A Warning to the Queerious
Hello everyone, here’s Part 2 of my conversation with the excellent Sam Keeper. Enjoy.
Also, here‘s a recent edition of Watching Robocop with Kit Power, in which I join Kit and Daniel to watch and talk about… um, Superman III.
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At long last, here is Part 1 of an extra-special Shabcast, in which I am joined by the brilliant Sam Keeper, of Storming the Ivory Tower, to chat about Star Wars, with particular emphasis on Rogue One.
Very pleased with this one. There were some technical difficulties with it, but I’ve hammered it into eminently listenable shape.
Part 2 next week.
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Here are Sam’s articles on Rogue One:
A Galaxy Very, Very Near: Are Time And Space in Rogue One Core to its Resistance Narrative?
Modern Myth-Busting: Are Rogue One’s Characters Worthy Star Wars Heroes?
Film Theory Theory: MatPat’s Star Wars Theories Are Nazi Garbage
and
Nerd-On-Nerd Violence: Why Is Geek Star Wars Crit So Lousy?
and here is her announcement of the upcoming (expanded and revised) collection of these essays (plus bonus content).
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I’ve got nothing today. I was trying to get something written about Wonder Woman but it’s not ready yet, and may not be good (or tactful) enough to publish anyway. Meanwhile, a podcast I’m editing is presenting big audio-quality problems. So, yeah, coupled with other stuff going on IRL… I ran out of time. Sorry everybody.
So instead, here is a little round-up of stuff I’ve been reading lately.
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Here’s Andrew Hickey saying important stuff about Autism and Empathy.
Josh was kind enough to send me this interesting article in the New Yorker about ‘the occult roots of modernism’. Essential for modernism geeks.
Cameron L. Fantastic wrote a review of Zero Books’ much-anticipated Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle… and it’s not pretty. I have to say, my hopes weren’t high because I think Nagle is overrated. Her Jacobin articles have been okay(ish) but shot through with frankly bizarre problems. I can’t say Mr Fantastic (?) is right about Nagle’s new book, because I haven’t read it, but if half of what he says about it is true then it’s a major disappointment (though not, as I say, to me).
This demolition of Bill O’Reilly’s rubbish history books was fun, from Harpers’ Magazine. Fish in a barrel, but hey… a very unpleasant fish that richly deserves to be shot (metaphorically).
Here’s Richard Seymour being very astute (I think) on the prospects for Corbyn and Corbynism, and what needs to happen.
Relatedly, here’s James Butler on similar issues.
Here’s Jonathan Cook giving an account of Seymour Hersh’s investigation of claims that Assad ordered a sarin gas attack in April (the basis of Trump’s much-lauded bombings), and of how Hersh’s investigation has been ignored by the media.
Here’s Ali Abuminah putting the kerfuffle at Chicago Dyke Pride into context.
And finally, the first example of genuine, solid-gold comedy genius I’ve seen for a long time. Kaleb Horton at MTV (whose podcast with our very own James Murphy, The Last Exit Show, has just returned from hiatus, and deserves to be heard) presenting selected highlights of the script of Sully. Trust me.
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Needless to say, my liking for all these things doesn’t imply that any of them necessarily have any kinship with each other, or with anyone else. Nor does my linking to these articles mean that I myself necessarily agree with everything in them.
Laters.
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Yes, the Drunken Whocast returns. It is now, undeniably, a regular thing. Some guys – Jack, Kit, and Daniel this time – in varying and progressing stages of shitfacedness, talking far too much about Doctor Who.
This time, your arseholed hosts talk Series 2 (2006). And other things (this was recorded before the election).
As before, you’re getting this almost entirely unexpurgated. We’ve removed only some dull pauses, some bathroom breaks, one or two jokes that were a tad too off-colour upon sobre reflection, and one instance of vicious slander.
Stick with it – I’m told hour 4 is the best.
