This is a house of Sienkiewicz: Mega-Cities, Treks and a galaxy far, far away

I still think a vampire is gonna get me

Daylight savings ended recently, and now when I get the chance to take an evening walk after the kids go to bed, I end up walking around in the dark. This is not unusual - I have spent many, many hours walking around my home town in the dark - but what might be unusual is that I still have a genuine fear that a fucking vampire is going to get me one night.

I've seen every kind of vampire film there is, and I know they're not real, but sometimes I swear I can still hear them flying overhead, looking for human prey, and setting their sights on some dork like me, and I'm gonna end up like this poor bastard in Hellblazer #68, and just meat for the beast:

Shit, Steve Dillon did the best facial expressions in the business, man...

Super powers always fighting, but Mona Lisa just keeps on smiling

I still don't know the exact lyrics to a lot of my favourite songs, and still just hum along to Nirvana - especially the one where he likes the songs, but doesn't know the words, and I'm suitably aware of the irony to all that. 

You can get the lyrics for anything in 10 seconds flat now, but the lyric sheet printed on the back of the album cover used to be a major reason for getting the tapes or CDs, because then you could show the whole damn world how much you loved some music by singing along with it to the proper words.

I used to spend ages in the local record store, peering at the vinyl issue of Pink Floyd's The Wall, deciphering some of the lyrics I couldn't make out in my endless listenings, until the store owner gave me enough stink eye to drive me away. I would wear out video tapes going back and forth on songs like Queen's The Miracle, the immortal Star Trekkin' by The Firm, and all the songs from the first half of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (I only had the first 40 minutes of the film on video before the tape ran out.)

It was pain-staking, but sometimes it was the only option, and I remember well into the 90s, sitting around the table in our flat, trying to decipher Spoonman. All that effort, over all those years, and now I can look up lyrics anytime I want. I still don't do it most of the time, because singing the wrong words with passion is just as much fun as getting it right.

Nopeing out on a Hunter so fast

The first Stephen Hunter book I ever read was Dirty White Boys, when it showed up at the local library in the early 2000s. I was going through one of those phases where you're constantly trying new authors to find something new to read, and I just liked that title and the synopsis sounded dope, and I just jumped right in.

Twenty years later, and I've read all of the books featuring the indominable Swagger clan and their unwavering talents for killing bad motherfuckers, often at considerable personal cost.

I call it sniper porn, and even though I'm a proudly lily-livered pacifist, I love the way the Swaggers take down the worst scum in the world, with a bullet in the right place. A lot happens in Hunter's books, but it's all so direct and clear and free of any bullshit, as sharp as the sniper's sight.

So of course I had to check out Basil's War when I saw it in the library the other week, and I haven't checked out again of a book so quickly in years. I don't think I made a dozen pages. Because while the Swagger books are straight to the point, Basil's War is full of nothing but bullshit.

I can certainly see what Hunter was going for, a piss-take of all the stiff-upper-lip ideals of old WW2 films, taken to the ultimate extremes. But it's so extremely different from the usual directness of his books, it was everything I didn't want in a Stephen hunter book.

I'm still down for the next Swagger (or Cruz) book, but Basil can do his own thing, I ain't got time for all that bullshit.

Power Pack never appreciated their parents

I read my first Power Pack comic when I was 10, and have a deep admiration for any PP comics drawn by the mighty Jon Bogdanove (he did a great Superman, but his kids were sublime), and I only just realised that the Power kids' parents were clearly based on Louise and Walt Simonson.

The Simonsons remain the most awesome couple in modern comic books, and now I just think their superpowered fictional off-springs are evil little shits, for all the crap they put Wezzie and Walt through.

Dicks in the New Adventures

Terrence Dicks was the first book author I knew to search for, because I knew he did a lot of the Doctor Who novelisations. But when I first got into the New Adventures books in the 90s, Dicks felt like old hat, and since I only had a limited amount of time to spend on Doctor Who at the time, I was more inclined to read the other books by the young, hip and experimental, like Cornell, Orman, Parkin, Miles and the rest.

So I've only just read Blood Harvest - Dick's second effort in the range - 30 years after it came out, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was bloody brilliant.

It's got vampires straight out of a Hammer film in the same story where the Doctor and Ace are rubbing bootlegging shoulder with Al Capone., before the TARDIS crew are suddenly dealing with a full-on Five Doctors sequel.

And it reminded me that Dicks was still a master storyteller in the 90s, long after I first read the great Dalek Invasion of Earth. Blood Harvest just hums along and gets to the point with extreme efficiency, and has terrific cliffhangers, each chapter ending with a new twist or dilemma that demands more reading time.

