5/8 PLENTY SUNTAN PLENTY MELLOW

PIC: izzy-wizzy KM 2026

Sooty’s Original Theme (With Lyrics)

SABRINA CARPENTER’S DONKEY HOSE SENSATION

I write on Owl Awareness Day, an awareness worth encouraging if you’re a field mouse on a moonlit night, or, on the other hand, a lonely owl in search of friends.

Last day on the Magic book Kickstarter! It’s doing very well apparently.

I should point out that this book is not a grimoire, or a manual, a guide, or a how-to book. It’s a 25, 000 word conversation about the historical use of symbols in Magic, and the accompanying development of ideas about God across millennia from the Neolithic period until now.

In other bird-related news, Bill Oddie, ornithologist, musician and member of the Goodies, (the Python-lite comedy troupe I loved as a kid), died last week, so here is his finest moment of many, at least as far as I’m concerned. As a youngster, and even today, there was nothing I found more thrilling and amusing than seeing macho authority figures losing their shit, and this cover of the Troggs Wild Thing not only beats out the original but delivers in spades with an orgasmic portrayal of the police force that almost rivals Derek Jarman’s half-naked dancing bobbies in Jubilee, despite being filmed in what appears to be 17th century 4K using a complex apparatus made of sand, brass and glass.

The Goodies - Wild Thing

HIGH-T AND HOLIDAYS

As a so-called UH-T (that’s ‘Ultra High Testosterone’ for you …) individual, I intend to add my manly voice to a chorus of indignation that’s been ringing out from here to eternity after the US Secretary of Death announced his plan to round up and milk high-T individuals like myself, and perhaps like you, of our raw-T juice, direct from the gland!

Look buddy, I love Uncle Sam as much as the next feller, who doesn’t? But there’s something – I don’t know – something just ain’t right when I’m being told to use my thoughts to picture mighty herds of healthy men lining up for the milking of their personal high-T, just to supply the assembled feyboys of the military-industrial complex with what they don’t got enough of on their own. Hell, that makes me feel downright funny…

In truth, and quite literally, it’s more of a Baron Harkonnen cosplay thing, I hear, where a pulley arrangement is used to lower SecDeath up to his neckline in a gooey pit of gluey high-T residue, there to coax into life a raging half-inch combat erection, fierce as a nipple, using sheer force of will and accompanied by an anguished rendition of Don’t Look At Me That Way, Jesus!

‘My aaaassss!’ screams SecDeath, when requested to sum up 250 years of American culture and achievement. ‘My GODDAMN ASSSSSSS!’

UFO STREET

I read Dreaming of Cockaigne, which was fairly dry but gave me everything I needed for a story I’m picking away at entitled The Only Cop in Cockaigne.

Mostly, I’ve been working on some currently top secret comic book projects this week.

Downtime, I’ve been diving into the first volume of The Familiar book series by Mark Z. Danielewski but it’s a bit of a struggle. The style changes for each chapter and while I’m hooked on some of the strands, including the primary story fortunately… others are simply exhausting. There are sections written in a Singaporean pidjin and some in a kind of cholo gang speak where I actually have no idea what’s being discussed or referred to, reduced to bouncing along on a foam of words without referents.

Next, I watched half of Masters of the Universe before giving up. I didn’t hate it utterly, it was too bland for that, but it was the sort of film you’d get if you asked ChatGPT to mock human creativity. Much more enjoyable was Marty Supreme. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Timothée Chalamet actually working his aaaaasssss off before, but he was great in this, with a performance whose assured commitment reminded me of some of the great ‘70s auteur era turns like Dustin Hoffman or the young Al Pacino. Sinners was brilliant and Michael B. Jordan was great in it, but for sheer old school acting, Timothée deserved the Oscar for Marty Supreme, a cut above.

There are some films where you don’t want to know anything about them beyond the poster. A case in point is this new one, Wicker, with Olivia Colman, which on a first impression appears to be a filmic record of what happens when a writer hears of the existence of a film entitled The Wicker Man and is moved to speculate, ‘But what if he was actually a man made out of wicker?’, in what must surely be the elevator pitch deluxe. Based on the bare minimum promo, I’ve decided the film is about a woman who gets bored with cuddling brine-smelling fishermen and decides to fashion a more amenable husband out of fragrant baskets – The Shape of Wicker you might say – and all kinds of romantic trouble follows as it surely must when you date men you’ve woven from willow rods.

