Category: Uncategorized

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“Harmony is The Word, Donnie!”

Jack Kirby / DC Comics

Kirby does synaesthesia, from Forever People #2. There’s something wonderfully compelling about an old square’s idea of being “turned on” to the flower people, especially when he’s doing it years after the peak of the flower children movement. I’m not being sarcastic, I should add; I think I like Kirby’s take on psychedelia more than I like the “real thing” in many ways – there’s a purity of intent to it that was very quickly vanquished from the genuine article. Kirby’s Forever People must have seemed out of touch when it appeared in 1971, as opposed to the more charming “out of time” quality that it has now, because it was too close to what it was writing about, but not close enough to be concurrent with the movement… But, looking back now, all I can really think is that I wish that Kirby’s version of the Age of Aquarius had come to pass, somehow.

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“The Germans Deserved Great Credit For Their Moral Seriousness”

The delicatessen had three or four tables at which people could sit, purchase a cup of coffee, and read out-of-date Continental newspapers. There was always a copy of Le Monde and Corriere della Sera, and sometimes Spiegel, which Isabel found interesting because of its habit of publishing articles about the Second World War and German guilt. It was important to remember, and perhaps some Germans felt that they could never forget, but would there be a point at which those awful images of the past could be put away? Not if we want to avoid a repetition, said some, and the Germans took this very seriously, while others perhaps preferred to forget. The Germans deserved great credit for their moral seriousness, which is why Isabel liked them so much. Anyone – any people – was capable of doing what they did in their historical moment of madness – and their goodness lay in the fact that they later faced up to what they had done. Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine-tooth comb? She was not aware of it, if they did, and nobody seems to mention the genocide of the Armenians – an atrocity which was virtually within living memory – except the Armenians, of course.

And the Belgians, she suddenly remembered, who had passed a resolution in their Senate only a few years previously noting what had happened in Armenia. Some had said that was all very well, but then what about what Leopold did in the Congo? And were there not islanders, somewhere in the Pacific, whose ancestors stood accused of eating – yes, eating the original inhabitants of the lands they occupied? Most unfortunate. And then there were the British who behaved extremely badly in so many parts of the world. There was the woeful story of the extinction of the Tasmanian aboriginals and so many instances of cruelty and theft under the bright protection of the Union Jack. When would British history books face up to the appalling British contribution to slavery, which involved the Arabs, too, and numerous Africans (who were not just on the receiving end)? We were all as bad as one another, but at some point we had to overlook that fact, or at least not make too much of it. History, it seemed, could so quickly become a matter of mutual accusation and recrimination, an infinite regress of cruelty and oppression, unless forgetfulness or forgiveness intervened.

– Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate.

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Today Is The Greatest Day I’ve Ever Had (Note: Sarcasm As Well As Smashing Pumpkins Reference)

It’s one of those days, the ones where everything just seems to continue happening even though you’re hoping that there’ll be some time soon to catch your breath; from waking up to the sound of an alarm that water was coming in the basement to everything that’s followed (Mostly related to the basement flooding, which has pretty much taken up the entire day and my brain throughout), today feels like a month of stress wrapped up into one 11-hour package (Has it really only been 11 hours since I woke up? Jeez). This can only be a karmic reaction for being so relaxed during a massage yesterday that I fell asleep; this’ll teach me for thinking that my embarrassment over falling asleep during a blooming* massage was karmic payback enough.

(* – self-censorship for both comic effect and whatever sensitive souls may be reading this.)

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#Humblebrag

This will never, ever happen again, I’m sure, but here’s the current list of top 10 stories on Techland:

The ones that aren’t blurred out? They’re mine. Somehow, I have four stories in the current top 10, and three of them are the top 3 currently. This is a somewhat boasting post, I know, but hopefully illustrates my point about what a weird week it’s been.

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As I said in email to someone earlier this week, this week has been crazy; I’ve had weird (and amusing) passive aggressiveness with PR folk for work things, semi-quasi job offers that I really really wanted to accept but financial and time realities prevented me from doing so, amid personal stuff and a cleanse that has kicked my ass in ways that I would never have imagined having previously done other cleanses that have seemed so much more hardcore (Seriously, on Monday I could’ve killed someone for looking at me the wrong way, I was so pissed off and unhappy). Considering how last week went, it’s possible that January is fascinatingly shaping up to be the month that tries to kill me before I make it through to what is hopefully going to be a much better Rest Of 2012. If what’s happened in the last couple weeks is an omen for how the rest of the year is going to turn out, I might just consider hibernating and starting over in 2013.