Hell, it even gives old Borusa a happy ending, and I did not see that coming, and makes a joke about Dick's own clichés, which I kinda did.

I'm more than two dozen books into a re-read of the New Adventures book, and after endless cyberpunk bullshit, the straightforwardness of a Dicks beats all that post-modern nonsense with professional ease. The old guard were always the best guard.

Living the beat life

It's fun to think that On The Road is the greatest book in the world when you're 20. It would be weird if you didn't, and I know I went through the same kind of beatnik phase so many other teenagers do.

Of course we all contain multitudes, and you can be several things at once - a geek and a jock at the same time. And while they will bury me a punk, I definitely went through a deep and passionate love affair with the poetry and prose of all the beat generation crowd at the same point in my life.  

I don't know how much he gets lumped in with the rest of them because he came a little afterwards, but I was always a bit of a Emmett Grogan fan, even though I believed less than 10 percent of his stories. Ringolevio felt like a blueprint for some kind of life, but was too extraordinary to take as a practical guide. 

On The Road offered more, and while the endless roads of America might as well have been on the fucking moon for how accessible they were to me, Kerouac's book was full of tiny little truths, and the freedom of hitching a ride in the back of a truck, and watching the cold stars above, is still immensely attractive. And the story about the endless roll of paper going through the typewriter is still one of the most genuinely romantic images in literary history. 

I was turned on to all the great writers by smart girls and nerdy co-workers and was soon haunting the bookstores, looking for the most obscure authors (and finding a surprising number of them, New Zealand used to be one of the most literary countries in the world, with amazing proportions of readers, and you could find the most extraordinary books in small town second hand bookstores).

And you follow those threads and get stuck into the spiritual side of thing, and there are all sorts of revelations to be found in the Eastern philosophies that were never mentioned in school.

And while that all gets very zen, following the beat generation means you inevitably read more about the actual writers who put together these extraordinary words, and they mostly turn out to be the worst fucking people, melting down into hopeless drunks, or beating women with absolute gross impunity.

Bill Burroughs could break your brain with his literary mash-ups, but was also a whiny old shit who shot his wife in the face - and then was embarrassingly snide about the horrific incident in later years.

At least we'll always have Ginsburg, who seemed like a decent dude, especially compared to his contemporaries. It's little surprise how majestic Howl still is, and can still be absorbed with few caveats.

By the time I grew out of my beats streak, I was more about Hunter S Thompson, and his truth bombs in amongst the hedonism. He could still be a shit, but was more open about those short-comings, rarely just blaming it on the drugs when he so easily could have. 

That infatuation lasted a lot longer, largely because it was just way more fun. But again, if you're in your forties, and still think Hunter's stoned ramblings are all you need to know about the American experience, you've got some way to go yet. Don't we all?

This is a house of Sienkiewicz: Outside the mainstream (part two)

Spinal Tap: The saddest of all keys

I hear there is some new Spinal Tap coming out soon, and if they can capture a tenth of the perfection of the Lick My Love Pump scene from the original film, I'm there on opening day, man.

Die Hard: We're gonna need some more FBI guys, I guess

 

Even though it's pushing 40 years old, my belief that Die Hard is the greatest action film of all time remains rock solid. It has a sublime cast, incredible pacing, real emotional connection, sparkling dialogue and the best group of henchmen in the history of cinema.

That belief is only getting more petrified in age, as things that used to annoy me suddenly seem to have a clear purpose. Such as the buffoon police chief Dwayne T Robinson, as played by the late, great Paul Gleason.

Gleason's skills as an actor were always obvious - in this and The Breakfast Club he plays the hard-assed authoritarian figure who you actually kinda like - but I always used to cringe at his one-liners that he dropped after the most breath-taking parts of the film.

Whether it's deadpan of 'we're gonna need some more FBI guys' after the big fucking explosion, or the 'I hope that's not a hostage', delivered while Hans Gruber is plummeting to his death, it always seems a bit much.

But after years and years of ham-fisted action films and far worse quips than anything Dwayne ever managed,  the way he gives punchlines to the biggest moments of the films now feels like a strong punctuation to the explosion, letting the audience catch their breath after al the action.

It's truly skillful film-making, no matter how bad the jokes are. They just don't make' em like that anymore. They try, but they don't.

Kraokoa's happy endings (while they lasted)

The Krakoan era of the X-Men is coming to a rapid end soon, to be replaced with an all-new, all-different direction that looks incredibly familiar. 

