Fashionably late capitalism
Keep forgetting to queue this up. Sorry about that.
This episode of Human Bondage sees the gang divided over one of James Bond’s silliest adventures. Jack Graham joins us for a bit, and it’s generally a good time.…
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Ennis’s Hellblazer concluded as it began: Constantine cornered, desperate, and tricking the Devil himself.
“Here, I’m John Constantine and loving it, bastard terrifying with my eyes full of history and my head full of secret things, here in one of London’s collapsed veins, feeding off it.” – Warren Ellis, Hellblazer
Astra, it turns out, is actually a disguised Ellie. The raid at the beginning of the arc that killed Header was to steal some old pages, which turn out to have contained the lore that Ellie/Astra revealed to the First of the Fallen at the beginning of the outset, prompting him to murder the other two demons to whom Constantine sold his soul and begin his final attack on him. All of this was part of Constantine’s plan, set up to allow Ellie to fashion a weapon that would kill the First of the Fallen and to get into position to do so. And so Constantine tricks the Devil, turns his own scheme back on him, and kills him, a final triumphant escalation of the basic pleasure he’d been offering since his second issue.
This was the heart of what Ennis offered on Hellblazer. And it emphatically served as the definitive take on the character. This was no mean feat given that Constantine was created by Moore, had been written by both Morrison and Gaiman, and had already had an iconic run at the start of his ongoing series. He was not a character who seemed in dire need of a reinvention, nor one who even straightforwardly appeared to have room for one. And yet going forward it was Ennis’s Hellblazer that would be the template. Any other writer working on Constantine would now be reacting to Ennis, whether to follow his lead or rebel against it. This was simply how the character worked now.
Implicit within that was a larger vision. It has already been discussed how Moore and Morrison found their success by bringing techniques from more literary fiction to the genres associated with pulp fiction. Crucial to this, though by no means the whole of the story, were the techniques that arose out of modernist writing. Ennis’s approach squares the circle to an extent, adopting both a pulp tradition and a modernist technique that were largely neglected by Moore and Morrison. But unusually, in this case the pulp and modernist traditions were never entirely separate in the first place, and their fusion, and the innovation came purely in the form of fully porting this process over to the medium of comics.
At the center of this is Ernest Hemingway. Unequivocally one of the primary figures of literary modernism, Hemingway, like Ennis, sat at a strange aesthetic remove from his contemporaries. Where writers like T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and James Joyce became famous for starkly difficult and complex prose, Hemingway’s prose had the by now familiar halmarks of terse directness. The beginning of his novel A Farewell to Arms is apropos: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.…
Rhosgobel, the wizard Radagast’s homestead, lies on “the forest borders between the Carrock and the Old Forest Road.”[2] Tolkien includes few other details about it. Unfinished Tales glosses Rhosgobel as “russet enclosure,” suggesting that it’s private land. The wizard’s lair refuses to be described.
Its occupant, Radagast the Brown, is the wizard Francis of Assisi, “a master of shapes and changes of hue” who “has much lore of herbs and beasts, and birds are especially his friends.”[3] Radagast is more reclusive than his fellow wizards Gandalf and Saruman, although he may be more outgoing than the Blue Wizards, two permanently offstage pieces of trivia. Rhosgobel’s positioning near Mirkwood lets Radagast watch for Sauron and monitor the forest’s decline, as well as be close to nature.
Radagast is one of the Istari, or Five Wizards, whom the Valar send to Middle-earth “to move Elves and Men to beware of their peril”[4] from Sauron. The wizards’ career begins at Mirkwood, meaning Radagast is the most ideally placed to monitor it. Like all the other wizards except Gandalf, Radagast strays from his charge, preferring birdwatching to sorcerer-fighting. At the Council of Elrond, Gandalf says when he convenes with Radagast, “he is one of my order, but I had not seen him for many a year.”[5]
With Radagast, Tolkien explores the trope of a wizard as a hermit. The Hobbit film trilogy emphasizes this, showing Rhosgobel is a house with a tree growing through it, metastasizing into a mess of tangled branches and roots across its wooden floors, surrounded by magical paraphernalia. Artist Alan Lee cites author T. H. White’s depiction of Merlin in The Sword in the Stone as an influence. John Garth points out that Radagast almost shares a name with the Slavic god Radegast, putting him in a tradition with the Carpathian Mountains and Slavic Dracula.
