All of the noise takes me to the outside

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BRIXTON TULPA

Inevitably, as usual, we get there too late but manage to sneak round the side and establish a not-bad view from alongside the gents. The reek of piss seems an appropriate companion to Cardiacs’ distinct aural combination of vaulting sublimity and back-alley skronk. On my way past the bar a veteran growls at me ‘You’re not fucking old enough to have seen them first time round’ and he’s (almost) right, but it’s nice insult for a 48-year old to bear. I mean, I also love the Beatles and I only shared the planet with John Lennon for two years.

I get it though. For those unaware, presiding genius of the band Tim Smith ‘“fell” into a pool filled with shit’ in 2008 ‘and was bravely and without complaint, crawling and scratching his way out of it until his untimely and tragic death in July 2020’ (according to Cardiacs’ website). The new album and tour are then a loving restoration, tribute and rescue mission.

The band launch into ‘Ditzy Scene’, whose extended glam ‘aaaa-aaahs’ themselves invoke the ghost of Marc Bolan. Why does this music mean so much to a (ahem) spring chicken like me? And why am I so moved by this musical conclusion to the story of a man I didn’t know and was unaware of in his pomp?

If I had a better grasp of music theory I could probably identify the combination of intervals and chord changes that makes something sound so instantly Tim. If ever there was an artist who could be, not reduced to, but embodied by his maverick, expansionist vision —  rock meets prog/punk/sea shanty/nursery rhyme/folk/martial hymn etc then it was him. Live, Cardiacs are a thrilling tribute and a summoning — Tim Smith’s improbably wide Joker smile smeared amongst the strobes like the Cheshire cat.

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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword part two.

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Show you the life of the mind

Tell just one person that you liked this newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for reading.

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Video Tracking

Alien is one of my favourite films. As a kid I was drawn to Gremlins, the cute image of Gizmo in his toy car held appeal. Watching the movie… I don’t remember how I felt. Entertained, I think. What I remember clearly is the intensity of what happened next. Nights spent in terror that the yellow eyed beasties were under my bed, waiting to strike. The crying. Getting up in anguish. Driving my parents daft.

It was years before I could brave anything ‘scary’ (childishly inconsistent). Refusing a copy of Aliens from one of the few other Betamax owners at school. Hiding just out of sight of a telly showing the video of Thriller.

Then, Alien War. The creature’s countenance was familiar from the windows and shelves of the local comic shops. On it’s way to being a domesticated nightmare. Built into Glasgow’s Arches, the experience was somehow too tantalising to resist. The films followed, starting with the recently released Special Edition of Aliens. I borrowed Alien from my uncle. 

One of my major regrets in life is never connecting with certain relatives better. Of course, it’s easier to be unforgiving to your child self, projecting current consciousness on a simpler time. My uncle would rent tapes and make dodgy copies for himself. A sci fi focused library.

He died in his fifties in the early aughts. I was allowed to scavenge the VHS remains, Alien amongst them. One bleak winter teatime I learned to love it. Especially the first half. 

From the cold, industrial spaceship interior, through the ringed planet, to the blasted landscape. The procedural nature of it. A shit job, but someone’s getting paid to do it. Damage inherited from the Red Dwarf obsession. And Gremlins die in the sunlight.

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Mindless Exploration - Hotel Earle, Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen, John Turturro, John Goodman, 1991)

Transported from Broadway to Hollywood, Barton Fink (Turturro) has money and a room to write in, but his status is as uncertain as that of the Hotel Earle itself. Bollocked in a restaurant, his feet showered with kisses, his movements increasingly suspect; corridors full of shoes with no observable owners, a ghost world that sweats and pulses, a zone of isolation and zero privacy.  

Producing work for the common man is Fink’s stated ambition. Talking to the common man, meanwhile, seems more like a prompt to restate some assumptions, meaning that Fink just blusters past salesman Charlie Meadows (Goodman)’s repeated ‘I could tell you stories!’ 

The need to feel like you’re more than liquid trying to escape flesh is understandable. Whether your life matters nobody can truly say, but you might want them to try. Shame they can choose to inflate their own reality by obliterating yours: ‘I didn't think this dump was restricted!’

Like your treasured self, art is a product of all of the physical and social circumstances it was conceived in, and its most lasting existence is boxed up in the minds of others. In the Hotel Earle, this truth is phantasmagorically overstated: doors open with a hermetic vacuum woosh, nightmares rattle around the pipeworks, and all worldly horror and possibility seems to be contained within the building. Art, like life, cannot exist in these conditions. 

