The Shining River

ITEM
MINDLESS EXPLORATION - Klatsand, Searoad (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1991)

Pay attention. People are talking. Most but not all of them are women. 

(Tony Roberts, Sea Road)

The first image is of foam women rising up and falling in the sea, “gone, till the long wave breaks again.” The second image is of rain women moving “inland, upward to the hills… unresisting, unresisted.” The stories that follow trace these disparate characteristics in the people who live through the beachtown of Klatsand.

Le Guin's SF work is “anthropological,” we say, rarely pausing to consider the implication of a perspective so overwhelming it may already have annihilated its subject. Searoad establishes its own variation on this dynamic, less dramatic but more recognisable to the readership, a blithe tension between the “nightmare homogeneity of the megalopolis” (see MO #9!) and the spaces it allows to ease the pains of its development.

There is sickness here. Trauma. Stories of abuse, bereavement, and murder move through Klatsand. On the page, though, there’s talk and thought and precious little action. Remember to pay attention. 

One character articulates the limits and consolations of not listening halfway through:

“Men frightened him much more than women did, but there were things he could say to men, ten or twelve things...”

The boldest of these tales - ‘Hand, Cup, Shell’ and ‘Hernes’ - say bollocks to that. The former takes us through great cloud formations of consciousness, drifting from person to person. In the latter, lives crash in like waves, and the reader is dragged back and forth through history. In this tentative break in the commercial matrix, we may find fresh patterns in the conversations of women on its edges. There’s a new old network here, a system - resisting, resisted - of connection. “Important wasn’t the point. Things didn’t have rank.” Falling, then rising. All we need is space, time, and telepathy. 

ITEM
ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS

ITEM
5 COMEDOWNS
Comedown 3: CANAL

(Brixton Fridge, 1996)

Trance music was a necessary evil. You could still access the required focus and euphoric bliss when connected to it by the amphetamine jack. But it came with a certain hippy / crusty baggage that to us at the time, all straight lines and techno-purist attitude, seemed utterly unwelcome.

Sometimes, though, necessity compels, and so we found ourselves at Brixton Fridge  for ‘Escape from Samsara’ (don’t). We ploughed through the bindis and glowsticks and found our own private source of ecstasy. Hours dancing, eyes wide, teeth gritted. You know the drill.

Once we were out, and heading home on the endless picaresque night-bus journey, thoughts turned to the inevitable comedown. Students now, alcohol featured more heavily in life. We, Archimedes-like, had recently realised that consuming heroic quantities of booze and spongy-skunk was one way to fight back the comedown-void.

So it was that we found ourselves by the canal in Mile-End, where we studied. Outside the New Globe pub. A sunny day, four tarnished freaks sat sipping pints, oh-so-pleased with ourselves.  Nothing beats the dissociated buzz of a rolling recovery session, sparks of the night before still flickering in the pupils.

Suddenly, a kid appears. Tottering along the side of the canal. Uh-oh. He has a look. He has that look. The wiring’s gone. He’s laughing to himself. Well, that’s nice we think, full of chemical benevolence. He’s holding a can of super-strength lager.

Stops. Crouches down. Scoops his can into the filthy green/brown aqua of the Regents Canal. Turns to us, smiling still. Takes a long, refreshing draft of this nectar, brined with missing corpses and rusty bikes. Laughs more and stumbles on.

We sit like statues, before collapsing in horrified hysterics. He instantly passes into our personal folklore, a totem of universal messiness. 

I think about him often. 

ITEM
JUDGE DREDD vs. STRONTIUM DOG by Garth Ennis, Henry Flint, Rob Steen (2000AD/Rebellion, 18th June 2025)

Our highest level operator. Deep tier one experience, classified bodycount. Constellis on speed dial, T-therapy on expenses. Late night bourbon sessions with brothers after tearful ipad chats at sundown with the kids, tucking into breakfast and doing so well at middle school. The adhan mournful in the background, pretend you can’t hear it. Call a different time tomorrow… but what if they’ve left to catch the bus?