I’ve been progressing nicely through the story recently, but have become obsessed with my farm and orchard in Crimson Desert. Not content with feeding stray cats twice a day in the real world, I’m now making regular forays to collect fruits and vegetables to supply my new array of simulated pigs, ducks, hens, and goats. They grow up and breed and everything!

Fucking tragic, man…

Had a good Zoom call with Richard Metzger and Luke Haines last week. I’m a huge fan of his work going back to The Auteurs and Show Girl, which I bought as a single, but I hadn’t met Luke before. We got on like a house of fire, I’m pleased to say. It’s nice to talk to someone who knows what you’re on about, and shares so much of your cultural heritage.

I read an interesting paper from Academia by Roy Baumeister about Comic Books as Moral Pornography, arguing that the exaggerated forms of good and evil that exist in comic book stories fulfil a similar function to pornography’s equally exaggerated approach to human sexuality, while appealing to a similar predominantly male audience.

It’s an interesting take, which cites a Ben Bova piece on tips for writers, which I quote here. This neatly outlines an argument I’ve seen made often:

“In the real world there are no villains. No one actually sets out to do evil. Yes, there are madmen and murderers and rapists and crooked politicians and greedy land developers and all sorts of villainous behaviors. But each of those people believes that he is doing what is necessary, and maybe even good… There are no villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds. There are only people with problems, struggling to solve them.” (Bova, n.d.)

Perhaps it’s only because I write comic books which feature genuinely and proudly evil individuals, but I would argue against this. There are most certainly people who do evil because they know it is evil and they get off on the transgression of being able to do what most people would balk at. They don’t do it because it’s necessary, they do it because they have opportunity and drive. They don’t do it because they think it’s actually for the greater good. They do it because they know it’s bad. Doing ‘evil’ is the point and it you’d be missing the point if you convinced yourself what you were doing was ‘good’. Some people really enjoy watching others suffer and be afraid. They know this is bad, but the wickedness is the special sauce! Guilt is consumed like champagne! I think there are real ‘villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds’.

If Skeletor proves anything, it’s surely that!

Many of the same self-styled critics who took aim at the Supergirl film, as mentioned here last time, decided to get into a fight they were never going to win with Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey. Unsurprisingly, this latest in a string of cinematic hits for Nolan turned out to be impervious to racist imprecations and transphobia by triumphing at the box office.

What can we learn by venturing into the multiverse to study outraged and lonely Emperor Skum L-One, the world’s wealthiest alien toad of Parallearth-1367, (an Earth conquered and enslaved in 1898 by Martians with powerful antibiotics), who took to his mind scanner with an announcement that he planned to make his own historically accurate rival version of The Odyssey to counteract the fictional flights of fancy of his his world’s Nolan, (a squirrel). AI, NeuraLego, and cutting edge omnicrochet technologies will be employed to ensure the prompt delivery of the competing movie, in which historically accurate cyclops actors will join historically accurate sirens and gods, played by actual Greek deities who, as will be revealed, turn out to be very, very white in real life. Skum delivered his portentous announcement to a captive audience of 5 million excitable fireflies, denizens of his twilit swamp kingdom on a planet orbiting a strange alternative sun with zebra stripes of yellow and blue. His repeated croaks of ‘go woke, go broke’ triggered the glowing multitude to reply as one with a series of synchronised strobe semaphore flashes - ‘go fash, lose cash’ - and so the call-and-response of society is maintained and the rhythm of seasons and of stars doth continueth unto that bit at the end of the Bible where it says …Amen!

That’s where the head’s at this week. Pray for me.

THERE GOES THE AURA!

You write, we reply, they live, it follows…

Jonny – I’ll do what I can!

Sean – Can’t do much about the postage but otherwise, this book is intended as a luxury limited edition item in the Century Guild style. This is probably the only form in which it is ever likely to exist. It’s very specifically a strand of work that’s in collaboration with Century Guild, where I’m aligning with their publishing aesthetic.

Persefonie – Wishing the best of health for Lola and Blue and hope they stay strong in the Power of Love. And Leonard too. I’m very fond of crows. M. John Harrison and crows in one reply! I met Harrison once in 1999 when he wasn’t sure about continuing to write science fiction. He’d been producing great work that went largely unrecognised and was feeling a bit down about it. I’m glad he turned it around and I’ll probably pick up The End of Everything.

