Whatever New Year

Been quiet around here for a while.

I won't cheapen my intentions by stapling the phrase "New Year's Resolution" to them, but I'm hoping to make a bit more use of this particular vertex of the blogohedron in 2019. With the first stretch of IDFC almost two thirds of the way through, that feels like it should be possible.

I guess we'll see, though. In any event; I hope everyone enjoys themselves today, and that 2019 finally breaks the grim run of increasingly indefensible orbits of that there Sun.

Best of luck to you all.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.7 - "Still Ill" (The Smiths)

I can't think of another Smiths song which begins so deliberately ugly. Marr's slashing. palm-muted collisions scrape the brain like the sound of a machine refusing to start. Once he swoops into a more standard Smiths riff (which is to say, an astonishingly good one) Morrissey contributes his own unpleasantness with a dead-eyed skewering of Little England assholes:

I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving
England is mine, it owes me a living
But ask me why and I'll spit in your eye
Ask me why, and I'll spit in your eye

It's a swipe that gets both more powerful and more baffling as time goes on. How did Morrissey go from so effortlessly nailing the sour entitlement of the EDLs recruitment pool to acting as their unofficial spokesperson? Who is ill here, and how?

It just wasn't like the old days any more
No, it wasn't like those days
Am I still ill?

"Still Ill" is a fever dream, a burning hallucination of things that don't exist, and never did. The tragedy here - the central mistake that warps and twists and burns and kills, the excuse grabbed for when waving England flags in immigrants' faces and pushing dogshit through their letterboxes - is that the patient believes it is the country that's sick. That one day they'll wake to find their fictitious, quasi-fascistic Britain (emphasise fascistic, rather than quasi-) has recovered its senses, and returned to what it was.

We might never know when Morrissey's chronic case of nationalism first became symptomatic. I'm not sure that's a question spending all that much time on, actually. All we can say is that he's still ill, and the fever he's helping spread shows no sign of breaking.

Back before it became impossible to miss what Morrissey had revealed himself as, though, this song meant something very different to me.

Under the iron bridge we kissed
And though I ended up with sore lips
It just wasn't like the old days anymore
No it wasn't like those days
Am I still ill?

It's been twenty-five years since I was first prescribed medication to aid my mental health. I've tried at least three different drugs, over at least four lengthy periods - most recently, an eight-year stint on citalopram, a state of affairs I'm hoping will last indefinitely, absent any actual sign of recovery.

It's not a perfect solution. The meds take away some of my sadness, and most of the white-hot unrelenting anger that used to give me jaw-ache from clenching my teeth so hard. But there are side-effects. Whether the limitations are pharmaceutical or neurological, it's not just the negative emotions that end up damped. The lows are more shallow, but the highs are flattened out. On my best days I can be aware my immediate situation is a pleasant one, as though I'm reading about a favourite fictional character being happy, and am feeling pleased for them. On the worst days, happy situations just make me sad.

(Though so does fear, in fairness, which can make watching horror films with me a rather odd experience.)

This can't possibly not have a knock-on effect regarding relationships. Without the drugs, love becomes anger, and lust becomes misery. With them, it often feels like something happening to someone else. I need you to understand that it isn't I'm incapable of love. It's that he way my mind expresses love would be unrecognisable to my younger self. "It just wasn't like the old days anymore", as the man said, irrespective of the number of kisses exchanged in the shadow of cold, dripping architecture.

Maybe this is simply part of growing old. It's hard to tell - I've got nothing to compare my interiority to. The closest I can come, for some reason, is music, which from time to time stirs up sensations in my head that I can recognise as essentially me.

As emotional stimulants go, an mp4 file is more fast-release than a swig of alcohol, and more reliable than literally anything else. Self-medication through music isn't entirely risk-free, though. Knowing you'll feel something is distinct from knowing what precisely you'll feel. There's a sense in which I'm playing (Russian) roulette with emotions I've lost the knack to processing. Sometimes "Still Ill" makes me feel understood. Other times, it makes me feel unsalvageable. Am I still ill? Fucking hell, yes, as it turns out. Still.

Morrissey can't seem to stop getting worse, and I can't seem to start getting any better. A song released before Morrissey was a joke and before I was a schoolboy continues to gather new layers over time. Like scar tissue. Like rust beneath an iron bridge. You can see what was originally there, but you can't get to it.

I'm too scared to check whether Brexit might result in disruptions to my med schedule.

Are these people still ill? Oh no.

------------------------------------------------

B-side:

(The live version on Rank is even better than the studio recording, which of course makes me hate Morrissey all the more.)

Retrial

Hey everyone, it's Christmas. Have a ghost story.

-----------------------------------------------------------

‘It will be standing in the corner’, the dead man told her. ‘In the far-right of the room. That’s always where it starts.’

Jia found something persuasive in the dead man’s voice; an urgency that carried through the distance and metal of the phonograph recording. A need to be heard above the whir of the very machine delivering the message.

So she looked.

At first, she could see nothing in the thin light of her budget electric lantern. Books and folders stood stacked and decaying, dying messages from a century previous. Dust danced, but like people who’d rather just be going home to bed.

Jia narrowed her eyes, let her pupils widen. There.

It was standing in the corner.

The figure had its back to her. It stood in the shadow of boxes she’d not yet looked at. That and the weak light saved her from being able to make much out. A thin, grooved body, glistening and concave; an hourglass that demons might use to apportion their torture. A squat, creased head, swaying slowly from side to side as if searching the wall in front of it for an exit.

