15/7 SCOTLAND MADE ME
PIC: KM 2026
Pizzicato Five - Twiggy Twiggy Twiggy vs James Bond
MAKE MINE MAG!C!
I have a Kickstarter book on Magic coming out!
I’ve mentioned couple of projects I completed recently in collaboration with Tom Negovan at Century Guild, purveyors of fine art books from the Symbolist/Decadent era. This is the first of those projects to go public. Tom is a world expert on Symbolist art and one of the smartest people I know. He liked the idea of publishing some small, beautifully designed, and perfectly-formed volumes made to be unearthed in the dusty back corners of mysterious bookshops a hundred years from now!
And so, Magick and Symbolism - a wide-ranging conversation tracing the development of symbols and the depiction of gods from the Neolithic era to the present day, taking in Ancient Egypt, Greece, Blake, the Symbolists and AI.
Is the famous ‘Dancing Shaman’ rock art a picture of a magician or a Stone Age superhero? How did the Ancient Egyptians collaborate with Death to lay the foundations of Capitalist culture? Does Magic really have a ‘price’? What is the esoteric meaning of Christ? How did Milton and Blake engender the idea of ‘personal mythology’ and how did Jack Kirby benefit? And is AI a working technology or an ideological purity test?
Magick and Symbolism has all this and more more more!
You can visit here for further information:
DEEP STATE FAIR
With that done, it’s all about the heat this time around. We’ve got the hottest country ever!
When it gets cold, I can reliably warm myself up, when it gets hotter than even nakedness can account for, the only recourse is suffering in the soaking humidity…
On the plus side, walking down the lane through streaming sunlight felt like a trip down the aisle in a green cathedral with its complex interlacing of leaf and branch overhead, a vaulted ceiling, alive with an orchestra of birdsong that surrounded and immersed me in a free New Age sound bath.
This week I’ve been researching Helium-3 for a project I hope to be able to announce soon, and doing a deep dive on the Land of Cockaigne for a short story I’ve been working on. In that vein, I’m awaiting the book Dreaming of Cockaigne by Herman Pleij.
I finished The Unseen Internet by Shira Chess, a fascinating and thought-provoking account of occult ideas baked into the creation of the internet. Well worth a read.
I played through the James Bond game First Light which was great, with one very minor gripe that there could have been more driving and car chases. That aside, the game lives twice or dies golden and forever on Patrick Gibson’s fantastic, even definitive, take on the young Bond. I was a bit unsure of the Estuary accent in the trailers, but it really grew on me. I came away from the game thinking it was the best version of Bond in any media for years, perhaps of all time! He felt more like a spy than an action hero, which is often not the case. What I’ve always liked about Bond was not the violence or the sex, although those are intriguing elements, but his confidence and his ability to roll with any situation.
Back to the interminable Crimson Desert which is becoming frustrating in the sense that the game is too big and the bosses too difficult to fight for the likes of me. It’s one of those games that could easily replace your entire life if you let it.
SOOPERDOOPER
I can’t quite fathom the vicious railing on the actor Milly Alcock, who is playing Supergirl in the recently released film of the same name from DC Studios. I don’t know if it’s a good film or a mediocre one - I’ll probably watch it when it comes on TV - but as far as I can see from the trailers and promo, it comes across as James Gunn-lite space action, with an unconvincing dog in danger plot, (if he’s such a bastard, why wouldn’t the villain just disintegrate Krypto?), and the likeable Jason Momoa as Lobo in there somewhere. What I do know is that the film has underperformed at the box office.
DC’s film division makes the same mistakes over and over again, no matter who is in charge, by making a point of picking the wrong people for the job. They do it all the time and will continue to keep doing it, and will keep making the same costly mistakes because it’s in their nature to misunderstand these superhero characters and what makes them tick.
It also seems a little disingenuous to suggest, as some have tried to do, that there is no hint of misogyny in the criticism of Supergirl when so much of it comes from older men, and revolves around Alcock’s appearance, and her attractiveness, or lack of it.
Even Ricky Gervais weighed in to suggest that Supergirl was only criticised because it was poorly made. He dismissed the other complaints as ‘woke’ Hollywood freaking out in its usual manner, and claimed there would be no backlash if the script was good to start with. He and numerous others denied any accusations of misogyny in online critiques, even though most of the initial complaints had nothing to do with the script or story and everything to do with bitchy middle-aged men insulting the looks of its young star. Given that many reviewers even suggested they would be fine with the movie if Sydney Sweeney had been cast in Alcock’s place, it’s hard to make the case that the film’s story was what let it down. I’ve also enjoyed a lot of Gervais’ work, but when Ricky attacks out of touch celebrities by insisting that they shouldn’t be airing their apparently misguided political opinions, there’s an odd disconnect. Surely Gervais himself is a multimillionaire success story who is fine with airing his opinions as if they are more relevant than others in his position. I’m not sure what makes him think he’s more ‘in touch’ with ordinary people than all the other superstar entertainers.
