Elizabeth Sandifer

Right. Posting schedule for the next couple weeks is this. Next week, my post will go up mid-to-late week and be a review of Resolution. Then I’m gonna do a Cultural Marxism post that I’d meant to get done today but then this thing I was throwing together for Patrons got out of hand and I got busy with holiday travel and preparation and I just decided fuck it, this is a blog post now. (Patrons will be getting a draft of an essay on magic and psychogeography very soon though.) Then on January 14th I’ll be going back to TARDIS Eruditorum with a Pop Between Realities post on Blackstar. That’ll run into the summer, at which point we’ll probably start up Boys in Their Dresses: A Psychodiscography of Tori Amos. Because I’ve never done a song-by-song blog, and I’m due.

Also, you’ll want to clear some time on December 30th to be in the Discord server, where Jack and I are planning on doing a live Q&A to round out 2018.

For now, however, my 2018 highlight reel.

Music

Weirdly the category I have the most options in. The honest answer is probably some Seeming demo I’m not actually allowed to talk about, but if we’re talking about stuff that was released in 2018, let’s go with Alice Glass’s “Mine.” Glass has been interesting but not extraordinary in her solo career, mostly contenting herself to do “I can still do Crystal Castles-style music without my abuser,” but with “Mine” she fascinatingly regears into more pop-oriented music while maintaining the perspective that led to one of last year’s highlights, her shrieked chorus of “GET THE FUCK OFF OF ME” on “Natural Selection.” “Mine” is a seductively triumphant anthem of self-reclamation through self-injury. Its chorus soars even as it describes how “I’ll go down and choose a 99 cent razor drawn line / leave a trace until I’m finally mine again” in what is one of the bravest and most genuinely unsettling moments of pop music I’ve heard in recent memory.

Runners Up: The top slot probably would have gone to one of the tracks on King Princess’s debut EP if I could make up my mind on which one. Utterly charming and unabashedly queer Gen Z pop, the personal high point is “Holy,” the lesbian dominatrix cunnilingus anthem Lorde wishes she wrote. The objectively best song on the album, however, is the lead single, “1950,” a dreamy love song about all the joys and agonies of love in the closet.

Deeper on the list, obviously we have to talk about Janelle Monáe. Dirty Computer is a triumph. “Screwed” remains my favorite track, but there’s barely a misstep all album. Chvrches had a delightful third album that finally tried new things instead of recapitulating their debut like their second album had. “Miracles” feels fresh there. Florence and the Machine’s new one was solid too—let’s go with “Big God.”

Essay

Never any doubt that this was going to go to Andrea Long Chu’s “On Liking Women.”…

Continue Reading

CW: rape, sexual assault, violence against women, transphobia, and homophobia. This chapter contains multiple NSFW images.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Yeah, it’s been a bit. Maybe you just want to read the chapter. If not, it was mostly an analysis of Rorschach’s role in the narrative. 

There is, however, another important sense in which Rorschach represents a myopia within Watchmen and, more broadly, Moore’s larger artistic vision. As mentioned, a crucial part of Rorschach’s psychology is his tortured relationship with sexuality. Sex is a major theme of both Watchmen and Moore’s career, and one that he has much of value to say about, but there is something unseemly about the directness with which Rorschach’s disgust with sex is pathologized, not least because it’s a character trait inherited from his underlying relationship with the apparently asexual Steve Ditko. More broadly, there is something oversimplified and unsatisfying in Moore’s approach to sexuality—a flaw intimately connected to his persistent inadequacy on the subject of sexual assault. This would be a relatively minor issue were it not for the awkward fact that the relationship between superheroes and sexuality is one of the comic’s major themes.

The theme of sex within Watchmen ignites in the seventh issue, “A Brother to Dragons,” which forms, along with “The Abyss Gazes Also,” a symmetrical axis at the center of the series. Watchmen can be divided into two types of issues: ensemble pieces that feature a large cross-section of the cast, and character-focused issues that provide backgrounds and meditations on individual heroes. The first half of the book alternates between these two types, with “At Midnight, All the Agents,” “The Judge of All the Earth,” and “Fearful Symmetry” jumping among multiple points of view while “Absent Friends,” “Watchmaker,” and “The Abyss Gazes Also” focus on the Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach respectively. The second half also alternates back and forth, but here it is the odd-numbered issues that are character-focused, looking at Ozymandias, Silk Spectre, and, in “A Brother To Dragons,” Night Owl.

