If you're going through hell keep going

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Work Punk

The Mindless Ones have their bleeding digits on the throb of the cutting edge of culture, constantly hunting down tomorrow and reporting it to your simple faces. That's why I found myself in Peterborough on a Wednesday night, heading for unpopular nightspot Velvet Panache. My guide is Javin, a young entrepreneur who sells warm cat food encased in self-propelled, furry mouse-shaped pouches. “Cyberpunk is dead, Steampunk doesn’t resonate with those who don’t want cogs on hats.” Says Javin, dressed head-to-toe in M&S. Arriving at Velvet Panache, Javin introduces me to Force, a BMX base jumper working for Redbull. Force has been hard at work covering the neon with motivational posters and installing desks for the night ahead. The night is simply called “Wednesday” and it’s at the vanguard of a new Punk emerging from the East of England - Work Punk. “We just got bored with our exciting lives” explains Javin. “The 21st century has forced young people down dynamic career paths that pivot almost weekly. There’s a growing movement of kids who just want to do the same thing for a while.” The night starts at 9pm sharp with a chatty crowd of relentlessly sensibly clad punters ready to sit at desks. “I have no idea what any of the stuff I’m entering on this spreadsheet means and it’s brilliant!” says Amantha, an axe-throwing idea barista who has travelled from Northampton with her crypto adviser friend Tremensa.  "Enough chat! I need that report on my desk before end of play today!" interrupts Tremensa with wry seriousness. Amantha apologizes deliriously and returns ecstatically to her meaningless typing. Things are looser at the water cooler: "Did you see the singing competition show on the television last night?"

"Yes. I enjoyed it. They all have good voices but my favourite is the girl with the dead nan."

Unlike most youth movements, Work Punk doesn’t have a musical identity. The gentle sound of keyboards tapping, chairs creaking and functional talk is all these kids need. 

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The gripes of Roth

When the BBC producer mailed, asking if I’d go on Front Row to discuss the Stahl House going up for sale, how could I refuse? They wanted a critical massage of Modernism’s favourite screensaver, the one everyone knows because lensman Julius Shulman turned Los Angeles into a lifestyle with his balmy night shot of it hanging above the city’s vast electric grid.

Still, I don’t really do glow-ups for Mid-century Modernism. Way too coffee table. But I had an idea. Radio 4 would expect swooning - that perfect cantilever and pool, the city twinkling below. Hoogivza - right? I don’t actually know what the Stahl ever really said about LA, beyond the fantasy. A rich family, a great site, a killer view. Architecture as poster. Lovely, sure, but thin gruel for a city fighting fires and ICE.

Then there was Olly Wainwright’s roasting in City of Memes, an essay by Shane Reiner-Roth in the Los Angeles Review of Architecture. It skewers the Guardian critic for his ‘oldarchitecture criticism’ reducing LA to spectacles and symbols, ignoring the political, economic, and social realities that actually shape the city.

Instead, I’d extol the virtues of Isla Intersections, the new social housing I’d ‘judged’ the winner of the housing category at the World Architecture Festival in Miami. Tucked beneath the Lovecraftian snarl of the 110-105 Freeway junction, Ghazal Khezri of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects has stacked shipping containers into a jagged, deconstructed village for LA’s homelessand army vets. A real place but carved out of fumes and SLOAP (Space left over after planning, folks). Surely Reiner-Roth would approve?

I email back: When do you need me at Broadcasting House? When the replies comes in - 6.45pm - I relax, and type:

Ahh, no, sorry. Can’t do that. Taking my daughter to Guides then.

Phew.

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St Francis Damn

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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FFFFFFilth #4: Imagine Me and You (The Filth, MorrWestErskCo Ltd, 2002-2003)

It’s not all action round here though. Remember the girl who invented Severance in 1993 to survive the school day? Or the cleaner who eased his pain by hoovering speed so fast he never touched the weekend? What about the social worker who broke up private and professional by enacting behaviours at home they’d tried to coach people out of all day?

(That’s not me. I’m in less than half of this picture.)

Let’s start again with a quote from Kieron Gillen:

“When I was young(ish) and cruel(er), I had a one liner. People who liked Kill Your Boyfriend got into writing comics. People who liked All Star Superman got into writing about All Star Superman.”

To which we might add: People who liked The Filth went to work for the council.

(It’s me. I’m people.)

Just out of Uni, sick of feeling like a machine that talked shite all day, I committed to welfare checks, leaky roofs, and phone calls about turds in lifts. Home life at that time: cancer, multiple sclerosis, redundancy. Where did life start and work end? Good question! I made some comics along the way. Sometimes I wrote about All Star Superman. 

Such an uneasily partitioned sense of self isn’t necessarily uncommon. Nor is its eventual collapse. The muck flows through us, gets mixed up with our hopes and delusions, our sense of how we act in the world, our survival mechanisms and inside jokes. Difficult to say what that mix would look like if you could see it. 

