Welcome back to Diane.

Join Rosie, Adam and Mark as they discuss part 11 of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

The sky spins open*, the street spits up its sickness, and a sweet fraternity brings life to the desert.

*So does Bill’s head.

There’s no backup for this.

Theme from Diane is by Mass Roman of Strangers from Birth.

During Twin Peaks: The Return, new episodes of Diane will appear on Libsyn 24 hours after UK broadcast.

Diane is baking extra content, including a video version of this episode, on Patreon. Go chuck a buck buck in the buck buck bucket, bucko!

Or just as welcome, please head over to iTunes and give us one of those fabulous Five Star Reviews. They make us smile like Shelly seeing Red.

You can always get back down to earth with Diane here on Mindless Ones Dot Com or vomit green bile over us in the place where people do that: @dianepodcast.

We even have free cherry pie for everyone on tumblr.

First, an apology that this post is so much later than the first six. Sadly, I had an arthritis flare-up that made it painful for me to type more than a sentence or two at a time, and which also made me too fatigued to even think for more than a week. The perils of chronic illness.

Still, my hands are working – more or less – now, so let’s have a look at the most-loved story (or to hear many people talk, the only loved story) of season twenty-two.

I Don’t Like My Hair Neat #1-2; I Wished I Was Married to the Sea

Have you ever underrated someone while praising them to the heavens? A friend perhaps, someone whose dress sense and confidence you’ve long admired without realizing that in doing so you were also reducing them to those qualities?  Worse still, that you had somehow decided that because these attributes were so hard to ignore, your were somehow giving them all the attention they required just by doing that?

That’s how I felt when I read the second volume of I Don’t Like My Hair Neat for the first time. I’d written a snappy, enthusiastic review of the first issue earlier in the same year, one that I thought was appropriate to Jules Scheele‘s talents in tone if not in excellence.

It was clear to me even then that Scheele is a better cartoonist than I am a writer.

The second issue initially seemed to me to be something else, something more traditionally laudable.  Reading it on the train up from that year’s Thought Bubble in my traditional vulnerable, hung-up and borderline euphoric post-con state, I was surprised and overwhelmed.  At the risk of getting a bit Dead Zone about it, I felt like the ice was going to break:

Make of this what you will. For me, it’s evidence that the bullshit critical distinction between Style and Content is somehow alive and in me in the present tense, some half a century after Sustan Sontag publicly annihilated it in ‘On Style’:

Practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the inside. As Cocteau writes: “Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body.” Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing, this by no means necessarily entails an opposition between a style that one assumes and one’s “true” being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face…

Click here to find out how any half-decent analysis of Scheele’s style makes my initial confusion about their subject matter seem not only dumb but callow!


Welcome back to Diane.

Tonight the air is electric with violence and lust as Rosie, Adam and Bob discuss part 10  of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

We talk about the body heat between Dougie and Janey E, the burn of aesthetics over plot, the hot of pink, and a cold unnerving absence in the night sky.

Theme from Diane is by Mass Roman of Strangers from Birth.

During Twin Peaks: The Return, new episodes of Diane will appear on Libsyn 24 hours after UK broadcast.

Diane is baking extra content, including a video version of this episode, on Patreon. Go chuck a buck buck in the buck buck bucket, bucko!

Or just as welcome, please head over to iTunes and give us one of those fabulous Five Star Reviews. They make us flap like Dougie’s arms in the boudoir.

Enjoy a post-coital cigarette with Diane here on Mindless Ones Dot Com or come and abuse us on the abuse machine: @dianepodcast.

You can even go and see pics of cats dressed as Laura Palmer or whatever over on tumblr.

SILENCE! #233

July 18th, 2017

 

 

WE’RE SO SORRY, UNCLE ALBERT

Hadrian-like, The Beast returns erecting a psychic wall between the listeners and their memories of the recent Scottish invasion. That’s right, it’s a  ‘Classic’ SILENCE! with those stodgy old pros Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die.

<ITEM> Fake pleasantries, artfully inserted Sponsorship and a bit more discussion about Small Press Day 2017. A ‘classic’ meat and potatoes intro.

<ITEM> A bit of proper Sadmin as The Beast eulogises recently departed horror auteur George A Romero.

<ITEM> Hot topix section alert! There’s a new Doctor Who in town. HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS INCREDIBLE SECRET?? Hot-takes like hot-cakes – ALL HERE!

<ITEM> Finally – finally – the Reviewniverse is breached. Thar she blows! Al Ewing’s Rocket is discussed and then there’s a nice long digressionary ramble about autobio comics, taking in King Cat Comics, Joe Matt, Billy, Me & You, Robert Crumb, James Kochalka and The Cleaner.

A few audio fumbles and then it’s a hop, skip and a jump off to la-lal-land. Did I mention how CLASSIC (classic) this all is??

Ta-ta!

@silencepod
@frasergeesin
@thebeastmustdie
@bobsymindless
@kellykanayama


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You can support us using Patreon if you like.

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.

AND IT CAME TO PASS that fully paid-up member of women Maid of Nails, deep Dundonian Botswana Beast and comics artist/aesthetic superstar Dan McDaid had many thoughts regarding the Justice League.

The BS nature of “good immigrants vs. bad immigrants” stories, the mind of Morrison, the paranoia that comes with mortality – all is laid bare in this exclusive audio recording from one of the many times they got absolutely fuckin’ tanked.