Or a meal.

‘Crap,’ she whispered.

‘Do not stop playing these recordings,’ the dead man told her. ‘Do NOT stop, or it will notice you.’
There was a click as the wax cylinder containing the message reached the end of its groove. With it no longer turning the number ‘1’ could once again be seen stencilled at one end.

The figure’s head began turning, very slowly, towards her.

Hands shaking, Jia reached for the phonograph, still balanced precariously atop the small table she’d found it on, beside the old furnace in the complex’s sealed basement. Sealed until she’d broken in, anyway, like a cat on its last life still determined to live up to its rep.

Jia removed the played cylinder, replaced it with the next, set the needle.

‘It will still mooove’ the dead man continued, his tinny voice slowing and deepening where time had warped the wax grooves into which he’d poured his words. ‘But this way, you can buuuy time for the others to reeeach you.’

Jia looked again. The figure had left the boxes now, shark-bulk muscle moving silently on insect limbs. Mucus glittered at its edges. It still did not turn to face her, looking instead down a short side passage leading off from the main basement.

‘It iiiiis imperative you make nooo other sound’, the dead man said. ‘We know now how tooo treat these cylinders so to stave off murderous rage from the subject. It will stiiill move, but slowly’.

A click signalled the end of another recording. Jia forced herself not to look at the monstrous figure as she set the next one spinning.

When she glanced hurriedly back, it had shifted once more.

‘The subject will now be approaching,’ the dead man told her. ‘Do not move, and dooo not panic. Avoid looking at its face, as this can cause alarm aaaand in some cases madness.’

Jia didn’t understand. The creature still had its back to her, and had moved away, entering a tunnel that led outside the wan light of her cheap lantern. It took another step away as she watched, a twisting lunge of glittering horror, fast and slow in all the wrong places. It didn’t so much walk as throw itself down a flight of stairs that didn’t actually exist.

‘We have reecorded many reactions to an incoming subject,’ the dead man said. ‘These incluuude goose-bumps, wailing and the gnashing of teeth, garment-rending, ichthyophobia, ichthyophilia, deeemands for compensation or danger money, and diarrhoea, listed iiiiin increasing likelihood of promptiiiing an attack.’

Jia felt frustration and confusion seep into her fear. It didn’t so much dilute it, as freeze along with it, ­bulking out her unrest. Just what the hell had these people been doing down here? How many lives had been lost so some smug prick could use their deaths to record a how-to guide on avoiding immediate murder? And why had this all simply been sealed away, instead of actually dealt with?

The monster was still tumbling away from her, thin and lurching and obviously unbound by the dead man’s narration. Suddenly it froze just outside the lantern’s circle, a darkness silhouetted against deeper darkness.

It was facing the right-hand wall, apparently staring at something there.

‘Survivors are reeequired to complete paperwork detailing any and aall psychological damage following the encounter, and tooo rate the experience out of ten, compared to previous interactions with suuupernatural horrors.’

Jia scooped up her lantern, turned the control that focussed the beam, and, taking great care not to spill light on the creature itself, passed her circle across the musty brick it appeared focussed on.
Her light bounced glinting off a switch, angular and upright.

The machine clicked once more, and the creature’s head again began to slowly swivel toward her.
Jia reached for the final cylinder, thinking desperately. The door behind her was too far away – she’d never reach it before the horror reached her. The door ahead was far closer, but she had no idea where it led, or even whether it was unlocked. Maybe the creature would start moving away again, and give her more time to run? Either way, once the last cylinder ran out she’d have to make her move.

Jia had almost inserted the cylinder when she felt it. Something attached to its end, just next to the number ‘4’. A small blob of wax, with a faint trail leading back to the main cylinder from which it had once dripped, liquid and warm.

Understanding hit like chain-shot, splintering, dragging down. The recordings hadn’t been warped by time. They’d been warped by heat.

Realisation and terror made her clumsy. She got the last cylinder running, but knocked all the others off the table in doing so. Instinctively she reached down to recover them, putting her hand on the phonograph’s table to steady herself.

Immediately the table shifted, creaking as it turned on a hidden axle until it settled with the phonograph facing away from her.

Jia barely even noticed the creature as it threw the switch and ignited the furnace.

It was a rotating table.

She’d been looking in the wrong corner.

The second creature had hold of her before she could move. Jia yelled in surprise and pain, tried to twist herself free. All she accomplished was turning to face what held her. She caught a blur of bone and sucker-mouths, and huge, sightless eyes.

‘Rescue should nooow have been enacted,’ the dead man told her. ‘Otherwise, death is certain.’

‘Screw all three of you’, Jia spat.

She heard a collapsing laugh, like the mockery of a battleship, and then simply darkness.

When Jia awoke, she was burning.

D CDs #474: Noise Of Summer

One of the nicest things about the D CDs project is how far it can force me out of my comfort zone. This is probably the furthest out from shore I've been yet, and the water is no less deep for the sea being gentle and sun-kissed.

It's not just the "Latin reggae" thing, either, though that's already at least a time zone away from my regular haunts. There's not even really any lyrics here for me to over-analyse. Even the songs in English here don't aim for anything past easy-sounding nonsense. I can't even get worked up by the careless linking of enjoying sex and criminal activity in "Promiscuity" (sorry, "promiskwity"). It just doesn't read as a slice of puritanical moralising, so much as a careless afternoon's leafing through a rhyming dictionary. There's no more weight to the lyrics here than the eclectic, gleefully silly choice of samples throughout. How are you supposed to fret about what could be read as an ill-judged puritanical lecture when it's delivered alongside what sounds like a chipmunk in mourning?

