There’s a hole in every goal

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MINDLESS EXPLORATION - the venue, Pansycore #2: Mosh (Jules Scheele, 2023)

You can see the stage to begin with, but the way this comic really orientates you has more to do with the movement of the crowd. The first few pages have a tidal flow, with a wave of gig goers pushing at first towards the band then back into itself.  It’s a swirl of casual contact: the weight of a crowdsurfer on those passing him overhead, one body leaning on another for support, a stray hand on a steady leg. You know the scene. You can feel your sweat blending with the sweat of strangers. In this place, in this moment, it’s easy to feel the charge of more deliberate connections; in this case, a discrete fuck under the waves that’s still connected to the pull of the shore.

Jules Scheele has spent much of the past decade illustrating graphic guides to gender, politics, queer theory and sexuality. In these works, his clear line artwork and refined portraiture were bottles of visual information in a great wave of text. Taken alongside Scheele’s other 2023 comic, the post-lockdown horror story This Isn’t My House, Panyscore #2 suggests that this work has increased his ability to map information onto a page. In a sea of ecstatic faces, you always know where to look. In the bubble of a toilet cubicle, our two hungry lovers are always aware that something might burst. 

With its uncanny gravity and seeping red intrusions, This Isn’t My House was a comic about how sometimes home is where the harm is.  Pansycore #2 is the mirror image of that story. This comic is a joyous release, a fantasy of queer public living so abundant it can also contain the promise of private adventures yet to come. Let yourself get swept away in it.

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HEXEN 2.0 (2012) / HEXEN 5.0 (2025) by Suzanne Treister

From the limited previews available, including the artwork exhibited recently at the Warburg Institute, the relationship between HEXEN versions 2.0 and 5.0 appears to be akin to that between the labyrinth and Ariadne’s spool of yarn.

The same could have been said of 2.0 itself  - that it was designed to be a key to the exit. But upon contact with reality, it immediately became just a map of the prison. This is not to undervalue being given the ability to detect the wire and iron surrounding you. 

This capacity for becoming its own opposite might be an effect of artistic form. Traditional tarot constructions insist on the importance of the image (or, in unillustrated minor arcana, the meanings generated through combination of numbers-x-suits) to escape the determining force of language and enable transmissions of a different order. Treister’s word-art breaks this ancient technique, and in forcing the atomic shells of logos and image to occupy the same position, releases intrusive and chaotic energies. 

If it’s this collision that gave 2.0 such a rare ability to so completely infiltrate and capture the 2010s, omens are uneasy as to whether the same card trick can work twice. Where 2.0 de-occulted and wove the strands of our malignant technocracy into a pattern that could be held and beheld, 5.0 seeks to eclipse those now ubiquitous anti-life logics with a projection of green-ray imperatives: indigenous futurisms, deep ecology, the varied utopias of Butlerian cyborgs.

But was this vision of the world to come not already overground, and abruptly blinded at the end of last year by the red lodge’s bullish victory? Maybe 5.0’s formula can click the wheel of fortune onward a few notches, and stitch the triumphant empire’s foreclosure of the future into some hapless final flourish, so its thread may be cut - 

But the omens.

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The Auteurs – Unsolved Child Murder

https://youtu.be/fMXv0IycwIU

Boo! Hiss! Here comes the bad guy!

Luke Haines smartly cemented his position as perpetually sneering outsider to a pop culture that was clumsily desperate to congratulate itself; firing scathing volleys at his contemporaries, nose-wrinkled at the music spewing from cocaine spackled studios; dismissive missives lobbed against a tidal wave of patriotic gaudy excess.

The irony was thick enough to spread on toast. Here was the actual greatest songwriter to emerge in the nineties. Here was your perfect British pop. Tuneful morsels of verse, bridge and chorus served up in doomily-headlined newspaper, with a splash of piss and vinegar.

Haines, performatively scowling, strove to hide the sheer craft at the heart of his work. The Kinks and the Go-Betweens bubble close to the surface, but his songs easily match his heroes. Prismatic constructions, catchy and clever. Nothing outstays its welcome, the tape is flipped over and played again and again.

