The Brown Wedge

Super-villain Names News

Super-villain Names News: uncharted territory entered (via ILC)

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists
I’m not going to review this book. On Amazon, dan2004 says “you certainly get a lot of laughs per pound” and “A reader” says “I kept putting itdown and down and down again. I put it down so many times I started tothink it was a coaster.” But as “A reader”’s review refers to the non-existent paperback review you can discard that. I agree with dan2004 - a lot of laffs and I wasn’t disappointed I’d paid a hardback price.

I could out-PoMo the universe by just reviewing the footnotes. The footnotes are nearly all scientific facts or at least real information, from the boiling points and melting points of a couple of elements, to the recipe for a Mai Tai cocktail and the advantages of wearing black. They stand in deliberate contrast to the main story which is told in wide-eyed childish language in the broadest-strokes possible - the characters are called “The Pirate Captain” “The Pirate in red” “The Pirate with an accordion” and so on. I particularly liked the bit when they first meet Darwin and he explains his theory.

I have a feeling this book won’t be hard for you to find - it’ll be there in the counterpacks between Schite’s Miscellany and The Little Book of Sp@m so pick it up and leaf through. If the style doesn’t have you smiling or larfing out loud within one short page then leave it alone. Otherwise it’s quite pricey and you can get it at Amazon at a discount.

Unfortunate this book will be compared to Pratchett, which will attract the Pratchett fans, but it will put off many others who would get a kick out of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author came out with a sequel soon. And then another, and then… well when exactly did Pratchett become annoying again? (NB rhetorical! i.e. Don’t fill the comments up with answers to this)

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Edinburgh Festival

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - Edinburgh Festival

The Scottish tabloids were full of Christian Slater’s 35th birthday. Big Daddy O’s lap dancing club had thrown him out for ’swearing’. ‘Hellraiser’ Slater wasn’t about to apologise, suggesting Trainspotting also included the odd profanity. Perhaps this explained the huge queue outside the Assembly Rooms.

For tabloid tittle-tattle he may be barrel scraping, but as a sane man in a mad world, he was excellent. As much Jack Nicholson (whom he physically resembles) as RP McMurphy, Slater came across as an actor approaching middle age and angry at the thought of it.

Nurse Ratched was less of a success. Part of the delight of the story is the ambiguity of her motivation. Frances Barber plays her too straight, too rigid. The audience took an instant dislike and uneasy empathy is everything that makes her fascinating. She didn’t earn it here.

Mackenzie Crook has arguably the hardest role. Billy is a difficult character to get right. The stutter has to be spot on or it sounds trite. And he is the most typecast of the actors. He seemed to struggle at first, but shined in more structured scenes. Physically he looks the part. No make-up required.

The other key role is The Chief. The play loses a little by employing The Chief to push the narrative along, adding between-scene monologues of tribal reflections “Big waterfall, Indian land.” When McMurphy penetrates his deaf and dumb ‘wall’, it’s not the plot pivot of the original and less of a revelation.

At one point Nurse Ratched rails against McMurphy’s lifestyle, “all your women and drink and immorality.” He must have been tempted to wink but played a straight bat, firmly in the role of McMurphy, not Christian Slater. He’s looking good for 35 and I’ve never really considered it before, but he can act too.

This Ain’t A Library

This Ain’t A Library

Expensive comics are killing the comics biz. Well, duh, no great analysis there. But the spiralling prices - as well as putting kids and casual readers out of the market - have an effect on my perceptions of stories, too. I like a lot of highbrow comix but it’s no secret that my comics weaning was on fast, cheap, naff superhero mags. Pulp dialogue, big ideas, and tartrazine at 40 pence a pop. I still like those things. It helps if the comics are good, but ‘good’ isn’t necessarily all I’m looking for from a comics experience. Problem is, at two quid each I feel it should be.

