7/3 GENERATION JONES RIDES OUT

PIC: ADAM MORTIMER 2010

K.Flay - High Enough (Lyric Video)

OOOH-LAH!

Welcome to this week’s newsletter where it’s WAR! WAR! And more fucking WAR! All the WAR you can stomach, with even more WAR on top!

The stakes just get higher, the distractions more desperate! Satan sniggers and goads Horus to trigger the Boomer Apocalypse. But can a boring old world war cut the mustard and win big in the Last Battle for ratings in this hectic non-stop news/soap cycle?

We don’t think so!

We’ve already had two World Wars and one Cold War! Been there, done that! The only way to go is sideways! Alternative World War 1! Never mind the mullahs, we, the Non-Player People, demand an invasion from a parallel Earth hellscape where Kamala Harris won the 2024 election and rules the rubble as America’s first Empress! We want invaders from a world next door where the English aced the War of Eternal Dependence and where wisecracking Han Solo leads a band of rebels including Hulk Hogan, Dirty Harry, House, and two of Charlie’s Angels against the cunning and petulant cyborg King Androidrew! We’ll settle for nothing less than the arrival, through some sort of dimension-chute, of a third counterfactual world in which savage apes are the dominant species, under the opposable thumb of their tangerine-coloured President-King Louie AKA King of the Swingers!

That’s the very least of what we request from this new kind of war! Add a World Cup War element to the mix, where every goal is 50 square miles of ceded territory, and we could be looking down the barrel of peak War! GOAT War!

We want to see world after world take a kicking, until the audience gets tired or confused, or forgets, or dies.

Then World War 4 will be a back-to-basics reboot of the whole concept…

MUMMY! YOU’RE NOT WATCHING ME!

World is soggy, lawns are mudbaths. Whole place looks like it’s been found in an alley behind the bin bags, beaten and left for dead. Strange moods, curious stalled weathers prevail. Extended days of heavier-than-air clouds sinking to head height in all directions, erasing distant landmarks, familiar coastlines and hills.

30 years ago, I was in hospital flirting with Death! We decided it wasn’t working between us but I think she still fancies me…

This week, 30 years later, whimsy reigns against a crisis backdrop.

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag struck a chord with me. I must have been a pirate in one of those past lives we often hear about. I expect it will have been one of the shorter, if merrier, of the past lives but nevertheless... While I’m all too aware that, in the real-life 18^th century, opting for piracy invited a harsh and nightmarish existence circumscribed by weevils, scurvy, blackstrap, buggery and the birch, the romantic vision of lush West Indies lagoons and typhoon-lashed timbers, swept me away on a shanty and a shiver-me. I played this game to the very last treasure chest and even hunted the white whale in honour of Ahab. Made short work of the beast too, and I won’t swear on it, but I could count more than two tears in the oaken figurehead’s eyes as that ghost-pale leviathan rolled over spouting his great and final foam of gore…

(I try to stick to a Batman-like rule against killing computer animals in games, unless they’re fixing to kill me, but this one obliged the player, in this case Yours Truly, to murder a zoo full of creatures to progress in the ‘crafting’ menu. How they suck you in! I was willing to sacrifice a few dart pouches and jungle outfits to keep my vow never to kill any digital deer or other ungulates you’ll be glad to know)

With my absorbing and moreish turn on the ocean wave all done, I’m catching up on Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, set in old Baghdad. So far, it’s very beautiful, with all those lush gardens and azure domes but it’s not the same. I‘ve got the breakers in my blood now and the desert sands, the songs of the muezzins hold no candle to the depths of Davey Jones’ Locker and the rough shanties of my shipmates. I was cap’n of my own Spanish brig, the Jackdaw, buddies with Blackbeard and Rackham and Mary Read. Now I run around roofs, stealing dates, and I can’t fight worth shit…

At least I’m learning some history from these things. No zombies or pus-palaces in space for me, just places you can still visit, during times you can’t.

Otherwise, I’m still reading the Richard Mabey book about plants I mentioned last time, which is one of those amazing treasure troves of unusual information you sometimes stumble across, and I’m writing up a storm after a fallow winter. Mostly comic stuff this week, including a big one yet to be announced.

The pseudonymous ‘Frank Quitely’ sent me despatches from the front; he’s nearly finished drawing ‘It’s a Dead Dead Dead Dead World!’ I’ll let you know what that actually means next time and, of course, our paid subscribers will receive their exclusive first look at this startling new Morrison/Quitely collaboration.

