Linkblogging for 14/07/09
I wanted, today, to finally do my European Election aftermath post that was delayed by lack of net access, inspired by this month’s Liberator (now with 100% more unfair attacks on Alix Mortimer! Very odd, that bit…) but my head’s battered today, so I’m going to give you some links and watch a Doctor Who DVD instead.
Alex at Love And Liberty has done his own Doctor Who essential DVD list, partly in response to mine, and has also been reposting a few articles he wrote for the now defunct site Outpost Gallifrey. Probably the one you need to read if you haven’t is How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal, his most well-known piece, but there’s a few good new posts up there.
Pillock has also been on a roll recently, with posts on Alien Legion And Depression and Wednesday Comics, neither of which I’ve felt coherent enough to comment on, but both of which I think are among his best stuff.
Eddie Campbell tells you how to get into the movie business. (Incidentally, those of you who don’t read his blog should – it has the same level of insight that makes his comics so great).
Charlotte Gore wants to Ban The Internet!
Zom has a great post on Batman And Robin – another of many that I’ve wanted to comment on recently but haven’t had the brain to say anything sensible about except “good stuff”.
And Costigan Quist has written a lot of good stuff this week, so just go and read through his last dozen or so entries.
A Beginner’s Guide To Doctor Who DVDs
A short while ago I was having a discussion about Doctor Who with my friend Tilt, as part of a larger gathering of people that included several Doctor Who fans. Tilt was arguing that as one gets to see more vintage TV, the less special Doctor Who seems, and that the show only gets so highly rated because of fans with blinkers. I was arguing that while the show had its ups and downs, there *were* plenty of ups. The conversation then went something like:
“I mean, it was hugely uneven in quality – you had stuff like An Unearthly Child, which I’d seriously put up there with anything, but you can’t sustain that for 26 years without producing some rubbish, so of course there’s stuff like Warriors Of The Deep“
At which point someone chipped in “But Warriors Of The Deep was good!” and I had to argue about this, thus proving Tilt’s point (just to note the fan in question is not an unreasoning zealot or anything like that, but he did choose a bad show to defend).
Most of the guides to Doctor Who on DVD out there tend to be written by the kind of fan who defines himself (I tried writing ‘themselves’ there but my verb-agreement nerve started twitching, and to be frank they are all male) as a fan first and foremost, and following them will probably lead very quickly to buying The Three Doctors and being surprised it’s not a masterpiece of Gothic terror, as you were told, but some silly nonsense about jelly monsters, or saying “This Lost In Time thing doesn’t make sense! It’s just a jumbled mess of different bits with no story!”. (Honourable exception here goes to Alex’s guide, which overlaps quite a bit with this one, but seems to be trying to provide a thorough guide for people who want a LOT of Doctor Who on DVD).
This guide, on the other hand, is intended for people who may never have seen the old show at all and who want to figure out what the fuss was about, and don’t want to spend much money doing it. I’m going to suggest *one* DVD per Doctor, all of which can usually be picked up for under a tenner. I’ll also mention three box sets you should get, because the box sets of DVDs are often far better value than buying the individual stories.
The very first thing you should buy if you don’t mind spending a little money on trying something is the Davros box set, which can be bought from Big Finish for forty quid. This is about as good an introduction to the series as you could hope for – five stories, featuring four different Doctors, and with three-and-a-half different production teams, and at least three of the stories (Genesis Of The Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance Of The Daleks) being considered among the very best of their respective Doctors’ tenures. On top of that there’s also several audio dramas – Davros, featuring the sixth Doctor, which is as good a piece of Doctor Who as you’ll hear, Juggernauts, another Sixth Doctor story, and still pretty good, Terror Firma, an overly-continuity laden story featuring the Eighth Doctor that you have no hope of ever understanding, and some stories about Davros with no Doctor in there. Even if you only enjoy half the set, that’s still something like twelve hours of entertainment, not even counting the several discs of documentaries and other bonus features.
The other two box sets I’ll recommend will come in their respective chronological places – they can both be picked up for around a tenner from Amazon, and so don’t really require any special expenditure, unlike Davros.