That’s why I gave up comics, because they priced me out of the market for gaudy crap and it turned out I needed the crap to sustain much of an interest in the good stuff. The last time I read them with any regularity was when I worked in a comic shop and could read a bunch of the new issues over a few beers at lunchtime. That was ‘96-’98 - the Bob Harras era at Marvel, the post-Image implosion, electric Superman, Heroes Reborn… I don’t think anyone would claim those were great times for mainstream comics but I remember them with some fondness because I was reading all this stuff for free. Since then I’ve only bought the odd trade paperback, often Marvel’s black and white cheapo Essentials collections, but there’s a limit to the amount of Silver Age romps I can take (bloody Roy Thomas).

Now comes a lifeline, though it comes at an ethical price. It turns out you can file-share comics which some mentalist fan has painstakingly scanned in and then encoded in .cbr format, to be read with a bit of software called CDisplay. Soulseek is full-ish of these things. Yesterday morning I finally bit the bullet and downloaded it. By yesterday evening I was swimming in trash again.

Of course reading a comic on a screen isn’t ideal, but fuck it. They’re disposable anyway. At last I can once more treat comics like the junk they are! And by doing so enjoy them a whole lot more. The only problem is that I’m blatantly freeloading. Now comics have always been a shared medium, before the collector mentality set in they would be passed around many a pair of grubby paws, but this is a bit different - nobody has ever seen a penny from a .cbr file. You could argue that with its short-termism, gimmickry and history of apalling creator treatment the comics biz deserves to get shafted. Not to mention that during the good times it’s been happy to milk the consumer until the teat bleeds. But the comics industry has already got the shaft and is on the brink of doom anyway.

I’ve never felt too guilty about music file-sharing and downloading because I know I spend a lot of money on CDs and it’s increased since MP3s. So file-shared comics will be an interesting test: this is a medium I currently spend next to nothing on. If I start buying comics again on even a semi-regular basis then it will suggest (to me at least) that .cbr works as a promotional tool. If not, then when the first .cbr series I read gets axed I will feel like a low, crawling thing.

Now I know more about 23 than ever before, I guess

Now I know more about 23 than ever before, I guess — by chance, as with the best of my library discoveries, I stumbled across Simon Ford’s 1999 book Wreckers of Civilization, his story of the folks behind COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. TG have always been one of those groups I’ve appreciated more than loved, though I have four of their CDs; however, I admit there was something weird and fascinating about their story, or what little I knew of it — the mentions in Jon Savage’s writing, the story about how Robert Hilburn hyped them to hell for their LA show and apparently received so much negative feedback that he firmly retreated into the chickenshit Boss/U2/Beck hype and sterility camp from that point forward.

So this was a fortunate find and a pretty good read. The subject matter by default steered away from a rock bio as such, as it became first and foremost the story of Genesis P. Orridge and the series of obsessions and (if the story of COUM’s origin is taken at face value) revelations which led him to first form a none-more-extreme performance art group and then something musical out of that. It’s an illustration of a Britain I’m not as familiar with as well, one of art and life defiantly well out of a mainstream for the early to mid-seventies, of art and politics (each in many different senses of the word) slamming into each other with varying results. It’s as an art history that I probably learned the most from the book — modern art however considered in general just isn’t a strong point or an overriding interest. There’s no question a lot of what I read was downright queasy — I feel no moralistic horror over the various installations described (a number sound just plain playful), but when P. Orridge and Peter Christophersen start in with the knives on their flesh, I had to skim ahead.

And then again it’s the story of relationships not quite working as planned, of P. Orridge and Cosey Fani Tutti’s personal partnership turning into one of Tutti and Chris Carter. It’s a collection of little details I had never heard about that were of particular interest (Ian Curtis was a massive TG fan, I learned, and apparently P. Orridge spoke to him the night of Curtis’s death). It’s a collection of a lot of photographs and recording details and descriptions and contradictions. And then there’s Christophersen, of the four the one least portrayed, a continual presence but outside of the intense triangle, and also holding down a specific regular job at the Hipgnosis design firm the whole time. It’s a split he maintains to the present day — design and video directing and commercials as the day job, the continual unfolding slow motion unease of Coil and affiliated bands elsewhere. In my own small way I have this gentle split in my work — library work on the one hand, writing and commenting on the other — and so I sympathize with this approach more than one which in its dedication to ‘nothing short of total war’ becomes its own entrapping siege mentality. Maybe if I had grown up as Neil Megson before he took on the Genesis name, I would think differently.