Without my standard crutch, then, what is there to talk about? Atmospherics, naturally. This is a summer record. I don't mean it's a record that belongs to summer, or one best played then (though I think both are true). I mean it's an album that generates summer. It doesn't matter if I'm playing "...Esperanza" over a beer on a warm day, or spinning it in the car during a drive through winter darkness and lashing rain. The mood it generates is inescapable, all breezy promenades and self-conscious-free boogying on sandy beaches. I listened to a sermon once where the minister talked about the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. "One changes with the room's temperature, the other changes the temperature of a room".

"Poximon Estacion Esperanza" is a thermostat record. It evokes feelings of warmth and relaxation, and does this despite - or surely because of - the madness surging just beneath the surface. In Manu Chao's world, you're never more than a few seconds away from an interjection by a demented duck,  or a drunk in a midnight choir of Clangers. The result sounds like the inner soundtrack to David Lynch's head on the happiest, drunkest night of his life - the sadness is still there, but even that tastes sweet (the opening track "Merry Blues" puts this tension front and centre, from its title onwards).

A deceptively simple, smooth listen, then, enjoyable for the initial sparkle and commendably disciplined assembly alone (more than half the songs here last less than three minutes, and none last more than five). Dive under the surface of the glittering ocean, though, and you'll find hidden depths, and creatures of strange beauty uncoiling to sing to you.

 Seven and half tentacles.

The Wrong Side Of The Lee: The Politics Of Marvel's Loudest Voice

(Note: this is part of a larger piece I wrote in 2015. I’ve made a few tweaks this week to tighten the arguments, reference something I wasn’t previously aware of, and – obviously – reflect Lee’s death.)

I want to take this opportunity to discuss Lee's politics, and how they came to influence his writing. Some of what follows was gleaned from Lee's own Amazing Fantastic Incredible, but the main influence here is Sean Howes' The Untold Marvel Story, without which this essay wouldn't have been possible. I highly recommend Howes' book (Lee’s is interesting too, though the limitations of its usefulness in the pursuit of understanding who he truly was are presumably obvious).

Let's start at the beginning. Born the son of a Romanian immigrant and a native New Yorker, Lee's family struggled badly with money whilst he was growing up. It would be entirely too pat to suggest his parents' difficulty keeping him entertained on their budget (Lee talked about a gift of a pedal bike being life-changing, and said he has no idea how they found the money for it) is what led him to start dreaming up superheroes and alternative dimensions. That said, there is one aspect of his childhood worth lingering, and that's the story he told of leaving his local cinema each time he watched an Errol Flynn film and riding on his bike around the neighbourhood looking for women being harassed so that he could intercede.

As Lee admitted, it's fortunate for his own sake that he never actually came across a woman being harassed. Which is to say, of course, any woman he understood as being harassed. That's an important distinction to make, because this seemingly random slice of Lee’s childhood manages to summarise precisely what made Lee so inconstant a political actor. The central tension arises from two fundamental truths about the man. First, he abhorred bullies. Secondly, he wasn’t all that good at actually recognising bullies, or knowing what to do about it when he did.

(I hadn’t realised when I wrote this back in 2015 that Lee himself had been accused of sexually harassing women in his employ, but that fact adds another level of not just ugliness to this story, but irony too.)

That’s the diagnosis, then. What’s the pathology? Lee’s basic error, so far as I can tell, was a conviction that the US government was, broadly speaking, a force for good, or at least not so bad that its claim to be the country's ultimate moral authority (divine beings aside) could seriously be doubted. Sure, there were individual members of that government who could fail to live up to the responsibilities and duties their positions placed on them (Lee wrote one or two of them himself), but as an aggregate unit, Lee seemed willing to believe the government is always doing the absolute best it can. As Lee had Iron Man announce in 1966: ``No-one has the right to defy the wishes of his government! Not even Iron Man!''.

Say what you like about Lee – he walked the walk. Several of his fellows at the then-called Timely Comics were drafted during WWII, but Lee went in voluntarily. One can quibble over whether this decision was made out of a wish to serve America as a political structure or as a national ideal, but there’s little enough sense elsewhere in Lee’s life that he thought too much about that distinction in any case. If there is meaningfully different alternative explanation for Lee volunteering, it’s more likely to be his established hatred of bullies. Perhaps Lee simply wanted to help out his colleagues and fellow Jewish men who had been so ahead of the country’s mood in condemning (and provided four-colour shit-kickings of) Adolf Hitler.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether he signed up first and foremost to serve the United States, or to oppose Hitler. Either way, Hitler was most certainly the kind of man Lee liked to oppose. The label “bully” falls as short of adequately describing Hitler as does the phrase “leery of diversity”, but that isn’t to say it’s actually inaccurate. Describing fascism as bullying with a body-count isn’t terribly sophisticated, but there is certainly truth there. It genuinely isn’t difficult to imagine Lee enlisting because he wanted to play a role in Hitler’s downfall. To sum up his decision, as does Captain America in the MCU, by noting his dislike of bullies.

