Okay, fuck the lot of you
So the Bastard Nazi Party have got a European Parliament seat in Yorkshire, and may well have one in the North West where I am. They have done this on a turnout of something around 43%. That means that, statistically, more than half of you reading this and eligible couldn’t be bothered to vote.
I didn’t think I had done very much campaigning in this election, but I did a couple of days of Hope Not Hate stuff, and I spent the whole of Thursday working for the Lib Dems. And believe me, it was fucking work, leafletting in that heat I walked so much my bus pass dissolved in my pocket and my legs were still aching this morning. I have a lot to say about the stuff I heard when doing telephone canvassing too – the utter, total lack of faith in the political system which has been brought about by decades of corrupt, authoritarian right-wing governments, which I’ll write about later. But practically no-one was out doing this.
On the days I did Hope Not Hate stuff there were maybe thirty or forty people doing it. On the election day there were eight doing active campaigning where I was (which is not to say there weren’t other Lib Dems campaigning in other areas – with it being a regional thing people were hitting target areas).
And I want to personally praise John Leech, the MP for Manchester Withington, to the skies – he was out there leafletting from five o’clock in the fucking morning when I didn’t drag my lazy arse out of bed til gone ten. He also gave various people lifts – while certain other MPs in nearby constituencies have chauffeurs, he was driving a bunch of us around in a tiny Mini that I had immense difficulty getting into and out of.
But the only election leaflets I got through the door this year were from the BNP and Greens, the only paid advertising posters I’ve seen were for racist UKIP (votes for whom I can at least understand, as they at least make a half-hearted go at pretending not to be racist). I’ve not seen a single person with a Tory or Labour poster in their window, and only one with the Lib Dems “Winning Here” diamonds (my friend Dave Page, so he’s one of the people exempted from the general ‘fuck you’ here).
Like I say, I didn’t do much to stop this happening – almost nothing, in fact. Just a couple of days’ work. But that’s a couple of days’ more work than almost anyone else, and fifty-six percent of you couldn’t even be bothered to put a cross in a box. You didn’t even have to go to a polling station to do it – you could have used a postal vote. And don’t tell me that on a ballot with twenty-odd parties on there’s not one you could have voted for.
Anyone I see claiming they’re upset, annoyed or sickened by the BNP getting a seat had *BETTER* have been out there actually doing something to stop them. Otherwise you’re part of the reason why my tax money will now be going to supporting a party that wants most – if not all – my friends and loved ones dead.
Were it not for the fact that innocents will be harmed because of this – seriously harmed – I’d say it serves you right to be getting incompetent thugs representing you (and indeed ‘representing’ me). But the money the BNP will get from the EU will be spent on things like defending party members who go out ‘Paki-bashing’. The BNP will now have a legal right to airtime on the BBC. This fucking matters.
So come on. What, if anything, did you do to stop this? And I don’t mean going #thebnparetwats on twitter, ho ho ho very amusing – what did you actually do? If you can’t answer that, then you’re at least as much to blame for this as the corrupt Labour and Tory politicians, or the fascists themselves…
Nananananananana Nananananananana BATMAN!
Batman! Batman! Batman! Nanananananananananana – BAT-MAN!
Morrison and Quitely’s Batman & Robin #1 is – until the disturbing last couple of pages – the most fun Batman comic I’ve read in years. The feeling of it is summed up in the very first panel, where the explosions form the words “BOOM BOOM” in fire – the incorporation of the sound effects into the physical action of the panel (like the ‘splash’ made up of water shapes a few pages later) puts us into kids’ comic-book territory, somewhere closer to Dick Sprang (although with a big dollop of Keith Giffen) than to Frank Miller.
This is Quitely’s comic all the way. It’s a cliche to say it, but more than any other writer in comics, Morrison depends on his artists, and much of the reason for the underwhelming response his Batman run so far has had has been his pairing for the bulk of that run with the decidedly… competent… Tony Daniel. Morrison plants clues in the action, in the visual look of the comic, and to have that come off requires first that the artists draw what he tells them (at least where that matters to the rest of the story) and also that the pages be enjoyable enough to look at that one is willing to drink in all the little details, rather than just skim over the pictures looking at ‘what happens’.