As often happens, people who sponsor me on Patreon heard this ages ago. (I don’t thank my sponsors at the end of Drunken Whocasts as it seems wrong somehow, almost as if I were insulting them, but they all get namechecked at the end of regular shabcasts, as long as I have time to record that bit.)…
The image across is by Steve Bell and was published in the Guardian. I’ll take it down if they ask. But it seemed too brilliantly, horribly perfect to abjure.
This month I’m joined by Kit and James, to talk about the election we had last week (surprise surprise) in which Jeremy Corbyn defied his critics to resurrect the fortunes of Labour and pummel the Tories into a very uncomfortable corner. We also talk about the horrific Grenfell Tower fire, just had just happened when we sat down to record.
Please share around, tell your friends, etc. I think we’re all proud of this one.
Credit where its due: this episode very much came about because Kit and James organised it, and James both edited the main body of the episode and supplied the wonderful title. I’m not even in the episode for half an hour or so.
So, interesting times, huh.
Actually, incredible times.
The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn fights the Tories to a hung parliament after years in the wilderness. Go back in time and tell me that in early 2015 and I’d laugh in your face. Not because I ever had anything but respect for Corbyn. I’ve always considered him a man of seriousness, principle, and dedication. And not becaue I think left-wing policies (or what passes for them these days) can’t sway people, can’t be popular, can’t win elections. They can, and do.
(The truth is that, spread out across Labour, the SNP, Plaid Cymru – and taking into account the many people who vote LibDem for left-liberal reasons, and the many more people who abstain because they’re too left-wing to feel represented by any party, even if they themselves don’t necessarily understand themselves that way – the majority of the British public are to the left to some degree. As Milton Friedman once bewailed, the public are irretrievably collectivist.)
No, I’d have laughed primarily because I would never have thought Corbyn would be able to get the nominations to stand for the leadership; and then I’d never have believed that the incurably cowardly and centrist Labour Party would elect him. But he got those nominations – essentially because of a prank – and then the Labour membership stepped up. Moreover, the people who had either been alienated from the party, or never attracted to it in the first place, owing to the poisonous legacy of Blairism, began flooding to join.
Initially, the Corbyn group showed serious lapses of judgement and competence. Many of these were probably inevitable when people with no experience of party leadership started trying to lead a party in adverse circumstances… but, it must be said, many others were avoidable and unforced.
Even so, the main drag factors causing Corbyn’s persistently low polling and approval numbers in the pre-election period were the systematic media bias against him (across the spectrum from the hard right tabloids to the BBC to the supposedly left-wing Guardian, they either left what he said unreported or misrepresented him, often to the point of simple and outright fabrication) and the resistance from inside his own Parliamentary Party. The comical palace coup failed to unseat Corbyn, as we know. And there we saw a first real glimpse of the man’s grit, as he faced down not only a jeering David Cameron but a hefty chunk of his own party (his PLP being largely a bunch of centrists at best), going on to win a second leadership election with an increased majority.
Even so, most commentators expected – along with Theresa May, clearly – that Corbyn would lead the low-polling Labour Party over the cliff and into oblivion in this election. Such is the unassailability of the entrenched and religiously-believed dogma of the neoliberal normal. So imagine their astonishment when Corbyn started closing the gap – spectacularly. The one difference being that, in election season, any media with any desire to pretend impartiality are more or less obliged to give coverage to both sides. …
Okay, first let me apologise for the paucity of long-form written pieces here at Shabgraff lately. Normal service will (hopefully) be resumed fairly soon, or a proper announcement of some new normal will have to be made.
Next, let me remind you all of the existence of two new(ish) podcasts featuring me.
There’s a new episode of Oi! Spaceman, in which I join Shana and Daniel to – for reasons that now elude me – talk about ‘The Return of Doctor Mysterio’. HERE.
And there’s a bonus mini-episode of Wrong With Authority, featuring myself in conversation with Daniel about the 2007 David Fincher movie Zodiac. HERE.
We may do more of these (comparatively) short extra episodes in future, with just a couple of us chatting about a movie outside our main sequence. We’ve decided to call them Footnotes. Because we’re just so damn cute.
