Some kind of damage as a brown fluid came from his mouth

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SHE LIKES SURPRISES (IF THEY’RE NICE)

I THREW IT BEFORE I CAME IN THE ROOM, HAPPY NEW YEAR MF

Unbelievably & unforgivably forgot to do any comic of the year stuff last week, pretty sure as usual I have read 0-1 on the Guardian list, who cares -

• Deniz Camp came thru on NYE with the confident, assured, exciting beginning of Ultimate Endgame and it is a delight to say and see someone who I just spoke to occasionally on social media who absolutely loves the format, the classics, to see them knock it out the park basically a couple times a month every time from debuting with Maxwell’s Demons a couple years ago
• Endgame had a fire starter, Absolute Martian Manhunter has been the best looking, most humane and wise book in years. A kinda anti-but-respectful-of Ditkovian book it actually merits the term “state of the art” in ways probably not seen in superhero comics outside the occasional few Adam Warren or Al Ewing does, with complete consistency. Best new(ish) writer in idk 23 years.

Nice surprise.

My other best surprise was not wholly new either, she has been at it 8 whoops 9 years, but new to me and probably breaking through post-lockdown, was a young white woman from Portland named Wynne, who is so good - I am talking in a league of rappity rappers with multiple flows - that she can sit with JID or Kendrick at the top table, it feels a bit like an optical illusion. Look at Sway and them lose it here. Best white girl surprise (this is coke language, wise up *taps head*) since the headline “Dundee weightlifter to star in TV Gladiators” if you ask me, very unsurprising people assumed she was Eminem’s daughter.

JUST WATCHING THE PITIABLE END OF STRANGER THINGS HERE, IT REALLY HAS RENDERED EVERY SELF CONGRATULATION IT WANTS TO GIVE ABSOLUTELY REDUNDANT, COULDN’T EVEN BE SAVED BY 2 - TWO!! - PRINCE DROPS… OH, AND A BOWIE

“WARNING: EXTREME RUBBISH” 🚨🚨

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MINDLESS EXPLORATION - Bledin Towers, Batman: Dark Patterns #4-6 (Hayden Sherman, Dan Watters, 2025)

The apparent fatalism in describing a missing Gotham may yet haunt us. Should it be between ourselves and God, face held aloft from those born officers all but the dead must confront?  

Always an ally in the Tower though, no matter the obliging incitement, the disease in the body politic we are told can only be addressed by violence. Passport politics at all the key lymphatic checkpoints? Why, I’d sooner descend into the forever basement than hand my spells over to the arch puppeteers, thrumming with the charms of police as they are.

The inhabitants of this state in Gotham know that Batman demands and justifies good people. The wearing of that familiar a kingdom with rogue voices and police and needs of its own. Would that land agree to turn a building dead by violence? It’s the crusader against chaos, melancholy fires, riot guaranteed… unless, of course, these states combined to discover new measures in that strange night standoff. 

With GCPD binding each layer of skin, the tower is an index of blood flow that might encourage new immune theories despite the tense pulse of capital. Scarface sicks Scarface and no more, but Gotham has hostages and demands an onerous duel. Batman finds Batman, and Gotham… Gotham finds deeper hurt, gouges in the underworld so true they suggest wounds beyond even the Batman! To the true tower mob, there is at least the voice of a living building. A terrible navigation in the direction of mystery, development echoing across the discourse. Everyone will be able to identify a Caped Crusader when they hear one in the dark, but the voice… the voice will rise also. 

Next time perhaps the story will be free of a convenient puppet telling us not to listen to living aspects of the body. 

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Adventures in Pyramid Building: Make Some Noise

23rd November 2025. Back in the Adelphi for the Schools of Death. As Pyramid Builders our role is to support the Brick Bearers and Brick Kin, to give them the best day possible while creating the things needed for the Spectacle. We use technologies that wouldn’t be out of place in a playgroup. It is deeply silly but never trivial. Silliness is our cushion to carry the heaviest feelings. 