Figure 1000: The cover of Watchmen #7 not only sets the primary visual motif for the issue but visually quotes the Comedian’s badge with the positioning and angle of the smeared trail through the dust. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, 1986)

But structurally forcing the direct comparison to “The Abyss Gazes Also” does few (indeed no) favors to “A Brother To Dragons.” For all that “The Abyss Gazes Also” overplays its hand, it is at least a comic in which things happen in subtext, requiring the reader to work through the twin unreliable narrators of Malcolm Long and Rorschach. “A Brother to Dragons,” on the other hand, is aggressively straightforward, dropping its thematic points squarely into the dialogue to make absolutely sure nothing is missed. Its plot is simplistic and linear, with only one sequence of any significant formal complexity, and even that’s pretty up front about its meaning. Basically, Dan explains his backstory to Laurie as they meander around his basement.…

Continue Reading

I’m pleased to announce that, just in time for the holiday season, the third volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is officially back in print. Covering every story of the Jon Pertwee era and then some, the book is the most comprehensive take on early 70s UK culture ever to use the words “Gel Guards,” “Venusian Akido,” and “Pertwee death pose.” And it includes my mildly legendary essay “This Point of Singularity (The Three Doctors),” a pataphoric Blakean odyssey that Paul Cornell once read out loud at a convention to an audience including what I can only assume was a deeply puzzled and slightly alarmed Terrence Dicks.

Speaking of Paul Cornell, the book has been spruced up with a new essay on Paul Cornell’s Third Doctor comics for Titans, a way better name on the cover, and some minor improvements to the typesetting (as well as the removal of a line about making Doctor Who great again that had… not aged well). It’s the perfect gift for the most glam Doctor Who fan in your life. And if you don’t have a glam Doctor Who fan in your life you can read it on public transport until someone with incredible makeup and glittery clothes comes up to you and says “great jumping Jehoshaphat, is that TARDIS Eruditorum?” And if that never happens, at just shy of 400 pages it’s pretty effective for throwing at the creepy men who will try to talk to you instead. 

You can get it at the following links:

US: Print, Kindle

UK: Print, Kindle

Smashwords (for other e-readers)

And if you are in the market for a very geeky Christmas present, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1, on the William Hartnell era, and TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2, on the Troughton era. And if you’re looking for something a bit more apocalyptic for your beloved, there’s always Neoreaction a Basilisk, a work of horror philosophy about the alt-right. 

And just to really shovel the goodies on, I’ll be back tomorrow with a brand spanking-new chapter of The Last War in Albion. 14000 words of magical war, superhero comics, and kinky sex. …

Continue Reading

The folks at Mad Norwegian Press were kind enough to send me their preposterously monumental 4th edition of Ahistory. This now three-volume set, which began as Lance Parkin’s A History of the Universe for Virgin twenty-two years ago and has been periodically and extensively revised with help from Mad Norwegian publisher Lars Pearson is… completely insane. I mean, I’m the author of a six volume and counting history of Britain through the lens of Doctor Who, but I look at these things with a mixture of trepidation and awe. They are sublimely, gloriously useless, and I absolutely adore them and recommend them to anyone for whom the admittedly considerable price tag of three large paperback volumes is not prohibitive.

What Ahistory sets out to do is simple: provide a complete in-universe chronology of every Doctor Who story. But by “every Doctor Who story” I do not mean some relatively easy and straightforward task like all of the television episodes. I mean all of it. Every television episode through Twice Upon a Time is in here along with the televised spinoffs, the Virgin and BBC Books lines, Big Finish, the comics… all of it. This is a book series that accepts the “it’s all true” ethos of Doctor Who non-canon and then does the single most ludicrous thing you can possibly do with that premise, namely try to get it all to fit sensibly together. 