Copybooks

Copybooks

Browsing idly in WH Smiths on Friday a couple of new books caught my eye. One was by Vivian Cook, called Accomodating Broccoli In The Cemetary. This unpleasantly unwieldy title turns out to be a book about spelling, subtitled “Why can’t anyone spell anymore?”.

The publishing world is fad-driven like everything else. But for some reason its fads annoy me more. Maybe my expectations of books are higher than my expectations of, say, the pop biz, where if a band hits big then of course a half-ton of identikit ones will surely follow: I take that as part of the landscape and it never bothers me. Maybe it’s the time the cycle takes - in films a surprise hit may take a few years for other people to copy, so it’s harder to become sick of things.

Vivian Cook’s book does not come with a blurb saying “If you loved Eats, Shoots And Leaves you’ll just adore this!”. It hardly needs to: plainly there is no way it would be in WH Smiths’ Top 10 without Lynne Truss’ pedants’ charter breaking this particular path. I also just know that it’s the start of a flood - just think how many Miscellany books are on the shelves now. In a business where the margins are presumably pretty stinking every successful title will generate a mass of imitators - further along the Smiths’ shelves was the latest in the flourishing women-like-kinky-sex!!! subgenre, this time about a teenage BSDM enthusiast. It at least put “Move over Catherine M!” on its cover.

My irritation over this kind of marketing is rather self-defeating: it can work in the readers’ favour. Longitude was a bit of fluff whose popularity was bizarre, but it did break open an entire new popular history genre. It allowed people whose good social history work would have been footnoted to death in unread journals to actually write a bit and tell a few stories: many of the post-Longitude cash-ins were considerably better than their genre-mother. Similarly Lynne Truss may allow a few linguists to earn an honest bob - the write-up of the Cook book suggests it casts its net intriguingly wide. But I won’t be reading it: my quixotic stand against copycat books is not going to be weakened by mere quality.

Cut your fringe!

Cut your fringe!

You can amuse yourselves here with 1-star reviews of the worst of the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s possible some of these comments are funnier than the shows themselves. Of course, the secret to the Fringe is that everything is bloody awful, but because you’ve paid fifteen pounds for fifty five minutes with some twat you’ve seen on the TV, you’re not going to complain. From the reviewers’ point of view, bad reviews of name acts are ruled out by the threat of free tickets drying up, which is why all the big venues run their own press office. It’s only the little shows, to whom anyone and his dog can get a free ticket with a Fringe press pass, that critics can piss on. Now will everyone please sod off home and let us get on with our lives in peace?

WHO REVIEWS: #5, #6, #7

Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible - Marc Platt (7/10)
(TARDIS crew: 7th, Ace; VILLAIN: The Process)

Cat’s Cradle: Warhead - Andrew Cartmel (7/10)
(TARDIS crew: 7th, Ace; VILLAIN: Butler Institute, Mathew O’Hara)

Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark - Andrew Hunt (2/10)
(TARDIS crew: 7th, Ace; VILLAIN: Some random Welsh gits)

The first four New Adventurers gave Whovians the epic Timewyrm, chasing all around the galaxy and even into the Doctor’s mind. The next three books all bear the “Cat’s Cradle” moniker and was poised to be another multi-book saga.

So what went wrong?

The three books have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Time’s Crucible is a base-under-siege pastiche mixed in with some startling revelations about ancient Gallifrey. Warhead is a near-future ecoterror story. Witch Mark is a parallel universe exercise in fairyland fuckwittery. The linking device is a silver cat that represents the TARDIS but only actually impacts the plot of Time’s Crucible. Events in Time’s Crucible have a negligible impact on the setup of Witch Mark, but Warhead could have occurred at anytime without causing any real continuity hiccups. As an overarching epic, these three books fail completely.