The First Doctor
If you’re going for a single story from the first Doctor (who is *horribly* underrated by fans generally, who only remember his occasional fluffed lines and forget that the show was taped ‘as live’ in those days, with no second takes, and who don’t seem to notice what a subtle, solid performance he gives) then it should be The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, which is essentially “What if the Nazis won the Second World War?” but with Daleks instead of Germans. That said, what you really want to be getting is the The Beginning box set (currently nine quid on Amazon), which contains the first three stories – the absolutely astonishing An Unearthly Child, The Daleks, which is a little padded to modern eyes but does introduce the famous monsters, and Edge Of Destruction which is unlike anything the show tried again.
The Second Doctor
Unfortunately, almost nothing exists of Patrick Troughton’s time as the Doctor, the BBC having decided to set fire to it all in one of their regular clever decisions that also consigned their coverage of the Moon landings, Where Was Spring? and tons of live footage of the Beatles to the fire – because no-one could ever have use for any of those things, right?
Of the few surviving stories, probably the best for a beginner is Tomb Of The Cybermen – shorter and punchier than most of Troughton’s stories at only four episodes, it’s essentially The Mummy set in space. Fandom remembers it for the scenes of Cybermen smashing their way out of their tombs, but the bit that sticks in my mind (other than the unfortunate ethnic stereotypes) is the quiet scene where the Doctor comforts his companion Victoria, whose family had died in a story just before this one.
The Third Doctor
Jon Pertwee’s era as the Doctor isn’t a favourite of mine, but that’s more for the setup for the bulk of it (the Doctor stuck on Earth for most of it, working as an adviser to the military) than for Pertwee’s performance, which was, when he was given a decent script, as good as any of them. For an absolute beginner, probably the best story to go for is The Time Warrior – a fun pseudo-historical romp by Robert Holmes, the series’ best writer, which has no great depth but is full of wonderful moments.
(My recommendation for Pertwee after that is simply to avoid anything except The Green Death where Jo Grant is the companion, and concentrate on stories with Liz Shaw or Sarah Jane Smith).
The Fourth Doctor
Choosing a single story for Tom Baker is harder than any of the others, because of the sheer length of time he was in the role (he was there for seven years – Pertwee was there for five, and all the others for three). But if I have to choose, I’d go for City Of Death. A comedy story co-written by Douglas Adams, with some of the best production values the series ever had, gorgeous music, perfect performances, cameos by John Cleese and Eleanor Bron, and multiple genuine Mona Lisas (all but one of which had “This is a fake” written under the paint in felt pen), it’s not the most adventurous or challenging story ever, but there isn’t a moment where it’s not entertaining.
At the other end of the scale, I’d also suggest the box set New Beginnings – Tom Baker’s last two stories and Peter Davison’s first. Fans mention a lot of things about these stories – the return of the Master, new companions, regeneration and so on – which have to do with the stories’ ‘significance’ to the show, but aren’t important to the casual viewer. What is important is that these are from the brief time when script editor Christopher Bidmead (who wrote two of these three stories and essentially rewrote the third from scratch) was trying to make the show about ideas (as well as doing ‘story arcs’ and so on years before the more modern shows were doing them – this trilogy of stories came after the ‘E-Space Trilogy’ and all six stories are essentially one continuous one, though you don’t need to have seen the E-Space stories to appreciate this). Logopolis (the middle story of this box) is essentially the show you’d get if you tried to fit Neal Stephenson’s Anathem into two hours, and works astonishingly well, while Castrovalva is a story based on Escher pictures.
The Fifth Doctor
Peter Davison’s time as the Doctor isn’t a favourite of mine, even though he was the Doctor I grew up with – too often he was given tenth-rate scripts and expected to carry them on his performance alone, and in several stories it feels like he’s the only one who’s bothering to try at all. He did have a few good ‘uns though – like The Caves Of Androzani, his last story, in which he gets caught up in a complex web of political intrigue and assassinations while trying to save the life of his companion. Written by Robert Holmes, this is very stagy and artificial, but in a good way (Alex WIlcox rightly compares it to House Of Cards, except with more firing squads and plummeting spaceships).
