evening_tsar

So, Esso gas stations have now taken up blaring advertisements from their pumps.

Advertising is obnoxious at the best of times, but there is something particularly, murderously, irritating about it coming from a gas pump. Perhaps it’s the proximity to my ear: a TV blaring in the distance, or a loudspeaker overhead, can somewhat be tuned out. But a speaker blaring directly in my ear like an airhorn – that’s my personal space right there. My poor old ADD brain can’t handle disembodied voices in my ear while I’m trying to perform a task, even one as simple as pumping gas.

Especially one as simple as pumping gas.

Fact is, I don’t want those little needle voices injecting themselves into my brain at any time. I don’t care what the reason are, it’s an intrusion, and I don’t want it.

We live in an era where commercial interests feel entitled to blare noise at you at every given opportunity, and society as whole, enamoured as it is with noise, feels no need push back. Silence in the public sphere is treated much like farmland or green space: empty voids to fill with things, preferable profitable. Of no intrinsic value in itself. These days even libraries are blaring inane shit through loudspeakers and screens.

Ray Bradbury predicted it all of course. A huge theme of Fahrenheit 451 is not just the burning of the books, but the sheer amount of noise inflicted on everyone all hours of the day, so that no one is ever alone with their thoughts. I’ve lost count over the years of how often I’ve felt like the protagonist Guy Montag, as he sat on a subway train trying to remember some lines of poetry.

Trumpets blared. “Dendam’s Dentrifice!”

“Shut up!” thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field

“Dendam’s Dentrifice!”

They toil not. . .

“Dendam’s. . .”

Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up!

“Dentrifice!”

He tore the book open and flicked the pages and felt them as if he were blind, he picked at the shape of the individual letters, not blinking.

“Dendham’s! Spelled ‘D.E.N…”

They toil not, neither do they. . .

A fierce whisper of hot sand through an empty sieve. . .

“Dendham’s does it!”

Consider the lilies, the lilies, the lilies. . .

“Dendham’s Dental Detergent!”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag found himself on his feet.

How often I’ve just wanted to scream shutupshutupshutup! at the incessant racket all around – not least on the trains, as the recorded voice repeatedly warns people, in English and French, not to stand in front of oncoming trains. At least they’ve not introduced advertising or muzak yet, which I am sure some folks would be only too pleased to have (don’t get me started on those cretins who actually tried to put muzak in schools. In Bradbury’s book, people wanted the distraction, actively feared and dreaded silence, and the unwanted thoughts that might emerge within it. Our world has very much fallen into that pit – can anybody be alone with their thoughts anymore, without whipping out the phone?

I’m not blameless in this regard: my own pohone has become something of a defence against other people’s phones. Like going armed with one’s own six-shooter into a wild west saloon, it feels necessary. My ADD brain may crave the dopamine, but my soul recoils at it.

Again, I must defer to Bradbury. In “The Murderer”, a man is jailed for waging his own personal war against noisemakers. His description of the phone feels prescient: the “Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies.” He then goes on to describe the long term effects of phone dependency: “it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality.”

I’m tempted to quote “The Murderer” in full, every line being so damn perfect. Substitute a few words, and you’ve got the exact encapsulation of our modern lives:

The telephone’s such a convenient thing: it just sits there and demands you call [text] someone who doesn’t want to be called [texted]. Friends were always calling, calling, calling [texting, texting, texting] me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. When it wasn’t the television or radio or the phonograph [Facebook, Youtube, Tik-tok], it was motion pictures at the corner theatre, motion pictures projected, with commercials on low -lying cumulus clouds. . .music by Mozzek in every restaurant; music and commercials on the busses I rode to work. When it wasn’t music, it was interoffice communications, and my horror chamber or a radio wristwatch on which my friend and my wife phoned every five minutes.

In some ways Bradbury was too optimistic: his characters are bombarded with Beethoven’s 5th, Bach, Hayden, Rachmaninoff, and Duke Ellington. We should be so lucky: autotuned, drum-machined, sampled, AI-Generated digital slop is what we get in our dentists offices and grocery stores. But the principle stands. The main character is driven to dump chocolate ice cream into every device he sees, and it is strongly implied that his prison shrink will come round to his point of view. Glorious wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Anyway, I get my gas at Petro-Canada now in glorious silence. Who knows how long they’ll hold out, or what I’ll do after they decide to puncture the bubble. Buy a donkey I suppose.

Mea culpa:

Pertaining to my previous post, it tuns out neither Ambrose Bierce, nor Gustav Flaubert wrote “[Patriotism] is the belief that one’s own country is best because one was born in it.” as I asserted, at least not in the sources I assumed.

What Bierce did write, in his Devil’s Dictionary from 1906, was that patriotism was “Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.” He went on to define a “patriot” as “One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and tool of conquerors.”

So not exactly what I remembered, but still relevant to the discussion, and even more viciously skeptical.

In 1911, Gustav Flaubert’s released his own dictionary – The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas , based on conversations he overheard in drawing room parties. While not as angry as The Devil’s Dictionary, it is, for my money, much funnier, not least because these are things actual people apparently said. Alas, it has no entry for “patriotism”: nearest I could find was “Political Economy”, defined as “Dismal Science”.

Go figure.

I think it was Ambrose Bierce (though it might have been Gustav Flaubert), who defined patriotism as “the belief that one’s own country is best because one was born in it.” It’s as good a definition as I’ve been able to come up with. While I am not so humble as to not believe that most places aren’t improved by my presence, I don’t necessarily think that any one place, including a state, is necessarily better than any other place because it happens to be where I am. I’ve long been skeptical of the idea that I automatically owe the state any particular loyalty, our acquaintance being largely based on cosmic chance.
I’ve always rather taken to heart Robert Heinlein’s quip that “no state has any business putting its own survival ahead of my own” (or words to that effect), and think about them when I look around the world and see most states doing exactly that. In Russia, North Korea, China, and who knows how many other places, the state largely sees the citizens as the property of the state, as embodied (coincidentally enough) by whoever’s running it at the time.
Whoever coined the adage that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel must surely have had in mind whichever scoundrel first declared “my country, right or wrong”, which so happens to be Yuval Noah Harari’s very definition of fascism: the idea that loyalty to the state should represent the entirety of morality. One owes everything to the state, and has no inherent loyalty to any human being, especially if they were born on the other side of the line in the sand. How may atrocities have been committed over the years under the aegis of this noxious principle? I think about that a lot. I remember thinking about a lot during the invasion of Iraq (“Gulph War II” I tend to call it), when “support our troops” was code for “never-ever question Government foreign policy”.
Having said all that, it is possible for the state to earn some amount of loyalty, by being better than whatever else is on offer. Canada, for all its faults, continuously tops lists of most livable countries. There is a remarkable amount of bullshit we don’t have to put up with that others do. A lot of people come from elsewhere to make their homes here. My own grandparents thought this place a vast improvement over nazi-occupied Poland; a veritable oasis in fact, after watching relatives executed in the streets, and faking death to escape the SS. For them and others like them, Canada had earned their loyalty. I think providing safe-haven to people is a much worthier goal and loftier ideal than whatever it is those who would keep them out claim to aspire to.
Not having fled nazi-occupied Poland (or Stalinist ruled Poland for that matter) myself, I will have to defer to their judgement. I will confess to a rather deep gratitude to have Come to Be here rather than there. Besides this, my affection stems from sources rather more mundane: when I hike the Bruce Trail in the fall or look out across the Niagara Escarpment, or scale the moss-covered rocks of the Canadian Shield. This, I realize, is affection for a place rather than a State, but I find places altogether more worthy of affection than States. No politician provided those and no national stereotype accounts for it. There is no pride there, as neither I nor anyone else can take any credit for it. Only gratitude.
(That the current Captains of the Ship of State, Doug Ford and Mark Carney, are more than willing to bulldoze such places further demonstrates the gulf between State and Place – the State can claim very little affection from me if it fails to protect the Place.)
When I wander these Places, and consider that I am there rather than some GUlag, that my Gran’s final hospital stay will not bankrupt the family, and that my nephews will probably not be shot in their elementary schools; when I listen to loons or listen to Rush, watch cartoons on TVO, and even scarf down a dishwater-like Tim Hortons Double Double, I am forced to admit that whatever this weird convergence of Place and State is, I should like it to continue to exist, and that whatever replaces it must not be that nihilistic kleptocracy to the south.
Happy Canada Day, eh?

Late the party as always, but I'll gladly bore the stragglers. Disney Doctor Who, series 2, my takes:

The Well - 8/10

Right-o, here’s what we’re going to do for the peace of mind of all parties concerned: let’s just ignore the pre-credit scenes of all stories from here on in. Just pretend they don’t exist because they all routinely suck. Then, we can get on to the real story, which so far has been pretty good.

