Linkblogging for 29/04/09
I’ve been too tired to blog properly for a couple of days – the migraine mentioned in the last post was actually a symptom of me coming down with some minor infection – not bad enough to keep me from going to work, but bad enough that I’m too tired to concentrate. Getting a bit better though so hopefully normal blogging will resume tomorrow (and I *might* have some big news – though I might not. Either way, my usual netcast *will* be up tomorrow at Liberal Conspiracy). In the meantime, here’s some links:
The people who used to be at Seebelow, the livejournal community, have started a group comics blog by the same name. It’s got some of my favourite writers involved, including the welcome return to blogging of Matt Rossi, ex of the Howling Curmudgeons and Once I Noticed I Was On Fire…
Roasted Peanuts is also worth a look, going through (nearly) every Peanuts strip from the beginning in order and analysing Schulz’s changing style.
Andy at Wouldn’t It Be Scarier? has strong views on the government’s recent plans to allow faith schools to apply their ‘values’ to sex education. I’m not keen on his last paragraph, which assumes it’s the responsibility of all religious people to constantly distance themselves from those who supposedly share their faith but who hate gay people, but I agree with the thrust of his point.
Brad Hicks is not keen on the newspapers.
And Alison Goldworthy points out how Labour is failing the people who used to be its core supporters.
Those wanting to get involved in the ‘newniverse’ project I spoke about a few days ago, by the way, I’m taking next week off work and one of the things I’m going to do is get that sorted properly.
The Zombies, Bridgewater Hall, 24/04/09
From Rock Of Ages by Grant Morrison and Howard Porter
The Zombies’ album Odessey And Oracle is one of the few ‘classic albums’ that happens to really be the best album of the band’s career. While many Beach Boys albums are at least as good as Pet Sounds, Revolver beats Sgt Pepper hands down, and Da Capo is half a better album than Forever Changes, The Zombies’ career was short enough that they only really made one proper album-as-statement, so it’s lucky that Odessey And Oracle, which was released in 1968, after they split, is as good as anything out there.
A few years back, two of the members of the Zombies, Colin Blunstone (the lead vocalist) and Rod Argent (the main instrumentalist – a wonderful keyboard player, who also wrote the band’s biggest hits) started touring together, firstly as “Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone of The Zombies”, but then the “Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone” started getting smaller on the posters and The Zombies getting bigger, and now their touring band just tours as The Zombies. I never managed to see them live, even though the Zombies were one of my favourite 60s bands, because there has always been some kind of scheduling conflict (for example when they played Liverpool in 2004, Brian Wilson was performing Smile in town on the same night), but the live recordings I’d heard of the touring band had been pretty good (though reunion album Out Of The Shadows was fairly poor, with only the decent Ray Charles-esque blues track Mystified being at all memorable, and even that badly produced).
However, last year the four surviving members of the Zombies (guitarist Paul Atkinson having sadly died a few years ago) got together for a handful of concerts in That London to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Odessey & Oracle. In the first half of the shows, Blunstone & Argent’s touring Zombies played a normal set, while in the second half the four surviving members, augmented by touring guitarist Keith Airey and keyboardist Darian Sahanaja (who regular readers will have heard me rave about before) performed O&O from beginning to end. (A live album from those concerts can be heard here for those of you with Spotify, but the live DVD that came out this week is better, having more songs). After this, they announced that they would be playing four (and only four) UK gigs doing the same thing, and then never play the album live again. As one of those was the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, I had to go, along with my 22-year-old brother who is only now starting to develop his musical taste.
The first half of the gig, by the current touring ‘Zombies’, was a mixed bag. The band themselves are the same kind of lineup you see when going to see any 60s group live these days – two original members (you’ll recognise these in any 60s group – they’re the ones with the mullets), a bass-player who used to be in a different 60s group (Jim Rodford, formerly of Rod Argent’s late-60s band Argent, and a member of The Kinks for 20 years), a guitarist who looks like he thinks he’s too good for this and insists on playing twiddly blues riffs all over everything (Keith Airey, who my brother said was ‘working out his mid-life crisis live on stage’, and looks like a clone of Roger Daltrey) and someone several decades younger than anyone else on stage who’s the son of one of the other members (drummer Steve Rodford).
Starting out with I Love You, the band stormed through the first half of the set. The early Zombies songs worked very well – the appeal of the Zombies early on was Blunstone’s voice and Argent’s keyboard, anyway, so the others weren’t too missed. Those early songs, while good of their type, were pretty much indistinguishable from other chart music of the time in their construction – most of their first few singles could have easily been hits for the Swinging Blue Jeans or The Merseybeats – but Blunstone’s breathy, gorgeous jazz-inflected vocals and Argent’s Hammond organ made the finished records sound like Mose Allison Goes Merseybeat.
Surprisingly, though, while the first set contained a few early Zombies songs, and one or two from the reunion albums, as well as songs like Sticks And Stones (a Ray Charles cover the Zombies used to do), a big chunk of the first set was devoted to Colin Blunstone’s solo records.
