19/2 BLEAT GENERATION
PIC: Leigh Morrison 1987
MORAL DECAY AT THE HEART OF THE ATOM
Now flurries melting down the hills on the skyline look like stretch marks on taut skin. Louring heavy cloud, you can reach up and run your fingers through, followed by epic blue skies transparent like crystal to the whole horizon as the days cycle nervously through all possible weathers, searching for warmth and light.
Nights of stars so dense against the black they’re a blizzard of times past. Photons that set out in 2017 from Sirius finally reaching my eyes in these early days of the year we hurry through and try to forget, harried by cold, anticipating dusk at 6pm, then 7, until by the end of March it’s still light at 8pm.
I hope I’m not alone in feeling a curious new sense of purpose and possibility in the face of all evidence to the contrary. What form it takes remains to be seen but there’s a change in the weather, a subtle shift in the light, an altered zeitgeist, a vibe shunt that may be related to the massive solar storm we experienced on January 19th, (the most intense and powerful radiation burst we’ve been showered with since 2003), or simply the slow incremental arrival of spring.
Last week was working more intensely on this curio of a film project I sort of mentioned last time without giving anything away. It’s a time-sensitive dream of a lifetime kind of thing which no-one will guess until I reveal what it is!
Otherwise, I was unconvinced when I started watching, and quite dismissive of One Battle After Another until Sean Penn came into it. Penn’s riveting performance as the monstrous Steven Lockjaw hooked me and then the narrative dug in its spurs, and by the end I was glued the the screen, cheering on every twist.
Watching this in the wake of the events in Minneapolis, with that cartoonish wrestling heel Greg Bovino still fresh in the memory, gave the whole thing a timely frisson where it seemed to overlap with the news, or predict the news, or in some other way mate with the news…
And most of all, it felt like someone doing a deconstructed sequel to The Invisibles that stripped away all the pop art glamour to show the reality of revolutionary praxis and set it thirty years after the original, with a new generation of rebels. The racist Boomer CEO Dollimore - from The Invisibles Vol. 1, issue # ‘Season of Ghouls’ - could have been a member of the Christmas Adventurers’ Club.
Three thumbs up!
NEVER WHAT IT SEEMS
Speaking of everybody’s favourite stylish rebel outsiders, two years ago I was wrapping up the script for a proposed Amazon movie version of The Invisibles
In the script, there’s a fusion of the Harmony House stuff with the de Sade digression, where Harmony House takes the place of the Castle of Silling. were sacrificing kids to incarnate their extra-dimensional ‘god’ – the King-in-Chains. Just as the Aztecs gave up their children in a frenzy of blood to gods that fed on anguish, the willed, planned slaughter of children and animals occurring in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere was presented as a deliberate sacrifice designed to incarnate a ‘dark god’. It will be a thing of monstrous jigsaw biology. It will be vast and appalling and its survival will require a world hotter and more toxic than this one.
In the story, the seemingly senseless degradation of the environment and the natural world had this purpose - the billionaire servants of the Outer Church and its allies were terraforming, or more accurately xenoforming our planet to make it more hospitable for their ‘gods’ when they take monstrous apocalyptic physical forms. The Earth is therefore being heated, desertified, and poisoned so that it will become a Hell where human beings are enslaved, tortured, and farmed to produce the mass suffering the Archons dine upon…
I’ll bet you wish you hadn’t called the Samaritans help line now, love…
Anyway, Amazon wasn’t keen…
(If it all sounds a bit pessimistic and depressing, don’t panic - that’s exactly where our Invisibles come in to kick out the jams !)
That was two years ago. Three years ago I was working on an animated series for K-Pop girl group Blackpink. I loved it but like so many of these things, it went nowhere – although K-Pop Demon Hunters went on to cover some similar territory, so I was on the right track as usual, even if they wouldn’t believe me…
PRIVATE LIVES OF THE MASTER RACE
Speaking of fiction blooming into reality, some of the strangest e-mails in the unredacted Castle Epstein files have brought to light a little discussed aspect of the Duc de Blangis’ life of vice and libertinage. To wit, the repeated and tantalising references to a ‘Performing Crab Cabaret’, that have provoked wild speculation as to what might be alluded to in this curious phraseology.
