End Of Year Progress Roundup

Another quiet year on the blog, and this time I don't even have the excuse of moving house, changing jobs, or having to keep grinding out content for Geek Syndicate. So what have I been doing?

The short and entirely unsatisfying answer is "not a lot".  My new work/living combination doesn't afford me quite the same amount of unclaimed time as I once enjoyed. Much of what spare time I've been able to claw back from domesticity/capitalism has gone into starting a book version of IDFC, something I assumed would be relatively painless until I remembered I hate everything I've ever written approximately six months after I write it. I'm almost done with the first three essays, with thirty more stretching out ahead of me in various stages of NOPE.

There's been a little progress on the painting front, at least. I do mean little, as well, but I've accelerated over the last few months, which is encouraging. My 'Nid army is now at around 4500 points, with these two lads rounding off a third Warrior Brood (as always, I've deliberately painted them in the same absurdly simple colour scheme I've been employing since my mid teens).

(Also pictured: a piece of battlefield detritus I painted during a D&D session, just to give my hands something to do).

I've also been chipping away at my Black Reach Orks, last seen here back in August. Since then, two more Boyz have dropped off the end of the assembly line.

The assembly line itself has moved on fractionally as well, with every Boy below precisely one step closer to completion than they were four months ago.

There is one exception, as the particularly attentive may observe - the lad at the front left has a head that's nothing more than undercoated. This is due to a savage, unpredented and deeply upsetting betrayal, in which two of my family members conspired against me. First, my cat knocked the miniature to the floor from where it sat on our kitchen table, whereupon my dog swallowed the head whole.

Which reminds me: we have a dog now. Here he is:

JUST LOOK AT HIM HE'S AWFUL. Except more canine-related excuses in the future, because this lad CANNOT BE TAMED. He makes Zoltran Hound of Dracula look like Lassie on general anesthetic. It's like living with a chaos god hiding inside a smelly rug. As with essentially every dog since the beginning of the domestication process, it's a good fucking job he's cute.

ANYWAY. Next up on my list of things to do is another No Apologies... post, this time on a song which a) I have no strong specific connection to and b) everyboday already knows their position on, so you won't want to miss that. Afterwards, maybe I'll do a bit more work towards finishing my critical tour of Mike Carey's Lucifer, given I have at least two more other Carey/Gross collaborations to bore you about. The next essay in the book is calling me too, though, so who can say?

Right. then Happy New Year for those as recognise it, and I'll be back with more musings in 2023.

D CDs #472: Things George Michael Has Gotta Have

Faith just isn't for me. I simply don't care what George Michael thinks about sex, or how George Michael wishes he were having more sex, or how getting more sex as George Michael can get complicated by the fact that George Michael is George Michael.  It's not Michael specifically; I'd put myself as a 9.8 at least on the horny/revenge scale of "Why make art"; horny songs just don't do it for me. It sounds like a cheap shot under the circumstances, but nevertheless, it all feels a little too much like listening to someone masturbating.

Michael's debut album isn't exclusively about sex, though after being bludgeoned by Michael's libido for fifteen solid minutes via "Father Figure" and "I Want Your Sex", it's hard to think about much else. There's a sense of vulnerability here which at least seasons the horndog panting. Which makes sense, given Michael a) had just torpedoed a band that had sold thirty million albums and - via a China tour - changed the international political landscape, and b) was trying to challenge Prince and Michael Jackson on territory they didn't so much own, as had sculpted from the planet's bedrock through sheer force of will. You can see why he'd be nervous - there must have been times while recording the album where Michael was wondering whether unseating Hu Yaobang would have been the easier job.

So it's not fair to call Faith one-note, though comparisons to Prince and Jackson do rather underline the album's lack of range. It's probably not helped by the fact Michael just completely, perfectly nails what he's aiming for on the opening track. "Faith" is glorious, as tight and bouncy a package as Michael's denim-sprayed arse in the accompanying video. A rollocking stab of lust and nervousness, set to a rhythm like the heartbeat of God. The vid even sees Michael sport a jacket emblazoned with the word "REVENGE" on the back, as though the guy gets what art should be after all. It's also the shortest song on the album by a minute and change.

