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I'm trying my best to get into the Fyfe Dangerfield solo album but...it's just not as interesting as Guillemots. I think we have to conclude that, in the new terminology, he has 'done a Cheryl'.
With so much good TV restarting this week, I suppose it makes things easier that, its Fast Show pedigree notwithstanding, Bellamy's People is rubbish. The broad-brush caricatures - of a fat man, the Mitford sisters, Andrew Loog Oldham - lack any spark of life, and even when they have a target which is rich in comic potential and really deserves the mockery, a 'community leader', what ought to be funny is not.
Similarly, How Earth Made Us has some stunning footage - especially of a crystal cave deep beneath Mexico - but I'm saved from the need to persevere by the presenter, who is essentially Peter Capaldi playing a prick.
"in a real revolution - not a simple dynastic change or mere reform of institutions - in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment - often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured - that is the definition of revolutionary success."
So wrote Joseph Conrad in 1911's Under Western Eyes, and could the last 99 years have done more to prove his point? Of course, he does not deny that the Russian autocracy against which his revolutionaries strive is itself a grotesque and incoherent tyranny. Similarly, we cannot really claim any better for the deranged kleptocracy which still dares to call itself capitalism and which holds the modern world in so firm a grip. But nor can we realistically believe that a revolution would make things any better when, almost without exception, history shows them making things basically the same, yet slightly worse.
Have also been reading Tokyo Days, Bangkok Nights, a collection of two Vertigo Pop miniseries from 2002-2003. At the time I only read the London one by Peter Milligan which, like so much of his work, remains uncollected (but wasn't that great anyway). These two are by Jonathan Vankin, a writer whose name still means little to me, and on this showing that's no great omission. Both stories have Americans coming up against cultural strangeness and institutional corruption in the relevant cities, and while I've quite liked Giuseppe Camuncoli's Hellblazer art (a gig for which he was blatantly auditioning with his portrayal of the one Brit here), he can't make Bangkok anything more than the sort of clunkingly obvious middlebrow culture clash story which, on screen, would be in with a good chance of an Oscar or two. So why did I bother reading this, or talking about it? Because Tokyo has art by Seth Fisher. I've only been getting into his stuff recently, but it's amazing - he's one of the very few artists to have anything like the sheer physicality of Frank Quitely, but instead of Quitely's hyper-realism it's paired with a cartoonish sensibility somewhere between Philip Bond and manga. It's gorgeous. And there's hardly any of it because, for reasons I've never seen properly explained, Fisher went off the roof of an Osaka club in 2006 and died having never really done any work with a decent writer. So we have to sift through what he could accomplish on a script by Vankin, or Zeb Wells, and wonder what he could have accomplished paired with Milligan or Morrison. Rest in peace, Seth.
With so much good TV restarting this week, I suppose it makes things easier that, its Fast Show pedigree notwithstanding, Bellamy's People is rubbish. The broad-brush caricatures - of a fat man, the Mitford sisters, Andrew Loog Oldham - lack any spark of life, and even when they have a target which is rich in comic potential and really deserves the mockery, a 'community leader', what ought to be funny is not.
Similarly, How Earth Made Us has some stunning footage - especially of a crystal cave deep beneath Mexico - but I'm saved from the need to persevere by the presenter, who is essentially Peter Capaldi playing a prick.
"in a real revolution - not a simple dynastic change or mere reform of institutions - in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment - often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured - that is the definition of revolutionary success."
So wrote Joseph Conrad in 1911's Under Western Eyes, and could the last 99 years have done more to prove his point? Of course, he does not deny that the Russian autocracy against which his revolutionaries strive is itself a grotesque and incoherent tyranny. Similarly, we cannot really claim any better for the deranged kleptocracy which still dares to call itself capitalism and which holds the modern world in so firm a grip. But nor can we realistically believe that a revolution would make things any better when, almost without exception, history shows them making things basically the same, yet slightly worse.
Have also been reading Tokyo Days, Bangkok Nights, a collection of two Vertigo Pop miniseries from 2002-2003. At the time I only read the London one by Peter Milligan which, like so much of his work, remains uncollected (but wasn't that great anyway). These two are by Jonathan Vankin, a writer whose name still means little to me, and on this showing that's no great omission. Both stories have Americans coming up against cultural strangeness and institutional corruption in the relevant cities, and while I've quite liked Giuseppe Camuncoli's Hellblazer art (a gig for which he was blatantly auditioning with his portrayal of the one Brit here), he can't make Bangkok anything more than the sort of clunkingly obvious middlebrow culture clash story which, on screen, would be in with a good chance of an Oscar or two. So why did I bother reading this, or talking about it? Because Tokyo has art by Seth Fisher. I've only been getting into his stuff recently, but it's amazing - he's one of the very few artists to have anything like the sheer physicality of Frank Quitely, but instead of Quitely's hyper-realism it's paired with a cartoonish sensibility somewhere between Philip Bond and manga. It's gorgeous. And there's hardly any of it because, for reasons I've never seen properly explained, Fisher went off the roof of an Osaka club in 2006 and died having never really done any work with a decent writer. So we have to sift through what he could accomplish on a script by Vankin, or Zeb Wells, and wonder what he could have accomplished paired with Milligan or Morrison. Rest in peace, Seth.