Which, obviously, is the right instinct. It’s quite clear that Lee wanted an end to overt bigotry. The problem is, it’s hard to find evidence that he ever thought very hard about how to do it, and whether that could be enough. Lee was vocal about how much he hated racists, for example, but had very little grasp of what racism actually was. Sure, he wrote several pieces for ''Stan's Soapbox'' about the transparent ridiculousness of racism (including the one currently blanketing Twitter like a carpet of faintly self-righteous snow). But he also responded to a letter criticising Marvel for a dearth of black characters and deriding Black Panther as a token by arguing it wouldn't look realistic if there was a sudden increase in the number of black people ``stampeding'' through their comics. As though realism was something Marvel had to take pains to maintain – at that point more of their heroes were reformed alien invaders than were people of colour – hell; that might still be true. Regardless, a rapid uptick in black representation would not somehow have broken any carefully maintained laws of plausibility.

 (Lee also wanted credit for the fact Man-Ape was black, which is probably even more clueless a defence of Marvel's commitment to diversity than bragging about creating a gay character named ``Pinky'' Pinkerton, which Lee also did. On the other hand, in the same response nodding to the Man-Ape, Lee mentioned Sam Wilson, the Falcon, despite the minor obstacle of Wilson not actually existing as a character at all. After writing his response, Lee and Gene Colan immediately huddled and created him, meaning that Lee both managed to give the original writer what he wanted, another heroic black character - and ultimately a Marvel mainstay - AND take the full credit. No-one ever looked at Stan Lee and asked whether he thought he needed a bit more chutzpah.)

What a sudden surge of African-American characters would have done would hurt sales, and as Howe puts it, ``[Lee would] happily preach tolerance, but he was not going to get caught taking an unpopular stance''. Which at that precise time, when Lee was responsible for the entirety of Marvel's comic output, was probably true. While Lee's approach and output during the late '60s put more than one nose out of joint (including the guy responsible for drawing Iron Man's nose, as it happens), his decision to take the path of least resistance at that point can at least be contextualised by the fact he was certainly aware that if Marvel collapsed, he would not be the only one hurt, nor the one hurt most. Just a few short years earlier, when Lee was busy helping to build the empire he would ultimately be responsible for, he was far more willing to take risks. Problem was, those risks were often in exactly the wrong direction.

Let’s talk about Iron Man, a character whose origin story focusses around his narrow escape from a clutch of sneering Asian Communists. Lee spent a lot of time coming up with sneering Asian Communists. One could easily infer from this that a) he hated Asians, b) he hated Communists, or c) both.

I don’t actually think this is the problem, however. I don’t think Lee was anti-Asian, or anti-Communist – at least in terms of coherently objecting to their politics. I think it’s simpler than that. Lee hated bullies, and thought that’s what the Communists were.

This lack of political nuance not only explains why so much of Lee's output involved Commie-smashing (seriously, Captain America: Commie Smasher was genuinely a Lee-written book title for a while), but how an apparent liberal - even a ``casual'' one, as Howe puts it - could decide the best way to run counter to the prevailing mood and generate an unexpected hit would be to create a superhero (Iron Man) whose alter ego specialised in creating weapons to fight the Communist overseas. We’ll come back to the Communists in good time, but for now, let’s marvel (hah!) at the sheer ludicrousness of imagining Iron Man could possibly represent some kind of deliberate inversion of the status quo. Somehow, amid the spiralling international tensions that would lead to the Vietnam War breaking out just a year later, Lee managed to come to the pig-headed conclusion that a hero designed to be “counter-cultural” would take the form of a man who made his fortune through getting commission on international murder sprees (or pretended this was the reason and figured people would buy it, which amounts to a similar failure to understand the contemporary political climate).

It is of course, beyond obvious that Tony Stark is not a hero from within the counter-culture, but one that stands opposed to it; a purely reactionary figure. Seeing the anti-war movement as the prevailing attitude of the time is, likewise, a fairly unambiguously reactionary position. But it isn’t the reactionary element of Lee’s take here that jumps out, so much as the incoherence. Lee was undoubtedly genuinely searching for another hit – genuinely thought it was smart to (claim to) swim about the current as a way of being daring and different. The fact he so completely to understand what that current actually was isn’t evidence of terrible politics, it’s evidence of a terrible grasp of politics. A fundamental inability to actually understand the complexities of the prevailing mood. Lee didn’t hate the zeitgeist. He just couldn’t recognise it unless it put a sheet over its head.

We see further evidence in his inconsistent attitude to protest movements, and in particular student protest movements. Lee wasn’t against student activism in and of itself. At one point he even replied to criticism of Marvel's poor treatment of hippies (which Lee was a part of, though how much his caricatures of the Beat generation were meant to be affectionate is an open question) by arguing he was actually very much in favour of activism on campuses. At least that way, he argued, they were engaging, making less likely that students would drop out.

Alas, his approval of passionate student engagement with the politics of the day only lasted as long as protesters acted in a way he approved of. Make your point, sure. Just don't yell, because yelling upsets people. It upsets the peace, and that might get you into trouble for which you can only blame yourself. It's this kind of cognitive dissonance - I agree you need something desperately and immediately, but please ask those nice government types politely for it - that meant Lee could simultaneously support the Civil Rights movement and write a comic about a hated minority that has an FBI agent secretly helping that minority, as oppose to plotting to assassinate Xavier if he ever became too effective. Lee might argue that there was no way in '63 he could have known how deep the FBI were into the government's attempt to stifle the move toward civil rights, but that hardly helps - he didn't know because he wasn't listening, and when he heard something by accident he demanded people quieten down.

