A week of recycling: Be seeing you

I like to think I'm Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, but I'm really Woody Allen in Casino Royale...

The Prisoner: Falling out of the world
Originally posted May 4, 2015

Every now and then, there comes a fictional character who can't be broken or compromised in any way. Somebody who will never go down, even when things get really, really weird. Someone with astonishing willpower and the drive to use it, somebody that you can't help but admire and want to emulate..

Somebody who will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.

Somebody like The Prisoner.  

The Prisoner was a 17-episode television show produced in Britain in the late 1960s. It starred Patrick McGoohan as Number Six, an ex-spy kidnapped and dumped in a trippy seaside prison. The system want to know why he resigned, and will resort to the most bizarre  methods to crack his resolve.

They trick to break him, and trick him, and cajole him into revealing his secrets. But he resists, fights, holds fast, maintains, and he beats them all.

It's a happily surreal serial, with anachronistic charm and genuine dread, tackling big issues of self and identity and resolve, while leaving crucial questions unanswered, and a climax that is deliberately mad and obtuse. It also featured some trampoline boxing.

It was McGoohan's show. He was fantastic as the unnamed lead character, refusing to be labelled as Number Six and standing firm against monolithic madness, and he wrote and directed the most pivotal episodes. The glory and shame is all his.

Fortunately, there is far more glory than shame. The Prisoner is arguably the greatest television show ever created - and sometimes I'll certainly argue it.

This I know: Sometime in the mid to late nineties, when I'm young and drunk and spending all my money on booze and comic books and giant cream buns, I convince myself that the last episode of The Prisoner is the greatest thing ever filmed. I watch it over and over and over again, night after night after night, until the dialogue is seared in my head.

I usually watch it when I'm a bit fucked up, because that's when things are really cooking. It was the prefect background for early evenings drinks, with the daft dialogue and mammoth subtexts firing up the head, and it was perfect for the end of the night when I got home, a blast of mad artistic energy after an evening at the pub.

This goes on for a couple of years, until the last episode is seared into my head. I love the previous sixteen chapters, but the climax is everything I look for in my fiction, and so much more.

It's the culmination of all the strangeness. In a last, desperate bid to break Number Six, they subject him to deep brainwashing and regression therapy, building him up again, and he still didn't break, and the system finally concedes to him.

Most of Fall Out sees the System hold a grand ceremony honouring his achievement. After gloriously vindicating the right of the individual to be individual, the assembly rises to him, and begs him to lead them, for he is the only true man there.

It's a strange metaphysical celebration of the self, while still something that is unreal, with biting dialogue that is sharply resonant without ever really making any sense. You don't have to know what a regrettable bullet is to have your attention drawn to it.

It's also an ode to rebellion, with acknowledgement of the revolution of youth, and McGoohan's approving smirk as he tells the young man standing in for all youth everywhere that he shouldn't knock yourself out,while also featuring the revolution of a member of the establishment turning upon itself. Leo McKern is marvellous as the career bureaucrat and former number two who finally gives the system he loved the stare, born again after literally breaking down during the failed regression plan. (The filming of the episode was reportedly so intense that McKern did actually have a breakdown, but he's back in fine form for the finale.)

And finally, it's about the triumph of Number Six, who finds out what happens when you beat the system and are given complete freedom - the system tries to bring you in, changing itself to suit your view. The ignored masses and political elite alike need him.

It's all a bit of a mindfuck, and just what I needed when I was 22 years old, and suffering the usual confusions about identity and self. McGoohan articulated all that existential messiness in a stylish and entertaining way that appealed to me like nothing else, save for the odd Alan Moore or Grant Morrison comic.

And it was funny and cool, which also helped and made it so endlessly rewatchable. The crazy tracking shots around the main hall in Fall Out, showing off the wonderful set design, and complemented with some incredible sound work, mixing the Beatles with 'Dem Bones' and blasting tones of authority.

And all that absurd humour - the inability of the mob to get past the word 'I', the slaughter to 'All You Need Is Love', the freed Prisoner's pantomiming explanation to a dubious cop, the monkey's face lurking beneath number two's mask, even that final revelation that the 'I' is '1'. Taking all this ridiculousness seriously would not be wise.   

It was the most perfectly insane thing I'd ever seen. And of course, given the choice to lead or go, The Prisoner burns another path and destroys the system instead, and what young punk doesn't like to see that.

My obsession with all things Prisoner cooled over the years, as these things always do, but I still have enormous amounts of affection for the series, and for what Patrick McGoohan was trying to say with it.

McGoohan passed away a few years ago, refusing to offer up any easy explanations for what he was saying, and greeting any in-depth analysis with that McGoohan snort of derision. He was awesome.

While McGoohan has gone, his work remains, and it's more than just a bunch of blistering acting roles over the decades – it's one of the finest stories ever put to film, as aggravating and resonant and marvellous and obtuse as it ever was, or will ever be. In the end, The Prisoner escapes into a world that is just a bigger prison. All these years later, he'll never be free of a devoted audience.

