Functions and entertainment

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SONGS FROM THE BACKSEAT

2: Zager and Evans: In the Year 2525

https://youtu.be/Gb7poHQuMWg?feature=shared

The myth of childhood innocence is pernicious; it’s a time filled with deep existential wrestling. Lonely reckonings with vast philosophical concepts, without the mental armour and apparatus to do so. Here be dragons.

The back of the car was one of the prime locations for my metaphysical battles; light flecks through passing trees, imagining myself running alongside the car at superhuman speed, thinking about death.

Mum had these tapes, ‘Songs from the Screaming 60s’, split between the US and UK. Cheap cash-grab compilations of bubble-gum pop, one-hit wonders and the occasional bona fide classic. These were rinsed on repeat during car journeys.

Zager and Evans’ histrionic, maudlin, novelty Apocalypto-pop record ‘In the Year 2525’ stood out to me, a weird meditation on the bleak future of mankind in the far-flung future. Over a tumbling, pomp-folk backing, the bearded duo intone a repetitive, escalating vision of societal alienation through technological evolution. It’s both silly and chilling:

Ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes

You won't find a thing to chew

It completely tore me up. Each verse jumps a thousand plus years, with each temporal leap resulting in yet more psychic dislocation. On one hand I took some assurance that there would still be a human race, child of the nuclear 1980s that I was. Yet this terrifying future filled with test-tube children, everything pills, and human-replacing machines filled me with dread. Fused with the understanding that I would not be around to see 2525, let alone the year 9595. My mind writhed in abstract conceptual turmoil.

Now, it's been ten thousand years

Man has cried a billion tears

Three minutes and eleven seconds of pure dread. 

Then on to the next track: The Supremes’ ‘Baby Love’.

Back down to earth with a sigh. We keep on keeping on. 

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ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS

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MINDLESS COMMUNICATION - Al Ewing

Writer, Absolute Green Lantern (with Jahnoy Lindsay, 2025 - ), Metamorpho (with Steve Lieber, 2024 - 2025), The Immortal Thor (with Alex Ross & co, 2023 - 2025). Ace podcast guest. Superstar DJ. All round sound human being.

Can you remember the first time you thought about alien intelligence?

Probably last week. I'm doing at least one book about alien thought processes and how an alien philosophy might differ from our own... while still cheating it all completely by having that different alien philosophy say things about very real and destructive human philosophies that we can't get away from. That said, I always enjoy a nice New Wave of SF story about navigating alien systems of being, so there's plenty of that in the DNA.

What are the chances of anything coming from Mars?

A million to one, they said! The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one - but still they come!

You once said it was important for Metamorpho to have a sincere relationship with the audience. Which element do you have the most sincere relationship with?

I'm incredibly sincere about the element oxygen. I think that's the one you really can't fake a relationship with. Eventually, of course, I'm going to have to break up with oxygen - but not by choice.

Can you say anything about the future of Absolute Green Lantern?

The further along I get with it, the more it reveals itself to me. Every issue from here will bring new and strange revelations until the tangled timeline of the book is entirely filled in... at which point, having untangled time, we tangle space and take a detour to the other end of the universe. I'm writing that one now.

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT FUTURE EVENTS IN WORLDS BOTH FAMILIAR AND OBSCURE!

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Scissor man

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 for reading.

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DOOMED SUMMER: Weird for Weird’s Sake.

Doom Patrol is an initiatory text,  a wild collage where everything flattens to the infinite depth that is the surface of the comic book page. Techniques that Morrison would refine and make explicit in the hyper-sigil of The Invisibles are all worked through here.

But the prevailing critical view is wilful weirdness, even Elizabeth Sandifer in her excellent Last War in Albion compares Morrison unfavourably with their stated influences, Svankmajer, Deren, Anger “…their weirdness was always in service of a clear point. They had things they wanted to say… Morrison, however, embraced strangeness for its own sake, turning to these techniques simply because in their view Doom Patrol should be weird and these were the weird things they liked.”

In Caliban and the Witch Silvia Federici shows capitalism dependent on acts of colonising violence, like the Witch Hunts, to manifest. But physical brutality at scale first brutalises the soul. The first war is on the imagination. If you need your people to become worker drones you have to destroy the magical. 