‘To see oursels as ithers see us!’
Anyway, Supergirl blah blah…
BOUND FOR THE FLIES
PIC: KM 2026
We were delighted to welcome Gerard Way and family this weekend when he was in Glasgow for the My Chemical Romance show at Bellahouston Park (site of my youthful footballing debacle as recounted in the last newsletter) We all had dinner at our place and it was great to see him in person and hang out again after so long, far from the madding crowds.
The show the following night was fantastic. The whole thing felt more like a film or a play with music and kept me riveted throughout.
What might in someone else’s hands have been a nostalgia workout has become an operatic spectacle that directly addresses contemporary concerns.
It takes what might be heritage rock – the play through of a 20-year old classic album – and turns it into an operatic spectacle of autocritique. It recontextualises the songs, it skewers nostalgia, especially nostalgia as deployed by fascist ideologies and speaks to the current moment, when authoritarian tendencies roam roughshod round the globe. What happens to a successful band that survives into a world where their music is reframed by political upheaval? When they’re beaten and brutalised into playing the hit album over and over until the end of the world? In this story, our heroes are the 52nd ‘division’ or iteration of The Black Parade and we’re meant to assume that their predecessors were killed or disappeared.
It’s a fantastic conceit. and makes everything new again. The post-mortem superheroes of the Black Parade, Sergeant Peppers in the Afterlife, become performing monkeys, traumatised and scarred, playing the hits as threats, executions, and an apocalyptic exchange of missiles strive to destabilise the performance. A man runs from wing to wing on fire. The band are taken away in hoods after the singer is killed. The pop nihilism of The Black Parade runs into the real deal in this Grand Guignol, this Theatre of Cruelty.
It struck me that the second half, on the |B stage, where the band appear as themselves to play a medley of material from their other albums, told its own story. As I saw it, the broken down and co-opted band from the first half, forced to play their breakthrough album endlessly for a military despot, exists in one universe where they got so big they became ripe for exploitation. The second half takes place in a world where they wound up as a punky bar band but kept their integrity.
I thoroughly enjoyed it and I can’t think of another big pop band operating at this level of talent and creativity. Gerard, like Bowie did, approaches all of the band’s work as art projects, and it pays off with a freshness and urgency few bands can match.
STARS IN THEIR EYES
Replies to your correspondence ensue:
Jelly Result – It just looks like a ghost but it’s water and living organisms in suspension. It’s half-ghost, half-animal, all-wet!
Bobby –Those Illuminatus! games are brilliant! I’m addicted!
Persefonie –which is to say, I agree with you here!
Aled – I agree that Doctor Who is best when it‘s aware that there’s a vast weight of continuity embedded in its history, but it’s folly to expect the power of nostalgia to prevail when Sutekh or Omega returns, especially with poor redesigns that only remind old timers of the verve and originality of the originals.
Capaldi’s taken my top spot as well. Pertwee was ‘my’ Doctor, then I loved Matt Smith, but Capaldi was able to push the character to places we’d never seen and Clara was peak ‘companion’. Bill was a great addition too. Those final episodes were brilliant, shocking and satisfying. As time has passed, I see Capaldi and his ever-shifting performance as the gold standard Doctor.
Wild Boys is a good one. I think First Light proved that a contemporary Bond can not only work but give the original series a run for its money. A period piece while authentic to the books would turn the character into Sherlock Holmes, with the Cold War instead of Victoriana.
I had no idea This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave was intended as a Bond song. I’m a big Pet Shop Boys fan and I really like that one but I’ve never considered it Bond-like.
This one by Black Box Recorder feels like a deconstructed Bond theme – where there should be brass, there’s plinking piano and guitar, but the lyrics are pure Bond and England Made Me is a great title for a Bond story.
DeeSee – see for me, Duran Duran was the Master of the Positronic Ray, Master of Sogo, so when those New Romantic hangers-on showed up with Planet Earth they seemed like also-rans.
Vomit clocks are a real thing I just found out about. They’re not actually made of puke, sadly, nor are they clocks that have been regurgitated as ingredients in a sour stew. In fact they’re fashioned from acrylic resin, and just happen to look like an undifferentiated lump of diced carrots and corn with a clock embedded. If you look them up, you’ll discover there’s even a digital Vomit Clock Museum where you can learn important stuff like ‘Cleaning your Vomit Clock regularly’ among other things. Worth knowing!
What a wonderful world!
I compare Hockney to Picasso more for his range of technique and style than anything else – from the photo-realist pop art paintings through the amazing Polaroid experiments in the ‘80s onto his more recent iPad paintings which vibrate with pure colour and light. Those latter pictures are definitely more in the vein of Van Gogh though, I’d agree.
