I still miss you, Tommy Monaghan

Up on the walls

I was banned from putting up any posters or pin-ups on my bedroom walls for most of my teenage years, and for good cause too. I was only allowed to have things like Mum's creepy old angels painting hanging up there, because I destroyed the wallpaper at one of the rentals we were living in. I'd used sticky tape to cover one bedroom wall with 2000ad covers and pin-ups and all the wallpaper was ripped when it came down.

By the time I left home I was allowed the odd Nightmare on Elm Street or Spider-Man poster, but things got out of control in my first few flats in the mid-90s. I would cover every single inch of my bedrooms with posters, pin-ups, covers, trading cards and cool pictures cut out of a Previews comic catalogue.

Some flats, this mad collage of anything vaguely interesting from movies, TV or comics would spread out into the communal living areas, tainting the whole place with my rampart dorkiness. There would be bits from John Woo movies, or Vertigo mini-posters, or Withnail and I stills, or Batman comic covers, or endless Star Wars bullshit across those walls. The back of the bedroom door would host entire trading card collections, and the hallway was full of movie star pin-ups from some 1960s magazines I found at the op shop.

It dropped off after a couple of years - sometimes literally - because it was just too much fucking work, keeping all this shit up and under control, replacing the stuff that was bleached out by the sun, finding room for the gorgeous Eraserhead and Blade Runner posters that came with Empire magazine. In the end, there were fewer and fewer things on the walls, and by the time I moved in with the lovely wife 14 years ago, there was only the odd poster or two.

These days, the walls are full of tasteful art by our mates, and little paintings and prints that we picked up overseas. Some of the stuff that was part of the '90s collage - including some Ralph MacQuarrie prints and flyers for things like The Usual Suspects and Man Bites Dog went into the bin last week, and it was about time too, they were all getting a bit ragged.

But I wish I'd bothered to take a photo of the collage at its peak, when it overwhelmed the room and flat. It really was a remarkable sight, and the pinnacle of my nerdiness.

All about taking a deep dive

So much pop-culture criticism is so superficial, barely scratching the surface, and I’m just as bad as anyone. But I do love a decent deep dive into one particular movie or book, wringing out absolutely everything that can be said about it

Right now, all I want to listen to on the long walk home after work every night is the One Heat Minute podcast by Blake Howard, which is going through Michael Mann’s brilliant movie minute by minute, and doing an episode for every single one of its two hours and fifty minutes. It’s up to minute 115, and while I thought the joke would wear thin, there is more than enough in the movie to discuss for more than a hundred hours.

In this kind of deep dive, everything gets covered -  the acting, the themes, the production design, the music, the facial hair, the everything – and Howard and his fellow podcast hosts turn over every rock in the movie and see what’s underneath.

It’s not a surprise that a movie like Heat can stand this kind of scrutiny, because it’s a fucking excellent film that is complicated and complex enough to merit that focus.  But you can do it with almost anything, if you have the will to follow through. Right now, TV’s original bad boy critic Sean T Collins is promising to do an essay on Patrick Swayze classic Road House every day in 2019, and he’s almost two months into it and hasn’t come close running out of things to say about that huge slice of American cheese. Turns out, there is a lot to talk about, from Sam Elliott’s magnificent hair to the standard of henchmen in the film to the ARE YOU KIDDING? guy.

I’m not saying that everything actually deserves this kind of inspection, there are plenty of movies that have nothing to say beyond the fact that they exist. But it’s always a pleasure to take that kind of deep dive on something that really deserves it, and seeing what comes to the surface.

What a piece of work is a man!

Rammstein in the rain

It was one of the last Big Day Out music festivals in Auckland, and we weren't that bothered about seeing Rammstein, but it had been a miserable rainy day, and we had time to kill until Iggy Pop came out, so why not?

And even though every song basically still sounds the same to me, they were magnificent. The stage show was off the charts, with so much fiery pyrotechnics that they literally burned the rain away. And, even though we were a good 30m away from the stage, our eyebrows as well.

