might have even seen them while living in the UK.
Back in these ancient times, before videos and goddamn YouTube, we used to get our Python fix through their amazing records. My brothers (again!) owned them, and listened to them avidly at every opportunity and it's these versions of the sketches that burned themselves onto my impressionable, malleable pre-pubescent mind. [NB There's a doco about these on Radio 2 tonight presented by the Mighty Boosh Guys. Don't groan that way, maybe they'll play it straight! It'll be on listen again for a week, so go listen to it!] I was startled when I saw the Cat License on DVD and it didn't end up with the wonderful Eric the Half A Bee song, and neither does the Michael Baldwin sketch end up with the Philosopher's Song. I think that the versions of the sketches on the records tend to be a little than the original broadcasts, too, the rhythms are hit a little harder and the scripts are a wee bit sharper. Plus you don't have to sit through some of the ... er... weaker items.
In addition to the records are the completely brilliant books, the Monty Python Hardback Bok and Monty Python's Big Red Book. My brothers owned these, two and I practically memorised them as a kid. I picked them both up second hand quite recently (on the Isle of Wight!) and they are a real delight. The design is fantastic, using different types of paper and cut outs to add a whole other dimension to material from the show. They could probably have just printed the scripts and walked away with the cash, but instead the material has been solidly re-worked for the new format, giving it a whole new dimension.
I saw the films in my early teens, first the Holy grail and then The Life of Brian when i was fifteen or so (it was an R16 in New Zealand – those were different days!). I can vividly recally seeing it in the old majectic Cinema on Willis Street (now the site of an ugly skyscraper) and feeling exhausted with laugher before the end of the credits. The Meaning of Life was a disappointment, of course, and it's probably instructive to ponder why that is. I guess it seemed like a retrograde step after the wonderfully unified (in the Aristotelian sense, in fact) Life of Brian and, for that matter, after Time Bandits and Brazil, Gilliam's great first flowering and nearly Python movies in their own right. I'd say that by the early 80s the show was over for the Pythons and it's been annoying cruft like Spamalot ever since.
Ah well, who can complain when the originals are so marvellous? Watching the TV shows now (via the wonders of DVD, but it's nearly all up on youtube if you want) them now they are still amazingly funny and fresh. The first couple of episodes of series two, for example, are nearly faultless, including the Ministry of Silly Walks, the Piranha Brothers, Meet the Press (“I'd like to answer that question in two ways....”), and the Spanish Inquisition. They have the reputation of being “clever” with jokes about philosophy, art and literature, but what really strikes me is the amazing gleeful silliness of it all. There's so much wonderful slapstick and word play, grotesque costumes and simple clowning about – what are the Gumbies if not drolls? Some of my favourite sketches are based on such simple premises, like Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson or the whole “No Time To Lose” sequence, which ends with the brilliantly stupid gag about “No Time” Toulouse, the Fastest Impressionist in the West.
The other key element is the quality of the performances. They weren't just wonderful writers, but brilliant comic actors. On the one hand they are brilliant clowns and physical comedians but on the other they can play straight to provide the correct leavening to the wackiness, notably Graham Chapman's wonderfully straight performances such as the army Colonel in series one and later in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Life of Brian. Terry Jones also had a nice line in stuffy middle class types, like the guy in Nudge Nudge that could also break in wonderful silliness. These two elements combine most memorably in Cleese's performance in the Ministry of Silly Walks – while the top half of his body expounds on government funding, the bottom capers hilariously around the office.
Python has been a huge influence on me creatively ever since I started acting out and writing and everything. When I was nine, I goaded my friends at Greenacres School in Tawa to perform the Lumberjack Song for the Friday performance assembly. Who knows what Mr Swan made of me pulling aside a plaid shirt to reveal one of Mum's bras? His thoughts were never recorded. My “funny” writing leans heavily to the Pythonesque. I sometimes wonder if I've fallen into a Douglas Adamsy/Terry Prathcetty mode (who also echo Python pretty heavily) but... hm, well, I don't know. I try and be a little meaner than those two, who I admire technically but I find a little good natured for my own tastes. I worry about the age of it all, too – is it too old hat in this age of rock star comedians playing stadiums and hosting every flavour of programme on TV ever (how long can it be before Jo Brand joins the team on The Today Programme? Or – worryingly realistically – Russell Brand?)
So, there's two posts in a row about what are probably my foundational creative elements. Marvel comics and Monty Python - no wonder I can't sell anything!
Superman and Batman Get Yet Another Bloody Reboot
WARNING: This post is a bit boring, but I had to get it out of my system. Ah well!
Fair go they want to try and make them approachable for the casual reader and everything, but why announce it like it's the most amazing news ever? Batman and Superman get "rebooted" every damn year! The last four or five years in particular have seen the whole DC universe repeatedly re-started like a cantkerous computer that refuse to connect to the wireless (as mine does from time to time). Well, I guess it's about making some sort of connection, because DC seems to be losing market share little by little every year. They seem to have lost it to independent rather than Marvel, who've seen some fall in market share but have been sitting on the late forties for a while.
Now, lemme level with you, I'm a born again Marvel zombie. Here's the background (skip ahead a few paras if this kind of kiddy nostalgia bores you, you heartless creep!):
I was a Marvel lad in the early seventies as a wee fella in the UK (via the black & white weekly reprints like Mighty World of Marvel) then in New Zealand I used to enjoy the pocket-money friendly black & white DC reprints from Australia (twenty-five cents for sixty four pages, and no ads except for the eternal stamp-collectors club in the inside back cover). These presented whatever stories were to hand in any order and following continuity was simply not possible. There'd be a Legion of Superheroes from the seventies next to Superman from the late sixties and then some oddball thing like Manhunter or Kamandi. My uncle David (who is Down's Syndrome) had a huge trunk of these when we arrived in NZ in 1975 and joyfully shared them with me.
They were happy times. I hardly knew anything about DC in those days apart from the Batman TV show, and the Batman who was in the comics was nothing like that! Similarly the old George Reeves Superman who fought gangsters and ... well, more gangsters couldn't hold a candle to the Superman in the comics with his bottle cities, robot duplicates and secret artic bolt hole. And add to that all those strange fellas like the Geen Lantern, the Flash, the Atom and Wonder Woman, plus the occasional glimpse of something really whacky - Dr Fate, the Phantom Stranger or Dead Man. Brilliant stuff.
Later, there was 2000AD of course (subject of another post one day, maybe) and then distribution of US comics improved and I discovered Marvel again. Marvel offered something that those black & white DC reprints never could: a story that lasted more than one issue. The X-Men's problems went on and on, and extended into the New Mutants, and then there was the Avengers and the West Coast Avengers and all that and it was like my mind expanded, like I discovered a whole new way to tell stories (I write a bit about that in this review of The Essential Fantastic Four vols 1-3).
Well, that was all well and good, but then Alan Moore moved to DC and I discovered the comics shop in Wellington. Well, suddenly Marvel wasn't good enough any more. DC seemed to have a kind of moral superiority that that Marvel lacked. Marvel appeared venal and tawdry beside DC's noble heroes with an ancient lineage. Hell, they'd invented the whole shebang, as I discovered through fanzines and oddly layed-out small press comics histories (before the internet, gasp!!)
One title I liked in particular was Roy Thomas's All Star Squadron, which told the story if the DC universe during World War II, retconning a number of properties they'd acquired over the years into their "Earth 2", the alternative universe where Superman had appeared in the 1930s quickly followed by Batman and Wonder Woman and all the rest, and where the Flash wore a soldier's helmet, Green Lantern had a cape and the Sandman was an oddball in a gasmask rather than an annoying mopey goth. You see, to keep their comics current they'd had to update them from time to time and... well, if you don't know what I mean when I say "Earth 2" then there's no real space to explain it here.
Anyway.
Just as All Star Squadrom was really hitting its stride, DC made the first of their massive reboots. Earth 2 was suddenly no more, eaten up by the Anitmonitor All Star Squadron was now about these rather uninteresting second stringers. Superman was rebooted as a yuppie. Barry Allen the Flash was dead replaced by the Kid Flash. All the wierd and quirky elements were eliminated and replaced by something that looked a lot like the Marvel universe I'd seceded from just a couple of years before.
Then the twin body blows of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, and suddenly the whole super heroes idea seemed a bit embarrassingly stupid. DC had somehow managed to hug their golden goose to death.
Whhheeeesh wheeeessh, winds blow and I wander in the wilderness, enjoying the outer reaches of Alan Moore for a while and the post-underground black and white guys like Dan Clowes and Joe Sacco and then, suddenly, I'm not reading comics any more. Years go by, dark years, empty years. No one punches anyone through a wall. No one agonises "Oh, Betty, if only you knew the real reason I ran out on our date!". No one I read about has unfeasible pectoral muscles.
Then, one day, I decide it's been too long. Inspired by online debates about Marvel's Civil War, I jump in again with World War Hulk, a series where the Hulk returns to Earth and... well, look that's what wikipedia's for, right? But the point is I found a new way to read comics. Instead of following individual title or characters, I started reading "events". I read World War Hulk and its attendant specials and cross-overs, without getting any of the other series (well, I did end up siging on for the Incredible Hercules, which is sublimely brilliant). Then I read Secret Invasion (skrulls invade!) which morphed seamlessly into Dark Reign (Norman Osborne, aka the Green Goblin becomes director of S.H.I.E.L.D; hilarity ensues).
People complain about these mega-crossover events but I like them. I think it's a development in the story telling technique as powerful and interesting as the original idea of a shared universe. I'm wierd that way.
Anyway, these are all good fun series about people being punched through walls and missing dates and having unfeasible pectoral muscles, so I'm happy, but I feel bad! I have the residue of my old worry that DC is where the real oil is. Indeed, Grant Morrison, another alumnus of 2000AD's golden age, is working at DC and doing some amazing stuff. Aside from his Vertigo books (like The Invisibles and The Filth) he's planning big cross-over events, too, so I read Inifintie Crisis and then the weekly multi-character book 52, and then Final Crisis. Well, they're all good. 52 is excellent, in fact, and extends the idea of the superhero comics being about continuity rather than particular characters in a really interesting direction, but it can't be maintained. The Crises, in particular, come hard on each others heels redefining the DC continuity again and again until it's not even a recognisable continuity anymore, but a kind of meta-continuity which self consciously references its own artificiality and gets all crazy whacky and occasionally brilliant, but more often unreadable.
So, in the last year or so DC has retrenched a little, put Mr Morrison back on the strong tranquilisers and launched a Green Lantern-based mega epic, Blackest Night. Unfortunately it's a pallid version of the sort of thing that Marvel have been doing for the last few years, but without Marvel's wilfully vulgar brio. I dunno why, but there's an energy that still comes through from Stan Lee that allows the Marvel creators to be histrionic, melodramatic and silly that DC lacks. DC seems stolid and boring by comparison. Blackest Night opens with about eight pages of dense of dialogue as superheroes attend a series of memorial services on superhero day, remembering fallen comrades, mulling their heritage and oh Christ I JUST WANT SOMEONE TO KICK SOMEONE ELSE IN THE FACE!!! Is that so wrong?
So, well, what did I actually want to say here? I guess, where this is heading is saying that DC seemed to lose the superhero plot sometime in the 80s. Something about the Vertigo deal meant that they could never again just do superheros kicking each in the face and revelling in their unfeasible pectorals. They seem obsessed by dignity and legacy and history in a way that Marvel are not. The Marvel comics aren't great art but they're great, cheesy superhero thrills. Other people probably watch Heroes and stuff for a similar kick (I'm not much of a genre TV fan) but for me well, Make Mine Marvel!
What makes DC's annoucnement all the more stupid is the wonderful All Star Superman produced by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely which did everything they claim their Straczynski Superman is going to do in a single eloquent 12 issue run last year. Having read that, I just don't see how anyone (and certainly not a hack like Straczynski) can top that. Okay, Miller's All Star Batman was a mixed bag (if you mixed vomit, shit and weevils) but then the wonderful Mr Morrison's been doing superlative work on the mainstream Batman title for several years (yes, I've been reading that and it's been truly magnificent stuff).