So why publish them with Cat’s Cradle in the titles? I can understand not wanting to do another “Doctor and Ace hunt down a threat” multipart story; variety is the spice of life, after all. However, there isn’t even a thematic link or a “the events of one story lead into another” setup going on; I have no idea what Peter Darvill-Evans was thinking when he tried to shoehorn these books together (beyond “HAHA STUPID FANBOYS I TAKE YOUR CASH AND FLEE LIKE WIND”).

Individually, two of the books work very well. Time’s Crucible sets a deeply claustrophobic mood by stranding Ace in a nightmarish, time-ravaged landscape with no Doctor, no TARDIS, a bunch of amnesiac explorers from Gallifrey’s history called Phazels and a gigantic, disgusting datavore that calls itself The Process. Platt does an excellent job of revealing twist after twist, springing revelations about where the action is taking place, why The Process is making the Phazels look for the Future, and where the Process’s creepy humanoid guard with the insect heads actually came from, all while meshing in the Ancient Gallifrey plot that explains the emergence of rationalism and time travel and gives some startling details about pre-Time Lord life. Warhead goes for a different type of harrowing, evoking an Earth not too far removed from our reality but full of neat little future ideas, like the holographic answering machine. Cartmel’s Doctor is firmly in chessmaster mode, maneuvering character after character in a grand scheme to stop the schemes of a severely disturbed businessman and his plan to cheat death by forcibly downloading humanity into a supercomputer. The most interesting part of the story revolves around Justine, a neo-Luddite teen obsessed with nature and witchcraft, and Vincent, the Whoniverse’s most fascinating psychokinetic who channels emotions into fearsome mental powers.

Then there’s good old Witch Mark. Poor, sad, horrifyingly bad Witch Mark. The book is packed with stereotype after stereotype, what with the stranger-hating Welsh farmers, the two American backpackers that seem to have actually come from 50s London, the Peter-Davison-in-”All Creatures Great And Small”-esque vet, the helpful old couple in the inn, the surly humans in the fairy realm, the wise, gentle unicorns, the staid trolls, etc etc etc. The vestiges of a great plot lurk in this mess (the fairy realm is collapsing and the inhabitants there, along with the Welshmen, are attempting to infiltrate Earth, creating conflict both on Earth between the UK and the transplants and between the fairyland humans and the fairy creatures, all exacerbated by witches using the situation for their own gain) but the book seem to be actively conspiring to hide this from you. Glaring plot holes fly all over the place, including one particular howler that isn’t resolved for another 49 books. This was the last book I needed to complete my New Adventures collection; I still have conflicting emotions about having spent money for this nonsense.

In the end, we have two very good books and one shockingly bad book, all more pessimistic in tone and setting than the previous four novels. Apparently, adults don’t like fun very much (and it only gets grimmer from here).

BOOKS I COULDN’T FINISH: 1: The Fortress OF Solitude - Jonathon Lethem

BOOKS I COULDN’T FINISH:
1: The Fortress OF Solitude - Jonathon Lethem

Sometimes life is too short to read a book you have lost interest in. Sometimes you complete it anyway because you have already invested too much time into it. I’ll do both, and feel a lot worse about the former. What is annoying though is when you get a book you think you’ll enjoy, and even do for a bot, which then drifts away from you.

The Fortress Of Solitude was one such book. I had heard good things about it, and I have generally liked Jonathon Lethem. Even the JL titles I have not really liked (Gun, WitH Occasional Music say) I have finished. His failings as a writer have usually hit me as a lack of respect for genre (or more properly genre audiences) and being willfully oblique. The Fortress Of Solitude promised none of that: it was a coming of age tale of a couple of Bronx kids obsessed with comics. And the first hundred pages were readable in an overlong way. Perhaps too much detail was being placed on certain childhood games, but I did get a good overview of the lead characters development.

