Muting the Avengers

I survive the never ending maelstrom of social media with a heavy blocking and muting policy. It does not take much. Any gross display of entitlement, any thoughtless piece of rudeness, or any bigotry at all, and it's an instant block. Life is much better that way.

But there are some topics where good people have dodgy opinions that I just can't get behind, and that requires a delicate sense of muting. And several months out from the latest Avengers film from Marvel, I have trained my meagre social media presence to ignore all things related to that film.

On one hand, there is some mindless adoration and endless publicity that I can avoid, but on the other, I get to also avoid exposure to all the cool kids telling me how much they hate the films. So I still want to follow film writers who bang on about great transgressive cinema, but I really don't need to know how much they hate Spider-Man movies, because of course they fucking do.

I really don't get either side of the love/hate equation to the Marvel superhero movies. None of them are masterpieces, but none of them are total dogshit either, they're all just fine. And sometimes fine is okay is all right. Some basically competent filmmaking with a few things we've never seen before is all I need for a good night out at the movies. I rarely remember much about them, but that's all right, my brain is full enough.

The trigger for my latest bout of industrial strength muting was the general complaining about all the homework that was supposedly required for the new film. All the past stories that needed to be revisited to get the full effect of the latest effort. 

The biggest complaints seem to come from people who would never see the new film anyway, and I don't think you need to see a damn thing before going to these movies. I can get the gist. I don't understand the plots of almost all the James Bond films, but I like the sex and violence.

Besides, I was 350 issues behind ion Fantastic Four when I first started reading that regularly, complete bafflement about the history of every damn little thing is the point.

So I don't find myself missing much by cutting out the chatter. It can make the end experience better because it's no context, all feeling. I've enjoyed the past few years of Doctor Who a lot more because I haven't been interacting with that vast and sprawling fandom at all, and I greatly enjoy going to see films as soon as they come out on a weekday morning, before any reviews or general hot takes ruin it for everybody

So I won't know much more about the new film before I go see it in December- unless they put a big spoiler on the sides of buses or something - and I look forward to that marvellous experience all the more for it.

Bowling With Corpses: She paused to examine her own heart

- Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown 

Art and story by Mike Mignola

Colors by Dave Stewart

Letters by Clem Robins

Burn, baby, burn

I might not find the most excellent Milk and Cheese comics by the even more excellent Evan Dorkin quite as funny as I did when I was a 21-year-old edgelord. 

But the older I get, the more I think their ongoing rampages of destruction are entirely justified. 

The best guitarist I ever saw

I've had the extreme good fortune of seeing a handful of the world's best guitarists do their thing in the flesh. I've watched Neil Young shred it up with his Crazy Hose buds, and I've seen Jack White play to his audience of one.

There are many, many of the world's greatest guitarists who I have not seen, and never will. I'll never see Hendrix in the flesh, or any of those 60s greats that have, at the very least, retired from constant performing.

Then there are the great bluesmen of the old days, whose work survives in scratched permanence, and they were doing great work a century ago. And there are the people I've seen in pub bands who never broke big, but could do remarkable things with their guitar. And even some mates - my friend Louis has some of the best slowhand technique I've ever seen, but is content letting it rip at jam nights at the local pub.

But when it comes to the big shows and the big stars, there is one guitarist who genuinely impressed me more than anybody, and that was Tom Morello.

I didn't even know Prophets of Rage was a thing - a supergroup of members from Public Enemy, Audioslave, Cypress Hill and Rage Against the Machine - until my mate Brian convinced me to go to their show, and I was fucking glad I did because it was one hell of a gig, with that kind of back catalogue to dive into.

It was also a great fucking show because I spent almost the whole time staring with absolute adoration at Morello's guitar playing. I'd seen the big man perform a thousand times in music videos and concert films, but seeing him show off all his tricks in front of a huge audience was a total trip.

He shredded the big riffs, of course, but his playing was also so light and playful. He actually made feedback work as a separate instrument, and filled in the songs with all kinds of crazy noodling about. He had been doing this for several decades now, and obviously knew how to impress a crowd, but made it look like he was coming up with new ideas on the fly, as if this was the first time he'd ever thought of playing his guitar upside down.

And he made it look so easy, as if the six-strings were another part of his body, and playing unearthly sounds on it was just as natural as walking.

I've seen a lot of the huge bands I grew up loving, and look forward to seeing more - I finally got to see Pulp this year, so anything is possible! But it would take something to beat what I saw Tom Morello do on stage that one time.    

How Rocky Horror always made me a better person

Re-watching a film you used to be obsessed with is always a strange experience, and the longer it's been since you last indulged, the stranger it gets. Some dialogue, characters and entire scenes can seemingly be forgotten, until the re-watch drags them up from somewhere deep in the memory, and you realise you never forgot any of this shit.