As a reference book, at least for what I do it’s an object of occasional use, although when I need it it’s amazing. When I needed to figure out the precise details of why Under the Lake/Before the Flood‘s dating was weird, it was an earlier edition of Ahistory that I checked to go “oh, right around Paradise Towers, that’s weird all right.” But its value is less as an actual reference (although it’s surely of use to anyone who wants to do an inventively fanwanky work of fiction, authorized or otherwise) and more as a textual game that has been played to masterful perfection. Ruthlessly footnoted with a bevy of sidebars and appendices, Ahistory is just plain fun for any intense Doctor Who fan to dive into and be swept away in the minutiae of. Immaculately argued and thus dellightful to disagree with, this is a masterwork of sheer and unbridled ridiculous ambition.

Ahistory 4th Edtion Volume 1 and Volume 2 are currently on sale. Volume 3 is available for pre-order and will be out in March.…

Continue Reading

For the last of our Series 11 podcasts, I’m joined by Niki Haringsma, author of the forthcoming Black Archive book on Love and Monsters. Have a gander here.…

Continue Reading

So this is the Chibnall era. A season of such bland mediocrity that an episode that in any of the previous four seasons would have come in around level with the Gatiss episode comes in third in my final rankings; where the five episodes by the showrunner all add up to nothing and go nowhere; where the politics are so bad we got a pro-Amazon episode; where there’s no sense whatsoever of who or what this show is for other than being the BBC’s attempt at filling an hour on the Sunday night schedule. The only tangible advantage Chibnall has over Nicholas Briggs is that he cast a female Doctor. It’s soulless, pointless, and worst of all, it’s fucking boring.

And I mean, none of that is new to, wait, let me check the spelling again, The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos. Which, incidentally, did not contain a battle. But at least while things were rumbling blandly along there was always some vague hope that it might, if not make good, at least go somewhere or have one moment somewhere that seemed to at least have something to say. But no. Instead we get Revenge of the Stenza, a villain who were perfectly fine as a counterpart to the Sycorax, the Atraxi, and rubbish robots from the dawn of time, but who as something that’s supposed to anchor any sort of arc are… stompy guys in leather? I mean, I suppose they’re no flimsier than the arc, but… I dunno. I honestly just don’t understand how you put this together and think that you’re doing something worthwhile with Doctor Who. Like, I remember in an interview after Twice Upon a Time Moffat talked about how every episode of the show has a moment where it’s clearly going to be the worst one ever and a moment where it’s clearly going to be the best one ever, and then it ends up somewhere in between. And while that’s surely an exaggeration for Knock Knock (and, in its own way, for something like The Magician’s Apprentice) it’s genuinely unthinkable to me that anyone in the course of making this looked at it and thought they were making a classic for the ages.

I mean, what am I even supposed to say about this? Its dramatic tension was “will the white man take revenge over his dead wife?” Its sense of conviction behind this is “if you kill the guy who genocided six planets you’re just as bad as he is,” and sealing him in a stasis pod for supposedly all eternity is somehow morally preferable. It had Mark Addy running around to conveniently remember things when they needed to be exposited. It still doesn’t know what the fuck to do with Yaz. It’s full of macguffins that don’t go anywhere, doing things like a whole “we have to take the inhibitors off” routine that just goes nowhere. Its biggest idea is “religious faith is dangerous and easily corrupted,” and it can’t even sustain that through the final scene. …

Continue Reading

I’m joined this week by Rachael Stott, artist on Titan Comics’ Thirteenth Doctor comic, for a wide-ranging conversation that centers on It Takes You Away. Thanks so much to Rachael for agreeing to stop by our weird little show. Have a listen here.…

Continue Reading

Delightful, but it’s impossible to look at this fact without noting that this is because it largely eschews the tropes of the Chibnall era in favor of being a Doctor Who story. Indeed, to stir the obvious and very tempting pot a little more, this is delightful because it has a relationship to the Moffat era other than studiously avoiding everything about it. It is not that this feels like a Moffat-era story, although it certainly wouldn’t have been out of place within Series 10. (Imagine it instead of Lie of the Land for the narrative job of dealing with Bill’s mother.) But it feels like Doctor Who that has actually seen the Moffat era, taken on board the sorts of things it discovered the show could do, and moved on. In feels like a story that belongs to that moment where we had Mathieson, Harness, and Dollard all turning up every season to do something interesting.

