Student radio forever

I still feel like a total perv when I get into the pop music produced by young female musicians - while I am very much not the target audience for it, I can't help it if they keep making some stonking music. Our household has been listening to a lot of Phoebe Bridgers lately.

I also feel similarly awkward when I listen to student radio too much, but they also give me great music to listen to, and I can't do much about that either.

The main reason I end up listening to so much of the local student radio station is the very dumbest reason in the world. I only listen to the radio while driving around town, and Auckland University's BFM is the only radio station that plays music at the top of the hour, and I get unheathily angry at the ads all the other stations are playing (I even have a oddly visceral reaction to the way every ad ends with somebody saying 'tees and cees applies', as if that is just so much cooler than saying 'terms and conditions').

And every other radio station (apart from my beloved public broadcaster, if I'm in the mood for news), fills the airwaves with their awful braying commercials, except for the students, and I just end up listening to them by default.

But I also still like the shabby nature of student radio. I never really went to university, but I still adore the drawl of the young student announcer, the bored monotone is quite relaxing compared to the hyperactivity of the commercial radio DJs.

And, most of all, it's where I hear the new music that I would never hear anywhere else. All the hip young things and the forgotten legends. There is always a part of me that craves the new sound, the tune that isn't like anything else in the world, and the student radio delivers it up every single day.

And then there are the shows focused on hardcore dub, or old school reggae, or eternal old country tunes, or thrash metal. Old beats and archaic sounds that are as fresh as anything else produced in 2026, because they are new to me, and not like anything else on the airwaves. I still feel old while I listen to them, but not that old.

Old men and their books: Red Sheet

Red Sheet
By James Elloy

I never know what the hell is going on in James Ellroy books. It's always a huge, convoluted mess of reprehensible people - a volatile cocktail of racism, lust, power and political ideologies running rampant, as communists and Christians alike commit horrific killings in post-war LA. 

The big picture is always easy enough to follow - there are hard twists in his stories, sudden revelations that burn into the page - but it's the details that really matter. You can't skim read Ellroy books, you'll miss something vital, especially with such a sprawling cast of characters, although some important points get hammered over and over again in macabre rhythm. There's just so much to keep track of, you need to mind photograph it all like the fictional Nazi detective Hans Maslick advises.

It's page after page of surveillances and break-ins and putting details together, before exploding into sudden violence. The action scenes are also hard and fast and brutal - evil men don't get socked in the jaw, they get their noses bitten off, or their feet set on fire.

Red Sheet has all of this usual Ellroy malarky, as well as a brilliant mystery - who are the four evil motherfuckers who murdered priests and raped nuns in the Spanish Civil War and have been running discreet death squads on the American west coast for decades, and how much do these feverish 20rh century ideologies tarnish the entire world?

The Freddie Otash books are more focused than the second LA Quartet he has also been working in for the past decade or so, with that first person narration, is all coming through Freddie's head, and full of the analysis he puts on scenes of atrocity.

His brain takes in all the incredible details, I still love the way his characters toss a room, and I really like the sound of the Cure, when powerful men get too strung out on speed or booze of women, and they hole up in the back of a Chinese restaurant, get hooked up to a glucose and morphine drip, get some full blood transfusions, eat a fucking shitload of chop suey and come out feeling like Superman. That sounds like fun.

I always deeply enjoy the Ellroy books and never recommend them to anybody because these stories of psychos and stone cold killers are most definitely not for everybody. And his style is extremely idiosyncratic, - it was getting more abstract in the later American Tabloid books, but has been pared back a little by Freddie's narration. It's easier to follow, but also packed and bopping and machine gun delivery. 

It remains incredibly hard to write about his books without imitating that style, but nobody could capture words like James Ellroy does, even when they are put together for the most appalling crimes.

Old men and their books: I Hear A New World

I Hear A New World

By Alan Moore

The great magus may have bid farewell to comic books, but seems pleasingly devoted to getting out as many novels as he can before he merges with the infinite, and I am here for them.

I Hear A New World is better than the first book in Moore's current Long London series, building on the world of The Great When, laying clues and portents that are all building to something terrible at the end of the 20th century.

The plot has never been the most important part in any of Moore's stories, and his new novel may be the most disinterested in plot mechanics yet. The main character actively puts off participating in it for as long as possible and gets away with it for months before reluctantly getting involved, because there is no sense of wonder at the secret world that exists sideways to ours, just confusion and horror as our heroes wander around looking for a metaphysical villain.

They do find it sitting on the lap of Ronnie Kray, and then it fucking comes for them, and that's about the whole story. But that monster at the end of the book is truly great, a god of death who is also a tiny little man, hanging out in the gangster underworld and coming down the street in a tornado of trash, a miniature mystical terminator who can not be stopped by human hands, but really should not have fucked with the London Cat.

