Here comes the past #30: Who is the Man From LOVE?

This is the Man From LOVE:

#1. It all starts at the movies
#2. No shot
#3. All you need is dance
#4. A night off from saving the world
#5. Dinner with the Goodsons
#6. Cleaning up afterwards
#7. How to sign up
#8 A virtual certainty
#9. All will be well
#10. Wrong
#11. Don't look now
#12. Dealing with it
#13. Metaphysical manipulation for fun and profit
#14. Run fool, run
#15. This is not normal
#16. The man in the moon
#17. A nice glass of red
#18. The Trevor situation
#19. Left behind
#20. There is no Trevor
#21. This is not you
#22 Cross country
#23. Good morning
#24. Lost with the fairies
#25. Alone
#26. Fighting and fucking
#27. The House of Good
#28. How the world works
#29. Everything is everything
#30. Cool

The Man From LOVE was written for the NaNoWriMo thing a few years ago, which should be obvious due to its brevity and half-assed plotting. It was also born out of a general frustration that every attempt to do a 'secret agent for the 21st century' story was still mired in 20th century genre and cliche, and I wanted to do something that genuinely tried to update the conventions.

Like almost everything piece of fiction I ever write, I just wanted to do it for fun and did absolutely nothing with it when it was done. This was mainly because I couldn't even imagine anybody ever giving a shit about it, but also because it painfully exposes my crippling anxiety about mortality, which is a bit embarrassing.

But this has been a rough year, and I needed to take a break from writing about the latest dumb comics and movies for a while, so dug up this story from the depths of a half-dead hard drive and put it up. It's out there now, for all the world to see, and we can all move on. Normal service will resume later this week.

I should really get around to finishing The Woman From LOVE, a sequel which is more of the same, with added time travel and vampires and maybe even an explanation of what LOVE and HATE stand for. That'll probably appear here in another three or four years. You can't rush the meaning of life. 

- Originally published 1 September 2018 

That was the Man from LOVE. I became a dad almost immediately after posting this and have written very little fiction ever since, but did start writing the very last LOVE story a few months ago, because why would you ever stop?.

Here comes the past #29: For the love of Batman

“Batman’s rich history allows him to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. To be sure this is a lighter incarnation but it’s certainly no less valid and true to the character’s roots than the tortured avenger crying out for mommy and daddy.”

- Bat-Mite

The Brave and the Bold cartoon

Admit it, if you like superheroes, you fucking loved the Batman TV show as a kid. And then you hated it as a teenager. And then, if you grew up enough, you started to like it again.

 

The good bastards at the comic shop near my work put out a whole bunch of comic magazines on sale for $1 each. Issues of magazines I’d never seen before, many from the TwoMorrows publishing outfit – stuff like Alter Ego, Comic Book Artist and Back-Issue.

I had only seen a small handful of these magazines before, and was surprised how much I enjoyed their unashamed wallowing in nostalgia. The sheer amount of reproduced raw art is responsible for most of that enjoyment and a general tone of unabashed enthusiasm is highly contagious. After reading a long, rambling and highly enjoyable conversation between Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell, any reader will be convinced of the genuine worth of that mid-period Legion of Super-Heroes and that funk-tastic design sense.

But the writers often leave their inner fanboy showing a bit, most notably through their enthusiastic gushing over subjects few others care about. There is also the unfortunate tendency to dismiss the Adam West Batman as an unfortunate diversion from the true Batman which has tarnished the public’s perception of the character and pushed back any serious interpretations of the concept.

The inherent fanboy can be heard in the sneering. It’s obviously an embarrassment to all true Batman fans, a campy glitch in the history of the Dark Knight, the annoying uncle you have to acknowledge.

But it’s not. It’s brilliant. Turns out this annoying uncle actually has a good sense of humour and all sorts of stories to tell. The Batman TV show from the ‘60s is bright and colourful and cheerful and surprisingly ironic. It’s a bit stupid, but smart in ways that really matter. All those old showbiz hamming, chewing down on the gaudy scenery. Those catchphrases, those actors and that music, imprinted on generations. It’s brilliant.

When I was a little kid, the first television programmes I ever remember watching were Doctor Who and Batman.

That was my tastes rooted for life.

But I was genuinely excited about the Batman show when my brain was forming, and it was 20 years old then. There is something about that absolute deadpan that made it timeless.

Kids love it because it is loud and fun. It’s got a theme tune that is insanely catchy and these bright characters running around and having adventures. Its most obvious humour level is pitched somewhere around the eight year old’s level, so it always gets them laughing with the dumb joke.

I’ve seen kids in the 21st century fall over themselves in excitement when the Batman TV show was on television. They were eating that stuff up and asking for seconds. Their parents didn’t understand.

And then you get older and a girl catches you reading something meaty like The Killing Joke and laughs at you because she thinks it’s full of Fatman and Slobin and you’re like fuck that shit

I once had a lovely conversation with a girl who sometimes has to go out and do weather reports for breakfast television. They make her do the stupidest things, any old excuse to drag the waking eyes over to a TV screen.

She said she knows it’s all horribly embarrassing and tacky and cheesy, but if you show an inch of that knowledge, it just doesn’t work. The only way to avoid being embarrassed is to be as embarrassing as possible. Otherwise you just look stilted and awkward, and that’s much, much worse.

That’s how the television Batman works. There was just enough winking to show they were all in the joke, but not enough to be mean about it.

I watched it again in my early twenties and it was just stupid, so I filed it away as something best forgotten. Comics are serious business for serious young men. There will be no camp here.

And then I watched an episode with those kids I was talking about earlier, and it was bloody fantastic. The whole programme was dripping with deadpan irony and still played well – four decades after it was made.

It looked crisp and clear in a way that 70s television shows never do. It remains timeless and I can handle a Batman that digs the day.