An almost perfect synecdoche of Lee's approach can be found in his dialogue for Amazing Spiderman #68. Here Spidey encounters a group of students protesting their university's declsions ion how to use its land. At first Peter is sympathetic to their cause, but like Lee it doesn't take long at all for him to decide that whilst they might have a valid case, they're going about it in entirely the wrong way. ``Anyone can paint a sign, mister! That doesn't make you right!'', our hero yells at one point. The issue ends with the protesters framed for vandalism and arrested, with Spidey swinging away, amused that their entirely unfair and potentially calamitous brush with the law might give them time to calm down. This was in 1968, the year of the Columbia University protests.

Once again, we see evidence of Lee's beliefs regarding the basic decency and natural authority of, well, authority.  He will grant you the right to talk back to those in power, so long as you do it quietly, and accept it immediately if they rule against you.

The problem here will be familiar to many of you. Setting yourself up in opposition to those compelled to shout, just so they can be heard, is obviously going to mean taking stances against protesters and minorities - these being the people who have to yell themselves hoarse simply to be heard. Of course the quietest voices are those of the status quo. There's no need to shout your message when it can be heard everywhere at all times. When your position has become the heartbeat of your very country, there is no need to reach for the snare-drum and mark time for the march.

Demanding those without access to a microphone keep their demands sotto voce is no more than a plea to not have to hear them at all. It's a way for the poerfupp to salve their consciences, by ensuring every problem is either one they don't know about, or one they can feel justified in ignoring because of how "badly" those who notified them of the issue are behaving.

The reports of Lee getting frustrated over demands by Kirby and Ditko to receive their fair share of Marvel revenue is perhaps germane here - Lee knew he wasn't prepared to do what was necessary to secure them equitable deals (and in Lee's defence, it might have taken threatening to quit, with the risk that Martin Goodman would have called his bluff) so he became audibly frustrated with the fact they wouldn't quietly swallow their displeasure.

The common thread throughout all this is Lee’s desire for people to get along. If people couldn’t agree, they should just agree to disagree, and then forget the whole damn thing. The most generous interpretation of this impulse is that Lee genuinely believed the system was generally sound, and just needed people to behave a little better. The less generous view is that he just wanted everyone to quietly allow him to enjoy his wealth. Whichever it was (or what ratio existed between the two), Lee was fairly undiscerning in his curmudgeonly shushing. Lee didn’t want racists to be overtly racist, but he didn’t want students to be loudly political. He didn’t want fascism taking over Europe, but he didn’t want the Communists causing a fuss either.

I said we’d come back to the Communists. There’s absolutely no doubt that Lee liked to put the boot in where the Reds were concerned. And why wouldn’t he? The last time the US Armed Forces he onced signed up to had headed for war, it was to stop the nightmarish actions of Hitler's Nazi Party. Why should first Korea, and then Vietnam be any different? When you look at how the US government was portraying foreign Communists at the time, why wouldn't Lee see them - as Captain America himself puts it - the ``Nazis of the 1950s'' and beyond?

It’s instructive to consider what Lee’s experiences in the Army actually were. Lee spent his time there writing narrations to training films and designing posters warning GIs about the dangers of VD. Important to the war effort, no doubt, but by spending the war Stateside, Lee never got the chance to experience the realities of war or, more importantly for our purposes, the difference between the propaganda's presentation of the enemy and the enemy themselves. He never learned to doubt the official line, up to and including some pretty racist assumptions about Asian communists that led to some fairly disgraceful representations of them at Marvel. In fairness, Lee later admitted his mistake on this, but racist thinking was essential to his conceptionof the Communists, who were forever the sneaky foreigners being deservedly punched by square-jawed representations of American imperialism.

And yet there’s X-Men #14-16, the introduction of the Sentinel robots. Those three issues are simply packed with veiled references to people like Joe McCarthy, and groups like HUAC. Lee might have disliked the Communist abroad, but in his own country it was the witch-hunt for domestic Communists that seemingly put his back up.

One might cynically suggest here that Lee was, hardly uniquely, nervous about the McCarthy juggernaut treating middle-class white men (many of them writers, no less!) as though they were somehow equivalent to those sneaky foreigners. Honestly, though, I think Occam’s razor suggests Lee was just doing what he always did, and suggesting the best thing for everyone is if people could just calm down a bit. Lee’s criticisms of McCarthy were vastly more elliptical than those of the Communists of Indo-China, but they arose from the same impulse – what Ultron called, in easily the best moment of his eponymous MCU turn, “mistaking peace for quiet”.

Quiet was always the goal. Lee himself stated proudly that he tried to ensure the politics of his story-lines were vague enough to keep both left and right happy (though one imagines what he saw as ``the left'' was warped by his self-imposed deafness to certain positions, and clearly Lee had no problem grotesquely offending the foreign market). To return to Tony Stark, though, the limits of this approach are readily apparent. Refusing to either explicitly condemn or support the status quo is not to remain neutral, but to implicitly support the status quo. When a co-founder of the Libertarian Party can compliment Marvel for ``the fact that the heroes run to being such capitalists as arms manufacturers... while the villains are often Communists (and plainly labelled as such, in less than complimentary terms)'', you're no longer letting sections of the right see the patterns they approve of in the inkblots. You're using your fountain pen to write what they want you to write.

