alexsarll: (marshal)
Some jolly news for a gloomy Sunday* - Iran's nuclear-dick-waving, anti-Semitic scumbag of a President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is reportedly rather unwell. Let's all hope he takes a turn for the worse real soon!

*Looking out of the window, I'm not currently seeing the benefits of that hour we saved.
alexsarll: (howl)
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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.
alexsarll: (marshal)
Local people respond to the news that a marksman has been called in to kill Kingston's pigeons. Please note, localness cannot be guaranteed.

"Historical war epic 300 has been criticised as an attack on Iranian culture" - what infuriates me here is not so much that the censorious scum are whining, just as they did with Alexander; I can understand that it must suck to be reminded that the West has kicked the arse of Persian slave states before and if needs be, will do so again. It's the specific *substance* of the complaints which I think worth noting.
"Following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the US initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture. Certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies."
Yes, because anyone familiar with Frank Miller's work will know just how much he toadies to the US government and media; it's certainly not as if he's consistently treated them with a scorn second only to that in which he holds the enemies of Western civilisation itself.
As for describing 300's Asian armies as "ugly murderous dumb savages" - look at the top picture on that story. Does that man look ugly, or dumb? Cruel, perhaps, even barbarous. But not ugly or dumb - then again, perhaps they're going by the standards of modern Iran and considering effeminacy and beardlessness to be inherently abominable? As for savagery and murderousness - well, I think the Spartans give the Persians a run for their money there - in fact, that's pretty much the point of the story, isn't it?
(I do have one worry of my own about 300, though. I hear that they've expanded the love story past half a dozen perfect, heartbreaking panels into an actual subplot, which could only distract from the brutal, inspiring purity of the comic's plot. Poor show)

A hundred-odd pages into Neal Stephenson's The System of the World and, as against the fitful starts of its predecessors, it hits the ground running - from misty Dartmoor across a resurgent England to the bustle of modern London's beginning, it's an astonishing feat of sustained storytelling energy. I had thought to hold off a little longer before finishing the Baroque Cycle, but couldn't resist when I saw a paperback of this in the library (the hardbacks are a menace, at least if attempted on public transport); thus far, I'm very glad I buckled.

Doom Patrol's creator dies; unlike many of the old breed, Arnold Drake was a man smart enough to realise that Grant Morrison was the perfect handler for the old toys. In other comics 'news': an incomplete list of Captain America's previous 'deaths'.
alexsarll: (pangolin)
Oh, but this weather is a tease! So sunny and Spring - but it looked that way yesterday too, shortly before I got a drenching. And already today, there was the shower timed perfectly to catch me as I went for the paper.

If you've yet to hear Israel's Eurovision entry, a demonically gleeful response to the possibility of getting nuked by Iran, then Teapacks' 'Push The Button' can be found here. I was expecting something more synthpop, for some reason, so its Gogol Bordello stylings were rather a surprise, but it's still awesome. Between this, 'Vampires Are Alive' and the Ark up to do Sweden's entry, this is the first time since Tatu that I've put the date of the final in my diary.

"There aren't any jobs for black actors in the UK", complains an article backed up with an apparently compelling list of those who have made it big in the US. Where it falls down is in not noting that the young, attractive white male lead in The Wire is also a Brit without much UK work to his name, ditto the young white male leads of Battlestar Galactica. Even Hugh Laurie has been reduced to putting on an atrocious American accent as House, because there are simply more jobs and more money for actors in America, whatever colour they may be.

December 2017

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213141516
1718192021 2223
24252627282930
31      

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 24th, 2025 04:32 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios