blog

General blog posts.

Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars

I’m currently working my way through Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series of pulp adventure novels. A Princess of Mars, the first of the series, was a surprisingly enjoyable romp reminding me of a mix of Gulliver’s Travels, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. While I’ve always been aware of John Carter, I’d not read any of the books in my youth. I’m not sure why as it would have been the sort of thing I’d have loved. Burroughs – who is possibly more famous for penning the Tarzan books – secured publication of A Princess of Mars (initially titled Under the…

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Back to the Back of a Block-rocking Comic Book!

One of my monthly pleasures before Lockdown was to scan the pages of Previews, the catalogue that would announce upcoming comic book and graphic novel releases. Things have changed since March: lots of titles have been cancelled (some creators have been cancelled, too, but that’s a whole different matter) and DC has split from Diamond distributors which has thrown the comics business into a great sense of foreboding and confusion. UK comics are being released a week later than the US at the moment which is a bit rubbish as the online hype and conversations about each week’s releases will…

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Room at the Top

After I was born my mother took me home from hospital to a small rented attic room at the top of a Victorian house in Rochester. We walked past the house today and I pointed it out to Alice and Soren. “That’s where I lived as a baby,” I told them, pointing at the top far-left window. It’s a tall, dark and Dickensian-looking house that hasn’t changed at all. My mother was on her own when I was born and she told me that she spent a very cold winter with me in her room. She became unwell and her…

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Florian Schneider, “sonic perfectionist”

This month’s Electronic Sound has a heartwarming tribute to the enigmatic Florian Schneider, who died earlier this year. The piece, by Stephen Dalton, gives an excellent account of Schneider’s role in Kraftwerk. It’s particularly good in establishing the nature of the tensions between Schneider and Ralf Hütter that eventually led to Schneider leaving the group in 2008. I loved the ending of the piece: “Their Kraftwerk Konzept still visionary, their musical legacy unassailable. Humans may die but The Man-Machine goes on forever.”

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"a furball coughed up by a supervillain’s cat"

Frankie Boyle on the British government: Boris Johnson, flapping about like a poorly-tethered bouncy castle, is supposed to serve as a distraction, a furball coughed up by a supervillain’s cat. He isn’t supposed to actually lead us through anything. We have a government that has no interest in governing up against an opposition uninterested in opposing. It feels like we’ve got Owen Jones, graffiti, and breakfast news against a ruling class, media, and virus that are broadly in agreement.

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“this weird thing of hyper-normalness”

Mark Fisher in an old interview: “What we have got with this digital culture now is this weird thing of hyper-ordinariness. You have got people who are done up to the nines but it isn’t like David Bowie where you are playing with some abstract aestheticisation. We have got people who have this uber ordinariness – it is a normative model: perfect teeth, right skin tone. An utterly conservative artificiality.”

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Discover, with a deflating quotidian horror

Mark Fisher on Doctor Who: “To look at the old Doctor; Who is not only to fail to recover a lost moment; it is to discover, with a deflating quotidian horror, that this moment never existed in the first place. An experience of awe and wonder dissolves into a pile of dressing up clothes and cheap special effects.”

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micro.blog

As much as I’m enjoying the Twin Peaks anniversary stuff, UK-based newspapers seem to have forgotten – or decided it wasn’t important – that those of us in UK didn’t see the first episode until October. By then the big reveals were already being spoiled…

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Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.

Frankie Boyle: Did you ever wonder what you’d be doing during an apocalypse? Indeed, you have to wonder if the virus is so very different from extractive capitalism. It commandeers the manufacturing elements of its hosts, gets them to make stuff for it; kills a fair few, but not enough to stop it spreading. There is no normal for us to go back to. People sleeping in the streets wasn’t normal; children living in poverty wasn’t normal; neither was our taxes helping to bomb the people of Yemen. Using other people’s lives to pile up objects wasn’t normal, the whole…

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“democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like this one”

David Runciman on what the Covina-19 crisis reveals about democracy, politics, power and order: Under a lockdown, democracies reveal what they have in common with other political regimes: here too politics is ultimately about power and order. But we are also getting to see some of the fundamental differences. It is not that democracies are nicer, kinder, gentler places. They may try to be, but in the end that doesn’t last. Democracies do, though, find it harder to make the really tough choices. Pre-emption – the ability to tackle a problem before it becomes acute – has never been a…

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