In fact, whilst we're dragging him over the coals for throwing red meat to the Libertarians, we should note that, were Lee truly as keen as he claimed to keep Marvel clear of the rocks and shoals of political commentary, it was an idiotic move to let Steve Ditko take control of Amazing Spider-Man to the point he was directing Lee (in the page margins; the two were no longer speaking) to have Spidey spout terms straight out of Ayn Rand's horrific philosophy. Ditko bit hard and deep into Objectivism, a political stance so objectionable it broke up at least one further collaboration - calling those who require assistance to survive ``parasites'' tends to have that effect. If Lee had any qualms about a superhero nominally dedicated to helping the less fortunate spit venom at those who failed to meet Rand's ugly (and profoundly hypocritical) standards of acceptability, however, I've seen no evidence of it. Again, this is not letting those who espouse harmful political philosophies think they see echoes of their position in the text. This is letting the text sound out those positions.

(This is an essay about Lee, not Ditko, but I couldn’t let this moment pass without pointing out the profound irony of Ditko insisting his co-creation of Spiderman justified him using the character as a Randian mouthpiece, given that Parker’s refusal to stop a criminal because there wasn’t anything in it for him proves to be the foundational mistake atop which his entire character is built. Spidey is an asshole about stopping a criminal, and a half hour later his beloved uncle is dead. No, libertarianism, fuck you.)

I realise much of the above comes across as quite critical of Lee, but the truth is the worst that can be said of his political philosophy is that he wanted to do good, to be a force for tolerance in the world, but simply wasn't sufficiently interested in politics to manage this consistently, or without actually working against it on multiple occasions. His chaotic, contradictory political stance is exactly the sort one expects from someone who doesn't really believe they have a political stance, or at least one who insists a person's writing can be apolitical. 

There's certainly some evidence that politics just isn't something Lee finds important, at least in comparison to whether or not he likes political figures personally. In Amazing Fantastic Incredible he spends as much time fondly reminiscing about meeting George W Bush as he does the Clintons, which both get approximately the same amount of space as Lee running into George Clooney (Lee's trip to the Carter Whitehouse gets more space, but only because the US Secret Service tried to shoot Green Goblin in the face for scaring Amy). That Clinton was far closer to the kind of politics Lee tended to subconsciously gravitate towards, and Bush very much wasn’t, doesn’t seem to have mattered in the slightest.

Lee isn't the only person who didn't take the chance to spit in Dubyah's face when given the opportunity, of course. Perhaps he decided the boost in visibility for his own brand of philanthropy was worth the implicit endorsement of a war criminal. More likely, Lee never conceived of that trade-off in the first place. Which makes things tricky. It's hard to choose the right path out of a dilemma when you don't recognise that dilemma to begin with.

I've spent plenty of time above talking about how Lee's frequent failure to take or even see the road less travelled led to some very problematic pronouncements and publications. But perhaps it has been no less often that Lee has somehow stumbled blindly onto precisely the correct path. The X-Men may only have been intended to criticise the most obvious forms of racism, but over the years the franchise has offered up no shortage of more cutting and more vital criticism, of a kind of genuine value to those looking to understand and combat systemic inequality (especially as the franchise is finally being wrested away from the stranglehold of cis-het white men). Lee might have created the Sentinels to claw at a potential personal threat, but the story he generated can be picked up and used by any number of people seeking to kick out against the spread of anti-left hysteria. And whilst Sam Wilson only existed at all so Lee could strengthen his case during a textbook example of whitesplaining, the Marvel Universe - first on paper and then on celluloid - has become a more inclusive and interesting place for his creation.

Stan Lee. He could have done so much more. Doesn't mean he didn't do plenty.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 6.1.13

Cycle 13 concludes with a rant about those pesky Klingons.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 5.1.13

Brian Markinson's most disturbing role yet.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 4.1.13

Seems I forgot to put this up last week, but my piece on "The Storyteller" is now up. Spoilers: Miles O'Brien forced into yarn-spinning is my absolute JAM.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 3.1.13

GodDAMMIT, Riker.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.6 - "Just Looking" (Stereophonics)

"Word Gets Around" is effortlessly one of the best rock albums of the '90s. It has a case for domination far beyond its decade, too. There's something inimitable in that record's mixture of anger, sadness, and nostalgia - in the bitter realisation that the things you love die, living on in memory, and yet nothing else that surrounded the hole they made seems to even notice they're gone. Twelve tales of a young Welsh lad watching himself and those around him lose friends, relatives, roads, houses, and entire villages, while the wider world cracks wise about intercourse with livestock.

The Stereophonics' second album, Performance and Cocktails, didn't really hit the same bittersweet spot. That can happen, right? Less time to write, less time spent in the home that suffuses their debut, less time observing something beyond the dizzying opportunities that unfold in front of twenty-somethings who have suddenly hit it big.

"Just Looking" is the exception. It might have been written in an Amsterdam hotel room, but unlike the alternating bombast and cool detachment that makes up the rest of ...Cocktails, it retains the sense of melancholy helplessness that made the band worth falling in love with (and which chimed with my existential panic in the winter of  '99, as I slid into my second term at university). It starts with easily one of Jones' sweetest riffs, before lurching into a similarly career-high Stereophonics chorus-juggernaut. It was probably the band's last chance to make a song about not being sure what they want or how to get it land, before such howls of dissatisfaction would be drowned out by their own success (this album went quintuple platinum in the UK; their next did better still).

And make it land they do. Hell, even the video sticks out from the pack; the only one among the five made for the album's singles to not just ape a famous movie and consider it job done.

The band have had other songs after this one that I've loved. This was the last time I got to love them as what they started out as, though. Some things we adore and lose get replaced, and some of those replacements can be just as good, or better. 