The Sixth Doctor
While Colin Baker gave one of the best performances as the Doctor, he’s the hardest to recommend DVDs of, because he only did two full series, one of which (Trial Of A Timelord) was a gigantic story-arc in a box set that’s perhaps the very definition of ‘patchy’, and even more than Davison he was lumbered with terrible scripts. However, Vengeance On Varos is a frankly stunning piece of TV by any standards. The script, by Philip Martin, is clever, combining political commentary with postmodernism in a way that was still interesting in the 1980s, and actually uses the self-referential nature of the story to create one of the best cliffhangers the show ever had, Martin Jarvis’ performance as the ruler of Varos is extraordinary, but the show is really made by Nabil Shaban’s performance as Sil, the last truly great villain created for the show.
(ETA I just thought of the best description of this while talking to James Graham in the comments – Vengeance on Varos is the closest TV ever came to 2000AD in its prime
The Seventh Doctor
Other than Remembrance Of The Daleks (already part of the Davros box mentioned earlier) it’s hard to find a Sylvester McCoy story one can recommend wholeheartedly – at this time the show’s budget was being slashed, and some of the scripts in McCoy’s first series were, frankly, risible. But The Curse Of Fenric comes close. If you buy the DVD, watch the re-edited ‘film’ version rather than the original episodes, which were cut to shreds to fit the running time. The story itself has a little too much going on (a Russian invasion in the middle of World War II *and* vampires from under the sea *and* evilevilfrombeyondthedawnoftime *and* resolving Ace’s mother issues *and* an Alan Turing analogue) but it works thanks to some great performances, especially (and this will sound ridiculous, but it’s true) Nicholas Parsons as a vicar losing his faith – the scene of Parsons reading 1 Corinthians 13:13 from the pew to an empty church is worth the price of the DVD in itself.
In 1989 Doctor Who was taken off the air and never came back…
Spotify Playlist – The Boy Can’t Dance
This week’s Spotify playlist is not particularly themed or anything, and in fact was put together in two chunks – before and after I lost my net access. So it’s more varied than most, although overall more downbeat than usual.
Little Hands by Skip Spence is a song I discovered in Robert Plant’s quite gorgeous cover version a few years ago. This song – and the album it comes from – sounds like the missing link between Arthur Lee and Syd Barret, and is an obvious influence on people like Robyn Hitchcock.
The Girl Can’t Dance by Bunker Hill is my very favourite Little Richard soundalike record (yes, even better than Larry Williams or Don & Dewey). Hill doesn’t have Richard’s camp or falsetto, but the performance here is absolutely rabid. Wonderful stuff…
Appropriately, Holly was earlier watching a documentary on the Russians sending dogs into space. I say appropriately because I’d already included Russian Satellite by Mighty Sparrow in the list – a calypso song about how “I am very sorry for the poor little puppy in the Russian satellite”.
America by Van Dyke Parks is an arrangement of God Save The Queen (yes, yes I know he’s doing it as My Country ‘Tis Of Thee, but it’s our national anthem, not theirs) that makes the horrible dirge actually listenable, using elements of Japanese tonality and orchestration, from an album all about connections between the US and Japan.
Shortenin’ Bread by The Ready Men is a track I first heard on the CD version of Pebbles Vol 4 (the vinyl version has a very different tracklist – both are essentials for lovers of surf music) – a version of the old song done in the style of Surfin’ Bird with a blistering Dick Dale style surf guitar solo. Sublime.
Sarah Lee by Esquerita is a good example of the man whose visual style Little Richard stole completely. Musically, though, he’s closer to the New Orleans strolling R&B of Fats Domino or someone of that type. This is actually an astonishingly sloppy record, but it manages to work.
Solar System by The Beach Boys is a classic from The Beach Boys Love You, an album that I always describe as sounding like “Tom Waits singing Jonathan Richman lyrics, over a background by Bach, played on a Moog set on fart sounds”. This one would make a perfect kids song, and I’m quite surprised it’s never been covered on one of those “Rock songs for kids” type albums like They Might Be Giants make. The middle eight of this is just lovely.