A week of recycling: Home, again

I still miss my old town something fierce, and never, ever want to go back and live there...

Teh-mook-ah 
Originally posted October 31, 2013

My real name is Bob Smith, which is about the most generic English-speaking name you could possibly have. This means that people are always forgetting my name, unless they're fans of The Cure, and that usually means I have to smile at their crap jokes about how boys don't cry or the fact that it's Friday, and I must be in love.

Those jokes never get old.

So when I decided to start writing this blog, I needed a new name (which is nothing new in internet culture – I already had a couple of discarded alter-egos), and it didn't take long to come up with something.

People always forget that I'm Bob Smith, but they usually remember when I tell them I'm Bob from Temuka.

I haven't lived in Temuka for more than 10 years, but it's still my home town. It's small – only about 4000 people – and it's located right in the middle of the East Coast of the South Island, about 200km south of Christchurch and 20 kays north of Timaru.

I was actually born in Timaru – another modest town of around 30,000 people - and spent the first nine years of my life there, before my family moved out to Temuka on the night David Lange's Labour Government came into power in 1984.

I move there when I was nine and stay there until I'm 18, and that's a fairly significant period in anybody's life. I came back ten years later for another couple of years, before moving away for good. A lot of my family and my very best friends still live in Temuka, and I still visit about twice a year.

I still think of myself as a Temuka boy, and while I’ll probably never live there again – not after marrying a proper city girl – it’s still one of my favourite places in the world.

But the main reason I used the town name here, and the reason I'm writing abut it now, is because it's the town where my love of comics became a full-blown obsession, and every time I head back home, literally every single street is somehow tied to some kind of comic in my mind, because that’s the sort of thing that happens in my head. 

I always associate comics with the places I first got them, or read them. I buy comics when I travel overseas and sit them on the bookshelf to remind me of the lazy afternoon when we went wandering around Dublin, or a frenetic day barrelling around the stores in New York.

But it’s not just like that for the big travels – I have a stupidly good memory for where I first read hundreds and hundreds of comics in the dullest places. I can still look at a Whizzer and Chips I bought in 1982 and remember that I first read that in the kids’ ward at Timaru Hospital, and I can remember the exact spot on the street, down the south end of town, where I got to the big twist at the end of Morrison and Yeowell’s Zenith.

I can’t help tying my ego to the places I live in, and I can’t help tying them into the comics I happened to be reading at the time, and I definitely can’t help remembering it all when I go back to the town where I lived half my life.

Especially in a town where I really did get more and more obsessed with comics. While a lot of friends grew right out of them in those long teenage years, I just loved them more and more.
 

Temuka is a tiny town, so there wasn't a hell of a lot to do when I was growing up there. In summer, you could go swimming down the Opihi River, and that was about it. It's a flat town, so you could bike anywhere, but there wasn't really anywhere to go.

But even in this tiny town on the arse end of the world, there were comics. There was no comic shop for hundreds of kilometres, but there were two small bookstores that had a surprising amount of material, (even if it wasn’t all that consistent), and more than half a dozen dairies where you could find all sorts of material.

There was the dairy on Maude Street where I found the best free gift ever, and the dairies on King Street would often have semi-recent DC comics for a dollar like this one. The shop on Denmark Street was the place here I got the last issue of Camelot #3000 and the first issue of the New Warriors, in that unfortunate order.

Temuka Stationery was a great bookshop for finding random issues of the Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe (Deluxe Edition), but Baird's bookshop was the best store. I bought every issue of 2000ad between 1986 and 1991 from there, and was an eager subscriber to multiple X-comics. You were still guaranteed to miss an issue a year, but it was still pretty regular. Mr Baird used to write the New Zealand price on the cover in ballpoint pen, and I still own a lot of comics with his distinctive $2.85 on it. These marks still drive my mate Kyle bonkers, but I like 'em. They remind me of home.

The town wasn't just a supplier, it was a setting. I still associate GI Joe comics with the Temuka High lunch area, and the Inferno crossover is undeniably linked to the Temuka RSA. Cam Kennedy’s Judge Dredd art (and Jon Pertwee Doctor Who) will always be associated with the Temuka TAB, and I still have one of the Eagle comics I found on a bench down Hill's Creek.

I remember reading the first issue of Marvel's short-lived Nightmare on Elm Street magazine in the spacies section at Lester’s fish and chip shop, and I remember someone stole it from me while I was playing Rastan. And I remember reading my first proper Sandman comic while sitting in the grandstand down the Temuka Domain.

Soon after I learned to walk, I learned to read while I walk, and the streets themselves are drenched in memory, because I would always read my new comics on the walk back home. I nearly got hit by a train while reading the T2 comic adaption while ducking through the train yards, and I got stuck in all sorts of worlds on those wide, empty streets.

And that’s the house where I begged Mum to get me an Indiana Jones comic (and moaned when she got the wrong one), and there’s the house where I got in so much fucking trouble because I used sellotape to put my 2000ad star scans up on a wallpapered wall. And there’s the house where I got stoned for the first time and read an Aquaman comic, and it’s literally just around the corner from the house where I first saw Bolland art on an American comic.