Once you've heard it, though, do you really need the icky metaphors of "Father Figure", or the knackered randiness of "Hard Day", or, the fear Michael's own success is cock-blocking him in "Kissing A Fool", or etc. etc. Given Michael's later coming out of the closet, we can at least retrospectively cast "I Want Your Sex" as an attempt to literally sing the praises of gay sex, but even so - dude, it's nine minutes long.

The album works best when it moves into different themes. "Hand To Mouth", a pulsing condemnation of the failures of the American dream built around a skeletal, looping keyboard riff and Spanish guitar, offers a breather from the heavy breathing. "Monkey" is a superior example of 80s Gabriel-tinted synth-funk, a desperate plea to a a friend to kick the drugs, and huge fun both as written and when you doggedly insist on taking the lyrics literally. 

Neither are fit to buff "Faith"'s leather jacket, of course. Nothing else here is. Faith both proved Michael could write and sing with the best of them, and that there was no guarantee he necessarily would. So I says, anyway. What do I know? The album and its many singles did absolutely ludicrous numbers, and netted Michael critical acclaim and multiple awards. All the cold water I can muster thirty-five years later isn't going to make a difference to what caught fire here. Michael's Faith had paid off.

Six tentacles.

Lighthouse

 

                                                              i

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.14 - "Not Up To You" (Stereophonics)

Last time this band appeared in these essays, I talked a little about how you have to accept that the acts you love will change. Some will change more than others, though. Some will age better.

In hindsight, my love affair with Stereophonics was doomed from the start. Their first album remains one of my favourite debuts I've heard, but it relies on an alchemical process almost impossible to repeat. The recipe is simple enough - two parts classic rock delivered by a frontman whose tonsils have the density and range of quasars, one part muddled melancholy as you watch the tiny community which offered you nothing as you grew up in it continue to die by degrees. 

The first trick is in actually mixing those ingredients. Sad-gossip-garage-rock? Are you, like, entirely fucking sure? But it works. Or at least, it did in the context of the '90s, when British mainstream rock was crying out for a band that was willing to look past their own dicks. Or, for that matter, to not steal all their good riffs (including a Stereophonics one, actually.)

The second trick, though, is even tougher. The problem isn't in identifying or combining your ingredients; it's in finding them. The band took a while to hit, but when they did, it was with the force of a collapsing coalmine. Catapulted into a world of stadium gigs, Tom Jones collaborations, and backstage shenanigans with Noel Gallagher (which he presumably went into wired for sound), Stereophonics found themselves in a situation where bittersweet songs about backwater bar dramas might be tough to sell, and, more critically, were impossible to source. The lead single from Word Gets Around was about a homeless man who remembers his past just well enough to seek it out, but not well enough to remember where to find it. The lead single from Performance And Cocktails was about a sly deal between a bartender watching who gets most drunk, and a thief who steals from those identified as least likely to notice. The lead single from Just Enough Education To Perform? A tuneless whine about how the music press had been mean to the band. It's almost too perfect that "Mr Writer" was (at the time) by some distance not just the worst Stereophonics single, but their worst recorded song.

Maybe you have to have a certain amount of bombastic self-regard in order to play the kind of stages the band suddenly graduated to. How would I know? All I can tell you is that without that strange, bittersweet taste of nostalgia for something you'd always resented, you may as well be listening to fucking Oasis anyway (though Jones' riffs are still better than Gallagher's).

"Not Up To You" isn't the best song on Word Gets Around, but it's likely the strongest distillation of what makes the album work so well (It's not quite true that there are more truly great songs on Word Gets Around than on their subsequent eleven albums, but I did have to crunch the numbers to check). It's too melodic to be a dirge, (just) too high-tempo to be mopey, but the song's simple structure and heavy haze still recalls shoegaze, only - and this is critical - we're staring at the shoes of other people. Kelly Jones is one of those musicians whose lyrical quality is inversely proportional to his lyrical precision, and "Not Up To You" is a triumph of smudged thumbnail sketches of lives no-one else was in a position to even notice. 

