Specials

All right, shut up the one person who noticed - I haven't updated in a while. Been a bit of a busy [when was the last post?] three and a half months, what with long-awaited redundancy, a steady round of job-hunting, a few interviews, a new job [in London] and a new kid to contend with. Phew. Now let's see what 2012 brings, shall we?

Here's a place holder while I get some material together to update this dusty old thing - snapped at a pub in Hoveactually:

The Great DCnU Swindle

This week, DC Comics completed the first phase of a controversial reboot of their entire line of monthly comic titles. August saw the final issues of all existing titles, with storylines rapidly concluded and a few titles unceremoniously 'disappeared', and since Wednesday 31st August they've been releasing what now amounts to 52 first issues.

These titles will comprise the so-called DCnU - or DC new Universe, differentiating it from the pre-existing DCU - and will incorporate into a single continuum popular established characters from DC-owned 'imprints' Vertigo and Wildstorm - essentially separate but closely-linked companies with their own editorial structure and creative pools.

Some of these 52 new series - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash - existed before, but many of them are brand new. They've also stated that the issues will be coming out on a strictly regular monthly basis, regardless of creator lateness, so all #2s will be in October, #3s in November and so on.

On top of all that, one of the cancelled titles was Action Comics, which has been in print ever since debuting a little-known character call Superman in April 1938. This was canned at #904, just under two years shy of its thousandth issue. That's just vandalism - I remember when the world used to make sense, goddamnit!

The aim, at least ostensibly, is to pare down DC's offerings to their essentials in an effort to attract new readers. Everyone knows who Batman is, but DC editorial see his decades of back-story and labyrinthine continuity as a major sticking point when it comes to attracting new readers. A friend - let's call him 'Marzie' - who has only recently started making tentative forays into the dark world of comic collecting has confirmed that this is one of the main impediments to the medium's accessibility.

While this has been an incredible marketing coup that has generated an unprecedented spike in both interest and sales, in the long run this will result - indeed already is resulting - in the hasty assignment of fill-in artists and shoehorned backup features from one issue to the next. This, in turn, can only result in a total lack of aesthetic continuity when a series is reprinted in trade collections, which must be an essential parallel source of income for a wing of the ailing print publishing industry.

One of my favourite series of recent years - Planetary - is a case in point. Warren Ellis and John Cassaday were the respective writer and artist throughout 27 issues and some preposterous delays - most notably three years between the penultimate and final issues. Read in their collected form, however, their story is just sublime, betraying no hint of the real-time delays, behind-the-scenes editorial chicanery or wild speculation generated by the fanboy rumour mill. There's no way Planetary would be cropping up on anyone's Best Of list if it was subject to the whims of the DCnU, with last-minute artist replacements and fill-in issues interrupting the clarity of vision shared by a single creative team. Simply put, there's no place at DC Comics at the moment for a title as artistically valid as Planetary.

Using another example, while the root causes might not have been the same, editorial interference is precisely what killed The Authority - another one of my favourite series - with A-list artists like Frank Quitely and Art Adams jumping ship after being forced to redraw numerous panels - or worse, blurred colour filters simply being overlaid straight onto their artwork during the colouring process to obscure hyper-violent detail.

This would appear to be a direct response to those vocal elements in the fanboy community who seem to value punctual regularity above quality, and who continually bang on about the creator delays that now permeate the comics industry and how you never would have been allowed to get away with it in the '80s. When did that become paramount? Planetary, The Ultimates, All-Star Superman and many more maintained a single creative team through various delays, but will guarantee perennial reprint sales for decades to come. No-one's going to want reprints of this DCnU hodge-podge crap in even a year's time, and I'm going to have even fewer killer recommendations for poor 'Marzie'.

So I'm keeping clear of the DC reboot until the dust's settled. No doubt I'll pick up any collections of the series that are getting sustained rave reviews, but otherwise I can't help but see this as a perfect jumping-off point, which just so happens to have the coincidentally happy side effect of being a huge money-saving exercise. 

Thanks, DC Comics!

Jumped-Up Café Schmucks

Sometimes all you want is for people not to give you any shit.

I was running late and had to skip breakfast this morning, so as a special treat for having got to work on time and - rarity of rarities - logged in before 0900 hours, I decided to pop back out and get myself something from Costa. Costa is my massively overpriced high street hot beverage vendor de préférence and I never had any trouble with the staff in Lewes where I used to work.

However, since having been moved [without consultation - another story] to the Brighton office of the law firm that I used to but now sort of don't but ostensibly still do work for [see above], I've been introduced to an altogether different type of Costa employee: one who sees fit to lecture its customers on their pathetic ignorance of all things coffee-related.