Is it, as Dan said, “the worst podcast ever”? I mean, probably. But there’s only one way to find out….

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Wd3DomYYztOEVOOC0yeF91WU0/view?usp=sharing

The bunny/duck optical illusion of our times

I show my friends I care by obsessively tracking every detail of their lives

 

The smell* of urban magic permeates the air

 

*it smells like Silk Cut and wine voms

At first glance this looks like it might just be a new art school favourite. The linework is soft and rounded, occasionally crumpling into more naive forms or vacating the page completely in favour of washes of expressive colour – it signals the intimacy of experience in a way that is immediately recognisable to anyone who’s managed to read past the superhero comics on the graphic novel shelves of their local library.  Elsewhere, the colouring takes on an active role on the page, sometimes embodying a shift in perception and understanding, sometimes becoming a source of unexpected affect – it signals a sort of deliberate intelligence of design in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has read as far as Asterios Polyp.

All of these qualities are exemplified in Take It As A Compliment, but the book resists praise on the grounds of mere formalism.

Drawn from the true tales of those who’ve experienced various forms of sexual assault, Take It As A Compliment sees Maria Stoian using the full range of her artistic abilities to give voice to those who have been on the receiving end of this shamefully commonplace form of violence.

These pages are full of crowded or empty streets, appeals to a horrific spectrum of threatening outcomes (“If you don’t your dad will be mad!”) and various forms of complicity (“Oh he was just trying to be funny“) but they are always centred on the experience of the victims.

The use of colour alone makes these experiences inescapably vivid in a way that demands a trigger warning, and the Stoian brings these stories together with an explicit purpose: “in sharing we can make it easier for survivors to deal with their experiences, and create a society that does not tolerate sexual violence!”

Do we sometimes flinch from art that is so clear about the impact it wants to have on the world?  And if so, does this reaction come from a lack of belief in our ability to affect the world or from a conviction that the goals of art are somehow incompatible with such efforts?

Take It As A Compliment is so delicate and powerful that such perspectives seem impossible while you’re reading it.

It gives voice to experience without forcing those who have already suffered to risk further suffering; it makes the social conditions that allow this suffering explicit; and it does all of this in a way that cannot be separated from its aesthetic excellence, from its commitment to exploring all the different ways that the intersection of words, shapes and colours on the page can reflect the reality of the human experience.

These stories are not my story so I can’t comment on what they have to offer to anyone who might find their reality reflected here.

But I am still a part of the society in which these abuses take place, and if I come away from Take It As A Compliment without finding extra determination to be there for those who need listening to and to confront those who need to be stopped, then the failing will be in me rather than in the book itself.

SILENCE! #232

July 14th, 2017

“SOME LIKE IT SCOTT!”

With The Family Beast still busy chewing on cigars with the big boys of Amazon “Optimus” Prime, mere minutes away from negotiating a deal that will see them broadcast into living rooms and pockets across the world, Gary Lactus is forced to do the one thing he didn’t want to do…. negotiate with the Skype-inept monsters of Mindless North for a second episode running.

Despite the usual technical problems that occur when North and South try to get together – blame Nicola Sturgeon for nationalising Scottish Skype in a better reality! – Gary Lactus is joined by Illogical Volume and Mister Attack, their shirts wet with rain, their bellies full of macaroni and rage.

<ITEM!> Who sponsors Gary Lactus? Some guy called Dave.  Who sponsors the sponsemen?  Fuck it, I dunno, Geoff Johns probably.

<ITEM!> The gang discuss the recent Small Press Day, the life changing/band forming dangers of encountering strange works by shifty creators in darkened rooms and the explosive properties of turtles.

<ITEM!> Shifting effortlessly out of the classical forms he has already mastered and into the new realm of Perhaps, R. Gary R.R.R. Lactus presents his new science fiction masterpiece: A Westworld.

<ITEM! > The question of who the nicest Mindless One is raised again.  Will Illogical Volume prove that he is actually a callow, cynical monster whose whole existence is a lie perpetrated against human decency by actually holding a twitter poll to determine whether people think he is nicer than Mister Attack?  Only time will tell.

 

<ITEM!> In SILENCE!…Because The Film Has Started, Gary Lactus is surprised by Spider-Man: Homecoming, and the Scottish are grumpy about Marvel movies and enthusiastic about gingers and ants.

<ITEM!> With all the relevant admin taken care of, the trio dive arse-first into the Reviewniverse for purposeful wallow in the  inky pleasures of comics.  John Allison’s Giant Days, new non-hierarchical/anonymous arts project SLABAl Ewing, Dan Brown and Travel Foreman’s Ultimates 2 (which Illogical Volume has finally started to read!), Craig Collins’ Oubliette, Hot Trash Dimension and Ross Geller Fanzine, the cosy era of the Justice LeagueGumby comics, and the wonderful info-comics produced by the University of Glasgow’s Wellcome Centre for Molecular Parasitology.

After making a speedy exit from the Reviewniverse, the team take a brief detour through the pages of Show Call…

…and tolerate Illogical Volume promoting Cut-Out Witch (drawn by the wonderful Lynne Henderson), Looking Glass Heights and Living Rent before heading off in search of more dinner.

 



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You can support us using Patreon if you like.

This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.

While widely reviled as one of the worst things Doctor Who ever broadcast, Timelash is in fact a masterpiece of postmodern avant-garde art…