Things have changed, of course. They always do.

Last time I went back, Baird's Bookshop was long gone, replaced by a $2 shop, and Lester’s fish and chip shop, and that back room of spacies at Lester's - where I spent a vast amount of my teenage years - doesn’t exist anymore. But there are still those vast, empty streets, so full of memory, and every time I go back, I make a point of going for a bit of a wander, and get lost in the nostalgia.

A week of recycling: Comics like me

I still like comics

Bob likes comics
Originally posted January 31, 2014

I like comics.

I like big comics, and I like small comics. I like big, fancy hardbacks with glossy pages and impeccable craftwork, showing off the talents of talented people. And I like tiny, stapled mini comics with rough edges and the need to shock, created by somebody you never heard of.

I like weekly comics and their quick hits, and I like monthly comics with the regular dose, and I like the overkill of a big one-off comic.

I like black and white comics, and full colour comics, and all shades of comics.

I like comics by Bolland, Davis, Severin, Wilson, Eisner, Wagner, Colan, Abel, Gibson, Perez, Immonen, Fraser, Mignola, Kennedy, Colquhoun, Bond, Bagge, Wieringo, Yeowell, Ditko, McKean, Kirby, Byrne, Fabry, Bisley, O’Malley, Maguire, Zeck, Horrocks, Buscema, Buscema, Lloyd, Campbell, Talbot, Darrow, Crumb, Simonson, Spiegleman, Novick, Robbins, Grell, Marcos, Cockrum, Ezquerra, Clowes, Buckingham, Kurtzman, Quitely, Dillon, Sim, Winslade, Lee, Orlando, Sala, Hembeck, Burns, Woodring, Beck, Langridge, Medley, Redondo, Kristiansen, Allred, Gibbons, Kuper, Frazetta, Kubert, MacNeil, Giraud, Toth, Staton, Rogers, Matt, Dwyer, Hernandez, Hernandez, Hernandez, Hernandez, Bechdel, Hewlett, Smith, Fingerman, Brunetti, Aragones, Manara, Doran, Glanzman, Chadwick, Sacco, Langridge, Geary, D’Israeli, Templeton, Hughes, Irving, Shanower, Lutes, Cruse, Grist, Pope, McMahon, Badger, Tomine, Adams, Adams, Brown, Dorkin, Davison, Giffen, Flint, Emerson, Jason, Tezuka and a few hundred other great artists.

I like intense action comics with stylish art.

I like the feeling you get after finishing an inordinately satisfying comic. I like the fact that it still happens on a regular basis, with both new and established comic creators. The surprise satisfaction is always the best - reading a comic you don't expect much from, and finding it absorbing and entertaining, is like a drug. The best make me feel like my brain has just grown in size a tiny amount, while I can literally be stunned by the very, very best.

The last time that happened, I got a bit emotional reading one of Kevin Huizenga's Ganges comics, and then I had to go to a dinner party straight afterwards, and I was a USELESS guest all night.

But that's fairly rare, and I'm happy enough when a comic is just purely satisfying. That still doesn't happen every day, but it happens enough.

I like last issues. The whole never-ending battle thing gets a bit, well, never-ending, and I have a huge affection for the full stop. Some series end because they don't have the readership any more, and a few even get the chance to finish while still on a high.

But there is always something a little melancholic in the final issue. If a series has been well established, it sad to see it go, and if it only just got started, it's smothered with the loss of failed potential.

I like comics that make me think, and comics that make me feel, and comics that are just goddamn good looking.

One of these things is not enough for me to hold on to a comic, two of them makes a comic a keeper, and a comic with all three is a downright treasure.

I like living in a town with two viable comic shops, which means I can build loyalty at one, and use the other for surprises. After decades of missed issues, I also living in an age where I can order a comic book, and it will actually show up. If I missed a comic when I was growing up, it could be years, even decades, before I got hold of that lost issue again.

But now I can be surprised to see Bob Fingerman's excellent Minimum Wage was coming back, mentioned it to the guy at the local store, and had the first issue the very next week.

The proximity to good shops also means I don't have to rely on digital comics to get my fix, which is fantastic, because I still can't get into digital reading.

I'm not into the digital, and I don’t like some particular comics, but other people love them, and who am I to say they’re wrong? I don’t want to be the asshole who is harshing their high, I don't want to be Captain Buzzkill, moaning about how Saga isn't all that.

I don’t like a lot of things around comics culture, including some appalling sexism, outrageous entitlement, rotten business deals and plain old nastiness, but nobody is asking me to like any of that bullshit.

I especially don't like bullying, in any form, and I'll not stand for that.

I like dollar bins, and have spent a significantly measurable amount of my life crouched over them, digging for gold. I like finding rare treasures among all the unloved Brigade and X-Force comics, I like using the $1 bins to build up solid chunks of long-running series, and I like using them to complete entire runs of short-lived oddities like Hourman or Glamourpuss.

I like reading books, magazines and internet essays about comics. I love the gossip and the reading about the story behind the story, and I like soaking up astute observations about various comics.