My faux pas, if faux it was, was to order a flat white with an extra shot. A flat white, according to the girl who served me this morning, already has two shots of espresso in it, so the addition of yet more espresso would upset the delicate equilibrium of the perfectly balanced drink. It would make it more flat. Or less flat. Or something, I honestly neither know nor care.

"We can do it for you," I was told, "but it won't be the right taste."

I'm sorry: the right taste? It's a CUP OF COFFEE. Some people like their coffee strong, some don't. I happen to appreciate a hit of caffeine that would give a rhino a sweaty lip. It keeps me on the edge, where I gotta be. Woo-hah! [Bear in mind that I'm writing this under the influence of a flat white with an extra shot, just like I insisted on].

Get some perspective. You're not an artiste and despite all the shiny equipment and OCD procedural slamming and banging, this isn't a science lab. I could vault the counter and do what you're doing - immediately, without any training whatsoever. Given time and strategic use of a cattle prod, a chimp could do your job, although animal rights groups might have something to say about the steam scalds and the cheap labour implications. And very probably the use of a cattle prod on a higher primate. You're not even a 'barista', you're jumped-up café staff, so climb back out of your arsehole and MAKE ME EXACTLY WHAT I ASK FOR. WITHOUT QUESTION.

Then we'll make superficially polite small talk while I pay you.

Then I'll go away with my WRONG drink and you can curse me. Privately, and in your own thoughts.

And that, my dear, is how shops work.

And Another Thing

My secondary school English teachers [or readers of this blog] might take issue with this, but I've always had a fondness for the robustness and versatility of the English language. This probably stems from a love of reading instilled in me from an early age by my parents, who patiently read stories to my younger brother and me every night. My partner and I are currently trying to replicate this with our son - this seems to be working, but until he learns to read we can't be entirely sure.

Chris Morris's surreal fake news satire The Day Today first made me consciously aware that you didn't have to use conventional syntax to convey meaning, peppered as it was with made-up words and inventive hyphenations. Having thought about it since, I'd managed to gloss over numerous other instances of linguistic creativity in the meantime - Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, for example, or the devolved Aboriginal dialogue of Mad Max 3 [itself appropriated from Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker]. This same mercurial approach to language is apparent at one end of the scale in the curmudgeonly creativity of Charlie Brooker, and at the other in the linguistic silliness of Adam & Joe, while Stewart Lee exhibits a clear love of often slightly antiquated language in his hilariously convoluted and meandering narratives.

You don't have to be a writer, journalist or comedian, though, to use language in a creative way, and I harbour a deep-seated distaste for those whose vocabulary lacks at least some inclination toward the inventive. Nothing encapsulates the object of my loathing more perfectly than the narrow aspirations and barren bleakspeak of the archetypal middle manager. Entirely devoid of creativity, their ungainly conversation creaks and groans under the weight of terrible set phrases: "singing from the same hymn sheet", "run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes", the abhorrent "blue sky thinking".

Among other crimes against conversation:

"Thinking outside the box" Despite constantly boring people to death with various assertions to the effect that their wild intellects cannot be caged, middle managers are the squarest and most blinkered sort of person you are likely to encounter. They are about as likely to be struck by brain-fritzing inspiration as I am to win the lottery.

"Pushing the envelope" See above. You couldn't gather such a braying congregation of narrow-minded losers together under your own steam, but HR departments the length and breadth of the western world seem to do this as a matter of course. I would honestly rather buy and then fully honour a weekend ticket to a Star Trek convention than willingly spend any time with these people.

"It's not rocket science" AKA "It's not brain surgery". Combine to ephemerally amusing effect with "It's not rocket surgery".

"Let's touch base" Let's not.

These have all quite rightly - if somewhat more belatedly than any decent person would have liked - fallen out of favour over the last decade or so, even among the least imaginitive of managerial mudskippers. Unfortunately they've been superseded by a new wave of meaning-stripped verbal padding that can be heard on a daily basis in television and radio interviews with that other rightly derided group - politicians:

"Joined-up government" OK, this is a now out-of-use phrase bandied about by Tony Blair's lot in the heady early days of New Labour. Use of this phrase decreased with every war we blindly followed George Bush into, which may in retrospect prove to be the only good thing to have come out of those ill-considered politico-military debacles.

"It's a big ask" Only the bounder would consider 'ask' to be a noun. At a push I would accept that it's also a chain of pizza restaurants.

"Let's be quite clear" As if you needed to state that! No, no - much better to be unclear, surely? That's why we invited you on this nationally broadcast, publicly funded current affairs programme, so you could respond in a purposefully oblique manner.

"Going forward" Meaning "from now on". Are you H. G. Wells' The Time Traveller? Are you Doctor Who? Have you found some way to remove yourself from the unidirectional timestream, an act upon whose very feasibility even the most bleeding edge of theoretical physicists remain undecided, and somehow flit about like some twitchy, four-dimensional marmoset? HOW WOULD YOU GO ANY WAY OTHER THAN FORWARD, THEN?

