Star Trek: Gods come and go, but office chairs are eternal

There is something oddly comforting about the way the chairs on the egineering deck of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation are still basic office chairs, including the little lever under your arse that you can use to make it go up and down.

They're not space-chairs bolted to the ground, or hovering in thin air, or even those comfortable lounge suites that they laze around on up on the bridge, they're just plain old office chairs.

It's a perfect design, I guess, one that will never be exceeded in the next 300 years. Some designs are just perfect, and take that perfection with you, out there into the final frontier.

Trivial pursuits as the world burns

In times of hardship - whether it's a matter of grief, or health concerns, or the greater societal nightmare that we see every single fucking day - it's still important to take some time for trivial things.

Trivia distracts us from the real world. It's not as important in any way, and you should always have your goddamned priorities sorted, but it's an essential part of keeping sane for many people. Sometimes we just need to just take a break, and get one short breather from this hectic nightmare.

Our entertainments are not as important as real world concerns, that's why it's trivia. But trivia can be a fun respite. Do what you can to change the world, and ignore all the fools, but also take a moment to switch the fuck off, because a machine that runs on righteous outrage needs to go into relax mode, now and then.

You might feel guilty, watching an old Carry On film or rocking some EDM, instead of marching up to society's masters and telling them to get fucked 24/7, but that's natural. There are so many wrongs to be righted, and so much work to do.

But it's also all part of getting ready for the next fight. Even the military know the importance of rest and relaxation, the general public need it just as much as them.

There has been a lot of shaming over this in the past few weeks, and there are a lot of people who are convinced that anything that doesn't confront the Covid-19 disaster and the BLM protests needs to shut the fuck up. While you can understand that anger, some of us still need to take a break and indulge in something trivial, for the good of everybody.

The Young Ones: Viv's head

It took a couple of years for the Young Ones to show up in this country, so the first thing I ever saw from it was a clip on a British awards show, and it was the bit where Vivian's head gets cut off.

I was only nine years old, and this piece of slapstick gore was absolutely the best way to be introduced to The Young Ones. It made the year or so it took to actually get to this side of the world - apparently they had to bicycle courier films around the planet, because everything took a year to get here - completely bloody unbearable.

It's just lucky that when it  did finally show up here, it was unreservedly brilliant, through and through, and the greatest TV show I'd ever seen in my life. Then again, after seeing Vivian's head coming clean off like that, it was always going to be.

Too many of the bad

Who really wants video phones anyway?

Everyone is on the Zoom, and it shows how we can all work in our hermetically sealed bubbles without having to actually meet in person, but every single time I try to do a video conference, I think of this short comic by Paul Kirchner and Val Semeiks, from the Big Book of Losers, part of DC/Paradox Press' thoroughly fucking brilliant Big Book series.

Those Big Books covered a lot of different things and were so good. I think about them all the fucking time.

Writing about music is so hard

You might only have to see a movie once to really write about it well. Especially if you see it in the cinema, where you're immersed in a single narrative, there in the dark for a couple of hours. And there has been a lot of great writing about television as it happens, and you can have weeks to think about a series, and what it all means and how it makes you feel.

But I have real admiration for those who write about new music as it happens, because it's the hardest slice of entertainment  to write well about. It might take a lot of repetitive listening of a single song before you can fully judge it, and some music can take weeks or months or years to click.

But music reviewers have to crash into it hard, and instantly have an opinion about something, with no time for contemplation. They might change their opinion later on, but that initial take is always going to be there, (and if the song turns out to be a classic, you get to be That Idiot in years to come).

Retrospectives are so much easier, because you might have had years to think about something, and have seen its cultural impact, but you're flying blind with the latest singles.

Maybe it's because music is something that is beyond words, and rarely has the narrative simplicity of a three-act screenplay. It can make you feel, rather than think, and capturing that initial rush, whether good or bad, is so much harder than it sounds.

I like it creamy and I like it mild

I've become quite used to the look the waiters at Indian restaurants give me when I order a mild chicken korma. They don't quite roll their eyes at me, but it's close, and there is definitely a 'nice one, white boy' condescending smirk going on.