Last week I watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a film I was brutally obsessed with for an incredibly brief time many years ago. It was the first time I'd seen it in more than a decade, and it was bloody awesome. I knew every song (up to a very particular point) backwards, and greatly enjoyed drinking in its unique vibe again.

Looking back, with its themes of wild and rampant sexuality, it probably wasn't the best film to be watching over and over again when I was 12 years old. But it really did help me become a better person, so maybe it was exactly what I should have been watching.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains a strange and goofy movie that is unlike anything else ever put on film. A lot of this is due to the fact that it remains oddly timeless - a pastiche of dopey fifties horror films made in the seventies, on very limited sets that have no foundation in the real world. It's a hermetically sealed world where everyone bursts into delightful song, or gets on down into some dirty sex, and it all takes place in a tight little universe.

Fortunately, almost all of those sings are still just as irritatingly catchy and meaty as they ever were - everybody knows the Time Warp, but each song, which come along at surprisingly regular intervals, is infinitely catchy. Over at The Frankenstein Place is a dose of haunting glam, Sweet Transvestite has some great thundering keyboards, I'm Going Home is still fucking heart-breaking, and the whole Science Fiction/Double Feature thing is a fantastic bookend.

And it's all held together by a fine cast, including the young and unflappable Susan Sarandon, and a ensemble who had mastered the roles in the stage show.  Tim Curry has done many fine things over his long career, but nothing beats his sly, snide and spectacular Frank N Furter.

Even with the groovy songs and unique atmosphere of cheery and gross dread, Rocky Horror still has some flaws. Some parts of the story are needlessly cruel, and some of the sexual politics are incredibly dated. And it's easy to see how the whole thing could be repulsive to certain people, with its callous disregard for taste and social niceties.

But it's precisely  those things that still make it an attractive experience for some. For many beautiful freaks and lovely geeks, Rocky Horror is still one of the greats.

My own obsession with the movie was oddly limited, in more ways than one. I had a copy on video tape when I was 12, but it ran out of tape almost exactly halfway through the film, right after the point when Frank separately seduced Brad and Janet.

So I just rewatched the first 45 minutes over and over again, because that was enough. I loved the look of the film, and that unique and unusual atmosphere. I would watch that same 45 minutes over and over again, memorising the tunes and dialogue through sheer osmosis, (although I had to play 'Hot Patootie, Bless My Soul' a million times over to figure out what Meatloaf was on about). I pestered my parents to rent out a copy from the video store so that I could see how it ended, and was thrilled to see the second half continue with the same bizarre vibe. They didn't really understand the attraction, but indulged it.

It didn't last long - youthful obsessions like that rarely do - and I was over Rocky Horror by the time I was a teenager. It was still something I would watch now and then, but the spaces between those viewings stretched out further and further, until I didn't watch it for 10 years.

A brief aside on the experience of watching Rocky Horror - I never, ever got into the whole audience participation thing, something Rocky is truly infamous for, and actually found myself actively turned off the movie by those fan events.

It's hard to really explain why, especially when so many outsiders and loners found those special movie screenings a revelation, all over the world. There are plenty of people who couldn't even think of watching the movie on their own, because the communal experience was what it was all about.

Not for me - right at the height of my Rocky Horror love I got a hold of a soundtrack album that actually included the whole audience participation, and it was so fucking annoying and restrictive and elitist that it turned me right off the idea. It was something about the strict rules over what dumb lines to insert in any gap in the movie, and the loss of the movie's silent charms, that was so off-putting.

I went to one live show once, and it only took five minutes for one person to get loudly upset because the others "weren't doing it right".

Still, while I'm just a grumpy old shit on this issue of watching it with a crowd, I can point to one way that the Rocky Horror Picture Show made me a better person, and I'm so glad it did.

Because when I was going through that phase of watching it every day at school, I was literally living on a farm outside a small rural community in New Zealand in the mid-1980s, and that whole scene was conservative as shit. And growing up in that place, I was a bit of a conservative little prick, worried about things like homosexuals and transexuals and anything that could be classed as 'abnormal'. I never experienced anything to do with it, it wasn't really on TV or anywhere, and I knew a few camp adults, but they just seemed really happy all the time.

So Rocky Horror was actually one of my very first exposures to all these issues, with some very mature moments in between the rock and roll. And seeing a man in sexy ladies underwear seduce both Brad and Janet was an absolute revelation, because I suddenly discovered I had absolutely no problem with any of this. Confronted with some very adult issues at a reasonably young age, I couldn't see why people were so scared of this sort of thing. Because if Rocky taught me anything, it's that you should just be happy with who you are, no matter what the rest of the world says.

Confronted with these things, I really didn't think it was any big deal. If feeling good about yourself means putting on some tight pantyhose and slipping the odd nipple out, go for it. Who cares what anybody else thinks?  I'm still painfully heterosexual, but if people want to change clothes, or genders, or anything like that, then I don't want to get in their way, and I encourage them to do whatever makes them feel good, because we could all use a bit more of that in life. I may have been a small minded little son of a bitch, but Rocky Horror opened that mind right up.

