Ehhthang Ehhthang

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5 COMEDOWNS
Comedown 1: Cramp
(Club UK, 1994?)

When I first took speed, it was a deep, instant immersion. After psychedelic dalliances with the fringes of rave culture in the countryside, this was into the big leagues with both feet. Club UK, Wandsworth, London. Three-room mecca of 4-to-the-floor techno, at its early nineties peak. Seamless four hour sets by Andy Weatherall, Carl Cox, Dave Clarke.  

We travelled up on the train, took a bus, and found ourselves in the queue outside. Bass thrumming through the corrugated steel shutters. Proper security – bomber jacket hard-nuts, no fucking around. So we time-bombed the Rizla wrapped grams of speed before getting in.

It hits and I’m switched on like a robot. It all makes sense in a rush. A synergy of physicality, rhythm and sound I’ve never felt before. Dancing. Really fucking dancing. Heartfelt brotherly conversation with a Basildon plumber atop a platform. Sweaty hugs with friends on the dancefloor, vows to never stop doing this. Chain-smoking B&H in a grimy corridor and they taste so good. On it goes. Hours of laser-focused euphoria.

And then it's over. Cast out, eyes-wide in the brutal morning city light, clad in a sodden, clinging adidas 3-stripe. Back to Jim’s house in Brixton. Not yet a native of this cursed capital, I am geographically clueless. Initial buzz, chat and spliffs, the speed is still coursing. People peel off towards bedrooms and collapse. Still wired, I assume the same position. Maybe I’m tired too?

I am not.

Trapped alone in a stranger’s empty bedroom, I stare at the ceiling. My mind reels and races. A one-sided Kerouac speed-rap. On and on. I feel insane. Teeth clenched. Suddenly my calves seize up, like balled fists. Agony. I grit and howl silently. What is happening? Maybe using those muscles unbound for 8 hours has a price?

Worth it. 

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MINDLESS EXPLORATION - The City, Babe: Pig In The City (George Miller, 1998)

Some say that it’s impossible to watch, let alone discuss, this film without thinking about the applications of 20th century literature.

The 2024 adaptation of Burroughs’ Queer performs a form of geographical cut-up. Its Mexico City is Rome, Sicily. Its Quito really is Quito, at least in part, while its highways look like models from a Wes Anderson movie. Many films are made this way, but in foregrounding the unreality of the landscape, Queer makes our alienation inevitable. 

Whatever our intentions, we can only ever be tourists here even in a moment of crisis. 

Pig In The City takes us on a tour of an environment that is even more aggressively unreal. Its architecture and waterways bring to mind Amsterdam and Oz equally, while its skyline is a cut-up of the most famous signifiers of the most famous cities of its century: BERLINMOSCOWLONDONPARIS, LASIDNEYSANFRANSISCO, NEWYORKNEWYORKNEWYORKNEWYORK! 

There is alienation here, though unlike in Queer our motivations are existential in a material way rather than a spiritual one. We are here to make enough money to save the farm. Our pursuers are the enforcers of capital, or those left behind by it. Everywhere we look, we can see our fellow pig people trying to help us on our way. 

In its blurring of all possible cities into one pliable form, Pig In The City also calls to mind Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, with its creeping “nightmare homogeneity of the megalopolis.” In Calvino’s novel, as in this film and George Miller’s other mature triumph Fury Road, we are able to glimpse a limited form of sanctuary. Here as elsewhere, getting there turns out to be a matter of sustained collective action winning out over battered self-interest, a million small miracles made possible by trust. “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.” 

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ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS

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Perfect Blue - (Satoshi Kon, 1997)

A former J-pop idol struggles with her identity and a murderous fan unhappy about her new career move. 

Adapted by Satoshi Kon from the manga Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis/Pāfekuto Burū: Kanzen Hentai but don’t let that last word put you off, it has a different connotation in Japanese… at least that's what your dad
told me. 

Compared to other films in that small cohort of mass appeal anime, Perfect Blue feels restrained. There’s no psychokinetically engorged flesh or throbbing human/computer interfacing, just a satisfying psychological thriller, the sort that wants to cuddle afterwards.

As out there as it ever gets is when presenting the protagonist Mima’s, collapsing mental state, a discordant blend of competing identities very much framed as her problem and not realities. So yeah, don’t go in expecting World War God or a lone post-apocalyptic wanderer tearing peoples bollocks off with his thumbs. Not to say that Perfect Blue isn’t explicit, the commodification of the body is a recurring theme and anxiety for Mima as her career transitions away from virginal popstar, a struggle elegantly represented early on as a fan raises his hand in front of his busted-in-frog-face to ‘hold’ Mima as she performs on stage some distance away. This is her stalker, known by his chat-room handle ‘Me-Mania’, a name that describes screaming fan obsession whilst echoing insanity. 

‘Otaku’ fan culture is a subject that Satoshi Kon frequently revisited but it’s arguably Perfect Blue that presents this social phenomenon the most cynically. Fandom here is online and corrupting, a paradox of tribalist isolationism rather than the more child-like escapism presented in Paprika. It’s malignant and controlling, a sort of digitised misogyny that feels very far away from the respect and warmth of Millenium Actress and yet it’s kind of funny that the earlier Perfect Blue feels the more accurate depiction. You know, funny, in that way that it isn’t.