So, please, DC, don't pretend this is some Earth shattering new idea that's going to revive your properties. It's the same old bollocks in the hands of a bunch of annoying hacks. Raaargh! Nerd Rage!!!
Fair go they want to try and make them approachable for the casual reader and everything, but why announce it like it's the most amazing news ever? Batman and Superman get "rebooted" every damn year! The last four or five years in particular have seen the whole DC universe repeatedly re-started like a cantkerous computer that refuse to connect to the wireless (as mine does from time to time). Well, I guess it's about making some sort of connection, because DC seems to be losing market share little by little every year. They seem to have lost it to independent rather than Marvel, who've seen some fall in market share but have been sitting on the late forties for a while.
Now, lemme level with you, I'm a born again Marvel zombie. Here's the background (skip ahead a few paras if this kind of kiddy nostalgia bores you, you heartless creep!):
I was a Marvel lad in the early seventies as a wee fella in the UK (via the black & white weekly reprints like Mighty World of Marvel) then in New Zealand I used to enjoy the pocket-money friendly black & white DC reprints from Australia (twenty-five cents for sixty four pages, and no ads except for the eternal stamp-collectors club in the inside back cover). These presented whatever stories were to hand in any order and following continuity was simply not possible. There'd be a Legion of Superheroes from the seventies next to Superman from the late sixties and then some oddball thing like Manhunter or Kamandi. My uncle David (who is Down's Syndrome) had a huge trunk of these when we arrived in NZ in 1975 and joyfully shared them with me.
They were happy times. I hardly knew anything about DC in those days apart from the Batman TV show, and the Batman who was in the comics was nothing like that! Similarly the old George Reeves Superman who fought gangsters and ... well, more gangsters couldn't hold a candle to the Superman in the comics with his bottle cities, robot duplicates and secret artic bolt hole. And add to that all those strange fellas like the Geen Lantern, the Flash, the Atom and Wonder Woman, plus the occasional glimpse of something really whacky - Dr Fate, the Phantom Stranger or Dead Man. Brilliant stuff.
Later, there was 2000AD of course (subject of another post one day, maybe) and then distribution of US comics improved and I discovered Marvel again. Marvel offered something that those black & white DC reprints never could: a story that lasted more than one issue. The X-Men's problems went on and on, and extended into the New Mutants, and then there was the Avengers and the West Coast Avengers and all that and it was like my mind expanded, like I discovered a whole new way to tell stories (I write a bit about that in this review of The Essential Fantastic Four vols 1-3).
Well, that was all well and good, but then Alan Moore moved to DC and I discovered the comics shop in Wellington. Well, suddenly Marvel wasn't good enough any more. DC seemed to have a kind of moral superiority that that Marvel lacked. Marvel appeared venal and tawdry beside DC's noble heroes with an ancient lineage. Hell, they'd invented the whole shebang, as I discovered through fanzines and oddly layed-out small press comics histories (before the internet, gasp!!)
One title I liked in particular was Roy Thomas's All Star Squadron, which told the story if the DC universe during World War II, retconning a number of properties they'd acquired over the years into their "Earth 2", the alternative universe where Superman had appeared in the 1930s quickly followed by Batman and Wonder Woman and all the rest, and where the Flash wore a soldier's helmet, Green Lantern had a cape and the Sandman was an oddball in a gasmask rather than an annoying mopey goth. You see, to keep their comics current they'd had to update them from time to time and... well, if you don't know what I mean when I say "Earth 2" then there's no real space to explain it here.
Anyway.
Just as All Star Squadrom was really hitting its stride, DC made the first of their massive reboots. Earth 2 was suddenly no more, eaten up by the Anitmonitor All Star Squadron was now about these rather uninteresting second stringers. Superman was rebooted as a yuppie. Barry Allen the Flash was dead replaced by the Kid Flash. All the wierd and quirky elements were eliminated and replaced by something that looked a lot like the Marvel universe I'd seceded from just a couple of years before.
Then the twin body blows of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, and suddenly the whole super heroes idea seemed a bit embarrassingly stupid. DC had somehow managed to hug their golden goose to death.
Whhheeeesh wheeeessh, winds blow and I wander in the wilderness, enjoying the outer reaches of Alan Moore for a while and the post-underground black and white guys like Dan Clowes and Joe Sacco and then, suddenly, I'm not reading comics any more. Years go by, dark years, empty years. No one punches anyone through a wall. No one agonises "Oh, Betty, if only you knew the real reason I ran out on our date!". No one I read about has unfeasible pectoral muscles.
Then, one day, I decide it's been too long. Inspired by online debates about Marvel's Civil War, I jump in again with World War Hulk, a series where the Hulk returns to Earth and... well, look that's what wikipedia's for, right? But the point is I found a new way to read comics. Instead of following individual title or characters, I started reading "events". I read World War Hulk and its attendant specials and cross-overs, without getting any of the other series (well, I did end up siging on for the Incredible Hercules, which is sublimely brilliant). Then I read Secret Invasion (skrulls invade!) which morphed seamlessly into Dark Reign (Norman Osborne, aka the Green Goblin becomes director of S.H.I.E.L.D; hilarity ensues).
People complain about these mega-crossover events but I like them. I think it's a development in the story telling technique as powerful and interesting as the original idea of a shared universe. I'm wierd that way.
Anyway, these are all good fun series about people being punched through walls and missing dates and having unfeasible pectoral muscles, so I'm happy, but I feel bad! I have the residue of my old worry that DC is where the real oil is. Indeed, Grant Morrison, another alumnus of 2000AD's golden age, is working at DC and doing some amazing stuff. Aside from his Vertigo books (like The Invisibles and The Filth) he's planning big cross-over events, too, so I read Inifintie Crisis and then the weekly multi-character book 52, and then Final Crisis. Well, they're all good. 52 is excellent, in fact, and extends the idea of the superhero comics being about continuity rather than particular characters in a really interesting direction, but it can't be maintained. The Crises, in particular, come hard on each others heels redefining the DC continuity again and again until it's not even a recognisable continuity anymore, but a kind of meta-continuity which self consciously references its own artificiality and gets all crazy whacky and occasionally brilliant, but more often unreadable.
So, in the last year or so DC has retrenched a little, put Mr Morrison back on the strong tranquilisers and launched a Green Lantern-based mega epic, Blackest Night. Unfortunately it's a pallid version of the sort of thing that Marvel have been doing for the last few years, but without Marvel's wilfully vulgar brio. I dunno why, but there's an energy that still comes through from Stan Lee that allows the Marvel creators to be histrionic, melodramatic and silly that DC lacks. DC seems stolid and boring by comparison. Blackest Night opens with about eight pages of dense of dialogue as superheroes attend a series of memorial services on superhero day, remembering fallen comrades, mulling their heritage and oh Christ I JUST WANT SOMEONE TO KICK SOMEONE ELSE IN THE FACE!!! Is that so wrong?
So, well, what did I actually want to say here? I guess, where this is heading is saying that DC seemed to lose the superhero plot sometime in the 80s. Something about the Vertigo deal meant that they could never again just do superheros kicking each in the face and revelling in their unfeasible pectorals. They seem obsessed by dignity and legacy and history in a way that Marvel are not. The Marvel comics aren't great art but they're great, cheesy superhero thrills. Other people probably watch Heroes and stuff for a similar kick (I'm not much of a genre TV fan) but for me well, Make Mine Marvel!
What makes DC's annoucnement all the more stupid is the wonderful All Star Superman produced by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely which did everything they claim their Straczynski Superman is going to do in a single eloquent 12 issue run last year. Having read that, I just don't see how anyone (and certainly not a hack like Straczynski) can top that. Okay, Miller's All Star Batman was a mixed bag (if you mixed vomit, shit and weevils) but then the wonderful Mr Morrison's been doing superlative work on the mainstream Batman title for several years (yes, I've been reading that and it's been truly magnificent stuff).
So, please, DC, don't pretend this is some Earth shattering new idea that's going to revive your properties. It's the same old bollocks in the hands of a bunch of annoying hacks. Raaargh! Nerd Rage!!!
Sunday, 6 December 2009
The Bonfire of the Vanities
This is one of those classics that you always promise yourself you're going to get around to reading but never do. I generally rely on fate to throw books in my path for about 80% of my reading, and so when I happened across this for 20p at an Amnesty International book sale, I figured the time had come! I wasn't sure what to expect, and have a fifty-fifty kind of relationship with “classics” (at best) and find a lot of them don't interest me that much for one reason or another, but I was totally swept away by this! It's compelling funny and clever, with the kind of penetrating vision that speaks of real knowledge and experience of the milieu he describes.
This novel brought to mind a piece of Wolfe's journalism I read earlier in the year, “Radical Chic” published in the New York Magazine in 1970. The article uses a lot of fictional techniques, but the novel really brings home John Gardner's assertion that fiction can tell truths that non-fiction can't reach. While “Radical Chic” describes the actions of a small group in the great game of power, The Bonfire of the Vanities uses fiction to illustrate the entire cycle of power and money in New York in the 80s, showing how it flows through the city and the people.
This is a satire, and the characters have only the depth and characteristics that satire demands. They are libidinal, dishonest, cowardly, greedy and lazy and it's these characteristics that drive them rather than any desire to do or be good. They are partly symbolic of various players in the game of power, although some are more symbolic than others.
Sherman McCoy is at the heart of proceedings here, and is the most rounded character. His actions get the whole thing started, and we spend the most time with him as he makes his way through the justice system. He's the only character that's really changed by what he goes through, and for all the blame he can rightly take for what happens to him, he's an innocent compared to the people that drive the case forward and ultimately ruin him. The Reverend Bacon who pushes the case on behalf of the impoverished black community of the Bronx is shown to be self-serving and corrupt using the rhetoric of oppression to line his own pockets (in a subplot about funding for a community daycare centre that remains half developed) and the district attorney is more interested in re-election than justice. Both men are forever in touch with the press making sure that their righteous actions are there for all to see. The press, of course, come off no better and are represented here by the venal, drunken Englishman Peter Fallow, who works for a scandal sheet and only really worries about free drinks and snobbery.
Wolfe wades into all this with great wit and verve. He has a great fractured style, breaking sentences up with dashes and ellipses to create a stream of consciousness that follows his characters eyes and thoughts around a room. He's especially good at waspish observation, whether it's Fallow's disparaging commentary on barbaric Americans or McCoy's bored superior view of his wife's friends (emaciated social X-Rays and Lemon Tarts). The plot is effectively driven by the competing desire of of everyone to reveal or conceal different aspects of what happened on the night of McCoy, Kramer and Bacon all have their own reasons for presenting a certain version of the events, and Wolfe builds up tension as they try and conceal or reveal matters for their own advantage. Most of the tension builds up around McCoy, that familiar dread where you know what's coming but it's artfully spun out as the author ratchets up the consequences of not coming cleans notch by notch.
The elements work brilliantly in isolation, but they all add up to a fantastic satirical vision, one that seems compellingly true and vital, revealing the cracks in society of 80s New York. All in all it's a fantastic book, one of the best I've read this year!
This novel brought to mind a piece of Wolfe's journalism I read earlier in the year, “Radical Chic” published in the New York Magazine in 1970. The article uses a lot of fictional techniques, but the novel really brings home John Gardner's assertion that fiction can tell truths that non-fiction can't reach. While “Radical Chic” describes the actions of a small group in the great game of power, The Bonfire of the Vanities uses fiction to illustrate the entire cycle of power and money in New York in the 80s, showing how it flows through the city and the people.
This is a satire, and the characters have only the depth and characteristics that satire demands. They are libidinal, dishonest, cowardly, greedy and lazy and it's these characteristics that drive them rather than any desire to do or be good. They are partly symbolic of various players in the game of power, although some are more symbolic than others.