What do I know though? This is just a pretty picture for you to stick on your wall. Hell, if you stare into it long enough it might just take you somewhere. There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of a mind. Given that the mind is part of the body, that may not help when it all goes up in flames. 

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I’M AT THE PIZZA HUT/I’M AT THE CENTRE FOR TARGETED PROTEIN DEGRADATION

New comic shop in the toon — £3 for the greatest What If…? of all time (it isn’t even close; flips the standard format where everything gets fucked and thereby makes the tragedy keener still) and £4ea three individual issues of Assassin, you really absolutely, 1000000%, cannot say fairer than that. The backing board on the What If has sliced my HMV tote bag as though it were Ms Natchios’ sai itself today.

Anyway it occurred for all recent chat of bad b energies, this week I got those - and Absolute Wonder Woman vol. 2 + Green Lantern #12, and the NK Jemisin Far Sector DC compact collection, oh and the Venom Spider-Man crossover issue and these are all female protagonist superhero comics, yeah Venom is a woman now, no you can’t immediately tell. That was something unimaginable I think maybe even 5 if not 10 years ago, to be able to get a raft of female led books — it’s good, I imagine there were points when they didn’t publish four simultaneously, quite often.

Elektra is particularly interesting because she was the premier solo female character Marvel had for some time (like if they had four characters to put on a sticker set it would be Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk or Cap and like “ehh, Elektra for the girls? Even although she is an ice, cold killer” - Storm almost certainly is this premium character but rarely solo) and she isn’t really a hero, she is what I suppose you would call an anti-heroine in the line of Wolverine or the Punisher, with origins as an antagonist and also, in my thesis, borne of a dalliance or obsession creator Frank ‘the tank’ Miller had with physique artist Lisa Lyon (RIP). 

What is important here, and I think you know the reason a particular group of white men lose their minds over a black Green Lantern or whatever, is decolonisation:— heroism or being the protagonist is now accessible to other groups via CULTURAL MARXISM and they cannot stand it. (Side note: isn’t Ethan van Sciver just a dismal human, really, gawd.) Elektra was recently Daredevil for a bit but I haven’t read those and I find it all a bit overdetermined when like the Falcon is also Captain America; can’t just stack superhero identities imo.

They are all human story about humans, and any division you believe in is a lie, Ima be real with you. I am trying to draw a line here to ‘trans rights are human rights’/‘gender is a prison’ (possibly worth mentioning here when Elektra was ultimately and probably wrongly resurrected for a Peter Milligan series the supporting cast included the one of the first transgender characters I am aware of the publisher doing, though it says here Jessie Drake was first, another Daredevil and Typhoid Mary character.)

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Miss Julie by August Strindberg (1888. Literal translation Peter Hogg, stage translation Helen Cooper, 1992. Methuen.)

The frantic evil, an antagonism without a consciousness, develops not from the staged apparition of the Count’s kitchen, but in the contextual materia littering the written stage. Details seen in the script but audience-invisible — Japanese pottery, juniper twigs and lilacs — precipitate the point of disaster in concert with incidental details: midsummer, menses, a hunting bitch named Diana.

The modernist theatre of Europe’s high north obsessed over this central absence counterposing a peripheral density. The pulsing ground of revelation — a painful, saturating meaning which Strindberg’s preface denies is possible, despite his continuous and disavowed attempts to evoke it — is outside the text, but pressing upon it.

It is the year of three eights, famous for three dead Emperors and five dead whores. A calamity of the Second Reich’s ruling class and the blood of the penniless painting London’s slums, with a future of meaningless screaming implicit in the gulf between. Strindberg’s script is so sullied and explosive it lies in a drawer for fifteen years before a cast and house can be found to play at it. Warnings heard too late.

With all the bitter weight of a hundred years of tragedy, Cooper’s reworked dialogue introduces a rhythm and coarseness which draws the barn dance nearer to the parlour door. But this comes with an excess of precision which flattens some of Strindberg’s luckier ambiguities. If the uncertain‘He’ of Christine’s words is expressly focused on Jean, then other, unseen ‘He’s - the escalating authorities of the Count, god or Jean-becoming-the Count - are unable to gather at the kitchen’s edge.

Cooper’s not to blame here, but with the same century of hindsight, amid the manic cascade of psychic reflexes and social inversions, some moments arrive too clearly. When Julie is cursed and condemned as a witch from Jean’s lips, we know his accusation is a confession. When the footman leads the broken lady outside with the razor in her hand, we know his vengeful destruction of the old order lacks a better vision to replace it.