Bombshell research has now revealed that the ‘Crab Cabaret’ was no codeword or metaphor but a plain and accurate description of what de Blangis referred to ‘the little Big Top in my pants!’
As the story goes, and following a particularly vigorous, painful, and unhygienic bout of grotesque sexual congress with Madame Desgranges - this coitus deliberately and perversely sought for the express purpose of cultivating a hybrid species of virulent filthy mega-pox he could pass on to his innocent victims - de Blangis was afflicted with a no less spectacular infestation of seething pubic lice, affectionately known as ‘crabs’, despite having six legs to the conventional beach crab’s eight!
After numerous unsuccessful, if comical, attempts to blitz the venereal invaders from that grizzled, matted sweatforest habitat known also as de Blangis’ steaming, unclean, and scarcely private parts, with searing malathion lotion and permethrin cream – in manner much like the USA’s attempts to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia - an itch-crazed de Blangis appeared to have developed ‘a new respect’, even fondness, for these lively and hardy specimens of the species Pthiris pubis and, we are told, made it his life’s work to train the beasts in the arts of clowning and seduction that he might set them to work in his employ as high class insect courtesans. No sooner was his mind made up than the jaded, diseased aristocrat set to his labours while the merry members of the phylum anthropoda of the phtiridae family of the class insecta that he hosted proved quick to learn a variety of simple tricks.
And so were born these weird microscopic entertainers, these wandering minstrels of the genital acres!
By the time a three-month training period was complete, the tiny obligate ectoparasites had learned to arrange themselves into ever-changing crotch displays - forming chevrons, stars, lovehearts, swastikas, and even personalised monograms. Under the Duc’s careful and attentive tutelage, some of the more advanced bugs went on to master a range of miniature musical instruments which allowed them to perform a limited repertoire of show tunes inaudible to the human ear. Others were taught to organise and play a form of 30-a-side football using a dainty crab egg or ‘nit’ as the microscopic soccer ‘ball’!
Indeed, certain of de Blangis’ debauched and depraved associates took to replaying famous FIFA World Cup tournament winning games across the tilting pitch of their inflamed groins as a prelude to buggering the servant boy…
THE MINISTER’S DAUGHTER’S IN LOVE WITH THE SNAKE
There follow some responses to your correspondence!
Sean – a literary behemoth then! Don’t know if All-Beard and No-Beard count as magicians, they’re just rival homeless pirates. The duelling wizards thing, which for me goes back Gwydion and Math in the Mabinogion, is a classic trope that works very well in superhero comics. It’s maybe a Cold War echo - the idea of vast contending powers with ordinary people caught in the backwash is always narratively appealing. There’s an argument to say all superhero stories are expressions of the ‘duelling wizards’ idea - Batman vs, the Joker, Superman vs. Luthor or Brainiac… they’re all ‘magical’, powerful creatures battling it out across the stage of the ‘real’ contemporary world they inhabit, while ordinary folk look on and hope for the best outcome.
I will always take the opportunity to interact with any cat, even when they’re entirely virtual like these cats and kittens from Assassins Creed Shadows – the mighty samurai Yasuke habitually makes time between bouts of spectacular slaughter to befriend a passing cat - a true man!
Felipe – the year is beginning to thaw from cold winter’s grip and new ideas are budding.
I don’t know what the intended viewing order was for The Prisoner, presumably something like the way it was broadcast! Fr. Theta is correct about the Village - or Villages - and its shifting location, and also in saying that the episodes are largely complete in themselves and could likely be viewed in any order (I would think Once Upon A Time and Fallout would always have to be taken as a pair but who knows…) the first episode I saw was The Girl Who Was Death which, as a child, was just about the greatest hour of TV I’d ever seen. I was immediately hooked, only to discover there were only two more episodes left, both of which also turned out to be the greatest things I’d seen! The Prisoner wasn’t repeated on TV until 1978 and, as there was no such thing as easily available videotape until the ‘80s, enthusiasts - the official fan/appreciation society was formed in 1977 - tended to rely on their magnificent memories when they got together to discuss the show!
