Jack & El Holiday Q&A Audio
Still poking the Resolution review, so expect that Friday. For now, have the audio of Jack and I answering all manner of ridiculous questions on Discord. …
El and Jack Holiday Q&A
Jack and I will be doing a live Q&A on the Eruditorum Press Discord server on December 30th at 6pm UK time, 1pm eastern US time, and a variety of other times. It’ll be a pretty open-ended AMA format with us chatting and talking about whatever you lot can drag us into. Sobriety is not guaranteed. We’ll release a reording of the mayhem as a podcast at some point. If you won’t be able to make it, there’s a channel in the Discord where you can leave questions in advance. Otherwise, we’ll see you tomorrow.…
The Marvel(ous) X-Man and the Fantastic (Meta)phor/s
Thoughts on Series 1 of Legion
(NB – I haven’t seen Series 2 yet, and was distressed to see El saying it had become disqualifyingly “rapey”. Why do they ruin everything?)
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SPOILERS
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Legion might be the first show since Hannibal to genuinely achieve substance through style. Of course, I haven’t seen every show since Hannibal, but I know Westworld didn’t manage it.
Legion takes place in a corner of the X-Men universe, in which (as per the concept) some humans are being born as ‘mutants’ with special powers. In line with how these things usually go, the most powerful mutant so far discovered turns out to be David, a mediocre white guy with a Harry Potter-esque backstory. He and his fellow mutants are, naturally, being hunted by a sinister government agency.
So far, so clichéd. But Legion does some genuinely interesting things with these concepts.
It is deeply divergent from almost all TV/movie genre SF/Fantasy now, especially the Marvelverse, with which it is obviously most likely to be compared. Its style is light years away from the Marvel shows (Daredevil, etc) and from the movies. The nearest Marvel movie to Legion in terms of style is Doctor Strange, but that seems tame by comparison. There’s a deep 70s-genre-TV-ness about it, and especially about the effects sequences. It goes with the 60s/70sness of the production design generally. The quiddity of this aesthetic is more than just ‘cheapness’; it’s rooted in a particular approach to the fantastic which Legion seems to want to resurrect.
There is a peculiar and distinct aesthetic to the effects sequences in Legion. They seem to have deliberately gone for a kind of visible… ‘effectyness’. They want you to notice the effects, and notice that they are effects. This is what they want you to do instead of playing the usual game of accepting effects as if you don’t realise they’re mock-ups of unreal and impossible things while simultaneously enjoying their rendering of unreality and impossibility, via a kind of mental game of pocket billiards whereby you pretend to accept (and thus do accept) those ideological notions about what is or isn’t convincing.
Against the odds, it works. Especially in those sequences where ‘effecty’ things – particularly in the form of the surreal intrusions – interact with real environments. The show repeatedly creates tableaux in which very obviously ‘unreal’ things are obtrusively mapped into real settings. Like the ice cube which descends through the ceiling into Cary’s bedroom in the imaginary mental hospital.
It could just be my influences showing, but it looks to me as if they have deliberately attempted to create something of the accidental TV-version of the ‘alienation effect’ that occurs in 1970s British television SF/Fantasy, most notably via the use of Colour Separation Overlay (CSO). Legion does not of course use that creaky old tech, but it seems enamoured of it, and of the strange byproducts it had.