They're never the same, though. Nostalgia has a unique taste, salty and sweet.

And this is one of my favourite slices.

 B-side:

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 2.1.13

"Mermen.*cough cough cough cough* MerMEN."

(Except that one of them is a Vulcan.)

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 1.1.13

Shakespeare an' that.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 6.1.12

Cycle 12 ends with easily one of the top three shite-storm episodes we've covered so far.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 5.1.12

Robert Beltran's week off.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 4.1.12

DS9 takes a hard-line stance: war is never good. No, not even when you're fighting fascist occupation.

(Boosting ratings, though. I guess that's different.)

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 3.1.12

Brothers are assholes.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 2.1.12

Back to Kirk's cartoon capers, and a pocket universe containing something pretty special.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 1.1.12

Late to my own party, but I've tackled the second part of "The Menagerie".

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 6.1.11

Attacking your spaceship is one thing, but refusing to talk is really rude.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 5.1.11

The epic saga of Beoduv.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 4.1.11

A changeling, a liar, a vortex, and a revelation.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 3.1.11

A holodeck goes wrong, if you can imagine such a thing.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations BONUS POST

Kirk's grasp of probability is interrogated in my most pointless IDFC post yet.

Fear Of The Known or Why We Must Not All Ignore "We All Ignore The Pit"

Anyone who's a fan of horror stories and isn't regularly checking out The Magnus Archives is making a big mistake. It's a weekly horror anthology series that eventually turns out to be building to something rather more than it initially appears.

At present, the show stands at 100 episodes, with a remarkably high level of quality control given they've all be written by the same person. Almost every story comes in at or above the level of "good", and occasionally Johnny Sims absolutely smashes one out of the park.

For all that I love the show, though, I've not actually written anything about it. Sims' bite-size tales of unsettling goings on are generally much easier to appreciate than they are to analyse. Episode 97, released a couple of months ago, was very much an exception. That episode, entitled "We All Ignore The Pit", was so fabulously chewy I ended up writing an entire essay about it, which I've reproduced below. Naturally, spoilers abound for the episode in question. There's nothing below that would spoil more than that episode itself, however, so if you want to read the essay to get a sense of the sort of thing the show does, then you can be confident that 99% of the currently available material will remain able to surprise you.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 2.1.11

This week we reach the episode where everyone realised Trek was about to shrink into nothingness, and had absolutely no idea what to actually do about it.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 1.1.11

The Kirk-Spock-Pike love-triangle in full effect.

Thanos Made No Reasonable Points

A post in which I get oddly serious about a film that could easily have been subtitled
"Bruised Bollockman And The Genestealer Infestation"

It's inevitable that after a sci-fi blockbuster movie has been on release for a few days that people are going to start arguing that the bad guy had a point.

Arguments along those lines are not necessarily a bad thing. Ultron, for instance, absolutely had a point, one so strong Age of Ultron had to have him attempt genocide simply to hide the fact that his criticism of the Avengers as enforcers for a grotesque status quo could be safely forgotten.

It doesn't track from this that every villain has at least something of a case, though. This should be obvious enough from the horrifying crypto-fascist (heavy on the fascist, light on the cryto-) defences of the Empire/First Order that keep popping up following the return of Star Wars to our cinemas. And while we might want to quibble over the respective degrees to which they reveal horrifying politics on the part of those making the argument, putting forward the case that Thanos was right is, at least, equally ridiculous as saying maybe the Death Star counts as economic stimulus.

Avengers: Infinity War spoilers below.

GUEST POST: The Counsellor's Consent

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately, what with me beavering away on the second half of IDIC's first run. It's pretty handy then that official Friend of the Blog and general all-round good egg Dr Lynda Boothroyd has found time during our strike to put together some tasty thoughts on Trek's approach to the representation of women, and the nature of consent. It's guest post time!

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What is a Psychology lecturer to do when on strike, ill and snow bound? In my case, the answer is: rewatch old SciFi on Netflix and analyse it in a way one never could as a child. Specifically, I have found myself struck by both the good and the bad elements in the way different Star Trek plot lines presented female sexual consent. I have seen angles on these shows which eluded me in the 1990s, and which I now cannot help but filter through my intervening experiences as a woman in world with still-evolving attitudes to sexual agency.

(Spoilers for all of Star Trek: The Next Generation and associated films, and Star Trek: Voyager below.)

We’ll start with the bad: Deanna Troi and the never-ending violation of her sexuality – an issue on which others have written before but which cannot be over emphasised, not least because of how embedded it is in the franchise. Indeed, it’s only the second episode of the whole series when we see her agency first compromised. The Enterprise crew has become infected by a virus which drives them to utter hedonistic abandon. Their poor empathic ship’s counsellor (or, psychotherapist, anthropologist and head of personnel as her role actually seems to be) is then subjected to these emotional overflows and falls into a state of severe ‘drunkenness’ herself, in the end trying to seduce her ex before falling unconscious. Good on the ex for not taking advantage of her (this time? well we’ll come back to that), but as a viewer it is profoundly uncomfortable to watch.

Flash forward several years, and a visiting diplomat manipulates her into a ritual in which she becomes empathically linked to him. He pours his negative emotions into her, and yet again she becomes sexually demanding, sleeps with a junior officer who should probably be off-limits on professional grounds, tries to seduce her ex again (who again, resists her advances), and eventually falls into a near-fatal coma.

