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The Blob. The Black Casebook. Andrew & Steven. Suede. PAAI. Ray Vaughn. Andor.
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The Blob - (Chuck Russell, 1988)
An indestructible gelatinous organism eats its way through the residents of small town America…
A lesser regarded but worthy 80s horror remake that compensates for its lack of master director or enduring star power with an array of intense practical effects and a fun story that successfully subverts expectations, delivering more than just a reimagined premise that occasionally nods to the source material. There’s a real sense this remake has eaten the original film. A cogent metatextuality, evoking Roberty-Bloberty’s threat of over consumption and spasming change. It’s Americana digesting in 1980s viscera. A coke honked nose bleeding chunks into a malted vanilla milkshake.
In the 1950s version Roberty-Bloberty is defeated by a coalition of townsfolk and the capable public institutions that protect them. The police, fire brigade and military stand alongside parents and quaintly rebellious teens to defeat the extraterrestrial menace which ends the film imprisoned in Arctic ice, like Santa.
That same town depicted thirty years later still clings to the dissolving vestiges of 50s simplicity, but it’s a self-deception. The high school football star is not the hero the town needs, the cops certainly can’t help and the military... well…
This is the late 1980s, the cold war has sustained an arms race between nation states and a desperate paranoia in otherwise powerful men. The fading promise of self determinism is seeping into the next decade, changing into cynicism and apathy, making Roberty-Blobertys of us all. Authority can not be trusted, a sentiment embodied by the character ‘Flagg’ a punk kid armed with an attitude and a permed mullet who despite his greaser aesthetic is primed to see through the bullshit around him.
He’s a reluctant hero, but true to the film's protean nature, he’s not the only one…
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MINDLESS COMMUNICATION - The Black Casebook
Best Batpod or bestest Batpod? You can support Walt on Patreon, or by getting your own rubber Batsuit made up and joining him as he patrols the city at night.
You bring a lot of different theoretical approaches to comics in your show. Can you remember the first comic book that got your brain fizzing like that?
I first got into comics when I was in middle school thanks to an online friend with an FTP, so like any teenaged boy in the Aughts I gravitated toward comics with “Hell” in the name. It would be years before I understood the nuances of Mignola’s inking or why the Brits hated Maggie Thatcher so much, but the blend of folklore, pulp, history, and the occult in both Hellboy and Hellblazer instantly enchanted me.
(I’ll never forget reading the Newcastle issue of Hellblazer around the same time that I was first assigned Hamlet in school, seeing the demon say “Get thee to a nunnery,” and realizing that there was no inherent divide between fine literature and disreputable comic books.)
Was The Black Casebook always conceived of as a podcast?
Yep! It was inspired directly by my college buddy Nat Yonce’s show Collective Action Comics and Connor Goldsmith’s X-Men podcast CEREBRO, both of which I was listening to obsessively in 2021. Quietly fuming whenever Nat (playfully) slandered Batman had already given me the idea to do my own Batman podcast to correct the record, and when Nat reached out to have me do a guest episode about the politics of Batman—including fronting me the cash to buy a decent mic—my path was set. I finished recording my first episode directly after that interview. Blame him!
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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers
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Suede – Asphalt World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_kGX0AmG7k
I never bought it. The self-serious melodrama, the anachronistic obsessions with glue-sniffing while the country lost its mind on ecstasy. I wasn’t a believer.
Even so, there was something there. Something assured and strong. The band as a gang; a unified aesthetic. Design sense. Attitude. The pomp and swagger, fusing goth flourishes with the thuggish glitter of British glam rock. A lead singer who was ridiculous, but magnetic. Parental eyebrows raised above the evening paper, while older sisters sat rapt as ‘Metal Mickey’ blasted, strutted and seethed on TOTP.
A necessary sea-change too. The right time. Not the best, but the first, to realise that something had been missing. Righting the scale with self-belief, boisterous riffs, and pantomime visions of perverted urban squalor.
Two, maybe three dynamite, unimpeachable singles and a mediocre debut, before the wheels came off with an indulgent and flaccid second album. There’s more to come of course. None of it matters; the fleeting moment of aggressive, cocksure supremacy had passed.
‘Dog Man Star’ is silly, but not silly enough. Bloated but dull. It’s not a lost classic, no matter how hard you squint. It does contain the precise moment the dream dies however, in the stunning ‘Asphalt World’. Brett and Bernard beautifully united here, just before shaking terminally apart.
The vocals are deep, sad and tired. The song sighs in its languid journey. A city lullaby. There’s a guitar solo – Butler uncurling spectacularly one last time. Unlike the more posturing efforts elsewhere, this song has a total vibe. The usual lyrical peccadilloes seem suddenly profound. A chorus that rolls and crashes. The end of something. The end of everything.
Suede played a role, but it wasn’t their fault. They were the first to be pushed from the trenches, victims on an altar draped in a Union Jack.
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PAGANS AGAINST AI
Name: LIKLUKHO!