It’s no coincidence that prior to this the only part of Morrison’s run on Batman that has been universally admired is the three-issue Black Glove story, drawn by J.H. Williams III, who is for my money the single best artist working in comics today. And as an artist Quitely is almost as good as Williams, while he’s someone with whom Morrison seems to have an incredibly strong working relationship, so it’s unsurprising that on the evidence of this issue, the first storyline of Batman & Robin is going to be at least up to those heights.
Quitely’s storytelling here is almost uncanny – so much of the information here is conveyed by things like character expressions and body language that even I, who have no visual aesthetic sense and a near-autistic inability to pick up on non-verbal signals, am able to figure out these characters from single panels. Even if I knew nothing about Dick Grayson or Damian Wayne – and this being a first issue one would hope (though that hope is no doubt in vain) that it would be appealing to new readers – I could tell literally everything about them from the first panel in which they appear:
B&W copy of the top panel from pgs 4 & 5 of Batman & Robin 1
Here Damien looks stern, determined, and over-confident – at least in his face. His expression actually looks like what he is – a snotty little kid who wants everyone to think he’s a grown up. But then look at his posture – tensed up, arms crossed – he’s trying to look casual but instead he’s desperately insecure. Meanwhile Dick Grayson, the new Batman, is truly self-confident. He’s utterly relaxed precisely because he knows he’s in complete control. That’s the posture and expression of someone who’s trained in something like acrobatics, martial arts or Yoga (and of course Grayson is supposed to have trained in all these and more) – someone who knows all the time what every single muscle in his body is doing, and so can relax completely because he’s in complete control of the situation. This is shown again and again in their respective postures and expressions.
Look, for example, at that big splash page with Batman and Robin jumping down from the sky in front of the Bat-signal. Damien has his arms pressed close to his body – he’s completely straight and rigid and plunging down head-first. Dick on the other hand is arcing gracefully, with his arms wide open.
And Quitely being so bloody good (and there are a myriad examples of this throughout the comic – look at the second panel of the burning man, with the evil grin on his face that the cops don’t notice) allows Morrison to just let him tell the story with the pictures and get on with writing realistic dialogue, rather than expositional.
In particular, I found it amusing that Dick Grayson recognises Mr Toad’s (and what a perfect Batman villain he is – I can’t believe that no-one thought to use him as one before now) speech patterns as “European Circus Slang”. It is – but only a character who grew up in a circus would make that association first. Mr Toad is actually speaking Polari – a slang that, while apparently originating among Romany circus-people, spread later to theatres and thence to the pre-legalisation British gay subculture, and certainly to any British person over the age of forty the first association would be Julian and Sandy rather than circus people (an association Morrison is certainly aware of, as Danny The Street in Doom Patrol also spoke in Polari.
But we also have touches like Damien telling Alfred “you can leave it by my toolkit, Pennyworth” when offered some supper, while Dick says “These chicken and jalapeño sandwiches are ferocious – I could eat them by the ton” – Damien (much like a caricature of his father) trying too hard to have self-control and self-discipline in an almost anorexic way, while the much more well-rounded Dick Grayson manages to take pleasure in the sensual world, rather than the purely intellectual. (Incidentally, is this the first display we’ve seen from Morrison of a sympathetic character actually eating meat? )
At the moment there appears to me relatively little to say about this comic as far as subtext or clever allusions or any of that stuff goes (though I’m betting the Mindless Ones will find more stuff to say about it when they all take turns in writing about it). It’s just a really good, fun, Batman comic, of a kind anyone can enjoy. I can’t wait for the next one.
Seaguy review either tonight or tomorrow.
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ 24 – Max Warp
I’m going to try to get back to doing these once a week, on Saturdays (because Saturday is the proper day for Doctor Who as everyone knows) .
Jonathan Morris’ Max Warp is one of the range of ‘Eighth Doctor And Lucie’ hour-long audios that Big Finish have been doing, initially for Radio 7 but more recently just for their own CD/download range. These were explicitly aimed at being a half-way house between the old and new series, so the format is that of the new series (single-episode stories that are self-contained for the most part but hint at ‘arcs’ that are resolved in ‘season finales’), there are few of the continuity-wank bits that sometimes infect the main Big Finish range, but it’s still recognisably ‘classic’ Who (as we are apparently obliged to call it) rather than nuWho.