The Well is definitely a win for style -over substance – but what style! A spooky dark planet with a mystery to solve, and a massively high body count to go with it. We haven’t had this kind of out-and out space-slasher since, when, Oxygen? If the story is more basic than it appears to be, and its connection with Midnight tenuous at best, the atmosphere is a triumph, dark, tense, and at times, genuinely scary. At least until Murray Gold’s shrieky string section kicks in, diffusing the tension like a leaf blower to a sand-sculpture. Ye Gods, can we please bring back Segun Akinola? At least he respected Delia Derbyshire’s theme!

Credit must go to co-writer Sharma Angel Walfall presumably injecting some guts into the proceedings.

Lucky Day 2/10

For the first time in forty years - in forever really – I skipped the intro. I can’t do it anymore, sorry. I should have skipped the episode. I did skip large segments of it.

Pity about Conrad. I liked him. I suppose we were supposed to. He was more than a bit of a buffoon, but I was attracted to his burning curiosity and open mindedness – qualities I admire. I thought he’d have made a good companion, and yes, I thought he and Ruby made a cute couple. I suppose that’s what’s supposed to have given the story its dramatic punch. Instead, I felt it to be more of a bait-and-switch, following an agonizing sixteen minutes of set up.

I suppose I should be grateful that the schmaltz was undermined in such brutal fashion, but that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t begrudge Ruby her boyfriend; I just didn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with them. And for God’s sake, I didn’t want her suffer. It was squirmy and awkward and uncomfortable, and didn’t at all make up for the torturous sixteen minutes. It felt mean.

And how about this throwaway bit of dialogue.

“Was he [the Doctor] your boyfriend?”
“Oh no. If he were here, he’d be flirting with you.”
Notice: once again, it’s entirely the sexuality of the character/ actor that determines whether the Doctor fucks his companions. NOT because he’s an ALIEN!!!! Not because he’s more than A THOUSAND YEARS OLD!!!!! No one ever brings that up. Why tf not?

Anyway, if Pete McTighe’s script offered a much needed take down of conspiracy fantasists and online post-trutherism, well that’s great, but it also made for miserable television.

The Story and the Engine – 8/10

Holy shit, did he really name his ship “Nexus”? Bugger all, that was a key term from MY latest fiction! Bloody hell, it was the title! Granted, it was always a tentative title, but now I’ll have to come with another one.

But onto the story, we are taken to the heart of bustling Lagos where an interdimensional spider-shaped vessel fueled by fiction is disguising as a barbershop. It’s an inspired, almost brilliant idea that makes for immensely entertaining television. Here’s the thing: I rather like stories, and have always been a sucker for stories about stories. So something like this has me in from the beginning. It’s rather reminiscent of “Rings of Akhnaten” in terms of this theme (another, much maligned, tale I just melted for): some big malignant entity craves stories, and who knows more stories than the Doctor? I suppose I could quibble with the Doctor’s contention that a night in the life of Belinda is more compelling than his adventures with Cybermen and Ice Warriors – it ain’t.

A more serious quibble might be that there are altogether too many mini-climaxes, so many long, drawn out triumphalist speeches underneath Murray Gold’s ear-splitting score - and I cannot emphasise enough, for the fifth time in a row, how much this hackwork ruins the episodes (who knows how they might have been under a more sensitive artist). It feels like the episode spends nearly a third of its running time ending itself. When things are going so well, what’s the hurry?

I’m also not thrilled about the Doctor hobnobbing with “gods” – we’re in full mythological territory now, but then again, we have been for quite some time. The abandonment of rationalism is something I deeply mourn.

Interstellar Song Contest 7/10

Argh! It looks like music won’t be getting any better between now and 2925, and I’ll be stuck with drum machines forever. Argh!

Alas, alak, if we could side-step the episode for a moment, I wonder if some audience members who balk at values espoused in episodes from fifty years ago might similarly bat an eyelid at the presumption inherent in this on that human culture, to say nothing of Western pop-culture, will not only survive but remain fundamentally unchanged for nine hundred years. I grudgingly accept that to mention it is to rather curmudgeoningly overlook the (undeniable) joys of the story, but I can’t help myself: it is a grumble I have with virtually every show of this nature, not just Disney-Who. Granted, it is impossible to predict the future, and not the purpose of every story to do so, but disappointing how few even bother to try.

Ce serra, the story is otherwise a hoot, mandatory sentimental drek (as probably mandated by Head Office) notwithstanding. I was tickled by the idea of some scruffy rocker type hijacking the futuristic Euro-vision, and the actor Freddie Fox’s superficial resemblance to a young Thomas Gabriel Fischer even more so, but it is probably for the best that the story did not go down this road. Besides which, the character states quite unequivocally that his favourite music is pop: I choose to believe that he meant it and was not just making an incredibly morbid pun. I would be willing to bet that far more mass murders have been committed by pop fans than rockers, but am in no mood to compile that data.

Back to the point, I was distracted from this train of thought by what I thought might have been the biggest onscreen body count in – nevermind Doctor Who, in television history. I’m glad it wasn’t – the spectacle of a hundred thousand dead human beings (and other species) floating around like so much glitter was truly nasty.

As per usual, schmaltzy violins ensure we never break out into autonomous emotion, and we are somewhat encouraged to believe that a song can halt a world-wide corporate genocide. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the power of Song – just not that one.

Whatever. Gatwa’s a blast, Sethu’s earned my respect, and if I don’t particularly like these song contests, at least I take comfort know that in that space station’s museum, there is probably an exhibit for Lordi.

(Yes, yes, this isn’t Eurovision, but don’t YOU get technical on me!)

Wish World – 5/10

One of these days, I will avoid the spoilers.

I think I managed to miss one of them, but it was so damned obvious it was hardly a surprise. The other one might have been, but I’ll never know. I’m takin’ it all in stride now. It’s almost like the big reveals don’t work anymore. We’ve come a long way from the time Derek Jacobi revealed himself as the Master. For one thing, they’re all practically unrecognizable, often sharing not much more than the namesake of the originals (I think only Davros got through unscathed). That, and it’s almost become routine. Who’s left I wonder? The Black Guardian most obviously. But who else? The Meddling Monk? Morbius? The Graf Vinder K?

How is this new reinvention? Well, Archie Panjabi is a delectable Rani. She drips evil, and megalomania, and even somehow delivers her lines like Kate Omara used to, even though her latent sexiness is miles away from Omara’s virtually robotic psychopath. Possibly we’re meant to think of Michelle Gomez’s Missy instead, though I doubt Missy would have the patience for. . .whatever the fuck this is.

Damned if I know what she’s up to strutting about in that celestial Fred-Flinstone palace. Something about getting all the energies aligned so that the Seventh Son of Seventh Son (no Iron Maiden in the soundtrack? Wasted opportunity!) becomes the Wish Master god who creates a world only so that it can implode and crack open the fabric of reality and unleash Omega. . . but she’s failed to notice a differently-abled encampment underneath who will doubtless be key to unravelling her plans.

I’ve almost stopped paying attention. There are so many disparate elements – Conrad, baby Poppy, two Ranis, the Wish God baby, the wheelchair Underground, a really big clock – I can’t tell you how it all adds-up, and pretty past caring because I’ve learned from hard experience that it probably won’t add up. None of it will matter because none of it ever does. The Rani will go “blah blah blah *something bad happens”. The Doctor will go “blah blah blah *something good happens” and it will end with long sentimental goodbyes amidst an ear-splitting violin assault. Destroying the world yet again will have no lasting consequences. It won’t make any sense because it never does.

Last year’s emergence of Sutekh was at least cool. This is just a blob. I don’t know how Conrad reading “Dr. Who” stories to the world every night contributes to the Rani’s plan. I don’t know why she wants to bring back Omega. Nor did I catch how her indulging Conrad’s retrograde fantasies serves her purpose – something about. . . oh why bother?

Taking the piss out of post-war American suburban utopia is old hat. It’s been done a hundred times from Stepford Wives to Wandavision. It reeks of complacency and smugness. It’s easier to satirize a long-dead social illusion from some seventy-five years ago than to turn the mirror on one’s own society. As for the mental slavery – the illusory world of false memories, false histories, and false contentment, well it all seems a retread of “Lie of the Land”. And we all know how badly that particular Hindenberg crashed and burned. . .

Still; breaking through illusions, confronting doubts, defying the gods and thinking the unthinkable are themes near and dear to my heart (why then am I not a bigger Matrix fan? Long story. . .). “Tables don’t do that” is a kinda neat moment. It made me long for a longer story which could unfold at a more natural pace and wasn’t so obviously a set-up for something that had been foreshadowed since last year. As is, it doesn’t amount to anything: the Rani breaks the illusion for him, which makes me wonder why she bothered putting him through it in the first place.

Overall, I get the sense that there’s nothing new here, just the usual overblown setup to the traditional end-of-season letdown. I can’t get excited because I know nothing of consequence will happen. Magic will save the day and none of it will have mattered. Call me cynical, but hey, I’ve learned to recognize patterns.

(And just suppose the next one, miracle of miracles, manages to deliver? Will that change my outlook? Probably not. A really good episode would have me caring what came next. A good follow-up may compensate for a poor build-up, but cannot retroactively fix its flaws).