We can’t talk about the Hobbit trilogy without discussing Sylvester McCoy’s portrayal of Radagast. We’re Eruditorum Press, so we can’t escape McCoy’s connections to Doctor Who, where he played the mercurial Seventh Doctor. Like Radagast, the Seventh Doctor sticks to the margins, playing observer more than actor, although the Doctor is sinister in a way Radagast couldn’t dream of being. Similarly he falls into cosmic plans, but again, Radagast never takes the Doctor’s Machiavellian path.
McCoy plays both characters as slightly cheeky but deceptively insightful, although unlike the Doctor, Radagast allows birds to nest under his hat and has bird shit caked on his face, a detail whose absence from Doctor Who is clearly a flaw.…
Previously in Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis’s take on John Constantine drew heavily on the noir genre for influences, and largely fit into the structures suggested by Raymond Chandler’s classic essay “The Simple Art of Murder.”
“I’m the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness.” – Garth Ennis, Hellblazer
Ennis’s approach, it’s clear, is much closer to the one Chandler lays out than is convenient for Ellis’s point, even as his eventual conclusion that Constantine is the enemy of abusive authority in the general case clearly works.
Central to this is the unspoken ethical foundation of Chandler’s manifesto and the fundamental difference between detective fiction and what Ennis is doing in Hellblazer. At the heart of Chandler’s notion of realistic detective fiction is, ultimately, the perspective and worldview of the police. This is in some ways natural; murder is the domain of the police, just as war is the domain of soldiers. One cannot tell a realistic story about something without relying on the worldview of the people who deal with it. But a consequence of this is a worldview that is shaped by the police and their worldview, with all the innate conservatism implicit in that.
The occult, however, is not the domain of any real-world job, and so Ennis was left with considerably more freedom in how to tell his story. But Ennis’s clear focus on making sure the magical solutions within his stories made sense and were adequately set up is a clear embrace of Chandler’s ethics of realism, and a clear rejection of the sort of thing Chandler criticized British mysteries for,. On a larger scale, meanwhile, Ennis put much effort into grounding Constantine in his own experience of the real world. As he explained, Constantine “was a bloke who lived in contemporary London and did contemporary London things.” And with this wide mandate to shape his hero and his moral worldview, Ennis substituted the realism of cops with the realism of a man who grew up in Thatcher’s Britain amidst the Troubles, who drank a lot with his mates. And so his Constantine took the basic framework of the noir protagonist and shaped it into something more anarchic and engaged. This was a savvy understanding of Constantine—an unearthing of threads that were implicit in the character since his creation that wove them into a form that was well-suited to the landscape of the early 1990s.
Constantine’s post-breakup collapse marked the beginning of Ennis’s endgame, although he had more than a year left to run on the title. First came a phase featuring an unshaven, drunk, and homeless Constantine. This only featured three actual issues—a two-parter that resolved the lingering King of the Vampires plot from Hellblazer #50 and a one-shot in which Constantine is spooked by the ghost of a crashed World War II pilot that inspires him to get back to his life. This marked the first instance of Ennis directly engaging with the war comics that he grew up reading, But this issue, with its mawkish and Churchill-quoting title “Finest Hour” and its moral lesson about how the dead pilot “never gave up” and “clawed and fought to the last drop of blood for life” that leads Constantine to decide he owes it to him to try to live, is far from the best instance of it, landing closer to the jingoistic pap published in Commando and War Picture Library than to the stuff like Charley’s War that Ennis was clearly trying to approach.…
This time, Daniel and Jack talk about Uvalde, Buffalo, the cops, the guns, and the discourse.
This episode is respectfully dedicated to the victims of these crimes and their families.
Content Extremely Warnings
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Show Notes:
Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes.
