Here’s a bit of a swerve for you. My awesome husband Penn Wiggins is a visual artist, and we’ve finally gotten around to collaborating on our first comic. Because I am me, I took Alan Moore’s advice that you should start by doing short stories such as the Tharg’s Future Shocks feature of 2000 AD extremely literally, mashing it up with Penn’s stated desire to draw faeries and sea witches to get, well… this astoundingly goofy piece of fun.
This site isn’t particularly geared for comics, so while you can click on all of the images below to expand them, my recommendation would be to head over to Penn’s site, where he’s actually got it configured to be easily readable. Or you can just download it, in either PDF format or CBZ format.
We’re already at work on our follow-up effort, which is… also extremely silly.
And swing back on Thursday for a release of a very different sort.…
Christopher Cantwell, the ‘Crying Nazi’, was recently tried and convicted in a federal court in New Hampshire. As our regular listeners will know, we’ve been following Cantwell’s fortunes for some time. In this episode, Daniel and Jack are joined by special guest, journalist and Cantwell expert Hilary Sargent, to talk about the trial, and the long, winding, bizarre, horrifying story of how we got here.
A mostly unloved dirge on The Dreaming’s tails-side, “All the Love” exists as a buffer between the uxorial laments of “Night of the Swallow” and “Houdini.” Little distinguishes it from its fellow LP tracks — its lyrics scan like an embryonic “Houdini” or “Suspended in Gaffa,” presaging future such Bush songs as “Hello Earth” or “Never Be Mine.” Admittedly the song’s points of intrigue are mostly limited to what comes after it, with “All the Love” mostly existing to get The Dreaming to ten songs.
Sonically, “All the Love” sounds like a callback to Never for Ever, to the point one wonders if the song is a holdover. The song’s centering of melody over rhythm is an aberration on the rhythm-preoccupied Dreaming, with Stuart Elliott’s drums quietly accentuating things rather than taking a “lead instrument” role. The relatively high position of Del Palmer’s bass playing in the mix also feels superannuated and reminiscent of “Blow Away (For Bill)” or “Egypt,” some of the oldest songs in Bush’s studio career. “All the Love” has some flourishes characteristic of the mid-80s — the sampling of phone conversations is the sort of thing Pink Floyd or The Smiths did around the same time (see The Wall, “Rubber Ring”). Nonetheless, “All the Love” sounds old, an adscititious swan song for Bush’s early style.
There’s certainly a callback to the subject matter of Never for Ever, nominally catastrophes that damage and alienate families. While Never for Ever’s songs are largely narrative, The Dreaming deals with Modernist techniques of abstraction, dissociation, and stream-of-consciousness, shifting the dramatic arena to the human mind. “All the Love” is social, even amusingly caustic in its distance from human living. Its lyrical triumph, “the first time I died…”, setting up an account of a person whose deathbed experience includes “good friends of mine” who “hadn’t been near me for years.” Where the hell have you been? Why are you doing this performative fraternal visitation now? The answer comes as “we needed you/to love us too/we waited for your move.” We’re given a set of people (or perhaps just one faction) who struggles to love people and relate to them properly.
There seems to be some concession of wrongdoing, admitting she wasn’t the most forthcoming to her friends (“but I know I have shown/that I stand at the gates alone”). But she tempers this with an admission that the emotional distance was mutual: “I needed you to love me too.” There’s even a sort of “if I could start again” concession, as the character asserts the inevitability of reincarnation (or afterlife?) with “the next time I dedicate/my life’s work to the friends I make/I give them what they want to hear.” Its grief for a lost, atemporal past binds itself to the effluvium of old and new styles “All the Love” embodies. In the words of Bauhaus, “all we ever wanted was everything. All we ever got was cold.”
An unplanned, emergency mini-sequel to our discussion of Tim Pool just a couple of days ago. Reality, displaying its customary poor timing, waited until just after we dropped our Tim Pool episode to reveal the story of the Wolverine Watchmen, a group of militia types arrested for planning the abduction and ‘trial’ (i.e. murder, presumably) of Michigan Governer Gretchen Whitmer. At least one of the conspirators seems to have been part of Tim’s audience; Tim has been demonizing Whitmer as a dangerous tyrant for ages; and Tim himself reacted to the story in ways that combine the hilarious, disgusting, and accidentally instructive. And so here we are.