Reality War – 0/10

Right, we’re done.

About time I got onto these:

(*ahem)

Robot Revolution – 6/10

I will probably never be reconciled to Disnified Doctor Who. The intrusive music, the bloated, virtually unrecognizable theme. . .the cartoony robots, the spaceships right out of Toy Story, the ultra self conscious and cloying attempts at contrived whimsy – someone really wants it to look like some long-lost Micky Mouse cartoon, and it makes me want to pull my hair out. That’s how it’s going to be from here on in.

Which is too bad, because beneath all that crap is a decent story. Once they get to the rebel base, and the Doctor starts doing his Doctor thing, it’s not that bad. Killer robots and underground rebellions - parallels with Terminator (or Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future maybe? Nah. . . ), notwithstanding, it’s a pretty straightforward upward revolt against the forces of dominant evil, for which I’ve always been a sucker. In the hands of a different set designer, background musician, not hell-bent on making everything so damned cute, it might have been kinda cool.

And of course, there’s Russel T. Davies, who doesn’t know how not to be sanctimonious. Platitudes are delivered with all the subtlety of a peppermint buttplug. Of course the Doctor can’t just say “let’s go home” at the end; he needs to rattle on about “destiny” and display the emotional intelligence of an eight-year old, whom the program is trying very hard to appeal to. Between that and the tiresome beginning, the decent story is kind of sandwiched. But I suppose I should be grateful that it’s there, and hasn’t been completely overrun with cotton candy just yet, despite the best efforts of the bean counters.

Lux – 7/10

Okie doke – since Doctor Who is a Disney product now, it was only a matter of time before it got its very own Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Credit where it’s due, it is immensely clever. It’s fun and exciting, and it’s a blast to listen to Gatwa spout technobabble. As the Doctor and Belinda have to almost literally tear down the fourth wall to escape their predicament, it becomes, probably inevitably, the single most meta episode ever.

I have mixed feelings about meta things. They can be mind-blowing or indulgent, largely depending on the execution. Lux falls somewhere in between, a cute little in-joke that is amusing, but falls well short of what the possibilities allow. Davies chose to spoof the fanbase (not without affection) rather than get into anything truly metaphysical. I suppose we’re meant to recognize ourselves and chuckle – yes, yes, I know I’m amongst the worst – but I gotta say, if the Doctor himself appeared in my living room, I’d rather talk about the secrets of the universe than gush about. That said, I probably would not have so helpfully recognized the solution like they did – you know, it being completely arbitrary and all.

Disappointing how there are no musings on the immortality of fictional characters – how they don’t really die as long as their fictions are remembered. Maybe that would be too meta.

Funny how these meta-fans criticize Davies’ plot holes – on some level he must be aware of them. Alas, he chooses not to fill them. Fortunately, they’re not so egregious here.

No, what’s truly egregious is that bloody Murray Gold muzak, which is more treacly, intrusive, cliched, overwrought manipulative, and damned irritating than ever. Whether its schmaltzy violins or tinkly pianos or blaring horns obliterating the natural mood, it makes several scenes all but unwatchable. It has utterly ruined the main theme. He clearly wants to be Hanz Zimmerman, but Zimmerman’s not that great either. Besides which, there is appropriateness to purpose: the raging timpanis of Basil Paledorus are great for Conan, the martial marches of Akira Ikifube are great for Godzilla, the Wagnerian blasts of John Williams are great for Star Wars as are James Horner for all its imitators, melodramatic space operas all, in the almost literal sense: none of these would work for the altogether more cerebral Doctor Who. My God, could someone turn him down?

I swear, sometimes the convergence of life’s disparate elements is amazing.

Of the many fetid Facebook slime-pits where I inexplicably continue to waste my precious time, the Midnight Oil Fan Community is possibly the least offensive. If the gallery of near-total strangers modeling their band shirts and hosting gatherings I will never be able to attend are of no direct relevance to me personally, neither do they do me any particular harm. In fact, they occasionally do me well, as when I was able to show off my Midnight Oil poster and accompanying pun to great fanfare - the only place in the world I might have been able to do so (yes, I am still a fanboy at heart, worn firmly on sleeve).

More recently, a chance posting by one of the aforementioned near-strangers (as in United-in-Oil, though naught else) allowed me to solve a childhood mystery.

The post in question was simply the image of the band’s 1990 single “Forgotten Years”, which is not only a great song, but also the song they closed with on their very final show in Toronto, making it the very last song I will ever hear them play live. So, associations are positive, if bittersweet.

What struck me about the most about the post though, was the image on the cover, which I had not seen before. It was not the standard picture of the band, or accompanying vista of the Australian landscape the band tends to prefer, but a cartoon of a jet plane coming apart mid-air. The words “Who Cares” (or “Who Care” technically, as the final “s” cut off by missing tailfin) were written in bright pink across the fuselage. They were so prominent, one might have thought that was the name of the single. It was a cute, eye-catching image, playful while somehow ominous, and in no way frivolous, that well suited the raucous tone of the song and the tempered-by-but-not-trampled-by-realism idealism of the band.

Thing is, I’d seen that somewhere before. Not the whole picture; just the pilot. The pointy nosed, wide-eyed cartoon character. I knew that character, and that style. Where? A rusty cob webbed door of memory slowly creaked open.

In the early 80s, my uncle kept a strange cartoon book in his cottage. On the cover was a headless naked body chasing three flying heads with a butterfly net. The comics inside were just plain rude. I vividly remember one cartoon of a chef taking a dump in one of his soup pots, as posh diners cluelessly carried on in the next room. Another was of a urinating man inadvertently pissing in his own face when he tried to watch a butterfly. Yet another had a man using a periscope to examine his own bum (with evident disappointment). You get the idea. They were crass and scatological, the kind of drawings that would certainly have been confiscated at school and got you sent to the principal’s office. The appeal to a five-year old could well-be imagined. To find every dirty schoolyard joke given form, drawn, bound, and published by a grown-up was just, well, too hilarious to believe. It was big piece of subversion, carefully hidden from Mom and Dad, mischievously revealed to Grandma (who was obligingly indignant), conspiratorially shared with my uncle, and eagerly sought out every time we visited his cottage. It regrettably vanished when he sold the cottage and got married; my pious aunt would definitely not have appreciated its humour.

I was too young to remember the artist, so could not look it up in any library (who probably have refused to carry it anyway). I came across nothing like it in any second-hand bookstore. For all I knew, the book would be relegated to that overstuffed cabinet of the brain which stores the near forgotten fever dreams of childhood.

But now we’ve got the internet, and our Borg memory can remember anything. Here I was confronted with a crashing airplane, on a Midnight Oil ep cover of all things, and I was certain it was that guy. Who drew it? Again, the near-strangers of the Midnight Oil Fan Community helpfully informed me this was the Australian cartoonist, Michael Leunig.

Leunig. Leunig. Of course.

Leunig was apparently quite the figure in Australian media, named a “Treasure” by the National Trust of Australia, and seller of many books. He drew for the Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne’s The Age, and a pile of other publications. He was a vociferous opponent of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and, less admirably, an equally vociferous opponent of masking and vaccines during the pandemic. He got canned from the Age after comparing an anti-vaxer to the tankman of Tiananmen Square (classy, eh?). He died in December of 2024.

That book in my uncle’s cottage was The Second Leunig: A Dusty Little Swag. Unlce must have picked it up on one of his travels; to my knowledge, Leunig never made terra-firma in North America. I certainly never came across him until now.

Finding the artist and looking him up though only made me wonder again whether I’d hallucinated the whole thing. The samples of Leunig’s work I’d initially been able to find online (admittedly a small one) were clean, Hallmark level earnest, and infused with heavy religious overtones. Nothing at all like the vulgar etchings I remember. Granted, The Second Leunig was published in 1979; his last cartoon was published just before he died in 2024. More than enough time for an artist to evolve. Still, the gulf was jarring. Was it the same guy? No doubt: that was absolutely the book. By what tangling path does one get from that Point A to that Point B?

I examined the available cartoons a little more and dug deeper into my memory. Tenuous

connections began to emerge. The “new” ones (or more recent anyway) were not as innocent as they seemed at first, especially once he got into the anti-war stuff. But they were still earnest beyond earnest, and did not seem at all in keeping with the crudities of old. Yet, there may have been more to those than met the 6-year-old eye.

It wasn’t just the dirty jokes that drew me to those cartoons. There was a weird ambience about them that I found enticing. They were surreal, dreamlike, and a little ominous. They did not take place in any recognizable world, but in impressionistic landscapes, often empty and dreary, where night always seemed to be falling and things only made sense within the borders of the panel. Opening the book rather felt like falling asleep, and so not unlike the hallucinatory escapades of Halloween is Grinch Night, the Magic Shadows theme, Winnie-the-Pooh’s encounter with Hephalumps and Woozles, or Dumbo’s drunken visions. There was always a little darkness creeping in around the edges – literally and figuratively. I liked to dip my toes in that darkness. Just enough to see how it felt. I still do. I like to lift the rock of the subconscious and look at the little slugs hiding underneath.

The characters were wide eyed, big nosed, kid-friendly creations in a seemingly permanent state of confusion or mild-disappointment. The occasional happy ones (keeping in mind I’m relying on Google images to bolster 40+ year old memories here) usually sat blissfully unaware in environments otherwise suggestive of bleak despair.

A recognizable philosophy emerges.

Context helps. Reading them now, and seeing how involved Leunig got in socio-political issues, lends the older images meanings that were not previously apparent – to me anyway. I notice things now that I didn’t back then. Life experience will do that to you. An English degree and a teaching degree will also do that to you, not to mention showing other people how to recognize symbolism for almost a decade.

Perfect example, this one here, the only one I’m certain was in the Second Leunig I’ve been able to find:

I remember grumbling that this one wasn’t funny. I didn’t like the idea of being held up on a stick. I figured the grown-up behind was just trying to be edgy, and turned the page. As a kid, I didn’t get it.

As a middle-aged man, I definitely get it. When someone points to a dark void and says “face the future!”, it can only mean one thing. Many adults use children to ward of fear of that one thing. They see children’s lives as mere extensions of their own.

Whatever you think of my interpretation (and who knows what specifically Australian context I might be missing) this is not merely an edgelord scrawl: it is rife with meaning, and almost certainly polemical. Looked at that way, the previously mentioned cartoons take on a new significance. The shitting chef could be seen as contempt for the bourgeoisie (or possibly a critique of Australian’s culinary scene, I’m just speculating here). The pissing man got pissed on when he tried to look up from the ground and follow something beautiful. And the periscope? An indictment of self-examination. How often does it reveal something not worth seeing? Even a half-remembered multi-panel sequence about a man who lost his underpants was something of a Kafkaesque tale of wandering naked and alone in the desert.

It would seem that nothing was as it seemed.

This Betooga Advocate described Leunig's cartoons as “bordering nihilism” (and him an "old shit stoner"). I’m not sure that’s fair - about the nihilism. True nihilists don’t take principled stances against war or poverty (and say what you will about the idiocy of his mask/vax stance, in his own mind it was a matter of principle.) I would say they’re existential. Explorations of life, musings on the meaning of existence. Attempts to clear off bullshit (sometimes quite literally).

I’m not so invested in Leunig to be too disappointed that he turned out to be a crank (though it is dispiriting that yet another one went down that road). Yet, his work was a piece of my childhood, and all my predilections were formed in childhood. A tendency to navel gaze? A fondness for storm-clouds, shadows, and broken windows? Whatever came later, reading existential cartoons at the age of 5, 6, and 7 did its part.

Come for the bums; stay for the existentialism.

So how do you blow a twenty-point lead and lose your own seat? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Seriously, just a couple of months ago, everyone took it for granted that in the next Canadian election, Pierre Poilievre would win by a landslide, and the Liberal Party would be all but wiped out.

Obviously, he did not, and they were not. In fact, he lost, and they took his riding.

Clearly, Trudeau Derangement Syndrome is not the selling point he thought it was. Least of all when Trudeau was no longer on the scene. But still, he kept whipping that dead horse, kept singing that song and playing that game, even after the music and the game had changed.

Yeah, yeah, Canada’s worse off now than the Killing Fields of Cambodia, we’re all digging up white grubs for dinner, and Mark Carney is just Goebbels to Trudeau’s Hitler. Bitch bitch, whine, moan. You know, if you’re running for office, feel free to say something nice about the country you hope to lead.

Now maybe it’s all true, and maybe it’s not, but enough folks weren’t buying it that the Conservatives couldn’t crack it. (I for one got sick of being lectured about the price of housing by people living in 905 McMansions). Thing is, after November, Trump got into power, and nobody gave a shit about Trudeau anymore.

Trump came to power and threatened the existence of this country itself – and Poilievre wanted us to be afraid of the Liberals?

Doug Ford put on his Captain Canada cape, went on American TV and declared “Canada’s Not For Sale!”, a rallying cry you could fit on a hat. (I suppose “Axe the Tax” was a great slogan to – so great, that Carney went and did it himself.) Ford knew what was really on people’s minds, and left them no doubt where he stood on the matter. He did not exhort us to tremble at the ghost of Kathleen Wynne.

He won his election.

It was a super easy strategy which Poilievre bizarrely refused to emulate (and Ford himself wondered at). Nope, Trudeau was his whipping boy, and he was sticking with it. On the Wednesday before the election I got a text from Conservative HQ, asking if I’d help them “stop the Liberals” (how flattering to be found that potentially useful). Even at that late date, the Liberals were the boogey man they were chasing. As if the mere mention of the word would scare folks into their arms. Not a word about Trump. He just wasn’t something the Conservatives came across as worried about. If even a smidgeon of their anti-Liberal venom had been tossed at the Tangerine Tyrant, they’d have had a government now.

So why not? I have my suspicions, and so did voters. In the minds of many it amounted to praising with faint damnation. Rightly or wrongly, Poilievre was seen as Trump’s guy in Ottawa (the terribly Trumpian promise to bypass the Charter of the Rights and Freedoms didn’t help).

Not even offering to overturn the single-use plastics ban could overcome that.

So, onto literary matters.

17 books this year. My lowest total since 2017. Though there were times it seemed I spent every waking hour with my nose buried in some tome, clearly, it didn’t actually amount to that much. Certainly not compared to rotting away on social media, or gaming, or such lesser usages of time. A stiff decline since last year, when I managed 25.

Or course, lists like this don’t tell the whole story. In 2024 I consumed 58 short stories, compared with 2023’s mere 49, so there was plenty of reading still going on – just not of full-length volumes.
Also keep in mind, the list only covers completed full length volumes. . .
I’m not one of those types who slavishly feel they need to finish every book they start. In fact, I’m quite ruthless about ditching whatever doesn’t grab me. Life’s too short to waste on bad books. There are only so many books we can get through in life – 816 for me, if I manage two a month and live to be 80 – and for every bad one slogged-through, a good one will go unread. So, every single one has to earn its place on that shelf.

I was stuck with a lot of false starts in 2024. A lot of tomes I picked up and just couldn’t be bothered to see through. More than usual. Either I had bad luck, or showed particularly bad judgement. Or my patience is wearing thinner than ever. Or, perhaps in these awful end-times which we find ourselves living through, I’m less willing than ever to let a book contribute to my miseries.

Part of the problem was History. I love History, read a lot of History, but rarely get through a large history book from beginning to end. Unless there is a very specific thesis the author is trying to prove, I tend to dive in at random spots, take from it what tidbits I can, then move on to the next tidbit. Often, I will put it down for extended periods, with every intention of picking it up again later. Thus the case with The Road to War by Richard Overy (with Andrew Wheatcroft). A very readable, worthy work of scholarship – great for the pub - but not one I’m in a rush to get through. The chapters on France, Britain, and Italy were (are) fascinating, but I find the rise of Hitler’s Germany just too depressing a subject to confront in more than short doses. Armaments production and strategic doctrine might be interesting and useful, but as for doctrinal motivation, I neither need nor care to know more than that they wanted to conquer the world and kill the Jews. Nor, after November, could I bring myself to read the chapter on America, and yet another account of how Roosevelt out-maneuvered the forces of isolationism to come in on the side of right. History is repeating itself, and this time fascist isolationism has won. Victories of the past, that the modern world decided not to emulate, are just too damn depressing to read about.

That brings us to Ian W. Tolls’ Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific 1944-1945, a 792 page tome I got some 310 pages into. Like the Overy book, it’s a find work of scholarship, but I paused it for different reasons.

Partially because after 310 pages, my attention tends to waver, even in the best of tomes (there’s a reason I reads so much short fiction!). I tend to get bogged down under the weight of too much detail, especially the kind of sequential-play-by-play these kinds of histories tend to engage in. I’m less interested in which direction particular ships sailed in when they were suddenly struck and went down at oh-two-hundred hours, than an informed opinion on whether Admiral “Bull” Halsey screwed up at Leyte Gulph or not.

Still, some interesting stuff. Apparently, Halsey didn’t like his nickname. Toll is quick to explain why:

The bull is respected for it's size, strength, and aggression, but not for its tactical acumen. The bull is stubborn, unreasoning, “bull-headed”. It goes about its work heedlessly, “like a bull at the gate.” Other large beasts are clumsy in tight quarters, but it is the bull that is most dreaded by the world’s china shop proprietors. Every mammal leaves its feces on the ground, but it is the bull’s that has a revered place in American slang, signifying “nonsense, lies, or exaggeration

Elsewhere in the year, I was bedeviled by false starts. In the mood for some science fiction, I first attempted James P. Hogan’s Enoverse, which somehow wound up on my shelf, and a bright orange cover which brought cyberpunk to mind. It was not. What it was I’m not that interested in discerning, as I made it barely past forty pages, bogged down by the ridiculous amount of exposition required to make sense of his insanely convoluted story world, and the stench of contrarian politics. Hogan was apparently big in Japan once, and apparently an influence on Robotech according to his Wikipedia entry (though not Robotech’s oddly enough).
By the end of his life he appeared to be something of a kook, giving himself over to Shaver-like pseudo histories. Bad science, bad politics, and bad prose make three strikes for me. No thanks.

After which, still thirsting for sf, I finally took down Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Gripping Hand. This attractive, hardcover has been sitting on my shelf since the 90’s, purchased for a lunch-money low price at a Chapter’s book sale, and miraculously managed to survive the Great Flood of 20xx. I figured it deserved the attempt. Alas, Niven and Pournelle tried my patience a touch too much. I got bloody-well sick of passages like this:

“Sinbad, this is Atropos. We are closing in range to Motie ship. We have
a beam on her.”
“They’ll stop,” Blaine said.
“I am certain you are correct.”
“Eudoxus is signaling,” Buckman said genially.
“Everything happens at once.” Joyce said.
““Sinbad, this is Atropos. As soon as we demonstrated that we could hit
the Motie ship, it turned off its drive and is now hailing us in Angelic.
‘We come in peace.
This is the Motie ship King Peter’s Gift. We come in peace. Do you have
instructions?’ Sir, do we have instructions?”
“God’s navel.”
“Suggestion,” Blaine said.
“Talk to me!”

What the fuck was all that about? How about this one:

“Who are the Medina Traders? Who must we negotiate with?”
“We are the family with the foresight and the power to be here in the moment after Crazy Eddie’s Sister opened a path. You must be aware that none can speak for the Motie Species.”

Notice how they don’t answer the question? All the dialogue in the book is more or less like this, chaotic exchanges of seemingly random belched-out phrases with little or no relation to the previously belched out phrase. It’s some of the most clunky, awkward dialogue I have ever read, and my patience for it is very, very thin. To say nothing of following the intrigue, dependent as it is on the mechanics of a story world that only makes sense in the authors’ imaginations. Why doesn’t the Empire want its agent to inspect the planetary blockade? Why is there a blockade again? What the hell’s Crazy Charlie again? Couldn’t bring myself to care.

Eventually, my thirst for science fiction was better satiated by short fiction (the form’s more natural mode of expression), and I moved onto historical fiction.

Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes seemed a perfect summer read. Pirates! Yargh! And I do know Crichton can write page turners. But this page turner sucked. To start with, it was not much more than a piratical version of Ocean’s 11 – a heist film set in the 18th century Caribbean, with a criminal mastermind handpicking his team of specialists for a big score, each unique, none in the least bit likeable.

I despise heist films. I find them all more-or-less the same, I can’t generate any interest in their “gangs” or the success of their criminal enterprise. Often as not I want them to fail. So shoehorning that damnable trope into a pirate setting is a foolish enterprise, at least as far as keeping my attention is concerned. This one had none of the things I enjoy about pirate stories.

None of this motley bunch behave much like pirates: they’re more like ninjas, sneaking about in the dark, killing men in their sleep, sneaking up on people and stabbing them in the back. The one female member of the bunch is mainly there to distract sentries by flashing her tits, a strategy she resorts to not once, but twice. There are some nasty scenes of torture, I suppose so we know how bad the bad guy is. There is no swashbuckling. Precious few swordfights. Pirate Latitudes is to pirate literature what The Flintstones are to cavemen, without the humour. Or the cute animals.

Then, we’ve got a misguided foray into respectable Can-Lit with Morely Callaghan’s Such is My Beloved. Something of a Canuck classic 9at least according to the jacket blurbs), it was at least short, so I assumed would be sweet. Never assume anything.

The story of a young, idealistic and naïve priest befriending two prostitutes in interwar Montreal is intended, I am sure, to highlight our hypocrisies and double standards as a society. I am certain as well, it was a ballsy thing to write about at the time. But it was an ordeal to get through, and I found I just couldn’t do it. Every page, cringier and cringer, as the inevitable social scandal consumes our young protagonist. The awkwardness and embarrassment are intolerable.

I understand our friend is young and naïve and idealistic, but really, is he so clueless as to not see where this is leading? Does he really think those rich lawyers in his congregation are going to look at it sympathetically? It is also fairly obvious that it is not just theological concern for the fallen women’s souls that keep him going back to them. I suppose it’s deft psychological writing, but intolerable story-telling. Did this tale of humiliation need to be dragged out into a novel, when a short-story might have taught the same lesson?

I suppose I may pick it up again, and mayhaps it will surprise me. But I don’t handle humiliation or awkwardness well, and every paragraph had me squirming. Every attempt to pick up the book ended with me quickly putting it back down after only a few minutes, and no more than a couple of pages. There came a point I realized there were many other books calling for my attention, so I started reaching for them instead.

Such is life. Such was 2024.

One of my favourite stories from the 20th Century has to be the reaction to Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of War of the Worlds in 1938. Basically, folks thought it was the news, and lost their shit.

Do listen to the radio play if you ever get the chance. It does sound like a radio broadcast. It starts with an announcer from an authentic sounding station introducing an orchestra, some music, briefly interrupted by a report on some meteorites, followed by more music, then more newsflashes, until. . .

Listeners could be forgiven if they thought it was the real thing (especially in those tense, pre-WWII days). If they seemed incredulous, well, loads of people today in the internet age believe far stupider things.
George Orwell addressed the phenomenon in 1940. More specifically, he addressed a survey, conducted by Princeton University, of the -victims? Participants? I’d love to quote the whole thing for you in full, but suffice it to say, his words, as usual, are still crushingly relevant.

The first interesting bit he addressed was the extent to which people on both sides of the Atlantic tended to trust what would now be called the “Mainstream” or “Legacy” media. People thought they were hearing the news, and assumed what they heard on the news had to be true. He suggests that had the story appeared on the front page of one of London’s papers, the British public would have believed it as well.

“It is known that newspapers are habitually untruthful, but it is also known that they cannot tell lies of more than a certain magnitude,”

God knows Orwell was no fan of the papers. But he kept things in perspective, and he knew there were rules to the game. For all its flaws, I’ll still take the legacy press over the post-apocalyptic swamp of meme-land, which has fostered wide-spread climate-change denial, vaccine skepticism, Russian pseudo-history, and even bloody flat-earth theory. The papers weren’t that bad.

Even so, the listeners are not entirely let off the hook for their credulity:

“So few of the viewers attempted any kind of check. . .It appears over two thirds of them attempted no kind of verification: as soon as they heard the end of the world was coming, they accepted it uncritically.”

It seems our lot. People don’t check. They don’t verify. They don’t investigate. They don’t stop and think “hey, wait a minute. . .” They click “like” and repost. And base their world view on that, and vote based on that. And so here we are.

Maybe no one’s believing in Martian invasions, but they are panicking about immigrant invasions, woke hive minds, and big pharma. They’re terrified that George Soros will implant microchips in their heads, but think it cool when Elon Musk actually does it. They rage at phantasmagorical Q Anon Pizzagate child-sex rings which don’t exist while ignoring the child victims of school shootings, who do (even tormenting the parents of Sandy Hook victims), and care not a whit that their messiah was buddies with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The President of the United States can make stuff up off the top of his head, and every word is taken as Gospel.

Our civilization has no business lecturing anyone about gullibility.

As interesting, and no less relevant to us today, were the apparent backgrounds of the believers. “The evident connection between personal unhappiness and the readiness to believe the incredible is [the survey’s] most interesting discovery].” I will quote the last bit in full:

"People who have been out of work, or on the verge of bankruptcy for ten years may actually be relieved to hear of the approaching end of civilization. It is a similar frame of mind that has induced whole nations to fling themselves in the arms of a Saviour".

So, hitting the "Post" button on DW's menu will not post your post. It will clear the way for a new post.
It will not ask if you wish to save your work. It will ask instead:

"Restore from saved draft entitled ""?"

Say what?

Hitting the "Cancel" button does not cancel your action. Instead, it cancels the auto-save, and provides you with a nice blank screen to replace the unsightly full screen you had up previously.

I'm not convinced this is the best way of doing this, but what do I know?

I knew there was a reason I never type directly into this space.

Having finally decided to fill in one of those silly survey things, for whatever reason, I saw fit to write it here instead of copying and pasting from Word. And, of course!, Dream Width erases the whole thing!

When I attempted to post, I was certain I had hit the wrong button - so I naturally enough hit "cancel".
For most other programs, from Microsoft to Meta, the "Cancel" button means "stop, nevermind, don't do that. As you were." Alas, in DW it apparently means "Discard your work". It never occurred to me in a million months of Mondays that the "cancel" button might mean the opposite. Every other frickin' program gives you the option to save your work. "Cancel" means cancelling the operation you inadvertently initiated, not exiting the program!

Fortunately, it was nothing important. I was not even particularly proud of it. But it was an hour's worth of typing, gone forever. I am unconvinced this is the best way of doing things.