September Gurls by Big Star is unfortunately not the studio version, which isn’t on Spotify, but is a very decent full-band demo which sounds almost identical except for the harmonies. One of the best pop songs ever written.
Rolling Sea by Eliza Carthy is from Rogues Gallery, a compilation of songs about pirates and sea shantys put together by the great Hal Wilner. Anyone who likes good music should check out the compilation, which features everyone from Jarvis Cocker to Richard Thompson to Van Dyke Parks.
Red Wine Promises by Victoria Williams is from an album of cover versions of the songs of Carthy’s late aunt Lal Waterson. Waterson was always an underrated songwriter because her family were so well known as interpreters of traditional song, but some of her stuff is as good as any of the better known songwriters of the British folk movement, and it’s nice to see her getting some recognition, albeit posthumous.
Rain Stops Play by The Duckworth Lewis Method is from the duo’s eponymous album – an album of songs all about cricket, from Neil Hannon and someone I’ve never heard of before. I think the album tries a little too hard to be ‘arch’ and ‘eccentric’ for its own good – it’s the album of people who desperately want to be like Vivian Stanshall or Ivor Cutler, but aren’t, quite. But still, being like Stanshall or Cutler is a laudable aim, and everything on there’s listenable, but I do think this is the best track.
Once I Had A Sweetheart by Pentangle is a lovely little version of the traditional folk song by one of the most interesting bands of the 60s. Also one of the best examples of Jacqui McShee showing what she brought to the band – listen to the way she’s double-tracking herself in very different voices.
Hard Time Killing Floor Blues by Skip James is the second song by a Skip here, but I presume everyone knows this one. But sometimes things become classics for good reason…
The Cruel Sea Captain by Bryan Ferry is absolutely shocking, because you couldn’t imagine a vocal performance further from Do The Strand or In Every Dream Home A Heartache than this wispy, ancient-sounding croak. A really astonishing performance, that almost makes me forgive him for being a fox-hunting aristocrat-suckup Tory arsehole.
The first part of Deserts by Edgard Varese is Varese writing far more conventionally than he usually did – this could almost be Stravinsky or someone of that type – rather than his more extreme atonal electronic music. Zappa fans will note that this was clearly the *koff* ‘inspiration’ for Semi-Fraudulent/Direct From Hollywood Overture from 200 Motels, and indeed to modern ears this sounds like film music, but it was one of Varese’s last major works.
And to finish we have One Track Mind by The Knickerbockers. The Knickerbockers were a one-hit-wonder band in the US whose hit, Lies was such a perfect Beatles soundalike that many people still think it *was* the Beatles (and Holly was surprised just now when I told her they were American). But in fact they were jobbing musicians from New Jersey – Buddy Randell, the singer/saxophone player, had previously been in The Royal Teens (who had a novelty hit with Short Shorts) and their drummer later briefly replaced Bill Medley in The Righteous Brothers – who just managed to sound like whatever was on the radio. One Track Mind is probably a better record than Lies, because it’s less slavishly Beatlesque, though still with very Lennon-sounding vocals. I also like the segue between Varese and this…
Linkblogging for 08/07/09
Now that the evil burning day-star is finally being chased away a bit the writers’ block of the last few weeks seems to be easing slightly for me. I’ll hopefully be reviewing Wednesday Comics tomorrow, doing a Spotify playlist on Friday and a BFAW on Saturday. And I’m hoping to make quite a big announcement in the next week or so.
In the meantime, here’s some links.
For some reason, almost everyone whose blogs I read has been talking about Torchwood this week, including Jennie and Millennium, and they’re talking about it as if it’s somehow got good – I’m beginning to suspect some kind of (ahem) Liberal Conspiracy going on to try to get me to watch a truly terrible piece of TV. That said, even Lawrence Miles seems to like this one, and his ‘review’ is probably the most interesting, though also worrying (Miles doesn’t tend to leave these up very long though, so read it while you can)…
Chris Bird is still talking about why he should write Doctor Strange.