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THE MINDLESS ONES LOVE YOU

A few months ago, my friend Tilt summed up the Beach Boys better than I ever could. He quoted Mike Mills of REM saying“…even if you haven’t heard of Big Star, you owe them, because I guarantee you: Any band you like did hear of them…” and followed with "The Beach Boys are the same, but instead of being influential despite their obscurity, it's despite their colossal fame."

I'm reminded of this by the recent announcement that there's going to be a deluxe box set based around the 1977 album The Beach Boys Love You. This is an album that, whatever you imagine when you hear the phrase "Beach Boys album", it isn't this.  

This is an album of croak-voiced middle-aged men (in their thirties, but sounding like the resurrected zombie corpse of Tom Waits) singing over farting analogue synths, but singing about how manly Johnny Carson is, and the solar system. It's outsider music - this is a record of Brian Wilson at one of his lowest mental health points, and a couple of the other band members weren't much better - but it's also crafted pop music with *thought* put into it, with chord changes you'll hear nowhere else.

Johnny Carson (Remastered 2000)

I would say it was the only intelligent response to punk by a legacy act, except that it's almost certain Brian Wilson had never heard a punk record - it was just convergent evolution. But the punks definitely heard the Beach Boys:

Between 1967 and 1977 the Beach Boys were in a commercial slump, with nobody interested in their new music, while making some of the best records ever made. The Beach Boys Love You is the last gasp of them as weird experimentalists, before they leaned into becoming a nostalgia band and Baywatch appearances. But what a last gasp it is.

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The Mayfair Set (Adam Curtis, BBC, 1999)
SAS: ROGUE HEROES (Steven Knight, Connor Swindells, BBC, 2022-25)
Peaky Blinders (Steven Knight, BBC, 2013-22) 

The warrior cult may not have been the first religion. But in England it will be the last. Its tenet, ancient enough but once formulated by an Etonian taking notes on the costa del cosplay, bundled among the names to stamp and send home, is ‘good folk may only live in peace because bad men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.’ The fatuousness and circularity are what elevate this cant to the authentically cosmic.

The warrior cult’s enemy is warriors themselves. Berets and jackets dark as November, shuffling under a medal rack externalising their patched-up wounds and shining with rain. Their dignity restricts the cult’s deepest fantasies, which become more extravagant as they disappear.

At the end of the century, the BBC’s depiction of SAS founder David Stirling (Amplefordian) is discursive and penetrating, while the handful of volatile if aging commandos who served under him remained alive to correct the cult’s myth making. Curtis (Sennockian) is the Beeb’s limited hangout guy of choice, but still makes Stirling a deluded cold warrior, haunted by the predators in the dormitory while outsourcing military doctrine for an island without an empire. By the 2020s the admiration no longer sneaks around in fear of an opposing moral force.

In SAS: Rogue Heroes, Knight (comprehensive) is captured by his own reinvention of Stirling, positing the aristocratic cavalier as the effective enemy of global fascism, rather than its cousin. This overcorrects Peaky Blinders’ earlier depiction of the national socialist as the immovable object of history, where an England of travellers, mystics, Jews, veterans, communists, gangsters and bohemians were helpless before the blackshirt. Only certain fictions are permitted - we may sanctify the warrior-entrepreneur, but not enjoy the spectacle of Mosley’s (Wykehamist) face slashed open by a razorblade.

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THE POINT IS, THE BOY AND THE HERON SOUNDS DIFFERENT IF CHESTER HIMES’ IS SAYING IT

I read Arthur C Clarke’s ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ today, I have done the math and it’s a 13 character alphabet they feed into the tetragrammaton computer; this week’s serendipitous coincidence is that in 1984 Carter Scholz, who would go on to collaborate with Jonathan Lethem on Kafka Americana also wrote - in part homage to Borges ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ in part homage to Clarke’s own the Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told [below]

shabiri

And Carter Schulz, well, Carter Scholz wrote The Nine Billion Names of God too, and - I am not making this up, like Superman I can’t lie, I am not a “writer” - so did I, around 2000, when I awoke from a particularly memorable dream in which an African woman emerged from a matrix tank having solved the name; I think I was only tangentially aware of the story, but perhaps I had read it in a compendium as a youth; when Menard is faithfully replicating the Quixote he is also simultaneously hoping to supersede Cervantes as the author - he does not want to write a Quixote but the Quixote - in comics, one might draw analogy with Peter Milligan relitigating Joyce thru Tank Girl or Skreemer, or Morrison becoming in many respects the UNwriter of Crisis on Infinite Earths. The point is I think, and this is a retrograde and soon to be lost idea, there is more value and valour in these apparently pointless or redundant human endeavours, that these are attempts to communicate and entangle yr quanta, that there are magic words for a right time and place but if the Everything Machine does it, it is no fiat, no lux and the stars may as well go out.

THE TITLE OF THIS WEEK’S COLUMN IS GloRilla - Ehhthang Ehhthang (Full Album)