‘Unsolved Child Murder’, from the Auteurs’ third Steve Albini-produced album takes its subject matter from the taboo crimes that are a staple of British newspapers and TV. Bleak and dreary parks and woodland dotted with dazed policemen and reporters. The howling void of incomprehensible horror masked with Wednesday morning drizzle on the camera lens.

The song is peppered with lyrical surrealisms – “Gave the photo to a psychic” – treating the event as an arcane but familiar middle-England ritual. It’s gauche, the work of a younger childless man, but it’s also achingly beautiful and genuinely haunting. And naturally Haines, the bastard, makes it the most melodic, hummable song on the album, a delicately orchestrated sucker punch.

The Auteurs never made a bad record. An impeccable discography, then gone as the 20th century switched off.  Haines continued his strange path alone, a maverick who still has all the best tunes.

He’s behind you!

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PAGANS AGAINST AI

Name: WIKWOODGI

Attribution: The Forest

Purpose: This servitor strengthens the community bringing people together providing them with the resources they need. WIKWOODGI also warns outside the community helping the facts about Generative AI be known and undermining the story that it is both benign and inevitable.

Colours: Purple/Indigo/Buttercup/Orange
Smells: Hot Buttered Toast/Tea/Pine/Lavender/Mushrooms/Wet Wood/Sun Warmed Flowers
Tarot Cards: Six of Cups/Three of Cups/Ace of Swords/Queen of Pentacles/The High Priestess/Seven of Pentacles
Sounds: Ambient  music, natural sounds, susurration and/or anything best sung in a group/anything with a call and response. 

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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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

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Link - (Richard Franklin, 1986)

Isolated in a scientist’s coastal mansion, a young research assistant must resist the dangerous attention of the intelligent pyromaniac chimpanzee, Link! 

Franklin’s films are perfect Hitchcockian Ozploitation, a blend of suspense and raw sensationalism captured by a compelling camera technique that immerses the audience deep in the visual narrative. Also, this film has monkeys!  

OK, they’re apes… including one adult chimpanzee whose presence feels inherently dangerous, but chimpanzees had been flogging tea bags for decades when this film was released and held a reputation as peaceful creatures you could dress up in various tradey costumes without fear they’d unionise.

There’s more trepidation nowadays, more concern with that distant look in Coco’s eyes as she remembers a lost life in the warm jungles of Tanzania, the empty blue sky above and the surrounding miles of impenetrable green foliage. Coco reaches up a thick fingered paw, plucks a leaf from a tall fibrous tree only to be shocked back to a dreary British television studio by the wet screams of a boom operator, who’s face she’s casually twisted off… 

The film itself is perhaps too restrained and largely limited to off-screen violence. Late in the film the research assistant’s boyfriend arrives with a couple of mates, one is bloodlessly dispatched down a well, the other is dismantled, implied by a brief sound effect and glance to a bloody hole. It’s classy but unsatisfying. 

The villain Link is your classic tragic promethean, who rejects ape identity and adopts a parody of upper-class civility. Link murders his way to social ascension, claiming his master's mansion. He wears ill-fitting shirts and suits and yes, he even steals fire… but only to light his cigars. And if not for his inevitable ironic death I’m sure he could have enjoyed a career amongst the country's other top psychopaths…        

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David Lynch is dead and he’s standing in a room behind everything
Blue Velvet, 1986, Dir. David Lynch

Despite Lynch’s reputation for opacity, if you put in the work his stories always surrender a few of their secrets, just never in a way that is final or satisfying. We - and his characters - are perpetually on a threshold that invites but denies penetration. Blue Velvet, red curtains, spotlights, theatrical staging, television screens, darkness. A parade of elements that obstruct our passage or remind us that we stand behind a fourth wall. 

Like the curtains in Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet implies that the draped fabric of its title sequence haunts the screen for the film’s duration. It doesn’t disappear. It fades like a ghost. This speaks to the way Lynch’s mystery transcends its conventional role as a narrative device to become an artistic principle structuring the entire experience. When we expect to go "behind the velvet," we misunderstand that the velvet constitutes the totality. The impression that hidden content awaits revelation is both compelling and an error.