This is no bad thing. After the Zombies split, Argent formed the imaginatively-named prog band Argent, along with (as a non-performing writing/production partner) Zombies bassist Chris White, but Blunstone went on to make a couple of exceptional solo albums – One Year and Ennismore – before his later, more mediocre, solo work. One Year was produced by Argent and White, and so is effectively a Zombies album by any other name, and may even be the best of them.
Unfortunately, One Year was based around some gorgeous string arrangements which couldn’t be replicated live, but the Tim Hardin cover Misty Roses still worked wonderfully with just Blunstone’s vocal and Airey’s (remarkably restrained) acoustic guitar. Say You Don’t Mind worked less well, turned into a Status Quo-esque boogie (they said later that the Zombies used to play it that way live, but that didn’t make it any better). I Don’t Believe In Miracles, on the other hand, from Ennismore, is one of those songs it’s impossible to mess up, though it helps that Blunstone still has one of the most extraordinary voices in popular music.
Unfortunately, the sound in this first half was *appaling*, and the fault must be that of the sound engineer as the Bridgewater Hall has the best acoustics of any venue I’ve ever attended. Blunstone’s voice was almost drowned out for much of this first half, and the whole thing was a wash of reverb. The band played wonderfully, and Blunstone in particular sounded stunning – but it was a strain to hear him. I should have realised the sound engineer would be bad even before the start of the gig – the intro CD was an Otis Redding mono/stereo twofer, and when it turned into stereo, we could only hear one channel through the PA, so we were treated to minimalist bass-and-horns-only versions of Mr Pitiful, Satisfaction and so on…
However, despite this, the first half was very good, and the ‘new’ members acquitted themselves pretty well. The first set ended with Argent’s hit single Hold Your Head Up, which sounded far better (though still not all that great) with Blunstone singing lead.
The second half was what everyone had come to see, though. The Zombies had split up before Odessey And Oracle had ever been released, and so they’d never performed this material live. In fact Hugh Grundy, the drummer, and Chris White, the bass player, have not played live much at all in the forty-plus years since recording the album. But here were four of the original Zombies, plus Keith Airey on guitar, Darian Sahanaja on keyboards, the Rodfords on backing vocals and hand percussion and Chris White’s wife Vivienne Boucherat on backing vocals.
I was particularly glad to see Chris White on stage, as while Rod Argent wrote the band’s biggest hits, and some very very fine songs like A Rose For Emily, Chris White wrote seven of the thirteen songs on Odessey And Oracle, and I always found his songs to be more to my taste than Argent’s – songs like This Will Be Our Year and Friends Of Mine seem slightly less calculated than Argent’s rather intellectual, precise writing.
But actually one of the striking things about Odessey And Oracle is how unified Argent and White’s vision was. Normally if you have two non-collaborating songwriters in a band you end up with two very different styles – think of Lennon & McCartney, both equally good, but McCartney could never have written I Am The Walrus and Lennon wouldn’t have written For No One. By contrast, White and Argent have almost interchangeable styles – White slightly more folky and Argent more jazzy, but Argent could easily have written Butcher’s Tale or White I Want Her She Wants Me.
What’s even more amazing is how well the album stands up as a live performance. Usually, when watching one of these ‘classic acts perform their classic albums’ shows, there are one or two songs that just don’t work in a live setting – watching Brian Wilson do Pet Sounds live, for example, Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) never really came off very well, even though on the record it’s by far the best song. By contrast, it was relatively weaker songs from Odessey And Oracle like Changes (only relatively weaker – O&O is almost unique as a filler-free album) that shone here – hearing those block harmonies (and the vocal blend was stunning, with Blunstone, Argent and White sounding just like they always did, and the other members only adding background touches that had been tracked in the studio) sent shivers down my spine.
Thankfully, the sound engineer had sorted the balance out for the second half, and every note was audible, and Airey had toned down his guitar histrionics, playing note-for-note the parts on the record. Blunstone was in stunning voice throughout – and he’s the only one of the great sixties vocalists whose voice hasn’t aged at all – and everything from the opening of Care Of Cell 44 through to the end of Time Of The Season was about as perfect as you can imagine. The record was replicated absolutely faithfully, but Blunstone’s vocals were if anything even better – I was open-mouthed in awe at his singing on the “she told me to be careful if I loved her” section of I Want Her She Wants Me, and every single song in the second half was just beautifully done, from the a capella folky chanting of Changes to the pastoral psych of Beechwood Park (the “Oh roads in my mind” section being another stunner) to the jazzy pop of Time Of The Season.
After this, there was an ‘encore’ which didn’t involve anyone leaving the stage, consisting of their two big hits, She’s Not There and Tell Her No, plus Going Out Of My Head, all augmented by the brass section who’d come along to play on This Will Be Our Year, and then a final real encore where they performed the Gershwins’ Summertime, the first song they ever recorded.
