The death of MF Doom: Just let people live where they want

The ongoing demonization of immigrants around the world drives me crazy, and I am constantly disappointed by political parties that profess to be on the side of justice and compassion, but still use immigration as an obvious scapegoat to appease all the moronic bigots in society.

I am ridiculously pro-immigration, the people who move into a new community bring vibrancy and life to the places they join. The school my kids go to is full of families from dozens of different nations, and I adore their exposure to all new traditions and histories and cultures and ways of thinking about the world.

But if I had to choose one small example of how fucked up the entire global immigration system is, it's in the sad death of MF Doom.

Doom was a terrific artist, his beats were epic and his wordplay was sublime. There was depth to his music, an intelligence and humanity lurking beneath that stark metal mask. His work with Czarface was legit my single favourite album of the past decade. 

And you had this guy who did wonderful music, and his words were poetry, and he died far away from home, kicked out of America by the dullest of bureaucracies.

What kind of a society is that, when you can just dispose of artistic genius like it is nothing? Doom's history of nationhood was complicated, but every life is complicated, all pounded into submission by the brute force of the system, and there was no recourse for Doom to get back to his family, his friends, the world he grew up in. 

When societies treat their greatest artists like this, those societies are worth nothing. And all this happened to Doom before the current shitshow that is the ICE nightmare gripping the US, and there will inevitably be more great minds and great people currently being forced to leave the place they love, because John Q Fucknuckle doesn't like how many brown people are working in his fast food joints.

Borders are just lines on paper, that fuckwits use to justify their own feelings of superiority and cruelty. Because if you can't see the value of keeping poets like MF Doom in your nation, you are no nation of worth at all. 

Awards always beat cockroaches in the pie game

There was a grimly fascinating exercise in human behaviour at the local bakery in the past couple of months, and I got to see what really matters to my friends and neighbours, and I am honestly not surprised by the clear result of it all.

It's a very bougie bakery, with $12 pies that are, admittedly, fucking excellent. Of course I tried them, I have very serious opinions about meat pies, and had to see if their special Philly Cheesesteak pies were really worth $12.

And then the store shut down for a week, and I thought they were just on holiday or something, but it turned out they had a cockroach infestation. And despite a quick clean up and the prominent display of a 'A' health rating in the front window, it definitely had an impact on business. There used to be constant lines out the door for their terrific pies and excellent sourdough options, now there was only ever one or two people in there. 

It was never empty, but it certainly wasn't as popular any more. If you're going to pay premium prices for your grub, you want to know it won't have a cockroach leg in it or something. I didn't think it would last much longer - fancy eateries must have massive overheads - and I did feel quite bad for them, and then the NZ pie awards were announced last week.

I'm not the only one in Aotearoa to have strong opinions about pies, all five million of us have very clear judgements. My five year old has some extremely valid thoughts about what makes a good pie. So the pie awards have great weight.

Even my own apathy towards all awards everywheer is tempered slightly by the pie angle, and it is always interesting to see what comes out on top, and watch the inevitable feeding frenzy that follows, as fairweather pie fans descend on the award winner.

And when that tarnished local store won the Supreme Award for its bacon and egg pie, I had to see if it had an impact on business, and for the last few days it has been back to lines out the door 

I wasn't going to get into line - I think bacon and egg pies are not quite an abomination, but they are definitely getting there - but I got my kicks on seeing all those pie loves snake down the street again. Because a health code violation is all well and good, but if some randoms say it's the best in the country, maybe that's more important than a cockroach or two.

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The fine end of Roddy the Ruin

I am nowhere near as emotionally invested in House of the Dragon as I was in Game of Thrones - mainly because every single character in the new series is just a total cunt - but I am so happy for Tommy Flanagan getting one of the top five death scenes in all of the Song of Ice and Fire.

This has been a Jackass century

I don't know these people, and clearly most of them are irredeemable dickheads who would be absolute pains in the ass in real life, but I did feel genuinely sad when the last Jackass film wrapped up.