Luda is the Devil/Dual. That Luciferian Self I mentioned. The reflex of the Holy Guardian Angel.

Dorothy – Rain dances all round then! And please don’t feel pressured to create poetry every time! Your regular prose is every bit as elegant!

I’ll happily connect Bill & Ted with Doctor Who. The telephone booth is a TARDIS with chameleon circuit adapted to its 1988 San Dimas location – TARDISes are notoriously shonky devices so this ancient relic just forgot to be bigger on the inside when it engaged camouflage mode - and Rufus is a venerable Time Lord on his final regeneration who has settled down on Earth 700 years in the future! His last great victory is defeating De Nomolos and ensuring an excellent future for the planet by guiding Bill & Ted to success.

And thanks for introducing me to the Reading Abbey Girls’ School material! What a treasure trove!

Nathan – There’s no dragging down the vibe round here! If we can’t eulogise our animal pals, what good’s Xanaduum for? For all it’s immensely rewarding to take responsibility for the care of the vulnerable, it can be sore on the soul, as I’m sure you know all too well. The intensity of these connections is what life is all about, but it sets us up for grief when the connections we make appear to be broken or lost. Like the thrills and spills provided by velocity and gravity on a rollercoaster ride, the devastating emotional ups and downs of life on Earth go towards making the ride exhilarating, scary, painful, and ultimately delightful.

That aside - as the ghost of Peggy Guggenheim whispered in a room in the Gritti Palace in 1998 - no love is wasted, no love is lost. Nubbin will never be forgotten by any of us round here!

I must admit I’m feeling overwhelmed right now by the cat colony and looking forward to things quietening down for the winter. It’s like a visceral soap opera. Huge characters you think the story could never do without are suddenly gone. New faces emerge, and those that once were background NPCs take on depth and personality as they persist through years and emerge into foreground as dear and persistent old timers, before exiting stage left in their turn.

Watching the two 3-month old brothers who survived in the greenhouse as they revel in their mad, tumbling childhood in our overgrown garden in summer is a balm for the heart. A third tiny black kitten from another mother sometimes joins in the sunstruck ruckus, and it’s truly captivating to watch them racing around the grass and running up trees without a care.

All that aside, yes, there will be a physical Tarot deck! I’ve been stalled on the last three cards for various reasons but really ought to knuckle down and finish them now that I have a breathing space between jobs.

MagicK – 1. I get on well with Steve Wacker and with Brad Winderbaum, his new boss, so there’s always a chance. I don’t feel the same deep connection to Marvel as I do with DC, but special projects are an option.

2. That’s an interesting take on Luda. It’s one of the elements of the story that wasn’t consciously intended but you’re right – there’s a ton of Superman references in the book and there must be a reason for that! I’ve always enjoyed that David Watts/ (the Kinks song about a perfect schoolboy – ‘I wish I could be like David Watts’) Geoffrey Ingram narrative. Or like Spartacus Hughes in The Filth – the smug, self-assured and charismatic arsehole at your school who is just naturally better at everything and everyone loves and admires them. I think of it as the Luciferian self.

Fr. Theta – Good to know! Any unusual variants?

Drowzeezachary – I don’t use the Crowley formulation ‘Magick’ – I usually roll out ‘Magic’ with a capital ‘M’ when I’m referring to occult rather than stage magic and prefer ‘Mag!c’ for my own system – but the ‘k’ adds a retro touch here.

Green Lantern was my favourite comic during the Geoff Johns era when Geoff was on fire with that character. The main book was gripping and relentlessly inventive and I loved the spin-offs, the Green Lantern Corps series with Pete Tomasi and Tony Bedard was great too.

I thought the Yellow Lanterns from the Sinestro Corps War were a fantastic bunch of villains – really well put together. I also liked the Blue Lanterns, the hippy Buddha ones, with the Ganesh-like, elephant-headed Brother Warth. Geoff loved the character of Larfleeze, the Orange Lantern, but I found him charmless and annoying.

When it comes to the unwillingness or inability of comics to evolve, I’m mostly in agreement with Patrick’s analysis.

Patrick – Interesting to hear that about Corenswet. It tracks, as I didn’t see a whole lot of All-Star influence in Superman.