An “exquisite corpse” is a collaborative piece of art created by three artists, each in complete ignorance of what the other two have done. The Exquisite Corpse Project is ostensibly an attempt to apply this approach to film: five different writers are tasked with writing one section of a film script, without knowing what came before, or what will come next. If you’re expecting an interesting experiment in collaborative art, you will be disappointed: if you have a sense of schedenfrude, this garbage fire of combustible egos and flammable friendships may tickle your fancy.
The title is misleading: these guys aren’t working in complete ignorance – they are allowed to read the last five pages of the previous guy’s script. So they actually know quite a bit about what the last guy established and where he might have gone. It’s more like one of those creative writing projects where you have to continue someone else’s story. Either way, we never actually get to watch the titular corpse project from start to finish: it is constantly interrupted by interviews and cinema verite footage of the writers arguing with each other. We’re clearly not meant to care about the finished product, but only the dysfunctional process – this is not an experimental film, but a documentary about a failed creative endeavor.

The six guys in question (five writers and the director) once comprised the comedy team Olde English, who achieved some amount of success earlier this century, before disintegrating over creative and personal differences. It’s not hard to see why: these guys do not work well together. They don’t even seem to like each other. They’re endlessly critical of each other (and quite harsh in those criticisms), completely insensitive to each other’s concerns, and make no attempt at all to build on each other’s contributions. I’m not sure they had a kind word to say about each other. Maybe that passes for comradery amongst comedians.
The result is more a combative project than a collaborative one. Instead of working together to create something, they treat it as a kind of party game, where they try for laughs by obliterating the previous guy’s work with increasingly egregious deviations. This kind of one-upmanship might work as a party game, but sabotages any art. It might have worked as comedy if any of it were funny.
What we do manage to see is virtually unwatchable. It’s hard to know how much of this is intentional, as we’re mercifully spared more than a few minutes of it at any time. But disguising incompetence as comedy is a trick of the amateur (see Unicorn). Another is to feel the need to explain a joke, or draw attention to it in case we miss it (again, see Unicorn). Whatever the intention, it never escapes the tension of incompatible personalities struggling for dominance.
What struck me more than the failure of the project itself (understandable under the circumstances) was the unwillingness on the part of anyone to even try to make it work (one of them even boasted about being intentionally awful). I didn’t get the need of these guys to tear down their mates. Maybe it’s a personal thing: when given an unfinished piece, my first instinct is not to junk the thing in its entirety – I’d start my own piece and not bother with the original if that were the case. I would work with what I had and try to make it fit. I’d take pride in the seamless of it (if achieved), not the incongruity. But that requires a little bit of humility – something in deeply short supply here.

When I taught drama camps, the most popular activities tended to be improv games, involving the kids just going up and making up scenes off the top-of-their-heads. Our only strict rule was “you can’t say no” meaning not that you couldn’t say “no” as a line of dialogue, but you couldn’t out and out reject your partner’s contributions. You had to build off what they gave you, and they’d do the same. This lead to way more interesting scenes, to say nothing of the life lesson: cooperate with people, work well in groups, and the end result will be greater than the sum of its parts. You belong to the art, not the other way around.

These guys never learned that rule. They should have come to my camps.

Another Hallow’s Eve past – my Groucho Marx was a hit, at least with the tiny handful of people who saw it. Like all my Halloween costumes, Groucho was an idea that just popped into my head and refused to go away. For the first time in living memory (or at least recent memory) I had a second idea floating around in there (courtesy of Tetsab) – that of the Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, which I pulled off with aplomb the previous week (even the dodgy bristleboard fez worked better than expected).

The night of, I opted for Groucho over Smith, partly because I hate to throw away an idea that refuses to go away by itself, and partly because I wasn’t convinced the kids at the door would recognize Matt Smith – the oldest among them would have been barely two when he regenerated – and I was loathe for anyone to think I would wear a bow tie under other circumstances. Granted, most of them wouldn’t recognize Groucho either, but they would at least recognize that a costume was being worn.

He was remarkably easy to do – black make-up, a cigar from the variety store, a plain suit and tie. Oddly enough, the glasses were the hardest thing to acquire – where do you find glasses if you don’t wear glasses? Especially that style of glasses? The glasses were no less vital than the moustache or the cigar – you’d not believe how much the visage collapses without them. I found the perfect pair at a Spirit Halloween store, and here we get to the point of my story.

I really don’t like Spirit Halloween stores. I know I’m supposed to – a whole department store dedicated to spooky stuff! What could the problem be? But I always go in happier than I come out. They leave me feeling vaguely empty and dis-Spirited, even if they do have the perfect glasses for my costume.

If I put on my snobby-Gatekeeper hat, I suppose I could call them the Hot Topic of Halloween: a commercial shortcut to an ersatz state of being. Or, they just don’t provide what I’m looking for (and I’m not talking about phony glasses).

No holiday or festival more perfectly enables the dysfunctional marriage of creativity and commerce than Halloween. Put on a costume? Decorate a house? What could be more conducive to creativity? To imagination? At the same time, what an amazing commercial opportunity! Suddenly, everyone needs something, everyone’s looking for something, and you could probably sell anything. Sell them the props, sell them the decorations, sell them the costumes in their entirety, and pretty soon they won’t need to be creative anymore. Why spend all afternoon repurposing cereal boxes into gravestones when you can buy fancy plastic gravestones and tomb markers? Why raid old wardrobes and attics when you can slap down a credit card and get a ready-made costume in its entirety?

At Spirit, you can purchase plastic bags containing everything you need to be a pirate, a vampire, a clown, a knight in shining armour, a farm animal, a lumberjack, a football player or a cheerleader, a doctor, a nurse – sexy or otherwise. You can purchase an open hospital gown with a pair of foam buttocks for the back, in case that’s what you really want to go out as. Basically anything that occurred to anybody, all in one convenient package. The packages aren’t cheap, but the materials usually are – felt, plastic, or paper imitations

It's all super convenient, ideal for last minute I-put-no-thought-into-this considerations, but somehow offends my lingering, long since futile insistence that costumes are meant to be assembled rather than purchased.

Franchise promotion is the order of the day. Harry Potter, Sonic the Hedgehog, Goku, Minecraft this and that. Star Wars, Marvel, DC, all with laser sharp precision. What kid would bother with an approximation? Freddy, Jason, Mike Myers, Chucky, Leatherface are all there to happily disembowel you, along with newcomer Art, the Terrifier (proving again, no amount of violence against women and children can get in the way of profitable merchandizing). I’d resent the intensity of the promotion less if it weren’t so narrow in focus. Where’s the imagination? Where are the deep dives? Are the Universal monster really so out of favour? I couldn’t find them anywhere, except on a three-dollar plastic cup which I had to have.

If I’m heartbroken that Jason Vorhees has replaced Boris Karloff as the face of the season, I can on some level at least understand how it happened*. But is American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman really intended to be part of that circle? Is Scream still popular enough to warrant an entire wall display? Do that many people want a Trick r Treat poster? This all strikes me as some boardroom’s idea of what Halloween people want – someone looking in from the outside, but who’s never delved too deeply into the pool.

It seems churlish to complain about the place which did provide me with vital components of my costumes. After all, they DID provide my Groucho glasses, and my Matt Smith suspenders, to say nothing of my Universal drinking cup. I can almost hear my father say “you got what you wanted, what’s the problem?”. Isn’t that what so often deflates critiques of capitalism – “you got what you wanted”. I suppose part of me should be grateful that such a thing is available – that, no matte what suburban wasteland you find yourself in, you can find a very large department store that is sure to have at least
something (if not the very thing) for your needs. And of course, as long as other people seem to enjoy it, well, who am I to complain?

Well, who do I need to be? I’m not denying anyone else their fun, and I’m not demanding these stores shut their doors forever, and I’m not even saying I’ll never shop there; I am arguing they are not as cool as they seem, and if nothing else, hell, I’m allowed not to like things. If Charlie Brown was allowed to insist that Christmas isn’t really about lights and display contests or aluminum trees, then I’m to allowed to insist that Halloween isn’t really about plastic knives and free candy.

It's a symptom of a much wider phenomena, of a civilization that wants to convenience itself into comatosivity. Any amount of thinking or effort tends to be seen an obstacle to bypass with technology or money. On a purely consumerist level, I can’t help thinking of all the time and energy I spent tracking down old monster movies, Doctor Who merch, and Heavy Metal records, and how now I could just nab it all up with the press of a button – and how much less meaningful it seems. Or how every battle jacket I see now was almost certainly ordered online. Or how one simply buys any autograph or selfie one likes at a ComiCon. More importantly, I see AI being used to make art and music, and Grammarly openly boasting that they know the mechanics of good writing “so you won’t have to.” Press a button or spend a buck, and you need not do anything nor think anything ever again.

If I take Bradbury’s contention seriously, that Halloween is a direct successor to all of history’s Deal with the Dead festivals, then I reserve the right to get a little grouchy.