Maybe it's just that simple The songs on Word Gets Around are always about other people, even if Jones' memories are our way in. An accused paedophile, a wedding barely holding itself together, two - maybe three - suicides, one drunk high-functioning, one very much not. And the characters in "Not Up To You" don't even reach those levels of local notoriety. Not even stories, just butts of cruel jokes in low lighting. All they're doing is living and lying and loving and lusting in a village that, save for Stereophonics, we probably would never have heard of. Even though there's an unknown village in all of us.

"Who's to know", indeed. "Who's to know; whatever".

B-Side

"And Bark, And Grunt, And Roar, And Burn"

(Image from Wakelet)

(Spoilers for up to Episode 100 of The Magnus Archives below).

"'Til The World Falls Down"

(Image from Wakelet)

Right. Now we’re talking. Now, things are kicking off.

(Spoilers for all five seasons of The Magnus Archives below.)

Boxing Clever

(Image from Wakelet)

(Specific spoilers for The Magnus Archives Season 1, and oblique references to the whole show)

"Do Not Open" is a fun episode to take apart, because none of my usual routes actually work. There's no way to do much in the way of character study here; the common observation is that Josh is surprisingly smart is correct, but that's a plot beat rather than a character note. Semiotically, the statement is unusually (and ironically) lacking in depth. This in itself isn't a complaint. Not everything needs subtext, and a twenty-minute horror story can certainly do enough other things for it to not need powerful thematic undertows. I guess you could try and link Joshua's experiences in Amsterdam with his time struggling not to open the box, twisting the whole into some commentary on alcohol/drug recovery.  Importantly, though, that would be tasteless. Even more importanly, it would be shit.

No. Let's just take this one at face value. It's certainly pretty enough. Essentially, and this delights me, "Do Not Open" is a locked-box mystery where the goal is figuring out how not to unlock the box. As I've said, Magnus Arvhives fans talk a lot about how smart Joshua's solution is, but that's just one peak among many. Joshua calmly works his way through figuring out the basics of something entirely inexplicable, and keeps himself alive as a result.

This also means the box's contents aren't revealed to us. Yes, we return to it next season, but this early into the show, where there's no firm evidence there even is an ongoing plot, never mind where it might lead, there's no reason to think we'll ever learn what lies inside the box. This is probably, for me, even smarter of Sims than the solution he cooks up for Joshua to delpoy. The need to open the unopenable box for the audience is Horror 101. No, it's more general than that. It's woven into the most basic levels of storytelling, from poor Pandora onwards. If you set up a box whose contents cannot be released, someone's going to do just that. It's just too obviously a source of entertainment, however bleakly defined. We might call it Chekov's Fun.

But no. While it seems very likely that John opens the box at the end of the statment, he does so leaving Joshua - and hence the audience - with no clear idea of the consequences. the mystery is deliberately prioritised over the satisfying reveal. This is true more generally here, too. Why does the box scratch when he puts orange juice on its lid? Is there something specific about it being liquid, linking it to the mellifluous moaning when it rains? Why does the weather affect the coffin, anyway? What lay within the dreams Joshua no longer remembers?  And over all of this, just why did John pick a Brit in Amsterdam to look after a coffin?

I've heard Sims talk about the difficulty in providing enough answers to play fair with the audience, while avoiding giving them so much the mystery is lost. It's a problem every serialised story which trades in mystery has to grapple with eventually, and Sims stakes out his position quite early here. Even with the entire storyline resolved, much of what I've pointed to above still has no answers. Sure, we know now that torrential rain and the flooding it can cause lies within the remit of The Buried, and that the scratching Joshua heard was probably some poor soul desperately trying to escape. There are still far more questions than answers, though.

For instance: just what actually was going on with John? I've not listened to every Q&A Sims has done, so it's possible he's explicitly ruled this theory out, but I'd always assumed the original plan was for John to be an avatar of the Buried, rather than the Stranger. The way he's described as very short, with a strange aura of density, and the way he refers to himself as being "inside" a foreign land, all point that way. So too does the fact the first victims of the Buried we learn of are both called John. My theory circa Season Three was that both lost Johns eventually became avatars, with one getting killed by his own God for not feeding the coffin, and the other one going on to... well, there's a question. Here's another one: isn't it odd that we never actually meet a contemporary avatar of the Buried, literally the only of the fourteen fears that this is true of?

