Thank the sun for vanishing, wishing it would fall faster

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“Take all the precious things, nothing less” - JLA: Rock of Ages (Grant Morrison, Howard Porter, Oscar Jimenez, Greg Land, 1997–1998)

I’ve spent 2026 trying to deal with what you’d euphemistically call a situation. Faked deaths, improbable car crashes, stories that flit about like Stephen Dedalus’ mind on the beach – there’s some drama to savour here, e.g. when you tell a group chat with fifty strangers you can’t make someone’s 40th because you’re off ghostbusting that weekend. 

The reality is pretty abject though. I won’t make a zoo of it here but it involves a house made entirely of broken windows and rotten deliveries, walls caked thick with deflection. Obvious warning signs: not just for the funny pages!

When discussing all this I often say something glib about having reshaped my brain to think like the Joker. Rock of Ages, pure superhero material! It means yr face goes a bit like the Joker’s, see. 

Sometimes a situation’s so absurd and draining that you’ll take any relief, any glimmer of light, humorous or conceptual. 

Though of course, when pratting on about the Joker it’s always worth pausing to consider whether you’re just being a silly goose. 

But trying to remain open and responsive rather than superhumanly clenched can bring its own troubles. Write “conflict resolution” and “crisis management” on a million CVs if you like – knowing what to do won’t always help. 

The feeling of being in the wrong time, hard to escape when faced with that house. “What year is this?” Last there in 2000 – is this the same rescue mission or a new one? When did it get into this state? And when did the inside of my mouth start to feel this rough and broken? 

When time and reality are fucked, maybe you need a distraction that reflects all that while being more likely to end well. “A ladder from here to who knows when” – even if you don’t get there, it’s okay to pause and look up.  

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Planks Constant 

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The Pilman Radiant 5: Toxic

In 2002’s The Secret Map of Britain, activist comedian Mark Thomas employs his usual cheeky ambush tactics to annoy the staff at sensitive sites in the UK. Highlighting the absurdity of the state denying publicly available information.

One segment in particular stayed with me. The home of Raymond Fox is killing him. Poisoned by an unidentified radioactive source. Did Shell have a secret reactor in Reading? No culpability would be admitted.

Near where I grew up in the centre of Glasgow lies the site of the old St Rollox Chemical Works. Demolished in 1964, I understood it to be the reason journeys up Pinkston Road absolutely fucking stank. I would attempt to hold my breath anytime my dad drove us up it, but it was too much. The area underwent redevelopment recently and I find myself conflicted by the results. Homes without gardens, but nice access to the canal. Assurances that the land has been treated but also a lovely view of the M8 motorway and whatever the hell blows in from that.

Eight years ago, I started listening to the crime podcast Swindled. Drawn by an interest in financial crime caused by discussion (still unsatisfactorily explained) of the murky financial career of a certain famous island owner. With episode 4, I crashed into the story of Love Canal. A chemical dump turned into a housing estate. That most primal of fears: Your home is killing you. The course of your life bent and curtailed by powers beyond your control. Like real cosmic horror.

I cannot look away. Human tragedy as the ultimate horror story. We dream of a world free from such horrors, but corporate malfeasance places money over the land and people.

The Canal / The Leak / The Mine / The Switch / The Well / The Skywalks / The Mix Up / The Ghost Town

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Mind the Gap

Prog 226 was the first my grandparents brought me. Just shy of my 6th birthday, far too young, so the perfect time for Mills and O’Neill to get in and do the damage. I have a Prog 226 in my collection but it’s a fragment of someone else’s childhood, newsagent biroed Howard on the cover. Mine, the one they touched, the one I read on my stomach in the lounge at Serpentine, warm orange squash and dust motes swirling is lost to precarious living and regular enforced shedding. 

Ignore for a moment my predilection for sentiment, and fetishisation of objects which means the one I’ve lost means more to me than the one I’ve got. In what sense are all instances of Prog 226 the same comic? 