The Israeli molly is good for keeping the PTSD flashes at bay -

But he’s terrified of the UK in the 21st Century following certain tactical failures in the 90s. Relocation and endless overseas victories - largely police actions - have not improved decision making in subsequent domestic forays.

It’s a bad idea, but there are no better ones throughout all the multiverses of existence: use fictional constructs to improve cognitive models relevant to real world concerns. The secret to  making it good is to go gospel. Push it past the realms of reason. Step up a level and incorporate all the crisis points where the analogy breaks and authentic novel insight can spontaneously emerge.

By all means invoke the historic spectres of the Bostoʞ Seven silo or Milton Keynes Uprising to illustrate contemporary debates around Samson options and Operation Al Aqsa Flood. But then also look at the nuclear annihilation of the California coastline’s billion-plus population - mere days ago - and reflect on its strategic imperatives: to starve the enemy of potential recruits, maintain Eastern & Texan control of the continental resource base, and signal willingness for further TAD deployment.

That’s before you factor in second-order implications of Operation Judgement Day. The first HALO injection of enhanced hybrid personnel directly into the primary theatre; highly successful test of Asian battle tech supply lines; historic co-operation between independent private contractors and a multilateral alliance of city forces to achieve key goals. Locally, even this would be to overlook the most significant legacy of the global struggle against the revenant army - permanent erosion of the great western barrier wall (itself a tyrant’s legacy, continued by Justice Dept post-regime change) and ongoing migration of irradiated subaltern populations.

It would all be funny if it wasn’t so damn tragic. 

ITEM
MY DOPAMINE IS HIGHLY UNREGULATED

50 Cent - In Da Club (Official Music Video)

The Club is one place, just like The Library - perhaps the most famous paean to it is the one where you find 50 Cent therein - my favourite addict, Danielle, sang it to me in admiration at my black and gold Adidas trackie top a couple months before she overdosed. She knew how to butter a mf up.

THE CLUB GETTING THOROUGHLY ABSTRACTED; ORTHOGONAL MATRICES VIBRATING

The Club is highly portable now, really after the age of… 33? 34? You should not be in the literal, physical Club, the young people are horrified to see you - I did a trial shift in my early twenties at an over-35s club and it seemed like brown hell, but that was the early 00s… before. Consider only the ‘bedroom disco’ genre perhaps best exemplified by Shygirl:-

 Shygirl - thicc (ft. Cosha) [official music video]

THE CLUB IS IN YOUR CAR, IF YOU WANT IT TO BE/THE CLUB PHAZING, BECOMING HELLA OKKVLT

At the excellent V&A exhibit on the history of the club, its seaside rocketport origins were laid bare in excellent soft-edged sci-if furnishings in Rimini and places such, designed to smell of the future. The Club is everywhere now, it is in The Gym, it is in me and I am in The Library, The Car, The House. 

The Club is also the harbinger and release valve of industrialisation.

VERB OF THE DAY: uncursing

At my recent library event, Hermit author Chris McQueer struck on a useful formulation in answer to the quandary of the adolescents of Adolescence, the troubled young men, when he said: “why can’t women be heroes? My granny was mine, I wanted to grow up to be like her when I was a wean.” ungendering the word as we have ‘actress’ is a start, first of all, and this may be a social by-product of heavily industrialised - and poor more importantly - urban centres like Dundee and Glasgow but it reads like the start of a solution to me

ITEM
The Life of Brian

...and a few days after my essay here a fortnight ago, Brian Wilson died.

There have been many, many, many attempts to sum up his work over the last week, all of which have fallen foul of the rather obvious issue that words can't express what he did (indeed, with rare exceptions, Wilson was the most inarticulate of all major songwriters of his generation, often relying on lyricists to craft his raw expressions of emotion into something more commercial). Shortly before his death, I put together a playlist of the music that best sums him up, and I think that listening to this is the best way to understand him https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/80zVbxcBGM

But the discourse has brought up another issue. He is constantly, and understandably, talked about as a "genius", but he said himself "I'm not a genius, I'm just a hard-working guy".