They always say it's the last one, but it seems like they really mean it this time, especially with the greatest hits aspect.

If it is the end, it really is the end of an era, because Jackass has been a constant presence in my life for the 21st century. I still think their films are funny, charming and occasionally really clever. And if it's ever taught me anything, it's that if you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.

It came in as the end of another era - Jackass was one of the last video tape phenomenons I remember. There really wasn't any of the internet video options we have today, so unless it was broadcast on television, the only way you could see the earliest Jackass films were on video, which could only be found down at the weird local skate/head store, or through a mate who copied it from another mate who got it from the ninth version of hell, judging by the quality of the final product I saw.

I still remember the one piece of footage that sold me on Jackass forever - it was the one where Danger Ehren dressed up as a football player, intercepted peoples' fast food orders and ran off with them. Which was mean and cruel and really, really funny, but the best part about it was the spiking of the food on the ground in front of the victim. Just so dumb and silly, and full of life and joy and celebration.

And it's this joy that has made it endlessly watchable. They have exquisite comic timing (nothing is better than the giant high five in the third film), some truly radical ideas (the bungee jump with Wee Man and Preston that actually pays off) and a fearlessness that it actually admirable (everything else). There is real pleasure in the laughter of the people watching their mates do terrible things to their scrotum, only beaten by the endlessly wonderful 'why do I have to be Steve-O' whine.

But it's the joy of the thing, the kick of doing something that makes your best friends fall on the floor laughing. The hugs and concern at the end of something properly painful, and the sheer glory of loving life and living it as hard as you can.

And we've grown old with them over the years, and each film has had its own vibe - I think there is a weirdly obvious order of quality in the movies and it's 3, 1, 4, 5, 2 - and we all feel those aches and pains, and didn't need to crash a giant shopping trolley to get them

And all the things that happen when you grow old, fall out with friends, or just lose touch, or there is genuine loss - RIP Ryan. All that partying is having a definite impact, and the hair is a lot greyer, even as Chris Pontius remains forever ageless, so maybe it really is time to call it a night. 

New home, same bookshelves

There is a lot of work in moving into a new house, and my wife absolutely hates the whole moving process. But I have to bite my tongue when she makes her entirely justifiable complaints, because I'm already so very bad at hiding how much I love it.

It's back-breaking and frustrating and I am getting way too old to lift all those boxes full of Judge Dredd Megazines. It's financially draining, and requires stupid amounts of paperwork, and you have to figure out the new rubbish bin times, and how you're going to mow the fucking lawn.

But I've lived in 42 houses in my life so far, and I'm not just used to the process, I'm actively into it. I love sorting everything out, I love figuring out the new configurations for the bookshelves. I love consolidating and sharpening the collection of nerd shit I have. I love working out where everything can go. Where it all fits.

We have finally moved from renters to homeowners, so we won't be going very far anytime soon, but I still desperately sorting out the massive piles of Comics Journal issues, and work out where they are going to go, as fast as I can. Setting out a little space on this piece of land for my pile of Doctor Who novels.

I almost got crushed by several bins of 90s music mags while sorting them out the other day. It would be a truly dumb and extremely fitting way to exit this world, but for a split second there I thought the last thing I would ever see was a NME cover with the lovely Louise Wener on it.

I'm making some real progress sorting all this out, but I still haven't felt the sense that this is my land, and instead of all my earnings going to a landlord, it's going into this property that can go to my kids one day. And everyone keeps telling me that I will be so invested in things like property taxes and interest rates, but I never gave a shit about any of that before, and have no desire to start now.

But I do recognise this feeling of getting all my shit together - and I've got a lot of shit - on a property that is a lot smaller than the past few places we've been in. It's a lot of sorting, of getting everything together and working out what I actually need to keep handy, and what I need to show off, and I'll never get sick of that feeling, no matter how decrepit my aging body gets.

Happy birthday, Evie!

