Goodnight, Billy

The end of Billy Connely's stand-up career has hit me particularly hard, in a way that I never really expected. 

I always liked Connolly's standup for the same reason everyone else in the world does, he's a natural storyteller. He would never be the first name on my personal list of history's greatest comedians, but he's always been a solid top 10, and have seen many of his best routines many, many times.

He was always such a lively and vibrant performer, full of life, always there, always absolutely fuckin' brilliant because he's the best 'guy in a pub telling you some crazy story' anybody ever heard. So cheerful and astute and loud.

And now that's all done. The health problems might not be as bad as the tabloid press made out, but Connolly has had to give up the stand-up and live shows.

And I think I'm more bothered by it than Billy is. He's hanging out in Florida, living out his days on the American swamp, and getting everything out of life he can. But the knowledge that this beautiful mad fool, owning the fucking stage, can only be found in fuzzy old videos anymore, is properly heartbreaking.

Gotta stop thinking about the explanations for kids stuff

Decades of post-modern culture pop analysis bullshit has absolutely ruined me and vandalized my cultural appreciation, because I just can't appreciate things for what they are.

I can't just get lost in a movie or TV show without thinking about how they made it and the challenges involved in making those images. And I can't stop watching dumb kids programmes and wondering how they logically worked. What is the economy of these cartoon worlds? What are the physics of the thing? How do they function?

Do they eat meat in the wonderful dayglo world of Hey Duggie, where every piece of life is anthropomorphized? Who supplies the ingredients for their Pinky Ponk Juice to the dwellers In The Night Garden? Is Thomas The Tank Engine like Cars, and take place is a post-Terminator society?

The answers to all these questions is, obviously: IT DOESN'T MATTER. But I still can't just enjoy things for what they are, and have to dig them apart and look at them for revisionism and explanations

This bothers me a lot, but the lovely wife has no problem in imagining Thomas and his 'really useful crew' as a bunch of crims planning a heist, and just thinks it's funny. And the kid just likes the sedate and colourful adventures. I just need to get over myself and find the child inside, before I ruin it for everyone.

Stealth on the Blu Ray shelf

I spend way too much time thinking about the first blu-ray I ever saw on the shelves, and how it was a copy of Stealth, the Josh Lucas and Jessica Biel-starring 'jet fighter with a brain' film that absolutely nobody demanded.

I just wonder if it went to a good home. It cost $40 so if it was bought and paid for, it went to somebody who could really appreciate Stealth for the cinematic masterpiece it so clearly must have been, somebody who needed to see it in the highest possible definition. I bet it's still there on the shelf in their house, gathering dust as everyone goes streaming, but just waiting for the day that someone, somewhere says 'We should watch Stealth on blu-ray'. Its day shall come.

And it all seems larger than life

It took me a while to warm to The Chills, but I eventually got to the 'I'm a haunted alien youth' stage like everybody else, and listened to them alone in a dark room with a deep bottle of vodka. It's just what you did in Dunedin when you're a young 'un. 

And the recent documentary about the life and times of chief Chill Martin Phillipps was absolutely excellent, and not just because I ache for the past Dunedin, my absolute favourite city in the world as a kid.

It's because I also felt very seen when Phillipps is sorting out his 'collection'. It was so easy to see my own habits in the way he has built up this vast amounts of pop culture bullshit, with lines of DVDs snaking around the hallway, old boxes full of older toys and comics and records and all sorts of clutter.

And in between the heartwarming story of Phillips writing some of Aotearoa's very best songs, and the starkly brutal reality of his recent health issues, there's all this trash in the singer's house, cluttering up his world. And he's wondering how the fuck he ended up with a dog toy that means nothing to anybody, and is just a little chewed up piece of rubber.

I'm no Kondo head, and I like my stuff, but a collection has to be refined and curated and sharpened as often as possible, or it can take over your life, and that's no fun for anyone. Even melancholic pop genuises like Martin.

Everyone can do a journalism, can't they?

The Daily Planet has the worst fucking subs in the world. Their big lead stories are full of flowery words, have intros that are stuffed with passive language and they always bury the fucking lede in the fucking fifth paragraph. Does anyone actually look at these things?

No newsroom I've ever worked for have put out copy this sloppy - editorials disguised as straight news, feature-type writing on breaking events and just terrible news judgement. Journalism is something that anybody who writes think they can do - after all, they consume a lot of it - but there are still rules, motherfuckers, and they are there for a reason.