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“I Am Just As Bad As Everyone Else”

The crossword would start the day, and then she would glance at the new itself, trying to avoid the salacious court cases which seemed to take up more and more newspaper columns. There was such an obsession with human weakness and failing; with the tragedies of peoples’ lives; with the banal affairs of actors and singers. You had to be aware of human weakness, of course, because it simply was, but to revel in it seemed to her to be voyeurism, or even a form of moralistic tale telling. And yet, she thought, do I not read these things myself? I do. I am just as bad as everybody else, drawn to these scandals. She smiled ruefully, noticing the heading: MINISTER’S SHAME ROCKS PARISH. Of course she would read that, as everybody else would, although she knew that behind the story was a personal tragedy, and all the embarrassment that goes with that.

– Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club.

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No-One’s Listening

There’s something to be said for blogging in anonymity, like this; I’m so aware of “the audience” (or the potential audience, or the need for an audience) in my work that it makes me far too self-aware at times, too self-censoring or second guessing whatever I’d initially wanted to say – even if all I really wanted to say was oh please I have to do x number of posts still and there’s nothing to write about oh god – and, ultimately, that’s a weirdly depressing thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there’s an artistic muse to my blogging that must be followed or else, woe, disaster; I’m too much a believer in Bill Drummond’s idea of pop and the requirement of an audience for that, if nothing else, and too much a cynic and pessimist when it comes to whatever artistic value I can offer the world with my writing. But there comes a point, eventually, when you start to write what people expect or what you think they want with so little of yourself or your interests in there that it feels not just like “work,” but like the worst, shittiest work imaginable, and that’s never fun.

Here, however… I genuinely don’t know if anyone is reading this, because I haven’t really told anyone about this site yet; I made a passing reference to it on the old iamgraememcmillan site, but that’s it. I haven’t tweeted about it, or linked it on Facebook or wherever. I should, I know that, because I’m selfish and want an audience to hang on my every word and all that, but for now, I’m writing this honestly thinking that no-one is going to read it. And while part of me thinks that that’s very self-indulgent, I think that’s good, in a way; I think we all need to remember to be a little self-indulgent sometimes, if we can keep it in perspective. And, after all, isn’t that what a blog is supposed to be, just a little?

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A Startling Look Into The World That’s Coming!

“The World That’s Coming” is a phrase that comes from OMAC, a Jack Kirby comic cover-dated October 1974, which just so happens to be the month in which I was born. The idea that OMAC is the same age as me seems weirdly wrong, somehow; Kirby comics feel eternal in some way to me – I have no problem accepting that it’s 37 years old now, for example, but the idea that it was just 20 years old when I was in school, or in its teens as I was struggling with acne and puberty seems somewhat mystifyingly wrong in ways that I can’t properly explain.

It struck me, awhile back, that I am always living in The World That’s Coming, these days; not just in the sense of living in the future that Kirby was writing about in the mid-70s (OMAC is filled with futuristic devices and ideas that have come to fruition in one way or another) – although we’re in “the 21st Century,” a phrase that still feels like the future to me sometimes, more than a decade in – but also in that I make a large part of my living writing about technology, social media and the like, and so am constantly thinking about what’s to come (Another part of my living is made writing about comics that are months from coming out, speculating as to their meaning, their plot, their quality, the whole shebang). And so… The World That’s Coming.

The plan, such as it is, for this blog is pretty much a personal challenge: To write more for myself in 2012, without making myself crazy. There’ll be 366 posts about pop songs over the course of the next year – intended to be one every day, but that’ll slip at some point, I can tell, so then I’ll have to double up or whatever to get caught up – and lots of other ephemera, me working out ideas that I might use at Techland or Newsarama or whatever, as well as just… random things. Photographs, memories, commentary on whatever’s on my mind at the moment. We’ll see what happens together, I guess. Are you ready for The World That’s Coming?, as DC Comics used to ask.