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January being January, and me being a geek*, the best thing to do with Friday night seemed to be staying in and reading comics. The evening begins with a perfectly, accidentally synchronised double high; I'm listening to 'new' Dexys album The Projected Passion Revue while reading The Apocalypse War, and just as Kevin hits the spoken word passage of 'There There My Dear' and tells us he's only searching for the young soul rebels, Judge Dredd presses the button that will annihilate East Meg One with its own nukes. After that, the rest of the weekend has a lot to live up to.
The evening's main project was re-reading Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run. It no longer seems quite so heroically deranged as it did first time round, but that's just because the rest of the world has caught up. Now Morrison gets to play with Superman and Batman instead of the C-list, now everything from Natural Born Killers to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has followed on from throwaway Doom Patrol scenes...and if some of the more stream-of-consciousness scripting in Doom Patrol dialogue can now feel a little try-hard, you can nonethless see that it was a necessary stage both for Morrison and the medium. And for all its influence, Doom Patrol has its unique charms too - occult investigator Willoughby Kipling, for instance, who is basically John Constantine as played by Withnail, ie my hero. The adversaries range from Hoodman Blind and Hoodman Shame (who eat the words on the tip of your tongue) through the Brotherhood of Dada to the Beardhunter, and the dialogue includes some brilliant (skewering of) comics pseudoscience - "I'd suggest some kind of organising field, but a lot of the time I really don't know what I'm talking about." I'm so glad the copyright idiocies which prevented this being reprinted for so long have been resolved; I only hope the even better spin-off Flex Mentallo, probably the best comic ever, is next.
After which, for all that I enjoyed Seeing Scarlet and Feeling Gloomy and pubbing, the real world in January can only feel...well, like the real world in January.
Tobias Jones' jaw-droppingly batsh1t piece "Secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians" is essentially a series of logical leaps and misrepresentations strung together into something superficially resembling an argument, but it really hits its stride with the claim that ""the secular was Christianity's gift to the world, denoting a public space in which authorities should be respected, but could be legitimately challenged and could never accord to themselves absolute or ultimate significance". Christianity, far from creating an absolutist state, initiated dissent from state absolutism." Has this arse never heard of the Middle Ages, of the Inquisition, of heretics burnt, Jews slaughtered and pagan shrines despoiled? True, he seems to be a deeply lost, sad and confused man, but contra Albarn, I see that as no reason for mercy on the ludicrous tit.
(Whether by wit or serendipity, a few pages later the same section reprints an 1865 Free Kirk Bull Against The Press, in which a bunch of joyless Scottish christians threatened temporal and eternal sanction against the papers for daring to criticise said kirk's protests against Sunday trains. Alas, that doesn't seem to be online)
Looking at my Albums of 2006 list, there were some fabulous debuts by great new British acts last year. Alas, Lily Allen aside the public seems keener on buying the debuts of talentless twits.
*I know the geeks have conquered the world, but I was still taken aback to see an article about Games Workshop's profits in the business pages of the national press.
The evening's main project was re-reading Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run. It no longer seems quite so heroically deranged as it did first time round, but that's just because the rest of the world has caught up. Now Morrison gets to play with Superman and Batman instead of the C-list, now everything from Natural Born Killers to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has followed on from throwaway Doom Patrol scenes...and if some of the more stream-of-consciousness scripting in Doom Patrol dialogue can now feel a little try-hard, you can nonethless see that it was a necessary stage both for Morrison and the medium. And for all its influence, Doom Patrol has its unique charms too - occult investigator Willoughby Kipling, for instance, who is basically John Constantine as played by Withnail, ie my hero. The adversaries range from Hoodman Blind and Hoodman Shame (who eat the words on the tip of your tongue) through the Brotherhood of Dada to the Beardhunter, and the dialogue includes some brilliant (skewering of) comics pseudoscience - "I'd suggest some kind of organising field, but a lot of the time I really don't know what I'm talking about." I'm so glad the copyright idiocies which prevented this being reprinted for so long have been resolved; I only hope the even better spin-off Flex Mentallo, probably the best comic ever, is next.
After which, for all that I enjoyed Seeing Scarlet and Feeling Gloomy and pubbing, the real world in January can only feel...well, like the real world in January.
Tobias Jones' jaw-droppingly batsh1t piece "Secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians" is essentially a series of logical leaps and misrepresentations strung together into something superficially resembling an argument, but it really hits its stride with the claim that ""the secular was Christianity's gift to the world, denoting a public space in which authorities should be respected, but could be legitimately challenged and could never accord to themselves absolute or ultimate significance". Christianity, far from creating an absolutist state, initiated dissent from state absolutism." Has this arse never heard of the Middle Ages, of the Inquisition, of heretics burnt, Jews slaughtered and pagan shrines despoiled? True, he seems to be a deeply lost, sad and confused man, but contra Albarn, I see that as no reason for mercy on the ludicrous tit.
(Whether by wit or serendipity, a few pages later the same section reprints an 1865 Free Kirk Bull Against The Press, in which a bunch of joyless Scottish christians threatened temporal and eternal sanction against the papers for daring to criticise said kirk's protests against Sunday trains. Alas, that doesn't seem to be online)
Looking at my Albums of 2006 list, there were some fabulous debuts by great new British acts last year. Alas, Lily Allen aside the public seems keener on buying the debuts of talentless twits.
*I know the geeks have conquered the world, but I was still taken aback to see an article about Games Workshop's profits in the business pages of the national press.
