Fashion Beast

Alan Moore, Antony Johnson & Facundo Percio
Fashion Beast (2013)
I had no idea this even existed until I saw it in the used book store, it being something Malcolm McLaren requested from Moore presumably in an effort to hitch his wagon to yet another rising cultural star, having probably read an article entitled Pow! The Comic Grows Up in Time Out. It was supposed to be a film, but I didn't realise it had ever gone further than a conversation, never mind anything of substance sufficient for transformation into a comic book. I'm not sure quite how to take this, given that its worth seems predicated on the popular image of McLaren as a lovable inventive rogue, as opposed to just a bit of a cunt; and even Moore seems to buy into this in his introduction, which if nothing else is at least consistent with his own clueless sub-Russ Abbott take on punk rock in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Moore describes his meeting McLaren just as gingerbollocks was posing for Sun photographers in the wake of having lost his court case against the surviving Sex Pistols, and he speaks of the man in the terms with which we've all become roughly familiar always with a touch of the uproarious English pantomime tradition... Aladdin's uncle proffering new lamps for old, which for me sort of loses sight of why the fucker was in court in the first place, specifically for ripping people off, for his habit of making a parasitic living off those doing the actual work; not unlike DC Comics farming out Watchmen to persons other than Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in some respects.

Never mind.

I'm sure he was a lovely bloke in person.

Fashion Beast was therefore a script for a film, written by Alan Moore and based on something or other by McLaren - I suspect no more than the fucking title and a reference to Beauty and the Beast as worth ripping off given his usual methodology; it could just as easily have been Monkey Tennis or Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank. Anyway, Fashion Beast reads mostly as Alan Moore with flashes of McLaren's distinctively repetitive brand of complete cobblers showing through every once in a while: blah blah Dickensian urchins blah blah fashion blah blah sex blah blah young kids on the street blah blah London fashion blah blah blah playful and subversive etc. etc. Antony Johnson has clearly done as much as he can to turn this into something for page rather than screen, and while it's better than it probably has a right to be, and holds some historical interest in the context of Moore's career, in essence it remains nevertheless a mostly unpolishable turd.

The sexual ambiguity of the principal characters work very well, and there are some snappy lines of dialogue as you would expect, and there's a great speech about the medium being the message around the halfway mark; but otherwise it's a bit of a mess. The art is of promising fanzine standard at best, too many scratchy lines, figure work developed whilst reading comic books rather than attending a life-drawing class, and characters all wearing one of just three available facial expressions - regular pout, pissed off, or surprised. The beast turns out to be quite hunky - a real dreamboat in fact - which kind of misses at least some of the point I would have thought, and the fashions as illustrated suggest no actual research undertaken regarding the fashion industry or its history, even without taking into account that no-one sane or interesting ever gave two shits about the fashion industry or considered it in any sense important. Had they got, for example, Duke Mighten to draw this, they might just have had something, but they didn't, so here it is. I suppose at least they held back from giving Rob Liefeld a call.

Fashion Beast is true to McLaren's oeuvre in so much as he trots out the usual boggle-eyed observations about Dickensian London and Situationism, and then gets someone else to do the work; which isn't something I'd offer as a recommendation.

The Subtle Knife

Philip Pullman The Subtle Knife (1997)
I took this with me on the plane last time I went back to England, and got some of the way in but hadn't banked on how distracting it can be trying to read something in a foreign country, or what has become a foreign country. Now nearly four months later I return to the book and start again with some of that reluctance which generally prefaces a second attempt on anything left unfinished, for which it turns out there was no need as the re-read is as much a pleasure as was the initial foray.

Obviously this is the second part of His Dark Materials, and with no real sign of the promised atheist diatribe just yet, at least not that I noticed. In fact, weirdly, not much really happens in this one. It just sort of trundles along for a couple of hundred pages mumbling to itself and getting ready for whatever goes down in The Amber Spyglass. Lyra discovers alternate worlds and meets this other kid and they pinch a knife from some geezer with initials similar to C.S. Lewis, and some other stuff happens, and that's it. It's hardly even a story, at least not outside the context of the trilogy. Ordinarily this might be a crashing bore, but Pullman's talents are such that it isn't a problem, and you don't really notice because it's such a pleasure to read. Of course, it isn't that nothing happens, but most of what does is fairly low key, meetings and conversations facilitating the occasional revelation, the stuff which we'll probably need to know so that the last one makes sense.