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Episode Notes:
Shannon Foley Martinez Patreon: Shannon Foley Martinez is creating a different tomorrow | Patreon
Last Week Tonight: LastWeekTonight – YouTube
Michael Hobbes on Depp vs. Heard:
Cancel Me, Daddy: Deep Depp-ception (ft. Michael Hobbes) on Apple Podcasts
The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial (readthepresentage.com)
Buffalo News, Authorities investigating if retired federal agent knew of Buffalo mass shooting plans in advance
4plebs archive on Buffalo shooter and “Sandman”
https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/379701704
5-4 podcast on Castle Rock v. Gonzalez.
Less a geographic location than a metonym for Middle-earth’s unfinished tale, Mirkwood is a classic fairy tale forest that defines those forests. Its iconic appearance in The Hobbit which it profoundly changes is only one aspect of its story. Many characters and texts have their own Mirkwoods. This derivé will stray out of thought and time, and wander far on roads only we shall tell. It’s up to us to find a guide through it.
Mirkwood is too large and complex to be one thing. John D. Rateliff points out that Mirkwood marries “two archetypes: The Dark Wood and The Enchanted Forest.” Similarly, John Garth writes “Mirkwood is a portmanteau forest of forests.” Even the name “Mirkwood” is of early provenance, having been applied to a number of historical and legendary forests. Since its name doesn’t belong to only one place, Mirkwood exists in a state of identity crisis, with factions and traditions battling over their different visions of the forest.
In The Hobbit, Mirkwood has been effectively conquered by the gothic. The book shows Mirkwood as a divided primal forest with elements of gothic horror, so dark that it’s “not what you call pitch-dark, but really pitch.” The wood is festooned in “dark dense cobwebs with threads extraordinarily thick”, populated by “black moths, some nearly as big as your hand”, heretofore unknown butterfly species, and giant spiders. Bilbo and the dwarves walk among “dead leaves of countless other autumns.” It’s a Brothers Grimm-esque scary forest, the sort of place where stepping on the wrong plant could be fatal.
Where Tolkien innovates is that Mirkwood’s darkness is a symptom of sickness. Mirkwood is suffering from Sauron’s presence. In The Desolation of Smaug, Bilbo observes that Mirkwood “feels sick, as if a disease lies upon it.” The Necromancer, or Sauron, is a foreign presence plotting his return to prominence by poisoning verdant nature.…
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis was eventually joined on Hellblazer by Steve Dillon, whose simple expressiveness was a perfect fit for Ennis’s style, and who would go on to be the most significant collaborator of Ennis’s career.
“Yeah, well, that’s me, ennit? Enigmatic.” – Grant Morrison, Hellblazer
This arc wrapped in November of 1992, and with the arrival of Vertigo on the horizon Ennis wisely decided to do a pair of one-offs. The first of these saw him return to Constantine’s family with a story about his niece Gemma unwisely deciding to begin playing with the occult. This mostly served as a small showcase for Kit, who gets a four page scene in which she tries to talk Gemma out of continuing with the occult, noting her firm rule that Constantine keep his occult life away from hers, pointing out how “he’s been all over the world, he’s seen incredible stuff, he’s had the time of his life, and he’s cause a terrible, terrible lot of pain while he’s been at it,” and finally suggesting that the next time someone messes with Gemma she should just “chin the wee bitch,” It’s a succinct demonstration of the character, perfectly capturing why she’s an interesting counterpart to Constantine.
For his first Vertigo issue, meanwhile, Ennis penned a comedy issue about John Constantine’s surprise fortieth birthday party, thrown for him by the Lord of the Dance with a cross-section of Constantine’s supporting cast attending. This allows Ennis a change of gears, demonstrating the basic fact that he can do comedy. And indeed, the issue is tremendously funny, taking advantage of the oddity of the transition to use the permissiveness of Vertigo, which would soon become a siloed entity, to comment on the DC Universe it was in the midst of parting from. And so Ennis pulls gags like having the Phantom Stranger visit Constantine while he’s outside taking a piss, causing Constantine to surprisedly turn and pee on the Stranger’s shoes. “I had hoped we could ignore the cold facade that our kind deems so necessary, if only at this time of celebration. But I see there will be no hands clasped against the dark this night. I see I must remain a stranger,” he intones with sublime pretension before vanishing into the night. The issue is a charming bit of irreverence, if a stange sales pitch for Ennis’s run. Nevertheless, it worked; as Ennis describes it, the Vertigo launch meant that “The sales tripled… Just for one issue because there was a massive publicity push, which died away instantly the next issue, but it did us a lot of good. Even when the sales died down again they were still not quite double what they had been, so that was pretty good. A bigger audience got into Vertigo, and into that kind of comic.”