Sherman McCoy is at the heart of proceedings here, and is the most rounded character. His actions get the whole thing started, and we spend the most time with him as he makes his way through the justice system. He's the only character that's really changed by what he goes through, and for all the blame he can rightly take for what happens to him, he's an innocent compared to the people that drive the case forward and ultimately ruin him. The Reverend Bacon who pushes the case on behalf of the impoverished black community of the Bronx is shown to be self-serving and corrupt using the rhetoric of oppression to line his own pockets (in a subplot about funding for a community daycare centre that remains half developed) and the district attorney is more interested in re-election than justice. Both men are forever in touch with the press making sure that their righteous actions are there for all to see. The press, of course, come off no better and are represented here by the venal, drunken Englishman Peter Fallow, who works for a scandal sheet and only really worries about free drinks and snobbery.
Wolfe wades into all this with great wit and verve. He has a great fractured style, breaking sentences up with dashes and ellipses to create a stream of consciousness that follows his characters eyes and thoughts around a room. He's especially good at waspish observation, whether it's Fallow's disparaging commentary on barbaric Americans or McCoy's bored superior view of his wife's friends (emaciated social X-Rays and Lemon Tarts). The plot is effectively driven by the competing desire of of everyone to reveal or conceal different aspects of what happened on the night of McCoy, Kramer and Bacon all have their own reasons for presenting a certain version of the events, and Wolfe builds up tension as they try and conceal or reveal matters for their own advantage. Most of the tension builds up around McCoy, that familiar dread where you know what's coming but it's artfully spun out as the author ratchets up the consequences of not coming cleans notch by notch.
The elements work brilliantly in isolation, but they all add up to a fantastic satirical vision, one that seems compellingly true and vital, revealing the cracks in society of 80s New York. All in all it's a fantastic book, one of the best I've read this year!
Friday, 4 December 2009
Palindrome
I say! My Dictionary of Dumb Jokes defines "palindrome" as "Sarah Palin/Micheal Palin - two Palins enter, one Palin leaves."
I don't really care about Twilight, but...
... I thought this was an interesting article. I found the comments here about the reaction to Twilight fans in the geek crowd and online revealing. The comparisons with the reaction to Harry Potter are also very interesting.
I've always felt geekiness was a very male place, despite the increasing presence of young ladies with piercings, tattoos and odd coloured hair in comics shops. Representations of women have always been problematic, and I never felt that the sexy kick-ass chick was quite the answer seem people seemed to think. I boggled at the idea of Xena as a feminist icon, for example (although it would be foolish of me to try and speak for women who did find that image attractive) and while the soapier elements of Buffy the Vampire Slayer made that a much more female-friendly show (and of course the Buffy/Angel relationship prefigures Twilight), it suffered a little from the feminism = sexy lesbians equation that gets into geeky creators heads when they try and make strong female characters (in this case Willow, although she got mired in all sorts of sick-making paganism crapola as well).
That kind of typical nerd "empowered" female just looks like a male fantasy to me, created by men for men. When you look at fantasy actually created by women and targetted at women you get something else entirely and I find the territorial squawking of the fanboys pretty funny.
I've always felt geekiness was a very male place, despite the increasing presence of young ladies with piercings, tattoos and odd coloured hair in comics shops. Representations of women have always been problematic, and I never felt that the sexy kick-ass chick was quite the answer seem people seemed to think. I boggled at the idea of Xena as a feminist icon, for example (although it would be foolish of me to try and speak for women who did find that image attractive) and while the soapier elements of Buffy the Vampire Slayer made that a much more female-friendly show (and of course the Buffy/Angel relationship prefigures Twilight), it suffered a little from the feminism = sexy lesbians equation that gets into geeky creators heads when they try and make strong female characters (in this case Willow, although she got mired in all sorts of sick-making paganism crapola as well).
That kind of typical nerd "empowered" female just looks like a male fantasy to me, created by men for men. When you look at fantasy actually created by women and targetted at women you get something else entirely and I find the territorial squawking of the fanboys pretty funny.
Memes
"Meme" has come to mean a joke gone stale. When something is labelled a meme it's just another way of saying "I'm fed up with this now".
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Beware Death By Drowning!
I got soaked in a down pour on my way into work today, and now I've just knocked over a cup of water on my desk. If this was a creepy movie, I'd be getting worried about now. But then, I'm easily scared.
Sunday, 29 November 2009
Simple Childish Pleasures Colonised by Dick Heads
We went to see The Fantastic Mr Fox in the weekend, and while I thought it was a great film in a lot of ways, I was also profoundly disappointed by it. My kids adore Roald Dahl stories and are big fans of the original story, so they were very excited by it all. However, in the movie itself I could sense their eyes glazing over while George Clooney wrestled with his mid-life crisis. It made for a funny and joyous mid-life crisis movie, but the pre-pubescent subversiveness of the original had been dispensed with in favour of the longing of aging Gen Xers for their slacker youth.
The upcoming movie version of Where the Wild Things are seems to follow a similar pattern of taking a magical childish work, that thrived on a lack of explication, and turning it into a labouriously tedious examination of adulty alienation. A conversation on FaceBook with Jonathan McCalmont about the Christmas window displays on Oxford Street, which have abandoned childish notions of a magical Christmas in favour of avant garde expressions of decadance and sensuality crytallised this issue for me recently. What the hell was wrong with fairies and Father Christmas?
It seems to me that even while we complain about children growing up too fast - over-sexualised, exploited by manufacturers of shitty toys and junk food, opressed by an educational system obsessed with results, and constricted by "PC health & Safety" (tm Daily Mail) culture - our creative people are reaching back and stealing their culture and taking if for the adults.
For god's sake, leave them something other than Transformers and Barbie to enjoy. It's a strange world where a cynical commercial juggernaut like Star Wars looks good in comparison to the alternatives!
The upcoming movie version of Where the Wild Things are seems to follow a similar pattern of taking a magical childish work, that thrived on a lack of explication, and turning it into a labouriously tedious examination of adulty alienation. A conversation on FaceBook with Jonathan McCalmont about the Christmas window displays on Oxford Street, which have abandoned childish notions of a magical Christmas in favour of avant garde expressions of decadance and sensuality crytallised this issue for me recently. What the hell was wrong with fairies and Father Christmas?
It seems to me that even while we complain about children growing up too fast - over-sexualised, exploited by manufacturers of shitty toys and junk food, opressed by an educational system obsessed with results, and constricted by "PC health & Safety" (tm Daily Mail) culture - our creative people are reaching back and stealing their culture and taking if for the adults.
For god's sake, leave them something other than Transformers and Barbie to enjoy. It's a strange world where a cynical commercial juggernaut like Star Wars looks good in comparison to the alternatives!
Thursday, 26 November 2009
A Queen-Shaped Hole in the Brain
My kids have been interested in Queen for a while for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there's quite a fun video on youtube, where someone's taken scenes from Thomas the Tank Engine and cut them together with “Don't Stop me Now”. We've enjoyed this as a family since Lou was two, (they love the bit about a minute in where James spins around on the turntable) and they've always been interested in the music, which is nothing like what you hear on Thomas (“They're two they're four they're six their eight...”).
Secondly, there's Gubbins. Gubbins is a toy, a kind of blue bear (in fact the Danone “Inner self” from an advertising campaign of some years ago - my wife sent off a number of labels and we got one through the post) who features in their bedtime stories. He's all the things kids love – daft, rude, flatulent – and gets into all sorts of amusing scrapes and adventures. Among his friends are David Davis (former shadow home secretary and Gubs' best mate, and an elephant as it turns out) Farty Dada, a local who lives with his Mum, and Freddy Mercury, who lives in the Greenwich observatory (Brian May would be proud). They were amazed to discover that not only was Freddy Mercury a real person, but that he made the music for the Thomas video (they don't know about David Davis yet, I figure they're a little young for horror stories). (And hell, if their enthusiasm for Freddy is anything to go by they might end up voting tory!)
So, we spent more time on you tube looking up Queen videos and they were genuinely interested, so I bought the new best-of CD, Absolute Greatest.
I can remember when Bohemian Rhapsody was on Top of the Pops in the seventies, and I liked Queen quite a lot right up until I was in my twenties. I can remember being about 12 or 13 in particular and thrashing the old “Best of” (the current one's a new selection). Now I'm all old and a sophisticated and educated thinker, it's interesting listening to it again. In common with any serious rock fan, I was aghast when the We Will Rock You stage show was announced, but on reflection I think their music has a lot in common with show tunes. There's the obvious music hall sound of stuff like Killer Queen, and the anthemic songs like Radio Gaga, but in their entire catalogue there's something very simple and direct about their songs, despite the famous glossy production and technical expertise of Brian May. Don't Stop me Now, for example, has a real joyous abandon to it. I don't doubt it's all about Freddy's notorious party lifestyle, but still it communicates a pure uncomplicated pleasure in racing around that even little kids can grasp. All their songs are like that: the lyrics don't often make a lot of sense, or say anything particularly profound, but the sound and rhythm of the words fit perfectly with the emotional content of the music.
When listening Queen, it's as if there's a song-shaped hole in your head and even the first time you hear a Queen song it fits right in this places that's just been waiting for the song to come along and fill it. At they're best they can be literally breathtaking as they touch all sorts of strange and sensitive spots inside you, bypassing anything rational and going straight into the lizard brain.
This is one of the reasons why I don't really like them as much as some other performers, though. There's no surprises in there and the music, clever though it is, can be a bit crudely manipulative. As they went on they also depended on the same tricks that get a little tiresome. Later tracks like The Show Must Go On and It's a Kind of Magic, for example, are a bit tired. And let's not talk about fucking Radio Gaga – what's that doing on a best of anyway! (And while we're considering odd choices for an album called “Absolute Best” where are Fat Bottomed Girls and Bicycle Race, dammit!!) Their last great period was probably the time of Crazy Little Thing Called Love and I Want to Break Free (the latter one of their genuinely powerful and heartfelt songs, I have always felt).
That natural, uncomplicated sound really appeals to my kids, though, especially to my son. When he gets home from the childminder in the evening, he likes to put it on and lie on his tummy, looking at the booklet and listening along. It makes me really happy to see his musical education getting off to a solid start. It's not Tom Waits or David Bowie (we've just watched Labyrinth, though, and of course “Under Pressure”, so who knows) but it's a start!
Secondly, there's Gubbins. Gubbins is a toy, a kind of blue bear (in fact the Danone “Inner self” from an advertising campaign of some years ago - my wife sent off a number of labels and we got one through the post) who features in their bedtime stories. He's all the things kids love – daft, rude, flatulent – and gets into all sorts of amusing scrapes and adventures. Among his friends are David Davis (former shadow home secretary and Gubs' best mate, and an elephant as it turns out) Farty Dada, a local who lives with his Mum, and Freddy Mercury, who lives in the Greenwich observatory (Brian May would be proud). They were amazed to discover that not only was Freddy Mercury a real person, but that he made the music for the Thomas video (they don't know about David Davis yet, I figure they're a little young for horror stories). (And hell, if their enthusiasm for Freddy is anything to go by they might end up voting tory!)
So, we spent more time on you tube looking up Queen videos and they were genuinely interested, so I bought the new best-of CD, Absolute Greatest.
I can remember when Bohemian Rhapsody was on Top of the Pops in the seventies, and I liked Queen quite a lot right up until I was in my twenties. I can remember being about 12 or 13 in particular and thrashing the old “Best of” (the current one's a new selection). Now I'm all old and a sophisticated and educated thinker, it's interesting listening to it again. In common with any serious rock fan, I was aghast when the We Will Rock You stage show was announced, but on reflection I think their music has a lot in common with show tunes. There's the obvious music hall sound of stuff like Killer Queen, and the anthemic songs like Radio Gaga, but in their entire catalogue there's something very simple and direct about their songs, despite the famous glossy production and technical expertise of Brian May. Don't Stop me Now, for example, has a real joyous abandon to it. I don't doubt it's all about Freddy's notorious party lifestyle, but still it communicates a pure uncomplicated pleasure in racing around that even little kids can grasp. All their songs are like that: the lyrics don't often make a lot of sense, or say anything particularly profound, but the sound and rhythm of the words fit perfectly with the emotional content of the music.
