Bane is lying!

There are a lot of weird politics in Nolan's Batman films, and the relative complexity of the films are still very blunt and obvious.

But the idea that Bane actually stands for the little guy, against the corrupt oligarchy, and is a direct criticism of justifiable protest action - that one still grinds my gears. 

He's Bane! he's lying! He's using that righteous anger as a weapon, but he doesn't actually believe the shit he says. He's just another hateful ogre, using the usual brute force for his own goals, and he doesn't care who he has to sacrifice to achieve his monstrous goals.

You can't trust Bane!

The various Occupy movements were still happening when this film was released, and I can see how easy it is to see this silly Batman movie as a criticism of them, but it felt like more of a warning. Even as the protest movement's methods and infrastructure were co-opted by selfish, shallow fools, that doesn't mean their aims and goals were foolish -  making the world a better place is always a noble idea.

Politeness is not getting us far in this world, and it may take the guillotines before we get any real social change, but Bane is not doing that. He stands for nihilism and the void, and just wants to burn the world down, not build a new one. 

He had one of the great voices in modern cinema - anyone who complains that hey can't understand his mumbling is a total wiener - but Bane wasn't interested in making the world a better place, he just wanted to terrorise it. Any fool can see that.

This is the way the world works, with Tyranny Rex

2000ad has informed most of my politics over my life - much of my rage at the unfairness of the modern political and capitalist system was stoked by Pat Mills alone - and this one small sequence by John Smith and Steve Dillon, featuring new character sensation Tyranny Rex being sentenced to death for illegal cloning by a corrupt judge with a wedge of cash on his desk, informed a lot.

Much of my opinion on the modern judiciary can be traced to that last panel. 

You can't be a spectator - Thirteen observations from a Pulp concert in the year 2026

1) Jarvis has still got it.

2) Seriously, Jarvis Cocker has been getting up on stage for nearly 50 years now, and he knows how to work a crowd. He knows what shapes he can make in front of a blazing screen, he knows when to strategically deploy his arse wriggle, and the things he does with his hands can not be replicated by any other human being.

3) He can also bend like a motherfucker. 

4) I've been hoping to see Pulp live for more than 30 years ago, and they didn't disappoint, with a powerful and moving experience. It was everything I could have asked for, and so much more.

5) It was a very sensible gig - there was a 15 minute interval, and Jarvis threw tea bags into the crowd, and managed to make someone sitting in a comfy armchair look truly epic.

6) Bands that return to the stage after decades away can obviously be just phoning it in, but even with a few more wrinkles and a lot more grey hair up there, this felt like a band at their absolute peak.

7) Their brand new song - Begging For Change - was loud and fast and angry and very impressive, this is still definitely a band with something to say.

8) That new tune is coming out on a new War Child compilation, and that's the first I've heard of that, and I will most definitely be buying that on CD when I see it. That one that came out in 1995 was a game changer for me.  

9) At least half of the people who work in my office were there at the show - it's music for nerds and we are all very definitely nerds in public radio.

10) You can be 10m away from some dipshit letting off a flare in a crowded space and not even notice, because who looks backwards at a concert? 

11) There may have been a taste of AI in the background projections, especially since the band has dabbled in it recently, but it only lasted a second.

12) I was tempted by the Pulp beach towel in the merchandise trailer, but $70 was taking the piss.

13) I was not at all tempted by the white underwear under the glass. They didn't even have a price tag on that.

* All pictures taken by my mates Nik Dirga and Chris Walker, who made a great night even better

Forty hours of blank tape was the best Christmas present I'd ever got

I had no idea what I was going to do with 40 hours of blank video tape, but I was pretty sure this was the best goddamn Christmas present I had ever received in my entire young life.

When it comes to presents from Santa, there had been a few crackers in my childhood - some wonderful slot car sets, the occasional beloved Star Wars figure, some Fighting Fantasy books that got heavy use and my wonderful Grifter bicycle - but the 10 four-hour blank video tapes I got for Christmas 1988 was something special.

Blank tapes were a very important part of my life for several years. They were expensive as hell, and I made the absolute most out of every minute.  Most of them were three hours long, which was slightly frustrating when I couldn't quite get two films on a tape. 

Sometimes you'd fit two on perfectly - I did get both Bill & Teds and two Texas Chainsaw Massacres into the 180 minutes, with minutes to spare - but even if I couldn't get two films, I used up all the space with treasured episodes of TV shows and music videos.