That’s not everybody’s Batman. Many remain convinced that the tortured avenger of the night is the only valid interpretation of a cultural icon that is deserving of the respect its history deserves. Other people just like a Batman who grimaces and throws bad guys into meat grinders.

Others like a Batman who can be a bit competitive, while always fair. Who isn’t afraid to show others how it’s done and can do it with a laugh.

There have been a lot of thoughtful and genuinely mature stories about Batman that have been absolutely fantastic. There have also been a lot of goofy and funny stories that have been so enjoyable.

They’re all valid interpretations.

Nananananananana! Nananananananana! Batman! Batman! BATMAN! Nananananananana!

I still know loads of people who love reading comics, but wouldn’t be caught dead with them in public. While there are more people reading Sandman on the train than ever before, it’s still perceived as a child’s medium in western eyes. If you like it, you must be immature.

Well, so what? What’s wrong with liking a kid’s product if it’s smart and funny enough? It doesn’t do any harm. If people laugh at you because you get a bit over-excited about Batman and Robin, that’s their problem. It shouldn’t taint my enjoyment of it.

It took me fuckin’ years to figure this out.

- Originally published March 10, 2010

I got a boxset of all the Batman episodes for dirt cheap recently, and have been watching them with the kids. They love the punching, I love the female villains. Everyone is having a good time.

Here comes the past #28: Tying the world together (and getting your end away) with Philip Jose Farmer

Philip Jose Farmer was tapping into something powerful when he had Doc Savage and Tarzan literally cross cocks that one time, and we're not just talking about the obvious throbbing members.

Farmer's A Feast Unknown brought together the two pulp heroes under legal-friendly aliases and is still a ridiculously entertaining action romp, 45 years after it was published in 1970. It's just a tiny slice in Farmer's massive bibliography, but it's one of the most crucial, and most fun.

The fun is self-evident, with the adventure icons racing through a fevered fight against the usual mysterious and vast global conspiracy, while all their clothes fall off. But the importance is seriously under-stated, because Farmer was playing around with some big, culture-defining ideas decades ago, and the mainstream pop world is only just catching up.

Farmer was always the totally harmless, slightly inappropriate and enormously entertaining drunk uncle of late 20th century science fiction literature. He had big ideas about life and existence and consciousness and this wonderful, strange universe of ours, but he was never afraid to get a bit dirty and grubby, and his best works were always a wonderful amalgamation of the gutter and the divine. 

He found a huge audience with his Riverworld books, one of the greatest high concepts in all of science fiction, as everybody who ever lived wakes up on the banks of a world-spanning river, with no explanations or clear purpose. He also got into some seriously psychological shit with his World of Tiers series, even writing a book about the series' real-life use in psychotherapy, and he wrote a genuine Kilgore Trout novel, which pissed off Kurt Vonnegut Jr enormously.

And he wrote dozens and dozens and dozens of other novels and essays and short stories, often targeting subjects that were traditionally taboo in sci-fi worlds, like sex and religion, and all the messy stuff in-between. His stories certainly weren't for everybody, and every now and then he could get genuinely offensive, but they were often more thoughtful than they looked, and just as exciting as they promised.

I came to Farmer by accident – his works weren't found in my local libraries, not even in the adult section, and I would have missed him entirely if I hadn't heard about him from an article in some random issue of Starlog. But that was enough. This is somewhere in my mid-teens, somewhere in the early nineties, and his fiction sounded incredibly enticing, and like nothing else I was reading at the time.

I soon found some slightly soiled copies of his work at the local second hand bookstore, and I was off. His work had a vitality that was often missing in other pulp pastiches, and he always remembered that while man was reaching for the stars, he was mired in physical desires. Sex and death often intertwined, which was incredibly appealing as a teenager, and gave his stories their own swagger.

And, best of all, he made connections between fictions that was remarkably addictive, building up this vast chronology of the fantastic, dating back thousands of years to the time of Opar, and pushing these stale old heroes into strange new territories.

His books could still prove maddeningly hard to find – I still haven't read the Mad Goblin/Lord of The Trees stories, because I've never seen them bloody anywhere – but I still couldn't get enough of this kind of obsessive cataloguing. And as Farmer ended up tying more and more characters into the same world – the world of the Wold Newton family – I was there for the ride.

There were other writers who did similar things before Farmer, and there had been intricate fictional universes in the world of comic books, but not on the scale that Farmer worked on. In his fantastic fictional biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage, he laid out a vast tapestry of ultra-heroism, all dating them back together to a single event – the falling of a meteor in England in 1778.

This real-life event was, in Farmer's hands, the catalyst for all the great heroes of 20th century action yarns, spawning legacies of grey-eyed and steel-jawed heroes. They were often related, and Farmer sometimes even made the argument that different heroes were the same person, cracking under the weight of multiple identities and convoluted histories.

In a long career full of brilliant ideas, this was Farmer's greatest. Bringing the heroes together, and saying they all existed in the same fictional world, was a fantastically strong idea that still resonates, today, and still produces fictions that make billions and billions of dollars.

Farmer's ideas of a shared world reached some strange moment of perfection in the slightly sleazy prose of A Feast Unknown, promising a universe where everything counted, and where everything was connected. It's a small world in the pulp universe, where these indomitable heroes could barely go to the store without stumbling across some other adventurer on a desperate mission of their own, teaming up for the greater good.

It's an idea that has been almost totally drained of anything exciting and new now, and recent attempts to build shared universes in movies and comics and novels has led to some regrettable efforts, but they can still prove both artistically and commercially viable, and both the successes and failures all owe their debt to Farmer.

Philip Jose Farmer merged with the infinite in 2009, but the ideas he left behind are getting bigger and bigger, as shared universes become the ultimate breeding grounds for lucrative franchises.

