JUST HERE’S FINE, TA!
Invasion! Realism Hero. The Schools of Death. Andrew & Steven. Isobel Mckenna. A Fantastic Fear of Everything. Beowulf. Blue Velvet. The Sports Edition.
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INVASION!
Last week I was chatting with Patton Oswalt, and was trying to persuade him to come to Thought Bubble at some point, mentioning some of the regular attendees, and when I mentioned Al Ewing he was surprised for a second and said "I didn't know he was English," before saying "Of course he is, you guys always come over and revolutionise American arts."
This reminded me of something I have thought for a long time about the "British Invasions" in both music and comics, which is that they're examples of how cultural appropriation and cluelessness can sometimes work in art's favour.
There's a favourite line of mine, I think from Charles Shaar Murray, that when Bo Diddley sings "I'm a Man", he's saying "so don't call me 'boy', honky," while when the Yardbirds sing it they're saying "so you can't make me tidy my room now, Mummy".
And on balance, that is of course bad. One wouldn't want a cover version of "Strange Fruit" by someone who thought they were singing about apples that tasted funny. But at the same time it gives voice to a kind of adolescent frustration that needs one.
Less problematically, though, I think a big reason that Moore, Morrison et al made such an impression in American comics in the eighties is because they were feeding back their childhood impressions of American sixties comics -- comics in which the quotidian realities of New York life like skyscrapers would be every bit as fantastical to the average British kid as the stretching and web-slinging men.
America was another world, so bizarre in everyone else's eyes it could be sold back to Americans as fantasy. I doubt the current nightmare will prove so appealing reflected back as the American dream.
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REALISM HERO
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The Schools of Death
The People’s Day of Death 2024. The Schools of Death at the Adelphi. Generation Rave coming to terms with the inevitable. Community art school methodologies, making our own tools and rituals - masks, instruments, zines, letters to those we’ve lost. Amongst us the brick bearers, fresh in their grief, entrusting their loved ones to a final mad scheme. We owe them to make it as vibrant and alive as their memories.
The School of Poetry and Performance. One woman can’t make it through the poem about her mum. Two people read poems about Netty,, who sounds rad, the person whose kitchen you ended up in at 3am, drinking tea with the chemicals cooling off you and the secrets spilling out.
Last night, ghost hunting in Lark Lane police station (See MO 7). Looking for some way to deal with the policemen in my head. Incensed at the nasty way they spoke to the dead. Aggressive, hectoring, goading. Ex-prison officers still manifesting Law as weapon against spirit.
But here, now, is the care and reverence due.
Then the guy that ran the School of Howls reads a poem his mate Sean wrote.
for “I love you” say fuck the police / for
“the fires of heaven” say fuck the police, don’t say
“recruitment” don’t say “trotsky” say fuck the police
for “alarm clock” say fuck the police
Sean Bonney (1969-2019). Anti-fascist, revolutionary socialist. I devour his poetry when I get back. Aesthetic radicalism, militant challenge - what are all you lefty occultists actually doing? Psychogeography or a nice walk in the city?
Magic is about making your own tools. Magic is the art of arranging coincidences. Magic is asking what am I going to actually do?
all other words are buried there
all other words are spoken there / don’t say “spare change”
say fuck the police
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ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS
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MINDLESS COMMUNICATION - Isobel McKenna
Guitar/bass/effects/vocals: Guisers, Even Sisters, Blue Kanues… fukken hunners of bands, honestly. You can enjoy Isobel’s patter here, and support her on the Vivarium Sounds Patreon or by trading cash for local sonics on Bandcamp.
What are the best sounds you’ve made?
The stuff I'm doing in my band Blue Kanues each time we play together. No matter what song I bring to practice, the three of them Hannah, Laula and Mattie all come up with the most beautiful parts. We are going to record an album and will be playing a Glasgow show at the end of June.
What are the best sounds you’ve heard?
The best sounds I have ever heard was deep in Hangasjarvi when I lay down in the what seemed to be quiet forest and then after a few moments of silence there was sound coming at me from every direction.
You've got a track called 'Target: 2006'. Which Transformers are best and why?
Target 2006 was the first big story in the UK comics after Dinobot Hunt for me. I remember reading it all before the movie came out so knew who Galvatron was in advance. My favorite Transformer is probably Ratchet. I had the wee toy of him and thought he looked really cool and then saw that the comic and cartoon representation of him was quite different to the toy. I really liked him sneaking about the Ark and recovering the Dinobots and then later the horror of him being merged with Megatron. Great cunt.
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A Fantastic Fear of Everything - (Crispian Mills, 2012)
A writer confronts his fear of serial killers and launderettes.
Based on Paranoia in the Launderette by Bruce Robinson, but with expansions to his micro-story rounding it into a familiar cinematic narrative. The original story is all there but the protagonist is more realised, motivated and given a substantial arc that resolves in a supplementary third act.
It’s a compact film that avoids feeling too small with a bold visual style that contrasts grotty mundanity with the fantastic. There’s a lot here, altered states and animation but even the real world is exaggerated with whimsical colour grading and striking chiaroscuro framing the Withnailian squalor. There’s clever blocking too, with one nifty sequence hiding a payoff from the audience for such a long time that I rewatched it to see if it’s cheated.
The protagonist, Jack, is an isolated man. He’s orphaned, friendless and recently separated. Holed up inside a decaying town house, obsessed by his work and plagued by fears, often manifesting as a quivering eyeball. He’s played by Simon Pegg, an actor associated with various flavours of geeky loser, which gives him a sense of contemporary atomization. The fear of judgment and ridicule, the anxiety that comes with being forever observed and the mutation of the lonely and afraid into the monstrous.
