Medb for it

ITEM
Motor Cross

"I'll always go one better for Jesus!"

U.S. stunt evangelist Terry Cress has taken prayer to a new level.  Ahead of his sold-out show at Ardingly Showground I got to sit down for a brief chat.

"I saw folks like Keith Wheeler and before him, Arthur Blessitt doing great work and making great money, carrying the cross around all these different places in the world. One thing caught my eye though.  They both had a wheel at the back.  I thought, 'well shoot, why not have two wheels and an engine?'"

This was the beginning of Cress's custom crosses that now travel the world as part of his Motor Cross Derby, wowing audiences with the sort of stunts that made Evel Knievel an icon.

"The stunts have gotta be death defying - just like Jesus. It's what he would want.  I broke my back two years ago but Jesus helped me get back up and keep going."

Cress is referring to the incident in Croatia where he fell short of passing through a flaming halo and crashed into a 50 foot baby Jesus's face. 

"It was a miracle. But listen, I don't want to just talk about my incredible stunts. I'm a humble guy, like Jesus! There's other folk who keep this show on the road like the beautiful Jumpin Jesettes and my son, Li'l Jimmy The Bullet"

Terry's 18 year old son, James is the latest Cress Cross crowd pleaser. He is inserted into a giant cross-shaped gun and fired through giant wire and paper representations of the seven sins.

"Thanks for coming and enjoy the show, God bless you!" Says Terry as I am ushered out.

Later that evening, James Cress is badly injured by the horns of a coveted ox. Terry remains unavailable for comment.

ITEM 
The Horned God (Pat Mills, Simon Bisley)
Part Six: This is how you lose the time war

Slaine is ultimately the story of a hero that fails. The price of his failure is the Goddess flooding the Land of the Young destroying the tribes that claim to worship her.

Sengann has started the process that Christianity will continue, building a temple of stone over a sacred natural space. Klaus Schmidt’s investigation of Gobekli Tepe proposes ‘first the temple then the city’ we build places of worship first and the social ecologies and infrastructure follow. The city virus gets in through solar religion. The goddess floods the land as corrective. She is not for one tribe, she is for the totality of the system. And she does not trust that Slaine will be able to stop the progression toward cities, empire and tyranny. He is too much the solar god, too much mired in blood. As the battle begins Slough Feg the old horned god, the life force perverted into living decay declares ‘Eyes without life, sundered heads, piles of carcasses; these are pleasing words to me’ as Slaine decapitates one of his own soldiers in arcane ritual.

The tribe’s failure is clear. Slaine’s failure is Medb. Named after the legendary Medb of Connacht, wife of nine kings. Kings are chosen, to hold the land they need to be legitimised and it is the queen that grants sovereignty. Disguised as Megrim Medb performs this function for Ragnall and Slaine but it is a false legitimacy, granted by the Megrim shadow not the witch queen herself.

Slaine implores her to help him bring back the age of witches and matriarchal society. Medb refuses. She doesn’t believe he can do it. She doesn’t believe that if he does it will last. The flood immediately follows her refusal.

The flood is Slaine’s final lesson. He is the goddess’s consort, not her master, she decides what happens. As the druid rages against betrayal and the need to control women Slaine accepts the flood. It is this acceptance of his failure that finally makes him the Horned God.

ITEM
Deadly Letters - Saga of the Swamp Thing #35-36 (Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, 1985)

ITEM
Suggested For Mature Readers
1: The Revisions

It was never about taking the fun out of things.

That’s the lazy misconception, a cheap critical cudgel. Of course, it is easily evidenced by bad writers and bandwagoners, but it misses the point.

Revisionism was about re-thinking things; it was a storytelling engine. Smart and interesting creators playing weird new games with familiar toys.

It’s often pitched as comics’ adolescence, with all the condescension that engenders. The truth is though that adolescence is a time of great exploration and expansion. There is energy and creativity in adolescence, and a need to invest things with tremendous importance.

Naturally there was the giddy thrill of making the toys do bad things. Have sex, burn cities. Become middle aged. 

Whilst this aspect would become enervating with the degraded carbon copies that followed, in the first flourishes of revisionism it carried a truly illicit charge.

At best these comics were driven by genuine artistic curiosity and a desire to follow ideas through to their logical (or even better, illogical) conclusions. 

There’s a reason that certain core texts from the time remain on the permanent syllabus; because they are complete pieces of art, made with care and passion. Burning with ideas and enthusiasm for stretching the form. They have structural integrity.