Farmer really tied it all together, and it's an idea that had been refined with a number of rollicking League of extraordinary Gentlemen stories by Moore and O'Neill, or Kim Newman's bloody fangtastic Anno Dracula series, and anything becomes possible, and anyone can meet anyone.

Farmer sometimes wrote himself into his own stories, using the most obvious pseudonyms, which means that while he is no longer with us, he lives on in his own fiction. Maybe one day we will wake up on a Riverworld, and he'll be there. I doubt he'll be smug if he was proven to be right about everything, but I'm sure he'd be proud.

- Originally published 31 May 2015

Fun fact! A Feast Unknown was the first novel I ever read where I made a conscious decision not to skip to the end to see how it all turns out before going back and reading the rest of the book. It was a terrible habit and I'm glad I broke it. I also finally found the Lord of the Trees/The Mad Goblin books a couple of years ago and they were fucking excellent.

Here comes the past #27: Me, my mates and comics

Some of my best friends in the world hate comic books, and wouldn't read one unless you paid them. Others are into them just as much as I am. It's a good mix.

I never force comics onto my mates, but I'm there if they ever express an interest, and some of them give it a go, and I always remember what they like, so I can recommend something in the future.

Trumpy really, really dug Dicks, Chris gave Love and Rockets a go, (but ultimately couldn't get past the big tits), Samantha thought Peter David's Hulk comics were the best superhero comics ever, Anthony bought all the Vertigo comics that were too weird for me, Suzy gave me her beloved copy of School Fun #2, Glenn turned me on to Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and I turned Simon on to Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Kaz said the Big Books were the bee's knees, and Brian thought Big Dave was the funniest fucking thing he'd ever read.

I bonded with one of my oldest and best friends in 1985 over a mutual appreciation for the Judge Child Quest. I introduced him to the X-Men soon afterwards, and he still gets Uncanny X-Men every month, which is bloody useful when I've got an X-itch to scratch. We grew up together in a small town of 3000 people, so there weren't too many other people who shared our mutual obsessions, so we had no choice but to be best mates.

His tastes are a bit more refined, and mine are all over the show, but it's still an ongoing debate over which of us is obsessed by Doctor Who more, and after being friends for more than a quarter of a century, our Who collections have actually melted together. I tend to get the books and audios, and he gets the toys and magazines.

Kyle has also been into 2000ad as long as I have, and I finally talked him into getting the weekly series again a few weeks ago, and he’s into it as much as ever. The other day he sent me a text, moaning that the local shop had not got the latest issue in, and he was particularly bummed, because it had some new Slaine in it for the first time in ages, and young Kyle loves some new Slaine. So I told him that I would get a copy from my local store and drop it off when I go down south again next week, and that it would finally allow me to pay an old debt.

Twenty-five years ago, I couldn’t get the latest issue of 2000ad because I’d done something wrong and was grounded for a week. (I can’t remember the crime, just the punishment, although it may have involved some form of rocket fuel.) And I was particularly bummed, because the latest issue had some new Slaine by Glenn Fabry in it for the first time in ages, and young Bob loved some Fabry Slaine. Kyle bought a copy for me, and dropped it around after school, and I never forgot how grateful I was.

That's fucking teamwork.

In the past couple of years I’ve made friends with two people named Kelly.

I met Boy Kelly after I said nice things about a comic he wrote, and we now meet up for breakfast every few weeks, usually to rave about some Game Of Thrones shit. He’s as passionate about comics as I am, and even more passionate about the work of Alan Moore, and I’ve never met anybody in real life who was into Moore comics more than I was. (This will become abundantly clear soon, when this blog gets taken over with a discussion between me and Kelly about Moore’s movies with Mitch Jenkins.)

I met Girl Kelly through work, and now we meet up for smoothies every few weeks to bitch about the industry. She could not more more disinterested in comics, and she keeps calling them cartoon books because I do a really shitty job of hiding how much it annoys me. She didn’t even know what a Dalek is, and still can't pronounce it properly, but then again, she is South African.

I like talking to Boy Kelly because he reminds me that my tastes are adequate, and that it is worth getting passionate about your fiction, and what it all means. I like talking to Girl Kelly, because she reminds me that all that crap is not really that important, not in real life.

In the past couple of years, I've also made friends with two people named Nik/Nick, because I figure the less new names I have to remember, the better. They're both totally into comics.

I've made loads of friends on the internet who share my obsessions to a scary degree, but I've only actually met a couple of them in real life, so that doesn't really count.

Ten years ago, and I’m at a film festival screening of the American Splendor movie, and a complete stranger comes up to me in the line and says he has an extra ticket for the film, and he gives it to me for free.

Due to an extraordinarily boring set of circumstances, I happen to have two copies of the same American Splendor comic issue on me at the time, (and it’s the one with Letterman swearing on the cover).  So I give one to the guy, and he’s just as stoked by this unexpected bout of bartering. His name is Mark, and we still trade emails every now and again, usually when a new Love and Rockets comes out.

Sometimes comics just bring people together.

Geoff once told me he'd totally burn my comics for simple heating, and Shane once picked up an issue of Flex Mentallo, flicked through it, said “yeah, nah”, put it down again, and as far as I can tell, that's the only time he ever read any comics. Even my lovely wife is profoundly disinterested in some of the greatest comics ever created.

Fortunately, friends aren't clones, and you'll never learn anything in life if you surround yourself with people who like all the same shit you like. There are always common interests or points of views between close friends, but they are not always the same things between different people.

I can always be friends with a comic fiend, but real mates don't have to care about this shit as much as I do.

- Originally published October 10, 2013

I don't make too many friends at the comics store these days, but that's because comics stores are full of young people, and they don't want to hang out with people who are twice their age, but I can usually find an old crusty to reminisce about Stray Bullets with.