Significantly we begin to get something more of an idea of what the series is actually about, what with the suggestion of doing Genesis all over again but without the original sin. Specifically it seems to be about human spirit, or religion if you prefer, in contrast to corrupt authority figures having dominated human spirit for the duration of human history; which still doesn't quite read like any sort of build up to an atheist diatribe to me, but I guess we'll see.

Curiously I've noticed that even without the anthropomorphic bears, Oxford colleges, and talkative disembodied heads paralleling elements of That Hideous Strength - which constitutes the absolutely worst kind of Christian diatribe - we have, as mentioned above, the somewhat malevolent Sir Charles Latrom almost sharing initials with C.S. Lewis, albeit in the wrong order; and I wonder if His Dark Materials will turn out to represent some kind of counter to the aforementioned literary monstrosity by the earlier Oxford-dwelling author; although I have no idea why Latrom backwards should read mortal. Maybe it doesn't mean anything. I still don't know quite what any of this is about, but I've thus far had a great time guessing.

Swamp Thing: Family Tree

Scott Snyder, Yanick Paquette, Marco Rudy & others
Swamp Thing: Family Tree (2013)
I sort of enjoyed the first seven issues of the revived Swamp Thing comic as assembled in Raise Them Bones, but somewhere in this collection it just seemed to stop doing whatever it was doing that worked for me. The artwork is beautiful, at least for the first half and very much in the vein of John Totleben; but then we whizz off somewhere else to reinvent Anton Arcane and it turns into something which looks like it's sort of trying to not resemble cutesy big-eyed manga shite with Alec Holland as a blue-eyed Kurt Cobain variation from some sappy 1990s autobiographical comic, but not trying very hard; and it isn't quite so bum-violatingly agonising as the Camden-Archieisms of Philip Bond or Jamie Hewlett, but it's closer than I would like. Annoyingly this particular weak-link exposes the other one, namely that the writing probably could have used a bit more elbow grease. The horror aspect is fine, and all very Alan Moore up to a missed point, said missed point being that Moore's horror worked in his version of Swamp Thing because it was played off the contrast with a well-written prosaic reality, scenes focussing on the minutiae of the every day and familiar so as to root the story in something we vaguely recognise. This version of Swamp Thing is, on the other hand, just one horror scenario after another tooled so as to resemble some kind of narrative. It lacks the aforementioned contrast and is, after a while, unsatisfying, reading much as though referring only to previous comics, films, or - shudder - games in the same genre.

The drooling abomination that is Anton Arcane bursts into the shack. 'What, no hug for your Uncle Anton, Abigail?' he slobbers.

'I've got your hug right here,' she growls just like Sigourney Weaver, levelling her shotgun at the monster. By hug she means two barrels of hot leaden death, you see.

Clever.

Maybe I'm just too old for this, but I don't think so. I can read the earlier issues of Swamp Thing without wincing - the issues which came out when I was roughly somewhere within the age group at which they were aimed. This is just lazy writing, media which refers almost exclusively to previous versions of itself.

Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction

Ian Whates (editor)

Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction (2014)
I'm certain I remember enjoying previous Solaris anthologies, at least the three edited by George Mann, but this one just didn't do it for me. In fact so dispiriting did I find my route march through to the final page, that fuck it - I can't even be arsed to write about the bloody thing. Therefore here, for what little it may be worth, are the notes I made referring to the individual contributions as I went along, sentencised for ease of reading. Yes, that is a word:

I detect some craft to When We Harvested the Nacre-Rice by Benjanun Sriduangkaew, an elegant turn of phrase, but having read it I can't actually remember anything about it.

I liked The Goblin Hunter by Chris Beckett.

I also liked Homo Floresiensis by Ken Liu.

I couldn't finish A Taste for Murder by Julie E. Czerneda. It was too irritating.

Double Blind by Tony Ballantyne was okay, readable, although I couldn't really see the point.

I found The Mashup by Sean Williams hugely unsatisfying.

The Frost on Jade Buds by Aliette de Bodard: I hated what I managed to read of her novel Servant of the Underworld before giving up - about fifty pages I think it was. I didn't much care for this one either. It felt like career science fiction writing, calculated to hit certain literature buttons without any real inspiration behind the prose.

Popular Images from the First Manned Mission to Enceladus by Alex Dally MacFarlane is a story told as a series of descriptions of posters, or something of the sort. I didn't really get much from it.