I'm many years older now, and a lot of things have changed. But some things haven't.

I still love the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I love the way Richard O'Brien's kiwi accent only pokes through once (when he yells that they never liked him, right at the end), I love the American Gothic thing at the start, and I love that it's still as funny as hell - the 'Brad! Janet! Doctor Scott! etc...' bit is a strange comedic highlight.

And I'm still trying to keep that open mind going. I've seen plenty of other sexual shenanigans since Rocky Horror, but as long as it's this much fun for everybody, I'm up for anything.

(This was originally posted on the Tearoom of Despair in 2015, and I'm dusting it off in honour of Tim Curry, who really was one of the greats. I just read his memoir a couple of months ago, and he was just a super dude. RIP, Tim.)

Whatever Happened To...? A reprint request

The big comic companies have been reprinting all sorts of crazy things lately, but one comic I wish they would still republish is the 'Whatever Happened To...' back-ups in early 80s DC Comics Presents, where they would dig up some obscure character, and give them a proper send off, or maybe even a new lease of life. 

The main motive for these stories was quite clearly so the company could hold to the copyrights to characters they had no idea what to do with, but the tales themselves were often quite charming and nerdy, and could feel oddly important in the histories of Robotman or Hourman, or some other Golden Age hero. 

It might happen one day - DC is putting out a comic that is nothing but Joe Kubert covers soon, which is also 100 percent my jam -  so I can still dream about a book of codas.

The Matrix is glitching hard

One of the side effects of moving house and actually sorting out the collection for the first time in years is that I keep finding I have multiple copies of the same comics and toys, even though I have no idea where the hell the multiples came from.

They are the most random things - a complete double up of six issues of the Kev series by Ennis and Ezquerra, several Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition comics. While cleaning out the kids room I found the same puzzle in two different toy boxes, when I always thought there was only one.

I can only assume that or reality really is something like the Matrix and it is getting so glitchy and buggy that there are repeated errors. Like it's not even trying anymore to keep track of how many comics there are in the world, or even in the cardboard boxes I have in the shed. 

The radio doesn't help - after talking to a friend about the wonderful Kiwi band the Straitjacket Fits during a recent catch-up, I heard two of their songs on two different rock stations on the drive back home, and I never randomly hear their music out in the world.

And then when we moved out of old place, I met the guy who was going to move in with his family, and I recognised them as the DJ who plays at the kids' school disco. I don't know 99.9 percent of my neighbour's names, but I knew that guy.

Are there only so many people in the world, the universe has to keep using the same characters? Does reality need more quantum computing power? 

I don't think I'm going to try and jump off a tall building to fly like Neo to test the theory, but I am getting rid of those extra Kev comics. They freak me out.

The joy of admitting you are wrong

One dull weekend in the late 1990s, I got into a slightly heated argument with some dude I hardly know over an actor who appeared in The Fast Show, the wonderful British sketch comedy programme. I was certain that an actor in that was also in a recent movie, and that other somebody was certain it was someone different.

Until that point in time, it would have been hard to convince me I was wrong - and I was very, very drunk at the time, so I was totally steadfast - but we also had the internet by then, and we looked it up, and I was 100 percent wrong about it.

What I could not convince anybody else was that I was fine with being proven wrong, because I have often been wrong about things, and there is no real growth or development in a person's life if they can't admit that.

It was hard to convince them that I was okay with being wrong, because it's human nature to be upset about it, to feel a little foolish or chastened. 

Which, of course, is an attitude that is responsible for a lot of shit in the world these days. World leaders who can't admit they might have fucked up, and double down on their catastrophes, because the very idea that they could learn from their mistakes - and maybe even avoid them in the future - is completely unthinkable.

I'm wrong about all sorts of things, and I change my opinion all the time. I look back at things I wrote on this blog a couple of years ago and think that I sound like a total dipshit, as my tastes and opinions change, and I reassess things and come to a different conclusion.

I don't regret all the Radiohead hate I hurled at my mates after they fell for the first album - Thom was a whiny git and Creep just tried too hard, I insisted - but turned all the way around when OK Computer came along with the sound of the future. I was happy to admit I was wrong, and change with the times, and I could live with the constant reminders I got about my earlier hatred.

Usually it's the other way around, and I dislike stuff that I once thought was the bee's knees, and there are just too many examples of that to go around, because the movies and comics I once loved can now look clumsy and dumb.

I change my mind all the time and I'm not going to deny what I once felt. Human beings are complex creatures and contain multitudes, and can have different opinions from day to day, let alone over years.

And world leaders, or the odd in-law who doesn't like to be called out on their racist attitudes of old, who just can't admit that they were wrong, are really missing out on something. I am glad to be proven wrong about something, because I learn from it. I never got anything wrong about The Fast Show ever again, at least.

Bone: Well, bless my buttons!

- Bone #3

By Jeff Smith