I have now been a parent for exactly seven years today, and it has absolutely been the best seven years of my life, and it really has felt like it's been seven seconds.

Throwing hands with Doctor Strange

Sometimes, when I'm standing around waiting for something, I'll have my hands behind my back, and I'll make the hand gestures that Doctor Strange makes behind his back towards the end of the original Infinity Gauntlet, as drawn by the mighty Ron Lim.

I do it without even thinking about it, as an unconscious thing, but I haven't managed to open any portals with my mystical gesturing. Not yet, anyway.

Only Hollywood makes me cry

I've been a fool for Tarantino films since the start, when me and my mates all walked into Reservoir Dogs as innocent 18-year-olds, and all walked out cinephiles for life. His films are smart and witty and clever and stylish, and sometimes they get quite emotional - but the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the only one to bring me to tears. 

It was the last movie I saw before I became a parent - quite literally, the wife and I saw it the day before our eldest was born, and I spent a large part of the long run time hoping our little treasure would stay put for a few more minutes. And then the real life tragedy of what happened to Sharon Tate and her friends in that house is avoided, and the world of the film is just a tiny bit brighter because of it. 

The main characters' righteous violence against the Manson murderers who invade their home is initially hard to take, with big men murdering much smaller women with their flamethrowers, attack dogs and bare hands.

But when you know what really happened - that they carved up a heavily pregnant woman in the most horrific way possible, a dog biting off their face in this fictional context is getting off lightly. Watching it that first time, with the most pregnant woman in the world sitting next to me, I cheered on the carnage.

And when it's all over, and Rick Dalton is invited into the Tate household and greeted with love and hugs, it's heartbreaking. It's the ultimate Hollywood ending, where the good guys win, and the most awful tragedy is avoided. And there is real sadness in the fact that this isn't what happened in real life, that those more people in the Tate house had the most awful of endings.

Those final moments are the quietest of conclusions to a Tarantino film, and the weight of real history weighs heavily on this happy ending.

But if Hollywood is a place of dreams, this is the most pleasant of them, where the Manson killers pick the wrong fuckin' house to crash, and the world isn't poisoned by their stupid cruelty. That's worth a tear or two.

You're paying way too much for your pot, Lester

American Beauty's reputation has diminished greatly over the years, even if it does have a moment of sublime beauty with the trash bag. Most people bounce off the obviously problematic stuff with a middle aged loser lusting over a teenaged girl, but the thing that always annoyed me the most about this movie is how much Kevin Spacey was paying for his weed.

The late nineties were my peak stoner age, so I was having a good fuckin' time when I saw American Beauty for the first time, after the usual morning sesh with Shane over the back fence. It was totally a vibe movie, and I was into it. 

And then Lester happily pays two grand for a tiny amount of weed , and I could not believe what he was doing. Three hundred for the ounce of regular marijuana seemed legit, but in all my dealings, I never met - or smoked - a single strain of weed that was worth that kind of money. You might as well be buying cocaine if you're going to spend that much.

(It also cracked me up how it was "genetically engineered by the US government", when the best weed growers are old crusty guys named Funk or something who knew more about pot than anything any damn government scientist ever dreamed of.)

I think about this now and then, because pot is still largely illegal in this part of the world and the local constabulary like to put out statements saying they have busted a big cannabis operation and seized millions of dollars in weed, but then you only have to do some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to realize the cops are full of shit because it turns out they're valuing it at $4000 an ounce, and nobody is ever going to pay that much for an ounce, even if it's personally sourced by the freaky kid next door.

So when I need my American beauty fix in the future, I might just watch the trash bag scene again, and forget about the rest of it. The cost of pot is enough, let alone the yuck of Spacey. 

Love and happiness forever!

It's a bit of a joke, when Ewan McGregor's insanely charming Alex makes the toast in Shallow Grave - forcing his partying flatmates to drink to 'love and happiness forever', He's being a dick about it, and it's all obviously about to go wrong and there will be corpse desecration and murder, but he's still demanding the oath. 