Amypoodle at the Mindless Ones has one of the best takes I’ve read so far on Batman & Robin 2.
Costigan Quist explains why the Tories are wrong about using Google for storing our health records. That this needs to be explained to anyone ever is one of the most incredibly depressing things I’ve ever heard.
In less depressing Google news, they’re planning to release their own free-software Linux based OS for web app users, using their Chrome browser as a basis for the UI (and I’ve been using Chromium, the fully-free version of Chrome, for a while now – it’s very nice). I use Linux-based there advisedly, as from the sound of it there’ll actually not be many GNU components if my understanding is right.
And a lot of people on Twitter all simultaneously noticed for the first time that the UK citizenship/residency test is an obscene, pointless waste of time and money that dehumanises all who come into contact with it and has no bearing on reality. I knew that already, as my wife is an immigrant, but most other people apparently didn’t. Charlotte sums up the views of those who have looked at it.
Batman Reborn
So, we’re now a month through the Batman Reborn ‘event’, it might be time to take stock of what’s been going on in the bat-titles ( I have of course reviewed a few of these titles here and here earlier…)
I’ve read all the ‘Batman Reborn’ titles except ‘Red Robin’, and it’s very obvious that despite the branding there is really no overarching ‘event’ going on at all here. Dini’s two titles are just unpleasant – Gotham City Sirens I dealt with before, but Streets Of Gotham is just as nasty in its own way, managing to combine mass-murder, child prostitution and continuity-wank into one perfectly horrible story.
I do wonder what on Earth happened to Dini. A couple of years ago his work on Detective was fresh and entertaining – fun, done in one superhero stories. But since around the time he started working on the egregious Countdown he has instead written some of the worst dreck I’ve ever read, and developed an obsession with Hush, a character that has not one single point of interest.
Meanwhile, the remaining title, Batman, is clearly the remedial readers’ title, as one would expect from a comic by Judd Winick and Ed Benes, with DIck Grayson explaining very clearly in words of one or two syllables everything that was implied by Morrison’s script for Batman & Robin#1 – that Batman is dead, that Dick Grayson is the new Batman, that he is not very happy about these things, and so on.
One could almost think that the new Bat-status had been set up specifically to educate superhero comics fans – “Look, this is what we call a good comic. GOOD comics can be recognised by having interesting stories, pictures which are nice to look at, and not leaving you feeling slightly soiled afterwards. THIS, on the other hand, is what we call a bad comic. In a bad comic, nothing happens that anyone could possibly care about, the women all look like stick figures with two circles drawn randomly in the chest area, and it makes you despair for the human race that anyone could possibly produce anything with such a grotesquely twisted moral tone. No, you CAN’T have the variant cover! BAD fanboy!” (smacks round the nose with a rolled-up copy of Gotham City Sirens)
One could think that at least, if one didn’t look through the comments on comics blogs. The comments to this post (I can’t link the comments directly, unfortunately) seem pretty typical – J.H. Williams’ art is “stagnant as the Dead Sea”, “confuses more than it clarifies”, “too hyper-realistic and stiff”, “tiresome” and “flashy show-off stuff that just distracts from the visuals”…
(Yes, that’s the J.H. Williams who does pages like this:)
bad art, apparently
So apparently the reaction of many superhero comic ‘readers’ when confronted with anything that might be called ‘good’ is to be scared and confused, because it makes things happen in their brain and that’s never happened before.
What’s particularly interesting is how much the two titles that might be called ‘any good at all’ rely on the quality of the art. Detective is a competent story with the best artist working in comics providing the art, while Batman And Robin is a very good story with the second-best artist working in comics providing the art. This is especially shown in Batman & Robin 2. This issue, the middle part of a three-part story, has very little in the way of plot, being almost all action, and most of that a fight scene, which provides a problem to reviewers like myself who can talk all day about writing but whose vocabulary for describing art stretches about as far as ‘pretty’.
