Happy 90th birthday to Liverpool’s finest export (apart from those four guys in that band). He’s looked awfully old and thin in the most recent photos of him, to the point where I’ve oft wondered if he’d actually make it to this milestone. But he has!
I’m not a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe, whose 215th birthday this would’ve been today. I discovered him, pretty much, via H.P. Lovecraft, whose Supernatural Horror in Literature devotes an entire chapter to him, so I thought he had to be something special. So I went in search of a book by him at the library, found one, read it… did not find it to be anything special. I spent years being mystified by Poe, whose historical importance I could appreciate but that was all; I was particularly put off by the fatuous humour of some items. A few years ago I tried a re-read, this time Penguin’s Portable Edgar Allan Poe collection of his stories, verse, and various non-fiction. And I think I understood him at last. Reading the critical work in particular, I think I finally got where Poe was coming from. But I still didn’t like his work as such (and I found much of the poetry actively irritating, particularly that technique he has of repeating lines with slight variations), and I may be doomed to never do so.
But look at him. Look at that picture of him, apparently taken in 1849 not long before he died. He looks EXACTLY like the sort of person who would write his stories. If you were going to be the pioneer of the short macabre tale, you’d want to look like Poe did, the face that illustrates what he said about terror being “not of Germany but of the soul”… perfectly untidy hair, haunted withdrawn eyes, quite rectangular moustache, that necktie and somehow disreputable-looking coat… it adds up to a middle-aged goth icon by itself. Better than his stories as far as I’m concerned.
I never had much use for Pitchfork, which always struck me as the peak of tedious music hipsterdom, but the news that it’s being shuttered and absorbed into GQ is bad nonethless. As full of shit as it may have been, I still dislike people being forced out of work. Some people are, frankly, not sorry to see it go and maybe they have a point, but even so (plus GQ is an odd magazine to merge it into). And whatever its flaws, it was quite correct about some things:
Briandead
No nudity in this one, but I feel I should advise that it does contain late 70s Jim Bakker. Yikes?
Because I’m trying to cut back on political posting here, I haven’t had much to say about the American election and so I don’t think I’ve mentioned Vivek (“rhymes with fake”) Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical near-billionaire (worth nearly $900m, so not far off). You may have observed from his name that he is of Indian ancestry, his parents having been Brahmins from Kerala who moved to the US where he was born. And by virtue of him being obscenely rich, he decided he might as well run for the Republican candidacy. He has not been very good at this, and the other day he finally had the sense to call it off.
This is how “the Christian Onion”, The Babylon Bee, responded to that news.
Charming. The Babylon Bee was founded as an avowedly right-wing satire news site a la the Onion but with more of a religious angle; in their earlier days they were actually quite snarky about some of the idiocies of American Christian culture, but not so much now. They just seem to be mostly unpleasant now, and, frankly, kind of racist. Elon Musk is apparently a big fan. Vivek strikes me, at least from whatever stories I’ve seen about him, as a clown (I mean…) with a handful of actually OK ideas but a lot more that suck, and I don’t think he was ever seriously in with a chance, mostly on account of him being brown and Hindu. A monotheistic Hindu, but a Hindu nonetheless; the one god he believes in is still not the one God the Republican voters he was trying to attract believe in, and they would’ve been painfully aware of that. But, though he may be a kind of awful person, the Bee’s bullshit is still pretty out of line and unnecessary.
At the same time, it’s also the face of the party he was trying to represent. Obviously the Bee aren’t an actual branch of the GOP, but this racist nonsense represents the party nonetheless. This is what Vivek’s own party probably thinks he’s fit for; he might be a near-billionaire like so many of them, but he’s brown, and the Republicans are the party of racist shits in the 21st century. There’s talk that Drumpf might actually make Vivek his vice president which would be… something to behold, I’m sure, but even if it does happen, you know that deep down his party mates still believe that running a 7-11 really is all he’s good for…
Book #3 for 2024 (the first one I actually started, as noted before, but the third actually finished). Here’s the thing, though; I actually started this 20-odd years ago but never actually finished it. Nightwebs was a posthumous collection of Woolrich stories that mostly hadn’t been reprinted or collected since their first appearance, and Gollancz included it in their Crime Masterworks series that they did back then (smaller companion to the contemporaneous) SF and fantasy series, and I have that paperback. Which I started reading, and was rather enjoying, but, as I tend to do with collections like this, I reached a point where I thought “this is good but I want to read something else for a while and come back to this later”, put it aside, and did not in fact come back to it. And then I had a notion to give Woolrich another go at last much more recently, found a slightly bodgy digital copy, and settled down to finish it at last. Except that in doing so, I discovered my old paperback was actually not the full collection, and the original edition (from which my ebook had been made) actually contained sixteen stories, not twelve, plus an extensive bibliography of all of Woolrich’s known work. Why Gollancz’ version left those out I don’t know, but anyway that’s why it took me sixteen days to read the book in full rather than twelve.
