We're designed to live neither together nor alone

[alexsarll]

Sentences which could easily be misinterpreted: "I was mourning the end of a long-term relationship with a massive bender."

Grant Morrison has abandoned The Authority, putting most of the blame on the predominantly poor reviews the first issue received. What? Where would he be, where would we be, if he'd quit Animal Man or Doom Patrol or JLA over the reviews which missed the point? Even with his current Batman run, a lot of people were underwhelmed until he deployed the issue that pulled it all together. On top of which, this is a man who more than anyone else understands art's roots in magic. That first, brilliant set-up issue of The Authority began with our world, our poor hero-less world...and then threw in The Authority to save us. You can't leave a spell like that half-cast, man! And for pity's sake, it was only meant to be a four issue run anyway. If he'd been on schedule in the first place, it would all have been written before those bad reviews even appeared.
I'm still looking forward to his DC Universe stuff, obviously. But this has really dented my respect for him.

It's little more than a month since I first saw The Long Blondes live; this time I knew the new album and they played 'You Could Have Both', but I still have my reservations, and they come down to one thing: Kate Jackson's not the 'Kate Jackson' of the songs. I say this not as any criticism of her, you understand - only with the same sense of regret as accompanied my realisation that Viggo Mortensen is not actually Aragorn. I love the Blondes' music for its loneliness, the predatory gleam in its eye, its desperation. My kind host cappuccino_kid tells me that in the smaller shows in earlier days, more of that sort of stuff came across. But at a triumphant Forum show, with the crowd singing back every line...well, Kate's too busy having fun to get caught up in all that angst, and who can blame her? It suits some of the songs (from 'Guilt' onwards, the show really comes alive) but I am forced to conclude that, like St Etienne among others, for me The Long Blondes are a band where the live incarnation just isn't quite what I'm after.

Hushang Golshiri's The Prince seems to be accounted quite the classic of Persian literature - Golshiri was imprisoned by the Shah and no more popular under the ayatollahs, which always augurs well. Nor have I any criticism of James Buchan's translation, or his introduction (which one critic correctly classifies as "lucid"). The problem is...there's only so far a translation can go. The back cover told me of an ageing prince looking back on his life and his dynasty's extinction, which made me think of Lampedusa's The Leopard; the tone sounded somehow akin to that obscurely poisonous quality in Mishima. These are both writers I've enjoyed in translation, and yes, there are resemblances to both. But the hallucinatory shifts in identity, the portraits unconfined by their frames...these reminded me more of Polanski's Repulsion or Cronenberg's Spider*. Imagine trying to write those out as prose. Now, imagine trying to translate that prose. Oh, and all the characters are obliquely identified historical and political figures about whom your translation's readers are unlikely to know much, if anything. Imagine a Mongolian reading The Damned United, or a member of a remote tribe whose first encounter with Western literature is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, and you will have some handle on my frustration.
The LoEG comparison's an interesting one, because straight after finishing The Prince I read an earlier, simpler Alan Moore - the recoloured 'Killing Joke'**. A book Moore has damn near disowned, purportedly because he doesn't feel it means anything in the wider world - it's just about Batman and the Joker being very similar, and since they don't exist, so what? Well, I'm not so sure about that. It's not his finest hour, for sure - like most of his DCU work bar Swamp Thing it's maybe a little sketchy, a little hurried. But would it mean anything to someone who'd never encountered these characters before? I think maybe it would. A murderous madman says all it needs is "one bad day", and any one of us could end up like him; another madman tries to prove him wrong. That's universal, isn't it? At least as much so, I would contend, as Golshiri's last scion of a deposed dynasty, at once ashamed and envious of his royal ancestors' excesses. Batman and the Joker don't exist - but nowadays, do faded princelings? Only a handful in the gossip columns; for the rest of us, strictly by analogy.

*Yes, I know it was a book first. But still...
**Yes, the new colouring job is much smarter, much more evocative, and simply better. But perhaps not so much so that the book's worth buying again if you already own it. Handily, I didn't, and this was free.

