Sound of Thrones: The King's final arrival

It's been a few years now and most of the talk about how Game of Thrones ended is still full of the same endless entitled whining. I stopped paying attention to it a while ago because it's just so fucking boring.

And ignoring all the nonsense just frees up more time to listen to Ramin Djawadi's astonishing soundtrack, which is still some of the most remarkable scoring I've heard. A large amount of this blog has been written while it's playing in the background - I write to the frenzied choral of the Light of the Seven; to the various permutations on the themes for the various houses; to the war drums and horns of the battle scenes; and the vicious strings of close combat.

I've been finding some very frayed metaphors for the show in its soundtrack since 2012, man, (which is still paltry compared to how long I've thought the Doctor Who theme music is a powerful metaphor for the Doctor's adventures). 

And I'm not stopping now, because I'm convinced the small change that kicks in four minutes into The Night King is a symbol for the way that there is hope in the darkness, however dim. Divorced from the context of the images it is scored to, I hear just he faintest sign that things are going to be all right. No matter how bad things get, no matter how loud the moaning gets.

David Lynch does the best dialogue

Oh sure, David Lynch's films are scintillating slices of American nightmares, a skewed and wonderfully perverse look at the underbelly of modern life, where old monsters always lurk. They're smarter and weirder than anything else out there.

They're all that, but they also have little lines of dialogue that are so pure - just so wonderful - that I happily steal them, and use them on a daily basis. 

It's truly been a privilege to live in the time of David Lynch, and to quote his works.

The grot of the old house

I have a weird fondness for the old houses that were used as locations in British 70s films, that are just so fucking gross. All the 100 year old dumps, with warped walls and peeling wallpaper stained with tobacco, doors that look like they're made of cardboard and ancient mould everywhere. Just rickety as fuck. 

I've seen it recently in a bunch of Hammer House Of Horror episodes, where working class horror takes place in working class homes, and I've seen it in a most recent re-watch of the most excellent Get Carter, where Michael Caine's lodgings and the homes of the locals are all yuck as fuck.

We don't have the history to have that sort of accumulated squalor here in New Zealand - the closest I've seen of it in real life is when we first visited the UK in 2007, and stayed in the back rooms of a pub that smelt of 200 years worth of gas leaks. And so much of it was swept away by the brutalism of the late 20th century, as terraced houses full of ruffians were bowled down, and they were shoveled into apartment blocks.

It also felt - with many notable exceptions - that a lot of low budget films moved out of these cold locations and onto sets, which didn't have the lived-in nastiness. (Although the set for The Young Ones legitimately looked like one of the most disgusting dwellings in the history of fiction.)

In the digital age, everything shines in sparkling detail, and even the grossest abodes can have a strange beauty. But that aesthetic can still be found here or there over the years, in the filthy flats of Trainspotting in the 90s, or in the sheer squalor of the main house in Matthew Holness' Possum.

I wouldn't live there, because I'm not insane, but I'll always love stories in houses that are falling apart and haunted by their own history.

Dillon Arseface is the only Arseface

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I still miss Steve Dillon every single day.

It's been a couple of years now since we lost him, and I still can't believe he's not out there, steadily producing the absolute best meat-and-two-veg comic art in the business. The world could always use more of it.

Be like this Brainiac

After read a grokload of old Legion of Super-Heroes comics, I've been sucked back into that sprawling subsection of the DC universe.

It hasn't been any one Legion, I'm been jumping in and out of his 65-year-old future history - a few issues from the unbearably sexy Grell/Cockrum days; some digest reprints of their earliest adventures; the odd 5 Years later (still my personal fave); some of the new 52; and the most recent run spearheaded by Brian Michael Bendis and Ryan Sook.

Legion fans have the loudest opinions of anybody in comics, and always have, and the most recent run hasn't got a lot of love out there. I liked it because it was fast-paced nonsense, and I like that in my superhero comics. It's not easy finding emotional depth with such a large cast - the fact that it occasionally happens anyway is always cause for celebration - and the most recent version of these super teens was so supremely shallow, but I still liked to get my feet wet in it.

Like every new rethink of the concept, it had some new ideas about characters that have been around for a long, long time. And I particularly loved the new Brainiac, who has traditionally been the biggest jerk on the term, frustrated by the slower minds around him, and abrasive and downright rude on many occasions, when he wasn't losing his mind and threatening to blow up the world.

(It was all an act, of course. Ask Supergirl.)

But while Bendis' Brainiac is still as super smart as ever, his intelligence has grown to the point that he seems to realise that he gets better results by being polite and friendly with people. That logic dictates that he can't do everything by himself, so maybe he shouldn't be an asshole to everybody.