It was definitely a show of two halves, and I feel very sorry for everyone who didn’t get to see this (they say they’re never going to do this in the UK again, though I think they’re touring the US doing it) but I’d definitely still recommend going and seeing the touring band if you get the chance – the ‘new’ members aren’t the originals, but they’re good at what they do, and their half of the set was marred by factors out of their control. But this was one of the handful of shows (like seeing Brian Wilson premiere That Lucky Old Sun, or Richard Thompson doing 1000 Years Of Popular Music, or Pulp at Glastonbury in 1995) that will remain with me forever. My brother, who didn’t know the band’s music at all before going to the gig, came straight out and bought a copy of the live DVD of last year’s show, which should tell you something about the quality of the show.
Whatever Happened To All Of The Heroes, All The Shakespearos?
There appear to be two schools of thought regarding Neil Gaiman among comics critics. One, popular ten years or so ago, is that he’s the greatest writer ever to have worked in the medium, and brings a new level of literacy and intelligence to the medium that no-one else can match up to. The other, which is increasingly popular at the moment, is that he’s a poseur – a one-trick-pony who’s mostly good at dressing in black and getting women who like Tori Amos records to swoon after him.
Ignoring the implicit sexism in the latter criticism (and a lot of the criticism of Gaiman boils down to ‘he makes comics that GIRLS like! Ewww…’) there’s a lot of truth in it – especially in his novels, Gaiman is an incredibly patchy writer, who does have a tendency to write the same storyline over and over (Coraline, Stardust, Mirrormask, Anansi Boys and Neverwhere are all so similar that I honestly think *I* could write a ‘Neil Gaiman novel’ now, and probably convince Gaiman himself he’d written it and forgotten about it), so I often tend towards the latter consensus. But then I read his *good* stuff (and some of those in the list above are actually good, but I’m thinking here especially of things like the short story collection Smoke And Mirrors) and I think that no, when he’s actually trying Gaiman is almost as good a writer as his reputation suggests. Not the very best, but up there in the top tier – around Dave Sim level, below Moore and Morrison but above Ennis and Ellis, probably around Peter Milligan level in the “British writers who became typecast as Vertigo writers” list.
The first part of Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader? was very much Gaiman-by-numbers, which meant there was a certain minimal level of quality which is far ahead of most superhero comics (and certainly ahead of any Batbook not written by Grant Morrison in the last decade or more), but it was still the kind of thing that someone trying to write like Neil Gaiman would have come up with – a group of characters gather for a wake and tell stories about the departed, and none of those stories ever quite match up. The stories of Batman are more important than the man. And so on.
But what it did do, quite effectively, was match up with Morrison’s work on the title – Morrison and Gaiman actually being more alike as writers than their surface dissimilarities would suggest, both having based much of their work on the idea that ‘all stories are true’, for example, which turns up as an ordering principle in both Morrison’s run on the title and Gaiman’s two issues.
This issue, the story takes a different turn – we see a few of the many possible deaths of Batman, done in the styles of different periods of comics history, so we see an alternate ending to The Killing Joke with Batman dying of Joker venom, a Neal Adams-esque Ra’s Al Ghul, and so on. Kubert actually excels himself here, turning in pretty good Dick Sprang, Neal Adams and Brian Bolland swipes/pastiches. Unfortunately, the inking by Scott Williams treats all these pages like they were Jim Lee, and the colouring similarly doesn’t vary at all. This really, really, needed a more sympathetic inker, rather than someone who treats every page as an opportunity to show how good he is at cross-hatching.
What works surprisingly well is the big reveal, which is that all this is taking place as a conversation between Batman and his mother, in his mind, as he dies, and that for Batman, rather than an afterlife or reincarnation, he goes back and is born again as himself, to repeat the whole thing over again. It’s really the only way that the story set up in the first half could sensibly end, and the only way you could really create an ending to ‘the Batman story’.
It’s also refreshing to see Batman’s mother playing such a prominent part – for the last couple of decades, writers wanting to work out ‘daddy issues’ have concentrated on Thomas Wayne almost exclusively, barely mentioning her (if nothing else you’d think that the fact that Superman’s mother has the same first name as her would make for a Geoff Johns ten-issue cryfest). Actually, for a small boy, it would probably hurt more seeing his mother die than his father – though of course either would be horrific – and the obsession with Thomas Wayne probably has a lot to do with the sexism of the comic industry. It also makes sense narratively that it be Martha Wayne Batman talks to as he dies, since it is her he gets handed to as a baby at the end.
(Incidentally, this reminds me of a pet hypothesis of mine – nowhere in Sandman is Death ever actually named, and it’s said that you see her twice in your life, once at the beginning and once at the end. My idea is that she’s ‘really’ called Delivery/ance…)
My main problem with this is the characterisation of Batman, who comes across as trapped in his childhood, trapped in the moment his parents died. Which is a valid interpretation of the character, and one that a lot of people have used, but it doesn’t work for me – to my mind Batman has to be characterised as someone who got over his parents’ death – if nothing else because the sentence spoken by Martha Wayne in this story – “You can’t bring us back” – isn’t true in the context of the DCU, in which Batman operates. Pretty much everyone Batman knows – Superman (who appears in this story), Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Metamorpho, Jason Todd, Ra’s Al-Ghul – has died and come back to life multiple times. A Bruce Wayne who was driven to become Batman solely because he couldn’t get his parents back wouldn’t make sense in that context.
