Mindless Ones

Give me skeletons over zombies any time.

Zombies have no charge for me anymore. I mean, I get it. I understand completely why everyone obsesses over them, what they *mean*, but it took watching that sequence from Mean Streets again recently, where the drunk, bullet riddled barman continues to lurch towards his would be assassin even though he should’ve keeled over and died five minutes before, to make me feel horrified by the undead again. All the hallmarks of the zombie were there, the shambling flying dutchman of an un-person complete with lolling eyes and outstretched arms, persistance of movement and ‘mission’ inspite of massive structural damage…. But this time I needed a real body, something more literal, less of a symbol (and, now, not just a symbol for scary stuff we’d all rather not think about, but a portal to a whole genre of entertainment/fandoms/an industry, etc. – a tangled mess of associations, many of which I find boring/slash annoying), to make me re-experience the supernatural horror of undeath and thence the very real, physical body-horror it points to. It was an assbackwards way to get there, but it worked.

But we’re here to talk about skeletons, right?

This is the first in what will probably -HAHAHAHAHAHAHA – be a series of regular, if shortish posts about good, scary moments in superhero books.

This week:

From Dante’s Inferno and Fungus the Bogeyman to the much maligned, because capriciously fatal, Chasms of Malice the megadungeon has, for me, an eternal appeal. But because I’ve always found it such a comforting fictional environment, films like 127 Hours and Touching The Void really fuck with my head. They take the safe, endlessly sheltered, endlessly contained and controlled space and aggressively insist it’s anything but. The endless shelter, the roofing, becomes nothing but a granite sky as uncaring, if not moreso, than the one in the stock quote. Because unlike the sky above us it can cave in, trap arms, pulverise shins. Can go on forever…. until it tapers into a little hole where the star of The Descent is still trapped, alone, left to rot and go mad in the dark. Dungeons jostle about like this in all our minds, I think. Humans seek refuge. We instantly anthropomorphise enclosed spaces. Potential homes. But they may resist us. Perhaps they *are* homes – but not ours. Filled with… things.

Or perhaps they’re not homes at all.

Um….

For some reason, probably because I found the Chief Man of Bats issue so meh and the following one bloody awful, and because I was in the Isle of Man, I didn’t pick up this, ahem, *special* (way to throw a cover together, DC art Dept!) when it came out a couple of weeks back, but I’m pleased I have now because this book’s back on track in a big way. We all moan about the Big Two, but DC aren’t stupid enough to completely overhaul one of their most popular titles, and, as with Snyder’s book, now that we know Batman Inc will stay pretty much on point after the reboot, I’m prepared to invest myself again.

Now that I know I won’t get hu….

DIDN’T THIS HAPPEN LAST TIME?

For some reason, probably because I found the Chief Man of Bats issue so meh and the following one bloody awful, and because I was in the Isle of Man, I didn’t pick up this, ahem, *special* (way to throw a cover together, DC art dept!) when it came out a couple of weeks back, but I’m pleased I have now because this book’s back on track in a big way. We all moan about the Big Two, but DC aren’t stupid enough to completely overhaul one of their most popular titles, and, as with Snyder’s book, now that we know Batman Inc will stay pretty much on point after the reboot, I’m prepared to invest myself again.

Now that I know I won’t get hurt.

Sniff.

As was somewhat unsurprising, the second part of this story really divided fans. You know my take on this by now. There are problems with Grant’s writing, sure. I know all about them. I’ve been reading him since Zenith. But they have nothing to do with the writer being on bad drugs. If people want a more traditional take, they can read Snyder. If they want a more colourful one that’s not afraid to push the boat out, then Morrison’s the man for them. If you belong to the former group, you should know now that what you’re about to read is going to take it for granted that experimentation in comic books should be the norm rather than the exception. There certainly won’t be any time wasted on justifying such an approach.

So: annocommentations annocommence!

I’m sorry I’ve been absent from posting for a month, but here’s a xmas mix for those who enjoy such things (click Amiga Mountain).

Although there’s tracks from years gone by in there, there’s also a great deal to love from this year too. It’s a shame everything I enjoyed couldn’t get a look in, but I just don’t believe in making mixtapes that last much longer than sixty minutes. From the biting cold synths of Pye Corner Audio’s November Sequence to the scuzzed-out wooze of Hype Williams, the thrumming desert horror of Ayshay and the complete and utter big-up-yer-bogle rudeness of Jam City, the year’s best music is pretty well represented here. Hope you enjoy and forgive me for the cobbled together nature of the whole thing and the fact that, well, it sounds too quiet on my computer and too loud on the headphones – it’s my first time using Audacity and I’m in the Isle of Man for New Year’s without a sound expert scientist like Gary Lactus to nag.