I like Cronenberg in the round as an auteur director so yes, I’ll watch anything he does. I especially like Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch and Crash. He was my first port of call, with Shivers, Rabid, and Scanners when I decided to watch horror movies. I’d always avoided scary films after experiencing spectacular nightmares based on seeing reviews and trailers for Alien and later, The Thing. Aged 25, I decided to confront my fears and with the help of the local video store binged on horror movies for a couple of weeks.
I soon realised my dreams and imaginings were so much worse than the actual rubber and plastic Fx, and grew to enjoy watching horror films, although I never developed a taste for gore or violence.
Kid Eternity was one of those projects that felt like it was done at a run and by the time I realised I’d written it, I’d moved on to the more psychedelic approach that characterized the work from Flex Mentallo on.
For a while, I tended to dismiss Kid Eternity as me doing work to order and creating one of those generic proto-Vertigo ‘adult’ takes on an innocent character from the archives but I must admit, aside from the heavy-handed drunken sex creep gran’pa sequence, I really enjoyed it when I did a re-read for this response.
I wrote it just after I’d read Ulysses and wanted to create a comic book version of the stream of consciousness effect but weaving in and out of multiple voices. As a result, there’s an interesting flow connecting everything in Kid Eternity, where the captions run into the dialogue and blend with song lyrics or crossword clues that show up. It has rhythm and a beat and is quite musical as a read. It’s an approach I’ve never really gone back to.
As research, I read the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost and there’s a sense of all that bleeding into this pulpy story (the ‘Canto’ divisions are the most obvious nod). The whole Val Hoffman strand was inspired by The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Jan Harold Brunvand’s book on urban legends, which compiled and analysed all those ‘friend of a friend’ stories, that were in some ways ancestors of creepypasta. I felt Val’s story was the weakest - she didn’t get enough time being sane to dramatise a descent into madness - and although I like how it ends, with the Waters of Forgetfulness, that beat hits awkwardly because it’s never quite emphasised how traumatised she’s been to justify wiping her memories!
Otherwise, there are loads of great ideas and I was delighted to find things I knew then that I thought I only figured out later! The Magical stuff is quite sophisticated and the central conceit of demons so sick and bored with life in Hell they make a plan to perfect the Earth and its people as a gift for God, in the hope he’ll re-admit them to Heaven, is still appealing.
Also interesting was the amount of material taken directly from dreams – the writer who comes to the city to fully chronicle its horrors then finds himself trapped by a neverending supply is from a dream, along with two titles I’d remembered, The Shrilling and The Punishment Cabinet. The vast Hell tree that Jerry Sullivan describes with millions of suffering souls pinned to its thorns is direct from a dream, as is the nightmarish Lamb of Torment.
In retrospect, I really like Kid Eternity! Thanks for encouraging me to do a re-read!
My favourite DC 1Million tie-ins were Starman and Mark Schulz’ Superman one.
The Doors are the kind of band where if you like them, you’ll like pretty much everything – it’s not a vast catalogue but there’s nothing else like it really. Riding the freeway or heading west on Sunset with LA Woman playing is the perfect fusion of place and sound. I’ve been listening to Not to Touch the Earth a lot recently.
I’m with you on ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ – that story went very smoothly although, for me, the issue that worked most perfectly from mind to page at the time was Black Science 2 Part 3: Pavlov’s Dogs from The Invisibles Vol. 2 # 19 -the one with the double page spread of the Magic Mirror/God snared by the military industrial complex with its gargantuan Tesla coils - both drawn by Chris Weston! That was a good run of issues from Chris.
I think Volume 3 is my favourite on reflection.
Mason Lang is Bruce Wayne, representing the seemingly implausible notion of a billionaire with morals.
Have a fantastic time in Africa!
Jonathan – wow! You were serious about this! This is great! I’m just going to sit back and enjoy for a bit!
BrotherDuffy – ZenFascism was ideas that felt completely contradictory to Western human thinking – I had a very well developed take on this that disappeared along with the rest of the Marvel Boy material on an Apple Cube cataclysm decades ago, so my recall is sketchy but think on the mantra ‘All is One or Else’ and keep thinking and there you will find the essence of Zen Fascism as practised by these parallel universe Kree! They subscribe to a kind of wild eugenics, trawling the ‘Sea of Monsters’ for new and formerly unknown genetic material with which to enhance their species. Marvel Boy Noh-Varr is himself augmented with cockroach powers (in a nod to Spider-Man and Ant Man). I should mention that relaxing is not easy in the presence of Mercury - who can sometimes make you feel like you’ve eaten an espresso and amphetamine gateau - so make sure you’re getting break times!