Looking back on it with the wonderful benefit of hindsight, it's obvious that a lot of it didn't work - the Arakko stuff never vibed for me; the constant deaths and rebirths were never really tackled to their full existential extent; and all the stories in fairy worlds were full of sound and fury and not much else - but there were also plenty of interesting aspects to the new mutant civilization

One of the most fascinating quirks of this new mutant world was the clean slate it offered. Krakoa was open to all mutants, no matter how diabolical they had been in the past, and for a while there, it all didn't matter. The members of the Mutant Liberation Front and various evil Brotherhoods were hanging out in the bar, and given the odd shot of redemption.

It was nice enough to see the original Hellions turn up now and again - well, apart from Empath, who was always a colossal waste of space - because the way they were originally slaughtered was always amazingly callous after their fun and games with the New Mutants, but they were also characters that I had painfully deep emotional connections to, like Rusty and Skids.

For a brief moment in the late eighties, the two looked like they could be a big part of the x-future, but were brainwashed, villainized and generally fucked over in the years that followed, to the point they were almost useless as characters.

And then, suddenly, all of that convoluted backstory didn't matter, and they could just be their best selves in a mutant utopia. All of that backstory didn't matter anymore, and Skids could have fun adventures with Gwenpool or whoever.

But all eras come to an end, and they're all back onto the same endless cycle of protecting a world that hates them, and I'm sure Skids and Rusty will be back as cannon fodder. I still hope they make the most of that clean slate, all the same. 

Oh my God, it's Timothy Carey!

It is always an absolute delight to be watching some old film like, say, The Wild One for the first time, and seeing Timothy Carey show up. He's such a weird and strange guy, like nobody else in the history of cinema.

I always knew him from the early Kubrick films, and from his devastating roles in John Cassavetes movies, and he's always instantly notable, even when he shows up in the middle of a crowd of 1950s thugs. His line readings were always unique, his body language was gawky as hell, and every movie ever made would be just a little bit better with added Carey.

Miracleman and OK Computer: The tedium of the blue sky

There are many, many pieces of Alan Moore comics that have stuck with me through the years, and one that still clings the hardest to my soul are the final pages of his Miracleman comics, drawn by the mighty John Totleben.

It's the part where the big man muses on the new society he has created with his chums, and wonders at the miracles that have been created with this brave new world, and wonders how it could have been built from the literal ashes of a super-powered rampage, and just wonders.

But as the former Michael Moran looks over the world from his Olympic perch, he also acknowledges that it isn't quite perfect, and that this is okay, because nobody really wants a diamond without a characteristic flaw, or a poem with a misplaced word. Nobody actually wants perfection. 

But this doesn't stop am unending blast of maddening demands for this perfection in our entertainment, when it's much better for everybody concerned if you just accept that you can't always get what you want.

This has been on my mind again because I've been on a Radiohead binge lately, and OK Computer is on high rotation. I was 23 when it came out, and I'd always thought Radiohead just a bit wimpy, even with the crunch of Creep, but OK Computer really did sound like music from the future, and that's exactly what we all needed at the end of the century.

It still sounds like the future, but it's also not perfect, because even after all these years, Electioneering still sticks out like a sore thumb. A jangly piece of delicious pop, it doesn't fit with the vibe of the album, like something the band outgrew somewhere between the first two records.

Weirdly, the very end of the song, and the way it suddenly stutters to a stop, is the part that does fit with the rest of the album, and the sharpness of it may be intentional, closing off that era of the band and moving into more ambient sonic waters

I don't skip past the song. It still jars to my ears, but it's part of the album, imperfect and all. That's how go forwards, not backwards.

A half century is not enough to read all my books

I turn 50 next year, which makes me officially an old fart. While I've never felt physically better, things are starting to slowly break down and it's increasingly impossible to pretend that I'm not closer to death than the other end.

So of course I'm wrestling with the usual existential nightmares about the obliteration of the self in the dead of the night. Aren't we all?

I always expected that dread to intensify with age, but I am disappointed to discover that wisdom is a lot harder to build up. I always thought that one day I'd wake up and be a wise old bastard, but I feel just as confused and foolish as I ever did.

Sadly, if there is one area where I do feel I've accumulated some kind of wisdom, it's with bullshit like movies and comic books. While I do have a few inane and illogical prejudices about certain slices of entertainment, I do think I've become wiser in my tastes, just by sampling more and more different wares over all these decades.

While I do feel like the dorky little shit I was when I was 18 on the inside, I've also built up enough experience to find the good stuff fairly easily.

None of this wisdom is of use to anybody else, of course. I'm the only one who gets any benefit out of it. And the wisdom that seems obvious to me might sound like madness to anybody else.

But the great part is that there is only more to come. This passion for new entertainments, new art, new styles, it's just as fierce as ever. There is just still so much more to watch and read, so much more to inhale. 