But I'll drink to that idea, any day. It's all everything we all need - what can be better than love and happiness forever? Maybe Nathan Barley's 'peace and fucking'.

Best dollar sale ever

I have always been a fiend for the $1 comic sale. Regular issues of American comic books are getting perilously close to $12 in local money, but give it a few years, and a lot of that stuff will end up in the cheap bins, and that twelve bucks will buy me a dozen slightly trashed old comics. 

A vast chunk of my comic collection was swept up from bargain bins, and I never miss the kilo sale at one of my local stores. But when the most excellent Iron Age Comics announced it was doing a special sale, I really did not expect it to be the best dollar comic sale I've ever been to. But that's what happened, all the same. 

It was a good sign when the first thing I see in the first box is Fantastic Four Annual #4, the one where the old Human Torch comes back - a pivotal moment in the early Marvel Universe, and it's just sitting there. It was missing a back cover, but was still a thing of beauty, in all its roughed-up glory. 

Then I found Avengers Annual #10 in there, and a bunch of other Avengers from the early seventies and many 60s and 70s oddities like ancient Justice League of America, prime Kirby Demon and loads of Marvel Two-In-One, and they're all just a buck each. 

They are, obviously, in awful condition. Some of them have been warped and torn by water damage, and some come with covers that have clearly been attacked by rodents, but a beat-up comic has just as much as charm as one that still smells like the printers. 

And if the cover is getting gross, there is so much thrills inside, so much beautiful artwork, for the cheapest of costs. Son of Satan issues and loads of terrific DC Comics Presents, including the one with the first ever New Teen Titans. A decent chunk of the post-Kirby Return of the New Gods, because why the hell not?

It's taken me weeks to get through them all, because Bronze Age comics are dense as hell, but two things are certain - short of straight-up stealing something, this is the best bang for buck in all  entertainment, and that I'll be there for the next sale, every time.

All the time in the world when you're unemployed

I haven't been properly unemployed for years now, but there were a couple of times when I was younger when I just could not get a job and I remember how much it sucked, so I'll be doing all I can to ever avoid being in that kind of situation again, especially when I have actual dependents in my life now. 

I was out of work for about four hours the last time I quit a job due to pisspoor management, and had two different offers in those few hours, so I hope I'll be okay. 

While there was some freedom to being free of the various obligations of employment, it fucking sucked. It sucked how much you had to scrape through every day with the barest of sustenance, and it sucked how much you were forced to rely on the generosity of family and friends just to pay the fucking bills. It sucked that you couldn't watch or read all the things you really wanted to, and you certainly couldn't go out at night, because there was no spare cash by the time the dole came through. 

The only thing you did have was free time, just acres of it, and I always managed to fill it out with endless books and movies, and so much of the film and general geek knowledge and experiences I have now is a result of the months when I had nothing better to do, so many years ago.

I didn't have the endless options of today, where you could spend all day on free streaming sites and never get bored, but I could hire eight movies on video tape out for a week for $8, and might even watch some of them twice. And when you're burning through so many films on grey Tuesday afternoons, it forces you outside your comfort zone, inspires you to try something different, and that leads down all sorts of wonderful paths.

And when I got bored of the movies, there was always books, and I would haunt the local library and again, try out novelists I wouldn't ordinary bother with. During my last extended period of homelessness, I started looking for older, classic books, and fell into an exceedingly pleasant Graham Greene wormhole.  

And when that also got a bit much, I could always try some writing myself, and churned out hundreds of pages of unreadable prose, trying to find some kind of voice.

The only other thing I would do is walk, a good walk never cost anything, is good for the health and the soul.

That's how I got through the day when the days got too long, and I didn't have any work to fill them, and there was some pleasure in it. It still sucked like nothing else sucks when you're an adult, but there was some light in those endless days.