This time, Jack and Daniel delve into the cesspool that is the barking, beanie-wearing, bollocks-talker Tim Pool. Prepare for a small avalanche of weapons grade stupid from YouTube’s favourite reactionary propagandist pretending to be a centrist or something.
“Is that his job? To hold people accountable? “Well,” Pool pauses. “That’s not my decision to make. That’s the majority’s decision. I will say that in the case of last night, I’m not advocating anyone to go after this person.”
“But it does offend me when people say I’m putting them at risk. If you throw a bottle at the police, you’re putting people at risk. When two innocent people who were doing nothing get arrested because you threw the bottle, that’s putting people at risk. I’m going to hold those people accountable.” “
The third episode of Of Human Bondage, the podcast where Kit Power, Sam Maleski, myself, and occasional guests talk about the Eon Productions James Bond 007 films, is now publicly available. This week we’re talking about 1964’s alleged classic Goldfinger, and, spoilers, we all detest it on artistic, moral, and political grounds. We discuss the politics of luxury, classism, the heightened cinematic language of director Guy Hamilton, race and Oddjob, and that scene.
Massive trigger warning for this one. From the beginning we clearly delineate the time stamps for the relevant segment of the episode, but we there is a long digression about the rape scene that occurs near the end of Goldfinger. It gets pretty raw, as we’re talking about a scene endorsing the sexual assault of a queer woman. There’s a part of the conversation where I discuss my experiences with sexual trauma, so if you want to avoid triggering autobiographical material, you may want to skip that part of the episode.
We’re very proud of this podcast though, and the triggering segment is clearly marked for anyone who wants to skip it. After we recorded this one we all agreed we’d hit our stride with it. It’s a strong couple hours of audio, and we hope you enjoy it.
Patreon pledges have declined precipitously, sometimes descending below $300, which is my baseline for comfortably living off the blog. Furthermore, my day job as a college tutor is getting an hours cut, meaning my outside income is jeopardized. These are stressful circumstances that can make concentrating on work difficult. As a disabled 21-year-old working class trans woman who has complex PTSD, ADHD, major clinical depression, and chronic anxiety, this gig is mostly what puts food on my table. It’s survivable for now, but if you could help me get to $350, I’d be immensely grateful.
The Dreaming’s sessions with Nick Launay exemplify the album’s episodic production. The songs originally engineered by Hugh Padgham explore relationships between headspace and environment and how unreleasing trauma and mental illness can be cathartic. Bush and Launay’s songs are teeming with trauma and catharsis. Frequently they anatomize historical subjects, particularly subaltern or marginalized narratives. An overarching focal point tends to be enunciating the unspoken. Perhaps this was Bush’s way of asserting agency over a largely masculine music industry that had thus far limited her and kept her from true leadership positions in the creation of her albums. “[It was] very dark and about pain and negativity and the way people treat each other badly,” Bush asserted to Canadian broadcaster Daniel Richer in 1985. “Perhaps the biggest influence on the last album was the fact that I was producing it and so I could actually do what I really wanted to for the first time.”
“Houdini” is the face of The Dreaming. It’s one of the only Bush sleeves where the image is supplied by the song. Its aspect, another creation of fraternal mainstay John Carder Bush, is a sepia photograph in medium closeup depicting a slightly agrestal Bush with her head tilted to the right, with her mouth open wide revealing a key on her tongue, which she passes to a faceless Del Palmer. This image derives from the lyrics of “Houdini,” which impart the fictionalized yet broadly historical experience of Bess Houdini, widow of premier escapologist Harry Houdini, who tries to contact her late husband through necromancy (“I wait at the table/hold hands with weeping strangers/wait for you/to join the group”). The relevant lyric “with a kiss I’d pass the key/and feel your tongue, teasing and receiving,” is unique among pop lyrics, as the overwhelming majority of them don’t contain idle recollections of Frenching a deceased spouse. It’s a bald-faced and ostentatiously move that flags how uninterested in notions of “normality” Bush is.