I don't care, I just want what I like. I'm not one for incredibly spicy foods and think the whole aura about eating incredibly spicy food is dumb macho bullshit. I just like my food creamy, and I like it mild, and I don't care if people judge me for that, because judging people by the food they eat is dumb as fuck.

Besides, I've gotten years of that look for reading comics as an adult, long before they grew up and became graphic novels. The patronising comments that I would get constantly were never smart or hurtful enough to overcome my actual enjoyment of reading the things, so who gives a shit what those losers think?

Sometimes I get embarrassed by some comics - seriously, those War Stories comics were the worst, and I had to hide them under piles of 2000ad when I read them for the last time - but I don't get embarrassed by the medium. As if I'd go off all movies just because I watched a couple of awful Troma films or something.

I'll still try new things on the menu at the local Indian restaurant, because new things are good. But I will always go back to a good korma, because they taste good. And they taste so good I don't care what people think about me for eating it.

The only time she was wrong, it was Neil Young's fault

It took me a few years of married life to realise a very, very simple fact: the lovely wife never apologises first, and very rarely says she's wrong. I'm cool with that - strong women have ruled my entire life and I'm not about to let them stop now - and it certainly made life a lot easier when I realised I just had to say sorry first.

But the only time she has ever really admitted to my face that she was wrong about something was over a Neil Young song, and I had to get several people to back me up, and find a track listing of the gig before she admitted she was mistaken, because she was so certain that she heard him play a song he didn't play.

It was when we went to the Big Day Out in Auckland in 2009, and saw Neil Young do his thing. this was festival Neil Young - not the Crazy Horse Neil Young we saw a few years later - so he did all the hits and it was transcendentally good. Cortez The Killer still fucking shreds.

He played a lot of the big hits - Old Man, Hey Hey My My, Heart of Gold, Cinnamon Girl - but one thing he definitely did not play was Harvest Moon, even though the lovely wife swears she still has a perfect memory of that tune.

She had, unusually, taken a small amount of drugs, and remains convinced they were responsible for a proper aural hallucination, remembering a whole song that wasn't there.

She will never, ever admit she was wrong about anything else, but I got her there with this song. Still, I'm just a little jealous that she got an extra tune that nobody else did. It was a hell of a show.

It's so easy to sell comics right now

I've been slowly sharpening up the comic collection with a minor - but ongoing - purge. Dumping whole runs of comics on a local auction site, and making a little cash on the side, which I'll probably plough into more comic books, because that's the circle of life.

Usually I sell three or four lots a week, and I just keep relisting and relisting them until they disappear, but I started up again when the post shop on the corner re-opened after the lockdown, and this shit is flying out the door, man.

Just this week, I've unloaded a Brandon Graham comic collection; a copy of Kraven's Last Hunt, all of Neil Gaiman's 1602 series; all of the Marvel Star Trek comics I picked up last year; some Batman giant black and white reprint comics; all 10 issues of a Doctor Who comic crossover from 2017; the anti-300 Three by Kieron Gillen and Ryan Kelly; some Mark Millar Ultimate Avengers comics; some Minimum Wage and Goodbye Chunky Rice and some repetitive copies of Kirby's Jimmy Olsen.

I sold off the last six issues of Cerebus the Aardvark, and three Jim Lee X-Men comics, and the four issues of Hellblazer that Eddie Campbell wrote, and three Clive Barker graphic novels published by Eclipse that I've had since the early nineties (I'm keeping The Yattering And Jack, because that's got some sweet John Bolton art.)

I got rid of all the War Stories that Garth Ennis did with Avatar, which had stories that were as strong as any other war stories he'd told - there is a lovely bit about fall and autumn on the closing page of one of them which is sublime - but had atrocious art that hurt my eyes. It was always going to be a step down from the first generation of War Stories artists - you're never going to match Ezquerra, Kennedy, Lloyd, Gibbons, Weston and Higgins - but these comics didn't even try. And my local comic dealer kept giving me the covers with the 'good girl nose art' variants, and I never had the heart to tell him they're the ugliest fuckin' things I've ever seen, and the main reason I decided to sell these off is because those covers are just so embarrassing.

And that's all in one week. I've been selling comics online since the late 2000s and it's truly never been this easy. Our lockdown lasted almost two months, and I think people are hungering for consumer goods, and need some comic goodness.

That's okay. I've got what they need.