Red Lights, and Rain by Gareth L. Powell: Hard to believe we could already have a time-travelling techno-vampire thriller which could be considered clichéd and predictable, and yet here it is.

They Swim Through Sunset Seas by Laura Lam was passable, but not very interesting.

Faith Without Teeth by Ian Watson: I had to sniff around online in order to deduce his political leanings, which are to the left, thus hypothetically framing this as a parody of a right-leaning science-fiction parody of left-leaning science-fiction; except I wasn't sure at which point I was expected to stop peeling back the layers, and it reads somewhat how I imagine the oeuvre of Vox Day and his pals must read, which seems counterproductive.

Thing and Sick by Adam Roberts was readable, although I had no idea what it was actually about.

I couldn't finish The Sullen Engines by George Zebrowski.

Dark Harvest by Cat Sparks seems to be military science-fiction reading in part like a Burroughsian cut-up of dialogue from the second Alien film, generically grizzled gun-toting grunts in cautious Vietnamesque investigation of weird alien village: Let's do this, Shit just got real blah blah blah... that sort of thing

Fift & Shria by Benjamin Rosenbaum communicates the alien by doing that thing of overloading the reader with references which only seem to make sense to the characters in the story. I have a feeling this one might be half-decent, but I found it difficult to concentrate past my burning need to get to the end of the collection and read something else.

The Howl by Ian R. MacLeod and Martin Sketchley is one of those alternate world Schrödinger's Vulcan bomber tales somehow relating to the Cuban missile crisis. It was difficult to follow but that may be due to the nature of the story which was in any case absorbing. In fact it's probably about forty times better than anything else here, and was the first story in the collection I could imagine reading a second time.

The Science of Chance by Nina Allan was nicely written, but seemed to go on a bit longer than necessary.

...and as for Endless by Rachel Swirsky: I couldn't follow this one at all.

Alien

Alan Dean Foster Alien (1979)
Supposedly one of the best novelisations of a film, and I've been warming to Alan Dean Foster of late, and Alien is a great film so here I am. This one certainly reads more like a novel than Foster's somewhat clunky Star Wars tie-in Splinter of the Mind's Eye. Reviews promised some elaboration and expansion on the original story, but aside from reinstating a scene near the end in which Ripley encounters a cocooned Dallas, Foster thankfully stuck to the script for the most part. That deleted final scene in which Ripley realises it was all a dream and then goes out to post a letter without noticing that she is being followed by three sinister figures in a transit van, her xenomorphic nemesis having teamed up with Dracula and Adolf Hitler - well, you won't find that one here either.

Alien was never what you would call a deep film but it was done exceptionally well, which was sort of the point, playing to director Ridley Scott's strengths, none of which were really in the thinky-brain-stuff department - and I've just noticed that not only is he the man who brought us the Hovis advert, but he almost designed the Daleks. Anyway, Foster's adaptation doesn't really add much in the way of depth, but nevertheless achieves an approximation of the suspense, despite it seeming quite a slow read in places. I suspect the pace is something to do with the grammar which alternates unpredictably between flourishes of poetry and weird patches of word not quite all good or to add up, such as are when Ripley for to confront Ash of the science officer, like thus:

But she couldn't still the suspicions. She almost wished Ash would get mad at her.

'You also managed to forget the science division's own basic quarantine law, something that's drilled into every ship's officer early in flight school.'

'No.' At last, she thought. A statement she could believe. 'That I didn't forget.'

'I see. You didn't forget.' She paused for emphasis. 'You just went ahead and broke it.'

I mean it's not terrible, but you really have to keep your eye on the ball in order to keep track of who is saying what, and as for:

A statement she could believe.

Just how did that get to be its own sentence? This sort of thing reoccurs throughout, so maybe that's just how Alan Dean Foster writes, but reading it can be a little like walking with your shoes on the wrong feet in places. Still, it's not a great book but is at least a decent book which is more than I expected, although I suppose there's a limit to how good an adaptation such as this can be given that it made me want to watch the film again. I can't tell if that's a recommendation or not.