And so, again, we head into psychoanalytic territory: Lynch’s aesthetic of mystery seem to embody Lacan’s theory that desire is an absent centre, perpetually unfulfilled yet vigorously generative. Like a black hole or perhaps rotting tissue around an ear canal, verdant with bacterial vitality

The same severed ear that a young man finds on his walk home through a shortcut that he’s no doubt known since he was a boy. Metaphorically marked by the curtain, Lynch’s mystery aesthetic lives in this boundary between the mysterious and the mundane. Mystery isn't concealed beneath everyday reality—it is woven into its texture.

This explains why his domestic settings - such as Lumberton - pulse with uncanny energy and why familiar scenes contain impossible or opaquely bizarre elements. Persistently liminal spaces where opposites interpenetrate—light/dark, known/unknown—rather than transitional states moving toward resolution and ultimately our understanding. 

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.9 recurring Evrythinggg [Thom Yorke voice].flac

I spent much of the week in a toilet hinterland after the contact with the idiosphere in big Alan Moore’s The Great When so don’t expect much - “it’s called Her Train”, a jellyfish like lace curtains, it can smell poetry - really quite disconcerting, I was enjoying the book whilst finding it a little overcooked. I similarly lost focus in Jerusalem when the paintings started using angelic language in the St. Paul’s basilica, fourfold meanings, partly cos no other part could live up to it - Grant had their version too of course, in those final Green Lantern issues, the Qings; the loca and usage speaks to either writer’s grandiosity and intent, I suppose, but I always found them parallel thinkers and useful to read in concert as much as to interrogate one another — a nose tweak is a good laugh though, Alan, get over it!

The Absolute books and Ultimate books are fine, insofar as they appear to understand our political context is up against the wall, highly straitened, there’s even some dare I say it third worldism - probably can’t say that now but it’s a recommendation - in Ultimates. They are, as are most of the good comics that come out now, highly Morrison-coded, slightly Moore-coded, quite Ennis-coded… look lads there’s going to have to be an Absolute JL so let me make one fantasy football wish: Grant and my boy Dan McDaid, you know it makes sense.

Couldn’t stop thinking about the bit the other day in The Savage Detectives when Bolaño’s self-insert character splits up with his bodybuilder girlfriend over Jack Nicholson’s book in The Shining; “It might be a good book” he says, the daft bastard… 

…it might be, you know.

More on this, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Peter Milligan and general windmill tilting SOON

Oh -

Almost forgot to write about a rapper: I have been listening to Aminé, a man some are unironically calling ‘the sound of Summer’ a great deal to distract from my tummy troubles. He is like if Drake liked women, incredible the difference it makes.

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Artistic Autists Against AI

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of collaboration recently, as I've been getting all sorts of random opportunities to be involved in projects. I'm currently working on a documentary film script to be directed by a minor seventies rock star (you wouldn't recognise his name, but would be able to sing along with his biggest hit), and on a collaborative podcast with a comedy writer. Then there's this, a newsletter that is much greater than the sum of its parts, in which there are resonances none of us individually put there.

I'm not a collaborator by nature (just ask all my ex-bandmates), but I'm increasingly starting to think that the biggest myth in the arts is the myth of the romantic solo genius. I don't think that genius comes from individuals at all, actually. I think genius comes from scenes. There are individuals within the scene who are more talented or who work harder, but all art is collaborative. Even people like writers who work alone are working in conversation with other writers, with genre, with a tradition. And very few writers truly work alone, with no editors, no beta-readers, no wife doing an uncredited rewrite of her "genius" husband. Start working alone, you turn from John Cleese of 1969 to Cleese today.

And this is why, I think, the reality of "AI" is so depressing. For someone like me, who chases away collaborators, who works best alone, a tool that can do what collaboration at its best does – bouncing your idea back to you with a spin you wouldn't have thought of, changing your faulty toaster to a dead parrot – would be wonderful. Instead you have something that feeds it back to you duller, blander, and deader. Turns out mindless machines can't replace the Mindless Ones:

STAY MINDLESS