Fury - My War Gone By: He wants to keep on fighting

- Fury: My War Gone by #3

Art by Goran Parlov

Words by Garth Ennis

Colours by Lee Loughridge

Letters by Rob Steen

Rock history always makes my day

There was a joke article in a 90s issue of the NME, where it was the secret diary of Henry Rollins, and it was just day after day of pain, misery and push-ups, and then he got laid and everything was lovely and fine. 

I always thought that was pretty funny, and I honestly think the closest I get to feeling like that is when a new episode of Andrew Hickey's A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs comes out, and another cold, grey day is full of sunshine and roses and some very big thoughts about rock music. Life really is a little brighter with that in my ears.

The Ballad of GI Joe: Do I really have any friends who love me for being Zartan?

The whole concept of GI Joe, of rampant American militarism running riot around the world, feel a lot sharper than it used to. The only way they can do GI Joe comics these days is by leaning heavily on the irony, or getting the Transformers involved somehow.

I do like the idea that they've talked about in the recently announced movie, which seems to latching onto the concept of Cobra emerging from small-town America, and all the fake picket-fenced suburbia with missile silos hiding under the elementary school. Larry Hama was really onto something when he was digging into that vein of ideas in a dumb comic about war toys.

But I don't know if my kids will get into GI Joe like I did in the 80s. They were the best action figures, and the coolest comics - but they have a lot more toy options to choose from, and I don't want them to just follow my nerd path, I get my kicks from seeign what roads they forge for themselves. 

Still, I do need to hide my most precious Joes away on high cupboards so they don't get broken by the vigoroius play of the young. I don't want my original Cobra Commander in battle armour to lose any more limbs, he's already got one of Zandar's legs. 

And the kids have already been exposed to GI Joe in the most gentle manner properly, because they freaking love the Funny or Die video about the Joes and Cobra living their best lives after hours. A lot of the films made by that crew are purely ephemeral, already vanishing into the ether.

But some of the them stick around, and I will never get sick of this tune, and the gentle ballad of  ninjas taking out the trash, mortal enemies talking on the CB radio, and Destro and the Baroness, practicing their clarinets. 

They're practicing their clarinets! That's a much better use of their time than using the Terror Drome to fuck up the world for everybody. Yo Joe!

No more than a movie

Some movies don't need any kind of sequel, and many of them really do not need it to be multiple hours of television.

The phenomena of the unwanted sequel is still with us -  where one movie is perfectly good enough, and the follow-up can't help but disappoint. We all saw it recently when Ready Or Not 2 came out to a critical and commercial shrug, because that movie made its point pretty fucking well in the first one, and there really wasn't much more to add, except for mindless escalation.

And now we get the unwanted TV remakes, prequels and sequels, and they're not only unnecessary, they stretch out for hours and hours and hours.

They keep trying to sell me on the new Man on Fire, and while the original movie does have a much better reputation than it did at the time (critics always got dazzled by the style of Tony Scott films, and were blinded to the substance that could lurk beneath his glossiest of surfaces). But even with a fine cast in the TV version - that lead dude in the new series is usually pretty excellent - there's no Tony Scott, there's no Denzel, there is no way many hours of the new thing is going to be better than two hours with those deadset champions.

Now there is a long remake of Cape Fear, and lots of people I trust say it's actually pretty good, but I just don't want to spend 10 hours in that kind of nightmare. A tight two hours and eight minutes with prime Marty Scorsese was enough for me. 

There is so much out there it's easy to ignore a lot of it - there's no need to bother with the forthcoming Harry Potter (and when the creator is using the cash it gives her to cause real harm to real people, it's a moral imperative to shun it and you can rest assured it will never be mentioned on this blog again); it did take me two seasons to realise the new version of Interview with a Vampire is really not my bag; and I never had the slightest interest in seeing that series about a young Nurse Ratchet.

Because it doesn't feel like it's not being added to, it's more like it's being leeched off. It's a dilution, not a construction.

I'm such a fucking film snob. Even after all sorts of televisual brilliance over the years.  After a catastrophic failure of my movie cataloging for this year, I've been catching up on TV series and some of them are great and some of them are okay and all of them would be better as a two hour movie. If you can't tell a story in 120 minutes, maybe you shouldn't be telling a story, and not everything needs to be 10 hours.   