The parasitical bone city of Orqwith, the clockwork mechanics of the Ant Farm, the hungry painting of Mr Nobody, Doom Patrol is a carnival of those who want to shape reality. And they call it liberation or they call it control but it always starts with colonising the imagination. In DP #59 ‘Dying Inside’ Morrison is explicit. ‘If you want to destroy a people destroy its dreams. Generations of missionaries have lived by that noble creed.’ The Candlemaker’s rampage through the dream of the world is explicitly framed as the tactics of colonisation. “We’ve been experts at this kind of thing for centuries.”

As above so below. The abyss our culture goes through is the abyss the self goes through.

This is the battle. So what are our weapons?

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Three Wizards and a Witch
Three: Lillias Hamilton

In the Hamilton family portrait, probably early 1870s, Lillias is the one sitting like a tiger in a cage. You can’t keep something like that around. Send it where it can make havoc.

When she qualified as a doctor she was put to the Work in Kabul as court physician to our man the Iron Emir. Her fictive account A Vizier's Daughter is an encounter with an alien mind, its capabilities and genius teeming with imperial bacteria: transcendental eugenics, theosophical fundamentalism, arrogant malice.

She attended Abd Rahman’s harem through his ever advancing syphilis, keeping the gout and ulcers at bay during his genocide of the Hazara people. ‘As slaves their market value would be absolutely nil.’

Yet the operation she is most famous for remains the psychic abuse of Violet Firth. The office, clock face, Daulatabad rug, motionless dust in the window light. Deep strategy as practised by England’s most dangerous adept, several hours one afternoon in Warwickshire, April 1913.

Violet had accused Lillias of impropriety connected to a vulnerable student at Studely Agricultural College. Defrauding extra fees from some man who didn’t want to think about his embarassing daughter. Never would have even missed it, but Violet found out, and tried to use it. Her employer's ferocious reprisal began a series of events ending decades later with Violet’s successful defense of the imperial core.

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Hobbies 'N' Heroes, Yeovil

I saw this guy in a comic shop, Hobbies 'N' Heroes in Yeovil. I say comic shop, there was a box of comics under a table, the rest of the place was Funkos stacked floor to ceiling. This guy was dressed in yellow dungarees and a faded red T-shirt so he looked a bit like a Battenberg cake. He was looking for the Funko version of the Transformer of Gil Gerard dressed as Tom Baker's Doctor that transformed into KITT painted as Rainbow Brite. It was down the bottom of a four metre high stack, the whole lot collapsed and buried him. His confused scream still haunts my nightmares. I tried my best to dig the man out alongside the shop assistant. I was frantic but the shop guy seemed more concerned with his stock, instructing me to place the boxes rather than throw them. The Battenberg guy wasn't there! It was fucking mental! Didn't make sense. The shop guy didn't seem too bothered and asked me to help stack the massive-headed nightmares back up. I was in shock and complied. I noticed one of the Funkos had yellow dungarees and a pink T-shirt. It was a character I wasn't familiar with called David Grahams. I asked the shop guy if we should call the police but he dismissed the incident as "probably just a magician showing off". So if you find yourself in Yeovil and you like Funko Pops then I'd recommend Hobbies 'N' Heroes but for those more interested in actual comics, the almost complete lack of back issues and sparse choice of modern titles mean I won't be returning.  Two stars.

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Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter

There is, though, always a danger when it comes to writing stories "based on true events". Whether you stick to the facts or just use them as a baseline for more creative wandering, the fact is that creating a narrative is a matter of pattern recognition and creation, and human beings are, by our nature, pattern-recognisers first and foremost. (There is a long explanation of why this is the case which I will save for a future post).

If you're looking for coincidences, you'll see them everywhere, and you'll start noticing events that fit into the pattern you've seen. This is, fundamentally, the basis for Moore's "I made it all up and it came true anyway" line in From Hell. You notice a thing and then suddenly it's everywhere -- twice today in different contexts I saw people using the word "ovipositor" to describe different bits of right-wing horror. I'm sure I'll see it again now that I've noticed it -- and likely now so will you. The problem is that your brain also starts to think "twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action". Why are all those people talking about ovipositors? What is their agenda? Who's paying them?

There's a phrase Ian MacDonald used in his classic book on the Beatles, Revolution in the Head, that has stuck with me for thirty years – "the Manson Family crossed the interdisciplinary divide between textual analysis and mass-murder". The more I look at the way the human brain works, and the more engaged I become in creating fact-based work which relies upon chains of associations and what one might call narrative pareidola to imply connections and give thematic resonance, the more I realise that that interdisciplinary divide is rather narrower than one might think.