When listening Queen, it's as if there's a song-shaped hole in your head and even the first time you hear a Queen song it fits right in this places that's just been waiting for the song to come along and fill it. At they're best they can be literally breathtaking as they touch all sorts of strange and sensitive spots inside you, bypassing anything rational and going straight into the lizard brain.
This is one of the reasons why I don't really like them as much as some other performers, though. There's no surprises in there and the music, clever though it is, can be a bit crudely manipulative. As they went on they also depended on the same tricks that get a little tiresome. Later tracks like The Show Must Go On and It's a Kind of Magic, for example, are a bit tired. And let's not talk about fucking Radio Gaga – what's that doing on a best of anyway! (And while we're considering odd choices for an album called “Absolute Best” where are Fat Bottomed Girls and Bicycle Race, dammit!!) Their last great period was probably the time of Crazy Little Thing Called Love and I Want to Break Free (the latter one of their genuinely powerful and heartfelt songs, I have always felt).
That natural, uncomplicated sound really appeals to my kids, though, especially to my son. When he gets home from the childminder in the evening, he likes to put it on and lie on his tummy, looking at the booklet and listening along. It makes me really happy to see his musical education getting off to a solid start. It's not Tom Waits or David Bowie (we've just watched Labyrinth, though, and of course “Under Pressure”, so who knows) but it's a start!
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
Too Clever
I used to think I was too clever by half, but the world is now too clever by three-quarters.
Monty Python Tribute
SCENE: A bar in the seventies. Behind the bar, Eric Idle is polishing glasses. Enter Terry Jones.
Jones: I'd like a cocktail please, bartender.
Eric: Of course, sir, might I reccommend a peanut colada.
Jones: Oh, a pina colada! Yes, yes, I like them, and walking in the rain, ha ha.
Eric: PEANUT colada, sir. Like a pina colada but with satay sauce. Delicious.
Jones: Oh, er no, perhaps something a bit sweeter?
Eric: Maybe an Edwyn Collins?
Jones: An Edwyn Collins? What's that?
Eric: You take a Tom Collins and add orange juice.
Jones: No, no, drier than that
Eric: An old fascist, sir?
Jones: Is that like an old fashioned?
Eric: Not really, sir. You rub a tall glass in nationalist rhetoric and then smash it over the head of the nearest communist.
Jones: No, no, I want a drink.
Eric: A margerita: tequila, lime and margarine, chilled to the consistency of runny lard. Very popular around here, Sir.
Jones: No, look -
Eric: A margetini?
Jones: No!
Eric: A singapore slinky! Gin, benedictine and cherry brandy served in a huge metal spring. It's had them snaking drunkenly down the stairs in Raffles since 1893.
Jones: Look, all I want is a refreshing aperitif, no peanut drinks or margerine or giant metals springs.
Eric: A line punch, then sir?
Jones: Line punch? What's in it.
Eric: Er, well, that's the end of the sketch, sir. Line punch, punch line. Do you see?
Jones: Ah. (pause) So, no chance of a drink, then?
Eric: Sorry, sir, sketch is over. (shrugs) Sorry.
[cue hilarious Gilliam animation]
Jones: I'd like a cocktail please, bartender.
Eric: Of course, sir, might I reccommend a peanut colada.
Jones: Oh, a pina colada! Yes, yes, I like them, and walking in the rain, ha ha.
Eric: PEANUT colada, sir. Like a pina colada but with satay sauce. Delicious.
Jones: Oh, er no, perhaps something a bit sweeter?
Eric: Maybe an Edwyn Collins?
Jones: An Edwyn Collins? What's that?
Eric: You take a Tom Collins and add orange juice.
Jones: No, no, drier than that
Eric: An old fascist, sir?
Jones: Is that like an old fashioned?
Eric: Not really, sir. You rub a tall glass in nationalist rhetoric and then smash it over the head of the nearest communist.
Jones: No, no, I want a drink.
Eric: A margerita: tequila, lime and margarine, chilled to the consistency of runny lard. Very popular around here, Sir.
Jones: No, look -
Eric: A margetini?
Jones: No!
Eric: A singapore slinky! Gin, benedictine and cherry brandy served in a huge metal spring. It's had them snaking drunkenly down the stairs in Raffles since 1893.
Jones: Look, all I want is a refreshing aperitif, no peanut drinks or margerine or giant metals springs.
Eric: A line punch, then sir?
Jones: Line punch? What's in it.
Eric: Er, well, that's the end of the sketch, sir. Line punch, punch line. Do you see?
Jones: Ah. (pause) So, no chance of a drink, then?
Eric: Sorry, sir, sketch is over. (shrugs) Sorry.
[cue hilarious Gilliam animation]
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Martin Martin's On the Other Side by Mark Wernham
This is a satirical near future dystopian reality head-fuck, not a hundred miles from The Red Men, and was also nominated for the Clarke Award (losing out to Ian McLeod's Song of Time, which I haven't read). Jensen Interceptor is a minor civil servant in an oppressive future Britain where the population is kept distracted from civil liberties by cheap drugs and game shows and tawdry celebrity crap. Unexpectedly he's drafted into the secret service to spy on a cell of terrorists who believe in a TV psychic messiah from the early 20th century and finds his loyalties tested as he is drawn to their teachings.
This isn't a very original premise, but makes for a hugely entertaining novel, based mainly on the brilliantly sustained voice of Jensen Interceptor. He's kind of an innocent, I guess, wide eyed and good natured charismatic and appealing despite his appalling vacuity. It's effortlessly fluid and clever, with a funny turn of phrase and well-captured jauntiness that make it a pleasure to spend time with him. Later, as he gets embroiled in the plot of the Martin Martinist terrorists, his hapless and wilful attempts at spying generate more humour, and because Wernham keeps Jensen as an affable fool, his moral confusion is sympathetic and interesting. Despite his grotesqueness, I really felt for old Jensen as he struggled to make sense of his experiences.
There are a number of other stand out scenes, not directly connected to Jensen that display Wernham's sympathetic eye for human emotions and ability to communicate them with great power, for example, Emile Henderson's post-mortem confrontation with Jack Jackson or when Jensen is allowed to view the memories of the old lady in the cafe (which reminded me so much of Winston Smith and Julia fiding peace out of sight of the screens in 1984 that I have to wonder if this was a direct reference). Wernham's clearlt a writer of great ability.
It all unravels somewhat in the last fifty pages or so, and I think Wernham made some bad decisions regarding the plot. Making Claire – Jensen's madonna-like moral compass among the Martin Martinists – one of “them” came totally out of the blue, and Reg made for a very unconvincing bomber. These sudden character twists revealed the hand of the author at work, pushing the plot in an unnatural direction.
I was also underwhelmed by the ideas of manipulating humanity's baser instincts with an aim for social control. It seems to me that the thinking behind this wasn't fully explored – what's the goal of this society? It didn't really seem much better than the current world at controlling eruptions of violence, and there was no secret elite protecting their own way of life like the inner party in 1984. I think an accidental tyranny of the lowest common dominator is at once more convincing and more chilling than the “manipulated by THEM” conclusion presented (albeit with great passion) here. I guess part of my problem with this is that I have written very similar stories myself. I think I always aim for a resolution of the conficting impulses of society, between difficult freedoms and easy but oppressive comfort. I don't see why you can't enjoy a weekend caning drugs and fucking big-titted bimbos and then get back to making the world a better place during the week(if only my life were so!)
There's also something a little retro about gender relations Jensen Interceptor's. Aside from Claire and the old lady in the cafe, the only women around are bimbos ripe for the fucking. There's no female equivalent of Jensen, no Fat Slags types getting bladdered and showing their knickers on a Friday night. I have to say that as much as i enjoyed this book, I kept coming back to this point and found it rather distracting. This raises the question of whether writers obliged to reflect these kinds of equal opportunities issues. While I'm not sure I'd say they're obliged to do so, in this case I felt that women were reduced to such shallow clichés that it made me distrust the rest of the setting. Because women were so absurdly under-represented I couldn't believe in Jensen's world as a real place.
Despite these caveats I found this a hugely enjoyable book, particularly for the first 200 pages. Highly recommended!
This isn't a very original premise, but makes for a hugely entertaining novel, based mainly on the brilliantly sustained voice of Jensen Interceptor. He's kind of an innocent, I guess, wide eyed and good natured charismatic and appealing despite his appalling vacuity. It's effortlessly fluid and clever, with a funny turn of phrase and well-captured jauntiness that make it a pleasure to spend time with him. Later, as he gets embroiled in the plot of the Martin Martinist terrorists, his hapless and wilful attempts at spying generate more humour, and because Wernham keeps Jensen as an affable fool, his moral confusion is sympathetic and interesting. Despite his grotesqueness, I really felt for old Jensen as he struggled to make sense of his experiences.
There are a number of other stand out scenes, not directly connected to Jensen that display Wernham's sympathetic eye for human emotions and ability to communicate them with great power, for example, Emile Henderson's post-mortem confrontation with Jack Jackson or when Jensen is allowed to view the memories of the old lady in the cafe (which reminded me so much of Winston Smith and Julia fiding peace out of sight of the screens in 1984 that I have to wonder if this was a direct reference). Wernham's clearlt a writer of great ability.
It all unravels somewhat in the last fifty pages or so, and I think Wernham made some bad decisions regarding the plot. Making Claire – Jensen's madonna-like moral compass among the Martin Martinists – one of “them” came totally out of the blue, and Reg made for a very unconvincing bomber. These sudden character twists revealed the hand of the author at work, pushing the plot in an unnatural direction.
I was also underwhelmed by the ideas of manipulating humanity's baser instincts with an aim for social control. It seems to me that the thinking behind this wasn't fully explored – what's the goal of this society? It didn't really seem much better than the current world at controlling eruptions of violence, and there was no secret elite protecting their own way of life like the inner party in 1984. I think an accidental tyranny of the lowest common dominator is at once more convincing and more chilling than the “manipulated by THEM” conclusion presented (albeit with great passion) here. I guess part of my problem with this is that I have written very similar stories myself. I think I always aim for a resolution of the conficting impulses of society, between difficult freedoms and easy but oppressive comfort. I don't see why you can't enjoy a weekend caning drugs and fucking big-titted bimbos and then get back to making the world a better place during the week(if only my life were so!)
There's also something a little retro about gender relations Jensen Interceptor's. Aside from Claire and the old lady in the cafe, the only women around are bimbos ripe for the fucking. There's no female equivalent of Jensen, no Fat Slags types getting bladdered and showing their knickers on a Friday night. I have to say that as much as i enjoyed this book, I kept coming back to this point and found it rather distracting. This raises the question of whether writers obliged to reflect these kinds of equal opportunities issues. While I'm not sure I'd say they're obliged to do so, in this case I felt that women were reduced to such shallow clichés that it made me distrust the rest of the setting. Because women were so absurdly under-represented I couldn't believe in Jensen's world as a real place.
Despite these caveats I found this a hugely enjoyable book, particularly for the first 200 pages. Highly recommended!
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Kids today don't know they're born
This is a terrific article that sums up a great deal of my discomfort with contemporary "nerd" culture.
"We nerds are spoiled. No longer are we trading rare prints of “Them” and “War of Worlds” or rooting through boxes of old magazines to find a publicity photo from that one really scary episode of “Outer Limits” we saw when we were ten and only half-remember. Now the world is set up for nerds."
Man, I could quote sections of this going "Yeah!" and "Right on!" but you should go read it yourself (it's not long!). This is my world: I've been given all the chocolate I want, and now I feel sick.
Maybe it's jus that I like knowing about things that no one else knows about, that feeling of eclusivity, or ownership: "You can keep your Dukes of Hazard and CHiPs, I'm watching a repeat of The Prisoner late on Wednesday nights," my 12-year old self might have said. Nowadays I can's summon any enthusiasm for this stuff. I remember absorbing original Galactica like a sponge, but I just can't be bothered with the remake. OBG was wierd and exciting, NBG just likes like standard TV product.