Here comes the past #26: Under the big sky (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Western)

There were only two TV channels available when I was a little kid, so the choices of entertainment on endless rainy Sunday afternoons was severely limited. One of the channels would usually be playing some kind of incredibly boring sport like snooker or golf or motor racing, and the other would probably be showing an old western.

And I hated the old westerns. Some of them would start with that Warner Bros sting, and every time I saw one, I would pray that they were going to play a Daffy Duck cartoon or something, but then it would all be black and white dust and scraggly bushes and boring boulders, and it would be just another damn western.

I was a Star Wars kid – the original films came out when I was between two and eight years old, which means I never stood a chance of being anything other than a Star Wars kid. And it led to a true fascination with the weird and wonderful worlds of science fiction, and things like 'real life' and 'realism' could piss right off.

After all, how could even the best Western ever compare to anything that had lasers and monsters and spaceships? All the cowboy movies ever had were endless dull pistol gunfights and women in huge dresses swooning over the passion of it all, and even as a kid, the ideological treatment of the native American population in most films was dodgy as hell.

That affinity for science fiction and fantasy naturally led into a teenaged horror obsession, and meant I would watch the worst nth-generation copy of an Umberto Lenzi film over anything with cowboys in it. And then I got bored with all that rubbish, grew up a bit, and suddenly, all I wanted to do was walk tall.

I finally got into the Western genre in my very late teens, and I walked in through a door marked 'CLINT'.

When you leave school and head out into the world, you don't know who you are yet, and all you can do is model yourself on the people you admire, even if they're fictional. I was happy to have some of Patrick McGoohan's enigmatic bluster from The Prisoner in my mix, and still prided myself on living up to Superman's moral code.

But Clint Eastwood was the coolest of them all, a man of very few words with the most intense squint in the world, and while I was (and still am) a total pacifist who abhors violence and can't stand the macho bullshit behind the use of guns in the real world, the same character that Clint played in almost all his movies still seemed like a brilliant role model.

His many, many films varied in quality from outright rubbish to sheer brilliance, but the best, without any question, was Unforgiven, and that film single-handedly finally opened my mind to stories being told on the the wide prairie winds.

Unforgiven has a shaggy and loose first two-thirds, but the just makes the apocalyptic good climax all the more stunning. The last third of the film is pure melancholic poetry, as William Mummy reveals that the weight of all his death-dealing is still on his shoulders, and that it's something he'll never get over.

He knows that violence is not the answer, but he still goes into Greely's shithole and kills everybody who fucks with him, whether they really deserve it or not, and then stands out in the rain under an American flag, and tells the survivors to make it right, or he'll kill every damn one of them, and that doesn't just rip apart the heart out of the Western, it's a concise and poetic way of exposing the heart of American itself, one of honour and friendship, crawling its way out of a bloody and muddy past.

Westerns didn't have aliens or hyperspace or teleporters, but they could come loaded with meaning and gravitas that space sagas can never really match, and after having my mind blown by Unforgiven, I started watching every Western I could find.

The Outlaw Josey Wales is the other great Eastwood film, not just because the lead character is a one-man army who can not be stopped, but because because there is iron in his words of life and death, and his willingness to leave the blood behind.

And the Eastwood hero-worship inevitably led to the Spaghetti Westerns, which could be lacking in the emotional depth of Eastwood's later work, although Once Upon A Time In The West is still a jewel of a movie, exposing new depths every time it's viewed.

But while they had their moments of  sad pathos, the Spaghettis were mainly just hugely entertaining with fantastic histrionic performances and set pieces of unbearable tension and excitement – the final gunfight in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is still one of the  tensest, operatic action scenes ever.

And once I'd got over my innate prejudice of the Western, there was no stopping me, and there was so much more brilliance to be found, and I'd follow any recommendation from anywhere, from movie magazines to the Preacher letter column.

I had always thought of John Wayne as a bit of a shallow caricature of a character, but after watching films like The Searchers, Rio Bravo and Stagecoach, I grew to appreciate his subtleties – the moment in The Searchers when he finally catches up with his lost niece after years and years of hateful tracking, and embraces her, still might be the most moving moment in all of cinema.

And there were always new lessons to learn - films like The Wild Bunch taught me the value of having a code, and of sticking by your word, even if it means your death, and more films articulated that unjust treatment of Native Americans that I had always felt uneasy about.

Westerns are the poetry of the common man in an uncommon land. It's a hard land, and taming that landscape inevitably sees characters taming their own souls, and becoming more civilised and more human.

They could get giant performances from Gary Cooper, Lee Van Clef, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and even Dean Martin. They splashed the wide open legends of America across the big screen, and confronted the country's own myths.

They helped teach me that genres don't really matter, and that great stories can be found on dusty roads, just as easily as they can be found on alien landscapes. And they featured some extraordinary stuntwork, of a kind rarely seen anymore.

And they were stories of people – broken men and resolute women, thieves and bounty hunters and herders – finding their place in this new world. What kind of young man could ever resist that?

The golden age of the Western movie ended a long time ago – cinema-goers became more interested in spectacle than introspection, and while the genre will never really die, there is just the odd tale of the Wild West .

By the time I got into them, there were few showing up in theatres at all. Occasionally you'd get something like the Quick And The Dead, an unashamed cartoon, or worthy efforts like Appaloosa, Seraphim Fall, or the magnificently melancholic Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Bob Ford, or modern version of ancient themes like No Country For Old Men.

The best Western tale of the 21st century wasn't even at the cinema - Deadwood was the best of the great HBO series of the past 15 years, and re-examines a lot of the themes that made the Western great, while bringing something new to the table.

And even though Deadwood is ten years old now, and there are relatively few tales of the Wild West forthcoming, there are still some, and I'm on board with them all. I'll never get into space or fire a laser, but I'm ready to saddle up and ride into the sunset any day.

- Originally published 4 October 2014

Some of my dreams still come with a Morricone score.