This furthermore indicates the subversive narratology Bush is pursuing. It’s quite boldly literal in the Carder Bush photo, where Del Palmer’s face is turned away from the frame. There’s an occlusion of “great man” narratives to “Houdini.” It’s named after one of the 20th century’s great performers, but it’s largely defined by his absence. As a result, the story has to be about the widowed Bess and her grief. Impressively, “Houdini” avoids elegy for the accomplishments of a Great Man, opting instead for the love Bess Houdini bore for her husband and the ecstatically weird lengths she went to demonstrate that. …
Heeeeere’s Jack, back with another Shabcast. In a break from recent tradition, this new episode does not feature me talking to Kit Power about his new book even though he does have a new book out as usual. Devastating news? Well, it would be except that instead I’m talking to our very own Christine Kelley), writer of the brilliant Dreams of Orgonon blog and all-round starburst of interestingness. Nominally our conversation is about Alien and The Shining, movies to which we both indefinitely rent cranial real estate, but you’ll find we range pretty freely from topic to topic as you’d expect from Eruditorum Press people. Our topics include Mckellen’s Richard III, Julie Taymor’s Titus, Branagh’s Hamlet, and even a few things that aren’t Shakespeare movies. Enjoy.
This time, Daniel welcomes special guest Rebecca Lewis to the show. Rebecca is the author of the Data & Society report ‘Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube’ about which Eric Weinstein was such an asshole (our word, not Rebecca’s).
Cycling several incarnations before appearing on record, Scottish singer Donovan Leitch’s “Lord of the Reedy River” is a minor classic of his career. Getting performances on a 1968 TV programme and a 1969 celebrities’ demo reel romcom before appearing on Donovan’s 1971 double LP HMS Donovan. Serene, erotic, creepy, and sensuous all at once, Donovan somehow manages to make the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, a fable in which Zeus seduces or rapes (depending on the telling; Ovid, surprisingly, removes the rape, while Yeats writes about it as one) the Aetolian princess Leda. Donovan’s telling is a strictly romantic and erotic one, rejecting the sexual violence of the tale in favor of a sensuous, mythical love affair (“she fell in love with a swan” has no business sounding as beautiful as it does, but that’s Donovan). It’s a stunning piece of work that fixates on the uncanny and eerie aspects of the tale (“he filled her with song,” “she in my boat long hours/he in his royal plumage”). The song’s sense of place is potent and inextricable from its sensuousness (“black was the night and starry,” “she threw him some flowers/in the reedy river”). Most delightfully, the song has a Shape of Water ending, with the final act of its drama being the “glide” of “two swans.” With its chilling harmonies, palpitating vocal, uncanny vocal, and genuine lyrical beauty, “Lord of the Reedy River” is a masterpiece, an unjustly forgotten landmark of late-60s-to-early-70s folk music.
Its album of origin HMS Donovan was a favorite of Kate Bush, a long-standing Donovan fan. Wavering between slating “Sat in Your Lap” with a cover of either Donovan or Captain Beefheart (the latter of which is mind-boggling to think about), Bush opted to cover the melodic Scotsman after serendipitously watching him perform on a Crystal Gayle programme. The choice was an interesting if unsurprising one — Donovan is as much a part of the British songwriting tradition Bush hails from as Ferry or Bowie or Waters. Yet the form of mystical, childlike ballad exemplified by “Lord of the Reedy River” was something of Bush’s past, an aesthetic that Bush had largely moved past by when she recorded The Kick Inside. This was an unexpected return to her musical roots.
And yet the song works as a unit of Bush’s Dreaming era. The sensuous, place-centered ethos of “Lord of the Reedy River” is the sort of thing Bush explores throughout her four albums we’ve read about. The mythical aspect of Bush’s work has never departed, nor has her tendency to explore complex subjects through a perspective of searing childlike simplicity (one of the most useful critical tools for exploring the endemic truths of myth). Simplicity isn’t inherently equivalent to reductivism — simple truths have fractal implications. Certainly “Lord of the Reedy River” is both unostentatious and unnerving.…
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