The Daily Bugle is as bad as almost any other fictional newspaper, but stands out. You don't see as much in other artifical newsrooms like the Daily Bugle, because the writers at that paper are supporting characters. But Lois Lane and Clark Kent are meant to be award-winning reporters, and their finished copy that goes to print looks like deranged rants, with outrageous headlines. 

It's the same in every medium - there is an incomprehensible headline in the new Justice League cut that is a piss-poor excuse for an Ayn Rand reference - but they keep publishing news stories in the comics that are absolute nightmares. It's been going on for years and years now and never gets any better, and there were two particularly egregious examples in some recent Superman comic by Bendis, and I wanted to take a red pen to my library copy, with something to fix in literally every line.

But there was also something new in these comics, and Bendis got it just as appallingly wrong. There's a Twitter feed, where the writer parcels out bits of information in the form of tweets. Whether that works or not as a storytelling technique is debatable, but while I can believe a man can fly, I can't believe that any news organisation would do this:

I get really nervous dealing with the biggest stories in the country and this is wise because if you fuck them up, you're fucking fired. There are no excuses.

And I love the social media and editorial teams that I work with, but if one of them put out something about a hot terrorist, one day after a mystery attack that killed hundreds, they would be fucking gone. Any media outlet would be rightfully crucified for that kind of shit.

The only horrible explanation is that the DC universe is such a nightmare that hundreds of people are getting killed all the time - gassed at the movies by the Joker, blown up in an airplane crash by Kobra - so it's no big deal when more are slaughtered, and everybody goes on their way.

But still, it's just bad media. And for fuck's sake, don't start a fucking news story with: 'In what he thought was a....', you absolute fucking child of a news writer. An old-school sub would eat your fucking face off for that.

Feeling dusty after the tidy up

I love sorting my comics shit out, and heaving around piles and piles of old paper to get them into some kind of order is something I can actually control is this weird world, and I'll take what I can get.

But more and more, for days after a good sorting, the eyes ache and there is dust in the back of my throat that won't come out. I was always mildly allergic to dust and dust mites, but dealing with comic books that I've owned for 40 years, and all that decaying paper, is the one thing that really gets things going.

It's not going to stop me, because this kind of zen calm is always worth a little irritation afterwards. It's only getting worse as both me and the comics get progressively decrepit, but I can only embrace the breakdown.

Daddy wasn't there!

 

There's more to life than daddy issues, despite what the movies keep telling me.

Barrie Chase gave it everything

For something with so much hysterical shrieking, It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has aged amazingly well. There is some mindboggling physical comedy which is eternally funny, and these ancient and hilarious comedians are doing some extremely hectic shit. Watching Jonathan Winters literally demolish a service station with his fury is a sight to behold, and is rightfully one of the great slapstick scenes of all time.

But there's still nothing in the film that beats Barrie Chase and her super intense twisting around Sylvester's living room. Chase is the last surviving member of the main cast, according to the internet, and I'm sure that longevity can be partly attributed to her absolute commitment to the twist, in the face of all distractions.

That's art, that is.

The Incomprehensible Thor

Reading some old Marvel comics is usually a nice, calming influence, and it's always fun to chill out on the overwrought melodramatics and spacey superheroics in simple tales of times go by. There's tonnes of them in the local library system, and I regularly load up on them.

And when it's something like a big, chunky reprint of the Thor issues where the whole Celestials On Earth thing is first sorted out, that was exactly what I was after. I read the earlier Eternals comics by Kirby that set up the scenario years and years ago, but had never seen that resolution in Thor #300. I knew what happened mainly from the detailed synopsis of the Marvel Handbooks, and had somehow picked up the fact that the Destroyer was heavily involved in the climax, but I had no idea how it actually went down.

So I'm reading the book and it's all going along nicely with the usual Eternal nonsense, until the disembodied eye of Odin starts retelling the Ring Saga, and I had fucking idea what was going on. There are multiple reincarnations of multiple characters, and things are happening for some reason, and there's a lot of words and if I genuinely can't follow what's going on as a 46-year-old, how the shit would I have been able to follow it as a kid?

I'm sure Roy Thomas felt it was all perfectly clear, because he spent his entire comics writing career always being perfectly clear. But he also liked squeezing old highbrow culture into his superhero comics and they just did not always fit. And with little knowledge of the whole Nibelungenlied saga - I think I read a P Craig Russell comic back in the 90s? - I was completely baffled by the whole thing and couldn't follow it at all.

By the end the comic suddenly remembers about the Celestials, and sorts all that out with a lovely big apocalyptic battle. And even though Roy went off to DC in the middle of all this thing, it is genuinely interesting to see how it all plays out. I just wish we didn't have to take the Ring road to get there.