I like reading comic reviews that prove that I was always right about absolutely everything, and I like reading comic reviews that tell me I'm wrong, wrong, wrong.

I like prestige format comics, with those glossy pages and sharp spines, even if you can never see a double-page spread properly. And I like the huge chunk of story you get in a decent omnibus edition, which might be unweildy and awkward, but can contain multitudes.

I like multi-creator anthologies, and still appreciate a smart six-page story. I like dodgy foreign reprints of US classics. I like abstract comics and I like Archie comics. I like the way reading mainstream superhero comics on the arse end of the world is a rewardingly non-linear experience.

I like sitting in the sun and reading a new Love and Rockets, and I like staying up late at night to read a new Garth Ennis comic. I like reading 2000ad on the street, on the walk back from the shop, and I like coming back from the library with piles of goodness, and I like stumbling across a pile of unknown comics in random second-hand stores.

 I like the fact that comics are just words and pictures, and you can do anything with words and pictures.

I like comics. A lot.

A week of recycling: All goodness is in jeopardy

I still won't believe there is actually new Twin Peaks coming under I see the trailer.

Welcome back to Twin Peaks
Originally posted October 9, 2014

When David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks made its debut in the early nineties it quickly scored a massive audience, hooked on the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer. But that success was fleeting, and the series was cancelled after just two seasons, as the audience fell away in their millions.

It was just too weird, and in the end, too uneven for the world, and it's notable that the strange and beautifully distinctive residents of Twin Peaks immediately gave up their central position in the early nineties US TV zeitgeist to Beverly Hills 90210, with its clean cut kids.

Twin Peaks returned a couple of years later with the intentionally baffling Fire Walk With Me prequel - which is only now really being generally recognised as a great Lynch film - and that was all there was for more than two decades, until it was revealed yesterday that Lynch and Frost were returning to Twin Peaks for a new series in 2016.

I could not be more excited about the fact that my favourite gum is coming back in style.

I can't watch Twin Peaks in the daylight, it's always been a late, late night thing.

It's somewhere in the nineties, and I finally get to see the whole series when it was, at long, last repeated on TV – DVD box sets are still more than half a decade away. But it's only being shown at two o'clock on a weekday morning, so I set my alarm clock to wake me up right on two with a blast of Britpop, watch the episode and go back to sleep for another few hours and have some fucked-up dreams.

It downloads directly into my subconscious, and leaves the real world feeling flat and uninspired, because I'm walking through a boring old world, but in my head, the owls are not what they seem, and there are places beyond space and time that can be soaked in fear, or open with great hope.

It's still early days into the return of Twin Peaks, with no announcements regarding the return of crucial cast members, although it has been confirmed that Lynch will direct all nine episodes.

Nothing else is known, but one thing is certain - it's bound to infuriate some fans, delight others, and baffle the rest.

It's difficult to overstate the importance of Twin Peaks in the history of American television drama. It put charm, complexity and sheer weirdness onto primetime screens, and proved to be massively influential.

It helped break the 'case-of-the-week' structure that was predominant in television at the time, with a long-running story that refused to offer easy, or quick, answers. Lynch and Frost famously never wanted to reveal who the killer was at all, and the caving in to network pressure on that issue was a huge nail in the series' coffin.

Twin Peaks also offered a unique creative vision - it's a complete world of strangeness and detail that could only come from the perspective of these creators, and that's a lesson that other important shows such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire and Deadwood took to heart, to tell their own stories, in their own way.

It's still somewhere in the nineties, and it's still somewhere in the early hours of the morning, but this time I'm really, really fucked up, and I've just staggered home from the pub, and somehow Fire Walk With Me is playing on my shitty video player.

My mates were laughing at the woman in the red dress, but I can't take it, the whole thing is so fucking emotionally and thematically rich. I've been regularly listening to the soundtrack, and Laura isn't just a victim – she sacrifices herself to save her friends, and maybe the world.

And then they go to the nightclub, and the music is pulsing and the lights are flashing, and the lights in the room I'm sitting in start stuttering for a moment, and it's all real, man, and it's profoundly terrifying for a good three seconds, followed by an enthusiastic euphoria at the weirdness of it all.

The world really is a weird place, and it's awesome.

Lynch drifted away from the show after the first season, and went off to create some of the creepiest and most unusual movies on the 1990s, but did return for the final episode, ending the series on several painful cliff-hangers that are still unresolved.

They certainly weren't resolved when Lynch made his final visit to the town, for the Fire Walk With Me movie. Fans of the show who expected Lynch to tie up loose ends were left unfulfilled, and even angry at the film's failure to provide answers, although some critics hailed it as one of the great horror movies of the nineties.

Lynch and Frost both moved onto other projects, and Lynch's next major TV series turned from commercial disaster to artistic triumph when the Mullholland Drive series was cancelled, and he used the bones of the pilot to create one of the best movies of his career.

But there was no more talk of Twin Peaks. Lynch said it was dead, and even the fabled directors cut of Fire Walk With Me, with featured cameos from many of the show's quirky characters, was locked away.