I also maintain I could have found those glasses and suspenders somewhere else.

Ha, little did any of you suspect, I too have been drunkenly writing this night, hacking out derivative retrograde space opera on a manual typewriter.

That's right, a Quiet Tab Deluxe Underwood typewriter, circa 1963. Feeding used paper scraps into the roller like belts of bullets into a Maxim gun, hitting big fat keys attached to big iron arms punching tangible ink letters directly into meat-space paper RATATATRATATATRATATAT.

But it's not death I'm spewing out, but life as new worlds appear on the page. Not the screen, the page.

It's a Godly feeling, never to be recreated on lousy touchscreens.

Now, if I could only figure out how to end the story. . .

(Not too worried for the moment about the potential allegories. Just as well: too blatant allegories make for lousy literature).

Needing a break from the impressive but lead-heavy Cancer Ward and finding Such is My Beloved intolerably squirmy awkward, I picked up Work Done for Hire by Joe Haldeman, hoping for something more distracting.

Yes and No.

Haldeman is an intelligent writer, whose Forever War is absolutely an SF classic. But I've not been blown away by much else he's done. His concepts are always fascinating, his details are complete, but he always seems to run out of steam toward the end, as if he just wasn't sure how to wrap it all up.

Work Done is a lot like that. The setup is irresistible - struggling author gets too-good-to-be-true miracle offer and of course things go wrong - but the ending feels abrupt and unsatisfying. And I really wasn't happy with the last-minute explanation for the whole scenario, which kinda rendered the whole thing nonsensical. The omniscient bad-guy is a trope I particularly loathe, and Haldeman implies there's a reasonable explanation for it, until he tells us there isn't. That annoyed me.

The book within-a-book approach is kind of abandoned two-thirds through, and ended up feeling pointless - why bother? They don't come together or influence each other at all, except for a rather half-assed analogy at the end.

The book within a book? Nasty serial killer stuff. The sort that certain imaginations glory in coming up with.
Such things often dip into the realm of the impossible - the better to scare people, or shock and disgust them at any rate - Haldeman keeps it almost plausible. Almost. It's as unpleasant as anything I've read, and weirdly morbidly fascinating because of it. Such is the way. I wonder if Haldeman is actually trying to satirize a certain kind of sensationalist paperback that were popular in the 80's and 90's. The book-within-a book conceit would allow him to do so without having to commit to such a work in earnest. It would save him the trouble of figuring out what to do with such a book, where the novelty is likely to wear out after the first few chapters.

Trouble is, there's every indication he had that exact same trouble with the main book.

Oh well.

Watching the latest Doctor Who has been a depressing experience, and I don't use the term lightly. Watching the latest offerings left my batteries drained like I'd just made-out with a litch. It is a painful, painful thing to watch something so previously wonderful dragged through the shitter like this. Like watching a great painting smeared with tzatziki sauce, or a loved one turn to Trumpism (come to think of it, I've seen that too).

Just as discouraging is the certainty that it will be lapped up by much of the public and media, the same enlightened folks who think the Met-Gala is an event of deep cultural significance. I've already seen some in the Twitterverse compare "Space Babies" favourably with "Inferno"; imbecilic philistinism on par with comparing Fifty Shades Freed with War and Peace. I despair for the human race!

In the spirit of masochism or vengeance, my thoughts on each run as follows:

The Church on Ruby Road 1/10
Alas, the Disnified era arrives in earnest, and I’d rather watch late-night ads for colon-cleansers. Possibly, somebody somewhere may enjoy this Bowie-less goblin gathering, but not here. It did not pique my interest, nor arouse my curiosity. It did not instill within me a sense of wonder, it did not surprise, delight, or amuse me. Instead, I began to wonder if we’ll ever get another companion smarter than a carrot. I really, really could not care. I decided I had better things to do with my time.
Besides which, it is morally reprehensible to assert that goblins would use auto-tune. . .

Space Babies – 0/10

Years ago they released a duo of films by the name of “Baby Geniuses” (I&II) which were universally considered to be worse than waterboarding. I did not go to see them: I had no patience for the concept then, and I have none now.

Nope, not doing it, not having it, life’s too short. Good day to you.

The Devil’s Chord – 5/10

Okie doke, now I can say something about Ncuti Gatwa, now that I’ve been given an episode I can actually sit through (rather than, say, commit hara-kari, or suck liquid drano up my nose with a straw). So here we go:

He’s got all the manic energy we’ve come to expect and demand from the Doctor, and as a Russell T. Davies Doctor, he is of course a mail-to-order all-around good guy who can dutifully cite all the bromides assigned to him. There is no denying he looks damned good in that suit. I found I liked him better during the quieter moments when he let his expression do the talking. It’s still early days, we’ll see what he’s got to offer.

The story itself. . . it’s okay. The Doctor faces down another mythical semi-deity with a sense of humour, defeating it via ad-hoc set of mystical ancient laws written into the script so they could be used for this purpose. Typical of an RTD script, they are the only set of limitations the villain must abide by. It’s amusing, but would definitely have had more impact if we’d not just seen it less than two episodes ago in Giggle.

I dunno, I find myself torn between the cleverness of the initial concept and the shallowness of the execution. It all seems so gimmicky to me, an excuse for stylish costumes, nostalgic name-drops, and musical numbers (which reminded me of Hairspray more than anything from the era) than a fleshed-out story. Does the Doctor really think than “Music is the highest form of thought?” He’s hardly ever mentioned it before! Every story ends with a twist? Since when? Would humanity really wipe itself out if not for music? Sure, the world would be an ultra gloomy place, but nuclear suicidal? A merely unhappy world though is not a high-enough stake for Nu-Who: we need apocalypse! Like every RTD story ever (except maybe Midnight or Left Turn), I don’t get any sense that he’s thought through the implications of the scenario. A great fantasist might have had something to say about the nature of music and its role in our lives. In Disney’s Doctor, we’ll have to settle for cheesy dance-moves and Beatles references. I come away from this with absolutely nothing.

Nothing.

So there you have it folks: a combined rating of 7/30. That's 23%. A failing grade in any institution. Back to class with this!

I have written at length before on Edgar Allen Poe's great thesis ("Story" just doesn't cut it) "The Imp of the Perverse", which sheds light on humanity's tendency towards self destruction. I'm no psychologist, but I believe there's more wisdom in the story than the entire body of self-help literature released between 1817 and 2024.

To whit, Poe says that we often do things for no other reason than that we should not. That we often actively work against our best interests precisely because they are our best interests. This is what he labelled "the perverse", using by way of illumination, vertigo, procrastination, and a criminal blowing his cover after he'd gotten away with it. If he were writing today, he doubtless would have included things like drunk driving, office romances, and storing porn on work laptops. On a society-wide scale, he'd certainly point to climate-change, vaccine-hesitancy, and our current bovine tendency to bend-over for Mr. Putin.

We all have our own little imps of the Perverse, little monkey-wrenches we throw into our own gearshifts, though none I hope as grave as the one exhibited in Mr. Poe's story. Putting off lesson-planning until the very last minute would probably be mine (the ordeal of THAT is grist for another mill), though any urgent activity can be delayed in my personal world.

I find, in my own case, it is refusing to do what I should, rather than insisting on doing what I should not, that gets me into trouble. Again, minor stuff for the most part, but headache inducing all the same. Like there's a little voice saying, quite insistently, DON'T do that. Don't respond to this text right away. Don't send out the assignment while it's still fresh in the mind. Don't ask the person's name while it's still socially acceptable to do so. Don't wash this dish before the cheese sauce solidifies. Don't RSVP right away (even if the answer highly unlikely to change). Don't ask for the time off while you're still most likely to get it. The list goes on.

"DON'T bring this potentially useful thing," is a frequent one. I will stand at the door with said thing in my hands, and the little voice will insist on putting it aside, or even actively REMOVING it from the bag, ostensibly to lighten it up. Chargers, textbooks, USB sticks, gloves, hats, earplugs, laptops, have all been abandoned in this fashion; I once very consciously left both phone and keys behind before a walk, and, of course, returned to find the house locked.

The funny thing is, on any number of occasions, I did bring these things with me, thinking nothing of it, and may or may not have needed them. But any time that voice speaks up and insists I won't need them, I invariably do.

The worst incidence was years ago, when my parents' house flooded. I could see the waters approaching, and had just enough time to remove some of my valuables, including my childhood stuffed toys - life long friends each. But, to my eternal shame, I left one of them behind. The voice said quite forcefully "DON'T bring him. He'll be fine." That part of me insisted the waters wouldn't go much higher than the bottom shelf - they would eventually go the ceiling.

I couldn't have really believed it - why bother with all the other ones, if I really thought things would be fine? Why muck about with instruments and electronics, documents and books, if I wasn't actually that worried?
Why not bring this little guy along, if I'd brought all the others, and it would have taken no effort at all? But the voice insisted. "DON'T. He'll be fine."

Of course he wasn't, and he regularly visits me in the middle of the night to say so.