What was to follow in the 90s and 00s was post-modernism but with none of the earnest commitment. Playful sure, but also smug and distanced. Everything with a wink and a smirk – everyone knows everything; nothing is a surprise. It’s an affliction that pop culture has struggled to recover from.

So those revisionist texts, that fuelled this subsequent ouroboric iteration, can be returned to with a generous critical eye. It was genuinely exciting to witness this blooming, explosive moment, a synergy of hungry artists and a form ripe for experimentation. 

It still can be.

ITEM
Guidance

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.

ITEM
Planks Constant

ITEM
THE BIT WHERE HE ASTUTELY REALISES THE PROBLEM WITH THE BAND NO DOUBT IS IN FACT, THE BAND NO DOUBT >>>

Watched a couple crap films this week, to illustrate what I think of the medium, which is barely even serial. They weren’t completely crap… mm, well, no I watched the Birds of Prey Harley Quinn film, all the way thru this time and I think I just, I tried it a few years ago and I couldn’t manage 20 minutes probably but it’s just that Harley is a very grating character and you need to be in a specific mood going “it’s Deadpool for girls and that’s fine” and actually it is then, if you convince yourself, very nicely choreographed fights but the fights are dancey and a little Brechtian, a little Westian —- it is silly but then Roman Sionis is, I have noticed this character since the Brubaker Catwoman twenty odd years ago, where I think he does do something vile to a woman, this character who was a nonentity in Arkham Asylum is now the sickeningly amoral lead-off into Absolute Batman, and is played like a skin-crawling and indeed sloughing misogynist horror by Ewan McGregor, of Crieff, in this and actually his comeuppance is very satisfying in that classic Game of Thrones way - Death, may thy sting be humiliating also. I don’t think there’s a single male character in the film isn’t a piece of shit - fair play, I have seen a number of films which appear to abjure the very existence of such a thing as women - but he is the tree topper. Far better than either Suicide Squad flick I feel but I absolutely detested both for different reasons: the first for cloddishness, the second broad misanthropy.

“I’m a right cunt, me!” - Roman Sionis aka the BLACK MASK

The other one I watched in my convalescence was the - frankly remarkably lazy, like Pharrell Williams my birthday twin and subject of the LEGO (ofc) biopic, has devoted precisely as much time to it as he did to accommodating No Doubt in his studio [see above]. What I do enjoy is seeing NORE and Pusha T as minifigs, and the representation of each beat as a kind of LEGO ziggurat or whatever weird shape, rhomboid, gimme weird shape names here, so yeah - unfortunately there’s very little coverage in the effective greatest hits soundtrack of the first stuff I heard with Neptunes production which was half the second ODB album and the first couple Kelis ones, so but ‘Got Yr Money’ would be represented here as like a bell and whistle contraption with like some elevating neon arc piece… they all look like that, and that’s kind of the sole takeaway from the film, because Skateboard P does just talk in rich person apolitical mimsy jive otherwise and it’s not really remotely insightful into him as a person. But the idea of yeah, a one purpose HING looking like

“a golden flashing ice cream, colour of pee-pee, will replace you my boyfriend and band”

BASICALLY CORRECT

ITEM
Wagon Master (John Ford, 1950)
Undercover: How to Operate Behind Enemy Lines (John Ford, 1943)

Ford spent the forties pulling cinema’s ways of working and light-based technologies fully into the military industrial base, busy gathering energy as it galloped toward the western lands. Undercover features his only spoken on-screen role as a rumpled attorney slash unhurried spook mentor, hiding out at the Sullivan & Cromwell offices on Wall St. Channeling JF Dulles, he fires the logic of the screen into the field, reconditioning a new agent with an identity sharp enough to fool SS interrogators like they were so many Midwest popcorn crunchers at the local Harry L. Nace. 

War was eager as he was and he went into battle to make her famous, building a movie camera corps from scratch for the OSS. Propaganda, information gathering, training data and analysis. After being hit with lead and demons at Midway, he understood that the secret of cinema is not in the miracle capture and broadcast of image - but in the staging of the event itself. Essential work at the moment America took the reins. From this far end of that train, the plan’s as clear as a lens. Put the material of wheels in motion under horsepower, pound the track and take manifest destiny global.

He could only live out peacetime in two extremes of space. On-board the Araner, back from patrol and stripped of her fifty calibers. The cabin wall inches from his nose for days on end, a new case of Bushmillls left outside the door each dawn. Or Monument valley, the middle distant uprights forcing themselves into the camera even stronger than the war did, stacking their horizons up and up, making the top of the screen go on forever. The desert sustains infinite room to stretch out and dissipate, spread the self thinly til it merges with the dust, and see serenity on a bronco.