Thick scars around the base of his throat

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A Half Life

I found Algis Budrys 1958 novel Who? to be a compelling wee read. A tale of Cold War depersonalisation about an American scientist rescued by the Soviets after an accident. Returned with a gleaming metal skull, a mechanical arm and a nuclear pile to drive his new additions that’s also going to kill him in fifteen years. His own side feel unable to trust that the individual they’ve been handed back is their man.

Is he really a traumatised man trying to reassess the life he made for himself, or a filthy Commie spy seeking to pry scientific knowledge from the enemy?

Later on in the book, unable to be trusted to work in his chosen field, the cyborg Lucas Martino returns to his dead parent’s farm. He spends his days grafting on the old homestead.

What is it that’s so compelling about the idea of a pastoral life? Probably the combination of ownership and the ability to shape and control one’s own world. The building of one’s own personal community. A sense of harmony with the land. I can’t help but wonder if my late father would find these notions hilarious. He grew up on a small holding. Daft stories about dogs drowning other dogs out of jealousy. Ram related violence. Learning the word topor from him, describing the state of a cat after eating an entire seagull in a single sitting.

My body fails me in many tiny, middle aged ways. Metal won’t do as a substitute. Medicine is issued for one problem. I secretly hope it cures another as a knock on mystery.

My wife and I hunt for houses. She’s fallen in love with the beaches of Ayrshire, and we try to make the numbers work. Greedily hoping for garden and beach. Some place of our own we’d love, especially if office jobs weren’t necessary to maintain it.

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Saint Etienne - Finisterre

London: compound city. Patchwork pile-on. Evolving urban archipelago. 

When you live here you can get complacent. Not often, but living life, you follow patterns. Move in circles. Forget to look around. 

It's important to reset, to find new routes. Journeys don't always need a purpose. 

The city will always open up again, show you signs and wonders. But you have to allow it. London's bigger than you, remember? When you're gone it'll still be here.

In some form.

So you have to lock step with it. Give yourself over to its currents and eddies. Become part of the collage.

I am watching Finisterre, the film collaboration between Saint Etienne and Paul Kelly. It is a scrapbook of images and sensation of the city from suburb to centre. An attempt to catch the moment of the city in 2003. It’s in dialogue with Patrick Keiller’s London, (1994), itself in conversation with Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979). 

Finisterre is a tone poem, romantic and optimistic about London at the turn of the century. 20 years on it is elegiac; pre-pandemic, austerity and division. I’m seeing places that I remember from being a student in the 90s, double nostalgia.

Next day, I am walking from King’s Cross Station to my work, listening to the album Finisterre by Saint Etienne. A crisp February day, as bright and clear as a brand new phone screen. Along Gray’s Inn Road, stopping in St Andrew’s Gardens to roll and smoke a cigarette. Nod hello to the homeless guy enjoying his first morning joint. Up Wren Street, past the Postal Museum. Down Saffron Hill, past the sleeping Betsy Trotwood pub. The city is energised, bucolic, moving. The sounds of the album in my ears, hopeful, wistful, playful.

Moments, sensations and memories pile up, time is a concertina. 

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Mindless Exploration - Casa Nova: A Transitional Place For Singles, “A Millhouse Divided” (Steven Dean Moore, Steve Tomkins, Dan Castellaneta, Hank Azaria, 1996) 

Thomas Pynchon’s admiration of Homer Simpson is a matter of public record: “Sorry guys, Homer is my role model and I can’t speak ill of him.” No surprise there if you trace the line from V’s Benny Profane, “a schlemiel and human yo-yo”, on through the work but it’s nice to think about it sometimes. Warming like the bed I sleep in, a million miles away from Kirk Van Houten and the Casa Nova. 

This scene keeps recurring, haunting the loveless goons who’re still in charge of the moment: “I sleep in a racing car, do you?” “I sleep in a big bed with my wife.”

A lot of pressure now for lads to disavow the big bed as suspect. The alternative not a life of hedonism but one of endless embitterment, a sales pitch creating its own market to sustain the anhedonic, extractionist practices that pass for sex at the top level of the grift. “Those bitches wouldn’t want to see you sleeping alone in the car bed, trust me mate! Just another five months’ subscription and I’ll show you how to actually drive the thing.” 

Pynchon’s fools might pass through the Casa Nova, but they more often get caught in the wake of inhuman powerplays. Golden Fangs all around, and it’s harder than ever to ignore nowadays.