The Alien Tide

Tom Dongo
The Mysteries of Sedona (1988)
The Alien Tide (1990)
Mysterious Sedona (2000)
Sedona is a small town or possibly a city - albeit not by my own ingrained European definition of the word - somewhere in the upper half of Arizona as you head for the Grand Canyon. Mrs. Pamphlets and myself stayed there in honour of our shared birthday and the occasion of my turning fifty; which was nice because, possibly excepting a couple of places in Mexico, Sedona is host to what is more or less the most beautiful landscape on Earth so far as I can tell. My wife and I very much enjoyed the Grand Canyon, by way of comparison, but as we returned to our hotel in the Village of Oak Creek, we agreed that we both preferred Sedona. The Grand Canyon is off the scale spectacular, but is somehow so spectacular that you can't always tell what you're looking at. Human eyes are not accustomed to viewing that much earth at that angle or at such distance, so in some respects it's almost like being in space. Sedona is nestled within the same general kind of geology but on a smaller, more human scale, semi-desert and layered red rocks sculpted by several million years worth of wind in comparison to which the Canyon seems overstated, the geological equivalent of the worst kind of progressive rock concept albums of the seventies. Arriving in Sedona is like walking into some epic Biblical painting of the nineteenth century, or maybe one of Albert Bierstadt's sublime landscapes.

I have a pet theory that we are each of us a product of landscape, at least by the logic that anyone growing up near the sea will tend to have different views concerning boats to those who know only dry land - this formulated whilst wandering around Mexico and realising just how much sense Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, and all of their theological pals seem to make in context of the environment. Land, and particularly mountainous or otherwise spectacular land, provides an ambient noise of forces greater than can be immediately understood in everyday terms and so, I dare say, will tend to inspire its people towards certain metaphysical modes of thought; or if you prefer - if your mouth falls open with an exclamation of holy shit every time you step outside the front door and set eyes upon your own little bit of world, chance is that your daily thoughts will stray to provinces other than those of insurance policies and which brand of washing powder represents best value for money. So, having spent four days in Sedona - which really is more astonishingly beautiful than I could hope to describe in case I hadn't quite made that clear - I can see why the town has a sizeable New Age community. Ordinarily I might be sharpening the knives at this point of the paragraph, but there really is something special about Sedona, and so special that I'm not going to begrudge anyone a few healing crystals or faintly suspect claims made regarding my aura. If it works and hurts no-one, then fine.

Actually the thing that pisses me off about New Age thought isn't so much seemingly wacky beliefs as the pick and mix appropriation of whichever indigenous culture has something which might go well next to the Navajo rug tastefully hung from the wall next to the telly; and appropriation without really showing that much respect for the source, which means you end up with crap like Aztec Horoscopes borrowing the symbols, changing their meanings to something a bit less aggressive, and pinning everything to an entirely unrelated set of spiritual post-it notes. At worst, New Age thought can be comforting slogans passed off as philosophy without either the depth of an actual philosophy or any of the work one might ordinarily be required to do in order to get your head wrapped around the thing. On the other hand, it's probably worth remembering that no-one was ever beheaded in the name of New Age thought - at least not so far as I am aware - so one should probably try to maintain some sense of perspective here.

Anyway, there I was in the Worm, an excellent Oak Creek book store with its own friendly hound numbered amongst the staff. I picked up The Alien Tide, indulged in some smirking, and then returned it to the shelf. Later in the day I realised I just had to go back and buy the thing no matter how ludicrous it might seem. I read a few chapters in the hotel that evening and then returned to the Worm the next day and bought the other two Tom Dongo titles they were carrying.

My initial fascination had been founded on an impression of The Alien Tide as something equivalent to outsider art, the self-published testimony of a local man who sees flying saucers, amongst other things - although this is an admittedly cynical description of that which drew me, and I tend to dislike the term outsider art, believing that the validity of individual expression depends on the work itself rather than either the approval or financial backing of persons other than the creator; and whilst I don't necessarily believe in flying saucers and the like, neither do I actively disbelieve, and I find the subject interesting as contemporary folk mythology at the very least - a roughly coherent understanding of the world which appears self-organising and as such owes nothing to mainstream or consciously directed culture - or to consensus reality, it could be argued.