This actually works rather well for the most part – while the Doctor is scripted more blokeishly than I would like, in what I presume is a nod to the new series (he speaks in one story of a Time Ring being ‘a bit bling for me’ and has an obsession with Liverpool Football Club), McGann invests the role with enough Doctorishness that it’s still recognisably the same character that was in the original series, and I *like* self-contained shortish stories that don’t require you to have a burning desire to know where the second-in-command at Global Chemicals disappeared to half-way through The Green Death (or whatever other continuity trivia some people bring themselves to care about).
The real downside of these shows is Lucie Miller, the Doctor’s companion, played by Sheridan Smith. She is the most irritating companion the Doctor has ever had – worse than Jo Grant and Melanie Knownasmel combined, if you can believe that.
Now, this is not for the reason that some have complained about online – the character’s working-class Merseyside accent. Complaints about the character for that reason have rather nasty classist and regionalist bases that I think should be done away with – I certainly don’t think the Doctor would have those biases. (If nothing else, the Doctor’s clearly a Northerner himself – while they are all speaking more-or-less RP, the fourth and eighth Doctors have Scouse accents, the sixth has a hint of Manchester, the seventh is Scottish (and you can’t get much further North than that) and you can place the Ninth Doctor – should you wish to count him – almost to the street in Salford). It’s the way the character is written that is unpleasant.
She’s portrayed as the kind of person who thinks they’re clever and funny but knows nothing and seems not especially willing to learn. The kind who’ll turn anything into a rather dismissive joke rather than try to understand it. It’s actually a very strong characterisation – Lucie is clearly a real person – she’s just the kind of person I want nothing to do with, so having her along on the adventure isn’t a good thing from my point of view.
Specifically, she seems like the kind of person whose presence on QI makes you know the show is going to be a rubbish one – like Jimmy Carr, Jo Brand or Jeremy Clarkson. And Clarkson is very much on topic for this story, as it’s in great part a parody of Top Gear, featuring Graeme Garden as ‘Geoffrey Vantage’, a ‘politically incorrect’ tight-jeans-and-bald-patch presenter of a show about spaceships, Max Warp, that becomes the centre of a murder investigation when one of the co-presenters, ‘the Ferret’ dies in a crash in suspicious circumstances.
On my first listen to this I found it very enjoyable indeed (and Jennie, if you’ve not heard this one, you must) , although a couple of things irritated me, notably the totally unnecessary Hitch-Hikers quote/references (I think there should be at least a fifty year ban on anyone writing science fiction and referencing a Douglas Adams line in the belief that this makes their writing as good as Adams’ – all it does is drag Adams’ work down by association and humourless repetition, devaluing the work they claim to enjoy). The plot also doesn’t actually play fair (or, indeed, make much sense at all) as a whodunnit – but that’s OK, because it’s still fun to listen along to.
But on a repeated listen, I noticed a curious thing – this story is a parody of a British TV institution, with a whodunnit plotline, where the TV show exists in-story and is being used as part of a peace initiative, but is being disrupted by the murders. It involves one of the presenters of the show being a disguised secret agent, has an irritating assistant and stars Graeme Garden. It’s a remake of Bang Bang A Boom!
As a story in itself it’s probably better than the earlier one – more tightly-focussed, less broadly farcical, but still light-hearted and fun. But it’s so similar to the earlier story that one can hardly believe no-one noticed and said ‘hang on, we’ve done this before’, so it has to be docked points just for not even being original within the Big Finish audios. It’s still an enjoyable listen, and one of the better McGann audios, but not a patch on the earlier story.
ETA I’ve just realised that this is written by the same person who wrote Flip-Flop , yet while that one was (as Alex put it) “written as if Jonny had just been consoling himself after a bad break-up with a diet of nothing but the Daily Mail. ” and an anti-immigration rant worthy of the BNP or racist UKIP themselves, this one, from a few years later, is internationalist in outlook and makes fun of Vantage for justifying his obnoxious views as being ‘politically incorrect’ (when the earlier story was a Clarksonesque attack on ‘political correctness’). Very odd…
Tomorrow I’ll be doing two comics posts – one on Seaguy and one on Batman and Robin. See you then.