On the subject of podcasts, there are some great Shabcasts coming up, including another Drunken Whocast (which seems to be genuinely becoming a new regular thing) and a fantastic chat between myself and Sam Keeper of Storming the Ivory Tower on Star Wars, Rogue One, etc. We talked about, amongst other things, fans who say destroying the Death Star was bad because the economy, or something. As if on cue, someone then wrote an online article arguing that Offred in The Hamdmaid’s Tale doesn’t have it that bad. Ho hum. Watch this space, as someone or other used to say.
I’d also like to thank everyone who donates to my Patreon. It is a genuine source of amazement to me that anyone is prepared to pay even small amounts of money to help me produce my nonsense articles and podcasts, but they do… and god love the poor fools. I’m not ashamed of asking for contributions, but I cant help ruefully reflecting on the fact that waiters in St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution started demanding an end to tipping as a degrading custom.
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Now, a word on more current politics. If you’re in the UK, for god’s sake vote Labour. I don’t expect them to win, but the better their showing, the stronger it makes their position, and the more there is to build on in the future. Jeremy Corbyn will lose, but if he can lose well, that alone will be worth having, a poke in the eye to a media and political establishment that has concertedly undermined him and pooh-poohed him from day one, and – by extention – the people he represents. If he stays on as leader even in the face of a defeat, as I expect and hope he will, then the closer-run the election, the better. Corbyn was, as I have always said, always a gamble and a long game. But what else have we meaningfully got, other than yet another surrender? And what have we got to lose?
Is Corbyn’s Labour perfect? Far from it. Deeper ideological issues aside, I’m still furious about the manifesto’s acceptance that free movement will have to end. …
Hello there… bit of a serious Shabcast this time, though there are some laughs along the way.
(EDIT: I forgot to say that I’m joined by James – who really knows about this stuff – and Daniel – who really knows about this stuff in America.)
This episode was prompted by the ‘Dementia Tax’ story, and became about the crisis in the NHS generally, and also about the horrors of the American system. It was recorded before the ‘Dementia Tax’ story developed (with Theresa May’s humiliating kindasorta u-turn) and also before the attack in Manchester, so it’s a bit of a relic… but even so, these are live issues, and a lot of what we say hasn’t gone out of date. The NHS is still in crisis, and its still the Tories’ fault, but also still tracks back to New Labour. And the American system is still awful, and the few improvements made by Obama may still be about to be destroyed, and we in the UK are still headed in that privatised, profit-driven direction.
I’d appreciate people sharing this about, for propaganda/electioneering purposes. You never know, it might help a bit.
The audio sample at the start is from this video, which I’d also suggest sharing around.
And here are the links (promised in the show) to the information about the 30,000 excess deaths in 2015 owing to NHS underfunding (I was going to link to the study itself but that doesn’t seem to be possible):
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-02-analysis-links-excess-deaths-health.html
And I ask a simple question: if its terrorism to set off a bomb in a concert, killing 22 people (and it undoubtedly is), then what do you call knowingly and deliberately underfunding a health service that people depend on for their survival, needlessly causing 30,000 extra deaths? For reasons grounded in political ideology?
On a slightly lighter note, here’s a link to the podcast about Bill O’Reilly’s book that Daniel mentions… unless I cut that bit out, I don’t remember at this point. Good podcast anyway.
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EDIT: Here’s something Kit wrote, which acts as a companion (an equal one) to this Shabcast:
http://kitpowerwriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/uk-general-election-2-dementia-tax-u.html?spref=tw
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When the world is a danger to Doctor Who, does it raise up in rage or does it keep getting stranger?
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Today, suffocation has a very specific meaning. In America, you can tell upon which side of the divide someone stands by seeing what their t-shirt tells you about their ability – or otherwise – to respirate. The divide in question is one created by a system of oppression that chokes people. It chokes them figuratively, and then has the brazen impudence to choke them literally as well.
One statement of resistance is the simple proclamation “I can’t breathe”, which derives its power from its ability to inhabit both the metaphor and the brute reality.