That doesn’t matter in a two-issue ‘semi-continuity’ story of course – and I can’t believe I’m complaining about ‘continuity’ at all – but this story is explicitly trying to be the story that comes at the end of every interpretation of Batman’s life, from Bob Kane to Frank Miller to Adam West to Christopher Nolan to Alan Grant to Denny O’Neil. But the decision to make Batman a viewpoint character in the story at all means that of necessity it has to be one interpretation of Batman – an actual character rather than the idea of Batman – even though the story is about the idea rather than the man (or rather, it’s about the man becoming the idea).
So, I think I have to consider this two-parter a failure overall – the parts that worked were the parts where Gaiman was on auto-pilot, and the parts that didn’t were the ones where he was trying. But Gaiman on auto-pilot is still in the top 10% or so of comic writers, and the bits that didn’t work at least didn’t work interestingly. There’s stuff to say about this comic, which is more than I can say about the vast majority of superhero comics at present, and it makes me look forward even more to the upcoming Wednesday Comics series to which Gaiman will be contributing.
I’m also looking forward to the changes in the Bat-books – Morrison & Quitely on one, J.H. Williams illustrating another, and a third with Ed Benes and Judd Winick on the same title (so they can both be quarantined away from any comics I might want to read). This summer might be a fun one for comics after all…
(BTW I will be posting something about the ‘Newniverse’ idea tomorrow evening, when my migraine’s cleared up – I’ll probably post a review of the Zombies gig from Friday tonight though, as that’s the kind of thing I can write with my brain only half-on, as is this post).
ETA I stupidly posted the link to this on twitter and used Neil Gaiman’s Twitter alias rather than his real name to save space in the description, and he only *READ IT*… his response:
@stealthmunchkin the review itself was written OK but 1st two paras read like sophomore snark, and the “ooh icky girls” stuff was just bad.
Well, I suppose that’s fair…
Inform Update
Edit 25 April for some reason WordPress broke the links in this. Fixed now.
Only a few (if any) of you will be interested in this, but Inform 7, the programming language for text adventure games (Interactive Fiction) has released a new version, along with a new, much-improved website.
Those of you who enjoy writing really should check out this absolutely marvellous cross-platform program (Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux and Solaris binaries available), which actually allows you to write something like this (taken from an earlier post of mine)
“Example” by “andrew hickey”
The Fortress Of Solitude is a room. The description of the fortress of solitude is “An empty, cold, lonely place – the kind of place a God would enter when he needed to cast off his humanity for a short time.” The South Pole is a room. The South Pole is outside from the fortress of solitude.
Superman is a man. Superman is in the Fortress Of Solitude.
A lead box is in the fortress. Kryptonite is a thing. Kyptonite is in the box. The box is closed. The box is not transparent. The box is openable.After opening the box:
Say “‘How could you bring Kryptonite here?’ shouts Superman, and he flees”;
try Superman going outside.
And have it be interpreted as an actual running program.
Inform 7 is an absolutely revolutionary tool for true interactive storytelling, and I want to start writing actual story/games in it soon (I’ve spent nearly a year just playing with it). The documentation is also some of the best I’ve ever seen.
Also of interest for the more technical and Free Software oriented of you is that they’ve started opening the program up under the Artistic License 2.0 (except the IDE, which has always been GPLv2 (GPLv3 for the GNOME IDE) , and a couple of still-closed bits – they’re followers of Knuth’s idea of ‘literate programming’ and want to make the source human-readable to non-programmers before releasing it). And not only that, they’re opening up the toolchain they created to create Inform 7 too – things like this literate programming tool.
If you’re interested in telling stories or in computer programming, you really should give it a go…
Labour Conspiracy
This post will be of no interest to anyone who is not hugely interested in the minutiae of British political blogging, and the wankery that goes on therein… I hate writing posts like this, and I hate contaminating my own blog with them, but i can’t really see anything else to do. I would post this on Liberal Conspiracy, but I don’t have direct posting access there – everything I write for it goes through an editor… I’ll post something about comics tomorrow.
As some of you will know, I recently started to contribute a weekly ‘netcast’ to Liberal Conspiracy, a group blog to which I’ve also occasionally contributed longer posts (reposted from this blog or my old LJ, and heavily edited by the site’s owner, Sunny Hundall).
Now, a lot of Liberal Democrats are very wary of Liberal Conspiracy. The site is supposed to be a cross-party liberal left site, but many Lib Dems consider it to be a way of trying to co-opt us into Labour in some way or other – a Labour fifth column. Many Lib Dems refer to it as ‘Labour Conspiracy’, and most of the prominent people on the site *are* Labour supporters. However, I do think it is a good thing to work across party lines, and some of the Labour people on the site (Laurie Penny, for example) are decent, there are Greens on there, and non-aligned people like Debi Linton, and the presence of people like the very strongly opinionated Lib Dems (and friends of mine) Jennie Rigg and Mat Bowles keeps me reading and contributing.