This is obviously not a hard rule - get some Dekalog into you, that shit is aces, and there is always the exception of Twin Peaks - but when so much talent so sucked up into a story that was already told with a lot more efficency, it all just feels so pointless. 

Hail Satan

A friend of mine occasionally sends me out of context comics panels from Jack Chick comics, and this one is definitely my favourite so far.

Grendel: Caring about Christine

When a comic character has been dead and gone for decades, one simple way to get the reader invested again is to show that character's raw emotions, and how they can carry a hurt that never dies. Christine Spar is back as Grendel and she is just as complex and angry as she ever was, but she's also devastatingly human.

Matt Wagner pulls off a fittingly neat and efficient narrative trick in the latest volume of Grendel. We're hundreds of years into the saga now, and Christine - a main character from the earliest days - has returned, cloned into new flesh. And the new Christine has work to do. This future world is run by leech-like vampires and she has to make it right, because Grendels fucking hate vampires, and this one most of all. 

Bringing back a new character as clone is the hoariest of cliches, but it takes less than an issue for this Christine to be established as a real person, because while she knows she is a copy of the original, she is still haunted by the death of her son, so long ago. 

It's the worst thing you could possibly imagine as a parent, to lose a kid. Christine's son was taken from her by a vampire Kabuki dancer hundreds of years ago, and she still feels his absence in the world, long after he would have turned to dust, even if he'd lived a full and rich life. 

All that lost potential will also be missed in Christine's world, wherever she is, and whatever flesh she is cloaked in.

It's a strong way to instantly give the character some weight and depth. It also helps to see her slice up some future fascist fucks in her first real outing - and Wagner's action sequences still sing with clarity and purpose - but it's the grief that makes her human, an ache that we all can recognise, if only in our worst nightmares.

The silent scream of getting old

There is a certain time in your life when you suddenly become very invested in how old Wilford Brimley was when he made Cocoon, and while he was playing someone vastly older than he was, there is some existential shock when you hit that age. 

Another moment like this that has stuck in my brain for decades is when Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise takes note of how old he is getting in the first TNG movie, and that he has come to terms with the idea that there were more days behind him than ahead of him, and I almost certainly crossed that particular threshold sometime in the post decade, and it is giving me the shits, man.  

Especially since it's been a blink of an eye since Malcolm McDowell killed Captain Kirk in that film, and it's somehow 30 years later. It's certainly comforting to see Sir Patrick still out there doing his thing in the X-Men, but he is much, much closer to that end he talked about with Deanna Troi, and it doesn't feel like he should be.

I do like being in my fifties, I'm far more well-adjusted and self-confident and plain old happier than ever before. I love my family and we just moved into our new home, after a lifetime of renting. I still love my day job, and while the world is in a general spiral of shit, all is right with the world around me.  

But it's also August already and I do feel time slipping through my fingers, like sloppy wet sand. And sometimes the sheer rage at how fast it is sliding by makes me want to scream in some kind of never-ending howl.

That's normal, right? One thing I can rely on in this uncertain world is that when it comes to aging, we're all in the same boat. We all feel life slipping away, even as we try to hold on. Time is a merciless bastard, and we all age together, and we're all silently screaming about it, and pushing it to the back of our minds so that we can just get through the day.

Even Jean-Luc Picard feels it, and his lack of a biological family gives more weight to the doubts he feels, even as his considerable accomplishments are immortalised in history. He'll be okay. After all, he's just a fictional character, and will live on long after I've merged with the infinite, which I still hope remains a long, long way off.

Bad Boy: Trying to escape.

- Bad Boy #1

Art by Simon Bisley

words by Frank Miller

Colours and letters by Angus McKie

One last hit from the past: A moment of Cassidy

- Originally published October 21 2014

I haven't woken up like this in a long, long time, but I'll never forget that feeling.