New Spotify Playlist – Messiaen, Johnny Cash, Dennis Wilson, Zappa, Sister Rosetta Tharpe…
OK, so I lied when I said I wouldn’t be posting for a while. It’s very boring without Holly around…
This week’s playlist is unthemed, but just based on stuff I’ve been listening to recently. More instrumental stuff than I normally have – I don’t know why that would be, except maybe that I’ve been a little non-verbal recently (the heat seems to have shut down the verbal reasoning parts of my brain).
We start with an excerpt from Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. I was reminded of this, an old favourite, today by a mention in About Time vol 3, which I’m in the middle of. I don’t have a great vocabulary for talking about art music, but I love this kind of stuff – experimental mid-20th century music (roughly from Stravinsky through Boulez), Americana and baroque (especially Bach and Handel) are the ‘classical’ styles that appeal to me, far more than classical music itself does…
The Dinosaur Song by Johnny Cash is from the Johnny Cash Children’s Album. No, really. This exists. I was as surprised as you. And this song is, indeed, Johnny Cash singing about dinosaurs. I have no idea what a ‘brontosaurus rex’ might be, but quibbles aside this is up there with Jonathan Richman’s I’m A Little Dinosaur and Four Tet’s Go Go Ninja Dinosaur as far as dinosaur songs go.
Fallin’ In Love by The Beach Boys is actually an early-70s solo single released as by ‘Dennis Wilson and Rumbo’ (Rumbo was a pseudonym for Darryl Dragon, later the Captain of The Captain And Tenneille). This has just been issued on CD for (I believe) the first time as a legitimate release, on Summer Love Songs, one of the fifteen-song-you-already-own-five-copies-of-plus-two-new-stereo-mixes CDs EMI release every year or so to snag completists. (This is doubly completist friendly, as it’s a different mix from that released on the single). The lyrics are risible – it’s a 70s Californian singer-songwriter singing about “my lady”, how could they not be? – but the music – Wilson doing Tim Hardin – is gorgeous, and it also contains what sounds like the earliest use of a drum machine I’ve ever heard.
Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart by Judy Garland is from her classic Carnegie Hall live album. I trust you know who Judy Garland was…
You Go To My Head by Rufus Wainwright is from his own live album, forty years on, where he covers track-for-track Garland’s earlier one.
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey by Paul McCartney is from another whole-album remake – this time McCartney, under the pseudonym Percy “Thrills” Thrillington remade his own Ram (by far his best solo work, and possibly the best solo Beatles album) as instrumental muzak. Actually it’s almost as interesting as the original album, expecially in songs like this – in the original McCartney had sung in many , many different voices (he’s a far more versatile vocalist than people normally credit him for) doing call-and-response, and it’s fun listening to the way the instruments chosen for the different parts mimic the different voices he used on the original.
Vielako soitan banjoa? by Scandinavian Music Group is from a playlist a Twitter friend shared with me. I know nothing about it except that it has a banjo on it and the band are from Finland.
Baby Plays Around by Elvis Costello (no Attractions, despite the Spotify credit) is a song I was reminded of by Debi’s Being Human playlist, from my favourite Costello album, Spike. Co-written with his then-wife Cait O’Riordan (former bass player of the Pogues), this has a melody as good as (and reminiscent of) the best of Costello’s other writing partner of the time, Paul McCartney.
Melody Fair by The Bee Gees is from Odessa, a very, very strange album they made in the wake of Sgt Pepper. This is one of the more straightforward tracks. This sounds like the missing link between Paul McCartney and Syd Barret – seriously. The Bee Gees are one of those bands whose big hits obscure some very interesting, strange corners of their music…if you can ever get hold of a bootleg copy of Robin Gibb’s unreleased solo album Sing Slowly Sisters give it a listen – it’s as out-there as Arthur Lee.