But my patience is wearing thin.
Just over a week ago Liberal Conspiracy became overrun with tedious, masturbatory posts about a non-issue storm-in-a-teacup sleaze story that involved *A BLOGGER!* and therefore must be talked about at excruciating length by all other bloggers, apparently. Charlotte Gore summed up my thoughts about that pretty well. Several people started calling for the site to stop being up its own arse and actually start talking about politics, rather than blogging about bloggers blogging about bloggers blogging (and now you see why I didn’t want to post this…)
But I thought when that nonsense died down, the site would get some semblance of a reasonable editorial line again. I was wrong. In just the last few days we’ve had a post headed “Our Ethic of Progressive Blogging”, the very first line of which started “We are a group of Labour party members and supporters”. The disclaimer at the top was added later, by Jennie RIgg, who *does* speak for me at least when she says in the comments “YOU might be a collection of Labour Bloggers but I’M not, and nor are any of the other Lib Dem or Green or unaligned contributors, and this is the sort of thing that makes us feel pushed out of the theoretical “big tent” which appears to only exist as long as Labour members are the ones in charge of the tent pegs.”
This apparently made Jennie and Mat and Tez Burke and myself and the other Lib Dems who commented there ‘mindlessly tribal’. But fine – the disclaimer was added, it was an obvious crosspost, mistakes happen – though they do tend very much to happen in one direction. But Sunny Hundall is an honourable man, and he says that he genuinely wants the site to be cross-party, so let it go.
The next day we get this nasty piece of bile, an attack on a decent ex-Labour MP (a proper Old Labour MP on the Stop The War Coalition committee and so forth) for leaving the party. I actually think it’s meant to be an anti-Labour piece, but I can’t tell because it’s just complete gibberish – sub-literate nonsense written by someone who hadn’t even read the resignation letter in question. Someone thought this was worth posting to the third most-read political blog in the UK…
Then we get a post about how “It’s Time For Socialists To Rejoin The Labour Party”, which unfortunately calls to mind nothing more than a spousal abuser begging for one more chance and promising he’ll change.
And finally we get this post, which conflates the ‘progressive, liberal left’ with the Labour Party and states that there is no ‘major national poltical party’ to represent ‘progressives’, while still also going on about how much Labour has to be ‘proud’ of (he mentions increased spending on the NHS – which would be good were it not that much of it is PFI spending and much of that is actually detrimental to patient care – I’ll explain why another time, the minimum wage – an actual good policy, from twelve years ago, and Sure Start childcare, which I know little about. Hardly a record to compare with the great reforming governments of the past, even if you discount the huge negative side).
Now, at least two of these posts are ‘guest posts’, which means that it’s not as if the writer just hit ‘post’ and didn’t think about it – they had to be submitted, and someone had to look them over and say “Yes, this is what we think should be published on this site.”
It seems to me that there are two types of posts on that site. The first, and so far still the majority, though a small one, are ones by members of many parties (including Labour) arguing for various policies because they are, in the view of the writer, correct. Those posts are often worth reading, and include some of the best political writers out there.
Then there are the posts which talk about ‘positioning’ and ‘narratives’. Almost all of these advocate the same policies as the other posts, but they also claim that those policies can *only* work if implemented by the Labour party. They usually, in fact, just assume implicitly that the readers are Labour members. Many of them talk about ‘saving Labour from itself’ as if it’s up to those of us who aren’t members to join a party that has committed war crimes, removed civil liberties, taken from the poor and given to the rich, and generally spent the last 12 years acting exactly like the Tories had for the eighteen years before, because otherwise ‘the Tories will get in *and it’ll be your fault!*’
If this doesn’t change, and very, very soon, then I shall have to come to the conclusion that this is not just a series of embarassing cock-ups and stupid comments, but a calculated attempt to marginalise those of us who consider ourselves ‘liberal’ and ‘left’, but who consider that a political party has to actually do something we agree with more than once a decade to be worthy of our support.
An Immodest Proposal
This blog has recently been turning more and more into a political-ranting blog for me, which is not something I’m particularly pleased by. However, it’s mostly because comics at the moment are stupefyingly dull. Oh, that’s not to say there’s not good stuff out there – I’m still reading five or six new comics a week at least – and I’m looking forward to Batman & Robin, Williams on Detective, and the new Wednesday Comics thing – but nothing excites me and calls me to write about it.
So since I don’t want this to turn into “What Andrew’s Angry About Today”, I thought I’d suggest a project. Those who’ve known me a while will know that I have a tendency to start grand projects which don’t get finished, and there’s no guarantee this will, but I thought I’d give it a go. A few years back, when I was still on LiveJournal, I tried to start a community to create a fictional ‘universe’ which anyone could write stories for. Tilt came up with some great stuff about the Wars of the Roses, Gavin R made some interesting suggestions about the English Civil War, my late friend Pete Fenelon came up with an alternate rock-music history for it and I repurposed a (frankly terrible) superhero story I’d started writing for it, but then it all petered out a bit.