Additionally, the weekly dose of new fiction will make a return next week.

Friday, the 13^th of March, brings the first of eight chapters of a mystery story entitled Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot. More about that next time.

PUNK PONY CLUB

There follows your correspondence as corresponded with…

Kupan – Thanks! ‘Burnt out librarian’ sounds more romantic than it ought to…

Dorothy – Great work! One thing about Xanaduum, our correspondents can turn a phrase! There’s some good writing on here!

RaVi – I didn’t know that! We stayed friends with Sharad - he’s very clever and good company – but haven’t seen him for years now in my exile from the USA.

Jonny – I won’t write off Eyes Wide Shut but for me at least, there’s not enough evidence in the onscreen story to support all the cool theories.

I’m often asked to assemble my thoughts on Magic into a printed book so it will probably happen sometime, but I prefer the kind of samizdat approach of putting it out online. There’s quite a bit of occult stuff in the archive. ‘Beyond the Word and the Fool’ - available here on Xanaduum October 13th, 15th and 16th of 2022 - sums up my approach to Magic but there’s a bunch of other stuff scattered throughout.

BeenAgain – Thanks! You’re welcome! Much appreciated!

Brigitte Gorez – Sigils still work when they’re created by someone else. They can be even more effective. in fact. So yes, feel free activate the transgender protection sigils, as well as doing anything else you can - from the mystical to the all-important practical - to help draw attention to and challenge this kind of scapegoating and injustice. What’s happening in Kansas, and I presume elsewhere, is wilfully cruel and abusive.

Ross – The tech bros have imagination enough to come up with Facebook and important stuff like that but the accumulated weight of wealth binds them to the Earth in ways that prevent their spirits from soaring much past the Moon of Yesod.

They work the material world. They hammer and melt and mould. They accumulate cavernous vaults of minerals, metals, spirit crystallised down to its tangible crust of gem and bullion. They make weapons and they hoard and plot in secrecy and darkness in mountain fastnesses...

They become the kobolds, or dwarves of legend. The svart álfar or dark elf counterparts of the airy ljósálfar, the light elves. The Light and the Heavy.

As you point out, so many of their ‘ideas’ are derived from ‘50s sci-fi – robots, Mars rockets, self-driving cars – but there’s a lot of fantasy in there. Palantir, for example, is the crystal ball from The Lord of the Rings, the all-seeing eye – presumably ‘telescreen’ wouldn’t have sounded quite as exotic – which suggests they’ll be trying to sell us on alleged magic carpets and rings of power next. Kobolds, I say!

Capitalism might just work if greed didn’t exist. My own dealings with the money goddess – and I experienced the spirit of cash as female, serpentine, green and liquid – taught me that she likes to flow freely and hates to be contained or hoarded.

Pinker is correct when he points out that humankind has become steadily less violent overall, even though there are many more of us than ever shared the planet before. We can be proud of ourselves for that. Few other animals can exist side by side in such concentrations without constant eruptions of violence.

Sadly, we squandered this advantage with a spectacular own goal, when we ceded control of our most destructive armaments to the most unstable and sadistic louts available!

Is Magical imagination enough? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it’s a good start. We need to imagine plausible futures before we can build and live in them. Dystopias shrink our horizons to dead ends. They coincidentally reinforce the narrative that the elites alone are equipped to survive into the future and thrive while the rest of us are just not rich enough to make it, let alone repopulate the corpse that was planet Earth. Money is the only guaranteed way to survive the end of all life, apparently. Dystopias condition us to believe that the rich are superhuman, godlike – uniquely privileged to live through terminal catastrophe in incredible luxury and license, they will preserve culture in underground cities built to endure extinction level asteroid impacts, nuclear holocaust, environmental and resource collapse, tsunamis, we’re assured. It’s another farcical fantasy, like They like to fool themselves they’ll last much longer than the rest of us when the world ceases to exist.

You hear less about the likely immediate failure of filtration systems, sewage, and electricity supplies, or the mind-numbing existential horror of being alive on your dead home planet with a bunch of Adam Sandler DVDs, plastic palm trees and a ‘calming’ video wall, let alone the inevitable rapid collapse of any fragile post-apocalyptic order when elderly leaders are dragged from their hiding places and violently dissected by their younger, stronger more ruthless and well-equipped ‘security’ forces, catering staff, and healthcare professionals.

