Well hello Mister Fancy-Pants

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Hive of the Gammon Worms

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One Man Went to Mow

Last week I saw The Straight Story, David Lynch’s only U-rated film. What struck me on this viewing was, despite its Disney wholesomeness, how much it has in common with his other films, employing familiar tropes and images to different ends.

Lynch has some deliberate fun with this. When Alvin begins his lawnmower journey, Lynch spoofs the recurring road motif of Lost Highway and Wild at Heart, reducing their signature frantic spooling of tarmac to a comic crawl.

Later, the lawnmower gets out of control descending a hill, a situation that could be comic, but which Lynch plays straight, with shaky close-ups of Alvin’s sweaty face and harsh cuts to a burning cabin, that recalls the exploding/imploding cabin of Lost Highway. But here the cabin is being put out as a training exercise by local firefighters and Alvin’s accident introduces him to a kind group of middle Americans.

In a key scene, Alvin encounters a pregnant teenage hitchhiker, who’s running away from her family. This echoes Lynch’s other road movie, Wild at Heart, in which Lula and Sailor encounter a dying girl in the wreckage of a car crash. Whereas they are painfully unable to help her, here Alvin offers the girl food, comfort and wisdom. He compares the idea of family to that of a bundle of sticks tied together – one stick is easy to break, but together they are strong. 

Those paying attention to their political history will recognise this image as the Roman fasces from which fascism is derived. Prior to its adoption by the Italian Fascists, the fasces symbol of collective power was as often invoked by left wing and republican organisations. The Fascist ‘strength through unity’ is a cynical perversion of the collective strength found in family, fraternity and community. The Straight Story is Lynch’s clearest filmic evocation of this spirit – in this sunnier version of the Lynchiverse, Americans actually help one another… 

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The Vile Dead 3: Army of Darkness (Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, 1992)

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A Brief History of British Comics
4: MELTDOWN

• Publisher: Marvel UK   
• August 1991 - January 1992
• 6 issues

When the dam broke, we happily drowned. We never realised that it wouldn’t last forever. 

The convergent factors leading to the W*tchmen / D*rk Knight fronted pop-cultural bubble bursting, were invisible to us. We haunted local newsagents, hovering around the second shelf, above the baby comics of Beano, Dandy, My Little Pony, Care Bears, eyes laser-scanning the rows of titles aimed squarely at our pre-adolescent minds. 

Which had we already bought? Which were worth further investigation? Fervently picking up issues and flicking through, preternaturally aware of the shop-owner's glare, innately mistrustful of local kids. A bloom of comics, new titles appearing and disappearing on the regular. Fleetway, Marvel UK, London Editions, IPC, all on the grift, caught in the goldmine rush of ‘Biff Bam Pow – Comics Aren’t for Kids Anymore’… Crisis, Deadline, Death’s Head, Predator, Revolver, Dragon’s Claws, Havoc, Overkill, Strip, Blast, Aliens, Zones, DC Action, Toxic, Sleeze Bros, Total Carnage. Too many comics for not enough pocket or paper-round money. Read as much as you can before legging it out of the shop. Doesn’t matter, there will always be comics, there will always be too many to choose from. 

‘Meltdown’ collated a random selection of strips previously published by Marvel’s experimental imprint Epic Comics into a monthly anthology for the UK market. No seeming editorial consideration other than a vague notion of edginess. Cholly & Flytrap, Nightbreed, The Light and Darkness War, Last American, Akira all slapped together between repurposed existing artwork. I bought a few issues; Cholly’s pot addled sci-fi; Nightbreed’s irresistible taint of Clive Barker, Light and Darkness War’s bemusing allegory, beautifully rendered by Cam Kennedy; The Last American’s transcendent McMahon evolution; Akira’s tantalising glimpse of an incredible new world, cut into ridiculous, arbitrary chunks. 

A chop-shop, cash-in comic, gone in a flash. Let them last forever. 

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Boomstick

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Haunted: Thing Three. 

I don’t remember that much about Woodchurch. Me mate Kevin across the way. The day-glo pop of Adam West’s Batman framed in rooms of brown. Adults being disproportionately angry at buttoning your coat at the neck to better emulate a cape. The usual fragments. 

The seething mass of anger in the front room stroking its moustache and staring out the window while the telly plays some sort of sport. Infection spreading through the house with every breath. I remember learning to spot the signs of shift patterns, repeated actions that indicate earlies, lates or the dreaded nights. 