Here comes the past #25: Fred Dagg's Meaning Of Life

It's been a busy week for the Tearoom's proprietor, so instead of a regular post, he's going for a transcript from a presentation by Professor Fred Dagg, a fictional creation of Mr John Clarke, speaking at the University of Taihape about the meaning of life, somewhere in the nineteen seventies.

You can find a video of this performance here, (and there are a couple of other cracker tunes by Dagg here and here), but I needed a transcript for ridiculous reasons, and this felt like a good place for it.

After all, every time I wonder what it is all about, I think of the Dagg.

Fred Dagg on The Meaning Of Life

“It seems eminently suitable that we should ignore very briefly the peripheral areas – however valuable - in the wonderful tapestry of science, and I think we should have a crack at addressing ourselves instead to the perpetual cosmic giant killer - the question of what is life.

“It's been worrying scientists for thousands of years. Mind you, they're a jumpy bunch of garcons, your science boys, and they do tend to worry very easily. And I feel that the very least we can do is to spend a few moments of our very valuable time in quiet and restful contemplation, as to what it's all about and why we're here.

“And then after that we can have some lunch.”

“Now, as to the business of when life actually got going, there is very, very little argument amongst the lads who are working in that area – of course, some of them are getting on a bit now and the smallest upset would have them toppling into the afterlife, so they do like to sit around and agree with one other and knock off the departmental port.

“The actual day of the beginning of life is not known, because of course the National Geographic was in a very adumbral phase at that stage. It is known, though and generally agreed by the boys, that if the first man who ever lived was alive today, he'd be pulling around about $47 million a week in old age pensions.

“There have been several old boys located in various spots - for instance, there was bogman who was located in a bog. We don't actually know what he was doing in the bog, but he was located there.

“Now science slowly, with the help of these discoveries, has been piecing together the story of man's evolution, and there seems very little doubt that man is descended from Neanderthal Primates, as we scientists call them, or in lay terms, mummy and daddy.

“Of all the many turning points and crucial stages -  from primitive ape-like creature through to the sophisticated and marginally less primitive ape-like creature that you see about you at zoos and football matches - the most curious development of all is that of the human brain.”

“The human brain has got man into a lot more trouble than has previously been supposed and unless we come up with some way of putting the brain out of commission or obviating some of the more ludicrous effects of the brain, then I don't think life's going to get any better.

“Now the main shortcoming of the human brain is that it has led to all this discussion about the meaning of life. Which is not really very healthy. It's quite a dangerous business, because the more you think about life, the less likely you are to reach a conclusion. That is, if you don't count including that you aren't going to reach a conclusion as an actual conclusion.

“Now, of all the attempts to work out what life is actually about, one of the more interesting ones were the boys that reckon that you don't know anything. You can't know stuff, these guys reckoned, because when you think about it – and you'll just have to accept the term think about it there until the man arrives with the official phrasebook - all your so-called knowledge about the world is based on your perceptions, and your perceptions are just a touch more fallible than people have cared to admit.

“It has been suggested by some that you can't know things because your perceptions are notoriously fallible, for instance, the visual sense has been known to play tricks. Sometimes when you think you see something you don't actually see it, and sometimes you don't see something or you say you don't see it, and it's common knowledge around the village that you saw it. And of course that can lead to trouble.

“Now you can't go drawing on any conclusions – that's what these garcons reckon - from that sort of thing or you'll make a monkey out of yourself in open court. Now, this is what Bishop Berkeley  reckoned and this argument applies to all the senses.

“Now Samuel Johnson, who was, well, kind of a... well, he was fat. Let's face it. He was a fat person. He reckoned that he'd cleaned up the problem one day when he kicked a stone, and he stated with relative certainty that he was rewarded with a godly sharp pain belting through his bunion. Now, of course, you could say that Samuel only thought he kicked the stone, when he in fact he was home in bed eating crumpets and thinking up some one-liners for a 21st speech we was writing for Saturday.”

“The whole business of doubt was perfected and refined a little later on by a character named Rene Descartes, who was a member of the French nation, and after he'd finished with it, there wasn't a whole lot of mileage left in it. And the up and coming apprentice thinkers decided to give the whole area a swerve and get onto something with a bit more class where they could show off a bit better.

“What Rene did was he started doubting things. Now once you start doubting your perceptions, you get on to realising you can't be sure if you're here, or maybe you only think you're here. Which is a bit of a worry and it's only a matter of moments before you're picking spots of light off the wall and putting them in a basket, and pretty soon you'll find yourself in a tight white overcoat in a room full of Napoleans and Lord Nelsons. Which is the principal fallacy of Rene's idea.

“Of course, in the 20th century, we have produced a fair array of theories about what life's actually about and probably the existentialists take the butt of confection for getting closest to thinking they had it all worked out. They used to hang about in the Paris area, which is in what we used to call Gaul, and talk about how terrible life was and how they didn't know if they'd really get to the weekend. They reckoned life was a pretty dreadful business and was filled with a thing called ennui.

“Now, ennui is a terrible thing, and seems to have roughly the same effect as terminal boredom. Ennui actually is a French word meaning Henry. And the story goes that once you get a touch of the Henry’s, it's all downhill and the only way to relive the symptoms is to whip down the harbour and pull a wave over your bonce and call it a day."

“From these examples you can see the dangers of thinking too much about what life is about and whether or not it's worth living. Now I have studied most of the better known theories and if I understand them at all, which is a pretty dubious proposition, and if I'm here at all, which again, there is some doubt, not to mention cold water being thrown on that at the present point in time.

“I must say that they're not very helpful, all these theories, not really very helpful at all. Now a mate of mine – bloke named Bruce Baylis who's lived up the road from us ever since he moved in – he reckons that he exists. He's quite positive that he exists, and if he doesn't exist, he reckons why does he have to pay tax?