Better I feel, to reject this kind of nihilistic forward planning and use our mighty brains to construct a narrative that veers away from self-destructive outcomes in favour of unlikely but plausible scenarios with more positive options and possibilities for everyone’s free expression, including the animals, birds, plants and insects. We’d be daft to allow the morbidly rich, fearful, and unimaginative to endlessly rehearse the same zombie dystopia horror story until they finally will it into reality. We have the ability to think of attractive exit strategies and escape routes from any situation if we stop being lazy and put our fancy to it. When the alternative is the squalid end of humanity, it becomes a form of delightful duty to deliberately think of exciting ways to manifest startling and creative futures! We owe it to the children of tomorrow to imagine a whole range of potential better worlds they might choose from to enjoy! Who wants to think of their own kids at war with insect-machines in the ruins of Los Angeles? Or fighting to the death over the last raw baby leg (which by coincidence is exactly what they’ll be eating in the gourmet bunkers of the rich, come to think of it…)?

Bobby – I’ve never been a Judge Dredd fan. I know people like and even love the strip and the character, but it never struck a chord with me. I think you need to encounter this stuff when you’re a kid to really appreciate it but even then, Dredd would have seemed like a baddie to me when I was young. I didn’t read 2000AD until 1985 when I started working for the magazine and thought I’d better immerse myself in the aesthetic, so I came too late to grow up a fan.

My own attempts to write Judge Dredd are considered some of the worst in the canon which makes me the last boy on earth to explain the character’s long-lived and surely well-earned appeal (I don’t care what they say, I like Inferno’s Hollywood ‘90s vibe, and the pisstake ones I wrote with Millar invoke fond memories of Bar10 vodka and orange afternoons…’so I’ve had my fun – and that’s all that matters…’). I’m sure many of our readers can step in to defend Joe’s honour!

Jwparrishiii – I only put up the first 11 and the final 3 pages of the script for Seaguy Eternal issue 1! The full script for #1 was never shown, let alone issues 2 and 3! Only the first one was completed, with the remaining two issues existing in page breakdown form, with the scenes and major plot points sketched out but not finished. Cameron Stewart is the co-owner of Seaguy so it’s his to draw.

Neal – the various Invisibles pilot and feature scripts are all owned by the studios that hired me to write them. If I leaked any, it would be pretty obvious I was the culprit! As much as I’d love people to be able to read this work they’ll never see onscreen , it’s not mine to disseminate.

Jimmy – I have that Michael Pollan book on order!

Fr. Theta – my dad’s MBE passed to me when he died. I don’t keep them together, but I have worn both at the same time and felt the empire resonate in stereo. The sound of the heartbeat of the Master! The drums! Fortunately, Ringo could play those drums, so I like to believe the Beatles did often combine the talismanic power of their MBEs to battle Blue Meanies everywhere in the heady few years between the awards ceremony and Lennon’s Vietnam protest.

I understand why celebrities hand their medals back to highlight injustices or express their public disapproval of government policy but I agree with you that it removes the talismanic object from your possession and kills its power. For me, giving the medals back would be like returning the Ring to Sauron.

BrotherDuffy – I know there will be some genuinely heartfelt favourite romance movies I’ve forgotten but if I’m being slightly perverse, my favourites are Natural Born Killers and Harold and Maude. My favourite war movies are Apocalypse Now! and Tropic Thunder. For psychedelic rock, you can’t go wrong with originals like Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Led Zeppelin. I tend to prefer the garage and pop strands of psychedelia to bluesy extended workouts, so for me it’s the Doors, or the Byrds. Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man is the very definition of the melodic psychedelic pop sound I favour. Then there’s the funky end of the spectrum with George Clinton and Parliament. That’s all ‘60s stuff. In the ‘90s, you could include My Bloody Valentine’s churn and drone. For the adjacent ‘stoner rock’ category, which combines heavy metal with psychedelia, Monster Magnet is a great go-to. There are many interpretations of what ‘psychedelic’ music should sound like!

Osiris – congratulations on finishing the novel! Sometimes the end just creeps up on you…

Kristan sometimes corrects things on the Wiki, but by and large we don’t have much to do with it. There are still some errors on there – I never ‘toured’ with my band, for instance, we just played gigs, and I was never a member of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth but otherwise it’s a useful resource.

