Lost in the romance of Lost

I watched the end of Lost again last week, and I'm still an emotional wreck about the whole thing. 

This was the third time I watched the entire series, after watching it week by week the first time, and then binging it all again about 10 years ago. I started watching it again in February this year because it was good background noise while I worked, and there were dozens of episodes I could pay the smallest amount of attention to, because I already knew how it was all going to work out.

There's so much of it - it's one of the last examples of a great TV show that did a lot more than 12 episodes a season - so I started barely watching it as I ploughed through the episodes, although I seem to speed up when I got close to the season endings.

But then, by the time I get to the climax of the whole thing, I'm emotionally invested in this stupid show again. The creators are clearly making it all up as they go along (this is not a criticism, despite what many self-appointed storytelling gurus will tell you), but I do genuinely care about these people and the outrageous shit they go through.

That's because Lost has a lot of weird shit going on, and the most insane twists and turns, and becomes an increasingly enjoyable mindfuck as it goes on. It has an abnormally charming cast, leans heavily into any storyline that is suddenly working, and is admirably ruthless at cutting off plots that aren't. 

But, most of all, it is achingly romantic. I don't really care what the Others are up to, I just want Desmond to get back to Penny, and for Jin and Sun to reunite after so long apart.

I just want Sawyer and Juliette to have a little happiness. They deserve it.

I'll almost certainly be watching it again in another 10 years, and I know I'll be digging it. And the first advertisement I saw for something new after I watched the climax was the one for the new Josh Holloway series where he plays a charming rogue in the 1970s, and the universe is definitely telling me something there.

Because when it comes to Lost, I never really cared what it all meant. I just liked how it made me feel.

People who hate Superman are not good people

The new Superman movie looks like a lot of fun, and I'll be there opening week, because the first movie I ever saw in a cinema was the very first Superman film, and I'm always up for more.

I do have one concern about the whole thing, and it's the bit they've shown in the trailers that faithfully recreates this nonsense:

It's my least favourite Superman cover ever, and that is not because of the usual sterling work of artist Rags Morales. If anything, Morales sells the moment too well for me, because I hate those fucking gimps yelling and throwing things at Superman so, so much.

Oh, you think Superman is an evil alien immigrant or something? He's only ever done the right thing for everybody he can, but you're angry enough to bawl in his face? Who told you he was the enemy, your racist uncle on Facebook? Lex fricking Luthor? You absolute dipshits.

The real world is obviously full of these kinds of morons, making far more noise than their meagre numbers actually suggest, full of dumb fear and misplaced fury. But I don't want to read a fucking comic about these boorish arseholes.

I tried one of the new X-Men books recently, and the first half dozen pages were full of some hateful bigot being unnecessarily cruel and grossly conceited, spouting off their uninterrupted nonsense for panel after panel, and I still haven't got past those few pages yet. And a lot of superhero comics are still using the 'talking heads on TV' trope that was old when Frank Miller did it in 1986, and is now just an excuse for some  DC version of Alex fuckin' Jones (usually noted fuckwit Jack Ryder) to spray spittle all over the page

I don't watch or listen to these nimrods in real life, because fuck that noise, but it keeps coming up in the middle of the Fantastic Four or something, as if that's helpful in some way.

There is a high likelihood that the new Superman film will end with those same dipshits realising that Kal-El is truly on the side of angels after all, but if they were willing to believe Luthor's lies over Superman's obvious good, they were the main fucking problem in the first place 

Your dream is over...

Literally any time I've heard somebody in a film or TV show in the past 35 years say seriously that something is finished, and everything is over, I have the dude from Queensrÿche in my head, making me question everything.

Always in the basement with the Legion

For the first time in several years, I've got all my comics under the same roof. There is some good dry storage in the basement and that's where the bulk of them live now. About half the boxes in that space are pure comics - all the 2000ads, the BPRDs, the Justice Leagues, all the fun stuff. And all the Legion of Super-Heroes comics. All 269 of them.

While I grew up on the ironic cynicism of 2000ad, I always like the optimism of the future teens, and followed them for years. For such an easy concept, they can have surprisingly complex storylines, frequently gorgeous art, stellar design and the best costumes in modern superhero comics.

I need to hold onto a couple of hundred Legion comics, because they're everything to me, and I've had some nice moments of zen down in the basement in the past few weeks, going through all the Legion and seeing what I have actually got.

It's a wide mix, with very, very few of the post-2000 Legion comics sticking around. But this is what I need -

* Five Legion comics from the Adventure Comics era - Nothing incredibly early or important, and all in terrible condition, but they are something.