And now it's the sci-fi year of 2014, just a few weeks ago, but it's still the timeless, endless late night, and I'm watching Twin Peaks again.

It's that Fire Walk With Me footage, which I'd given up hope of ever seeing, suddenly out there in the world, and it's so familiar, largely because the full movie script was one of the very first things I ever downloaded off the internet, but there are also all those other forgotten characters, still shining in early nineties youth.

It's disconcerting, especially because the new scenes have no real soundtrack beyond the dialogue, even though they have been put together by Lynch, and the lack of music and that quiet Lynch drone of dread gives the unearthed footage a step towards cold reality.

It's all out there now.

But Laura Palmer did say she was coming to see us again in 25 years, and she was always true to her word, even if she was dead, and the return of the actual series was finally confirmed this week.

The fact that Lynch will direct the TV show is very good news, especially since he hasn't directed a feature in almost 10 years, since 2006's Inland Empire, and his brand of idiosyncratic fiction has been deeply missed.

After all these years of anticipation, the new series is bound to disappoint many, and can never live up to everybody's expectations. But the murder mystery appeal of Twin Peaks faded a long time ago, and the stranger parts of the show have a weird timelessness that still holds up.

A return visit to the town again after all this time is bound to be startling, unexpected and uncomfortable. Just like it should be.

A week of recycling: New Adventures in time and space

I'm a total fucking hypocrite, because after bitching about the hedonistic bullshit of Chrononauts, I have to admit that if I had a time machine, I'd go back 20 years and buy Doctor Who novels. (And probably go back to the sixties with a video recorder and tape those lost episodes.) I almost have all the Missing Adventures now, after a superb score at a Winnipeg bookshop recently, but those last few are going to be a bitch to find.

 Doctor Who: On the beach with New Adventures
Originally posted July 8, 2015

Doctor Who started to die a long, slow death when the BBC took it off the air in 1989. Apart from a lamentable crossover with Eastenders, 89 minutes of Paul McGann and the odd comedy sketch, the TV show was off the air and gone from the world.

Russell T Davies and chums sorted all that out 10 years ago, and brought back the Doctor, better and bigger than ever. But for 15 years there, Doctor Who was pretty much dead in mainstream culture.

But it was only his TV adventures that were dead. Something strange and wonderful was happening with the Doctor in a new format, with a new series of novels that took the Doctor into previously unexplored realms of time and space. They were called the New Adventures, and if you get me drunk enough and thinking about girls with short, dark hair, I'll swear they are the best Doctor Who stories ever.

Here's a slice of space and time: Sometime in 1997, I'm on a beach in Dunedin on the arse end of the world, drinking a bloody big bottle of scrumpy cider and reading a book that has the best Wings-based pun ever, and it also features an incredibly smart woman with short dark hair who orders a pint of vodka, and I fall in love with Professor Bernice Summerfield.

Benny is the first proper companion introduced in the Doctor's novel adventures, and she's an absolute delight – snarky and sharp and clever and resourceful and expanding her mind as she falls through the universe. Never mind about running off with the good Doctor, I want to explore the limits of space and time with somebody like Benny.

She's still out there now in 2015, starring in the occasional book or audio adventure, and she's still as beautifully sharp as ever.  

The New Adventures were published by Virgin and were born in the immediate aftermath of the TV show's end, with the Doctor and Ace strolling right out of Survival and into the Timewyrm saga. It only lasted a few years, until the BBC grabbed the rights back in the wake of the McGann movie, and almost all of the Virgin novels have long since fallen out of print.

But they burned brightly, and remain a massive influence on the current generation of Doctor Who writers. Some of the New Adventures novelists went on to write for the series themselves, and some of them peaked a long time ago, but there was such a sudden rush of infectious enthusiasm for what you could do with a Doctor Who story at this time, with a burst of creativity and cleverness.

It became a series that got inside the TARDIS crew's heads like nothing before, or since. Unashamedly going for an older audience, the stories were complex and human, with a direct focus on characterisation – lots of hugs and hurt feelings as the Doctor saved the world again.

They could get quite brutal and dark, with massive body counts and destruction on a galactic scale, but they also featured the Doctor going off and getting drunk on his 1000th birthday and singing Happy Birthday to the universe, and they featured strange, lyrical tales set in long-ago English summers.

Paul Cornell set the new standard with Timewyrm: Revelation, and would come back every year or so to raise the bar again, and it was a level of quality that no other TV tie-in novel series came close to touching. There were consistently brilliant books by Cornell, Kate Orman, Lance Parkin, Andy Lane and Ben Aaronovitch, and they were all must-reads, with stunning ideas and swaggering style.

Here's another slice of time and space: One night during this period of New Adventures, I have this ridiculously vivid dream about pain and loss that leaves me with an inexplicable crush on the character of Dodo, a young woman with short, dark hair who was in the TV show in the 1960s and is precisely nobody's favourite companion.

I'm not sure where this comes from, all I know is that I'm fucking shattered when I get to the part in Who Killed Kennedy where she is callously murdered for plot purposes, and it isn't helped when she ends up with a brain-eating STD at the end of The Man In The Velvet Mask. Dodo deserved better.