There's always the sneaky suspicion that is also just as an act, but like Vonnegut said, if we pretend to be someone for long enough, we become that person

It's just nice that when so many super intelligent people in comics turn out to be monstrous human beings - see every Marvel brainbox of the past 40 years - that one of them has calculated compassion and co-operation into their equations, and comes out smiling.

How Anger saved my life

It was around about the turn of the century, and I was fucking miserable. This was partly because I was going through that thing in your mid-20s when you realise you have to be goddamn adult and you first really start to feel time slipping away from you; but mostly it was because I fucking hated the city I lived in.

I was far away from home, with few friends and family around, and it was a town with bad vibes. I had to give up a couple of dream jobs while I was there because the bosses turned out to be total shitheads, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with my life.

It took a couple more years before I did get my act together, and now I don't look back on my days in that city with much fondness. Except for the days when I could go to the most excellent video store in town and rent another tape in Kenneth Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle.

I knew who Anger was, long before I ever got to see any of his films. His name would pop up in interviews with other filmmakers, and my favourite comic writers would also often mention him as a strong influence. It was easy enough to find a copy of Hollywood Babylon at my most excellent local library, because that book sold like gangbusters in pre-internet days, but there was only a trace of the more esoteric side of Anger buried in there amongst the gossip.

And then, just as I was at my most miserable in that shitty new city, I saw his Magick Lantern cycle in that store on glorious old video tape, spread out over half a dozen cassettes, and it felt like a whole new world was opening up.

To this day, I stil have no real idea what was going on in his movies, but they never disappointed. They felt weird and strange in just the way I needed at the time, with magickal ceremonies burned into celluloid, strange opera and the kind of homo-eroticism that still had a kinky power.

I had read the Anger biography, so I knew the story behind these films, the way Anger would scrape up the money for his otherwordly visions, and all the scandals and silliness that surrounded them.

But they were also hugely inspirational in ways I still feel deeply. While I wasn't always sure what Anger was telling me, I adored the way he told it, and that he stuck to his guns to try and make the films he wanted, with no care for anything as boring as accessibility or coherence.

It just made me feel better. When the whole world feels a little miserable, these kinds of fims - these kinds of statements - can be a little oasis of joy, and sometimes that's all you need to get through life.

I've seen the whole cycle a few times now, (and with his devotion to the art of the short film, you can see the bulk of it in just a few hours,) and while I still have no real clue what was going on, I till think he is one of the hidden architects of 20th century culture, fusing film and pop music in a way that is still being exploited by the most mainstream of entertainments.

Kenneth Anger has left this world now, and the world is now a bit more grey, a little less bitchy and lacking in just a touch of magick. But we can still enjoy all that he left behind.

Marvel Fanfare Portfolios #16: Butch Guice

Jackson 'Butch' Guice's art found its real style from the 90s onwards, where his line became much finer and more detailed, with a wispy texture that could still shine through heavy inks. But his earlier work had a gooier, more flowing style that is still absolutely delightful.

I'll always miss you, Kevin Conroy

 

There have been a lot of superhero cartoons, and many of them have been great and thrilling and loads of fun, but only the Justice League ones from the early 2000s can squeeze some tears out of me.

I gotta get rid of all these trailers

Fucking hell, no wonder our home computer has running slow, I just found a folder hidden within multiple sub folders, absolute full of HD movie trailer from 10-15 years ago. Gigabytes of the shit. 

According to the files, I haven't even looked at these videos for 10 years, but they've been sitting there this whole time, sucking up disk space like a mofo. Unwatched and unloved.

I should do a bulk delete, and just get rid of the lot. That would be the sensible thing to do.

Like everybody else, I watch movie trailers on Youtube now, so there's no reason to store them on the home PC. I used to obsessively go through all the films on the most excellent Dave's Movie Trailer Page, and download every single trailer for films that even looked a little bit interesting (and this was still probably less than 10% of the trailers that Dave put up on his site.)

I even had an extremely nerdy system, where once I'd seen a coming attraction, I would move it into the 'seen it' file, just to keep track of what I've seen. Keeping track of everything coming out in a fractured media landscape is something you figure out for yourself..

And they just accumulated there over years, and now that I've found them again, there is a worringly large amount of films in that file that I don't remember watching at all, (but I must have, because they're in that 'seen' file).

I should just delete them all. But hell, I only need to delete some of the biggest and most worthless to keep the PC alive for a longer, if only as a reminder that I need to watch The Box again. Nobody else is ever going to remind of that.