But this is the first Thing I remember. I wasn’t dreaming. I’m awake. Sat up in bed and picking me nose. It starts to bleed. I panic, by which I mean I freeze. I’ll be in trouble for picking my nose. Like getting car sick I’ll be in trouble for bleeding. I’ll be in trouble if I sit here bleeding all over the bed clothes but I’ll be in trouble for getting out of bed and going to the bathroom and I’ll be in trouble if I call out. Another spurt of blood hits the sheets. I call for me mum. 

She walks into the room. Not walks exactly. She glides like a chess piece, she doesn’t come to the bed, she doesn’t come to me but she moves  to the centre of the room. Her dressing gown is the wrong colour. She turns to look at me. I can’t see her face properly. ‘Don’t worry’ she says ‘Everything will be alright’. That’s when I realise. That all-consuming rush of panic and terror you get when everything is wrong. 

‘You’re not my mum!’ I shout. The door opens and my mum comes in. Wearing the right dressing gown. I can see her face. The Thing is gone. ‘Why didn’t you go to the bathroom?!’ she says. 

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Why can’t I finish painting my kitchen?!?!!

Late on for ghosts to start challenging for album of the year but the new Mobb Deep is everything they ever were, abandoned palisades and boulevards under 4am light - Look At Me is a co-feature with the only duo to ever threaten to e-Clipse them and main contenders in said AOTY stake. I have listened to this song at least three dozen times and mean mugged and done “sheesh!” faces every time. Malice delivers a victory lap and the fact Havoc MVPs on the album amongst stellar Infamous mirroring guests and super producers lends it further authenticity.

It’s a little disconcerting to hear new ODB verses (on the SZA album closer Forgiveless) when I really thought I dug all them crates and one wonders in the brave new frontier of computer fakery the provenance of this or that, but karma remains in evidence when you see the ghost of Tupac inducing Drake to flub his stupid loser courtcase. Necromancy is its own reward!

(A lot of what folk call AI is just more efficient photoshop or whatever and whilst still largely for liars and the bone-idle not really that.)

Rest in Peace

Returning to some of my earlier material - look I know Nas’ Mass Appeal label is precisely aimed at giving gen X dads wet dreams but I been sayin how these cultures, alongside graffiti, are a pool - Sanford Greene is a terrific artist and the character concepts are quite strong, damn actually The Infamous is a moving homage which fails utterly to be ghoulish or cheap, impressive. I am not paying $30 for a comic however, that’s ComicsGate prices!!

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v. by Tony Harrison, 1987 (Bloodaxe Books New Edition, 2000)

Tony Harrison is dead. Back the other week when we were talking about headstones.

It is 1987 at a friend’s house, in the front room, with the telly on. Channel 4 is young and scandalous, and it is on because we will watch anything. A serious man in a darkened, adult room says the words ‘CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK!’ 

Our mothers, nattering, come alive with shock. What is this horrible programme? Turn it off at once. We turn it over, not off - we are not stupid.

The memory is so clear, yet almost impossible. The original November 4th broadcast of v. was Wednesday night, 11.00PM, impossibly late. A daytime repeat? Surely not, with all the Whitehouse glare and Tory fireworks in the press. A VHS recording somehow finding its way on after school? Unlikely, given the parental reflex we just saw. 

It doesn't matter. Between the screen’s provocation and the sofa’s reaction, v. is Harrison’s response to finding skinhead graffiti on his parents’ gravestone. His fusion of these living earthwords with the cold stone of the family plot eulogises industrial England at the precise moment of its going under. Her enemies have not yet admitted defeat, but the scabs and truncheons are not stopping. Coal stockpiles are holding. Striking families will break and a way of life will cease while I am watching TV.

But barbarous words sprayed on holy rock with empty mind are animating and generative. They told him what unloving hearts abhor: in the living universe, heaven is extraneous and death a fabulation. Everything is here and entangled and in play, long after it has stopped breathing or never breathed.

Now his ashes are alive, there in the vault, creating the floor of the cemetery and the roof of the emptied coal caverns beneath. The miners are alive. The skinheads are alive. The curses on the cemetery stones are alive. Poetry is alive. Bread is alive. Beer is alive. Tony Harrison is alive.