I meet J who is putting her dad into the Pyramid. She’s on her own, hasn’t been before and     doesn’t know the city. We pal up.  I don’t like how quiet I’ve become so I also join the foghorn     band. Barry teaches us how to fashion them out of downspout while this kid uses the lengths to tune them. ‘...that’s a G… that’s a D minor…’ there’s more to it that you’d think. 

We work out some call and response for the Spectacle that will fall apart the second we’re parading. But it’s a duty that I take seriously. If I gave the eighth or the twelfth or  the fifth person going into the pyramid less than I gave the first it would be terrible. 

A small group of us walk down to the Ferry. The pro-Palestine demo is cheering the names of the dead when we pass. We make some noise. We are pro-Palestine. 

A kid dressed entirely in orange runs up ‘Thank god I’ve found you!’ It’s surprisingly difficult to explain that you are not Just Stop Oil. The hi-vis really doesn’t help. There are two photographers with him for some reason. We pose for pictures. Fuck it, we’re Just Stop Oil. 

The choir sing us onboard, orange robes against a darkening sky. The Beatles Blackbird, The Flaming Lips Do you realize? We use technologies that wouldn’t be out of place in a     playgroup. We are silly but never trivial. 

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Sit on it

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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Chair Punk

"Something incredible is happening in Swaffham. It's ours and we don't need people like you coming in from wherever you're from and misrepresenting it."

Jeremy Deck, promoter of Big Stool at Tutankhamen's Emporium sneers at almost every question I ask. I observe that chairs are interesting in that one can only sit if you've stood and stand if you've sat. Do chairs represent the duality of life?

"If I need to explain what Chair Punk is, you're thick as dog mince!"

Spinning off from, (or should that be repelled by) the Work Punk scene in Peterborough. Chair Punk seeks to inject some attitude into the culture.

"We're nothing to do with Work Punk! I went to Velvet Panache and thought, 'where's the fucking punk?' I kicked over some chairs and went down the pub with Syd"

Syd Swivel, frontman of tonight's band, Thronefire is similarly taciturn but does reveal,

"We just thought the kids need to get up. In order to get up they need to sit down."

How Thronefire do this to audiences takes a leaf from the Sandwich Punk playbook. From the three piece's array of effects pedals long, aggressively relaxing swathes of sound wash over the seated audience, some of whom have brought their own tippex-customised chairs. Songs with titles such as Chesterfield Slump and Recliner Corpse are abruptly interrupted by a loud rendition of the National Anthem and the whole room rises in unison to stand before the thick ambience returns once more and the crowd recede like a slow wave retreating from shingle. 

I note that Swivel still sings "God save the Queen" despite us now having a King. Is there an element of nostalgia in Chair Punk?

"We're talking about Camilla, you cunt!" 

Chair Punk could be a Rubicon if it can escape the gravitational pull of Swaffham. God save us all.

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Inland Revenir

And so to Lynch’s final film, the beguiling, infuriating, haunting three hours of leering digital close-ups and non-sequiturs that is Inland Empire. In Lynch’s filmography, each movie becomes more dreamlike than the last, (arguably returning to the primal brainsplurge of Eraserhead) until even the police procedural of Twin Peaks succumbs to the dream (il)logic of The Return. Inland Empire is best understood not on the level of plot, or even character, but as a sinister dream or spell, itself haunted by the cursed fictional film it contains.

The mysterious Polish woman in her TV static-bardo pleads “Cast out this wicked dream that has seized my heart”. Sometimes when I’m stressed and over-boozed I get into this weird brain-state where real sleep is replaced by an exhausting series of shallow identity shifts, a tortuous rolodex of characters who I momentarily ‘play’ before awaking again. In Inland Empire, Laura Dern’s barely drawn character, Nikki, an actress, shifts through a seemingly endless series of recastings, unable to find her footing in this treacherous existential quicksand. Perhaps this is how Lynch the Hindu saw the ghastly treadmill of reincarnation. When (one version of) Nikki finds herself bleeding out on Hollywood Boulevard, the homeless woman next to her reassures her “it’s OK, you dying is all.”