Maybe this is just an example of early installment weirdness, or external events forcing a change of plans (such as the intended fates of Tim and Sasha). Or maybe it's neither of those things, and I'm just playing around in one of the corners of his world that was always meant to remain dark. My point here, once again, is how well Sims manages to make it difficult to tell what's been shifted around. The Magnus Archives, on top of everything else it is, is one of the most coherent serialised stories I've ever seen, even among single-artist works. Part of that is no doubt careful planning, but it's also about the savviness of keeping so much in shadow, you can rearrange things when people aren't looking.

As a horror story, this episode doesn't hit quite as hard as its predecessor (though that says more about how strong the show was, straight out of the gate). Follow ups are always hard, of course (is that why Joshua references The Lost World, Michael Crichton's first sequel, at least under his own name?). And really, in almost every other way, this is a clear step forward. "Angler Fish" immediately showed that Sims could write an effective horror story. "Do Not Open" proved that he knew why what he was writing was effective.

Fifteen To One

(Image from Wakelet)

So. The first of four essays about the four semi-finalists in the Magnus Cup. For those not in the know (and if this applies to you, you might want to rethink their life choices), The Magnus Archives is effortlessly the best horror podcast I've come across in the last seven or eight years. So good that I spent about nine months in 2019/2020 writing a Twitter thread about an episode every single day. Some of those threads were not short.

When even that wasn't enough (and I wrote up the fifth season too, week by week, as it came out), I'm in the process of using the SCIENCE of polls to SCIENTIFICALLY SCIENCE the best episode of the whole damn shebang - all two hundred episodes of it. Check it out on Twitter: the hashtag is #MagnusCup (not the one about swimming) and it's been going on for FUCKING AGES.

Explanations out of the way, I'm gonna chat about "The Eye Opens", judged by humans who press buttons to be one of the top four episodes of the show. It's also the Season Four finale, so if you've not come across the show before, or even if you just haven't worked through the first 160 episodes yet (and again, I did one a day and wrote about it, so save your excuses), I'd stay clear of what unspools below.

Friday 40K: The Littlest Waaagh!

Not done this in a while, innit. It's been... fucking hell, sixteen months since I last finished a model. Partly that's moving house, changing jobs, etc., but also it's because I've been in the process of painting eighteen Ork boys at once (along with three Intercessors, three Plague Marines, a Tyranid Warrior brood, a Tyranid Ripper brood, a spy from Talisman and five miniatures of various sizes from Dreadfleet), in a manifestly stupid way.

Look at them! All arranged in step order, in a most un-Orky manner. I had hoped to have this picture set up so the first mini was entirely unpainted, and the last completely done, but tragically my painting process ended up having nineteen stages rather than seventeen. Thus was my otherwise brilliant and sensible plan dashed upon the rocks of reality.

Not to worry, though! After taking the above photo (in my brand new collapsible lightbox, which thus far is significantly less dogshit than both my previous collapsible lightboxes), I took the dude at the front right and finished him to completion.

Rather proud of this guy - it's the most thorough paint job I've ever done on anything other than my first four Dreadfleet vessels (well, maybe my Hammerfall bunker, depending on how you judge these things). Certainly it's the most ludicrous ratio of time expended to points cost, with this guy being worth... FUCKING HELL, just eight points. Half a point a month is taking the piss even by my standards.

Still, a major milesone. My first Ork model from Assault On Black Reach, released just fourteen years and four 40K editions ago. And hey, the next one is already 84% painted! I'll have a proper Waaagh! together before you know it.

Poetry Hexadecagon

This is ludicrously niche even by my standards, but as part of the general policy round here of trying to keep everything I do in one place, here are sixteen poems I wrote over the last two months, each about an episode of The Magnus Archives. 

(If anyone's reading this who hasn't actually listened to that show, then a) spoilers!, and b) you should get right on that if you're a horror fan.)