What I thought was it would be fun to resurrect the idea (and if anyone who was involved previously wants to join in again, I’d be very glad to use their old ideas or any new ones) and put together a collaborative collection of short stories set in the same universe. That way any story, from fanfic-with-the-numbers-filed-off to experimental modernist narrative, would be given a deeper context.
If anyone wants to do this, what I’d like to do is for participants to write a few stories on their blogs if they have them, and I’d set up a wiki page for ‘factual’ details about the universe. If it takes off, we could do a book of the best stories through a print-on-demand service like Lulu. I’m hoping for a result something like Temps, the Superman-meets-Yes-Minister short story anthology from the 80s.
Would anyone be interested in taking part? I’m addressing this especially to the people I have linked on my blogroll, but if anyone else wants to get involved, it could be fun. It wouldn’t have to be stories either – could be news articles or blog posts from the alternate universe.
As a basic guide, here’s the original ‘proposal’ I wrote five years ago. This is essentially unchanged, so therefore awful, but I think it could do as a starting poinf. What do you think?
The idea here is to find a way to tell any story anyone could conceivably want to do, using the same shared-world backdrop. I think, as an initial idea, that the further away from ‘Now’ we get, the less like the real world it should get. Likewise the further away from the dwelling-places of the likely readers we get, the less like the real world. Inventing a new African country (a la Wakanda in the Marvel Universe) is a lot more ‘plausible’ to the average reader than inventing a new US State or county in Wales. Which is not to say we can’t do those too, but they should be thought about more carefully.
This is only the REAL basics so far…
The way I see it, we have a series of civilisations that rise and fall, leaving little or no trace.:
Prehistory – Dinosaurs. Do they have a civilisation at all? That could be interesting.
The Stone Age. This happened as many people imagine it from films and TV and so on, people living in caves and hitting each other with clubs etc.
The Age Of Heroes. We have a prehistoric Heroic Fantasy setting here, with elements of both Conan type stories and more Tolkeinesque stuff going on. Dragons, Elves, Wizards, Dwarfs etc all milling around doing their thing. This goes on for several thousand years. I think that each civilisation should go through the five stages from Illuminatus! – Chaos, Order, Confusion, Bureaucracy, Aftermath. This would allow us to do both traditional heroic fantasy and Discworld style satire of the Beauraucracy stage.
Atlantis also sank around this time.
Biblical times/Egypt/Greece/Rome – again, pretty much as people imagine them. Feel free to create as many pharaohs and emperors as you want, or to mess with the timeline as much as you like.
King Arthur – this is to the Age Of Heroes as the Renaissance was to Ancient Greece in our world, and should be played as such. The Arthurian times end around the same time as Robin Hood existed, give or take a few hundred years.
The Middle Ages exist mostly as a setting for Shakespeare’s plays.
The Victorian era onwards should happen more or less as it did in real life. There were more gangsters in the 1930s than in real life and superheroes started appearing then too, but in general life remained pretty much unchanged for most people. By the mid 18th century most of the more odd animals (vampires, trolls, talking gorillas and so on) had retreated to obscure parts of Eastern Europe or Africa, and people had essentially stopped believing in them.
‘Now’ is pretty much like now today, except that the level of technology in some ways is more advanced. Teleportation and time machines might exist, but if so they’re prototypes only, most people haven’t even become aware of their existence, and they don’t make much difference to people’s lives. There’s a colony on the moon, and another on Mars, but again these don’t really enter into most people’s thoughts.
Superheroes exist – there have been ‘mystery men’ since the thirties, and a few powered heroes since the 60s. There are nothing like as many of them as there are in superhero universes, however, and while superteams exist, people wouldn’t expect them to make any real difference to the world.
Roughly 20 years from ‘now’ we have FTL and first contact with alien intelligences. A hundred years or so from then, there is a nuclear war which devastates most of the earth. However, a few billion people by then live off Earth, and so while the Earth becomes uninhabitable for a while, except by a few roaming tribes of mutants and suchlike, it’s eventually repopulated, and becomes one of the centres of the galactic Empire.
The Empire itself goes through two separate phases. In the time of growth, it’s high-concept space swashbuckling, a la Flash Gordon or Buck Rodgers, with jumpsuited heroes battling evil space dictators and saving the girl. Later on, it settles down into a more sedate empire, a la the Federation in Star Trek or the empire in Foundation, except with multiple sentient species (humans, vampires, trolls etc) from Earth as well as aliens.
Eventually, the empire crumbles, humanity is reduced to almost nothing, and the Things under the sea, which have been guiding humanity for millennia through The Conspiracy (which involves every conspiracy idea ever) come out. Their breeding program has produced some very tasty meat…
There will be whole alien civilisations too, as well as beings from other planes (faerie, Heaven, Hell and so on). There is one ‘true god’, but that god has multiple aspects, each of which have multiple identities which can interact, thus allowing elements from any major mythology to share the same stories.