“He reckons that even though he does get the Henry's a bit, now and again at the end of the financial year, he's convinced that he's here. And if some people reckon they're not here, well, that's fine with Bruce and they can buy their own beer.

“He seems to have – in his terms at least – dispensed completely with the traditional worries about his own existence, although there are those who claim that Bruce is a wee bit closer to the simian primates than most people reckon.

“Now Bruce is called a naïve realist and I don't know that he's not right, myself. I've seen a few existentialists in my time - I've been to funerals - and they don't seem anywhere near as happy about things as Bruce does. And if we're all imagining we're here until we're all imagining we've bitten the dust, then I think it's a lot easier on the wife and kids if we imagine ourselves to be a bit happy about it.

“I'm not suggesting we all become like Bruce. Wouldn't do to revert completely to being chimps, but somewhere in between Bruce and the rest of the scientific world, there lurks a workable hypothesis which I reckon we should all get our teeth into.”

- Originally published 31 May 2013

I still get the Henry's as much as anybody, but this piece of writing also helps clear them away. While we lost John Clarke a few years ago, he is still fondly remembered, and a documentary about his life and work just came out this year, and shows there is plenty of just cause for that fondness.

Here comes the past #24: All the young punks

“They’ll bury me a punk,” says Domino, bitching about the Pistols on CD, just before his brain gets fried and his head gets twisted off in one of the last episodes of Zenith.

Sometimes, I know exactly how he feels.

 

There is one moment in time when I became a punk for life. Somewhere in 1995 and I’m watching the No Fun episode of the BBC documentary Dancing In The Streets – all about the punk and reggae scenes of the seventies – while reading John Savage’s England’s Dreaming and Griel Marcus’ Lipstick Traces.

There is a flow found in the BBC series and Savage's book, from rockabilly to Roadrunner to Max’s Kansas City to those dingy little rehearsal rooms in Soho, picking up with the heavy reggae influences of the time to create something new and exciting.

And that flow goes back even further in Lipstick Traces, back into a history of absurdity and individual freedom. Marcus draws a long and tenuous connection between the Dada artists of the early 20th century making it rain inside cabs and Johnny Rotten’s sneer, but I can see the deal: ideas and visions sparking across decades. Grinding guitars and screen printing genius: it’s all the same.

They’ll bury me a punk after this.

 

What does punk mean, anyway?

It’s loud, obnoxious and pisses off all the right people. It can also be ideologically sound, smart, funny and emotionally devastating. Just like music should be. It diversifies into a thousand different genres and movements, but it always comes back to the music.

It’s not a particular sound. Buzzsaw guitars and a sneering lyric do not make a punk song. It’s a short, sharp shock to the system, something that wakes you up and pisses off quickly.

It’s youthful stupidity and breaking stuff apart to see how it works. It might not go back together the same way and might be a little jarring at first, but at least it’s something new.

It’s an energy, a raw enthusiasm.

It’s life in less than three minutes.

It’s anybody can do it.

And that music. That wonderful, wonderful music that came out of all this.

Like any musical movement, there is plenty of trash, but the good stuff can be better than anything. Short catchy songs with killer melodies, driving beats and noisy guitars will always find an appreciative audience.

And like any other music, it’s a style that attracted its fair share of stone-cold geniuses: musical kings and queens who crafted songs of heartbreaking fragility, hidden beneath a whirlwind of noise. They showed up in New York and LA and London and Manchester and all over the world, all making some righteous noise.

And it seeped into the world of comics in the most organic way. The wave of British comics creators that swept over mainstream comics in the 1980s - a tsunami of hair, amphetamines and cultural wealth - had many of its roots in the punk ideal. Creators like Kevin O’Neill and Bryan Talbot and Alan Moore cut their artistic teeth in the fabled UK Art Labs of the ‘70s, but hit their peaks in the wake of punk idealism, which filtered through into their comics.

And it’s still there. Punk comics in every town – the fanzine mentality that will never die. Most of these proto-efforts go nowhere, but sometimes they produce something wonderful.

Once upon a time, there were none more punk than Los Bros Hernandez and that freewheeling storytelling and joyous self-indulgence is still there in everything they do. Nobody told them you had to live in New York and draw adventures of men in tights to make it in the comic biz, they just went out there and did it.

Anybody can do it. The old punk credo of picking up a guitar, learning three chords and getting out there to form a band applies to comics more than anything else. Whip up a few pages of art and words, run off a few copies and staple that shit together. Put it out into the world, see what happens.

Sure, it can be crushing when nothing at all actually happens, but at least you’re trying.

It’s a bit harder to do all that in the movies as singular visions get swallowed up by the vast machine of movie making.

But it can still be done. Low budget films with high ideas – usually young and hungry directors who scrape to pull their projects together and sometimes manage to squeeze some art out of their work.

And some make a whole career out of it. Directors as diverse as Jim Jarmusch and Spike Jonze have kept their punk credentials intact for their films, pleasingly refusing to cater to their audiences, but always worth watching.

It’s like this: Da na a na na naaa DA DA DA naaasaaaa!

They’re still out there, god bless ‘em. Refugees of ’77, bouncing up to the front of the crowd.

At a recent Buzzcocks gig in the centre of Auckland, the average age of the crowd was about 47 and that’s including some shockingly young boys up the front. (Got to hand it to those guys, sneaking out to slam it with the Buzzcocks in a good way to spend a teenage Saturday night.)

But for some, that fire never fucking burns out. That passion, that vigour – it never dies.

They’ll happily bury me a punk.

- Originally published November 26, 2009

Anybody can do it.

Here comes the past #23: I’m in love with Richard Harrow

My wife thinks I’m in love with Richard Harrow from Boardwalk Empire, because I keep talking about how noble and sad and brilliant Richard Harrow is, and I keep sending her texts about Richard Harrow that say things like HOLY FUCK RICHARD HARROW JUST KILLED THEM ALL TO SAVE A LITTLE BOY and I WOULD TURN GAY FOR RICHARD HARROW.