As a nerd I feel I've been crowded out of my niche by the cool kids or, worse still, by a bunch of sweaty wierdos desperate to join the cool kids... Bah, I hate being old!
"We nerds are spoiled. No longer are we trading rare prints of “Them” and “War of Worlds” or rooting through boxes of old magazines to find a publicity photo from that one really scary episode of “Outer Limits” we saw when we were ten and only half-remember. Now the world is set up for nerds."
Man, I could quote sections of this going "Yeah!" and "Right on!" but you should go read it yourself (it's not long!). This is my world: I've been given all the chocolate I want, and now I feel sick.
Maybe it's jus that I like knowing about things that no one else knows about, that feeling of eclusivity, or ownership: "You can keep your Dukes of Hazard and CHiPs, I'm watching a repeat of The Prisoner late on Wednesday nights," my 12-year old self might have said. Nowadays I can's summon any enthusiasm for this stuff. I remember absorbing original Galactica like a sponge, but I just can't be bothered with the remake. OBG was wierd and exciting, NBG just likes like standard TV product.
As a nerd I feel I've been crowded out of my niche by the cool kids or, worse still, by a bunch of sweaty wierdos desperate to join the cool kids... Bah, I hate being old!
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
CCTV Game Show
One more step on the inevitable convergence of surveillance and entertainment just kicked off! Sign up with Internet Eyes and you could become an armchair crime spotter and win £1000 a month! Hell, that's more than a part-time community constable gets!
Registration for cyber-vigilantes is free, so I guess the company makes its money from the owners of the cameras - most CCTV cameras are privately owned (shops, factories and offices, all the cameras in shopping malls and retail/business parks like Canary Wharf) so I guess that's who'll be paying the bills here. Old Raj in the offy over the road can now have someone making sure that no one's jamming short-dated Mr Kipling's up their parka or swiping cans of white lightning.
The BBC reported on this in October, and naturally roped in some anti-surveillance wingnut to chew off a sound bite about it. There's a lot of crazy shrill nonsense written about surveillance and all that crapola in the UK. Take a look at this sober assessment of a plan to monitor the behaviour of problem families that appeared in the corporate cyber-libertarian propaganda rag Wired. There're enough scare quotes there to give Jon Gaunt post-traumatic stress.
Now, the guy here totally got the wrong end of the stick, but there's a tone of desperate desire to believe in the evil of civil-liberties destorying Britain in his grumpy retraction. How long do you think he's been waiting to use that Orwell image? (And the original story came from the Express, for heaven's sake, which is the newspaper equivalent of your creepy conspiracy-obsessed friend, right down to the ads for creepy porn in the back; it's like taking off the top of his skull and looking inside. I mean, you DO have a friend like that don't you? Maybe it's just me...)
Anyway, I think there's a a sea change in our lives going on, where CCTV and reality TV and life blogging are going to meet up and change the way we live in the urbanised world. As technology zooms ahead the tools for snooping will only get more sophisticated; I don't think there's any way to stop a determined spy getting any of your details they want, and it'll only get easier and easier. No more copies of Razzle jammed down the back of the bedstead, no more empty doughnut box surreptitiously hidden beneath the potato peelings in the bin, no more discrete affairs with her next door with the missus is at her book club. All this stuff will be out in the open, and we'll either have to live up to myths we make about ourselves or (much easier, I think!) learn some humility and admit our foibles.
More seriously, of course, no more back-room deals, no more dodgy corporate corruption, no more abuse behind closed doors. In the perfect open society, information radiates out to everyone. There is a real problem of power and elites, of course that gets obscured by civil liberties knee jerkers, one that's tied up with rather boring and old fashioned socialistic ideas of money, power and the state. This is problem of politics, though, not the concept of surveillance itself. The accumulation of power and creation of elites an eternal problem, to which there's no single answer but, as the man said, eternal vigilance. This technology is coming regardless, and the question is, how do we make sure that we can turn the cameras back on those who would turn the cameras on us?
In the meantime, good luck to Internet Eyes and their users, I say! Registration is free, after all! Think of it as a mix of real-time You've Been Framed crossed with Crimewatch. I don't think very many crimes are gonna be spotted this way, but maybe it'll provide a little distraction for students or the unemployed during the ad breaks of Big Brother and Jeremy Kyle.
Registration for cyber-vigilantes is free, so I guess the company makes its money from the owners of the cameras - most CCTV cameras are privately owned (shops, factories and offices, all the cameras in shopping malls and retail/business parks like Canary Wharf) so I guess that's who'll be paying the bills here. Old Raj in the offy over the road can now have someone making sure that no one's jamming short-dated Mr Kipling's up their parka or swiping cans of white lightning.
The BBC reported on this in October, and naturally roped in some anti-surveillance wingnut to chew off a sound bite about it. There's a lot of crazy shrill nonsense written about surveillance and all that crapola in the UK. Take a look at this sober assessment of a plan to monitor the behaviour of problem families that appeared in the corporate cyber-libertarian propaganda rag Wired. There're enough scare quotes there to give Jon Gaunt post-traumatic stress.
Now, the guy here totally got the wrong end of the stick, but there's a tone of desperate desire to believe in the evil of civil-liberties destorying Britain in his grumpy retraction. How long do you think he's been waiting to use that Orwell image? (And the original story came from the Express, for heaven's sake, which is the newspaper equivalent of your creepy conspiracy-obsessed friend, right down to the ads for creepy porn in the back; it's like taking off the top of his skull and looking inside. I mean, you DO have a friend like that don't you? Maybe it's just me...)
Anyway, I think there's a a sea change in our lives going on, where CCTV and reality TV and life blogging are going to meet up and change the way we live in the urbanised world. As technology zooms ahead the tools for snooping will only get more sophisticated; I don't think there's any way to stop a determined spy getting any of your details they want, and it'll only get easier and easier. No more copies of Razzle jammed down the back of the bedstead, no more empty doughnut box surreptitiously hidden beneath the potato peelings in the bin, no more discrete affairs with her next door with the missus is at her book club. All this stuff will be out in the open, and we'll either have to live up to myths we make about ourselves or (much easier, I think!) learn some humility and admit our foibles.
More seriously, of course, no more back-room deals, no more dodgy corporate corruption, no more abuse behind closed doors. In the perfect open society, information radiates out to everyone. There is a real problem of power and elites, of course that gets obscured by civil liberties knee jerkers, one that's tied up with rather boring and old fashioned socialistic ideas of money, power and the state. This is problem of politics, though, not the concept of surveillance itself. The accumulation of power and creation of elites an eternal problem, to which there's no single answer but, as the man said, eternal vigilance. This technology is coming regardless, and the question is, how do we make sure that we can turn the cameras back on those who would turn the cameras on us?
In the meantime, good luck to Internet Eyes and their users, I say! Registration is free, after all! Think of it as a mix of real-time You've Been Framed crossed with Crimewatch. I don't think very many crimes are gonna be spotted this way, but maybe it'll provide a little distraction for students or the unemployed during the ad breaks of Big Brother and Jeremy Kyle.
Headlines make me laugh sometimes
Chocolate giants vie for Cadbury
The story's very boring, sorry, and linked for the sake of the curious only, but... chocolate giants!
The story's very boring, sorry, and linked for the sake of the curious only, but... chocolate giants!
Sunday, 15 November 2009
The Red Men by Matthew De Abaitua
This novel was short-listed for the Clarke awards in the same year as Richard Morgan's Black Man, a novel I really disliked and that eventually won the prize. By contrast, I enjoyed The Red Men a lot – it's well written, by and large and played close to a lot of my own preferences and interests – but there are few points that prevent it from being a great novel and I guess these are why it didn't win.
In the inevitable review style, I'm going to write more about them than why I liked it, but don't get the wrong impression - this is a very cool and funny book. That out of the way...
I think it shows a few first-timer mistakes. It's frequently over-written, with a lot of fancy word work of the sort that writers often think sounds good but is in fact empty word play. In one place (by way of example) we get “Florence inspected her wet hair, found a split end and plucked it out, as unfeeling as a one of The Fates cutting a thread.” This doesn't throw any light on the conversation being had and just seems to be there to nudge us in the ribs with a classical allusion. Where there is a closer relationship to matter of the text, they often over-explicate something that's already been said it seems to me that he had a few ways of describing some action or emotion and rather than choosing one he leaves them all in there. I feel, by and large, you're better off choosing one, and the simplest one at that in these situations.
It's hard to avoid the suspicion that there's a lot of embroidered autobiography here, too, another first-timer characteristic (I hesitate to say “mistake” here). The Nelson character doesn't seem a million miles from De Abaitua's own biography, although of course I don't know all that much about him. A lot of the writing about Hackney clearly comes from personal experience, and there are a few places that reek of real characters used without much fictional dressing. The latter half of the novel set around Liverpool also has an autobiographical air to it as the narrator deconstructs the place he grew up.
De Abaitua writes particularly well about the domestic reality of a young family. I really like this description of domesticity: “no task was ever finished: there were clean clothes drying in the hallway; half-completed application forms on the desk; party decorations from the previous year still hanging around,; this was the half-done, in-betweeness of domesticity, neither victory nor defeat, just an ongoing obligation”. I also liked his characterisation of the tension between work and life (“The corporation and the family are rivals.”)
The best part of this novel, IMO, is the first section dealing primarily with the poet Raymond and his experiences at Monad. This seemed to me to be the most fully realised fiction in the novel, where De Abaitua wasn't just writing about himself, but imagining a new person in a new situation and describing and discovering them.
I do agree with the notion that authors, by and large, write about versions of themselves, but I think better novels come from burying these elements more deeply than they're buried in the Nelson character. I wondered if a better novel might have focused on Raymond, ditching the Nelson character altogether.
The Red Men is a bit messy, as well, as if De Abaitua was trying to get everything in at once. The strange point of view gymnastics that were required to fit Raymond's narrative into Nelson's first person voice were nicely done in a dream like way, but it was rather distracting. I realise that i am overfond of focus and efficiency in fiction (I find it paralysing, sometimes) but I think this would have been a smoother and better novel with a bit more focus.
I'm probably too over-familiar with the kind of drugged out gonsticism this novel is based on to give a decent commentary. I have to say I'm heartily sick of all that Alan Moore-ish, Throbbing Gristly New Age occulty hoohah, having been heavily into it in my time and then woken up one morning and thought “wait a second! It's all bollocks!” This sort of stuff seems like a young man's game. It's a kind of adolescent view of the universe as a spooky place you can change to your will, as if a toddler stamping their foot can get what they want.
I think this novel is expressing a drift away from that kind of thinking on De Abaitua's part, but he kind of wants it both ways here – clearly the powers behind Monad are nutters, but on the other hand it seems to be true, and at the end Nelson expresses a final acceptance of these ideas. It's a credit to De Abaitua, though, that I enjoyed this novel despite my over-familiarity and (dyspeptic middle aged) hostility to these concepts. Maybe the drift away from the drugs and occultism chimed with my own experiences over the last decade or so.
So, I can see why it missed out the The Black Man, which is a more coherent work and plays a lot closer to mainstream SF concerns (and stupid populist machismo, which is what really turned me off). I don't know if The Red Men deserved that award – I haven't read the other nominees – but I definitely enjoyed it more than Black Man. I doubt I'll read another Morgan novel, but I'd be inclined to give De Abaitua another whirl.
In the inevitable review style, I'm going to write more about them than why I liked it, but don't get the wrong impression - this is a very cool and funny book. That out of the way...
I think it shows a few first-timer mistakes. It's frequently over-written, with a lot of fancy word work of the sort that writers often think sounds good but is in fact empty word play. In one place (by way of example) we get “Florence inspected her wet hair, found a split end and plucked it out, as unfeeling as a one of The Fates cutting a thread.” This doesn't throw any light on the conversation being had and just seems to be there to nudge us in the ribs with a classical allusion. Where there is a closer relationship to matter of the text, they often over-explicate something that's already been said it seems to me that he had a few ways of describing some action or emotion and rather than choosing one he leaves them all in there. I feel, by and large, you're better off choosing one, and the simplest one at that in these situations.