And then I put the book down, and could not pick it up. Plot ennui set in. Nothing much seemed to happen, the lead seemed a permanently scared narrator whose own sense of self was putting me off. What’s more I could not see where the book was going. Would the leads just get older and do all the trivial school stuff which no matter how well observed I was not in the mood for. Or was the slow start in anticipation of a plot twist that would upset the status quo.

I decided I didn’t care and read an Anne Tyler book I found in the cottage we were staying in.

Sex and the Single artist

Sex and the Single artist

Jeff Koons has lost his law suit, the one that wanted to reduce his lawyers fees from four million dollars to two million, which he has already paid. The law suit was in relation to his porn star ex wife, and his lovely little child Ludwig who was awarded to Mr Koons (perhaps because of puritanical standards in America, where the idea of a porn star as a wife seems ridicules, maybe because the wife seems just this side of unstable.). She up and left for her home country of Italy, which does not intervene in domestic matters as it relates to the courts, and Mr Koons has spent the last 5 years and 4 million dollars failing to get his son back.

The court case, and the internet chatter about it as provided an interesting code to what is happening when it comes to art and sex, art and model and art and politics, especially the politics of idenity.

One of the arguments in court, was that it was not a legitimate marriage, because both of them used their sexuality as a process and a product, ie the porn star can never have sex w/o it being a performance and an artist who uses his body as a tool is in cahoots with that act, like two con artists playing three card monte in their own personal red light district. If they were performing then, when does there performance end. Are they using Ludwig Koons as an odd kind of ammunition. Koons has said in Artnews, the shiny American/commercial publication that all of his art is now made to pay the lawyers and show his kid that he loves him, but most of his work, aside from the stuff that he did with Il Stona, was childish and toying with ideas of commerce and work.

That said is Koons work weaker now that he is doing it for his kids. There are large series of mirrors in primary colours that are cut in the shape of Eeyroe (think Disney not Milne) that are cheap, easy, banal, and silly–but not in a way that the Popples or Pink Panthers were. Even though he was a commodity Broker, there was always a tension between what was “commercial” and what was “art” in Koons work, its a tension that seems lost here. It’s also lost in his so called easy fun paintings– the name seems obvious, but this was a man who called a statue of four angels pushing along a pig Ushering in Banality. In that case he was poker faced serious, he wanted us to think of his work as banal, reclaim banality as a virtue, and do the work concerning craft and art, work that had not been done in High Art for a very long time. There was no easy exit for an audience that was used to escape hatches marked irony, farce or theory. The idea of Easy/Fun, how large they are, how badly constructed, and how looking at them seems to be nothing more then a game of pick the easy reference seems an abandonment of his early game playing.

But then the topiary sculptures are really strong– reviving a dead craft, making renewed public spaces , treating decoration as high art, and being joyous and happy are all things Koons is good at, along with balls out craft. There might be hope left for him as an artist, but I doubt it, esp. With losing this law suit.

Can we make the distinction b/w art as biographical indecision vs art as commercial intercessor for biographical purpose, or more crudely, is the art that he made for Ludwig to enjoy better then the art he made to pay the lawyers ? Can we tell the difference ? I think the 30 foot tall Scotty Dogs made of flowers are for Ludwig, others think that it is the Eeyore mirrors.

There ar e other aspects of commerce here as well, aspects that are less seemly. There are lawyers watching hardcore in their office under the auspices of research, returning the child’s mothers status from wife to whore–whore on two levels, whore because she is acting pornographic and whore because she is paid to sexually perform.

(I have mostly talked about Money here, but there is also sex.–Koons starred in a series of works about him and his wife called The Made In Heaven series, which negotiate the protestant sexual ethic by making whores into wives, and wives into whores–by refusing to play the games that the Americans set out, and making both commerce and art into it–it precluded the internet age of voyuerism and home taping. But he seems ashamed of those series, he talked of being humiliated by having to pay lawyers to watch his wife fuck on camera–and all of the evidence that he did similar things for different goals in the 80s have been bought up by him and destroyed–the originals at least–the ironic thing is that one google image search for Made In Heaven Jeff Koons will show his blandly pretty face, chest, cock and ass.)