I was listening recently to a live bootleg in which Mike Love says he doesn't understand how Brian heard those multi-part harmonies in his head. But we do actually know that. For several years, every day Brian would put on a Four Freshmen record, play a single bar, go to the piano, work out the voicings of the harmonies until he got it precisely right, then play the next bar, and he would do so until he knew all four vocal parts for the entire song. Then move on to the next one. For years.

Too often we think of genius as being the province of those born special, and in many ways Brian Wilson *was* a special person. But he let the world know about that specialness by putting in the work. He was a genius, because he was a hard-working guy.

ITEM
The Wicker Man - (Robin Hardy, 1973)

A policeman investigates the disappearance of a young girl on a remote island and comes afoul of the local pagan bonk cult.  

Folk Horror… I understand the sinister implications of freaky little cults beholden to forgotten gods and the uncanny violence of man and nature in red clawed harmony but I find any horror gets diminished when the milkman puts on a goat mask, horns strewn with daisy chains and starts dancing around some discarded masonry. My thoughts turn to ‘if Mr Tumnus came towards me brandishing an outdated farming tool, I’d chin the prick… unless my hayfever was acting up…’

It’s not just the milkman though is it? It’s the pub landlord, it’s the school mistress, the farmer, the poacher, the travelling tinker and every other rural stereotype dreaded by the commuter belt middle classes. It’s the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker whose pentagram moulded candles can be purchased alongside healing crystals and fucking tarot cards. It’s thousands of grubby yocals drunk on raw cider, fucking in wheat fields AND they all voted for Brexit!       

The Wicker Man is cited as a key Folk Horror text with its superficialities being constantly revisited in today's genre revival, perhaps at the expense of the film's more Gothic subtleties. Folk Horror is either a counterpart or a subset of the Gothic and articulates and inverts much of the same tropes, just with an emphasis on the culture of commoners rather than the gentry. The threat here comes from both sides of the socio-economic divide, the island’s cult is composed of cackling commonfolk, but their murderous chicanery is instigated by the cults leader, Lord Summerisle, who as the mad scion of a noble lineage that have corrupted the nature and people of this island, feels fixed in the Gothic tradition, even if he started wanking up a maypole.  

ITEM
Dark Shadows 

It’s difficult to prove you’re not a witch. Governess Vicky Winters is struggling. One minute it’s 1967 and you’re conducting a séance investigating the Collins’ latest troubles (Hint: It’s Barnabas Collins, he’s a vampire not a long-lost cousin from England) and the next you’re time swapped with Phyills Wick Governess of 1795. 

Vicky doesn’t cope well. The people she knows now have different names and personalities and events keep making a lie of  the official history. Freaking out and continuous declarations about ‘…the future’ have set the Reverend Trask on her. 

Dark Shadows never marked the seasons, no Christmas or Valentines episodes but now, for the next 5 months, it’s 1795. ‘Enders could never. 

Freed from the soap opera chronotype and the need to preserve and extend popular characters regardless of the cost of their deformation the writers do Peckinpah’s Hamlet. They need Barnabas chained in his coffin for his 1966 awakening and at least one sperm in Daniel Collin’s fictional balls. Everyone else is fair game. 

Vicky nearly makes it. Convincing the jury that accusations of witchcraft are nonsense, till Trask asks how she got here. It turns out accidental time-travel during a séance very much fits the Jury’s agreed working definition of ‘witch’. It’s difficult to prove you’re not a witch. Especially when you are. Your ignorance of your witchiness is no defence. 

They try to hang her. In vertigo inducing teatime viewing Vicky drops but it’s Phyllis who swings. Maybe it’s alright. Maybe she was a witch too. 

Vicky is back in the relative safety of 1968, she can’t get a mortgage or buy contraception unless the vampire decides to marry her but it’s only 5 years till Roe vs Wade and another step on America’s inexorable progress to truly being the land of the free.