I haven’t given much thought to the Fantastic Four movie but your interpretation seems sound. There’s definitely some kind of underlying alchemical structure - the FF represent the elements, of course, with the Thing being Earth, Reed being Water, Sue being Air and Johnny, fire, so those underpinnings are there to work with. When I was writing Fantastic Four 1234, I talked about the family as an ‘equation’ too.
The Kree vow on page 1 of Marvel Boy issue #6 is the Buddha Vow, with minor adaptations.
Philip – thanks! That makes it worthwhile!
Dorothy – every week! Even when there’s nothing to say!
Persefonie – well, this loops back nicely to the start and makes it look like there was symmetry all along! I’ve noticed The Invisibles cropping up all over, which I suppose is ironic in light of it being rejected for TV so often and again quite recently (and there’s some cop show on telly now that just ripped off the title and stuck it on another generic quirky detective ensemble).
In the ‘90s, I could see how conspiracy theory had the potential to become a kind of secular mythology, even religion, and tried to create a text to contain, study and manipulate that narrative ‘energy’, for want of a better word, and for want of a better world. It continues to do its work, not always in ways I fully anticipated.
As you say, we may not have access to the superdense material world technologies utilised by the Masters of the World but we can assemble unstoppable ideas and set them loose in the world of imagination just as easily as they can, and perhaps even more effectively…
The Chariot? That’s interesting but not unexpected. I was raised according to pacifist principles, which I tend to default to, so for me The Chariot is less the war-cart and more the dimension-traveling merkaba, the Mobius Chair (as seen here at Xanaduum on 21st June 2023).
Fr. Theta - that’s an essay I’d like to read! This is the first time I’ve thought about the parade of holographic Jor-El’s in pop culture and I’m suddenly fascinated!
I haven’t watched Small Prophets yet but I think I might like it, from what I’ve heard so far.
Bobby – Anytime! Our Leaders do love playing around in toxic shit, don’t they? They are connoisseurs of ill-will, bad temper, poisoned wine, broken promises, lies and betrayal! They seem to thrive on garbage, like cockroaches. The impression I get from them is that the more money you accumulate, the more you seem to want to spend it creating dirt, disease and dismay in your wake. There is the sense of a demonic fall into matter and corruption.
Osiris – it wasn’t reviews – if I got worked up over reviews, volcanic blood pressure would have struck me dead long ago - this was a bunch of alerts pinging from news site after news site that got under my skin. Each of them, and this has been going on for a week since I mentioned it, featured some variant of the headline ‘Superman writer says movie is shite’.
The podcaster, whom I like and enjoy talking to, has apologised but, for me it’s clarified a fundamental problem with the way these things are presented to the audience in such stark binary and oppositional terms, designed to provoke anger and conflict. ‘They’ deliberately stripped any nuance out of my response to the interview question about Superman for no other reason than to make people angry on the grounds that anger = engagement, which is a shite basis for communication and human interaction. If the only way to get people’s attention is to purposefully annoy them about trivial things, I’m not interested.
So, aside from a return visit with Doug Rushkoff’s Team Human, which I’m doing next week, no more podcasts for a while, and certainly none on the subject of comic books or superheroes.
Anyway, if I can’t be an old man about something now I’m an old man, when else can I enjoy this unique pleasure?!
There’s something very precise, even romantic, about the dreamy notion of looking after a baby cat in an otherwise empty Shanghai. Your everyday reality evokes one of those cozy AI clips accompanying ‘rainy night sounds for relaxation’ videos - dozing cat, city lights, steaming mug and writer stuff…
I’ve always been quite fascinated by Shanghai, mostly because of the indie bands. What’s it like?
What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?
Is it that time already…
Having finally finished Brother's Karamazov earlier this week (I liked it, but not as much as Crime and Punishment), I've started reading Murakami's Norwegian Wood, and I'm liking it a fair bit. Are there any works not originally published in English that you quite like?