So yeah, she’s totally right. I am in love with Richard Harrow.

I overdosed on Boardwalk Empire recently, watching all of the latest season in less than a week. It was a show that always felt richer if you let a few episodes build up, but I didn’t realise the season was almost over until it was almost done, so did the whole thing in one straight shot.

Watching two episodes a day might be the optimal way to see Boardwalk Empire, the tension never flags and the story motors along at speed. It’s a television show that can get unashamedly over the top with the sex and violence and intensity, but can also take a long time to get to the point.

I watched almost all of the late at night, around the Witching Hour, which wasn’t always the best idea, with one episode – the one that ends with a main character delivered in a box – giving me terrible nightmares that evening.

But I’ve always thought of bad nightmares as good signs of effective entertainment – if a story can upset up on that kind of subconscious level, it must be doing something right. Boardwalk can get downright nihilistic at times, especially when the body counts start to rise, and it’s still surprising, and enjoyable, to see something like that in a TV show.

And after two seasons of tantalising brilliance that was often buried in clumsy, obvious mush, Boardwalk Empire got a lot of things right in its third year.

Boardwalk Empire has always been beautifully shot, right from the Scorsese start, but sometimes the camera placements and lighting were just a bit too obvious. Not as painfully obvious as, say, the soundtrack to a Zach Snyder film, but almost exactly what you’d expect from an ultra-violent gangster flick.

After a couple of years of this, the homaging of older works is still there, but the show makers are just gleefully giving in to it. The opening few minutes of the last episode alone has homages to half a dozen great filmmakers, and it’s hard to hate that too much. (To paraphrase Sean T Collins, whose analysis was always the first thing I read after watching an episode, "Full Peckinpah! Full Scorsese! Full Coppola!Full Silence of the Lambs!")

Especially when the production design is so lush, and the landscapes so wide and open. It should also be noted that for a weekly genre television programme, it has some surprisingly courageous camera movements, talented and experienced HBO directors breaking down basic rules around blocking and light sources, finding the sublime shot in a world of gangsters and betrayal.

 

All of this would mean nothing without a solid narrative. Fortunately, the narrative meat of the story, which has long marinated in its own juices, finally gets a decent tasting. Boardwalk Empire is unashamedly Epic, a story of kings and king-makers, full of assassination, intimidation and deal making with the highest possible stakes. When Nucky’s plan all pay off in the final episode, I can’t tell if it’s a last minute gamble that happened to pay of, or long-gestating schemes that just happen to pay off.

That kind of dead-serious storytelling can awfully worthy and wordy, but Boardwalk can also be incredibly funny. Sometimes its deadpan seriousness is the funniest thing in the world – Michael Shannon’s barest twitch is hilarious – and sometimes it’s just sublimely silly – like when Stephen Root leans in to whisper a name in James Cromwell’s ear.

A lot of the humour and humanity in the sprawling cast of the show is due to the wonderful cast. Fantastic character actors like Root or Cromwell get a couple of scenes and show everybody how this acting thing is done, but there is also Michael Stahlberg’s Arnold Rothstein and the way he stands there with a cup of tea, a fixed smile and a murderous stare; the great Stephen Graham doing another charming psychopath with a heart; and Michael K Williams with his smirk-of-a-thousand-meanings.

Steve Buscemi still takes scenes that you always know are coming, and overcomes the cliché and delivers something unexpectedly real, while Kelly Macdonald is fantastic when she can’t help calling someone on their bullshit (even if she only gets to do it about twice a season).

The cast is full of charming people who hide their ugly sides beneath sharp haircuts and sharper suits, but it’s the broken ones who are the most fascinating, the ones who try to find a place in a world they can’t connect with. Broken ones like Richard Harrow.

Richard Harrow – as played brilliantly by Jack Huston - went away to war and got half his face blown off. He thought it also blew away part of his soul, but it’s still there, he just can’t connect with people.

It’s still there because he’s trying – so hard – to connect, and sometimes he fails, and he is made to feel foolish. And sometimes he receives a kind word at the right time, and he actually feels something far better.

The great tragedy of the character is that his inability to connect with his fellow man makes him the ultimate killer. He doesn’t necessarily wants to kill anybody, but if he has to, he’ll act without any hesitation or remorse. He’ll walk into a house full of gangsters and kill everybody in it, quickly and methodically and efficiently.

 

Huston is surely destined for better things, and even though the blank stare of his mask does a lot of the work, the way he moves around a room, or grits his jaw in silent determination, or stares out at the world through one good, lonely eye, makes him the most compelling character in a story that is full of them.

It’s been a great year for serial television drama, with shows like Mad Men, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad all providing some stunning moments, and Boardwalk Empire is as strong as any of them. It’s a lot less self-conscious than it needs to be, and approaches greatness on a weekly basis.

It’s not just because of Richard Harrow, but he certainly doesn’t hurt.

I’ve also been catching up on Breaking Bad over the past few weeks, and have nearly totally caught up on that, and I think I’m in love with Jessie Pinkman too, but that’s mainly because I think the boy could use a hug.

- Originally published 10 December 2012

Richard Harrow, like a lot of people, did not get out of that series alive, but I do think the best ending was reserved for Michael Shannon's Nelson Van Alden, which was hugely cathartic on a number of levels.

Here comes the past #22: Galactic Guardians and the death of a minor obsession

Anticipation

The first place I ever saw Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, it wasn't in a comic book. It was on a towel.

As a kid, I had this beach towel, which got some heavy use over the years, mainly down the local rivers, and it ended up falling apart at about the time I turned into a sorry-arse teenager. It had a picture of the Guardians of the Galaxy on it, and even though I didn't have any idea who they were, I thought Starhawk looked bloody cool.