The newsletter is intended to record the contents of my head during any given week or fortnight and sometimes that includes stuff I’ve read or watched, whether it’s a …ranting politician, or TV personality, or a shite football match.
As predicted, Scotland crashed out of the World Cup after proving yet again that it’s a sport we’re not even good at, let alone one at which we excel. Our supporters are exemplary but they just don’t deserve the timid and self-defeating national team.
Patrick – I also have series creator and exec producer credits and pretty good frontline experience of all aspects of production but you’re right that we don’t have a production company set-up. I’d love to write for Doctor Who but probably don’t have the bandwidth to take on something at this level. The TARDIS should always have a big role in stories and be treated like a character with its own arcs. I do like your idea of Tennant regenerating into the Timeless Child - that’s very elegant and satisfying…
Fr. Theta – Pegg/Frost is a potential but why do I feel I wouldn’t necessarily like the result? Thomas Brodie-Sangster - he played a fey schoolboy in Family of Blood and a credible teenage Paul McCartney in Nowhere Boy - is a great idea (we hired Harry Lloyd to play Bernard Marx in Brave New World based on his weird, stylised performance as the alien-possessed schoolboy from the same Who episodes).
My knowledge of the Troughton era comes from basic cultural osmosis – pictures of Cybermen marching down the steps outside St. Paul’s were in all the papers, Troughton was in the Doctor Who strips that appeared in TV Comic that I read every week, (I hated the way they drew his horrible hat – just seeing it again while researching this gave me a jolt of primal revulsion) and also in the Doctor Who annual some family member bought me in 1966 (along with The Dalek World from the same period, the 1966 annual made a very big impression, and was where I remembered the Voord and the Fishmen of Kandalinga from for The World Shapers). Pop culture was far more consolidated than it is these days and it was hard not to have a pretty good idea of of what was going on, even if you didn’t enjoy watching the show any more and found it a bit too scary, with a Doctor I couldn’t trust, as I did. When I joined the audience again, it was with Spearhead from Space and the Auton store dummies, (which oddly, I remember in colour even though we could only afford a black and white telly until 1974), subsequently falling in love with everything about the Pertwee Doctor’s Earthbound set-up around the time of the folk horror/Quatermass-inflected The Daemons, which blew me away. In 1973, I had the Radio Times Doctor Who Special, which I still have somewhere, that provided episode breakdowns for the entire series from the beginning, as well as including instructions for how to construct a full-size Dalek (useless at woodwork, I used the basic instructions to build a 3-inch Dalek model out of carboard, plasticine and silver baking foil), and We Are The Daleks! an amazing, shocking short story by Terry Nation. An origin story for the Daleks that does what it says on the tin and reveals that we are the Daleks! The bleak conclusion tells us Daleks are the natural evolutionary endgame of humanity’s greed and lust for war and conquest (Nation used the same story for a later Blake’s Seven episode, though he didn’t have Daleks for that one, just savage beast-men, and it wasn’t quite as effective).
I do know that the whole Planet 14 thing from World Shapers was canonized in The Doctor Falls and was able to thank Moffat for its inclusion last time I ran into him, at a rooftop party in San Diego in 2018.
While we’re on the subject, I enjoyed this one, with Who superfan Tia Kofi, from the only season of Drag Race I’ve ever watched right through, interviewing Steven Moffat, still my favourite Doctor Who showrunner and one of my all-time favourite pop culture writers.
The Ninth Doctor in ‘The Day of the Doctor’? Interview with Steven Moffat | The Whoniverse Show
And here’s another good one from Billy Barnell at Half the Picture.
STEVEN MOFFAT talks Doctor Who’s Future, Revisiting Sherlock & Why Humanity Needs Stories (4K)
Is that you doing all the variant TARDIS models I see online? There can’t be two Theta Sigmas surely?..
Drowzeezachary – welcome to Xanaduum - dive deep into the chat!
Do I think the comic book Renaissance has ended? Yes, I do. Which means we’re onto the Comic Book Enlightenment? Mainstream comics today are written to a high degree of efficiency by people who have studied comics and television storytelling and combined them effectively. The standard is high but with a few exceptions, as there are always a few exceptions, the basic tone and tenor of superhero comics has stayed the same for more than 40 years since Marvelman. This is not a problem for comics alone, as the same fate has also befallen pop music and fashion, thanks to capitalism’s relentless demand for a streamlined, successful product that can be recreated and resold endlessly without ever changing.
Sean – The Unseen Internet was very interesting and worth a read. The Traitors encourages paranoia and suspicion and the urge to denounce ones neighbours so it’s ideal training for life in an authoritarian surveillance state.
Ebirah is totally Bond inspired but it’s doing all these Japanese scale things with the template. I love it! Thanks also for Miki Matsubara’s ‘80s Bond effort, I’ll raise you Maki Nomiya and Pizzicato 5 at the top of this entry.
