Bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture

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Superman Says Don’t Smoke (Redux)

That's why he never says yes. Superman has thought about it. He’s felt the temptation. He knows how hard it would be to stop. It takes the intervention of a blue, red and gold god, and even then the brown fingers reach out, the chest is still heavy. The craving remains for “[cough] just one”.

Superman imagines his great lungs inflating to let in a flood of smoke, a blazing city block. A forest fire. Volcano. A red hot torrent, soothing, rushing to his head. Perhaps he’ll stumble a bit. Wouldn’t that be something? His galactic capacity for pleasure, tall as the stars, is of course only matched by the depths to which he could sink. A fathomless pit that even his supervision can’t measure or supermind compute. 

What’s down there? What would it feel like to fall and to keep on falling? What if he went the other way? How high could he get? Superman isn’t, it seems, beyond the pleasure principle, it’s just the scope that’s different, and the thunderous super ego that keeps it in check. A reality principle vast enough to incorporate an omniverse. 

Superman contemplates blasting through - meeting Thanatos in the void past the wreckage of Krypton. One, maybe two punches and death would be down. No final point of annihilation waits for him, just a redshift into infinite night. Sometimes he glimpses it under scarlet neon in Suicide Slum 

If he said yes and joined the boys and girls in the alley with Nick-O-Teen, faces shadowed by light from a bleeding sun. The kind that engulfs planets. The kind that would rob him of his powers. What it would be to curl up in his cape and listen to their stories of small world’s ending, and take a long, deep drag. 

This is an imaginary story. Aren’t they all?   

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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

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Mindless Exploration - Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, 1993)

A man regards himself, doubled, onscreen. For a minute there, one of these men appears as a god, capable of manipulating the elements with hands and breath. The other, standing in front of a blue backdrop waiting for fresh images to overrun it, goes on to experience Punxsutawney – or a series of simulations of Punxsutawney – over the course of the movie. 

“Got to stay ahead of the weather.” People can be moved as easily as digital clouds once you learn the tricks (ice sculpture, boogie-woogie piano). Hell, with practice, the man might almost solve Women - “Pick out your partner and join in the fun/The Pennsylvania Polka” - but only up to a point.

Two hitches. One, while the simulation is ongoing, the man cannot die. “I’m a god”, remember? When the novelty of this grim boon is exhausted and various traditional attempts at self-improvement have been attempted, the second hitch can reveal itself. The homeless man cannot live, regardless of the intervention – “He was just old, it was just his time.” A brief turn to horror. The tik-tok inevitability too close to our awareness of death outside the simulation, or perhaps to the schedules imposed by the social order that keeps old men like this living on the street in the first place. 

Eventually, the weather overtakes our man. The other man - the unseen man, the man who moves clouds, the one behind all of this - lets the simulation resolve. Hard to say whether human interest or the immaculate performance of it was the goal, or whether this was all an aberration. 

“It’s so beautiful” - it is, assuming you wake up in it. It's perhaps not realistic to expect the man’s simulation to humanise the world, but no need to concede that it all has to play out as forecast. 

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Down to Earth - Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway

Deportation is intrinsic to Gundam. More wood that some are unable to see for the trees. The ‘wow, cool robot’ meme points to the inherent antiwar sentiment, but the original run shepherded by Yoshiyuki Tomino is fascinated by class and disenfranchisement.

The giant space colonies orbiting Earth are populated by the working class, deported to space, leaving an upper class to enjoy a world less burdened. An environmentalist take more rooted in 70’s Malthusian concerns. The deportation angle more informed by the Sanrizuka Struggle. Starting in the late sixties, and apparently ongoing, leftist and locals staging opposition to remove farmers to make way for airport expansion.

It simmers throughout the series Gundam, Zeta, Double Zeta and the movie Char’s Counterattack. Many ascribe auteur status to Tomino for helming this period, helped by him novelising many of these. With Char’s he not only wrote a novel that is half prequel, half film novelisation, he capped it with Beltorchika’s Children. Essentially a director’s cut, Beltorchika’s Children retells the finished film with committee mandated changes undone. He followed that between 1989 and 1990 with a sequel trilogy called Hathaway’s Flash.