Attribution: The Sword
Purpose: This servitor will increase the luck of any creative fighting Generative AI in any way. Blows will land. Defence will work. LIKLUKHO! also brings inspiration and increases the individuals ability to act on that inspiration and complete their work. Colours: Blue/Silver/RedSmells: Ozone/Nag Champa/Bergamot/Tobacco/Amber
Tarot Cards: Star/Seven of Wands/Ace of Swords/Ace of Cups/Queen of Pentacles/ Eight of PentaclesSounds: Anything that makes you feel cool. Anything that makes you feel confident.
Servitors are aetheric entities created to perform particular tasks. This servitor was created in July 2024 using techniques outlined by Phil Hine. It was cast and launched in a series of rituals performed 29th-31st August 2024. You can perform rituals to add to their power and/or call them to your or others aid. Adding to their power. 1) Set the mood. You may wish to use the colours, smells, sounds and cards associated with the entity. 2) Clear your space. 3) Banish. The LBRP or Starry Cross are popular methods 4) State your intent ‘It is my will to empower [name] for its mission to...’ 5) Energise yourself. Use breathing, visualisation, movement to build up a core of energy within you. You may wish to dance. You may wish to laugh. Please yourself. 6) At the moment of peak, at the moment of no mind that is all mind visualise the entity before you and give that portion of the energy to it. 7) Calm yourself. Settle. 8) Banish again. 9) Ground yourself. 10) Later, but soon, do something sympathetic to the intentions of the entity, make something, reach out to someone etc.
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I SAW THE UNIVERSE INVERT DOWN THE BOTTOM OF THE ROSEANGLE, 40 YEARS AFTER ORIGAMI FIEND AND POET DON PATERSON DID SAME.
(Read his naughty and arch autobiography Toy Fights for more)
((for my part, I had sweaty palms and my hair stood on end for a week, May 2021, I never want to feel like that again))
How could a rose have an angle - well if you are a paper folder I suppose it could, how could it have a bottom, well I lived there — I always liked microcosms, an extremely mundane and satisfying holiday activity to me is going to Madurodam the miniature town in the Netherlands, and it is coruscatingly fascinating that the best known and most successful fictionalisation of LA, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was conceived and devised where I live (laugh love) and write to you, the smallest place in the UK you could reasonably call a city, but with just about every vicissitude and extreme (for better and worse) that most any other could conjure.
the tower block always falls; in perpetuum
THE REALLY YOUNG ONES HAVE NAMES LIKE CORRUPTED FILE PATHS
I find new rappers the exact same way I found other heroes in the Marvel universe; the co-sign - Spider-Man gives you shine in a guest appearance or the Hulk in Marvel Team-Up
“CJ from GTA taught me to drive” Ray Vaughn - XXXL Tee (Visualizer)
Very excited about Ray Vaughn, who I found this week, there’s an element of Kevin Hart in his delivery & persona; my final submission this week, if anyone was still doubting that rap is Marvel - consider that the MCU has undergone a fairly remarkable swing back into favour since ‘N95’ played over the Brave New World trailer, and the big hitter in Thunderbolts*… was directed by Kendrick and cousin Baby Keem MV director Jake Schreier Baby Keem - issues (Official Video)
FANCY THAT
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Andor (The Walt Disney Company, 2022-2025)
The surveillance technologies of the First Galactic Empire are much less frightening than our own.
Postwar discovery of computation as an elemental capacity in the gaps between matter and number tracks with certain technological developments. These perceptions influenced contemporary fabulists just as the previous century’s discovery of electricity did with authors as diverse as Shelley, Bulwer-Lytton and Wells.
The 1947 invention of the transistor and simultaneous dawn of the UFO era. Integrated circuitry for Dune, Marvel and SF’s New Wave. Microprocessors while Lucas scrapbooked Herbert with Kirby for his toymaker’s toolkit.
The purpose of each step was the same: to generate and explore conceptual frameworks for the arrival of the machine intelligence, and its endless interactions with human society. If none were ever able to provide a reliable model of the future, it’s because they shared, a few New Wavers aside, a blind spot hiding the deeper technology shaping the machine’s emergence.
Lucas - to his credit, and with the richest of ironies - got closest. More so than Herbert, whose future embeds computation back inside the body, makes genetics the mainframe, and wishes the internet away.
The astromartial (yes lads, we’re saying ‘astromartial’) version of the artificial organism develops without the hardwired programming of capital. So the distances between the stars contain space where its penetrating glare does not extend.
This means Andor has it easy.
The rebels can hide, connect, plot, build. Imagine futures not foreclosed by the droids in their pocket. No smart sensors marking their heartbeats the moment they hear the drumbeat.
Their enemy has not strategically updated since the 1930s model (miniaturised vacuum tubes), so solidarity maintains a capacity to liberate alien lands. Trauma doesn’t dull the senses, but sharpens the resolve.
When they say genocide it is heard everywhere, not automatically deleted.