At the heart of this is an investment in making sure the nature of the story actually shifts in meaningful way. Haunted house horror (done, it must be said, with a pleasantly new coat of paint) gives way to a bewildering but evocative fantasy sequence in some magic caves, at the end of which we find a sentient anti-universe that I’m pretty sure is Urizen, but that’s another essay. At each turn there’s a new set of rules to figure out, a new set of genre conventions, and new stakes. But in a season that has been fixated on the procedural, here we have an episode that is eager to embrace Doctor Who’s capacity to go “no, this.” The Doctor’s leap to identifying the Soletract is delightfully unelaborated on. The basic ideas are huge “revise your basic Doctor Who cosmology” juggernauts that nevertheless feel reasonably-sized and accessible when they land. And there’s a frog on a chair at the end of it.’

But for all that this is rooted in the Moffat era’s unapologetic embrace of the logic and iconography of fantasy over science fiction this equally clearly isn’t a post-Moffat story. For one thing, the idea that the universe would be structured like this—that a passage through a mirror would lead to a deadly cave where you have to make bargains for your life, and on the other side of the cave is a sentient anti-universe that’s secretly a frog—is just taken for granted, as opposed to being treated as something that the viewer should appreciate the cleverness of. As a result, the show finds itself willing to revel in the strangeness of things instead of preening about them. It becomes “oh, of course the world is this weird and unsettling,” which is an interesting point to hit.

On top of all of this, it knows how to use its characters. Graham and Ryan are both used effectively, put in positions and roles that are tailored to who they are. Yaz is still a plot function, left to perform the emotional intelligence role of the standard new series companion in a show where the Doctor is perfectly capable of that now, but on the whole the supporting cast is better utilized than we’ve ever seen.…

Continue Reading

Join El and Annie Fish (whose delightful Patreon is here) for a discussion that is at times about The Witchfinders. Listen here.…

Continue Reading

The cynical account would be that this avoided endorsing the idea that witch hunters had some valid points, and so is within the context of the Chibnall era borders on being a triumph. The more considered account would be that this retains many of the Chibnall era’s most annoying tics, but generally de-emphasizes them while succeeding at finding some new spins on old standards, which is to say that it works out more or less like the best case for the era.

At its heart it offers “what if spooky Doctor Who but with Alan Cumming camping it up throughout. The flaw here is that there’s not really a reason for these things to combine; King James’s arrival is only vaguely motivated and the plot really doesn’t particularly need him. His only role seems to be to keep the script from just being a kind of dreary mud zombies story. But while there’s a sloppiness to how Cumming is worked into the episode, he’s blatantly the best thing about it. Doctor Who works off of contrasts, and the gloomy folk horror of the plot along with Cumming’s wanton consumption of the scenery is an effective one. That it’s thinly justified isn’t a huge issue; something is always thinly justified in a fifty minute episode.

More to the point, the mud zombies kinda needed the help. They’re not bad, but it’s telling that their name, history, and plan are introduced and then dealt with inside of the last ten minutes, and that this, while slightly jarring, does not really feel like it detracts from them. They’re very “standard Doctor Who stuff,” and their abrupt reversion from spooky atmospherics to a completely standard explanation for this sort of thing is fine so long as they’re functioning as a platform for other things to happen. So the story needs a King James of some sort.

Thankfully, the King James it goes with is delightful. Doctor Who fans have, of course, known that Alan Cumming fits well with Doctor Who stuff since 1993, but at last we have him in the series proper. But he’s bolstered by the bold decision to have King James be, to put it bluntly, fucking terrible. The ideology of hero worship is probably the biggest of the millstones around the celebrity historical, and throwing the Doctor with a historical figure who’s revealed to be a complete shit is tremendously refreshing. Cumming, meanwhile, is capable of taking a character whose every trait is negative and making him entertaining without any redemption arc whatsoever. An episode built entirely around him would probably be annoying, but balancing him with mud zombies is exactly the sort of contrast that makes good Doctor Who, and ultimately if you stick the result you can handwave the setup.

This also marks the first time anyone has thought to handle Jodie Whittaker by giving her a talented co-star and letting her have a bunch of big scenes with them. While still waiting for an iconic hero moment, the exchange with King James when she’s tied up is easily her best scene this season, followed, really, by the scene of her about to be drowned.…

Continue Reading