I’ve not included here the ideas from anyone else, as I’m not sure they’d want me to, but this should give people an idea. Anyone want to join in?
Linkblogging for 16/03/09
I haven’t done a linkblog for a little while, partly because I’ve been doing a weekly one over at LC (my latest one is up now), but since comics dont come out until tomorrow because of Easter, I thought I’d do one today.
Alex at Love And Liberty has a tribute to Peter Rogers (producer of the Carry On series, Clement Freud (Liberal MP, chef, children’s author, McCartney album cover model and panelist on radio comedy Just A Minute for over forty years and actor John Cater.
Tim at The Hurting continues his phenomenal series on Kingdom Come and comics that culturally surrounded it with this look at Earth X.
Chris Bird continues to talk about why he should write Doctor Strange, this time bringing the (real-life) baseball legend Moe Berg into the story.
Justin at Chicken Yoghurt is one of many people covering the continued proof of police violence at the G20 protests.
And Fred at Slacktivist looks at ‘Tax Freedom Day‘.
Oh, and finally, for all the million or so people hitting my blog because the title of a previous post was a line from an old hit record, the song you’re after is Mickey by Toni Basil, written by Chinn & Chapman. Video of it can be found here, and it’s on Spotify at spotify:track:2cZFWUgoFqsruaDftuCv7e . Now don’t say I never do anything for you.
You Damned Sadist! You’re Trying To Make Them Think!
Debi has a fascinating post today on ‘the FedEx arrow’ – on the way that once you’ve seen subtext in a work, you can’t unsee it, and the various reactions that can come from that.
Now, I’m not really one to talk about that directly, because I can completely distance my reaction to a piece of work from a recognition of its political flaws – hell, I love Cerebus where for a large part the rampant misogyny and homophobia are text, not subtext. I enjoy the banjo music of Uncle Dave Macon, who recorded songs like “Run, Nigger, Run”. I can distance myself from these things, of course, partly because I’m not in the group being attacked, but also because I can split good art from its message.
However, many people in ‘fandom’ (a group of which I emphatically do not count myself a member ) have real trouble with this. If someone points out, say, that in Star Wars how heroic a character is correlates very strongly with how blonde they are, they go absolutely berserk, asking “How dare you accuse George Lucas of being racist?!” and saying “you’re reading too much into things!” Which is where Debi comes in.
Now Debi thinks, and I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of truth in this, that many of these people are worried that liking something that is (say) racist would make them racist, and since they think (possibly even correctly) that they’re not racist, and they do like those things, then the thing they like can’t be racist. I’m sure there’s a lot of truth in this – one should never underestimate the sheer, overwhelming sense of privilege and entitlement in fan circles – but I think there’s more to it than that. I think fans are often fundamentalists.
Many fans (at least the ones who don’t go around trying to find gay subtexts in everything) hate the whole idea of subtext – you just have to look at the people whose reactions to Seaguy we talked about in this comment thread. There is a sizable contingent of ‘fandom’ who hate metaphor, theme and subtext, and who say things like “It’s what it is, you just need to turn your brain off”. Many go so far as to deny, at least implicitly, the very possibility of something meaning more than its literal meaning (which is to say, they deny the possibility of art).
I’ve wondered for a long time what could cause such hostility to the idea of a layered narrative (and if you doubt that such hostility exists, go on to Newsarama and try to discuss Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, or anyone else who’s a relatively competent writer), and why it should show up in ‘fandoms’ far more than in the general public.Because I think, though I may be wrong, that most people’s reaction if you show them that a work they like is one that works on multiple levels, would be to say “Oh, that’s quite clever!” – to use the metaphor Debi elaborates on, they’re pleased to see the arrow in the FedEx logo, rather than thinking the designer was trying to play some trick on them.
In this, fans are like fundamentalists, who believe in the ‘literal truth’ of their holy books, even the bits that specifically state themselves to be fictional (there are people who believe in the literal existence of the Good Samaritan – Fred Clark has a great pair of analyses of their mentality) and who get really angry if you say “Well, the world wasn’t *really* made in seven days”. With the fundamentalists, it’s because they can’t understand the difference between ‘metaphor’ and ‘lie’ – if you say that some of their holy book isn’t ‘literally’ true, you’re saying it’s a lie.
I think some fans have such an intense desire to *actually live in* the DC or Marvel Universe, or the Star Trek or Star Wars or Doctor Who or whatever ones, that any reminder that these are artistic works – any reminder that they were created by a human being with a point of view, rather than just being neutral historical records of true events, is a reminder that they will never really get to travel in the TARDIS or Enterprise, and they react, at least a little, to that. If something isn’t absolutely, incontrovertibly, linear and one-dimensional, then they won’t be comfortable with it.
Which is, I suspect, why so many things created for or by fans are so deeply, deeply awful.