Then you crack open The Filth and look at mad cat-loving cunt Greg Feely.

See how his swagger-free empathy seeps into Ned Sled’s hardcore day job, and vice versa.

Know self, and know that this self-awareness won’t do much to save you. 

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Strength is Worthless 

So, what does it mean for a Transformer to die? Anthropomorphising them more after the Unicron revelation, the UK comics and Simon Furman make them mortal. Bob Budiansky laid out his terms early on. Spider-Man sees Gears die and is horrified. Optimus spells it out for the reader: we do not die as you do.

The web-head never sees Gears restored. His brief friend is dead. Twenty three issues later, as the US book flies, Optimus Prime dies.

Afterdeath! has become a joke in most quarters. Celebrated by those sickened watching Optimus’ California render farm version execute downed opponents. 

Optimus Prime and Megatron duel in a video game the likes of which was decades off. Simulated life reacts to compassion, punishes malfeasance. Optimus cheats, escaping a last minute 1-up loss, but in the real world cannot abide a victory with civilian casualties. A death by principle. 

What does death mean to a video game character? What if their killer is a digital entity itself? The axe forgets, the tree remembers. Think of the words of Tarkovsky’s Stalker: When a man is born, he is soft and pliable. When he dies, he is strong and hard. When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life. That which has become hard shall not triumph.

We see in AI a kind of hope of immortality. A mind forever preserved. A hard, unfresh being. Manipulated and calcified. A life beyond death.

What happens when a Transformer dies? The same as us mere humans. We leave this life with a sliver of hope that this is not the end. They simply have no other plane to journey on to, returning to physical realm.

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A Brief History of British Comics
9: Battle Picture Weekly

• Publisher: IPC Magazines
• 8 March 1975 – 23 January 1988
• 644 issues

If you grew up in the late 1970s / early 1980s you were closer to the end of WWII than to now. 

War permeated childhoods, was baked into the firmament of British pop-culture. Sunday afternoons were cathode-lit by war films; family visits soundtracked by the Sturm-and-Drang ambience of stoic combat. Grandparents had lived through the war, fought in far-flung corners of the globe. Toy shops were packed with ‘Airfix’ warplanes, and ‘Britains’ die-cast soldiers. 

It was hard-wired into us. Tossing imaginary grenades at imaginary Germans. 

War comics were everywhere; smudgy weekly anthologies peppered with “Gott-in-Himmel”, “Take that Nazi!” and “AIEEE!”. Stodgy historical accuracy rubbed shoulders with patriotic fervour and illicit battlefield thrills, steered by jaded editors who may conceivably have seen active combat. Victor, Warlord, Commando – they blurred into one jingoistic parade of explosions, rattling machine guns and stiff upper lips. 

Battle (full title Battle Picture Weekly) was bracingly different. The product of the same renegade energy that produced Action! and later 2000AD, devised by Pat Mills and John Wagner as a tonic to the generic war-dross littering newspaper shelves. Battle was cut through with a working-class consciousness and deep sense of scepticism. Characters were jaded, reluctant, anti-authoritarian, and hard as winter on the Russian front.

Instantly iconic strips include the frazzled, deadly mercenaries of ‘Rat Pack’, subversive flyboy ‘Johnny Red’, the Eastwood-riffing ‘Major Eazy’ and of course ‘Charley’s War’. An early Mills masterpiece, this was an anti-war symphony beautifully drawn by Joe Colquhoun, who could go toe-to-toe with any titan of the medium. 

Vibrant, dynamic covers, dripping with exploitative energy barged stodgy competitors off the shelves. The brutal, ground-level, subversive take on war strips chimed with the bleakness of British post-war life. Unemployment, punk nihilism and pointless wars in far-off lands.

4-colour death dreams of the crumbling empire.

AIEEEEE!!. 

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Mulholland Dread

Almost at the end of 2025’s David Lynch retrospective. Only Inland Empire to go, which my local cinema has disappointingly rescheduled from its initial Boxing Day showing.

On this viewing of the majestic Mulholland Drive I was struck by its omnipresent paranoid fantasy of control. It’s there in the iconic Winkies scene. Patrick Fischler’s terrified therapy patient says ‘There’s a man, in the back of this place. He’s the one who’s doing this’. More often, it’s shown in gnomic phone calls in mysterious corporate rooms, the machinations of Hollywood’s Deep State, enforcing casting decisions for occult purposes.

This idea that one’s life is being controlled by sinister forces is present in Lynch’s films from the beginning. In Eraserhead The Man in the Planet is literally pulling levers behind the scenes. But Mulholland Drive’s meta-paranoid dread creeps into the bones of the production. Perhaps you signed up to play a plucky girl detective in a TV mystery show and wound up starring in your director’s lesbian sex fantasy. What on earth do we make of Michael J Anderson being given a fake, full-sized body?