It's hard to avoid the suspicion that there's a lot of embroidered autobiography here, too, another first-timer characteristic (I hesitate to say “mistake” here). The Nelson character doesn't seem a million miles from De Abaitua's own biography, although of course I don't know all that much about him. A lot of the writing about Hackney clearly comes from personal experience, and there are a few places that reek of real characters used without much fictional dressing. The latter half of the novel set around Liverpool also has an autobiographical air to it as the narrator deconstructs the place he grew up.
De Abaitua writes particularly well about the domestic reality of a young family. I really like this description of domesticity: “no task was ever finished: there were clean clothes drying in the hallway; half-completed application forms on the desk; party decorations from the previous year still hanging around,; this was the half-done, in-betweeness of domesticity, neither victory nor defeat, just an ongoing obligation”. I also liked his characterisation of the tension between work and life (“The corporation and the family are rivals.”)
The best part of this novel, IMO, is the first section dealing primarily with the poet Raymond and his experiences at Monad. This seemed to me to be the most fully realised fiction in the novel, where De Abaitua wasn't just writing about himself, but imagining a new person in a new situation and describing and discovering them.
I do agree with the notion that authors, by and large, write about versions of themselves, but I think better novels come from burying these elements more deeply than they're buried in the Nelson character. I wondered if a better novel might have focused on Raymond, ditching the Nelson character altogether.
The Red Men is a bit messy, as well, as if De Abaitua was trying to get everything in at once. The strange point of view gymnastics that were required to fit Raymond's narrative into Nelson's first person voice were nicely done in a dream like way, but it was rather distracting. I realise that i am overfond of focus and efficiency in fiction (I find it paralysing, sometimes) but I think this would have been a smoother and better novel with a bit more focus.
I'm probably too over-familiar with the kind of drugged out gonsticism this novel is based on to give a decent commentary. I have to say I'm heartily sick of all that Alan Moore-ish, Throbbing Gristly New Age occulty hoohah, having been heavily into it in my time and then woken up one morning and thought “wait a second! It's all bollocks!” This sort of stuff seems like a young man's game. It's a kind of adolescent view of the universe as a spooky place you can change to your will, as if a toddler stamping their foot can get what they want.
I think this novel is expressing a drift away from that kind of thinking on De Abaitua's part, but he kind of wants it both ways here – clearly the powers behind Monad are nutters, but on the other hand it seems to be true, and at the end Nelson expresses a final acceptance of these ideas. It's a credit to De Abaitua, though, that I enjoyed this novel despite my over-familiarity and (dyspeptic middle aged) hostility to these concepts. Maybe the drift away from the drugs and occultism chimed with my own experiences over the last decade or so.
So, I can see why it missed out the The Black Man, which is a more coherent work and plays a lot closer to mainstream SF concerns (and stupid populist machismo, which is what really turned me off). I don't know if The Red Men deserved that award – I haven't read the other nominees – but I definitely enjoyed it more than Black Man. I doubt I'll read another Morgan novel, but I'd be inclined to give De Abaitua another whirl.
Wednesday, 11 November 2009
A Short Play About Brian Eno and Gerry Marsden
Scene: It is the mid-70s, probably about 1974. Waspish, arch and balding Brian Eno has left Roxy Music and finds himself adrift in London. Gerry Marsden, plump, dispeptic and rubicund ekes out a living touring working men's clubs with a disparate group of musicians that he has to bill as Gerry Marsden and His Pacemaker Band for copyright reasons. This unlikely duo meet up on a chilly night in november at a party in the west London pad of Arista Records UK business manager Bernie Madeupenstein.
Eno: By the fates! Tis Gerry Marsden!
Marsden: Alright, Bri, wotcha.
Eno: Wotcha indeed, like a televisual eye! Ha ha!
Marsden: Aye, yes yes. Er howzabout dat other Bryan what was in yer band then? He alright is he?
Eno: Alright? No, never all right, how many of us can boast of that, hm? Partially right, I suppose, as that is the best any of us could hope for, do you not think?
Marsden: Er, yeah, yeah... 'Ow's 'e geetin by then, going it alone, an' all?
Eno (is levitating slightly now): Am I my Bryan's keeper, Gerry? He has Phil Manzera to watch over him still while I float free.
Marsden: Oh. Yes. (Looking around, finding no opportunity for escape, says) An 'ows about you, then? Keeping busy?
Eno (clutching forehead): Wait! Wait! Falling! Mists on water!
Marsden: I beg yer pardon?
Eno: I have a story of Bryan's doings that may interest you.
Marsden (wary): Oh aye?
Eno: Aye! And eye! Yes!
Pause
Marsden: Er....
Eno: Bryan has been in New York, dabbling with the Warhol scene, you know?
Marsden (doesn't know, but nods): Aye.
Eno: He was working on a ballet, with famed avant garde choreographer Merce Cunningham. You know Merce?
Marsden (frowns): Did 'e use to do lights down the Cavern?
Eno: Nay, tis another of which you think! The Cunningham of which I thought-speak to you is leader of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He was working with Bryan on some kind of film.
Marsden: Well, sounds grand! How'd it work out?
Eno: Alas, it buckled under the weight of acrimony.
Marsden: A divorce and that?
Eno: Something of the sort.
Marsden: Oh, that's bad luck, that is.
Eno: Indeed so. (Waggles eyebrows mischeviously) No good can come when Ferry crossed Merce C.
Marsden (thinks): Are you taking the piss?
Eno levitates off stage like a shooting star and...
Curtain
Eno: By the fates! Tis Gerry Marsden!
Marsden: Alright, Bri, wotcha.
Eno: Wotcha indeed, like a televisual eye! Ha ha!
Marsden: Aye, yes yes. Er howzabout dat other Bryan what was in yer band then? He alright is he?
Eno: Alright? No, never all right, how many of us can boast of that, hm? Partially right, I suppose, as that is the best any of us could hope for, do you not think?
Marsden: Er, yeah, yeah... 'Ow's 'e geetin by then, going it alone, an' all?
Eno (is levitating slightly now): Am I my Bryan's keeper, Gerry? He has Phil Manzera to watch over him still while I float free.
Marsden: Oh. Yes. (Looking around, finding no opportunity for escape, says) An 'ows about you, then? Keeping busy?
Eno (clutching forehead): Wait! Wait! Falling! Mists on water!
Marsden: I beg yer pardon?
Eno: I have a story of Bryan's doings that may interest you.
Marsden (wary): Oh aye?
Eno: Aye! And eye! Yes!
Pause
Marsden: Er....
Eno: Bryan has been in New York, dabbling with the Warhol scene, you know?
Marsden (doesn't know, but nods): Aye.
Eno: He was working on a ballet, with famed avant garde choreographer Merce Cunningham. You know Merce?
Marsden (frowns): Did 'e use to do lights down the Cavern?
Eno: Nay, tis another of which you think! The Cunningham of which I thought-speak to you is leader of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He was working with Bryan on some kind of film.
Marsden: Well, sounds grand! How'd it work out?
Eno: Alas, it buckled under the weight of acrimony.
Marsden: A divorce and that?
Eno: Something of the sort.
Marsden: Oh, that's bad luck, that is.
Eno: Indeed so. (Waggles eyebrows mischeviously) No good can come when Ferry crossed Merce C.
Marsden (thinks): Are you taking the piss?
Eno levitates off stage like a shooting star and...
Curtain
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Duran Duran Bassist In Interesting Point Shocker!
The last person on one would expect to say something thoughtful and interesting is a member of the band Duran Duran. I admit to being a fellow of a certain age and having a sneaky appreciation of some of their songs, but really they never struck me as very thoughtful. Then the bassist goes and spoils this impression with a rather interesting speech at UCLA marking the 40th anniversary of the first message sent over the Internet (because the bassist of Duran Duran is obviously the person one turns to in these circumstances).
John articulates a point that's been rolling around in my increasingly grouchy sensorium for a while, the tyranny of plenty. John recalls seeing Roxy Music for the first time and having his tiny Brummie mind blown: John puts it thus: “The power of that single television appearance created such pressure, such magnetism, that I got sucked in and I had to respond as I know now previous generations had responded to Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show, or The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix.”
Now comes the interesting bit! He says:
“I believe there's immense power in restriction and holding back. When artists today are asked to Twitter their every thought, their every action, to record on video their every breath, their every performance, I believe they're diluting their creative powers, their creative potency and the durability of their work.”
I wouldn't go so far as saying he's right, but there's been a change in the relationship of creator and audience. Creation used to be such a solitary affair. A band would hack away at an album – or a novellist a novel (and let's face it, that there's where I'm really going with this) – in isolation and then out it would come, at some mysterious time. Fanzines ad the like formed a tight-bandwidth (and resolutely one-way) communications channel, but by and large we fans had to sit on our hands and wait.
I think this gave the whole process a mystery and intrigue that's interesting and important. Further down I talk about Jack Vance and how much pleasure I take in finding his books in second hand shops and what have you. Before the heady days of ebay and amazon sellers this was how one filled out one's collection. I haunted second had book shops for decades, that's how I managed to read everything by PKD, Michael Moorcock and Isaac Asimov back in the good old days.
Nowadays you could get it all tomorrow. John says: “I wonder - if I'd had unlimited access to that first Roxy Music TV appearance, if I'd had unlimited access to knowledge of their personal quirks, if I'd been able to access film footage of every performance, every rehearsal, every interview they gave that year from around the world, then I believe the bubble of my obsession would have burst a long, long time ago and I'd have ceased being a fan a long time ago.”
I'm reading Matthew De Abaitua's The Red Men (which I'll post about in more detail when I'm done with it), which posits a rationing chic culture of demob suits, spam fritters and mend and make do. It's an appealing picture when confronted by the swarming choices that greet us every time we sit down to relax.
John articulates a point that's been rolling around in my increasingly grouchy sensorium for a while, the tyranny of plenty. John recalls seeing Roxy Music for the first time and having his tiny Brummie mind blown: John puts it thus: “The power of that single television appearance created such pressure, such magnetism, that I got sucked in and I had to respond as I know now previous generations had responded to Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show, or The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix.”
Now comes the interesting bit! He says:
“I believe there's immense power in restriction and holding back. When artists today are asked to Twitter their every thought, their every action, to record on video their every breath, their every performance, I believe they're diluting their creative powers, their creative potency and the durability of their work.”
I wouldn't go so far as saying he's right, but there's been a change in the relationship of creator and audience. Creation used to be such a solitary affair. A band would hack away at an album – or a novellist a novel (and let's face it, that there's where I'm really going with this) – in isolation and then out it would come, at some mysterious time. Fanzines ad the like formed a tight-bandwidth (and resolutely one-way) communications channel, but by and large we fans had to sit on our hands and wait.
I think this gave the whole process a mystery and intrigue that's interesting and important. Further down I talk about Jack Vance and how much pleasure I take in finding his books in second hand shops and what have you. Before the heady days of ebay and amazon sellers this was how one filled out one's collection. I haunted second had book shops for decades, that's how I managed to read everything by PKD, Michael Moorcock and Isaac Asimov back in the good old days.
Nowadays you could get it all tomorrow. John says: “I wonder - if I'd had unlimited access to that first Roxy Music TV appearance, if I'd had unlimited access to knowledge of their personal quirks, if I'd been able to access film footage of every performance, every rehearsal, every interview they gave that year from around the world, then I believe the bubble of my obsession would have burst a long, long time ago and I'd have ceased being a fan a long time ago.”
I'm reading Matthew De Abaitua's The Red Men (which I'll post about in more detail when I'm done with it), which posits a rationing chic culture of demob suits, spam fritters and mend and make do. It's an appealing picture when confronted by the swarming choices that greet us every time we sit down to relax.