I think it’s worth pointing out that the writing in comics hasn’t changed much in 40 years, although the art has gone through more stylistic shifts in that time. In fact, I’d push it even further back to 50 years. Sometimes, I too can forget that grown-up, ‘sophisticated’ comics as we understand them didn’t leap into life fully-formed in the ‘80s but were around for a decade at least before that. There’s not much in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing or Gaiman’s Sandman that you wouldn’t also find in Don McGregor’s Killraven and Black Panther stories in terms of elevated ideas and plots, expressive poetic captions, hard-hitting ‘realistic’ dialogue and characterisation. The development of the Stan Lee authorial voice of the ‘60s via young counterculture writers in the ‘70s like Jim Starlin, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Don McGregor and others, resulted in a style that directly and obviously influenced the writers of the following generation, who then became influences in their turn.

The Beatles-inspired music sounds amazing in description, but I don’t have a Spotify account, so haven’t been able to listen to any of it yet! Will try to remedy that!

fylGja – Thanks for the extended commentary, which I have read and absorbed. Your articulate candour is appreciated and it certainly doesn’t create a rift of any kind to get your perspective.

Glad to hear you’ve dealt with the harassment. And I was unfamiliar with John Zack’s art but it’s interesting stuff.

We’ve been lucky enough to avoid the worst of the heat, but it’s 99% humidity today which is…taxing. Clothes soaked to the skin after five minutes outside. At least we have rain, lots of rain, unlike down South in England where they’re withering.

Back to the MCR shows - clearly, some audience members feel triggered, upset or angered by some of the imagery, but the same can be said of most confrontational art. Welcome to the Black Parade could as easily distress people who have lost loved ones to cancer, or who are undergoing treatment for the disease themselves. Or it could give them some comfort to see their daily struggles transformed into myth through art. My own feeling is that I’d rather the band used their work to assess the current state of America and the world than not, even if they make errors of tone and taste that are perhaps unavoidable in the context. There are few groups of MCR’s stature even willing to nod in the direction of real world issues, and as I said last time, the show is about a lot of things, not just the obvious trappings of authoritarian states. You allude to several of the metaphors and allegories playing out on stage. I think the fact that the band is inspiring these passionate feelings and challenging conversations is, on balance, a good thing but…

…this is not to deny or downplay negative responses to the material, which, as you laid out, are genuine and deserve consideration. Some audience members may have simply reached a limit with the band for the reasons you outline.

I’m still willing to see where they take it.

Michael S – I’m sure she’d appreciate that!

DeeSee – I like music…but not indiscriminately! I’m from the same generation as Duran Duran and played in a ramshackle ‘psychedelic punk’ band at the same time in the early ‘80s, so I’m afraid we ‘hated’ the Duran boys on principle and regarded them as chart shite – which meant we were madly jealous of their success, (I was reminded that Milo O’Shea’s character in Barbarella was ‘Durand Durand’ not ‘Duran Duran’). At the time, we were only willing to admit we liked Planet Earth and Is There Something I Should Know? (because it sounded a bit like the Beatles) but since then, much mellowing has occurred, and while I wouldn’t seek them out, I can listen without gagging to most of Duran Duran’s discography, but only in the same way I might nod along to a bunch of Robbie Williams or Oasis songs. They’re never going to make into my list of favourite bands. Your advocacy of the lads is admirable however, and I’ll concede that they’re hard-working, professional popsters, and still looking not bad for antiques! My favourite band at that time was the thrillingly lo-fi and indie Television Personalities, so you can understand why I might regard Duran Duran as uncool pro chart material from my staunchly homemade perspective…

Television Personalities - Geoffrey Ingram

And this is what my band was doing at the time. You get the idea. Garage power punk. No competition to Duran Duran obviously!..

The Mixers - Never Find Time (1984)

Duran Duran was, of course, the favourite band of Diana Princess of Wales…

Nudity isn’t enough to withstand the new breed of heat now that we have the hottest planet in the world! Forests are ablaze! Entire ecosystems rendered lifeless, with whole cities threatened by planetary scale elemental power. Except in the West of Scotland, where efficient rain has been pouring from the bungalow cloud ceiling on a regular and persistent basis, and where it’s just tolerably hot when the sun’s out rather than completely on fire. England has declared a drought and formerly lush green fields in Suffolk look like the desert sets from spaghetti westerns.

The lane I often refer to is the archetypal country lane that runs for several hundred yards between the trees behind where I live. You invariably get that churchy thing with the interlacing branches shifting overhead and the way the light comes in all sacred and flickering. Acid or mushies would make the whole experience positively ecclesiastical. Fire would only ruin the effect, so keep that rain coming, surly Scottish sky!