Tom Dongo covers certain aspects of this subject with which I might ordinarily have pronounced reservations. He tends to the view that psychic phenomena, channelling, extraterrestrial or interdimensional visitors and the rest are probably part of the same thing. Of course, one might suggest that each is simply a variation on delusion, imagination, or even bare-faced fibs, which is great except that it doesn't really take us anywhere useful and can be kind of insulting. For example, the science-fiction of Richard S. Shaver - supposedly based on events which he claimed happened to him - features ancestral voices, thought projection, underground alien civilisations controlling surface dwellers and mysterious forces operating behind the scenes - all equating to manias associated with certain forms of paranoid schizophrenia, specifically variants in which the two sides of the brain fail to properly communicate with each other, resulting in that which is perceived or conceived in one part of the mind being understood as something occurring externally to the individual in another part. Whilst Tom Dongo potentially ticks a couple of these boxes, I would suggest his writings and observations contain too much to contradict such a refutation for that refutation to be worth anything. Much of what Dongo describes of his own encounters and those of others read as direct experience, by which I mean that whether or not it really was a flying saucer from another world - for one obvious example - it would seem rash to deny that something out of the ordinary was experienced, not least because many of these accounts involve more than one individual experiencing the same thing. The possibility that anyone could just be telling stories is, I would suggest, made similarly ambiguous by the nature of the stories, many of which are just too plain weird. If you were going to make something up, you would probably try to come up with something more consistent, more convincing, more digestible in terms of established UFO lore. Additionally, whilst one may always invoke rational explanations, when a phenomenon can only be rationalised by an improbable cat's cradle of chance and circumstance above a certain baroque level of complexity, it might simply be more useful to admit that something weird happened for the sake of argument, then work ahead from that point. This is roughly what Tom Dongo does, his purpose being discussion rather than proving anything which characteristically eludes examination.

Of course this still leaves a few subjects with which I have some difficulty, notably that of channelling as represented by the testimony of one Erika Porter in The Alien Tide. Unfortunately it reads to me very much as a rambling daydream, and as such seems out of whack with the rest of the book; although on the other hand, I suppose if one is going to investigate this kind of phenomena, it logically can't be just the neat and tidy things which won't offend the sensibilities of some English bloke living in San Antonio; and by the time we get to Mysterious Sedona, Dongo himself expresses certain misgivings about proposals made in the earlier books, certain aspects of channelling significantly amongst them. This is one aspect of why I found these three volumes so compelling, specifically the attitude of the investigation as much as that which is investigated.

There's some seriously far out stuff here - saucers, alien animals, rock spirits, black helicopters, underground bases and all manner of oddities which seem particularly consistent with the geological territory, at least to me; and the author is only interested in making sense of his bizarre world, even if he never quite gets there. He writes openly, honestly with infectious enthusiasm, a conversational tone and none of the crankiness which defeats much paranormal literature; and by Mysterious Sedona it has become clear that he no longer even really cares about whether we, his readers, believe him or not. He's doing this for himself, and similarly we are spared any of those droning overly defensive testimonials about what science may be scared to admit, the things they don't want us to know and so on.

Tom Dongo weaves a genuinely weird, fascinating, and endlessly puzzling account of his experiences regardless of whether we're on his side. There is a generous spirit informing these books, and one of such conviction that it disarmed even my own customary tendency to sneer. This man deserves our support and encouragement.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy The Road (2006)
It's been a while since a book lived up to its hype for me, including even just the recommendation of friends as hype in this instance; but The Road turns out to be even better than promised. It doesn't really have much of a story, just some guy and his boy trudging through a post-apocalyptic wasteland towards some ambiguous possibility of a better life which almost certainly won't happen. The blurb on the back cover promises it to be a tale of love - man and child looking after each other under dreadful conditions - which it sort of is, although the description is unfortunately twee and a little misleading.

The nature of whatever has destroyed the planet is never discussed and probably doesn't matter. Our two survivors get by on what canned goods they can salvage in a world of grey skies, ash, snow, and death - nothing is left growing, and there don't seem to be any animals, and occasionally we are afforded a thoroughly stomach churning glimpse of how other survivors are getting by; and this all serves as dramatic contrast to two people actually trying to keep each other alive. It's simple, but it's really all you need given that this is one of the most depressing and harrowing things I've read in a while, albeit in a good way, sort of.

Weirdly, all the negative criticism I've seen of The Road seems to fixate on how it is written. McCarthy eschews chapters, most contractions, and even conventional sentence structure to yield something which reads very much like an extended poem, or at least a novel rendered as such. The form of the narrative serves to concentrate all actions within the present. There is no longer a future, nor any real past, just cold, brutal reality. The apocalypse has come and gone - and as such no longer matters - and the future will probably be worse, so all that is left is to move forward and hope that it won't be. I suppose it might be argued that this harks back to the earliest literature, things like Beowulf which was similarly composed as epic poetry and might even be seen as casting its characters into roughly the same hostile territory. Whatever the case, I don't think The Road would have worked so well as regular prose.