Monday, 9 November 2009
Day of the Dead
Here's the portrait of my kids from the British Museum's Day of the Dead celebration that I mentioned in my rambling misanthropic blather below. Isbo had her face painted like a skull, btw.
Sunday, 8 November 2009
A Long Post About Jack Vance's Durdane
One of life's great pleasures is hunting out old Jack Vance paperbacks. Wherever we are, if I spot a second hand book shop and can spare a moment, I'll nip inside and check the shelves for any of those old old Sphere, Coronet or New England Library paper backs (always with great covers by Chris Foss or Jim Burns) that I haven't read before, hoping for a new treasure.
Vance was terrifically prolific, and it seems there's always something new to find. A lot of those books are forgettable pot boilers, of course - The Five Gold Rings is one I read recently that was just a threadbare pulp fiction detective plot mechanically articulated through wooden characters, barely held together by Vance's deft turn of phrase. I suppose it's the latter that keeps me buying, as there's always some wry turn of phrase in a Vance novel to make it worthwhile. Plus they're always short and small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, the sort of book you can finish between Tuesday and Thursday on the commute to work.
I prefer to hunt my Vance in the wild rather than purchase farm-reared Vance from Amazon sellers - the hunt is part of the thrill, and life is long so why use it all up at once? - but even after twenty-odd years of foraging there are some gaps in my Vance reading. I recently got to fill one of those gaps by reading the Durdane trilogy: The Anome, The Brave Free Men and The Asutra. I owned volumes one and three for quite some time in a couple of nice matching Coronet editions (from 1975, I think) but hadn't been able to track down the middle volume until late last year. Alas, it's not a match to the other two, but a rather nasty Ace edition (from 1978) with paper so coarse you could getter a splinter from it. Maybe I'll have to replace that rotten tooth in my collection using Amazon sellers...
Anyway, Durdane is second-tier Vance (in my estimation) but still contains much of interest especially for the Vance afficianado. It has all the classic Vance elements – isolated communities with eccentric customs, a wilful boy who rebels against the local martinets, Vance's famously melifluous prose and dark imagination. I could write about all that, about the interesting political questions that Vance raises or his curious treatment of women in this story, but since finishing my course, I've been thinking a bit more about books from a technical writerly persepctive. I find myself trying to peek behind the curtain to see if I can spot the writer at work, and this series of books gives quite an interesting perspective into Vance's development.
What follows is a rather lengthy rumination on plot and structure in Durdane. Just as a warning, unless you're really, really interested in jack Vance, you might find this a bit boring. Fair warning, this is me in full three-sheets to the wind boring SF didactic mode. A few years back I wrote a profile of Vance for the Zone, and that's an altogether easier place for the casual reader to begin, and the Vance afficianado might be interested to read my review of Vance's last (perhaps last ever) novel Lurulu, also on the Zone.
First published in 1970 (serialised in two parts in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) it was only the second series he completed, after the four Planet of Adventure novels, having apparently abandoned the Demon Princes series after three novels in 1967.Both of these earlier series are very rigidly structured around concrete setting details: the hunt and destruction of each of the five Demon Princes and Adam Rieth's encounters with the four civilisations of Tschai. In each series, every new book starts with the plot dial set back to zero, with the previous events having little impact on what comes next. I think that's why Vance likes these isolated communities. He can have a bit of action there and then move the cast along somewhere else without having any impact on the long-term narrative. In Durdane, I think he's attempting to produce a longer narrative with rising action that relies less on the this type of episodic picaresque.
He nearly pulls it off. The first two volumes tell a reasonably seamless story of Gastel Etzwane, a young man native to the continent of Shant on the Planet Durdane. He escapes religious slavery in the canton of Bashon and vows to return home one day and and free his mother and sister from indenture to the vile chiliites. To do this he must petition the Faceless Man (the titular Anome), the unseen ruler of Shant who controls the population through explosive collars around their necks. What follows has a restless quality as Vance searches for the main narrative: Etzwane's escape from the Chiliites occupies the first third of The Anome. Over the next third he seeks his fortune as a travelleing musician while saving the money to pay for his mother's freedom, as instructed by the Anome. When he returns to Bashon, though, he finds that the inhabitants have been slaughtered by rampaging Roguskhoi, beast men who have been sweeping into Shant from north. He petitions the Anome to fight this scourge, but is refused. Incensed, Etzwane sets about to rouse the people of Shant against the Anome, and this, and fight against the animalistic roguskhoi, take the action to the end of volume two, The Brave Free Men.
These first two volumes read very much as a single narrative. In fact, The Anome doesn't end, so much as stop almost mid-scene. There's much less of the wandering picaresque in this story than Vance's earlier and Etzwane returns to various locations and meets up with continuing characters who develop and change. At the end of The Brave Free Men, however, this story is done, and the new government of Shant is established. The roguskhoi have been traced to their source (the Asutra, spidery-squiddy aliens that can infiltrate the body of a human being and control their actions) and driven from Durdane.
Unable to extend the narrative beyond the first two books, Vance falls back on old habits to wrap the story up. The third volume finds Etzwane and his ally Ifness travelling to Durdane's other large continent, Caraz, to trace the Asutra. Posing as a travelling merchant, Ifness is secretly a Fellow of the Earth Historical Institute and provides Etzwane with assistance throughout the series. He's a convenient deus ex mechina whose handy Earth gadgets get them out of many a pickle. Ifness can only be of limited assistance, as the Institute rules certain interventions as illegal. In this regard he's more of a Vancian wizard, in particular of Shimrod from the Lyonesse series who acts under principles enforced by the master magician Murgen. These two travel around Caraz for half the final novel, and the characters and situations that had been the focus of the previous two volumes are forgotten. After a series of encounters at isolated communities, Etzwane finds himself kidnapped and taken to the Asutra homeworld, where humans are being used as cannon fodder in the course of some internal conflict. There he fights and finally defeats the Asutra on their own turf.
Or so he thinks, because the ending has got a really strange coda.
While he's on Asutra, Etzwane witnesses a huge space battle between the Asutra's flying bronze disks and the familiar black globes of their enemy, but this time a new type of ship intervenes sleek and silent and powerful. A couple of black ships are destroyed before the silver ships arrive, but then the bronze ships flee. Etzwane and his companions fight their way back to the camp and over-run it. They lay a trap and hijack an Asutra bronze disc space ship to take them back to Durdane. The Asutra are strangely passive, but Etzwane is exultant – he has rescued hundreds of humans and returned to Dyrdane.
But what of Ifness? Over the many months he was a slave for the Asutra, Etzwane held out hope that Ifness would come to the rescue, but he never turned up and Etzwane assumes that Ifness was unable to convince the authorities of Institute to break their code and intervene. When he returns to Caraz, he collects Ifness's boat and returns to Garwiy on Shant to discover what has happened to his ally. He discovers Ifness in Fontenay's Inn, somewhat displeased to see him. Etzwane asks why he did not rescue them and Ifness explains bruskly that he returned to his masters on Earth where he arranged for all the humans to be freed from the bondage of the Asutra. The sleek ships that Etzwane and his fellow slaves saw were Earth ships. By the time of the battle that Etzwane witnessed, the Asutra were already defeated, that's the only reason Etzwane and his fellow slaves were able to escape: they were to be evacuated in any case.
Suddenly, Etzwane's victory is snatched from him. His enemy was already defeated. And what's more, the man whom he assumed was coming to his rescue had no such intention, and dealt with matter without regard to Etzwane's safety. In the end, after all their adventures together, Ifness hardly seems to notice Etzwane at all. Etzwane longs to travel the universe, see Earth, but Ifness dismisses him as he might dismiss a bumpkin. The series ends on a sour note: in the end, Etzwane even refuses to join his old musical band. He sits and broods and drinks.
Vance could easily have contrived matters to have Ifness and Etzwane reunited on Asutra during the attack, but he deliberately marginalises the hero and really you've got to wonder why. I think Vance was always attracted to tragedy and melancholy, but the standard heroic narrative doesn't really allow for it. The Demon Kings ends on a similatly down beat note (as noted by David Langford in Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (ed. A E Cunningham).
His first great work, The Dying Earth is a kind of very fractured mutiple viewpoint novel, but subsequently he stuck to close third-person narratives until the later, longer series. In Durdane and The Demon Kings he pushes this linear plot scheme as hard as he can. In this series, he might have had a strand with Finnerack and Ifness and thus extended the action and added a bit of depth to the tale. It has the structure of those later series, but not the breadth. The multiple view-point narratives allowed him to explore levels of success and failure, and to weave in patterns of set back and victory for the main characters to drive the narrative.
This is where I need some neat homily to wrap this all up, but I haven't got one and it's my blog, you know, not a PhD panel, so I'm gonna just stop. I've read the Lyonesse trilogy quite recently (in the last couple of years, at least) but it's been a while since I read the Cadwal Chronicles, and I don't think I've ever read Throy. Consequently I'm interested now to dig them up and see how they measure against my theory here. On the other hand, I've already got a pile (three books!) and so I'll wait for now. Time is so short, the number of books to read so huge, and ever-growing!
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
"Presentism" in SF
This article by Cory Doctrow explains to the uninitated (the people we called "mundanes" in our whacky, seventies pre-teen hey day!) that - duh! - SF is about the present, not the future. Since emerging from my pre-teen coccoon, I've always assumed this was self evident. I guess not, and one has to say it again and again.
However, it's not quite that striaght forward. It seems to me that SF could be divided into adventure novels with a futuristic or fantastic background provided for exoticism, and examinations of current trends into a "if this goes on..." formulation (as, I believe, Heinlein put it). Now, I like both, but they're doing different things, and I think this is what's at the heart of those writers who like to enrage SF fans by claiming they're not writing SF (Atwood, Vonnegut etc). They are writing "presentist" stories, and not the adventure fluff that gets lumped in with them. Sometimes people call this speculative fiction.
I can understand why Atwood doesn't want to sit on a shelf next to John Ringo or Peter F Hamilton, and I'd say it's important for her readership that she say these things. Similarly, J K Rowling's got too much at stake for people to "mistake" her HP books for stuff like Wheel of Time or the Shanara series (in practice, though, I'd say these same readers are an important segment of her readership).
These arguments expose the divide between the literary concept of science fiction, and the bookshop category. The bookshop category encompasses romances (in the old fashioned sense), satires (closest to the literary definition) and symbolist works (where the SF "novum" is highly symbolic). This spread of ideas is often missed by the SF community itself, where Steve Aylett of Tom Disch literary wierdness can sit cheek by jowl with a fat comics fan dressing up as Servelan from Blake's Seven.
It's a topic I mull over as I sit at the hopeful early stage of my career pondeirng agents and publishers. What sort of writer am I, actually? Am I satirist (as my current project is very squarely a satire) or am I bookshop SF writer (I enjoy those adventure-romance types of books and could easily write one if I turned my hand to it)? I think I want to avoid being stuck doing one thing over and over. My current project shares some similarity of tone with Pratchett and Douglas Adams, but I wouldn't want to feel I had to write a giggle fest everytime. At the same time, though, I don't think I could do straight writing, with no comedic or absurdist elements - that stuff is etched into me with a laser for some reason. Well, maybe it'd be a nice problem to have...
However, it's not quite that striaght forward. It seems to me that SF could be divided into adventure novels with a futuristic or fantastic background provided for exoticism, and examinations of current trends into a "if this goes on..." formulation (as, I believe, Heinlein put it). Now, I like both, but they're doing different things, and I think this is what's at the heart of those writers who like to enrage SF fans by claiming they're not writing SF (Atwood, Vonnegut etc). They are writing "presentist" stories, and not the adventure fluff that gets lumped in with them. Sometimes people call this speculative fiction.
I can understand why Atwood doesn't want to sit on a shelf next to John Ringo or Peter F Hamilton, and I'd say it's important for her readership that she say these things. Similarly, J K Rowling's got too much at stake for people to "mistake" her HP books for stuff like Wheel of Time or the Shanara series (in practice, though, I'd say these same readers are an important segment of her readership).