The Man in The Velvet Mask wasn't actually a New Adventure, it was a Missing one. A couple of years into the run of NAs, the editors started putting together new stories about past Doctors, filling in the character's continuity with new travels and confrontations. Some of them emulated the new style, and weren't that successful for it, while ones that were more blatantly homaging the era they were going for worked out all right.

But my favourite Doctor is always, always the current one, and it was the New Adventures that mattered. They started getting deeply weird as they built up a new story of the Seventh Doctor's new role as Time's Champion, a Machiavellian mastermind who played chess with the cosmos and still understood the value of a single life, who negotiates for peace on apocalyptic battlefields and then goes off to play the spoons.

They played fast and loose with the Doctor's world, and I totally understand how it turned a lot of people off, and some of them had the worst book covers I've ever seen on a science-fiction novel (they got tremendously better towards the end), so I can see how Who fans could reject it.

They also got delightfully self-indulgent, with the 50th book a huge love-fest for the whole series, a book line that got drunk on their own possibilities. The end was near, and things got tangled up in psi-war nonsense and real-word computer failure, and the last few books came out of order and became legendarily rare, even as they promised answers to the oldest of questions.

One last slice of time/space is longer than the others, and stretches over a year or so as I get obsessed with these books, almost too late for my own good.

I know about them, but other than watching the odd old story on video, I have little to do with Doctor Who in the early nineties. I see the books in the stores and check out the back covers, but it's only when I get Return of the Living Dead, another continuity-drenched piece of gushing Who love, that I fall for them.

It's fortunate timing, because I'm just able to grab the hardest ones to find before they disappear, and spend the rest of the time buying them in bulk, the first time I ever use the internet to figure out and track down a new obsession.

And it is an obsession - I'm in my early twenties, and my entire pathetic life revolves around getting as fuckin' wasted as possible, re-reading The Invisibles in search of the meaning of life, and tracking down Doctor Who books. It all melts together, and I'm sitting on that damn beach, getting drunk as fuck and spinning out while reading No Future and Flex Mentallo. It all seems so normal.

And then it was all over. The BBC books came in and were never as satisfying, with a lack of a strong editorial vision or real point. They got briefly interesting with Lawrence Miles' additions to the saga, but they proved too inherently self-destructive to really get anywhere.

And then, at long last, the TV show came back, and it was amazing, with strong actors and high production values the old series had only ever dreamed about. Most of all, it came back with brilliant stories which built a whole new level to Doctor Who, and the debt they owe to the New adventures is palpable.

There is that same cleverness, and that same naked sentimentality, that could be found in the best New Adventures, and they gave the good Doctor's adventures a new credibility. They could be about more than running down corridors and filling 25 minutes of air time. They could be about anything, as small as hurt feelings, or as large as threats to the universe.
 

I came in so late, and had to go back and read the books in totally the wrong order. And it too me years to track down the last few New Adventures I needed, which was understandable, considering the last few's pitifully tiny print runs. I paid more than fifty bucks for a copy of Lungbarrow a few years ago, because I had to have it, but the one I could never track down was Cornell's Human Nature, the one that everybody raved about, until I got it the other week.

It was weirdly easier to live with that hole in the collection when the story was used as the basis for a two-part story in the TV show, with the Seventh Doctor's story claimed by the Tenth. But I was always looking for the book then I got it a few weeks ago, and it's done.

I still haven't read them all, because I'll have to be pretty desperate to finally crack open The Pit, but I'll get there one day. Like all particular periods of Doctor Who, it was the perfect thing for its place in time and space, and we've all moved on, but I still have a lot of dopey affection for these stories, too wide and weird for the small screen.

A week of recycling: I was a teenaged fan-fictioner

When I looked at the Comic Book Resources site last week, and saw it had been transformed into another generic pop culture PR regurgitator which I never needed to look at ever again, I was genuinely bummed out. This is why.

My life on the Never Ending Board 

Originally posted September 20, 2013 

A couple of days ago I was mucking about on the internet, indulging in meaningless nostalgia, when I stumbled across a piece of fiction I wrote back in 1997.  That's right in the middle of my fan fiction phase and it was exactly as terrible as you would imagine.

But it was still fascinating, especially when I couldn't remember writing that particular bit of fiction. It was completely missing from my memories of those days, so I got to read a short story that I'd essentially written to myself, 16 years removed.

It wasn't all bad – I made myself laugh at a Prisoner in-joke. (I was 22 in 1997. Of course there was a Prisoner in-joke). And it basically made sense. But the writing was overheated and breathless, and trying so hard to be really, really clever, and it's definitely the work of somebody with some serious self-worth issues, which may still be lingering. Which is a little troubling.

But even though I'm too embarrassed to even search for all the other stuff I did at the time – which I'm fairly sure is still on the internet somewhere - I don't regret my fan fiction days at all.

There is no shame here.

I never intended to start writing fan fiction. It just happened.