Homer’s adventures are pretty rangey too, of course, putting him in touch with billionaires, local underworld types, secret societies, and even the occasional U.S. president. Despite a few moments of panic, however, he’s no more a permanent resident of Casa Nova than he is of the Anubis yacht. At the end of the day he goes back to being a perfect product/consumer hybrid - the family home a safe point of satire sustained by a blissfully fluid sense of memory.

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Behind the mask

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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Unmilked Cow

Unmilked cow.

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MONEY IS JUST TOKENS FOR MOVING RESOURCES

Slightly disappointed in the new Baby Keem album Ca$ino, not that it’s bad, it isn’t and he is developing as an artist but it feels more like the pre-Melodic Blue stuff and that felt such a complete vision. He is the heir of Chuck Mosley [R.I.P] for some reason though, nonetheless.

More in the mood of bad bihh/lesbian feelings energy stuff atm, MUNA & GloRilla, two great flavours - I suppose you are wondering how my Valentine went, well the recipient doesn’t know, or she would not have mercilessly teased me for my rigidity (not that kind alas) in her gym, leading to the most audible exhalation I have ever made… squint mouth emoji. I keep a printout copy of Kathy Acker ‘Against Ordinary Language’ in my jacket, they dun no about that either.

Been continuing to think about Absolute Batman, this week’s ish with a Rogues Review Poison Ivy was okay, the Wonder Woman crossover was decent - I am a Bruce/Diana ‘ship 4 lyfe, since JLU on the telly - but it’s basically immaterial if it slides now, it has been ehh what could you say, the biggest leftward Overton window move in comics since The Authority (the Ultimate line is earlier and similar but more middle-aged dream deferred types, especially Spidey; Luke Cage is the most important character there because he frequently in overtaking the prison industrial complex underlines that “it’s all one fight”: and it is - Proletariat vs Profiteer). 

That was a comic I think is quite possibly somewhat causally responsible for the last Iraq war, with its interventionism in East Timor. The Joker issue - wherein he is, frankly, a living egregore of the Disney corporation - would be an acceptable capper, these revolutions in the field tend to be brief splashes, and it represents an advance on another marker stone, Hexus the Living Corp in Marvel Boy and obviously as a grown up the best outcomes in politics you notice are maybe what you want in the worst possible way but they are doing a Green Arrow series and s/he (I bet it is a she cos Black Canary is absolutely jacked mind) is exacting the Mangione tax one arrow at a time off billionaires, sounds good.

5 MILLION WAYS TO KILL A CEO

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Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision (Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, Amazon Prime, 2026)

The worker bee, a symbol of good human organisation as long as there’s been symbols, is a being of unquestioned beauty, sculpted into organic perfection by its long interactions with the airs and flowers.

But the queen - or king, if we must - of the hive? Dull from its isolation beneath the layers of hierarchy. Swollen with the burdens of loveless reproduction. Cretinous from the arid ministrations of its drones.

Their ancient strategy of silence and invisibility, head-down, is failing, leading the direction of rot. The old queen held far more equity in her body than any had imagined. Her idiot children, exposed by her tattered carapace, are being torn apart by the procession of the heavens.

The degenerate brother, his endless appetite for defilement and corruption fully displayed to a world appalled. The heir fulfilled but hollow, bearing a slow, fatal wound, desperately fishes for favour, begging indulgence from one of the new celestial overlords. A solemn, big budget retrospective of a life spent in service to his own delusions of integrity and tradition, to shore up the rising tide of doubt in his absent ability to renew the land. 

Bezos, bored one assumes, duly blesses this appeal to ‘Harmony’ - a higher, implicate nature-beyond-nature, handmade and decorative, all curves and swirls, tell-tale signs of idle fingers, fat and wet, busying themselves drawing lines on maps, hand-made geometries claiming provenance from god himself.

These obsessive, omnipresent scratchings repeated everywhere - from snail shells to alphabet soup - are apparently timeless truths explaining a cosmic design which places the congenitally senile at the pinnacle of creation, explaining the great chain holding strong, explaining powers and thrones anchored in their proper orbit.

Thankfully for the future of the honeycomb, there’s a stronger, simpler law at work, well understood by anyone with English dirt beneath their fingernails:

If you’re explaining, you’re losing.