Kevin – I totally blanked on all that Japanese stuff. As I’ve said before, the only Japanese cartoons that touched me were Marine Boy and Gigantor, which I loved. I might check out that Moffat novelisation. I’ve only read one of his prose stories – about a little kid who thinks he’s a space tyrant and the Doctor talks him out of it – and fancy checking out some more.
The Cash Thunderball is a good song but sounds more suitable for a Western than a Bond movie. Hadn’t heard the Karen O one before but it’s pretty credible tune which just misses out on having Bond brass and string stings to elevate it ( I actually pitched for that Lara Croft game – my idea had a young Lara on a posh girl’s school cruise that goes wrong and she winds up on an ancient living island that turns out to be an ancient alien machine. It was Lord of the Flies meets Mean Girls for the start then veered into wild psychedelic take on classic Tomb Raider.
ks - I’ll check out The Silver Book. Sounds intriguing.
I wasn’t sure about the opening of the second Sugar season but the moment in episode 2 where he does the old lady’s dishes was pure John Sugar and gave me hope. It’s picking up with each new episode.
Osiris - Congratulations on completing the book!
Like most of us who take up the practise of Magic I had a lot of early successes, so the sense that it was really working pervaded all of my initial efforts. Certainly during the ‘90s, it was all I could do to keep up with the cascade of successful workings.
Nathan – so sorry to hear about Nubbin. It can be a rough ride. Summer is the worst here. Dead cats, dead kittens, dead birds everywhere. We had a year-old mother cat get very sick last week, with a serious respiratory infection that left me thinking she’d died. She abandoned two 3-week old kittens I found freezing and on the verge of death. I tried to save them but lost both again… Now, I think I’ve seen the mother still alive and beginning to recover. It’s heartbreaking. I can at least cheer myself watching this year’s four surviving kittens playing wildly on the lawn.
Ken Warhol – I’ve done versions of Doctor Who – like my own Nix Uotan at DC - and one of the stories I pitched to Steven Moffat unsuccessfully in 2013 involved the Doctor and Clara caught in a trap for time travellers, a Time Well, where the deeper the voyagers descend, the further back in time they go. The TARDIS is down there, so the Doctor must descend, encountering on the way a group of stranded chrononauts on different levels. I had characters based on HG Wells’ Time Traveller, a Pet Shop Boys-style duo occupying the Bill and Ted or Doug & Tony (Time Tunnel) slot, and a character expy of Phineas Bogg, from the US time travel show Voyagers. I really liked the timey-wimey twisty story but it was more like a feature film than a regular episode and was regarded as being too expensive for the budget. Iris Wildthyme is fun but again, I want the real deal, not the Supreme version!
FylGja – I wasn’t able to go to the London shows but I saw the band in Glasgow. I talked to him about the show, but Gerard prefers to let the work to speak for itself and won’t comment on any interpretation. The story is still undergoing updates and revisions. My brief review is earlier and has my initial thoughts. Basically, I loved it.
Otherwise, and while I don’t want to make light of genuine concerns – people will feel what they feel and there’s an understandable degree of paranoia in the Jewish community at the moment – the totalitarian fantasia of Draag seems to me less about the past, less about things that happened 80 years ago, than it is about now and the perilous position we find ourselves in with authoritarians sniffing round every open doorway.
The imagery is not Nazi-inspired. It’s depiction of tyranny is a mash-up of Soviet bureaucracy, banana republic junta style, and the gold braid and ‘scrambled eggs’ peaked caps of desert military dictatorships. The tech is mostly lo-fi Cold War Atom Age, with one explosive suicide vest, and does not reference World War 2 or the Holocaust, as far as I can see. The stage is presented as what it is, a stage for performers in a restrictive regime, not the gates of a death camp. The banner overhead is so people can read it. My own feeling is that any Auschwitz connection can only be made by stretching the frame too far but, as I say, people will come to their own conclusions based on their personal sensitivities.
As for the specific message, I regard it as dictatorship 101 iconography, just like 1984’s ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’ or the ‘WORK, CONSUME, DIE’ and ‘TO DIE ON THE JOB IS TO DIE FOR DARKSEID’ banners from my own Final Crisis. While the show is intended to be provocative and thought-provoking, I don’t believe this is a specific reference to Auschwitz. The whole thing is metaphor.
As I said, above, for me the show is about toxic nostalgia and aims to resist the pressures that turns vital art into heritage. The Grand Immortal Dictator can be seen as a stand in for an audience that demands ‘the hits’ played over and over again, ossified and drained of life. The fundamental engine of fascism is nostalgic - all those invocations of a glorious past that was somehow lost or mislaid - and as I see it, the band is tackling that. You may read it differently.
Further antics subsequently…