These arguments expose the divide between the literary concept of science fiction, and the bookshop category. The bookshop category encompasses romances (in the old fashioned sense), satires (closest to the literary definition) and symbolist works (where the SF "novum" is highly symbolic). This spread of ideas is often missed by the SF community itself, where Steve Aylett of Tom Disch literary wierdness can sit cheek by jowl with a fat comics fan dressing up as Servelan from Blake's Seven.
It's a topic I mull over as I sit at the hopeful early stage of my career pondeirng agents and publishers. What sort of writer am I, actually? Am I satirist (as my current project is very squarely a satire) or am I bookshop SF writer (I enjoy those adventure-romance types of books and could easily write one if I turned my hand to it)? I think I want to avoid being stuck doing one thing over and over. My current project shares some similarity of tone with Pratchett and Douglas Adams, but I wouldn't want to feel I had to write a giggle fest everytime. At the same time, though, I don't think I could do straight writing, with no comedic or absurdist elements - that stuff is etched into me with a laser for some reason. Well, maybe it'd be a nice problem to have...
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Loving Our Museums to Death
In the weekend I took the kids up to the British Museum for their Day of the Dead celebration.
We had a great day, but didn't get to see everything because it was insanely busy. We got there early (eleven in the morning or so) and were able to leap right in to mask making, but we queued about half an hour for face painting, then another half an hour for making (extremely cool!) Day of the Dead portraits in the digital suite. When went up to the Grand Court for the procession but could only see the guys on stilts.
There was more to see - an exhibition and the altar - but by then the kids were getting fractious and - to be honest - I too was ready for a bit of fresh air, so we left at about about three-thirty. By this stage there was a massive queue just to get in stretching around the front courtyard and through the gates and on to Russell Street. The queue was making slow progress and it looked like a good twenty to thirty minute wait for entry.
This brought to mind a trip we'd made to the Natural History Museum a couple fo weeks before. It was kind of off the cuff thing - we hadn't been for a while, and the kids like the dinosaurs, so we hopped on the train and off we went. What did we find - queues! Massive queues just to get in the front door (although the back door didn't have a queue so we cunningly got in quick) but we queued for dinosaurs for twenty minutes or so shuffling slowly through like shades shuffling around Hades. I'd wanted to take the kids around some of the more obscure bits, but by the time we'd done this they were fed up. Isbo's verdict on the Natural History Museum was "it's hot and boring".
I think one of the great things about living in London is the easy availibity of these fantastic resources but I'm beginning to feel crowded out of these places. Admittedly, the dinosaurs at the NHM are possibly the most popular museum display ion the city, and the Day of the Dead thing was a special occasion, but dear god, the idea of queuing just to get in fills me with horror.
I think that a great museum needs to give you space to share with the exhibits. In crowded museums I spend more time resenting my fellow curiosity seekers than in relaxed contemplation of the richness of human culture. In the interests of justifying their funding, I'm sure they have to reach out and attract people, but they've become part of the tourist treadmill now, filled with people ticking off a page in the guide book rather than pursuing an interest in the objects on display - bored looking gaggles of Italian, French or German school children and oddly dressed gangs of Japanese stopping in front of everything and taking a photo (a stereotype, I know, but if you want it confirmed just follow them around!) The only ones that that are getting a real kick out of it are the roving patrols of Bible Study tours, and they should clearly be forbidden entry unless they can prove they aren't Creationists.
I'll admit, I don't get this scalp-hunter approach to tourism. When I'm on holiday there's nothing I hate more than "doing" a museum in an afternoon or something. I'd rather not go than race around in a lather out of a sense of obligation - it's supposed to be a holiday for Christ's sake!
The same thing's happened to South Bank and the Royal Festival Hall - it used to be (like, a decade ago) a nice, slightly underdeveloped out of the way place to have a drink buit it's turned into a circle of Hell. It's hard to find a place to eat even on a Wednesday night these days, and cool in-the-know type things like the Meltdown sell out completely before the catalogues even hit our doormate.
So, what's to be done? I think the Museums are doing their job too well and need to introduce a greater level of elitism and incompetence into their public communications. Tourists need to examine their priorities - will filing past the Elgin Marbles really improve your life? Why not mill around Harrods and get your photo taken with Kylie's bum at Mdme Tussauds like you really want to. And finally, I'll be changing nappies at the Wallace Collection or the Wellcome Institute in future, I suppose.
We had a great day, but didn't get to see everything because it was insanely busy. We got there early (eleven in the morning or so) and were able to leap right in to mask making, but we queued about half an hour for face painting, then another half an hour for making (extremely cool!) Day of the Dead portraits in the digital suite. When went up to the Grand Court for the procession but could only see the guys on stilts.
There was more to see - an exhibition and the altar - but by then the kids were getting fractious and - to be honest - I too was ready for a bit of fresh air, so we left at about about three-thirty. By this stage there was a massive queue just to get in stretching around the front courtyard and through the gates and on to Russell Street. The queue was making slow progress and it looked like a good twenty to thirty minute wait for entry.
This brought to mind a trip we'd made to the Natural History Museum a couple fo weeks before. It was kind of off the cuff thing - we hadn't been for a while, and the kids like the dinosaurs, so we hopped on the train and off we went. What did we find - queues! Massive queues just to get in the front door (although the back door didn't have a queue so we cunningly got in quick) but we queued for dinosaurs for twenty minutes or so shuffling slowly through like shades shuffling around Hades. I'd wanted to take the kids around some of the more obscure bits, but by the time we'd done this they were fed up. Isbo's verdict on the Natural History Museum was "it's hot and boring".
I think one of the great things about living in London is the easy availibity of these fantastic resources but I'm beginning to feel crowded out of these places. Admittedly, the dinosaurs at the NHM are possibly the most popular museum display ion the city, and the Day of the Dead thing was a special occasion, but dear god, the idea of queuing just to get in fills me with horror.
I think that a great museum needs to give you space to share with the exhibits. In crowded museums I spend more time resenting my fellow curiosity seekers than in relaxed contemplation of the richness of human culture. In the interests of justifying their funding, I'm sure they have to reach out and attract people, but they've become part of the tourist treadmill now, filled with people ticking off a page in the guide book rather than pursuing an interest in the objects on display - bored looking gaggles of Italian, French or German school children and oddly dressed gangs of Japanese stopping in front of everything and taking a photo (a stereotype, I know, but if you want it confirmed just follow them around!) The only ones that that are getting a real kick out of it are the roving patrols of Bible Study tours, and they should clearly be forbidden entry unless they can prove they aren't Creationists.
I'll admit, I don't get this scalp-hunter approach to tourism. When I'm on holiday there's nothing I hate more than "doing" a museum in an afternoon or something. I'd rather not go than race around in a lather out of a sense of obligation - it's supposed to be a holiday for Christ's sake!
The same thing's happened to South Bank and the Royal Festival Hall - it used to be (like, a decade ago) a nice, slightly underdeveloped out of the way place to have a drink buit it's turned into a circle of Hell. It's hard to find a place to eat even on a Wednesday night these days, and cool in-the-know type things like the Meltdown sell out completely before the catalogues even hit our doormate.
So, what's to be done? I think the Museums are doing their job too well and need to introduce a greater level of elitism and incompetence into their public communications. Tourists need to examine their priorities - will filing past the Elgin Marbles really improve your life? Why not mill around Harrods and get your photo taken with Kylie's bum at Mdme Tussauds like you really want to. And finally, I'll be changing nappies at the Wallace Collection or the Wellcome Institute in future, I suppose.
Monday, 2 November 2009
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
I just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larrson. It was quite enjoyable, with a well-paced plot and good juicy messed up family dynamics. It hinted, gently, at a couple of agreeable political slants (white-collar crime and violence against women) without them becoming intrusive on the one hand or particularly urgent or relevant on the other.
It avoided the machismo and nihilism that puts me off a lot of crime thrillers without either having a tougher-then-nails she-devil as the protagonist or being twee and bloodless. Actually, I suppose the character of Salander is rather a tougher-than-nails she-devil, but there's an awareness of how difficult and damaged such a character would be. I was little disappointed when she fell for 50-something financial journalist, but that's part of the genre, I guess.
My wife had this one haging around from her bookgroup, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. I'd seen all the ads on the tube and although I generally don't read a lot of commuter fiction. , I was curious about it. I wonder if public transport is the only thing that keeps for the market these things healthy? Translation rights for any territory with a big commuting class are a gold mine for thrillers with the bland international style of an economy hotel - Freddy Forsyth and Len Deighton, back in the day, and now Robert Harris and Andy McNab. At the upper extremes you've got writers like John le Carre, I guess, and The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum struck me as just smart-arse versions of the same thing. Anything to pass the hideous half an hour to ninety minutes spent jammed up with your fellow homo domesticus as you're ferried from field to barn to milking shed and back again!
It avoided the machismo and nihilism that puts me off a lot of crime thrillers without either having a tougher-then-nails she-devil as the protagonist or being twee and bloodless. Actually, I suppose the character of Salander is rather a tougher-than-nails she-devil, but there's an awareness of how difficult and damaged such a character would be. I was little disappointed when she fell for 50-something financial journalist, but that's part of the genre, I guess.
My wife had this one haging around from her bookgroup, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. I'd seen all the ads on the tube and although I generally don't read a lot of commuter fiction. , I was curious about it. I wonder if public transport is the only thing that keeps for the market these things healthy? Translation rights for any territory with a big commuting class are a gold mine for thrillers with the bland international style of an economy hotel - Freddy Forsyth and Len Deighton, back in the day, and now Robert Harris and Andy McNab. At the upper extremes you've got writers like John le Carre, I guess, and The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum struck me as just smart-arse versions of the same thing. Anything to pass the hideous half an hour to ninety minutes spent jammed up with your fellow homo domesticus as you're ferried from field to barn to milking shed and back again!
Monday, 19 October 2009
Stupid Philip K Dick/banking acronym humour
It's a narrow genre I'm working to expand.
So, if the United Bank of Kuwait was the United Bank International of Kuwait, it'd be UBIK. Wait a second, these coins are out of date...
Yes, needs work.
So, if the United Bank of Kuwait was the United Bank International of Kuwait, it'd be UBIK. Wait a second, these coins are out of date...
Yes, needs work.
Still nothing!
Well, we're a week in and there's still not much here in the way of content. I want to put up my comments about Durdane, but it's going to be a few days til they're ready. In general, I hope to have a substantive post here every week, so I'm not going to start publicising it (in my modest way!) until I've got a few in the bag and ready to roll. General categories will be:
What I read - vague book reviewish things, not like a formal review, more of a "my take" sort of thing;
My complete works - being a post to or about all my published writing, and perhaps some of the unpublished stuff;
Stories of note - links to interesting articles and why I think they're interesting;
Jokes - if I think up any jokes, I'll post them here!
What I read - vague book reviewish things, not like a formal review, more of a "my take" sort of thing;
My complete works - being a post to or about all my published writing, and perhaps some of the unpublished stuff;
Stories of note - links to interesting articles and why I think they're interesting;
Jokes - if I think up any jokes, I'll post them here!
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Comments
So, I'm just getting started here, haven't even told anyone about this blog, but I'm already thinking about comments in my own mix of starry-eyed optimism ("My blog shall be a lightning rod for debate! Hurrah!") and watery anxiety ("My blog shall be a lightning rod for debate! Uh-oh!")
Timely, then, that this post arrives from John K on his "All Kinds of Stuff" blog.
John K is a great cartoonist and an all round good egg. I've never commented on his blog, but I like to read it partly because I love old fashioned cartoons, but I also just like to let the enthusiasm and good natured vibes roll over me.
Timely, then, that this post arrives from John K on his "All Kinds of Stuff" blog.
John K is a great cartoonist and an all round good egg. I've never commented on his blog, but I like to read it partly because I love old fashioned cartoons, but I also just like to let the enthusiasm and good natured vibes roll over me.
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
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