Surprisingly, the wife got a bit obsessed with their Teutonic chunk after we saw their show, and got all their albums afterwards. I saw the flames, but I didn't see that coming.

Losing the Millar for good

While clearing out the back cupboard in the spare room the other day, I found some print-outs of a bunch of columns that Mark Millar wrote for the CBR site in the early 1990s. I don't know why I had them, or why I had kept hold of them, but there they were.

And I actually thought about holding onto them, because I've always been weirdly attached to the writer's work, and because these columns don't seem to exist online anymore. They were lost, along with a lot of other great writing, during one of the comic site's periodic reboots, with hundreds of thousands of words flushed down the digital toilet.

We all thought the digital revolution would be a great way to archive things like columns over the years, but it turned out that it was just so much easier for everything to eventually disappear into the ether. In the end, it's so much easier to read printed fanzines from 1982 than it is to read something published online 20 years later, and if I got rid of these print-outs of Millar's column, I'd probably never read them again.

But then I actually read the columns and they were terrible, full of brash, boring arrogance and post-Loaded homophobia masquerading as banter, and I binned the lot. Pop cultural history is all well and good, but a lot of it is still completely worthless.

There is something good in digital footprints ultimately being so transient - I'm certainly glad there is no sign of the embarrassingly try-hard anti-Watchmen screed I put online in 1997 anywhere left on the web - and it's not like Millar has kept quiet since. All that old stuff can go now.

Tell it like it is, Ellsworth

“I may have fucked up my life flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker.”

Format matters: Not enough abominable omnibi

A good comic book omnibus is hard to beat, and they’re usually big enough to beat your enemies to death with them too. Of all the formats a comic can come in – monthly pamphlets, prestige-format one-offs, or digital files flying through the air – there is such chunky satisfaction in a decent-sized omnibus.

A trade paperback doesn't do it any more, not in this day of decompressed comics. And some of them are so slim – just four or five issues long – that you can end up with more than a dozen collections really quickly. The constant reboots hardly help.

But an omnibus – a trade paperback that collects three or more regular collections, with a soft cover and decent price tag – helps make it less of a mission to keep track of it all. My first ever omnibus was a collection of Asterix books, with four or five of the perennial albums put in one place.

And I still get them now. I've finally got all the Charley’s War comics in one place (and it took me weeks to get through it all). I've also recently been getting some of the Hellboy and BPRD books in their chunkiest, cheapest editions, and still have a few of the Essential and Showcase cheaparse collections on the shelves, although that particular format seems to have dried up now.

Creators like Robert Kirkman have got a lot out of the big-ass format, with his long-form comics The Walking Dead and Invincible collected into big damn editions. They can get quite pricy when you've got more than 30 issues collected in one place, but you also get more bang for your buck on a page by page basis.

I wish there were more. I would totally get something like Rick Geary’s murder stories if they were all collected in one fat volume, and would love a massive and cheap collection of Jason Aaron's Thor comics, because I lost track of that one three reboots ago. There's always a place for a thick omnibus for things like this, even if they take up a shit-load of room on the shelf.

The algorithm is so fucking stupid

I had to give up reading non-fiction books about the immediate future for mankind, because all the writers had an ideological hard-on for the algorithm, convinced it was going to run anything and everything in our lives, and that always sounds like pure horseshit.

While they pointed to studies showing Facebook knew more about people than their own friends and colleagues, there's the stink of confirmation bias, because they're dealing with people who gave Facebook everything. Like most people, I threw up a couple of pics, occasionally like something and have gradually used it less and less, and I've always found the social media platform has just got better and better at showing me exactly all the shit I'm not interested in.

Meanwhile, YouTube does seem to have got the idea that I'm not interested in alt-right fuckheadery, and unlike a lot of other poor folk, I somehow have managed to avoid that cesspool completely. But the ads it serves up are laughably off-point - I don't ever need to see another advertisement for Grammarly, because I'm a professional editor who gets paid to sort out grammar for other people, I'm never going to fucking pay for a robot to do it.

There might be a singularity coming when an AI reaches god-like perfection and is able to predict our every thought and desire, but we're not there yet. The algorithm is too stupid.