* Three issues of Valor - Because they are all tied into the end of the first generation of the Legion.

* Sixteen issues from the Grell/Cockrun era - Arguably the peak Legion era, not quite at the complications of later continuity, but the kids are older, and busting out their sexiness in some remarkable costume choices. I used to think they were the worst costumes of any Legion era, but they haven't actually dated so much, and all that skin and bellbottom pants still look groovy. 

* All three issues of Secrets of the Legion, two different Secret Files special, one crossover with Batman 66, and the immortal Subs special - While I've got all of these I'll ever need, there should have been a hundred issues of the Substitutes doing their thing.

* Three Who's Who and one issue of Legionnaires 3 - And I've been looking for the rest of those series forever.

* Twenty-six issues from volume three, the baxter era  - Almost all of them are from the start and end of this volume, where our man Giffen comes and goes, and odd issues like the one where Superboy dies, or Lauren Kent is a robot. I had such a crush on Lauren. (I also had massive crushes on Salu, Luornu, Tinya and Brin, because there was something for everybody in that sprawling cast)

* One Treasury comic, and three digests - The first way I came in to Legion history were through those dinky little digest reprints they put out in the early 1980s. There's a part of me that thinks they should all be like that, and another that thinks they should all be Treasury sized.

* One hundred and six slices of the v4 Legion - All the 5YL stuff, which is honestly some of the most complex and moving comics I've ever read in my life, and tonnes of the post-Zero Hour crew. I was reading that stuff when I first moved out of home, and I look at those covers and think of cold nights in cheap flats, and infinite possibilities. I can't get rid of any of that, although the issues after they all came back from the 20th century were not as essential

* 52 Legionnaires - See above, although there are least of the rebooted team on this side. One only needs so much Moy.

* Four issue of the Inferno mini-series from the mid-90s - There's really no excuse for holding onto this, except for the fact that Stuart Immonen was really, really good at drawing '90s teenagers.

* Twenty comics from the first great Giffen run, starting with the Great Darkness Saga - Part of the brilliant wave of glossy superheroics that crashed over the early 80s, with a far greater sophistication to the storytelling than ever before, with the solid writing of Paul Levitz. It took me years to get all these issues, but once I got the taste for Keith Giffen's Legion, I never lost it, no matter how crazy his art got. 

* All 22 issues of Bendis Legion comics - The most recent iteration of the future teen team didn't get a lot of love, but I really liked the slick art by Ryan Sook, and each issue felt like some kind of saturation, with so much going on, I'm still making vague attempts to figure out the plot. I've also been watching a lot of Robert Altman films lately, and I'm all the way here for the overlapping dialogue.

I also have about 30 post-New 52 Legion comics, but they are all in the pile of stuff to sell, because they didn't really give me anything new. 

So I don't know if I need any more Legion than this, I often get it mainly for the art - some Legion artists are deeply mediocre, and I don't really bother with them, and all those adolescents crushes have faded away.

But I'm always up for new Legion, done in some kind of style. All that optimism for a brighter future, it's got to be worth something, and it's the main reason I still have hundreds of these sproking comics.

Thank You Very Much at 4am on the telly

Sometimes there is a song that you know so well, and is so imprinted on your culture - while being completely divorced from the actual creator - that you never really think about it. It's always just been there, and it's suddenly weird to think of it as something that was created by actual people.

This happened to me very recently, when I was listening to one of the bonus episodes on Andrew Hickey's always excellent A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and he got to this song:

If you'd asked me before last week about Thank U Very Much, I would have been able to sing every word of it - albeit with some significantly changed lyrics, for reasons we will get to - but would admit that I had never ever thought about it. 

I would have assumed it was the rendition of an old folk song, or some music hall tastiness from the 1920s, or even just some advertising jingle that escaped confinement like a great meme.

It was everywhere when I was growing up in New Zealand. It might not have originated as marketing, but it was used in multiple advertising campaigns, and most notably was the key song for the TV telethons. Every few years, they'd get every celebrity in Aoteaora, rope in outside names like that guy from Coronation street and Leeza Gibbons, or Sgt Schultz from Hogan's Heroes, and broadcast the whole thing for 24 hours from multiple locations in all the big cities, raising money for some worthy causes.

There wasn't much to do in the 1970s and 80s in NZ, and the Telethon was actually a big fucking deal  TV still finished around midnight with the Goodnight Kiwi jingle, the idea of something going right through the night was actually mindblowing. And every time they reached a significant, they would crank up this tune.