DeeSee – where would I be without you? There are typos and missing lines all over these weekly Xanaduums! No editing time! I got Sharad Devarajan’s name wrong too!

Xanaduum has always embraced the wabi-sabi, the fragments, the mistakes and the incomplete! It’s our aesthetic!

Persefonie – No sane person can possibly lend credence to some concurrent online rumours that Jeffrey was one of the original 600, 000 male Israelites who came up from Egypt with Moses unto the Promised Land around 1446 BCE. It was here, on the border with Canaan, that he was bitten by a vampire. Some so-called internet scholars claim that, during the reign of wicked King Jeroboam, the seemingly undying jet-setter devoted himself to the idolatrous worship of Baal-Ashtoreth in the form of a golden calf. It should come as no surprise that Baal-Ashtoreth and the deranged cultists thereof were notorious for turning a blind eye to the routine bumming of minors.

Through the ages, this sinister immortal predator has assumed many names, they say – Le Juif Errant, Flamel, Saint-Germain, Dracula, Ra’s Al Ghul – but Jeffrey is his favourite, a title given to him by the demon regent Asmodeus during the turbulent reign of King Solomon.

If Jeffrey’s currently bearded and banging a babe-in-arms on some moonlit desert kibbutz, investigators would do well to search for a man named simply Jeffrey, according to Seoul-based ‘true crime’ podcasters Kim Gi-Jeong and Jung So-yeon He may try to blend in as Jeffrey Ashknaziy or Jeffrey Ben Dod, or attempt to become a cipher - Jeffrey Jeffs, Jeffrey Jay, Jeffrey X. The possibilities are as near to endless as the stars in an ingénue’s eyes, but one thing is for sure, his favoured name will be Jeffrey.

And that’s how they’ll nail the bastard!

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for T Coronae Borealis!

And I’m smiling right now…

Sean – Dinosaurs vs. Aliens was going to be three issues that did what it said on the tin, where the technologically advanced aliens misjudged and underestimated their primitive foes and faced a bitter struggle for survival.

Barry Sonnenfeld wanted to do an allegory about colonialism, specifically the colonisation of the West and its self-justifying concept of Manifest Destiny. Barry was interested in the complexities and contradictions that hid behind the portrayal of Kit Carson as a hero. The lead alien is called Kitt as a direct nod to the source of the idea.

While that was the subtext, the project was rooted in an action sequence Barry had carried around for years, depicting dinosaurs vs. aliens in their first confrontation/close encounter. He did an amazing previs animation for this scene, and if you want to see what it might have looked like, Transformers: Age of Extinction pretty much pinched Barry’s entire sequence.

I already had this idea about smart dinosaurs - with their evolved biped descendant showing up in All-Star Superman – developing rudimentary culture and I threw that in as a way of giving our dinosaurs a distinctive visual that was different from the Jurassic Park approach. I’d read about the evolutionary adaptation in corvid brains that made them smart enough to use tools and wondered if dinosaurs could have been more intelligent than we generally give them credit for. Even if this was unlikely, it provided a good idea for a story, and allowed us to create sympathetic dinosaur ‘characters’ with different personalities and story arcs of their own. We imagined the dinosaurs were painted and decorated by the nimble raptors, teams of which, following the rules of emergences, became smarter the more of them, to the point where they were adorning themselves and other dinosaurs with feathers, dye and twigs.

I really enjoyed working on the project and I can’t remember why it didn’t carry on. Our artist, the remarkable Mukesh Singh, couldn’t draw all three volumes and I think that might have thrown us off a bit. Then when the film didn’t happen, the project faded like spring snow.

I also wrote a movie script version of the story for Barry. This was a bit different from the comic and Barry put me through bootcamp with a series of intense creative meetings where we dismantled and rebuilt the screenplay again and again, until the last draft, the 10^th, as I recall, was pretty great – I said it was Apocalypse Now meets Jurassic Park and that’s about right. I heard they tried to do rewrites on it but stalled. It’s still out there…

In terms of unfinished projects, I most want to do Sinatoro - the comic book version and the screenplay - hence the inclusion of that ‘New Black’ banner at the top, from the rare collector’s edition Sinatoro T-shirt!

Haven’t seen Good Luck yet. Will report when I have.

More next time…