Anatomy Class

Hearts want what they want
Even false, spasming, wrong
They want what they want

Family Business

There died a young scion of Von Closen
Whose soul in a tome was then frozen
Until a deal he got done
Brought the page count down one
To ensure he'd no more be arosen

The Eye Opens

Statistics are the numbers of tragedy
A case study: the first day of the end of everything
Number of avatars: 3
Number of fools (hubris): 2
Number of fools (romantic): 1
Number of poor choices: Uncountable
Number of years: 200 (approx.)
Number of fears: 14 (approx.)
Number of victims: 7,000,000,000 (at least)
But the most tragic number?
Number of good cows: Unrecorded

A Guest For Mr Spider

The scratchy hatchy spider spun what Jon would read
John caught a pleb
Who’d fill the spider’s need
Out rang the knocks
And so much for the pleb
And the scratchy hatchy spider knew how to read its web

Bloody Mary

There once died a man who took Keay out
And was bound to the Beholding’s redoubt
Saw no threat in Keay’s bed
Tore the eyes from his head
And the double-blind trial saw him bleed out



Another Twist

The Last

Dear God, people are completely unacceptable
Every one, one too many
Look at this guy!
And that one!
This one has an umbrella! Fucking hell
Go away
GO AWAY
Fuck these seven billion people in particular

Do Not Open

Josh away to get dazed to praise a phase now passed
Nosh and hash, days on the lash, costs that dosh, costs that cash
Takes his bevvies, breaks the levies, and then things get heavy
Mate’s heavy like “dense”, makes no sense, ten grand makes things tense? Steady!
Any levy gets buried until he’s good and gone and ready

So dangles a year, no wrangle, no fear, till “Got I an angle on the Triangle, y‘hear?”
Sod nods, blows his wad, stows all he had for a pad on his tod,
And two mans in a van land to hand off contraband
Bam! Now there’s a coffin, stoppin for nottin, for bare ten grand?
Damn scam’s got heavy; got outta hand by the sand

In deep, there’s scratching and crawling, can’t catch himself falling
Asleep, that’s when the freaks start their calling
“Doubt I’ll make it out of a bout with that lock twice”
Stout lad outfoxed that box with his icebox; nice!
No dice, won’t pay no price, trap best entice new mice

Then John comes a calling, he’s done with the stalling
When’s someone bound underground? There’s one clown down for a mauling
But ground’s bound by no rules, fool, swallows all into its hollow
Choke’s just stoked some bloke gets broke, compressed to coke, do you follow?
So John’s gone, plans gone wrong, and Joshie wonders if he’s won

Our Sims sounds grim on this pick, now it’s out the doubts come thick
Highs and lies in profusion, the conclusion? Prick’s took the mick.
File in the pile styled “Worth Dick”. Recording ends. Click.

Lost John’s Cave





Nothing Beside Remains

I once suffered a man upon my deck
He said – “One day I called my sculpture home
He stood before me, sure he’d hold me in check
Half ruined, half shattered, half husk, all frown
And flame-scorched fist, and sneer set o’er black neck
Telling of a killer, feral and scarred
Yet he survived, stamped by these fearsome things
The hand clenched tight, and the throat set hard
And from dry chapped lips, these words spring free
My name is Jon, the Archivist, all truth I bring
Reveal your Works, ye Mighty, I must SEE!
Nothing beside remains, so cold and dim,
Jon, this colossal wreck; his eyes on me
Yet blind to me, and to where I’ll send him.”



The Panopticon

I watch monsters surge together, thrown
Like waves that meet at jagged stones
And rising from the undertow
A pattern only I could know
Pleasing Jonah Magnus

Once b­­lue, now red in tooth and claw
(So no real change from years before)
A loping hunter guards the fort
This trap in which her mate is caught
Hating Jonah Magnus

The creeping wrong that takes your place
And tears from time what was your face
Is freed from rock to kill again
And so hold ground that I need claimed
Helping Jonah Magnus

Our newest monster, barely born
Alone, yet not, heart whole but torn
With lonely eyes worn like a mask
He sets to Peter’s latest task
Killing Jonah Magnus

When hunters take your face as cue
(As if a mirror wouldn’t do)
It can get awkward ‘for too long
‘Cept these two dickheads went for Jon
Missing Jonah Magnus

Poor Peter really should’ve known
There’re downsides spending life alone
You’ll never catch a gambler’s tell
Or hopeless love, and so he fell
Cursing Jonah Magnus