Buddy Baker’s awareness of all our eyes meeting him in an instant and eternal moment suggests a link. Are the multiple, decreasing, instances of Prog 226 in space time persisting as an object in this moment separate or parts of the same entity, the mushroom like fruiting body of some vast conceptual mycelium network. Text and images transmission spores and concepts. ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ is a rubbish question. ‘Where do your ideas persist once manifest?’ is perhaps more interesting. Where do we meet the comic?

Groensteen tried to create a system for understanding comics, he fails because to his credit he cannot deny comics as objects. All manifestations of the story connect but the form creates a different reading experience. Not simply the gentrification of chip shop paper to deluxe hardcover. Different manifestations change the story. 

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A CEASELESS SERIES OF INEXPLICABLE SHIN SCRAPES

New Charli this week,obviously, I have been down since Nuclear Seasons‘ remix EP so you can fuck off if you have anything clever to say about this - she is pretty relatable (how it feels to be a girl, I finally get it: it’s confusing) for someone you have to imagine spends 40% of their life chinged out their mind - statement albums are a laugh aren’t they, it’s just do your art project but for Western culture…? I get very annoyed with some of my colleagues for treating work like school but maybe they are right and I am wrong.

It’s academies all the way down, until you reach ‘Hard Knocks’ and ‘Life’

It’s quite easy to see this as a transition for her, and an expression that actually she might prefer acting and filmmaking - I do think Vincent Cassel is in the video there largely because the song - ‘Camera’ - features the lyric “French exit” but ymmv, anyway some are saying ‘ss26’ which voices the album title [nothing’s gonna save us not] Music, Fashion or Film “is the exact slight thing you should hear in the background during the end of the world”, which is right, as is the the thesis these modalities of culture will not save us (alone…!) 

Not alone, but they are binding agents of culture and culture is borne of community - by all means, in fact, I strongly suggest you do build a self-mythology and romanticise your own life, if you don’t nobody is liable to, and you don’t have to go on about it unless folk really are into it, but beyond that build a community and work for it, we are all fucked if we don’t realise we ~ broadly, and it is the dismal who want you to think otherwise ~ like and need each other - it ends by quite strongly evoking and I would suggest refuting, through the director himself, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future:

As I was lying there on the sidewalk/I did not think about art at all/I thought about people, I thought about life

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The War Nerd Iliad by John Dolan (Feral House, 2017)

After the last war, across the black water, the ancient cult’s mythos, in its new home, mutated.

Victorious, they condensed the divine essences of past millennia, in whose names the fat smeared bones were burned, the blood cast to hold down the dust, into new talismanic assemblies. Angelic mustangs and Pershing tanks with three-inch steel skin - the twilight wisdom of the owls spread across the world in a net of radioelectronics.

The holy war energies, resilient as plastic but suppressed by their new telluric shells, leaked out and emerged as a schizoid storm of linguistic artefacts. With the paranoid vanity that only comes from omnipotence, the imperial priests, as young and doomed as Achilles (they love brazen Achilles and loathe Odysseus, sad and clever) turned Apollo, Athena and Ares into UFOs, MIBs and little grey ogres - a bestiary of new symbols for the empire of gasoline and greenbacks.

Long immersed in this language of sci-fi, spycraft and weaponised intelligence, Dolan’s translation into the digital demotic breaks with the fashion for a weirdless materialism, and reveals the Olympians as an invasive ecology of ultraterrestrial imperatives, inscrutable to the point of insanity. No Lovecraftian distance, but fascinated and appalled by humanity’s quarreling mass, no more able to ignore us than a schoolboy can stop torturing insects.

Like Logue and Nolan, he understands Homer's legacy can only be honoured insofar as it is ignored and abused. And in doing so with such gleeful horror, excavates the deep heresy without which we cannot understand the now teetering empire, bloated by alcohol, amphetamines and synthetic testosterone, as it's pulled apart by cheap drones and solar-Islamic resolve: war is great and glorious, and men yearn to murder and die for its thunder and lightning.