Be all that as it may. Like I said, this is a posthumous collection of then-uncollected stuff, so I don’t know if it’s really a proper best-of as such, but Francis Nevins’ endnotes for each story generally hail them as the best example of the sort of thing they are which Woolrich wrote, so. Most of the contents date from the 30s, when he was preposterously prolific after turning to pulp magazine outlets, with a few examples of his later (and lesser) output; it’s a fairly bleak world he depicts, shot through with often grim irony, horrible coincidences, and, in the later tales, outright cruelty (“Too Nice a Day to Die” in particular could also justly be called “Go Fuck Yourselves”), but also one with some frankly bizarre aspects to it (particularly “Graves for the Living”, which borders on the positively gothic). I suppose it’s a fair introduction to Woolrich, all up, although I obviously haven’t read enough to really know for sure; maybe one of the novels (particularly Night Has a Thousand Eyes) is better for that sort of thing? Either way, now that there’s legit ebook editions of his books available, I’m going to be checking the novels out too. As for Nightwebs, I think we can say it was worth the 20-something-year wait to finish…
Bill McClintock has a stack of mashups like this (he complicates things by also mashing up the videos for the songs he brings together), and this is one of his most inspired. I’ve followed Korn on and off for a while and I always thing “Coming Undone” was one of their better tunes, but I know practically nothing about Portugal. The Man other than I fucking hate that band name, and though they won a Grammy for it, I have never knowingly heard “Feel It Still”… or so I thought until I discovered I had in fact seen the music video for it, which my Youtube history tells me I did nearly a year ago. You can see what a deep impression it left on me.
Still, combine a hipster bullshit soul/funk revivalist beat with young Mr Davis’ angst and add a guest appearance by Tony Iommi as icing on the cake, and godDAMN if you don’t have a winner. I’ve never been big on mashups cos I don’t think they actually achieve much beyond incongruous humour; I’ve never heard one that actually adds to or improves upon the source material apart from the immortal “Stroke of Genie-us” by Freelance Hellraiser. Brother McClintock comes awfully close here, though. Stellar stuff.
Book #2 for 2024. Danzy Senna’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Black No More helpfully notes that, in later life, author George S. Schuyler swung to the political hard right, even joining the John Birch Society (surprisingly, I find that though the latter were super far right loons, they were oddly anti-racist despite that). Having read his book, written and published while he was still an otherwise good and committed socialist, I find myself strangely unsurprised by this; Schuyler clearly had, shall we say, reservations about his fellow African Americans that, had the book been written by a white author, it would’ve been considered even in 1931 to be unnecessarily racist. But Schuyler was black and, evidently, an equal opportunity hater; white people come out of this one every bit as badly.
The premise of Black No More is that a black medical entrepreneur has developed a technique for turning black people into white people permanently (no more need for skin lightening creams and hair straightening!), and our fairly dubious “hero” takes advantage of this new technology after being spurned on New Year’s Eve by a young woman who doesn’t dance with… you know, his kind of people (the book, obviously, is a lot blunter in its language). But what happens when all the black people in America go white? What do actual white people do without them around? How can they define themselves as white people without black people to define themselves against?
The book makes for fairly bruising satire of both white and black America in the then-near future of the mid-1930s; Schuyler applies equal venom to the corruption and uselessness of black leaders as well as the way the rural white workers are taught to fear foreign and other racial influences to distract them from how capitalism is their real problem. The cynicism is quite bracing and results in a lot of delightful descriptive passages, but narratively the idea only stretches so far and I felt the book ran out of puff about halfway through (mind you, it does come to a fairly remarkable climax), as you can kind of see by some of the character names getting overtly silly (hard not to love “Dr Samuel Buggerie”, though). A fun read, but when all was said and done, I think I found it easier to admire than really like as such.
This has just filled me with joy. I don’t usually watch reaction videos of this sort, but here’s Elizabeth dealing with one of my favourite songs by The Who in that terrific performance from The Kids Are Alright, so how could I not watch it? Cos this was definitely way out of Elizabeth’s experience, she clearly didn’t have much idea what she was in for, and her reactions to the song and the stage antics—Daltrey’s mic-swinging, Moon losing a cymbal, Townshend windmilling, Entwistle just standing there and letting his fingers do all the work—are delightful. Also, her description of Keith’s drumming as being like swordfighting struck me as extremely apt.
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