The first proper arc to take advantage of the book’s newfound readership was Fear and Loathing, which saw Ennis return to one of Jamie Delano’s best tricks, albeit with his own distinct spin on it.…
In a depressing but necessary News Roundup episode, we cover the recent apparent career problems of Elijah Schaffer, the weird implosion of Nick Fuentes’ America First Foundation, and… and here comes the depressing part… the recent nazi massacre in Buffalo, New York.
This episode is respectfully dedicated to the victims of this crime.
Content Extremely Warnings
Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud
Show Notes:
Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes.
Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper
Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618
IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod
Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper
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IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Episode Notes:
Sidney Watson tweet about leaving You Are Here
Elijah Schaffer tweet regarding being “professionally dumped.”
Elijah Schaffer tweet re: Mormons going to hell.
Kino Casino with Jaden McNeil and Simon Dickerman on leaving America First
Nick Martin thread on the collapse of America First.
IREHR, 27FEB2020 “An Affinity for Bigotry: Jaden McNeil of America First Students”
The Daily Beast, Supermarket Shooting Suspect Linked to Online Hatred
Unicorn Riot article on suspect’s online ties.
Buffalo shooter targeted Black neighborhood, officials say
Opening of the manifesto:
What you need to know
Closing of the manifesto:
From us to the shooter: Fuck you. There is no place in Valhalla for you.…
Last night I did a conjuring in the desert and now I have a new heart. Typical cowboy stuff, I say, casually replacing all my ribs. In heaven everyone is dressed as an electroshock burgermeister. Zeus himself paces the parking lot rubbing his temples, saying, my ceiling is falling.
Everyone here screeches that the world began with a sulfur god who chewed off his own tongue. That was the opening gambit, and we’re just a footnote—just congealed mayonnaise. That new heart of yours doesn’t change a thing, they say. That’s just how it goes, tackyboy. If the cornerstone is upside-down, what does that make the rest of the building?
I turn around, expecting to see my grandmother, but it’s only an obelisk of ribald mutton. I practice acceptance in this moment. It’s not hard, since a lot of my fanmail comes from nuns. I’m really wholesome these days. I pour oatmeal on anyone who asks. My pants are made of terra cotta.
To me you are the galactic ukulele, skudging and wooving. You vibrate me like twitchmilk in perpetual synchrony with your own inexpressible harmony. More than anything, I want you to report me to the Rancher. Get me in trouble. Pull back strips of gelatinous rabbit bone, and scoop them into my hair. The Rancher knows justice.
In the mirror, both my reflection and I are wearing stickers that say FOR RENT.
***
COMMERCIAL
CAMERA PANS ACROSS DESERT MESAS AT NIGHT. MAN’S VOICE:
The more my stomach rumbles, the more hot ketchup I want to drink. Let’s fall in love with a beehive and become circus friends.
WOMAN SINGING:
It’s a very confusing horse
A very confusing horse
I can’t get into details of how or why
But it’s a very confusing horse
***
The horse tune grows more popular by the hour. Soon everyone sings it. Disgusted, I ravage the television with a medieval saber. My hunger is great. It is dog-dog hunger. My dog-dog brain commands: Hunt bad man. Chew bad man. Dog-dog love blood. Be a pirate!
And I am in good company. My twin sister has entered dog-dog headspace too. She proclaims triumphant to the moon: I am a beeeeef, a BEEF! The crowd goes wild with rabies. Her stage name is Baby Sensation.