Comments

[baphomette.livejournal.com]

That Guardian article actually reads like it's a spoof. How can anyone be so addicted to something that they piss blood and get their flatmate almost knifed, then argue that it shouldn't be put in a higher classification? If it is real, that man is an idiot.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

You think? I quite liked that bit. Too many people make mistakes, and then try to blame the tools of their downfall rather than themselves as architects. "I crashed my car while speeding - thus cars should be banned."

Not that I was linking to it for its admirable sense of autonomy or anything, I just got the giggles over that opening. So to speak.

[baphomette.livejournal.com]

That's a fair point, but of course speeding is against the law, and rightly so ;)

It makes sense to take responsibility for your own folly to an extent, but when something is obviously dangerous and addictive I don't think it's an entirely bad idea to make that thing illegal to deter people from doing it. I still keep hoping the bloody smoking ban will force me to quit properly at some point...

And on points of etiquette, you should never laugh at someone's opening. Terribly bad form.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Whereas I would always rather the negative excesses which can result from abuses of the available options were penalised, without this being taken as a reason to crack down on the availability of options. For instance, let's say this guy (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_west/7360871.stm), having sobered up, starts campaigning for an increase in alcohol tax - I would not be impressed.

[baphomette.livejournal.com]

Actually that's not a bad argument for survival of the fittest non-peons. Applied to things like cars and guns it might not work so well thouh, since those are capable of claiming other lives, eg. I'm all for Pete Doherty dying of a heroin overdose, but not from smashin ghis car into Nando's while we're all having dinner.

District Judge Andrew Shaw issued an arrest warrant, adding: 'I hope the force will soon be with him.' I like this Shaw fellow already.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

The problem being, even our stern gun laws don't seem to be much cop at keeping guns out of the handsof peons. Or cars, for that matter - consider all the cases one sees of dangerous driving by people who had no license in the first place. For which part of the sentence, strangely, always seems to be a driving ban...

[baphomette.livejournal.com]

Or the 11 year old girl caught driving drunk who was banned from getting behind the wheel for... two years. Mmm, good thinking there.

Let's face it, the solution is to ban peons. I have suspected this for a while...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Come on, these days we need to think green. Why ban peons when we could use them as a fuel source?

[baphomette.livejournal.com]

What if we ever started to run out of real peons? We might lstart killing all the marginal peons off and then the only vaguely peonish unti eventually there were only a handful of elite people left, probably just enough to fill a decent sized pub where we'd all stay drinking forever because there'd be no need to do any work with that amount of people killed off by the peon cull

Sounds like a great idea.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Plus, you're forgetting how quickly they breed.

[baphomette.livejournal.com]

Some might say I was trying to forget that, on purpose.


Brrrrr.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

You must so be looking forward to travelling on London's buses again.

[moleintheground.livejournal.com]

I saw that bender thing too. I mean, I saw that bender and I... what I mean is, that bender thing made me really happy, I mean... oh you know what I mean.

Shocked at Grant. He must be getting old.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

But...I don't know, storming off in a strop is fine for Moore, because he always does it so well. It's the phrasing of this, the suspicion that there's an element of bullshit and maybe even cowardice, that's what bugs me.

I do hope it's just a glitch, and an excuse in part motivated by overwork (52 must have been a killer). But I fear you could be right.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

I remember championing the Long Blondes when they were not well known - you were one of the few people I knew who knew about them, who looked forward to that first album as much as I did.

I've never seen them live though, and this experience is salutory. I'd bought a ticket to see the Long Blondes at the Oxford Zodiac about two years ago, and had persuaded Jeremy (cleanskies) to come with me. I think this was before Someone to Drive You Home.

Jeremy was mugged and beaten very badly that weekend (she didn't realise quite how badly at the time - she thought she could still make it earlier in the day). Obviously, she couldn't come. I tried to pass her ticket onto other people in Oxford, but nobody could come at short notice.