Dennis Knuckleyard, the valiant soul at the center of this sprawling saga is one of Moore's great creations, fully fleshed out after his name unexpectedly burst out of the ether around Moore's skull. He's no hero, hating every second of it, even as he makes pals with the most fascinating figures of his age. People who aren't strictly people count him as a great mate, and respect his agency, even as they push him into the strange abyss between worlds. At least they all show Grace the proper respect, even the Cat.

I recently wrote on this blog about strange coincidences piling up, and they do it here too. I watch Adam Curtis documentaries for background noise while I work the midnight shift, and the story of Michael X and Peter Rachman came up, just as they make appearances in this book. I'd also recently read an article about David Litvinoff, another real-life character who bends through this story and will  offer advice on the set of Performance

It all adds to the pleasing strangeness of this book, the unreality of it all, more than the decapitated heads of the executed Londoners on the ruling council of the other side of reality in the mirror world, where metaphor has literal teeth that will rip you apart. It would be weird if if wasn't weird. 

Old men and their books: Model Actress Whatever

I really need to get back into my one-person book club, it always took me outside of my comfort zone with new novels. And I know I need to get back into it because the last three novels I've read are all by old white guys who I have been following for decades.

Fortunately, they are all fucking excellent writers who put out fucking excellent books that are worthy of further discussion, and that's what we are doing here, before I get back onto the road to literary unknowns.

Model Actress Whatever

By Kim Newman

I didn't read anything about the new Kim Newman book before it came out, because I don't need to. Newman books are always ridiculously entertaining and so much fun. I read them all, and never miss a single one.

But just going by the title and Newman's recent record, I did think this one was going to be some kind of Hollywood horror, a perfectly respectable sub-genre about the terrors of life in Tinsletown, possibly similar to the one that had Chandler and Karloff team up to solve gross mysteries in 1930s Hollyweird.

But Model Actress Whatever turned out to be a direct sequel to Newman's Diogenes Club books, taking those 20th century archetypes and seeing how they do in the reality show saturated media of the 21st. A new generation of cloaked superheroes and legacy villains, doing their best in stressful times.

It can be hard to keep track of all the continuity which probably only all makes sense inside Newman's head, but there is a Shade, and a network that goes back centuries still operating under the fantastical streets.

For a book so clearly set in the here and now, it does give an oddly 90s DC comics vibe, taking legacy characters and making sure the lineage goes on - there must always be a Doctor Shade, there must always be some kind  ofSplendid Six - while being ruthless with older generations (I have to admit a certain sadness about the sad end for Richard Jeperson).

It's frantic and breathless, but just gloriously entertaining, full of groaning in-jokes and references. It's a Kim Newman book about a Kim Newman world. He's not too worried if you can't keep up.

The four month comic chasm

I didn't get to comic stores on a regular basis until well into the 1990s, so my entire childhood of reading American comic books was always just behind the times. Four months behind, to be exact. 

Because it took four months for issues to arrive from the other side of the world. So the first time I got to an actual comic shop, it was weirdly disorientating, because it was getting a glimpse months into the future. My first comic shop had the first issue of Excalibur on the shelves, weeks before I even knew what had happened in the Fall of the Mutants. So much had happened in those few months and I was totally lost. 

I longed to send fan letters in to the X-Men, but couldn't be writing to them about the things that happened months ago. It was also hellishly expensive for a kid to send a letter overseas and it didn't feel like it was worth sending something when they are definitely not going to use it because they killed off Rogue a month after I sent something about her being the eternal X-man. (That was the closest I ever came.)

But the situation with the Galaxy's Greatest Comic was even worse, because it was six months before 2000ad got to my neck of the woods. I would spend a significant amount of my childhood wondering what was happening to Dredd in those impossible future comics on the far side of the world. And this was the golden age of the character, where significant shit was going down all the drokking time.   

Those days just added to the isolating feeling that I would feel when reading comics. I had very few friends who cared as much about Kitty Pryde as I did, and certainly no direct connection to any larger community. The temporal chasm just added to that and comics became more of an internal thing, an obsession that I kept largely to myself.

At least until the internet came along, at about the same time I started getting comics the same week as my cousins in the rest of the world. Until then, I had absolutely no idea what was coming, and could only imagine what the rest of the world was reading, which did help avoid spoilers about the fate of Johnny Alpha, I suppose.

But with regular trips to the comic shop and the first online message boards and news sites, I finally had all the information, and was getting comics at the same time and that was a total game changer. I could even interact with other people (and feel that interaction peaked with the discussion of who was going to be in the JLA in Morrison's second year on the title, which as some time ago). 