To watch this in 2025 feels newly uncomfortable. In the brilliant podcast Diane, our Bobsy drew attention to how the demonic possession plot of Twin Peaks corresponded to the actual beliefs of MAGA conspiracist Alex Jones. If, as suggested in last week’s Mindless missive, Lynch was mapping the hidden spiritual terrain of America, then perhaps these evocations of conspiratorial paranoia are further evidence of how intuitively he tilled the nation’s febrile soil.

Of course the last third of Mulholland Drive redirects the paranoid fantasy. SPOILERS! but maybe the sinister agent behind all of this is YOU, hiding behind an anaesthetic fantasy because you offed your ex. You are in charge of your life but the terrible truth is you’ve fucked it. The shadowy controlling forces are a metaphor and we’re not supposed to take it literally, right? Right?

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WELCOME IN THE DOOM PATROL PERIOD

GOAT CREAM

The static selector serpentine liver quo vadis

In align misalign combine I’m trying and they

Seashell invisible queen algae ridiculous silly man

Caterpillar tractor invariably erupts the silo

Syllabus syllabic syllable Scylla rock crater crust

Maquette magniloquent aggrandised sauce slap-up

Holistic theories of quarter century turns around the sun

Corrupt I could’ve been a snottery ivory tower cunt too

But in the end it lacked the wherewithal to move me

Cui Bono? You two egg carry melon collated

Sabre machine love cream 98 ‘97 mentalities

Cut-up method acting lol guy turnt Thursday ham

Ash lane crying over tree lounge and the Monday

Hum now elaborate pink lightning blitzen and donner

Coil rock hard bicep curl and twist backwards

My arms - the throb, suppurating messages massages

Coercive again whichever meek now calendar

Cursive yet help all over my scream for ice cream

Whippy hard and soft therefore whatsoever next

Question: which hand is forcing the page now?

Meatballs and Sweden; cheese sauce, goat cream

Articulacy fails behind the

Netherboard thatuum

Continuum in

                               u um,

And an oligarch’s egg

[note: I have not had a brain incident, below is automatic writing in my secondary dexter hand]

What should I tell you?

fish angle earrings

hearing earthlings

cock weathervane

morning

Alas, nay neg

regulate hydrate

mette music muscle

unreleased

untrammelled 

Well

Completely absolutely ultimate spend

EVERYTHING

C.A.U.S.E.

Bend against parallax and the grids pattern

Pattern dialectic umbrage without the outside

Hedonistic holistic mystic intersperse the tubes

D’you fancy me? Do you fancy her? Yes and yes

Quotidian pulse in the fingertips and sweat

Turquoise and emerald shore sandy jewels jacked

Run, kid, run and the hand’s amongst ‘em

Keep these hands on quintessence latticework

Cerulean blue oceans of time; matrices

Cube stood on a vertice - you are a joy

Polyphonic polychromatic polyrhythmic bounce

Garbed in death, seeds behind the black rainbow

And a garden of delight, boundless wealth

In Elysium, there I

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ELECTRONIC THE PUNISHER “TALKS” (Marvel/ToyBiz, 1991)

If vengeance could really talk, what would you say, Frank?

VENGEANCE IS MINE

Probably immediately contradict himself: the falsehood revealed by hitting the switch on the backpack. If the mission was revenge it would be close and targeted, limited to the handful of hoods who flooded Central Park with the orchestral choke of machine gun fire one summer’s day in 1976, 25 years before he took voice. it was never revenge. They used Thompsons, anachronistically, cosplaying the mafiosi of fifty years before, trying to make a statement. 

The money the bootlegger boys made in the golden age of American mayhem was like later Nazi gold - dense enough to warp the fabric of finance around its own logic: billions of dollars into the illicit economy, slosh fund big enough to establish an indestructible criminal infrastructure and permanent shadow culture, just as the industrial might was beginning to flex and, conceivably, empower its utopian ideals to compete with the old European families.

But they got in there first, The Empire Never Ended boys, a black hand pulling at the threads of the great tapestry, ensuring the republic would never realise its dream.

The Punisher’s abundant lust for violence - that Indochina blowback, What If We Became The Empire - was always going to find more victims.

NO ESCAPE FOR THE GUILTY

There was crime before, sure. But America loves to think big. For a revenue stream to build an an organisation capable of weathering the state’s tendency to monopoly, you need something extravagant, like a ban on alcohol.

American Christianity’s’ reliable love for the Devil’s charms - their inability to understand humanity - was all it took. By the time the temperance laws ran out, the structure was big enough to generate its own new reasons for being. Graft, gambling, girls. Protection, union rackets, eventually heroin, once Frank’s old Marine buddies had smoothed out the supply lines.

RAT-A-TA-TAT