And then it's 1988 and I was 13 and my big Christmas present for the year was a small box filled with 10 E-240 tapes. And even though I was going through the usual teenage dramas, this was proof that my parents still knew me, because this felt like a gift from heaven.  

Just a few years earlier I was spending all my Christmas money on a $15 blank tape because Star Wars was playing for the first time on TV, and I could tape it and watch it as many times as I liked, something that had been unimaginable for much of my childhood. While they were steadily getting cheaper - you could get tapes for $5.99 at the DEKA store in town - I still only had half a dozen tapes of my own when I suddenly had 40 hours to fill.

It took me a few months, but I soon managed to get copies of the best films in the world onto those tapes. With ample room for two films on every tape, I could get my own copies of 20 films, an unimaginably large amount for my young cinematic tastes. 

Most of them I taped off the TV - Psycho was one of the first films to get recorded - and then we somehow ended up with two VCR machines, and I could make my own copies of anything at the video store, and might have gone a bit crazy.

There have been several generations of new entertainment technology come and go since then, but I still have a couple of those long tapes, and the capacity to play them. I have those films in far greater quality, but there is a comfort in the warm fuzz of video tape, back when everything wasn't so sharp, and when a pile of blank tape was everything.

Sgt Rock: There he is.

- Sgt. Rock #422

Art, colors and letters by Joe, Andy and Adam Kubert

Written by Robert Kanigher

It ain't white boy day, is it?

True Romance was cool and slick and exactly what we all needed when we were stuck waiting for Pulp Fiction - the leads have never been more smokin' hot, the face-off between Walken and Hopper is so beautifully played and shot that if it wasn't for the deeply problematic conversation, it would arguably the greatest scene in history; and this is the movie where Brad Pitt became a true star without getting off the fuckin' sofa. 

But Gary Oldman's Drexl Spivey blows them all away - literally in the case of Samuel L Jackson - with an absolutely magnetic performance, and you can't turn away from watching the worst person in the fucking world go about his awful business.

In a just civilisation, there would have been 20 films where Drexl shows up, does his shit, and gets shot in the face by the main character. I can only assume we have failed as a culture and a society.

He just gets under my skin

There's something about the part in Sweatshop #5- written and drawn by Peter Bagge - where one of the miscreants in that vastly under-loved comic sets Neil Gaiman's pants on fire, and it's a moment which hits very differently in the year 2026, than when it was first published in 2003.

Gaiman's trousers are still on fire at the end of the story, and nobody seems to care, so I can only assume he's still burning away now.  

That cultural hole is getting bigger

The cultural hole around the start of this century is only getting bigger. We were all promised that once everything went online, it would be available forever, and that was such a dirty lie.

Websites go down, or fade away, and so much has been lost, and plenty of essays and articles have just vanished. There are too many stories of writers who have lost years of work because the sites they were writing for instantly vanished as the cash ran out. 

It's just so much easier to find out about comics culture from 1985 than it is for 2005. There were tonnes of professional mags and endless amounts of fanzines put out 40 years ago that are still kicking around. Ephemera that was printed out and distributed far and wide, and chucked in a box and rediscovered and kept because they are echoes of youth lost, but also filled with incidents and weird feuds and sheer data.

All that enthusiasm that went into these gorgeous little things didn't fade away, it just got given more platforms online and exploded out into the world. Instead of late night stapling parties, they're making videos for a bewildering amount of social media and working for geek websites.

And then those sites lose funding, and things on social media get drowned and forgotten (or more likely, never even seen as the algorithm continues to make horrendously bad decisions about what actually interests people), and trying to find information about things that came out 20 years ago is so much harder than finding data from 40 years ago.

So while the enthusiasms that were printed out 40-50 years ago can still be picked up for a couple of bucks at random comic stores and flea markets, more recent delights have vanished forever, and won't ever be haunting any old bookstores. The hole has eaten them all up instead.

It was a gas.

Blondie's Heart of Glass is one of the earliest music videos I ever remember seeing, and I still find it disturbing in a way I can never properly articulate. There's the sparseness of the tune, Debbie Harry's soaringly high voice, the minimal movements of the band - it all just makes me feel like a tiny kid again and truly creeps me out. 

Nobody else might be disturbed by how shiny her lip gloss is, but it takes me back to a time when the world was scary and unknowable, and I'm afraid I have not learned as much as I would like since then.