There is something very Sapphire and Steel about Legion.…
The 2018 Do People Still Get eReaders For Christmas Sale
It’s Boxing Day, which means that it’s time to put a bunch of Eruditorum Press books on sale until New Year’s. This year I’ve gone with something relatively simple. All four in-print books are on sale on Smashwords for $2.99 instead of their usual $4.99. You can get them at the links below, using the coupon codes listed.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1: William Hartnell: JK89H
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: Patrick Troughton: VW79W
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3: Jon Pertwee: MK73F
Neoreaction a Basilisk: CC25E
I’ve also, because I’ve been slow getting them back into print, put my out of print books temporarily back in print in their deadnamed editions for anyone who missed them and is desperate to catch up. I’ve set them all at “name your own price.” I set a recommended price of 99 cents because they made me set one, but you should please consider the name your own price a tip jar. Do not feel bad about naming a price of free. All I’ll ask is that if you do grab them for free, please consider paying for them when they come out in upgraded editions over the next few months. Anyway, these will be on sale through January 1st. No coupons needed.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 6: Peter Davison and Colin Baker
A Golden Thread: A Critical History of Wonder Woman
The Last War in Albion Volume 1: The Early Work of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison
Enjoy. We’ll be back next week for a review of Resolution.…
The Best of 2018
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.”…
Jack Considers a Christmas Reagan
Owing to a decided – and entirely understandable – lack of enthusiasm for the project from anyone else, I embarked on a solo commentary on the 1984 movie version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, starring George C. Scott as Scrooge. Luckily, I’m quite capable of wittering on for 90 minutes unassisted. So, here it is… a Christmas… treat for you? I guess?
The movie is on YouTube should you want to watchalong with me.
Obviously, a commentary isn’t an ideal way to analyse a text, so I left a lot of things out that I wanted to talk about. So you may be getting more on this. I’ve already written about it in passing here.
WWA did another CtR on a Christmas movie (though I understand this is a vexed question now) here.
Meanwhile, thanks everyone for reading my stuff this year. And thanks for being such a great community. And thanks to all those who’ve promoted my stuff by tweeting, retweeting, etc. And special thanks to my lovely patrons. They got advance access to this podcast. If that seems like a reward to you, you might consider joining their number.
Stomped Into Paste (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Chapter Seven: A Brother To Dragons)
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.
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| 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.…
Book Relaunch From Space
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:
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. …
Quick Review: Ahistory 4th Edition
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.…
Epics and Monsters
Parts of the below were developed in conversation with Niki Haringsma, whose Black Archive on ‘Love & Monsters’ is forthcoming, and who was recently heard in conversation with El. Again, I alone am to blame for the faults of what follows.
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So, contrary to those who feel it’s become ‘too PC’ (a misprision that is interesting by itself), Doctor Who these days looks increasingly like it is taking a reactionary turn – albeit one of a complex kind – as it seems to drift from being an “accidental critique of milquetoast liberalism” (as Kit Power put it) into an outright accomodation with the systems it has found itself unable to effectively struggle against. This makes Chibnall’s show, in its own way, a mirror to Moffat’s, which was also deeply concerned with the limits of resistance to systems.
This is a space for analysing the political attitude found in the content. But there is also reason to look at what the form tells us, what it assumes, what it permits, etc. As we’ve already talked about elsewhere, the form and content are actually inextricable.
Let’s take a detour into Brechtian ‘Epic Theatre’.
Brecht’s theatre doesn’t aim to ‘resolve’ political questions even when it is morally and politically clear because – at least in his mind, and one is free to disagree with him – its moral and political project is an invitation to the audience to contemplate profound contradictions and problems in society.
The problem with bourgeois theatre, for Brecht (and he sees Lukacs as doing the same thing) is that it is “afraid of production”, i.e. it hides it. Realist theatre (Ibsen, Strindberg, etc) tries to create an illusion of realism, an empathic connection with the characters, which not only smooths over social contradictions but also masks production itself. (Modern TV, which strives to look cinematic, arguably does this same thing far more than old-school TV, which was often more-or-less televised theatre.) Brecht dislikes this as a Marxist, and one with a particular emphasis on production as fundamental to social existence (an emphasis which I personally think is quite proper for a Marxist, but which is sadly lacking from much actual Marxism).
It is this masking of production which, perhaps more than anything else for Brecht, creates the bourgeois illusion of fixity which he aims to dispel. Epic Theatre concentrates on production both in terms of how people actually produce history and in terms of how theatre itself is produced. This coherence is, paradoxically, a key way in which it aims to reveal social contradictions.
The irony is that modern Doctor Who is arguably a lot less like Epic Theatre in this sense than most classic Who manages to be by accident! Classic Who is arguably far more concerned with political issues (re society and history) than New Who. But it also accidentally estranges the audience by highlighting its own processes of production, simply by virtue of its production values being so shoddy that it inadvertently showcases them!