Fortunately, I have gotten better at resisting the voice, learning that to do the precise opposite is usually the best policy. I wait for the day though, when it exerts its influence on something important.

Funny how things work out. . .

Does anyone here remember the nightmare it could be to find unfamiliar music in the pre-internet age?

By which I mean you catch a few irresistible snippets of melody on a radio or on television, but fail to catch the title of the song, the name of the band, or any of the lyrics? All you've got is this tune floating around your head and nothing to go on. Whadya do???

In some bygone era, you could call the radio station. But even assuming you got through in they hyper-corporate conglomoratized era of my early adolescence, what would you do, hum the tune? "You played something about an hour ago, it sounded a little like this:. . ." Isn't that a bit like going to the library and asking for the book with the red cover? You know, the one with verbs in it?

Even if you were musically literate, and could transcribe the tune into standard notation, who would you show it to?

You could of course hum the tune, and maybe, if it were popular enough, somebody might recognize it. But it would need to be a very recognizable, distinct tune, you'd of course need to do it justice. I never could - I always got the key or the tempo wrong, and it was always some weird proggy piece that didn't have an identifiable chorus anyway.

Classical pieces were particularly irritating because there were never any lyrics (or may as well not have been - you try singing an Italian aria you just overheard on a car stereo). None of your mates knew anything about classical music, and even if you knew someone who did, they almost never cared to enlighten you on the topic. For the longest time I tried to identify what turned out to be Prokofiev's "March of the Knights", having nothing to go on other than Iron Maiden occasionally using it to open their shows. (It has since been used to introduce the British version of "the Apprentice". That line of inquiry would of course get you nowhere: I once had the temerity to ask my brother "Remember that time time we saw Maiden and. . ." only to be quite definitively shut down by Dad. How could I be talking about Iron Maiden at a time like this??? (We were on our way home from Handel's "Messiah".) (Dad had and has an infuriating habit of addressing the point he thinks you're making rather than the point you are making. Questions were often left unanswered because unfinished. Possibly the origin of my loathing for interruptions.)

The answer would eventually be provided by "Classical Thunder" commercials.

Two other harmonic holy grails would remain for quite some time longer. One was "Ghost at Number One" by Jellyfish, eventually unearthed in the Google-era. (Though not before fruitlessly pouring over the Spirit of the West back catalogue). The other though remained elusive for some thirty years.

It was a prog-rock track first heard on some Q-107 Alan Cross documentary (I believe it was Alan Cross, memory may mislead me). It had a simple, but powerful piano/keyboard refrain, a somewhat urgent verse, and a high-flyin' chorus. I thought it sounded epic, important. For some damn reason it made me think of clouds - maybe it felt dreamy, or windy. It definitely made me feel like one King Vultan's wingmen. . .

And I didn't catch a single word!

I thought I heard the host mention Roxy Music, and use the words "Art as Pop". Two problems: 1) Dad owned a couple Roxy Music albums, and they sounded nothing like that. It couldn't have been Roxy Music, it must have been someone else. 2) There is no song anywhere with such a title as "The Art as Pop". Nobody anywhere has written that song. It doesn't exist.

I would occasionally ask around about it, describing it as best I could and humming what I could remember, and getting universal blank looks. I even once asked Tetsab to look up "The Art as Pop" on the fledgling Napster, to no result. Which is funny because. . .

Decades later, long after I'd despaired of ever finding this sonic Ultima Thule, I found myself again sitting up with Tetsab, searching for something short and untaxing, though not quite brainless, to watch before bed. We settled on a Roxy Music retrospective. We get half way through. . .and there it is!

"There's a new sensation
A fabulous creation
A danceable solution
To teenage revolution

Do the Strand, love. . ."

That's it! That's the song!!! It WAS Roxy Bleedin' Music after all. . .

It's not as epic as I remember. It's got nothing to do with leaving earth's atmosphere, but merely concerns a lousy nightclub dance. The piano/keyboard seems less vibrant, Brian Ferry's vocals have a bit of a David Byrnesque warble about them, and the tune is suffused with a ghastly saxophone I completely don't remember (for me, saxophone wrecks a song like urine wrecks a recipe).

Nevertheless, it's a catchy tune which I played on repeat (once Tetsab left of course).

A great mystery is solved. And yet. . .memory is a funny thing. They've done studies on it - it reconstructs reality for our benefit, but does not record it exactly, and so in our heads are only simulations rather than recordings of the actual thing. Just as a rewatched movie after many years might not look quite like we remember, the song in my head from all those years ago is not quite "Do the Strand."*

It is of course - the structure, the melody, the rhythm. . .I mean, it is the song! But every so slightly different. Enough to make me wonder - is there a version somewhere that sounds exactly like I remember? Could that song still exist?

Perhaps I should record it. . .

I should probably mention something of last year's reading list before I forget everything about it.

It was 25 this year, which is more that last year but less than the year before that. It may probably be more than next year, depending on the job situation, but we'll worry about that then.

Arguably, I cheated by throwing in a couple of kid's books toward the end, but hey! Kid's books count. If a huge one like Antony Beevor's "Russia" can artificially drag the total down, I see nothing wrong with artificially inflating the total with another "Diary of a Whimpy Kid" epic. My rules here!

1) Putin's Wars - Mark Galeotti

2) Away and Beyond - A.E. Van Vogt

3) The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
That certain folks think the world would be better off without this wonderful book tells you all you need to know about them

4) The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
Scary. Switch "Lindburgh" to "Trump" and "Hitler" to "Putin" and you have a near perfect reflection of the current world

5) Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia - Gregory Carleton
Oh those Bolshies! Ever wonder what official Soviet policy toward masturbation, or Stalin's attitude toward homosexuality really were? Whether promiscuity or celibacy reflected true Marxism was a debate that cost lives.

6) Odessa Stories - Isaac Babel

7) Canal Dreams - Iain Banks
"Canal", not "carnal". Sorry.

8) Engineers of the Soul
Reread. Should be subtitled: You Can't Build a Dam Here! How did writers keep their artistic integrity - and their heads - in a state that forced them to write about water irrigation?
Many didn't.

9) Literature and the Culture Wars - Deborah Appleman

10) Tales from Earthsea - Ursula K. LeGuin.

11) Colchis - Konstantin Postovsky

12) Love and the Worker Bees - Alexandra Kolllantai

13) Anxious People - Frederik Bachman
Blech! Blech! Blech! I have rechristened Chicken Soup for the Douchebag Soul

14) Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller

15) Girls at War - Chinua Achebe

16) First Blood - David Morrell
Called "carnography" by a Time Magazine reviewer, this book is way nastier and dumber than the surprisingly thoughtful movie it inspired. The protagonist is a regular Jason Vorhees, and it makes for super icky reading.

17) Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koeslter
Staggering. A deep dive into the mind of a revolutionary fanatic, and the mentality that killed millions. All too believable

18) Russia - Antony Beevor

19) Identity - Milan Kundera

20) Winter is Coming - Gary Kasparov
Subtitled I Fucking Told You So!

21) Victory Cities - Salman Rushdie

22) Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States - Bill Bryson
A rather misleading subtitle, as it's much more a cultural than a linguistic history. Still, it's no less fascinating because of it - Bryson has a gift for finding interesting tidbits.

23) Star Wars - George Lucas
Lansakes, Lucas' prose is bad! Awkward sentences, clumsy similes, appalling dialogue. . . and yet, you can hear John William's score in every lousy line, and in your mind's ear the original cast are saying it all properly. A great exercise for writing students might be to make 'em read this, and ask "what's the difference?" Somehow the whole project works, and we've been stuck in that galaxy far far away ever since. . .

24) The Twits - Roald Dahl

25) Diary of a Whimpy Kid: Hard Luck - Jeff Kinney
So sue me, I still find these stories of dog farts, 5-second rule mishaps, and dropping cell phones into the toilet unutterably hilarious. Make of this what you will.

In Years past, I would do best of albums at the end of the year, but these days I don't actually listen to that many new albums. Best I can manage are single songs which made a dent in my cranium. This is partially a function of the new commercial reality for music, as well as my new middle-aged reality - songs are released and largely consumed individually, much like the old days.

In such retrospectives, year of personal discovery is the deciding factor, rather than release date, which is how "Orgone Accumulator" from Hawkwind and "Lost and Found" from Sparks end up being two of my most often played and thoroughly enjoyed songs of 2023. Ditto on songs from Rory Gallagher, Tina Turner (RIP) and the Sesame Street Gang. Special mention must be made for Cheap Trick, whom I previously payed no attention to until not 3-weeks ago, and have since fallen in love with. Good riffs, catchy tunes, and a Slade-like silliness I find irresistible.

But for both categories, the trophy must surely go to Billy Idol's "Cage", released this year, an infectiously joyful anthem of self liberation cut criminally short at the 2:49 mark. I count as good any song that makes me want to jump up and punch the ceiling, and Mr. Idol has left many a hole in my landlord's kitchen floor. . .

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