Tracklist:

The Beegees – Until
Roly Porter – Caladan
Pye Corner Audio – November Sequence
Jean Claude Vannier for Yves St Laurent
Hype Williams – You Little Nothing
Amy – Ramirez
Cold War slow dance 1979
Omar S – Night Over Comption
Inga Copeland – Trample
Sand Circles – Midnight Crimes
Innercity – The Bells of Backworld
Ayshay – Warn-U
Julia Holter – Goddess Eyes
Rangers – Airport Lights
Machinedrum – Now You Know The Deal 4 Real
Jam City – Aquabox

Zom and I have talked many times in many articles about the fact that our mother used to work as a TV producer and how the company she worked for was, like so many production companies in the late seventies, situated in Soho. It was an old, thin building with an editing suite in the basement and her office at the top – a scary environment, full of weird adults. — —— used to hang out, drug addled, in the second floor editing suite where my brother and I were once offered cocaine by his pal and the in-house director/company director’s personal rent boy – needless to say, the offices of –TV was no place for children.

It was also haunted.

We were told how, in the old days, the building used to be a brothel, as if our child brains knew what to do with that information. This was a world even more adult than the one currently occupying the tiny, narrow spot in a cranny of central London where the production company had its base. All we knew was it must have been the site of enormous, incomprehensible grown up suffering. Our mother sensed a woman who would not leave, deranged, dressed in red. The presence was particularly strong on the third floor, but above it, in Mum’s office, the atmosphere would clear again. She never made herself felt up there. Just a few feet away and you were safe. When we had to stay late and the building emptied, my brother and I would shut the door between Mum’s office and the stairwell that led down to where the woman waited and sift through the video cassettes, any stray thoughts of ghostly, bloodied women washed away on the tide of Carry on England’s canned laughter or by the boisterous playground jostle of Rhubarb and Custard’s theme music.

Speaking to my Mum about it now, she doesn’t remember the red woman, and I have to admit it could have all got a bit confused in my pre-teen head. The point is, though, my Mum was always going on about ghosts. There was her first flat where her disbelieving housemates got a terrible, poltergeist style awakening one evening when the lights began flashing on and off of their own accord, doors opened with no one behind them and one girl accidentally sat on whatever it was, its arms furling around her, all of which saw the lot of them barricaded in one of the bedrooms when, one day, Mum, vindicated, returned from work. Then there was her boss’s house, the aforementioned director, where plates skidded across tables, books were found strewn over the floor of supposedly tidy rooms and where my mother’s bedside received frequent nocturnal visitations from disturbed, hostile entities silently demanding she leave and never return. Finally there was our family home in ——- and the old lady who would come to Mum in times of extreme sadness or stress in order to comfort her. My Mum’s always been haunted it seems. It’s like the Sixth Sense or something.

And we all know how that turned out.

The elephant in the corner of all these spooky fireside tales is somewhat less thrilling I’m afraid. Astute readers will already realise there’s a common element to all of this, the thing quite possibly causing it all, my mother herself. To say my mum had a happy time of it in 80s would be pushing it. She had a good job doing creative, rewarding work, but she was overworked, often stuck in that fucking edit suite for nights on end with no break, only to see her producer credit given to the rent boy. She was in a relationship with the same man who gave him the credit too. A highly abusive relationship. When she finally returned to our East Sussex home, often around midnight or later, sleep deprived, frazzled and terrified for her two boys because her boss/lover had decided, on a whim, to fire her that day, or some such everyday evil shit like that, she was a nightmare. Like her mother before her, my Mum was frequently a volatile mess, and, as much as i love her, and i do, i have to admit I spent a good part of my childhood genuinely frightened of her. It’s easy now to see that the ghosts in question were probably just her own pain, or, in the case of the old woman, its antidote, displaced into the places she inhabited.

My mother was the red woman, and, I tell you, there were times when you could practically see the frenzied demon peering out from beneath the mask she wore up to London every day.

Yesterday my nephew finally conquered his fear of river folk on ring-crack.

It was a small victory and I used it to illustrate the point I’d made an hour or so earlier when I was desperate for what we here at Mindless HQ call a ‘proper loo’ and had to forcibly eject him from the bathroom explaining that one has to face one’s fears – heights, spiders, being shut out of the bathroom while an adult goes to the toilet – if one is to conquer them. In the end his clinging to my leg and screaming made proper loo impossible and so I resolved to grasp the next opportunity to expand upon my, at that point barely sketched out, argument as firmly round the throat as I currently wanted to grasp my nephew…. Little did I know said opportunity would present itself within the hour when it came Lord of the Rings time.

