When he woke up he thought he’d dreamed about a movie he’d seen the other day. But everything was different. The characters were black, so the movie in the dream was like a negative of the real movie. And different things happened, too. The plot was the same, what happened was the same, but the ending was different or at some moment things took an unexpected turn and became something completely different. Most terrible of all, though, was that as he was dreaming he knew it didn’t necessarily have to be that way, he noticed the resemblance to the movie, he thought he understood that both were based on the same premise, and that if the movie he’d see was the real movie, then the other one, the one he had dreamed, might be a reasoned response, a reasoned critique, and not necessarily a nightmare. All criticism is ultimately a nightmare, he thought as he washed his face in the apartment where his mother’s body no longer was.
- Roberto Bolaño, ’The part about Fate’, p.234, 2666
This was originally notionally a piece called ‘Justify yr pull-list’, but I can’t seem to think of a more absurd enterprise than that, on reflection.
Reviewniverse
November 23rd, 2008
Masters of Kung-Fu: Iron Fist vs Badger
September 15th, 2008
VS 
Synchronicity. Whilst finishing up Vol 2 of Fraction and Brubaker’s extremely enjoyable but flawed Iron Fist, I was reminded of John Carpenter’s wonderful (and prescient) love letter to the Shaw Brothers martial arts movies of the 60’s and 70’s, Big Trouble in Little China. Lo and behold I got home late last night, turned on the TV and there it was in all it’s ridiculous glory (Hail Jack Burton, greatest and most misunderstood action hero of all time!). Something about that film’s giddy and gleeful mish-mashing of East and West pulp genres has seeped it’s way into the current incarnation of Iron Fist. Or maybe it’s always been there. Western culture has long evidenced a love affair with Martial Arts and ‘Eastern Mysticism’ (in the form of green smoke, immortal warriors, and exotic sounding fighting styles rather than any, y’know, actual Eastern mythology). Post-Enter The Dragon the 1970’s went Kung-Fu crazy, and whilst the obsession may have dimmed slightly (or at least been transferred towards fighty computer games) you can guarantee that school yards still resound with the clamour of ill-conceived ‘Special Moves’ and misjudged spin-kicks.
Podcast: big it up! slag it off!
September 12th, 2008
Okay, so this is the last bit we recorded. Here we each slag something off then big something up whilst sat on special hover chairs on my spaceship in space. No photos exist of this bit as my camera was on the floor and I couldn’t reach it because my hover chair was hovering too high. I think we’re going to make this a regular feature on our podcasts but we’re going to call the two sections “Voyage into the Negative Zone” and “Touchdown on Paradise Island” as we can travel to both of those places in my spaceship which is mine.
We’re planning to cast our pods again around Halloween when we’ll have a scary special edition from The Beast Must Die’s House of Haunted Horror! If you’ve listened to any of these aural assalts then: thankyou, glad you enjoyed it/sorry, well do better next time (delete as appropriate). So until next time…
KEEP IT COSMIC!
This is how the story ends… The Order #10
May 5th, 2008
I came to praise the Order and to bury them and now it seems neither action was mitigated.