Now I can still get a new issue of Concrete as the same time as the US (even slightly sooner, due to international date lines). 2000ad is back to six months behind, and too expensive and that's not a big deal because I'm holding fast to my current fallow period (although it's kinda easy when every prog is full of deeply average Kek-W stories). I don't need to keep up.

But I still remember the joy of getting my hands on the first comics from the future, and seeing what my favourite mutants were up to at the same time as everybody else. And the joy of that closing chasm still resonates.

Dracula Lives!: ...Until the end of time.

- Dracula Lives! #13
Art by Tony DeZuniga, George Tuska, Virgilio Redondo, Tom Sutton, Steve Gan and Russ Heath,
Words by Tony Isabella. Rick Margopolous and George Conway

There's nothing as good as bangers and mash with the Bash St kids

One of my great disappointments in life is that I have never tasted anything that looked as good as the grub in British kids comics like Buster, Cor!! and Whizzer & Chips. 

Rich Christmas pudding looked like a damned delight, giant mince pies that looked like the dream food, shiny fat cupcakes, and, of course, heaping of bangers and mash. No sausage and potato ever tasted so good.

Battlestar Galactica: No reason to get excited

I can still be surprised by people who watch the same things as me and get something completely different out of it. The Sopranos was one of the first times it really hit me, when people I saw it with would be disappointed in an emotionally crushing episode because nobody got whacked.

It has happened quite a few times since, but the biggest difference might still be in the 21st century version of Battlestar Galactica.

I watched the whole thing again recently and it remains a massively intense show. It is still a great watch in these stressful times - the world might be slowly burning down, but at least you don't have to worry about getting blown out an airlock by a fracking toaster. The performances are wonderful - Saul Tigh's amazing emoting eye remains a wonder - and the action still holds up, the shaky camerawork during the space battles used to annoy me but has aged really well, capturing the chaos of warfare in the vacuum.

But my favourite thing about it was always the weird spiritual dimension to it all, lurking behind the militarism and murders. When Baltar admits he sees angels in the room in the final episode - the first time he's really spoken any truth - it's a big moment, but there have been signs and prophecies and genuinely supernatural events that can not be explained, right from the start.

And most of all, I adore the idea that All Along The Watchtower is some kind of eternal song, a deep species memory that comes back out again and again. People hear it coming out of the walls of spaceships hundreds of thousands of years ago, before it finds a new frequency with Bob Dylan's mind in the 20th century. A song so good it transcends space and time and becomes a signal from the divine.

I still see people scoffing at the unknowable nonsense that permeates Battlestar Galactica, they just want to see soldiers shoot the shit out of robots, and I do respect that. But that's not why I got so much into it, I watched it for the strange and the spiritual, and for a song that existed out there in the universe long before humanity rose on Earth, and which led the way home.  

Phone etiquette in the theatre

Maybe it's because I grew up in the last age before everybody in the world had their phone in their pocket, but I was always just a bit too militant about the use of mobile phones in the sanctity of the movie theatre. 

I used to insist that everybody I went with turned off their phones as soon as things got projected on the screen, because this was the time to concentrate. I obviously got more lenient on using them through the advertisements before the start, especially when sometimes the ads are more than 20 minutes before an overlong film starts, and are the same crass slices of capitalism every time. 

But I do think the movie theatre is a slightly sacred place, and it is somewhat profane to sully it with an outside distraction, and that the phone should go away once the trailers start, and the experience begins. 

Like almost everything in life, parenthood changed everything. I have always used to turn my phone off. Then I had kids and it just wasn't responsible to go out of contact for so long, when you have small humans depending on you, and you need to be reachable for any kind of emergency.

I still mute the fucking thing, and turn the screen glare all the way down to the bare minimum. I don't check the phone during the feature presentation, but I will know if somebody is trying to call me by the vibrations.

Unfortunately, we do live in a deeply selfish age, and I know there are so many people out there who can't bear to be away from their feeds for two whole hours, and blithely don't care if they are fucking off everybody else in the room. It's everywhere - I had to tell someone to put down a whole goddamn iPad during a fucking Jim Jarmusch film, and they seemed genuinely baffled by how remarkably annoying they were being.

It's much more noticeable when I go to a Saturday night film in a crowded house at the multiplex, although many of the films I watch at the cinema are with the weekday morning crowd, where it's much less of a problem (and much easier to move about to avoid annoying distractions).

So it might be a losing battle to keep the auditorium dark, but I keep to my own standards and keep my phone off. Unless the school is calling because one of the kids has fallen over in the playground. That'll always be more important.