Apparently Dead Superhero In 'Not Dead' Shocker

[alexsarll]

Stay Beautiful last night was so close to being good, if it hadn't been for a few too many people with a variety of attitude problems. Some of them blatantly townie types, but others looking like they belonged there. Even among a generation only a little younger, there's a real...discourtesy these days. Which in turn makes one feel like a disapproving old person, which doubtless only encourages them.

The great thing about the Sudan teddy incident is the way it has totally mainstreamed 'islamophobia' aka the legitimate realisation that just maybe this religion is not in fact making legitimate demands, but is dangerously insane. The Danish cartoon row...well, I guess political cartoonists aren't as sympathetic a focus for British public opinion as a well-meaning teacher overseas with good intentions, are they? In a sense they are setting out to offend, so protecting their right to do so isn't quite such an easy sell. Of course, the average liberal acquaintance is one thing - but you can be sure that if anyone is prepared to defend the islamic outrage, they'll be a Guardian reader. Step forward Tom Snow, who places the blame for the incident not with a bunch of psychos looking for offence wherever they can find it, but with the European tendency to like animals! "Many Muslims find our relationships with dogs particularly distasteful", he notes - so to avoid the risk of offending these reasonable chaps again, let's not have any tedies at all, and all shoot our pets!
Tosser.
In fairness to the Guardian, they have also printed Martin Amis' latest word on the absurd accusations recently levelled against him. Realising that everyone except the very slowest children in the class should already understand that islamophobia is not racism, but aware that said children really do need to be brought up to speed, for everyone else reading he really cuts loose with the rhetorical fireworks. I've always liked him more for his essays - and no, not just on this topic - than his fiction, and suspect that's how he'll be remembered.

Speaking of the slow children - Frank Miller seems to be making it increasingly clear for their benefit that All Star Batman And Robin is a comedy book. Not that I mind, because it's bloody funny. Even if the goddamn Batman didn't describe himself as the goddamn Batman once this issue.

Comments

[monkeyssk8.livejournal.com]

You gotta love sentences like this:

The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.

Otherwise, what is Stay Beautiful?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

This (http://www.staybeautifulclub.co.uk/) is Stay Beautiful. For a long time it was very much 'my club' - these days, not so much. There were some real dicks in last night.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

This was my first in three months - I'm not the regular I was. But...I don't know, the problem with the Purple Turtle is not so much the venue itself, it's that it's in Camden. Everywhere in Camden seems to attract a certain percentage of wankers, on weekends at least.

[worldofagwu.livejournal.com]

- aw, no goddamns...? - for shame! ( - i think i counted 8 in the previous issue )

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

They might just have been blending into the background a bit by now - and at times I was laughing so much I couldn't see straight.

"Hal Jordan. Green Lantern, That ring of his is the most powerful known weapon in the galaxy. If he thinks something up - it happens. That makes him the Milky Way's top cop. His alien mentor was looking for a man of superhuman will - and a man without fear.
The mentor's job description for Hal didn't seem to factor in smarts. He's dumb as a post.
I've seen more intelligent hockey pucks."

[augstone.livejournal.com]

yeah, amis' essay was pretty good. i esp. liked:

It ought to be a rule of the discourse, of any discourse, that one novelist should give another novelist the basic credit of not being a maniac.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It's a great line, though I think the timing is a little against him - what with his recent passing, there has been much talk lately of Norman Mailer, who blatantly was a maniac.

[augstone.livejournal.com]

heh, yes, much as i like the line, i was thinking it couldn't be entirely accurate.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Still, I bet even Norman Mailer never drank wine and cola.

In my own special way....

[mylifebythesea.livejournal.com]

Just read All Star Batman. It's the mirror world version of All Star Superman and, as you say, hilarious.

Also, Dan Dare was indeed brilliant.

Re: In my own special way....

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I kept on misting up at the utter Englishness of it all.

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the text and sorry for running out without saying goodbye - I had been intending to come back in. I had a very agreeable cigarette with a very convivial young man and I think I realised at that point that my evening had peaked and my nightbus sense started going off and sure enough I got to the stop and my bus arrived.

Stay Beautiful is still fun if you get slaughtered - the last really fun one I had was when Mel and I poledanced and we got told off and I fell down the stairs a bit.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I think the last couple of times I got really drunk there I just ended up a bit confused by it all, whereas last night I was in pretty much the right state - it was just that the evening kept offering impediments to that (most of them young, male and convinced they were It).

And on the other count, no worries.

[moleintheground.livejournal.com]

Sitting in your toilet alone crying is fun if you're drunk enough.

[pippaalice.livejournal.com]

no it isn't. :P

ION Yay dancing christmas mole

[michael-winner.livejournal.com]

Especially if you're w@nking.

[moleintheground.livejournal.com]

I'm a fuck Tom Snow up. God, how DESPERATE can you BE to pretend that whitey is ALWAYS WRONG?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

That's the amazing thing about desperation - the realisation that there's no bottom floor in Hell. They can always sink lower, and they will.

[publicansdecoy.livejournal.com]

I know we've spoken about this before, so I don't imagine I'll change your mind on this one now, but do you really not see that you and Tom Snow are both making the same error - namely you're assuming that all Muslims will think exactly teh same when it comes to this issue (or indeed any other 'Muslim' issue).

Only a few eejits in Sudan have been pushing the punishment of Ms Gibbons. It's certinaly not a 'whole of Islam' thing. Sudan has received very little support on this from other Muslim countries. Even the usual pricks liek Inayat Bunglawala haven't exactly been tame in their criticism of Sudan.

There are lots and lots of thing that you can criticise about Islam and about the way some Muslims interpret the faith. In many cases that's a majority of Muslims too, sadly. But every time there's some bad news story about Islam it defies logic to say 'You are a Muslism, some other Muslims did this, therefore you must support them'. You can't just see all Muslims as some homogenous block. It's not logical, and it is pretty offensive.

-x-

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I don't say they all support this particular manifestation of islam (Hell, the letter before Snow's makes that plenty clear). I say that each idiotic emanation of islam reminds us of how noxious the central corpus is. There is simply too much in the koran and the bible that is poisonous twaddle for me not to be suspicious of anyone regarding either book as holy. They may, by selective reading, be a nice person in spite of the faith - but then they'd probably have been a nice person without it too, probably nicer. I'm sure there were some members of the nazi party who just liked the idea of German economic renewal, and had no beef with the Jews or gays, so skimmed over that part of the message. That doesn't stop nazism from being an overall bad idea - and christianity and islam have both had more time and more space to perpetrate more evil.

(It is interesting that Bungle seems to be taking a few steps towards sanity lately (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7125369.stm). I don't for a minute buy them as anything more than tactical withdrawals, but then a lot of progress against the christians has been made through just such limited retreats. It gives me a certain hope for the future, if only the eventual future)