Later we are seen riding an expensive flamingo and the crossing guard cries Terrorist! Accordingly I howl a purifying scent, sinew dripping on snow, animals blurring in desperate contortion. Eleven braided wildcats gnash across the kitchen floor. Ironsmiths beg for pine sap from the jade god, scultping goose heads from vulcanized fur and stabbing their apprentices with empty Fanta bottles. The purple yam grows even more purple. We have entered the Reptilicon. Lunch ladies with goat legs stand guard. They all wore jalapeño tunics as children. You can tell. Welcome to first grade: there is a bomb.
Here’s what I really meant to say to you that evening. Climb the astral staircase long enough and you’ll find a different world. Not the dirty copy of USA Today you wipe your babies with, but instead a crisp, clean Microsoft Word file of your life.…
Part 2 of Jack’s look at Jimmy Dore. Jack continues to tell an increasingly (and understandably) resentful Daniel all about insidious YouTube ‘comedian’ and political commentator Jimmy Dore, detailing his ‘leftist’ or ‘progressive’ version of reactionary politics via accounts of his slimy transphobic coverage of the Lia Thomas story (leading to a bizarre open challenge to all trans man basketball players), his frothingly misogynistic coverage of Taylor Lorenz’ interview about the harassment she faces, and his insane conversation with deeply silly and unpleasant Stalinist Caleb Maupin, in which they free associate (based on a ridiculous Grayzone article) about ‘Breadtube’ being run by the CIA. Along the way, it becomes very clear to see that their version of socialism is the national kind. Also features a discussion about Libs of Tik Tok.
Content Warnings.
Direct Download / Permalink / Soundcloud
Show Notes:
Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes.
Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper
Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618
IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod
Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper
Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_
IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Episode Notes:
Jimmy Dore:
Jimmy Dore at RationalWiki https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jimmy_Dore
Jimmy Dore at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Dore
The Jimmy Dore Show https://www.youtube.com/c/thejimmydoreshow
Videos:
Trans Swimmer Destroying Competition and Setting Records, May 20th 22 Trans Swimmer Destroying Competition And Setting Records – YouTube
Snowflake Journo Taylor Lorenz cries “victim” to silence critics – April 3rd Snowflake Journo Taylor Lorenz Cries “Victim” To Silence Critics – YouTube
Left-Wing YouTubers Co-opted By Security State, Mar 30 Left-Wing YouTubers Co-opted By Security State – YouTube
Rod Webber’s raw footage from Jimmy Dore interview Jimmy Dore – Raw footage from interview – YouTube
On Lia Thomas:
Members of Penn swim team say Lia Thomas shouldn’t compete – Sports Illustrated
Why I’m Proud to Support Trans Athletes like Lia Thomas | Opinion (newsweek.com)
Trans swimmer Lia Thomas bows out of college sports amid continued hate (pinknews.co.uk)
Emily Kreps at Broad & Liberty You searched for emily kreps – Broad + Liberty (broadandliberty.com)
RT article on Thomas feat. Kreps and Forstater Transgender swimmer breaks record as women ‘race for second’ — RT Sport News
Outkick.com
Outkick covers Taylor Lorenz You searched for lorenz – OutKick
Details about Outkick from Media Bias / Fact Check OutKick Bias Rating – Media Bias/Fact Check (mediabiasfactcheck.com)
Taylor Lorenz, harassment, etc
WaPo report by Lorenz on Libs of TikTok Libs of TikTok has become central to right wing politics – The Washington Post
Lorenz at Daily Beast on Instagram influencers hiding Pamela Geller connection The Instagram Stars Hiding Their Famous, Muslim-Hating Mom, Pamela Geller (thedailybeast.com)
Rolling Stone covers Lorenz / Libs of Tik Tok / Conservative backlash Conservatives Enraged Taylor Lorenz Wrote About Libs Of TikTok – Rolling Stone
Original MSNBC report Journalists Face Online Harassment – YouTube
Grayzone / Maupin / CIA conspiracy theory
Original Grayzone article about Abigail Thorn etc Leaked files expose Syria psyops veteran astroturfing BreadTube star to counter Covid restriction critics – The Grayzone
Fred Hampton and the Young Patriots The Panthers and the Patriots (jacobinmag.com)…