I might have been here for half a goddamn century, but I still have some way to go, and hope to get wiser still.

Mad Max by Dave Johnson

 

Mad Max by Richard Isanove

 

Mad Max by Rafael Albuquerque

 

Mad Max by Dave McKean

Mad Max by Celia Calle

Mad Max by Simon Bisley

Mad Max by Rian Hughes

It's another low-content week at the Tearoom, I'm afraid, as me and the family head over to the wild and wonderful West Coast for the week. But to keep the daily content ticking over, I'm highlighting my favourite pieces of art from the Mad Max: Inspired Artists book that DC released when Fury Road was coming out. 

It's probably out of print right now, but it can be worth tracking down if you like A) Mad Max and B) comic artists like Jim Lee, Paul Pope, Javier Pulido, Marguerite Sauvage, Cliff Chiang, Peter Kuper, Gibert Hernandez, Nicola Scott and many, many others doing lots of pin-ups of scenes from that apocalyptic white line nightmare. The art can get a little monotonous, but there is glory in those pages. 

See ya next week, friends and neighbours!

This is a house of Sienkiewicz: Outside the mainstream (part one)

How much more Hate do we need? All the Hate!

While the universe seems to take a great delight in shitting on all your hopes and dreams, sometimes it can give you exactly what you want, and literally the day after I finished re-reading Peter Bagge's Hate Annuals and wondering how old Buddy Bradley was doing these days, there was the announcement of some new Hate.

While I do have genuine concerns that Buddy might have gone full MAGA - all the signs were there in his earlier deeds and misadventures - I've known Buddy since he was a teenager and we haven't seen him in more than a decade. I'd like to know how he's doing.

For me, a grudge is no more than a place to pork your cor!

I haven't listen to any of the Twelfth Man albums in many, many years - the big man himself passed away a while ago, so it's not like there is any new stuff to catch up on - but I'm sure I would find a lot of painfully casual racism, sexism and homophobia if I go back on them. We've come a long way in that regard, baby, even if there is a lot further to go yet.  

Also, many of the people it made fun of in the Australian sporting scene, including Richie and his wonderful commentary team, are no longer with us, which adds some melancholy to any time I hear 'two for twenty two' in some modern commentary.

But I cannot stress how fucking funny it was to hear these albums when I was a teenager. I didn't get half the jokes because I wasn't balls deep in the Australian sports media scene, but that didn't make the outrageous accents and wordplay any less funny.

They must have made an impression, because there are still phrases that have stuck with me for life, and still get whipped out at opportune moments - whether it's telling somebody that we need to work like a team, and do it my way; or they can blow it out their arse. Or how it's a great day for the world and that's it's not canary yellow, it's Australian gold my friend, and don't you fucking forget it. 

Super bits of writing, that. Top stuff, expertly delivered. 

Admiring the dream of Dallas

Even for a soap opera, it was a ballsy move - to bring back a major character who had been killed off, the producers of Dallas decided to write off 31 episodes as a dream, with Bobby Ewing popping out of the shower like nothing had happened.

In the past 38 years, it's become a shorthand for creator laziness. Rather than coming up with a reasonable explanation for the return of the actor - an evil twin, a fake death, anything - they just started over again, as if nothing had happened. 

But I've always had a weird, sneaky admiration for the move and the sheer ballsiness of it. You can do anything with fiction - it's all made up, after all - so why not just wipe the most recent slate clean and start over?

Of course it doesn't make any sense, nobody dreams of 31 hours of events during one night's sleep. But it's the endless complaints that they broke all the rules of storytelling that really grinds my gears.

Because despite what all the 'Write real good' self-help guidebooks will tell you, and no matter how many times you quote Robert fuckin' McKee, you really do anything with fiction. There are no rules, not really. 

Some things work better than others when it comes to plotting or character development, but the appeal of creating your own stories is that you can do what you want with them, and if you want to make it all a dream, fucking go for it. 

After all, we all still remember Bobby's shower, four decades after it happened, so it must have had some kind of a impact. Just fucking go for it.

This is still Lima Mike Golf

For all the talk on Monday, bemoaning the lack of blogging that has faded away like a fart in the wind, it occurred to me that there is still one site that has been doing the business with regular updates that I've been following for more than 20 years now.

I started following linkmachinego in the early 2000s, mainly because its name was an Invisibles reference, but then never stopped because it kept updating with all sorts of weird and wonderful ephemera from around the internet. It remains a most delicious curation of delights, and I usually find something worth reading from it every week.

Everything quickly fades in a digital world, but some things endure, and nothing lasts like good recommendations.