Looking through his subsequent credits, this may be Pegg's last interesting film. Maybe that’s unfair, but there's a lot of bland franchise bollocks in that list, either spaceships or Tom Cruise chucking himself off things.
Far from Big Train’s macabre absurdism or the raw energy of Spaced, a show that told this teenage geek that similar minded people existed and that they could also be cool artists and he could be friends with them if he just escaped this remote countryside gooch. Which I can’t help but feel is more important now than cranking the wheel at the IP mill.
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Beowulf / lines 537-571 (Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber, 1999)
An old schanackkee’s baleful spit upon the dead millennium's carcass, and ambivalent gift-curse to the new. While Beowulf recounts a derring tale from his youth, the poet’s tight syllables tear apart the space between the sea and the air resting over it. The percussion does something bizarre to the heroic body, making it equal to its boasts, turning it amphibian, cutting metal footprints into the seabed.
Stepping through the silt and the carnage, we receive the map to a previously hidden territory. In this far reach of the imaginal all the whales are white, and eat men, and cough them up to live anew - raving, mad and prophetic. The monsters here are dense and gigantic, impossible to understand until dead and hacked to constituent pieces. They become black and oily under the pressure of conflict, food for their blind children, dust to build more deep ocean floor.
The poetry breaks open an atom and there’s a vanishing flash of light. Look up and it gives us a horrific glimpse of Old English psychopolitics - enough to see the dark waters of time stacked above us, enough to know how hopelessly submerged we are, enough to make us pop like a billionaire if there’s the merest crack in our battle armour, on which we’ve lavished so much labour and attention:
The work of the body and the mind is one task. Warriors and workers share the same awful role. Meat must be cut from the anatomy of existence if, in our endless activity, in our busy productivity, in our fountaining language, we are to have space to grow into. But as the axe leaves its mark evil things abound, swimming in mother’s blood. The things the cutting gives life to must be protected against, named, described and destroyed so that we may flourish, through the one action of operators and poets.
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David Lynch is dead and he’s rustling behind the curtain
Blue Velvet, 1986, Dir. David Lynch
“Listen to the sounds”
Is the first line of Twin Peaks’s third season. We, like Dale Cooper, are seated, awaiting revelation both from the return of this enigmatic world and the supernatural, oracular figure of the Fireman who sits opposite. And so we listen, and we keep listening. Wooshes, crackles, hums, rumbles, drones, tones and the occasional eruption of music. There’s an entire sonic realm beneath the show which Lynch spent months creating with collaborator Dean Hurley.
“Where we're from the birds sing a pretty song and there's always music in the air”
And there is. The otherworld behind Twin Peaks’s curtains is a place of music, dance and peculiar sonic disruption. Jimmy Scott will perform Sycamore Trees there in the showstopping finale of Season 2. The Man From Another Place jives, seemingly forever, to smooth jazz. And the Fireman makes his alarming incursion into reality when the series most powerful episode reaches musical apotheosis thanks to Julie Cruise’s performance on the Road House stage, another curtain shrouded space.
“...in the field behind our neighborhood - there behind Vista - I found an ear.”
Says Jeffrey, our teenage defective in Blue Velvet. Let's break that down. Behind the neighbourhood. Behind the *vista*. Behind what is visible, lies a token of the sonic realm. An ear. If sound in Lynch's work belongs to another place, then the ear’s presence threatens to take us there. The camera wants to dive into its portal-like darkness because sound, Lynch seems to suggest, is how we cross the barrier imposed by the curtains/velvet. It is through sound that Lynch constructs the possibility of a hidden world in his fiction - a world that seemed denied to us through the visual coding of the curtains/velvet - and how his mystery aesthetic hints at a true object.
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WELCOME TO THE SPORTS EDITION, I WISH SABRE OFF THE GLADIATORS WOULD FOLD ME UP AND PUT ME IN A BIN
2 or 3 things this week, first up I want to suggest - I do do the Lynch transcendental meditation and frankly it’s the only consistent habit I can ascribe losing 4 or 5 stone fat in about 2 years to, as well as increasing my ideas and engagement with the world, boy I was down BAD. But nae now; that will cost you in the range of £300 for an initiation probably but you can develop your own mantras, hold phrases close - “we want control of our body” from Fugazi’s ‘Reclamation’ (Red Medicine) for example is one I have used. The one I had operant just this last 10-12 days was, having noted 4+ decades of a roomy and cynical outlook, “it’s better than you think.” And you know what, it usually is - last week I watched my team not lose the Scottish Cup final by 3+ (I was sincerely envisaging 7) goals and instead thanks to a magic Bulgarian in goal win the bloody thing for the first time since I was 11.
Better than I had thought, that.
Hope the European Cup final tonight is as good as that semi.
I read David Peace Munichs recently; I don’t know why more nerds don’t like football, it has statistics and classifieds, I immediately embraced basically every boyish fascination from the age of 7 and steadfastly refused to let go of a one (“how bout those Transformers” - Thomas Pynchon, well I’m glad you asked…) Anyway a great, haunting book which created ghosts direct from newsprint and explicated a great deal of the not wholly sympathetic institution Manchester United to me. Some literal off-the-page unreal sequences which break Peace’s normally fastidious physical, gruey realism, as impressive as I have seen from him since the second one in the Tokyo trilogy with its noh sequences.
Lastly no thanks at all to comics reprobate Brian Wood who would quite often say true things in such an odious way as to make one wish to disagree, no thanks at all for putting me off CrossFit for 5 years, it is everything you said it would be, you twat.