Part two of the adaptation drops this month. Like many, I only know of the novel trilogy’s shocking ending. In between the robot fights, continuing the tradition of showing civilians being mowed down by careless actions, the most lingering scenes are the crackdowns. Government stooges called Manhunters search for people without paperwork to deport. Shopkeepers look away, worrying and complaining. A turreted robot zips the scenery with gunfire. 

Hathaway dives into a taxi. The driver, unaware he’s talking to the resistance leader, complains about him to Hathaway. He’s concerned about the Earth and overpopulation defends Hathaway. The taxi driver can’t care about the fate of the Earth, he needs money to pay the permits for his family to stay.

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Worship a rat

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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DO I LOVE YOU? YES I LOVE YOU - BUT IT’S EASY COME, AND IT’S EASY GO - ALL THIS TALKING, TALKING, IS ONLY BRAVADO

Welcome in my cave readers, comprised of every empty ventricle of the human heart. The acoustics are amazing.

FELLAS, IS IT GAY TO COLLUDE WITH THE GANG KNOWN AS “MEN”?

Happy Valentine’s Day, if you signed your card you have absolutely not respected the form, where my tiger-style tokens have arrived with an exciting air of mystique; poor from you, class (and in no way cowardly) from me.

Loads of music out for the day but I haven’t yet had time to get to Ras Kass’ Leopard Eats Face; great cover, features his twin sons with Teedra Moses (and the Inspectah) - it really does all work out in the end. Great cover.

“I never thought the leopards would eat my face”

There’s the Charli XCX Wuthering Heights OST, I particularly care for Out of Myself off that, really great Easyfun/Finn Keane production that makes guitar(?) and violins sound like her definitive glitch-pop… adds a bit of weight and pomp innit

The one I have really been waiting for though was Mette Towley’s Anxious to Love You which I have spent months listening to a c. 45 second snippet (the longest available) on her Substack mettenarrrative. It absolutely does not disappoint, didn’t know as needed that outro but I did - I play people a lot of music and Mette is the Millar/Quitely Authority of that shit, you know your flatmates were begging for new instalments of ‘The Nativity’, well it’s like that, basically a perfect blend of 80s pop trinity Madonna (cf: the bodily confrontation and voguing here,) MJ melodies and Prince with classy vintage film, musicals, iont know about that stuff. Well worth watching the videos, as much as for Christine & the Queens, because the body mind and dance are pretty integrally the full performance (she debuted in the NERD Lemon vid). I been listening to a lot of other Bad B’s (what is the procedure?) too but later for that

LONE ORIGINAL

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Nuts in May (Mike Leigh, BBC, 1976)

After two long sieges, only broken through treachery, simultaneous attack from without and within, Cromwell had Corfe Castle slighted (disassembled). New gravel paths and post offices for the village below. Ruins rarely happen by the acid of rain or friction of mere time. A good English ruin takes human hands to undo it, giving up before the job is finished but after the damage is done. To the south, the sea has bitten into the layers of coastal lime, revealing the fossilised truth of deep time, the stamp of dragons and their claim to the pleasant fields of Dorset.

Leigh loves to linger on the unwashed contents of the kitchen sink, and his best remembered sequences are full of numinous debris, prophecy and devilment - Johnny’s revelatory rant to a cowering Brian, Abigail’s dancing dream of a Greek bloke in a massive kaftan. So it is with Keith and Candace Marie, guileless idealists who’ve failed to grow from flower children into meaningful adults. Maybe they can create each other as real people again if they just speak each others’ names enough. For now their identities are embedded and desperately dependent upon the implicit codes of assumed social fortifications starting to be pulled apart. 

This time though, those chipping at the stones don’t even know they’re doing it. Ray’s placid, embarrassed demeanour has the same erosive effect on Kieth and Candace Marie as the waves on Stair Hole. Why should he have to learn stone stories, history and geology, when he just wants to play sport?

Honky and Finger’s fiery arrival feels more deliberate and antagonistic, but their glam rock noise just clears a space for Keith to empty his frustrations into. His violence, in one of the great English fight scenes, undoes himself quickly and thoroughly, pushing him into a future that looks like before but ruled by lethally bored coppers and randy factory farmers: pigshit domain, bogroll and shovel, barbed wire fences shredding his nuts.