Mindless Ones

So we thought we’d try linkblogging… I have no idea how Graeme McMillan or Dirk Deppey did and do do this on a daily; this is about a week or so’s worth of what I remembered to put in here, seemed interesting at the time…

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“It’s all my fault,” my Grandad told me, searching through his pockets for his pipe tobacco, “I should never have introduced you to Aubrey Beardsley.” There was a moment of silence before things slid into place, smooth as a Tetris block. My mind cast itself back over the last 15 years. 15 years spent hopping from books to records, comics to films. 15 years spent on my hands and knees shining torches into obscured corners and inhaling musty spores. The Unica Zurn I finished the day before, the Antonin Artaud the day before that. My first ecstatic discovery of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. My first viewings of Akira and El Topo. A host of patterns began to emerge, way-station lights twinkling the location of minor obsessions and remembered moments: Me and my brother were the only people dancing at the Boredoms gig…That gas mask was only a fiver…Fuck me The Invisibles is amazing, I haven’t thought about this stuff in yea…I hope Naked Lunch is as good as I’ve already told everyone it is…I’d kiss you but I’m on acid and I’m just not sure that my lips could stand it (kissherkissherkissherkissher).
Names combined and re-combined in the murk. Weaving together and separating like bacteria dancing – the mind altering fungus of the Tabula Rasa: Maruo and Hino, Blake to Brian Jones, Savoy, Sinclair, Huysmans, Cale. Answers to an Escher designed crossword filled in in Guinness by an ape with no more idea why he’s doing it than frogspawn does of its cosmic destiny. I was staring in to the Jet-black-streaked-with-vivid-crimson contents of my overloaded brain pan and it made. Me. Fucking. Hard.

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Let me get a few things clear: I don’t have a bloody clue who Talky Tawny is. I’ve never encountered an Atomik Knight before (either in the DCU or during a afternoon of live roleplay). Christ, I even know fuck all about the New Gods.

AND I DON’T CARE.

For those that do care, I say this: Why on Great Cthulhu’s soon to be trampled Earth do you give a monkeys?

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These are not my favourite pants. They count, they’re in the collection, they get worn on the regular cycle like the rest, but these pants aren’t all that good are they?

The blue trim is okay, and they say ‘Superman’ on them, which is pretty bloody amazing when you think of the millions of billions of pants that don’t have any superhero’s name on them at all, but next to the mighty world of Marvel pants that we’ve been exploring this last wonderful week, the DC territory starts to look rather sparse.

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Look at these. Not strictly a superpant, but the connection hardly needs to be explained.

There has been a few queries about where my favourite favourites have come from – In case you haven’t read the comments in the last post, the answer is in almost all cases H&M – I’d link to their site, only there’s little point – no online shop or even catalogue, except for in a few eurozone teritories that you probably don’t live in. Pants aside, I cannot unreservedly recommend the shop anyway – usually worth a look, but generally full of stock designed to appeal to sixteen year old crackheads, and on the weekends too rammed with said youths to be able to get what you want anyway.

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“How long would you say Heroic Ages last, Wally?”

– Jay Garrick, the Flash (I)

“Twenty years, according to Jones and Jacobs. The Golden Age lasted until 1955, the Silver Age until 1975, but the Dark Age just ended in ’95. That’s why it’s still too early to say what this new age is going to be called yet.“

– Wally West, the Flash (III)

Flash #134, cover-date Feb 98, script by Mark Millar & Grant Morrison

It always comes back to the Flash, in the end: from a purely DC pantheon angle, it’s easy to see how the missing middle mantle above, Barry Allen, and his death (“outracing the tachyon at the heart of the Anti-Monitor’s anti-matter cannon…[he] became one with the other side of light.” – so impossibly romantic, that) resonate with the term “Dark Age”, certainly as used pejoratively.

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It’s odd how many of the pants, upon the microscopic inspection they’re getting this week, carry art by the greats. You’d expect bad design and lame excuses to stick to these things like crabs. But with a couple exceptions the panels and pages used are great, not to say brilliant, just in comic art terms. There’s Miller, as we’ve seen, and lots and lots by Jack Kirby. That latter name is quite the one to conjure with these days the pencil strokes are deeper and clearer than ever before on the drawing board of current cultural life. How much of the pant selection was accident, and how much inevitable it’s difficult to tell. Did Merch Exec deliberately choose those becasue he had been told they were the ones to pick? Or did the natural quality shine through? I suspect it’s a combination of both, but look at these latest exhibits. No doubt put together by a true and loving believer, they are in all their gaudy, factory-made glory about as perfect and complete a pop artefact as you are ever likey to find on the High Street. Suitable for something that spends so long in the primal dark neath my nuts, they are also an ideal neo-primitive expression of the art of sequential narrative in full effect. Fit for a King, they are very truly my favourite pants.

Look at this motley bunch, these Tommy toting turkeys. (Though it’s obvious like a sausage down an alleyway, ignore the huge and mighty, roaring yet rubber-clad chopper wheel, slap bang in the middle there, if you can.) A more criminoid gallery of fizzogs you will not find in all Ray Chandler’s cheapest nightmares. (Pretend the crooks knobbly mugs don’t represent testicles.)

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