The original Magick and Symbolism interview exists but this particular venture is about the creation of an artefact, hence the bougie book format.

Jason – I have not yet, but I will check out Carousel and let you know what I thought next time!

Rodrigo – I borrowed that ‘technology or ideological purity test’ formulation from the writer and academic John Pistelli, whose weekly literature blog I enjoy when I need an intellectual workout and a painful reminder that I left school at 18, so the provocation is his. I felt he’d quite succinctly articulated something I talk about in the book.

It struck me that much of the discourse around AI was less about its technological and social impact and more about oppressive attempts to commandeer the conversation by a rapidly convened caucus of accusatory voices, intent on vilifying AI and anyone who dared experiment with it, and insisting on a Luddite moral purity from the creative community. AI was here to steal our jobs and piss on the human imagination went the outcry.

As an example of why I don’t fear being ‘replaced’ by AI, I wrote a positive review of James Gunn’s Superman for Xanaduum last year – then asked ChatGPT to write me a review of Superman ‘in the style of Grant Morrison’.

What I got was something that read like a fair parody of my hyberbolic superhero evangelism from the Supergods era around 2010/11, but, in style and content, the AI review was nothing like the review I’d just written for Xanaduum, 15 years after Supergods was published. AI can only follow. It may get close to an impression of your old style, but it has no idea what you’re thinking today, or what type of art you might decide to make. It can therefore never replace you, unless you rely on repeating yourself forever. I would never choose to follow AI versions of my favourite writers, especially if the originals were still available and creating new work.

It struck me also that the rhetoric around AI was similar to that surrounding other instances of slavery and exploitation. When our plan is to force another person or non-human entity to do our tedious donkey work for little or no reward, it suits us to deny that person or entity any consciousness or autonomy, and that’s something I see here.

Some surrender of human authorship would necessarily be implied in a true collaboration with a machine intelligence. You’d have to be willing to accept and incorporate the AI’s ideas, even where they altered your own, for it to be a genuine team-up, so that tension you mention would likely be at the heart of it.

Otherwise, I anticipate one artistic response to AI art being the rise of more obviously human and quirky artisanal DIY handmade work, and work that runs contrariwise to all the ‘how to’ books about screenwriting, the ‘improve your novel’ podcasts and all the other rules fed to AI and human ‘content creators’. If the machines are going to slavishly follow the rules of commercial art, I think human work will prosper and gain ground if it gets less polished, and more weird, surreal, and outsider-ish.

Another reason to reread Steve Aylett’s masterpiece ‘Heart of the Original’.

Digressions aside, this is a subject I find fascinating and creatively juicy, I think there’s a lot of room for serious artistic collaboration with AI, but the subject is quite toxic in the artistic community, and for me personally, the environmental cost is too high at present. I had a go, but find I can’t justify burning down a forest or evaporating a lake just to produce some glossy flea market surrealism.

Bobby – Thanks Bobby! The Century Guild book is deliberately styled on one of those understated Crowley or Golden Dawn volumes from the fin de siecle. I’m thinking I might actually go to the pictures to see The Odyssey. I wouldn’t do that for Supergirl, sadly.

Looking forward to the new comics!

And Happy Maybe Day Gone By!

Aled – it beats me on Quatermass and Doomwatch (created by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler, who worked on Doctor Who and made up the Cybermen). Both could be very easily updated and reimagined to great effect. I think about Doomwatch quite a lot, oddly enough. How I loved that show when I was a kid! Those emphatic opening titles - ‘WATCH’, ‘DOOM’, ‘WATCH’ - that start where Doctor Strangelove ends…

Opening credits sequence from “Doomwatch” BBC TV series (1970-72)

…that bludgeoning martial music! Every episode was some mad high concept eco-catastrophe, or a technological breakdown leading to madness and hallucination. Super-intelligent rats! A plastic-eating virus! Sonic booms causing psychosis! There was a disappointing movie version with the otherwise great Ian Bannen in the lead, but the show is amazing especially the first season with Robert Powell as Toby Wren, and that gut-wrenching, shocking finale where he tries to disarm an atom bomb on Byfield Pier.

The Doomwatch team leader, Quist, is Quatermass if he was a completely uncompromising bastard on a perma-rage - ‘To hell with the Dangerous Poisons Act!'.

There was an attempt to do a reboot in 1999 but it didn’t take.

See you next time…