Forty Cups Of Coffee by Ella Mae Morse is a great mid-tempo R&B track. There’ve been times when I’ve drunk thirty cups of coffee in a day, and even if her tolerance was greater than mine (and mine used to be pretty high before I made myself ill with overindulgence and cut back drastically), there’s no way she’d ‘want to hug and kiss ya and say I’m glad you’re still alive’ after forty cups – more likely she’d be having serious heart palpitations and suffering from paranoid delusions and a killer migraine. We need accuracy in our songs, dammit! She’s as bad as Cash…
Ride Into The Sun by The Velvet Underground is one of several songs from the Loaded era that are very, very different from the normal perception of the VU, and are much more interesting than the stuff that made them famous. I’d take this over any number of chugga-chugga look-at-me-I’m-so-cool-and-depressed distortion-fests…
King Kong by Jean-Luc Ponty is from the album of the same name, produced by Frank Zappa, where the world’s second-greatest French jazz violinist performed a selection of Zappa’s more fusiony pieces. The whole album’s worth a listen – somewhere between the jazz-rock of Hot Rats and the modern classical of The Yellow Shark in Zappa’s oeuvre, it’s also practically the only Zappa-related music on Spotify at present (so it’s a good job it’s in the top 10% or so of his work).
Count Five Or Six by Cornelius is one of those tracks that’s been co-opted by advertising, but if you listen to it without those associations it sounds like some strange collaboration between the White Stripes and the High Llamas, with lead vocals by a Speak-And-Spell machine.
This Train by Sister Rosetta Tharpe is a gospel classic. When listening to this, remember it was recorded long before the 50s rock & roll tracks it resembles. In that context, Sister Rosetta is clearly *inventing* rock guitar here – her licks are essentially the same ones that Scotty Moore would play on early Elvis records (they’re also almost identical to Chuck Berry, but Berry would play double-string rather than single-string lines, which would give a very different sound). And Sister Rosetta was playing like that from the *late 1930s* on.
And The All-Golden by Van Dyke Parks is probably the most ‘normal’ sounding track from his classic Song Cycle, another album you should listen to in its entirety.
Linkblogging for 03/06/09
Euro campaigning has been very low-key around here (what little I’ve done has been Hope Not Hate stuff rather than specifically Lib Dem) but I’ll be spending as much of tomorrow as I can (given the weather, which is almost literally killing me at the moment) out and about door-knocking and leafletting, so the earliest you’re likely to get another post from me is Friday (and probably not then, as Holly gets back from the US then). So these will have to tide you over til then:
Millennium Dome, Elephant has views on the rats abandoning the sinking cabinet.
Calamity Jon has a look at the 1991 Amazing Heroes Swimsuit edition. If you’ve ever wanted to see Olive Oyl, Wolverine or the cast of TaleSpin in swimwear, then you’re a sick and disturbed individual. If you’ve never wanted to see those things but have a morbid curiosity now I’ve mentioned it, head over there…
Gavin B has a great post on ‘slag-off’ punk songs.
XKCD is especially good today.
Fred Clark has a post on the ‘pro-life’, ‘Christian’ terrorist who killed a doctor in church the other day. (This is not an invitation for a debate on abortion in the comments here, incidentally. I am willing to assume that most people on both sides are people of good will, and I have friends on both sides of the argument and want to keep them, and I have never yet seen a discussion of abortion that didn’t descend into needless abuse. On the other hand, none of my friends are pro-shooting-people, I hope).
And The Beast Must Die has a great comic strip he created for a children’s comic that unfortunately didn’t happen – Abel And Baker – Monkeys In Space
Expect reviews of Seaguy and Batman And Robin on Friday or Saturday, and a BFAW on Sunday. I may get a politics post up tomorrow once we know what the election’s looking like. In the meantime, if you’re in Europe, please go out and vote tomorrow, and please don’t vote for UKIP or the BNP – remember UKIP are liars and racists who hate my marriage and the BNP are even more contemptible (but less electable) than that. At the moment it looks like a three-way tie between the Lib Dems, Labour and UKIP for second place – current polls have them all more or less within a margin of error of each other – and I’d hate to see the racist bastards get more seats than us…
Quick Doctor Who related question
I just got the second edition of About Time 3,by Tat Wood, which is apparently three times the length of the first edition.
I just wonder if the sentence “Miles cornered the market in sarcastic, whiney petulance and prima-donnaism, but here he went too far, and we’re left wondering how Lawrence was put in charge of such a complex and sensitive undertaking” appeared in the first edition, credited to Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood?
7 comments