It’s especially telling to compare this issue to anything from Morrison’s Bat-run from the last few years (other than the Black Glove story with Williams’ art) – the writing on those issues was just as good, but sometimes it was almost entirely unreadable, due to the artists not bothering with trivialities such as ‘telling the story’ or ‘drawing characters who look different from each other’. Here, even in a fairly story-light issue, the whole thing works, because Quitely’s ‘acting’ of the characters’ body-language and expression, and his layouts, and his staging, allow everything to move smoothly.
My favourite moment in the comic though shows what can be done by a good writer working within a superhero continuity. It’s the bit where Alfred talks to Dick about Dick’s ‘showbusiness’ background and tells him to treat Batman as a role. Not only does this work within the story, which is based in his background in the circus, while also illuminating things about Dick’s character, it also points to deeper things about Dick and Alfred’s relationship. Before becoming a butler, Alfred was an actor (under the stage name ‘Alfred Beagle’) and that shared ‘showbusiness’ background would be something Dick and Alfred would have shared, even though I’ve never seen it mentioned before in that context. So not only does it make sense that that metaphor would be one Alfred would think of, it illuminates their relationship by using a continuity point – but the story and that moment also still make perfect sense if you don’t know that.
That’s how continuity should be used – as something that adds resonance if you know it, but doesn’t detract if you don’t. Now, if only this ‘good comics’ thing would catch on…
So this ID card ‘news’ then…
I think my friend Dave has put it best…
As far as I can see there has been no substantive change in policy here. Originally, it was going to be compulsory to go on the ID database when you applied for or renewed a passport, but otherwise ‘voluntary’, at least at first, but you’d definitely get an ID card when you got your passport. Now, you’ll only get the card if you ask for it, but everything else is unchanged.
The card itself has never been the primary issue for No2ID and the other civil libertarian organisations that have opposed the ID card scheme. Which is not to say it’s a *good* thing, by any stretch of the imagination – as far as I’m concerned the idea of a compulsory ID card would effectively make everyone criminal by default for the ‘crime’ of not wanting to pay a regressive tax in order to have the ‘privilege’ of proving your identity to people who don’t have any business asking for such proof in the first place.
But the problem has always been the national ID register itself. The idea of storing what amounts to someone’s entire life history – biological data, health records, financial data, records of all dealings with any government department, records of any dealings with authorised private contractors, address, marital status, income and much more – on a single, central database accessible by anyone working in government – has some slight problems.
Firstly, of course, there’s the fact that it can’t possibly work, but that’s hardly a new thing with multi-billion-pound government IT contracts. Oh, they can store the data, it just won’t be useful for anything…
Then there’s the fact that you will be obliged – for the rest of your life – to keep this data up to date, or face £1000 in fines. They’re not even having the decency to employ spies to watch over us all – we’re meant to do it ourselves!
Then there’s the matter of access. Work in a company that has a government IT contract but don’t want your boss to know about your visit to the STD clinic? Have a stalkerish ex who works at the Job Centre who you’d rather not know your new address? Well, you’d better trust to their sense of duty and professional ethics, then, hadn’t you? Because nothing else will stop them having that information…
And of course it’s going to stop benefit fraud, because nothing makes identity theft harder than having every single piece of information about everyone in the country collected onto one centralised system to which millions of people will have access…
So the very slight scaling back (for now) (and all I can see that has actually changed is that Manchester airport workers won’t be forced to have a card yet) of the obligation to have the card means nothing if the obligation to be on the database is kept. So once again this month (having skipped last month to see old horror films in Bradford – I’m not a very good activist really), I’ll be out campaigning with OpenID – Saturday 11th July 2009, 2pm-4pm, St Ann’s Square, Manchester.
But remember – the fact that they’re trying to make it *look* like we’ve won means they know they’ve lost. We’ve just got to back them down all the way…
Weird…
Just noticed that, on this computer at least, anything in italics on this blog is rendering as whitespace in Firefox. Not sure if this is a FF problem, a WordPress problem or something else. Will investigate tonight. In the meantime, apologies if this is affecting anyone else…
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