I'm going for a lie down...

Moan Moan Moan

I've always been a fairly uncharitable person when it comes to other people's failings, and one of things that's struck me about getting older - as well as the encroaching aches and pains [predominantly in the back, shoulder and right knee, thanks for asking] and the all-consuming feeling that I have yet to achieve anything worthwhile - is quite how pronounced my intolerance has become since my comparatively free-and-easy youth.

These deep flaws of character or action invariably strike me as so blatant that the transgressors must surely be cultivating them with malicious intent, deliberately inconveniencing those around them for their own twisted amusement. The only alternative - that they are utterly oblivious to their shortcomings as either a valid member of society or a human being - is simply too hideous to contemplate.

But contemplate it I shall, and that is one of my own many flaws. Hey, at least I can recognize them.

As I trudge, resigned, through yet another soul-sapping round of daily mundanities, I can't help but notice that there is a distinct absence in those around me of any of the qualities inherent to a social conscience. Everywhere I turn, I'm confronted by a wall-eyed mob of bubblebrained losers - scattering litter hither and yon, howling obscenities and/or threats and actively encouraging their dogs to carpet the walkways with 'dirty eggs'. Some days I'd swear there was more shit than pavement around Brighton, penalty notices affixed to lamp posts offering scant deterrent to those dog owners apparently determined to acquaint shoe owners with the intricacies of their tread patterns. Girls not yet old enough to leave school dress as if they're on their final verbal warning from a particularly volatile pimp. Youths strip to the waist, the better to display a malnutrition-defined physique and de rigueur faux-Maori neck tattoo, maintaining malicious eye contact in the hope of rendering their afternoon marginally more enjoyable.

Even the basics of politeness seem anathema to the hoi polloi. It no longer appears to be the done thing to indicate gratitude for someone else [OK, me] having held open a door or stood aside on a narrow pavement. Indeed any verbal interaction with strangers is to be avoided, lest, one can only assume, this encourage the natural progression to an unsolicited physical inconvenience - a right good stab in the guts, for example, or one of these new-fangled 'head butts' I've been reading about in the news. Stick these bozos in a car, one hard outer casing further removed from the proximity necessary for meaningful social interaction, and the shortfall in manners becomes even more apparent.

One of David Cameron's governmental tenets is that of the 'Big Society', a concept that would have been derided as typically loony, left-wing, pie-in-the-sky idealism had it been mooted by the opposition. The idea is that we, the unwashed masses, would, in a fit of unprecedented altruism, automatically take it upon ourselves to fill the gaping voids left in our social services by the withdrawal of public funding; services that we have been coddled - coddled, I say! - into believing we should be perfectly entitled to in return for our more-than-reasonable taxes.

The real and unadvertised reason is that whoever takes charge is staring national bankruptcy in the face and unprecedented savings need to be made across the board. Naturally they want to spin that as a good thing, rather than the really bad thing it actually is, but there's absolutely no way on Yahweh's good Earth I want either a] to do it myself - I've got little enough free time as it is, and I'm not one of those people who's always putting themselves forward for Residents' Associations or Boards of Governors, any of that nonsense - or b] to let any of these hooting numbskulls take responsibility for maintaining our precious and fragile infrastructure. That, in its essence, is why we pay taxes - so someone will scoop up all our crap for us and whisk it away in a flurry of pixie dust.

If people already felt invested in their society then Cameron's crazy scheme might just work, but all the signs are pointing contrary to that assumption.

Meme of the Day

David Bowie - Let's Dance

"Put on your red shoes and dantz the blues..."

HoooOOOOO!!! Part 2

Jaguar Skills
Thursday 24th March - Concorde 2

Support: Tek One and Boycom

Jaguar Skills is a truly impatient man. Clad in a full-face black ninja mask, gold medallion flailing in the wake of his restless movements, Jag bombarded a mad-for-it crowd with a truly dizzying motorway pileup of party tunes, interjecting the floor-filling bangers-du-jour half knowingly, half reverently with the accepted jump-around classics. A mashup master with an extreme case of ADD, Jag's staccato tour of culturally popular music took in hip hop, hard house, dubstep and quite a bit of drum'n'bass, never sticking with one track for more than 30 seconds and seasoning this unholy audio gumbo with countless samples, sound effects and throwaway gags. His is a world where the recording of an actual police raid morphs into the siren whoop of KRS-One's Sound Of Tha Police, which segues seamlessly into the faux-reggae of The Police's Roxanne. Hendrix, Motörhead, Guns'N'Roses, Blur, Musical Youth - even the A-Team and Countdown themes got a decent look-in through the soul-shaking bass and urgent drum beats. They should wring the gallons of sweat from this man's ninja mask and sell it to aspiring DJs - God knows they could use some of what he's got.