Additionally, I've gotten a copy of both parts of Faust. However, I'm also the sort who believes plays are better seen than read. Are there any productions of either (or preferably both) parts that you would recommend?
What songs by Blackpink would you recommend?
Otherwise, looking forward to seeing Normal and, more importantly, Bulk. Also, I was rather charmed by the reveal at the end of Generation Z that it was, in fact, a sequel to Kill List as well as Down Terrace. Should probably rewatch that film at some point, not seen it since I was in the transition between High School and College.
I've been intrigued by the Epstein drops myself. Most notably -- and I hope it triggers no disillusionment for a MBE such as yourself -- that it reveals how many elites were essentially aspiring.
Fergie not only talks about a limited staff and desperate pursuit of various deals but seems to suggest, per some readings, that she'd have become Herr Epstein's maid, if I'm reading right. Prince Andrew meanwhile dutifully books rooms and books accommodations for parties he isn't invited to. One wonders almost if the reason Buckingham severed ties was less to do with Andy being involved in child subjugation (an old hobby of the powerful) and more to do with how hapless, awkward, and servile he appeared next to a man who spent his early years walking around a New York private academy in pimp cosplay while teaching arithmetic.
When I did my undergraduate degree in Marjorie Taylor Greene's current hometown, Ron DeSantis was himself a high school teacher there at an elite private school where he was known for drinking with high school girls. I think back on that and also how his presidential aspirations were dashed in small part by the revelation that he uses his fingers to eat pudding. (Custard on your side of the Atlantic, I think?) Marge meanwhile weathered the revelation that she was mistress to a crossfit instructor who liked to cosplay at conventions as the Russian Street Fighter video game character named Zangief with a tiny pair of red briefs and has exited politics for now under her own terms.
This brings to mind Obama's book The Audacity of Hope and how I always thought he seemed like a slick and clever guy who had some things backwards. Specifically I think most of us in this world are less motivated by the Audacity of Hope and more by the Hope of Audacity.
The criminals and artists and con men with any degree of influence seem to wield it in direct proportion to how audacious their claims are.
I experience disappointment at some of the intellectuals implicated in the files. I'd sparred a bit with Chomsky. I suspect Chopra is your closest connection in the files. I recall you touring together. But these figures made bold public claims and, perhaps most damning, seem boring next to Epstein. Search the word "entropy". Despite weak grammar and punctuation, it seems Jeff was interested in talking cerebral subjects with these luminaries who were more interested in beef jerky and muffin recipes. I know some who think these mundane phrases were code for corpses or something but I tend towards the reading that Epstein saw himself as this polymath genius and, once he inducted his way into the highest echelons, seemed disappointed by how little they wanted to talk about thermodynamics or multiverses and how much they were into creature comforts.
Of late, I gather Epstein managed to secure himself an office (at an Ivy) where there was research done in Evolutionary Sciences. There are photos of him, flanked by Steve Bannon, involved in a study group in a library study room. (A friend sent it to me dubbing it the worst version of Dan Harmon's Community.)
I'm told it was near unprecedented for a donor to get an office and get directly involved in research -- and the proximity of that research to eugenics should cause a chill. In my experience, most donors are generally interested in shaping legal and business curriculum to align society to their philosophy and are mostly interested in selecting text books and promoting or blocking tenure. Epstein was essentially creating a shadow professor position for himself.
I don't know. I have to ration my reading. A part of me freezes when reading about this man who was accused of doing nasty things involving eugenics, child mutilation, espionage -- who knows where it ends? Because he reads something like a protagonist in his own story, meddling and tinkering, full of manipulative vision. And the alleged elites around him read more like people who apparently pretended to be protagonists to enrich themselves but weren't terribly detail oriented or trying to actually shape anything, except for what other people directed them to promote on a mercenary basis for comfort.
I suppose what's dawning on me is the disillusioned possibility that royals and gurus are all essentially field labor and the actual capital and captains are criminals and thugs, carting around children in satchels like Krampus and throwing the best garden party. I'd long believed the world was rudderless, no one in charge, but now I'm starting to think it actually just responds to anyone who brings a rudder and indulges the excesses of those at the top, who will pledge themselves as serfs to anyone who validates them in a way they wished their parents had done. They inherited all but validation and they'll pledge their fortune to whoever gives it.