(This post took longer to write than any other post I’ve done, and is fewer words than almost any of my ‘proper’ posts. I’ve no idea why this should be, but thought it worth noting…)
Playlist for Easter Monday
Since summer appears to have started, alas, this week’s spotify playlist is a little more upbeat and summery than previous ones, though I’ve still included a couple of blues tracks, just because. You can play this one from here . It’s fifteen tracks.
Oh My Love The Wackers is a cover of the Lennon solo track by the classic Canadian pop band. As you might expect from their name, the Wackers were very Beatles-influenced, and this track was a deliberate attempt to do the song as it would have sounded had the Abbey Road-era Beatles recorded it. Gorgeous little track.
Product by Glenn Tilbrook and the Fluffers is from the new album Pandemonium Ensues, which is musically the strongest thing Tilbrook has ever done, drawing from a far broader palette than he ever did in Squeeze (though lyrically he still misses Difford enormously). This one actually worked better live, where it sounded very Jobim-esque – here the John Barryisms in the chorus sound a little cliched. But there’s still some very interesting stuff going on here, and bassist Lucy Shaw’s vocals are great.
Riot In Cell Block #9 by The Robins (the band who later became the Coasters) was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and is an obvious precursor to their later Jailhouse Rock, but this is by far the better song.
As it’s Easter Monday, I thought I’d add in the best religious song ever written, the lovely Country Boy by Jake Thackray. Over a melody which is strongly reminiscent of Heroes & Villains, Thackray sings about Jesus’ ministry in the down-to-earth Yorkshire Catholic way he had – referring to a prostitute as “living her life between the scandalised fist and the beckoning finger” and a thief being crucified as “clinging to life with hands that had always been empty”. It’s an expression of a very humanistic Christianity, and is in its own way as great a religious artwork as Bach’s St Mathew Passion or the Sistine Chapel – that sounds an exaggeration, but I truly think it’s the case.
Give Me A Pig’s Foot And A Bottle Of Beer by Bessie Smith is there for pillock, who asked about this one last week, but also because it’s a great early blues track.
Surf’s Up by The Beach Boys is one of the two greatest songs ever written. Both, according to most sources, were written by the same two men, Brian WIlson and Van Dyke Parks, on the same night (the other is Wonderful, Rufus Wainwright’s version of which I linked the other week). If this had been released in 1966, as part of Smile, as intended, rather than five years later, it would have been as important a record as A Day In The Life. But it’s still a better one.
You’re No Good by The Swinging Blue Jeans is one of the best Merseybeat singles ever. I always think it a shame that the Swinging Blue Jeans are ignored while even The Searchers get some respect now – You’re No Good and their version of Don’t Make Me Over are classic pop singles I could listen to all day.
Directly From My Heart To You by Little Richard is a song I first learned from Frank Zappa’s cover version. In both versions it’s a wonderful piece of greasy blues. Why Little Richard isn’t absolutely worshipped, I don’t know – the man was one of the greatest vocalists who ever lived.
Someday Man by Paul Williams is a version by Williams of a song he wrote with composer Roger Nichols for the Monkees. Williams and Nichols are possibly the least cool songwriting team ever, having written Rainy Days and Mondays and Rainbow Connection, but this song, Trust and To Put Up With You are as good as soft pop gets. This one reminds me of Neil Diamond, but less smug.
Candombe by Los Shakers is what you get when an Argentinian band that started out as a clone of moptop-era Beatles goes psychedelic.
Sport (The Odd Boy) by The Bonzo Dog Band is a rare full collaboration between Neil Innes and Viv Stanshall, and manages to be hilarious, an accurate attack on British schooling *and* parenting, and musically unusual, combining cod-Elizabethan woodwind, waltz-time harpsichord and mass chanting.
Three Hours Past Midnight by Johnny Guitar Watson is one of the greatest electric blues records ever made. In particular, the guitar playing on here is pretty much the template for all Frank Zappa’s playing throughout his career.
I Want A Pony by Candypants is my favourite stompy pop song of all time. “Mom, I wanna be the king of pop/buy me fans, hurry up/I just wanna be a millionaire/You’d die and leave me money if you really cared/…I want a pony, I want a pony, I want a pony, I want a pony now!” Lisa Jenio is my favourite songwriter of the last few years, and I wish she’d release some more albums of her own material.
Say You Don’t Mind is not, as Spotify thinks, by The Zombies, but is actually a solo single by lead singer Colin Blunstone, a cover of a Denny Laine song. Blunstone is a great vocalist (and I’m looking forward an unreasonable amount to the Zombies’ Manchester gig next week) but what really makes this for me is the fact that they’ve chosen to back him with *only* a small string section, playing in a chamber music style. It turns what would otherwise have been an average 70s pop-rock singer-songwriter track into something very different. And that last note just blows me away every time.
And finally, Cups And Cakes by Spinal Tap is a wonderful gentle pisstake of English pastoral psychedelia, while fitting the genre perfectly.
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