Kafka’s image in Gordon Cole’s office makes perfect sense in retrospect. This is a vision of existence menaced not by the infinite bureaucracy of earthly government but by the eternal machinations of spiritual uncertainty. But finally (?) there is a hint of merciful resolution, and we are returned to the ending of Blue Velvet, the Polish woman reunited in this case not only with her son but with her living, breathing husband.

Now the arrangement of molecules and collection of quixotic tastes and preoccupations that were David Lynch have been disassembled, leaving behind his strange, celluloid dreams. It’s OK, it’s dying is all.

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Other Glasgows are available

In a notorious, calamitous episode of urban renewal in Glasgow, the overcrowded Victorian tenements of the Gorbals were targeted for demolition in 1927 using the captured giant ape King Kong. Acquired by Glasgow Corporation following his capture on Skull Island, the 25-foot primate was intended to expedite slum clearance amid acute housing shortages in a manner befitting the city’s voracious appetite for shocking spectacle. The widely publicised event (flyers were rained down across the whole of Scotland) promised swift progress, attracting vast crowds and news coverage as an emblem of bold modernisation.

Beneath towering billboards promising new homes - ‘A Return to Gracious Living’- archive newsreels capture a surreal scene: handlers in pristine top hats snapping electric whips, blue sparks dancing across the flanks of the chained beast, as they drive the swollen ape toward the Gorbals’ derelict blocks – those cramped, unsanitary tenements immortalised by Dickens in his grim tales of the city.
Yet the strategy catastrophically backfired when, apparently, a camera flash triggered Kong’s escape. Chains shattered, handlers crushed and rampaging northward from the Gorbals -a waft of sweat-soaked fur thickening and warming the cold air – Kong tore through downtown Glasgow flattening the city’s unique commuter airships, shearing its multitude of ornate façades, and rupturing steam conduits in scalding explosions.

Kong’s path of devastation culminated at Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s multi-storey Glasgow School of Art, the crowning jewel of independent Scotland’s artistic and architectural renaissance. In a tragic climax, Kong scaled its iconic west façade, fists pounding the intricate stonework, punching through and utterly pulverising the school’s celebrated library. The building’s soaring design, a forerunner of Glasgow’s world-famous skyscrapers, soon collapsed never to be repaired and rebuilt.

Kong however lived on - as a stuffed exhibit in the Kelvingrove Gallery, Scotland’s most visited tourist attraction to this day.

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Acarii Crossii (Andrew Crosse, 1837)

Crosse made trees into cyborgs, enhancing the oak, ash and thorn of his Quantock estate with iron poles and copper cordage. A lattice overlay of lightning traps and ambient condensers culling plasmas from astral holes punched into the sky, drawing down and birthing new currents and charges from the atmosphere,into presence. These new modes of life fed the wizard’s ecosystem, the batteries and conductors in the lab, the pulses coaxing crystalline forms from teeming chemical cave water.

A rare lecture at Charing Cross, between St James and the Admiralty, in late 1814. Mary Godwin and lover witness a description of explosive electrical phenomena, talk of jagged fire trapped between two brass spheres, cherubim crackling like wasps in agony. If Crosse’s influence on her most famous child seems inevitable, the reciprocal is a gothic devastation as her fiction, assembled and escaped two years later, infests his life.

Twenty-three more years of obsession, rending the workshop sky, the thunder and lightning man’s family silver melted down for relays; wife, children, servants, home dissolving under the hum and bang of EMF exposure. He creates life in 1837, wringing it from electrified iron sulphite and hydrochloric acid. The impossible beetles grew from ‘whitish excrescences’ on the metal rock, emerging covered in networks of filaments to tap etheric static.

Fearing contamination, he scrubbed his protocols, checked his materia, re-fired his seals. Repeats the experiment twice, with the same results; three batches of insect miracle. Deep in thought he meets Robert Southey on the hilltops ‘which fern and furze imbrown’, who with a poet’s curse urges him proclaim his heresy in the Annals of Electricity, then suffer the disgrace. 

If we can pity the signs of psychosis in the compulsion and grandeur, we can still trace the promethean techno-heist for learnings of contemporary teratoma. Today’s electrical storms of artificial novelty connect us to a primal wisdom few have experienced as directly: the creation of life finally makes man as mad as god.