Now blooms the rose I fed for years
With ninety-three percent of fears
The flower I grew in the dark
Now knows the light, and knows my mark
Seeing Jonah Magnus

Omniscience means I keenly feel
Risk in the villain’s big reveal
But one last trial, and one last brick
Then endless life with one weird trick
Being Jonah Magnus



Checking Out

The Overlook has nothing on
The joys of Hotel Richardson
Don Henley’s vision pales beside
The wonders you’ve in store inside
The corridors that stretch for days
Free you from noise from motorways
The endless rooms where each one leads
Suit of all your convention needs
Just married? Sip on our champagne
And honeyed moon shall never wane
And do not fear you’ll too long stay
Our checkout times all read “N/A”
So join our guests who as one cry
“Walk out that door? We’ll sooner die!”

Monument

Academia isn’t where we keep the smartest people
It’s where we trap those most desperate for validation
And there’s never enough to go around
We demand respect, but we crave attention
Like naughty schoolboys, no tactic too shameful
Half of us riddled with Imposter Syndrome
The other half deliberately stoke it within us
Delighting in how they’ve made bullying into a career
Push back the frontiers of human knowledge?
Mostly you’re pushing against pressure that means to kill you
And even if you do find an idea, sell an idea, deliver on an idea
Half the field will say it was obvious, the other half; obviously wrong
And no-one else, ever, will ever knew you found it at all
The Spiral’s true madness is in thinking me trapped within it
As though insanity pretending to structure is new to me
As though an impossible mansion is harder to navigate than an HR policy
It promises fear, but it offers relief
I have built my life on shifting stone
This new futility finds me well-prepared
And at least I need not compete for grants
Work alone at the impossible, without pay or hope?
That’s what academics call “a holiday”
“Sink or swim” takes new meaning when drowning cannot kill you
But even there, little has changed
Academia always felt like drowning, forever
There’s a calmness with hope drowned too

Grifter’s Bone

Bone! (Bone!)
Let our music set the tone!
This dancefloor’s a battle zone
Your auditory canals
Will always be bleeding

Cos we’re Bone! (Bone!)
Grifting for motives unknown
Can kill live or through headphones
The Slaughter’s deep blood canals
Are never receding!

Bone!



I Guess You Had To Be There

This is a ghost story
I saw a ghost
Who stole our friend in London? The Government!
I saw a ghost
A Spiral’s victim met our gaze
I guess it was on fire?
His statement twisted like a maze
All dogs and roasts and turns and bends
The scratchy hatchy spider webbed shut Brian’s door
I saw a ghost
Whose arms stretch ‘neath rain or sun? The Government
Who’ll choke us with their foul mess? The Government!
Brian felt alone
Spilled his guts on the floor
Now where do I get my money?
And then he said he’d start again!
Whose lies grow best in darkness? The Government!
Dear God, people keep showing up where I am
Every one, one too many
In came Lukas
I’m only here to see Jonah, which is bad enough
Look at this berk!
And made Brian alone
Whining about spiders keeping his friends away
As though that isn’t the dream
And the scratchy hatchy spider knew the score was blown
Fuck this one guy in particular

Tale Of A Field Hospital

At Frere ‘twas typhoid dug his grave
At Spion Kop, gangrene
At Chieveley with the camp plague
The restless man was seen

Dead and deathless Amherst seems
Pursuing his sickening plan
A virus spreads across my dreams
I fear the restless man

A Girl Stays Home Alone At Night

The Night House is one of those films that disappoints not by being less interesting than I'd expected, but by being much more interesting than I'd expected, right up until it completely isn't. It's like expecting you'll get no action tonight and instead getting an aborted blowjob. Sure, you ahead of where you thought you would be pleasure-wise, but come on.

Spoilers below

Final Combination

So... this is done. Quite proud of it - not bad for six year's work.

Maybe I'll have more time to paint now.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.13 - "California Waiting" (Kings Of Leon)

Kings Of Leon hit early in the roughly two-decade long stretch in which I had both the disposable cash and disposable time to actually keep up with what we so sloppily call "the music scene". At this point, I probably remember the conversation around them better than I do most of Youth And Young Manhood's album tracks. NME loved them because they weren't another "The" band. The internet purists scorned them because their debut was co-written by the dude who gave The Mavericks their biggest hit. It's hard in retrospect who to pity more.