Part of the peculiar power of the metaphorical referent is that it expresses a feeling of helplessness as part of a demonstration of strength. Weaponised weakness.
‘Oxygen’ flirts with the SF trope of the post-racial future. The people of the future don’t understand why Bill should face prejudice. They don’t see colour. Except that there is the business with the blue man (played by a white actor, of course, because whiteness is perceived as neutrality, blankness, non-ethnicity, vanilla standard humanity, upon which a fictional alien ‘race’ may be projected without confusing things). But this seems like little more than a method by which the episode can not talk about race in a talking-about-race kind of way. After the imperfect but forthright way ‘Thin Ice’ touched on this subject, this is a failing. Apart from anything else, the refusal to depict class as imbricated with any particular hierarchical dynamics of race or gender is an especially glaring omission in an episode which, for once, explicitly concerns itself with class.
But even so, Bill dies in this episode. She isn’t suffocated, but she is deprived of breath. This happens in the context of a story in which the supply and denial of oxygen is the central iteration of hierarchical power in society. And yet she survives at least partly because she submits to the helplessness enforced upon her by an external force of systemic domination – her suit. She embraces negative capability. As resistance. That she has no choice only amplifies this fact rather than nullifying it. Her tactical embracing of her own helplessness is what ultimately leads to her survival.
She is, of course, saved by a white man. But this, while true and unignorable, is structural to Doctor Who… at least until the Doctor ‘does a Romana’ at the end of the series and chooses to regenerate into a copy of Bill.
(Shall we re-litigate this yet again? There is no way in which texts can be purified. There is no method whereby authors can ever entirely ‘win’. The solution to this problem(atic) is dialectical. It involves transforming society, not trying to amend the practice of authoring texts in the culture industries of late capitalism so that they become imperfectly ‘progressive’. Apart from anything else, what does ‘progressive’ mean in a society progressing towards some species of global choking and suffocation?)…
Phil was nice enough to cite me in the most recent of his (wonderful) ‘Proverbs of Hell’ series. I just thought I’d be cheeky and repost a little reheated morsel of the stuff of mine that he referred to… because I think it’s quite interesting.
In Hannibal Rising, the boy Hannibal emerges from privilege, from the Renaissance, from the Sforzas (a right bunch of bastards). But he also emerges from the aftermath of Barbarossa. His childhood tutor is a Jew who escaped the holocaust. He is adopted by a woman from Hiroshima. His early years are haunted by mention of the Nuremburg trials. He is born of the 20th century’s ultimate horrors.
Cannibalism is part of WWII-Gothic. Most particularly Barbarossa-Gothic. Thanks the Siege of Leningrad, and to Andrei Chikatilo’s (possibly bogus) childhood reminiscences, it is linked to the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union (see also Child 44). It is particularly appealing to the capitalist culture industries to depict the people of the Soviet Union preying upon each other “like monsters of the deep”, for reasons which should be tediously obvious. Famine is relevant in that it reveals the inherently predatory and competitive nature of humans, etc. As if the best way to judge the inherent worth of people is by looking at the behaviour of minorities in extremis. The capitalist culture industries are, as ever, very selective about which famines to mention. The one caused by Nazis (the other bunch of totalitarian zealots) may be brought up. The famine which followed the capitalist blockade of revolutionary Russia and the capitalist-backed Russian Civil War, is less often mentioned.
The TV show revelled in the related field of Eastern European-Gothic earlier this season [season 3]. Eastern Europe, as constructed by the Western-European imagination, is now Gothic several times over. It carries all the old freighting of the pre-20th century Gothic (i.e. vampires, Dracula, werewolves, castles, etc) and also all the baggage of the mid-20th century (Barbarossa, the camps dotted across Poland), and finally all the baggage of the late-20th century (Communism, Ceaușescu, Bosnia, Milosevic, Srebrenica).
The full post is here. And here and here are some other old posts of mine about Hannibal. And here’s Phil and I chatting about Hannibal, amongst other things, way back in Shabcast 11.
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