A few years later and I'm deep in a Marvel mood of mind. I'd seen the Guardians show up in a few comic books, with one legendary appearance in The Avengers during the Korvac saga. The last issue of this storyline left the Guardians and most of the Avengers in a state of mental limbo, as they are casually slaughtered during the climax. They all came back to life in the same issue, but there was just something about that resurrection that left my nine-year-old brain a little confused, and I never saw the following issue that would have set it all right. Were they really back? Or were they really dead? And who were these Guardians of the Galaxy anyway?

It didn't take long to figure that one out, and they showed up, here and there, over the years, fighting against the Badoon and zipping around in time. I had a little trouble figuring out how the Vance Astro in the New Warriors was connected to the Vance Astro of the year 3000, but a bit of confusion is good for the soul.

And then I heard about the new series, launched by Marvel its early nineties blitz of titles that never made it to issue numbers with three digits. Writer/artist Jim Valentino had a pleasingly loose style, and all the right friends. It sounded like something worth reading.

Naturally, the first one I got to read was issue #8.

Interpretation

It didn't make any sense. I had to know more and figure out what it all meant.

So what’s new? This is a fairly regular occurrence for any reader of mainstream American comics. Picking up a random issue of a title you might have heard about somewhere maybe, and being so totally lost as lots of people run about yelling at each other and dropping buildings on their heads. The first dip into a new continuity can be bracingly shocking, or just mildly confusing.

Sometimes this leads to obsession, ranging from a mild dose to full-on rage. Most of the time it's just mere interest, and in the case of Valentino’s GotG, this was as far as it ever really went, but that was enough.

The eighth issue of the series was one of the placeholders that mainstream comics are so very good at doing, moving off from a Big and Important climax and heading towards the next, with the usual amount of juggling sub-plots. When I saw it in a Timaru bookstore, I knew I had to have it, even though the first seven issues had never shown up in the town. 

That Saturday afternoon is still burned in my mind, even though it really was nothing special, sitting beside Caroline Bay and flicking through it, along with some recent Avengers and X-Factor action, and the series clicked. A thousand years on, the Marvel Universe was a very different place, but Valentino laid out all sorts of mysteries about the fates of the world’s greatest heroes and villains, and I’ve just turned 16 years old and in love with superhero comics like never before, so I’m hooked.

The next few issues feed the mutant fever young teenagers can always identify with, as our Galactic heroes found a lost x-colony, with all the pain, misery and Phoenix rebirths that this would predictably bring. The Guardians made their way back to Earth and a tonne of new mysteries were piled on, just as the old ones were sorted out.

The book remained surprisingly downbeat – there was all sorts of carnage, somehow made worse by Valentino’s splendidly cartoonish approach to art, and there was no guarantee of a happy ending, especially when billions of people had been horribly killed before the series even started. There aren’t that many shits and giggles in the apocalypse, so Valentino did a good job of showing the character’s humanity, buried amongst the vulgar sci-fi. None of them were technically fully human, but they all had soul.

As a 16-year-old misery guts, the early nineties Guardian of the Galaxy really was one of my favourite comics. For a while.

Purge

I never bought the five early issues I needed to complete the collection and bailed on the comic completely soon after Valentino bailed for Image. He stayed on as writer/plotter/vague presence in the background for a little while, but the drop in quality when his art disappeared was a good reason to quit. It was an irrational hatred of Kevin West’s art that saw me finally give up for good – West also finally got me to drop Justice League International, after sticking with it through that surprisingly good Dan Jurgens run – and I never bought a single issue past #33, or even read any of them.

Guardians of the Galaxy stumbled on for a few more years, and even made it as far as #50, but like almost every comic Marvel debuted in 1990, it didn’t make it to triple figures. Nobody really noticed when it finally died, nobody really cared.

I certainly didn’t. By that time, I was lost in Vertigo and Los Bros Hernandez and Dark Horse and Dan Clowes. I didn’t even notice when the last few Guardians comics came out, and it took me a while before I even noticed its absence.

That interest in the 30th century Marvel universe never really came back, and successive issues of the comic were sold off over the years, during periodic purges. It was easy enough to get rid of those Kevin West issues, and then the latter Valentino run went, with no second thoughts.

Eventually, I ditched the rest, getting rid of comics that I’d gone to a lot of effort to get back in the early nineties. I could still look at them and remember exactly where I’d bought it, but I need that bit of my brain to do other stuff now, so that scrap of memory can go. That was a lot harder to do, but I haven’t missed carting all those issues around, when I just didn’t care enough.

Or so I thought – the other week, I was sorting out the box of Marvel comics I’ve still held onto after all these years and I found issues 8 and 16 wedged between issues of Groo and late eighties X-Men annuals.

And the weird thing is, I was really, really glad to still have them. I’d obviously held onto the earlier issue for reasons of unashamed nostalgia, but I really thought I got rid of the second issue years ago and I was glad to have another look.

Reading them with a 2010 eye, they’re clumsy and a bit crude and they really don’t stand up as individual issues, but they’re going back into that box of Marvel. Maybe I just feel sorry for it.

Because it was just another nothing series, published during a massive glut of product. The stories haven’t been reprinted in recent years and are unlikely to be. There is a new Guardians of the galaxy series, but it has little to do with the earlier (later) team, apart from appearances by Star Hawk and Vance Astro.

But I still care. I can’t help it. The slight obsession that lasted for a year is long dead, but there is still some fondness for this unloved comic, and I can’t dispute that.

I also once had a thing for the Wonder Man comic that came out at the same time, but that’s another sad story altogether.

- Originally published 2 July 2010 

My affection for the old school Guardians of the galaxy hasn't dimmed in the past 16 years, and I've read those Valentino comics again recently and they hold up a lot better than the comic's contemporaries. The Guardians are a whole different thing now, but I always love it when the original crew show up again.