There are four million people in New Zealand, but we all live on the arse end of the world, so there is bound to be feelings of isolation. I've talked before about how the internet changed everything, and made me feel like I was part of a greater community. I ended up gravitating towards the Comic Book Resources message boards, in the days when it was clad in sickly purple and yellow word balloons, and that was my first home on the web.

It didn't take me long to realise that all the cool kids were writing their own stuff in one particular section of CBR that was devoted to fan fiction, and that looked like a hell of a lot of fun, so I started doing my own stories and putting them out there in the world.

They weren't strictly fan fiction – they weren't stories devoted to Batman or Doc Savage or anything like that. The setting for all these stories was a multi-universal street that ran forever, and that just meant any character from any comic or movie or TV show or novel or song could pop in for an appearance, but the vast majority of stories that sprouted up on CBR's Never Ending Board featured the writer's own creations.

There was the Dadamerican, and Buried Alien, and Joe Grendel, and the Mighty Hank, and Wet Willie, and Merlin & Cowman, and the Scarlet Dragon, and Wheat Lad, and Goldenager, and Rydgen, and Hatman, and Sharpshooter & Snow Sabre, and Paper Bag Boy, and OzBayt, and the Phantom Scribbler, and the White Knight, and Amyzon, and Typo Lad, and literally hundreds of other characters, long before I even started writing things.

The stories had only been running a few months by the time I joined in, and there were already recognisable cliques amongst posters, but the other writers - who were often indistinguishable from the characters they created - were incredibly welcoming, and I ended up writing a couple of dozen stories featuring my own creations, and it was marvellous.

I've still got a few stories I did from those days saved on my hard drive, in dusty old computer folders that haven't been opened since 2006. And there are a few that are still floating around on the web, (usually on sites that still have big, flashy nineties ads on them), but I don't think I could bear looking for them.

Because, despite the fantastic encouragement I got at the time, they really are unobjectively terrible – the first fumbling efforts at proper writing, all spat out for the world to see. The last few times I ever looked at that work, I cringed like a motherfucker. They're impossibly clumsy, and the two major influences on my writing at that time were – by some way – the Invisibles and the Doctor Who New Adventures, which were both pretty goddamn self-indulgent, so it wasn't pretty when I added my own ego to the mix.

When I do stumble across something that I wrote back then, I do see glimpses of what I was going for, but I generally failed to pay it off. Sometimes I got it right – I was so pleased with one action sequence involving a moving car and a hatchet that I have used it several times since - but in general, it's mostly rubbish.

But I don't regret spending all that time thinking and writing about those silly little stories. Most of the feedback that was produced was unhelpfully positive, but I figured out how to plot stories, and work with other writers (and their creations), and it was a great place to leech off all those youthful enthusiasms in my writing.

And there was such freedom in fan fiction writing. The ability to do whatever you want when you're not trying to please anybody but yourself was enormously liberating. The whole idea of just writing for fun - not to make money or reach a huge audience - but just for the fun of putting words together to create a viewpoint.

I was also going through a fairly difficult period in my life (again, I was 22, and we're all going through difficult periods at that age), but all of that was forgotten when I switched off and went back to J Street to add a brick to a huge wall of stories.

Sometimes it really helped - on the day I found out one of my oldest friends in the world was quietly ripping me off I started writing the adventures of a Jerry Cornelius rip-off called Dr Skin, and the Therapeutic Skin Jobs (as they were super-cleverly called) really did make me feel better. That sort of writing didn't help with proper trauma, but it certainly made me feel less grumpy on blah days.

I never made a conscious decision to stop writing fan fiction, it just faded away, as things tend to do in life. I wasn't alone - nobody has written a new J Street story in years and years. I do occasionally start writing another Therapeutic Skin Jobs every couple of years or so, but rarely finish them
 
I never really gave up fiction, and have even collaborated with several NEB writers on move scripts and prose things, but that was still just writing for kicks, not for any greater consumption.

And now I've got the Tearoom of Despair, which satisfies almost all of my writing urges on a daily basis. (I did finish off another short novel last year, but I haven't written any proper fiction since then.) There isn't the charge of collaboration, or the kick of a really good story idea, but it's basically the same thrill as fan fiction writing. This writing is all for fun, not for fortune and glory, and that's the way I'd like to keep it.

We do all think less of something when we hear it is fan fiction - 50 Shades of Grey never got over being a Twilight fan fiction for many people - and there is just cause for this, because the vast majority of it is terrible.

But I think it's also a hell of a lot of fun, a great way to purge the worst habits of fiction writing and a terrific way to meet people who are into the same things as you. I've only actually meet the Dadamerican and The Mighty Hank in person, but I have made some great friends through all this silliness, (and lost a few, too. Nope Callahan! Where are you, man? Email me at bobtemuka at Hotmail!).

I don't regret spending all that time and effort on something as silly as fan fiction. It's a phase I have long moved past, and one that I'm not going to revisit all that often, but I'm glad I did it.

New Bourne, same problems (and other new movies)

I don't want to read or sleep or work or anything right now. All I wanna do is watch movies.