I sat in the pub by the Zodiac looking at all the young, bereted people with long legs and off-the-peg attitudes masquerading as Webellion, and I knew that I couldn't handle going to this gig on my own; that a slightly plump middle aged Physics Teacher was always going to be treated with a slight sneer whatever her credentials, and I went to the Zodiac and said I wasn't coming, and could the ticketmaster pass the tickets onto someone deserving (The tickets were seven quid each - The Long Blondes were a seven quid band at the time).

I loved that article on the Kate Jackson we know through her music. Thing is, from what you are saying, Kate Jackson is probably defining herself by her audience. I reckon I'm the litmus test for the genuiness of bands; if I feel comfortable seeing them alone (I would see The Indelicates alone, for example) then I reckon they do what they say on the tin. If I don't, I'm probably subliminally grokking that they're more about image.

Not that there's anything wrong with image. I still think that Someone To Drive You Home is one of the best debut albums EVAH: It's very hard not to be derivative these days, and the Blondes actually manage there to be less derivative than most. I haven't heard the new album.

Anyway, I would like to see them, sometime. Perhaps when they're past their first flush of Cool.

[cappuccino-kid.livejournal.com]

Well, Alex spotted people in PWEI t-shirts and Dodgy t-shirts at the Forum...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I was quite a late adopter myself, by some standards - the first couple of tracks I heard I didn't really get, and it wasn't until cappuccino_kid persevered (taping me the original 'Christmas is Cancelled' alongside Vichy's cover, plus 'Giddy Stratospheres') that I was converted. Certainly I missed all the chances I could have had for seeing the early 'I was there' gigs.

I know what you mean about feeling out of place at shows - it's why I've not seen Los Campesinos! yet, for starters. And even company is no guarantee; when I went to see Patrick Wolf in December, one of our party had History with Wolf, and yet I still felt massively out of place, having apparently wandered into the set of Skins' goth spin-off. But the two Blondes shows I've attended in London have been odd for how few Blondes wannabes I've spotted. A handful, sure, but even aside from the t-shirt observation Jamie notes, the crowds seem to have more Kate-fanciers than Kate-emulators. Which apart from anything else bugs me for purely selfish reasons, just like the reverse situation obtaining at Momus shows, where there were always far more men who wanted to be him than the sort of girls one hopes would be fascinated with men like him.

The new album is worth a listen, certainly; I don't like it as much as the first, but I'd much rather they made this step to somewhere new than become derivative of themselves.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Sorry, forgot to say...I don't think it's even about 'image' per se. It's more...you know how there are a hundred sad songs which have been taken up as anthems? And especially when they're played live, the sheer communality tends to motivate against the sadness, because if you're all singing about being lonely together then you're not alone anymore? I think it's more that. And it's not even that I usually mind that in and of itself - hey, I've seen Morrissey live. It's something specific to the Blondes, perhaps because Someone To Drive You Home had such a story to it. So seeing those songs live feels like...like wandering through a reenactment of a favourite drama, maybe? Fun, but still somehow not quite right.

[azureskies.livejournal.com]

Gahh, I linked to the Newsarama panel piece this week, but was in a hurry, and so didn't read the whole thing, too busy focusing on what he was saying about Batman and Final Crisis. Arse. That's... really annoying. If nothing else, Gene Ha was turning in some career-best work on it. Could have been really something. I've never understood why it was so badly delayed anyway - he's turning out a lot of work at the moment, and it's been pretty much the only title that's suffered (apart from the odd week or two's delay on Batman, and the earlier necessity of a fill-in.

I was really hoping he might still pull it out of the bag and give us the rest of the story at some point. Sigh.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

That seems to have been the general reaction to that piece, tbh. It may even have been intended thus; a good say to bury bad news, and all that.

Re: delays - All-Star Superman felt like it was going pretty glacially for a while, but I just put that down to Quitely.
WildCATS, though, has been even more ludicrously delayed - one issue to Authority's two, and how insane is it that the two #1s shipped the same week? - and while Morrison claims there that he's persevering with WildCATS, it all ties in to the general perception that Wildstorm is DC's redheaded stepchild. Until I get some firm evidence to the contrary, I'm marking this down as another sin on Levitz's head. And even if I do get some firm evidence, I'll come up with a conspiracy theory to discount it.