We’ll completely skip over the forced alien pregnancy in Season 2, and move onto the most disturbing incident: Season 5’s "Violations". A visiting telepath is mentally attacking members of the crew. In Deanna’s case, this seems to take the form of awakening memories of an encounter with her ex, Cmdr Riker. It starts out a something we’d expect from these characters – a stroke of the hair, some kisses, “Do you still think about us?”, and her assertion that they can’t be together, “not while we’re serving on the same ship.” But then it changes. His hands are grasping her, she’s getting hurt, she’s becoming distressed. And finally … it’s no longer Riker in her memory, but the alien guest. Deanna falls at last into a coma (spotting a pattern here?)

‘Violations’ deviates from the other episodes in explicitly referring to what happened as rape. But it leaves unanswered the most important question of all – is this ship’s First Officer also a rapist? How much of the encounter was real? How much was distorted by the telepath? And either way, how is Troi supposed to keep working alongside him as if nothing had ever happened? [1]

Perhaps, for me, the worst part of this storyline is how closely it is repeated a decade later in the film Star Trek: Nemesis. By this point Troi and Riker have reunited (same ship, schmame ship) and married. On their honeymoon, a clone of her old friend and Captain telepathically invades her mind in her nuptial bed. The similarity to "Violations" in the visuals, as she hallucinates someone else above her, is both striking and disturbing. And this time, not only is she expected to get on with life with both her husband and her captain as before, but she’s asked by said captain to re-expose herself to the mind of the clone in order to help defeat him. There is virtually no exploration of the emotional impact of this event, let alone the cumulative impact of having her sexual agency violated over and over across the 15 years of the characters’ time together.

I have to confess here that Troi and Riker were my original nerd-verse ‘one true pairing’; I spent my early adolescence desperately hoping they would get together again and I would have been in ecstasies had that happened on the small screen with time to spare, rather than as a throw-away plot line in the last two films. I was so keen to see this that I was willing to overlook much of the above just to get some confirmation that they were Meant To Be. And sure, I can come up with all kinds of scenarios for how these things played out off-screen, how she and Riker got past what we’ll have to just hope were fake memories of him assaulting her. But why should I have to do that? Why could the programme makers not have given some thought to the fact that Troi deserved to be respected as a character, that her mental state was something worth exploring properly, rather than simply for titillation?

But that’s a hypothetical question. One only has to be reminded of what Marina Sirtis looked like in a V-necked onesie to get the answer …

But then there’s the good: Voyager’s B’Elanna Torres, Tom Paris, and the Vulcan pon farr attack (S3: "Blood Fever"). By the late '90s, Paris and Torres had become my second-favourite will-they-won’t-they on TV (behind Aly McBeal and Billy – yes, I judge younger-me too). And unlike Troi, Torres had been a well developed character with strong agency right from the start. At this point in the show’s run, it was clear Paris was attracted to Torres. It was less clear whether she reciprocated. Until, that is, she had a close encounter with a Vulcan Ensign undergoing pon farr – essentially their individualised ‘mating season’ where logic goes out the window and physical motivations are paramount. My one quibble with this episode is that it failed to really tackle the fact that the attempt by the Vulcan to mind-meld with Torres and in so doing ‘infecting her’ with his own symptoms, was itself a form of assault rather like those Troi so often suffered.

Where Voyager excelled, however, was in the thorough exploration it gave us of a man being the object of his crush’s sexual attention and his persistent resistance to those attentions because she wasn’t in her right mind. This episode is, in fact, my ideal guide on how to deal with a very drunk woman throwing herself at you. Paris is clearly tempted, he is clearly highly susceptible to Torres as she tries to persuade him to sleep with her, but it is also clear that he wants her to genuinely want him. And he knows he can’t treat her entreaties as reliable. The episodes skirts close to some real ickiness when Tuvok insists that Paris has to help her resolve her emotional state to prevent her from dying (round of applause for a schoolboy excuse even worse than the ‘only one bed’ trope) but thankfully the errant young Vulcan reappears and it turns out that an aggressive fist fight is all he and Torres need to feel better.

So what did the makers of Voyager learn during the '90s that had evaded the makers of TNG? That female agency was important; that men could turn down sex with a woman without it being dismissive or humiliating for her; that a sober ‘no’ followed by an intoxicated ‘yes’ is still a ‘no’ … and that men can say ‘no’ too when it doesn’t feel right. Which is not to say that TNG violated all these principles – there was even an explicit storyline about the importance of consent on an away mission. But somehow those writers struggled to treat their main female characters with the same respect. [2]

Torres and Paris became a pretty dull married couple in the end, with weak on-screen chemistry, and revisiting their episodes recently hasn’t filled me with the same strength of nostalgia as re-watching Troi and Riker’s long drawn-out years of sexual tension. But the moment when Torres was finally able to admit her real feelings in a later episode - sober, frightened, believing she was about to die and full of regrets over the time they’d wasted – was all the more meaningful because Tom
had waited to hear her say it and know she meant it. And for that they still remain a much-loved Trek couple.

[1] I don’t want to suggest that women cannot maintain relationships with loved ones who have harmed them. Indeed, very many women do and it’s a complex issue which gets too little attention both in fiction and in law. But the lack of even a head-nod to this episode impacting their relationship seems to me to be just as much an over-simplification.

[2] Unfortunately, Voyager still insisted on sexualising Seven-of-Nine with her skin-tight onesie and obviously-enhanced cup size. So it wasn’t all wins. For a 90s SFF show which managed to present non-sexualised female main characters who nevertheless formed relationships on-screen, see Babylon 5.