Towards the end of an eight and a half hour stint of babysitting one gets tired and I’m not ashamed to say that its normally around this time that the laptop goes on for an hour and a bit, and for the past few weeks the child pacifier of choice has been Lord of the Rings. The Nephew has much bigger balls than I did at his age and so far he’s braved cave trolls, balrogs and black riders without so much as a ‘fast forward it’, in fact he thinks all the aforementioned are cool – the cave troll being ‘SO COOL!’ – but even though his performance thus far had been impressive I knew until he’d managed to sit through the beginning of the Two Towers he couldn’t really have been said to be tested. Why? Because river folk on ring-crack.

Gollum is just a haunting in the first film, a half glimpsed series of disembodied eyes, hands and scuttling legs and low growled preciousses, and in the mind of a child this lends him incredible power. Long time readers of this blog probably know all about the characteristics of the haunting by now – high degree of absence generating presence, non locality translating into immanence, etc. – and so does the nephew. He’s learnt the hard way. This was obviously a big part of the The Fellowship of the Ring’s thrill for him, the pant shitting fear that Gollum might be lurking around every corner, that were he to get too complacent, too comfortable, then those scrabbling fingers might suddenly burst forth and drag him, wailing, back to a sunken lair beneath the Misty Mountains – Gollum, hiding behind the trees, the tv screen, the sofa, crouched, poised behind thin air, ready to pounce. So it was with great trepidation and, I could tell, not a little excitement that he agreed to sit through the beginning of the next film where, I knew, my point about facing one’s fears would be proved. Because as we all know Gollum’s not all that scary when you meet him in person. Suddenly the vast hyperdimensional spectre moving through the first film collapses in on itself, reducing to little more than a bug eyed, gangly drug addict – and, even less frightening and utterly inexplicably, one that appears to be afraid of the most ridiculous and annoying character in all the LOTR films, that ever whimpering sharer of loads, bloody Samwise Gamjee. So now, as the nephew himself says, he’s not scared of Gollum, not when he can see him, only when he’s hiding behind floating logs in the background.

Victory! Gaze into the fist of Dredd!!!

Still can’t go to proper loo when it’s just us on our own though.

So anyway this is all the obligatory autobiographical detour material you expect when you run a search for Mindless Ones, but the point is it got me thinking – thinking about rogues that lurk. There are different kinds of rogues, basically. There’s your Darth Vaders slap bang in the centre of the frame, big bads who command the action, and then there’s the guys in the background, the Bounty Hunters. Of course Boba Fett was a special edition, send off your tokens and get a free figure kind of deal, but I’ve never felt his status as the most popular Star Wars character ever could be quite so easily reduced to pre-Empire promotional toy guff. No, none of that stuff would’ve mattered one iota if the famous disintegrator had arrived fully fleshed out with all that crappy prequel backstory in tow. What makes Fett work so well, what makes all the bounty hunters work so well in fact, are the gaps in our knowledge. We all know this, it’s obvious. Films should not be made with fans in mind, continuity porn is bad. We are drawn to the lacunas in the atomic structure of the narrative around the Bosks and the Zuckusses. Providing my own explanation for why Dengar is wrapped in bandages or why there’s a 4 before the Lom is far more exciting and inticing than any a cruddy, or even not so cruddy, Star Wars fanficer can provide. And so it should be. These beings on the edges of our stories, just out of shot, are there to be chased but never caught, or in the end all we’re left with is a stupid gangle creature or Attack of the Clones. So there are some baddies we love to seek around the margins for, to whose pull we willingly acquiese.

And then there’s the other guys.

Are you sitting comfortably? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzAEtLPSzRg&feature=related

The remains of PAGE 53

You can see from the film that not only is Terner in a similar get up to his real life counterpart, but that Orlando and Charlie Watts share the same tailor too.

Here’s a song some of you might know…. And that’s just it: like Sympathy For The Devil itself (indeed, the titular Devil himself) Terner’s song never speaks its name, so it may as well be called Sympathy For The Devil too (2). Moore probably intends it that way, the song being just another of the Devil’s disguises, changing shape with whatever reality it finds himself in this time, fictional, real or otherwise, but the beat remaining the same. It occurs to me, actually, that Satan is a League character par excellence, in that one dare not speak his name directly for fear of drawing his attention and so he must be referred to via hints and clues…..

At first it seems there’s a delicious irony in all the peace signs appearing when the song starts up, until one considers…

Part 1, Part 3

Interview with Kevin O’Neill here

Welcome to the second part of our annocommentations. The idea with these things isn’t to compete with the excellence of Jess Nevin’s annotations, but to supplement them.  Jess doesn’t do much mulling over the meanings of his findings, and that’s what these posts are about. So if you ever wondered what Terner being from Performance says about the sort of sexual positions he likes, then you’re in the right place. Oh yeah, and the links aren’t just to dull old Wikipedia pages. Follow them.

We annocomment after the jump