I guess NME were at least circling an approximation of a photocopy of a point. Kings of Leon saw the arch remove of Strokes-pushed New Wave, and figured "Fuck that". Kind of like how Oasis kicked back against the last alleged crisis point in rock music nine years earlier, only with, you know, actual tunes.

Key to this was Caleb Followhill's agonised bark, the voice that launched a thousand metaphors. A weasel drowning in a mustard vat. Fingernails hate-fucking on a chalkboard. A live recording of the failed exorcism of a haunted bouncy castle. Whatever. In an era where coolness was defined by how little of a fuck you could give, the Followhills sounded like they really, really wanted to be doing this. They just didn't care if you wanted them to be doing this. "We're here, he's unclear, get used to it".

It would be easy to conflate the two approaches as both refusing to give a shit about whether the audience exists at all. That would be a mistake, though. The Strokes really cared that you thought that they didn't care what you thought. Kings Of Leon didn't give a shit. The Stokes ended their debut with a song called "Take It Or Leave It". Kings Of Leon start "California Waiting" with a fucking cowbell.

In fact, "California Waiting" is the lynchpin of that first album - not quite the strongest song (though only "Molly's Chambers" is better), but the one that most fully maps out their position of being desperate to play, and thoroughly uninterested in being heard. It's essentially a standard "fame is hard" song, except that it's arrived before the fame. You can read that as a statement of cocky arroagance, but you can also read it as all the ways in which everything about being a band sucks apart from the bit when you're playing. The weightlessness of touring. All the people you're interacting with who ultimately just stand between you and your instruments. Fidgeting behind stage while the crew get everything arranged just so. You only wanted to howl into a mic while your cousin laid down some tasty licks. "While you're trying to save me", Caleb droolhowls, "Why can't I get back my lonely life"? Just fuck off, everyone. You're trying to fix the wrong things.

It's not exactly original, clearly. It's not even persuasive - if you wanted to just keep playing in your garage, that option was entirely open to you. Nor can I ignore that this would become a recurring problem for KoL once they were fully established in the bigtime - the "oh woe I have to do promos" churlishness of "The Bucket"*, the skeezy-as-fuck "At least we keep getting laid" of "Fans".  Right here, though, the approach works, because it's fast, it's fun, and it at least wants to convey something. One more idea you can go with or not, because the band is just here to have fun.

Fun rock music, huh? What a concept.

*Which also absoutely rips off Led Zepplin's "Going To California", which suggests that the Followhill's at least knew that by that point they were repeating themselves and literally everyone else.

B-side:

 

A Load Of Balls 2022

This year's Crucible final prediction: O'Sullivan 18-13 Trump.

Actually got it bang on last year, so let's see if I can make it two in a row.

Edit: Tidy once more.

State Of Play

It's been very quiet around here for a long time. This was never intended, and stil isn't intended, to be a permanent state of affairs (if nothing else, I'll be putting up my 2022 Crucible prediction next week, which doubtless you're all desperate to see).

So let's do a brief update, ahead of trying to get a bit more active on here going forward. The big news is that IDFC, the website that has kept me so busy over the last year, is coming to an end. It won't actually run out of material until the tail end of June, but as I write this (indeed, while I write this as a displacement activity from actually working on Trek), I've only two essays unstarted, with a third half-finished. What happens after that, IDFC-wise, we shall see, but at least for a while I'll be free from the need to get things out on a tight schedule.

Roddenberry isn't the only reason I've been quiet lately, though. Last year was an exceptionally difficult one for me. My sister passed away in September, which is something I'm not ready to write about in detail. As well as that, though, it became clear the job I had been in for over half a decade was no longer tenable, for reasons I won't and indeed cannot go into. The resulting change in employer also brought about a change in county, which in turn necessitated the buying of a house. Perhaps most horrifyingly, it also meant I wasn't able to do any painting between the end of September and, well, last week, when I finally worked out which box I'd packed my painting supplies in.

With pots and brushes now liberated, the production can continue, and sporadic updates on what I'm creating can resume.