It had some significantly different lyrics, no mention of the mysterious Aintree Iron, just 'Thank you very much for your kind donation' and 'you don't know how nice it all seems'. But I must have heard that tune several thousand times growing up. And now it turns out it was written less than 10 years before I was born, and created by the brother of a Beatle, originating as a message on the phone, but go and listen to the podcast to hear all those gorgeous details. That might not blow your mind, but they exploded mine.

Upon further lazy research, it was unsurprising to see that New Zealand was the only country in the world where that song got to number one, because New Zealanders really do like being aggressively polite, and love nothing more than shouting 'THANK YOU' into other peoples' faces.

The moral of this story is, of course, become a backer for Hickey's podcast, because you'll get all the bonus episodes, and it'll change how you see the world, or at least the little bit of it tied into a very, very silly song.

Fighting with Frank (part 12 of 13): You'll live.

- New X-Men #138

Art by Frank Quitely

Script by  Grant Morrison 

Inks by  Avalon Studios 

Colors by  Chris Chuckry 

Letters by  Albert Deschesne and Richard Starkings 

How to eat a sandwich

I watch every film Guy Ritchie puts out - yes, even those ones - because there is always one scene, or one performance that shines like a cinematic jewel. 

Like this scene from Man from UNCLE, a movie that was just a bit more busy than it needed to be, where action, comedy and character work are all expressed through the eating of a sandwich. So beautifully timed, so nicely played, that it's a genuine movie gem. 

At the movies with LexG

I'm still struggling to find new regular podcasts to listen to after a couple of long-term favourites faded away a couple of years ago. I definitely needed a new movie podcast, and tried out a whole lot of them, but there was just too much braying, too many bad jokes, too much outright shilling. 

My standards for a regular podcast, one that I can listen to every week, are stupidly high. I was very much enjoying one I found that really dug into movie history, but just could not get past the comedy accents the host would often use. And so many podcasts with two or three hosts invariably descend into dumb in-jokes that go on and on.

But there are still some decent ones out there, and a recent favourite is this dude LexG, who talks about all sorts of movies in a direct, funny, informative and surprisingly nuanced way.

You can find his episodes here, and I do highly recommend his stuff. I'm not just saying that because we're about the same generation, and had the same films blow our minds at the same time. He's just there to riff on movies, and their themes and suck, not just out to make shitty puns.

Like all the best critics, I viciously enjoy all his hot takes that I disagree with, just as much as it's fun to nod along enthusiastically in agreement. The riffs do go off on glorious tangents - LexG does have loads of interesting stories because he was a huge film nerd in the 1990s Los Angeles, so he's met a lot more Bond villains than I have - but that just makes it feel like you're hanging out with a good film buddy.

There's no frills, no formats, it's just some guy talking about movies. But he really does know what he's talking about, and that's enough.

I'll hot desk in hell!

I never minded working in an office. My first jobs were in factories, and I appreciate the luxury of warmth and comfort that comes with working inside on a winter's day. I like the camaraderie of the people you work with, the forever friends you occasionally make, and the weird office politics that always crop up. But I really, really fucking hate hot desking.

I have to work from home for most of the week, and the one day I do go into the office is the quietest day of the week, so there is always plenty of room. Which is good, because I've been working in the same huge room for a decade now, and I've never felt less personally connected to my workplace.

The latest fad for hotdesking is perplexing when we're still dealing with the ongoing effects of the Covid pandemic. It is keeping with the general psychopathic nature of the management caste over the past few decades - making workers more and more miserable in the pursuit of some financial bottom line doesn't work out well for anybody, even if every business school is rabid about the idea.

But just having your own space, away from home is something that that is lost now. I've had desk spaces adorned with panels from Flex Mentallo, and far too many Far Side and Footrot Flats cartoons. Small piles of strange random books that just seem to accumulate, or my own fucking plant to take care of.

There's none of that with hotdesking, none of the desks have any personality, nobody keeps there stuff anyway, and it could just be any office, in any city, in any country. Blanded down by corporate cost-cutting, quietly ruining delicate structures of small societies, instead of just buying some more fucking gear.

My last desk got cleaned out during one of my day's off, and I lost some personal items, and that was two years ago, and I'm still fucking fuming about it. I'd worked at that desk for years, and it was truly mine, that tiniest slice of space/time. I'd gone through some things while sitting there - some properly traumatic things that I still struggle to deal with - and now it's just another empty space, in a world that is fucking full of them.