Jason Bourne: There wasn't a lot that was new in the new Bourne film – it's the usual mix of high-stakes secret agent bullshit, identity confusion and fantastic fight scenes. Bourne is still using everything at hand to win his fights – only now he's using a rioting city that is tearing itself apart, rather than a pen from his desk, or a magazine from the coffee table – and it's all as frenetic and focused as ever.

But it's also notable that it's a big blockbuster that actually ends on a note of total failure, with Bourne trying to find a new way to save the world that doesn't involve killing or hurting anybody who is inconvenient. Towards the end of the film, he gives the next generation of spooks the chance to do it differently, with their tech-savvy sympathies, and when they show that they're stuck playing the same bullshit powergames, he walks away.

In Bourne's world, empathy is a virus, and as Patient Zero, Jason Bourne is willingly contagious, but the immune system of the entrenched power structure is strong. He doesn't make much progress in the new film, so there is still somewhere to go with the inevitable sequels.
 

Everest: Yeah, it's tragic and all, but the various Kiwi accents in this movie were hilarious.

Tobruk/Raid On Rommel: So Tobruk is one of those men-on-a-mission war movies from the seventies, with a bunch of straight-backed soldiers giving the Nazis a jolly good thrashing in North Africa. Rock Hudson manages to chew up the scenery while remaining as lethargic as hell, George Peppard is cold as ice in the desert heat, and there are loads of great explosions.

Raid on Rommel is another of those men-on-a-mission war movies from the seventies, with a bunch of straight-backed soldiers giving the Nazis a jolly good thrashing in North Africa, and when I watched it the week after Tobruk, I couldn't help but notice that they'd just used tonnes of expensive battle footage from the other film in this one. A good third of the movie is exactly the same, even though the films have different actors and scenarios.

To be honest, it's some heroic work from the editing crew, using this much footage in another film, and having it make some kind of sense as a new story, even if it was impossible to disregard the original when you've just seen it.

Come to think of it, I would love to see this kind of blatant penny-pinching going on today. Imagine if you could take all the money shots out of say, Jurassic World, and making another whole movie around it. You couldn't do much worse.

Suicide Squad: Suicide shit.

Blackhat: Michael Mann can do a lot of things, including some of the most briliant and intense action scenes ever, but there is no way he can ever convince us that a computer hacker looks like Thor, no matter how many press-ups-with-his feet-up-on-the-wall he does.

I was surprised how long it took the plot to kill off the superfluous brother though, and the way that the two main characters hooked up long before his inevitable demise. I also liked how unexpectedly stabby things got towards the end.

Close Range: I heard they were making a sequel to Sicario, so I really, really hope they use Scott Adkins character from this shitty action film, whose solution to the complex geo-political issues of the Mexican drug scene is use spinning back-kicks to beat the shit out of the murderous cartels.

Still, they really shouldn't have tried to do Leone on a camcorder budget, with some ridiculous cross-cutting during the final showdown. That never works.

Green Room: There is nothing worse than a part-time punk, it goes against the whole philosophy. You've got to be hardcore, you've got to go all the way, or you might as well fuck off home.

Most of the band that get trapped by neo-Nazi fucks in this movie are secretly fans of Prince or Simon & Garfunkel, but the film doesn't pussy out, and when people are shot in the face or sliced open with a box cutter or have their throat ripped out by a killer dog, it's unflinching and visceral, and it really hurts.

You can flinch, but don't look away. The violence in Green Room is ugly and clumsy and wasteful, and you don't want to miss that. It's the whole point.

Hail Caesar!: Apart from their mysterious slump in the early 2000s, I've reacted to almost every Coen Brothers film in the same way. The first time I watch it, there is a vague sense of disappointment that it wasn't what I expected, and that it was so disconnected and didn't seem to go anywhere. The second time I see it, without all those gross expectations, I enjoy it a lot more. By the third time, and on all subsequent viewings, I'm convinced that they've produced another goddamn cinematic masterpiece. I've seen Hair Caesar twice now, and I'm right on the edge of that third reaction, even if I have no idea what all the religious undertones of the film are all about.

American Ultra: I really don't understand why nobody told me this had Walton Goggins in it. I would have seen it much sooner if I knew that. I went to see GI Joe 2: GI Joer at the movies because it had Goggins in it.

The main actors in this movie are some of the most annoying on the planet, but Goggins makes up for it, because Goggins makes everything better. He's so good in that Vice-Principals show – Danny McBride is doing his Danny McBride thing, but I have no fucking idea what Goggins is doing, and it's magnificent, and I keep having to stop myself from walking like he does, with an outrageous, repressed flounce.

They knock out his teeth in American Ultra, which is a crime against humanity. I can't remember anything else about this movie.

Keanu: Key and Peele's TV show is better, and Keanu loses its narrative momentum in the last third, but it's still a fun and slyly emotional story, and I hope they would do a proper horror film.

Still, it took me two weeks to get the literally cheesy joke about the Method Man's character. I literally said 'Oh, it's a Wire joke' out loud at work, which made me look really stupid.