A Load Of Balls 2025

Right, then. My prediction. Feels unusually tough this year, because I'm not sure how much can be gleaned from the O'Sullivan collapse.

Still, it is what it is. Gonna go Xintong 18 - 16 Williams.

D CDs #468: No

You know what? I decline. We're not going to do this.

I mean, I know I do do this, all the time. Rating acts of cultural appropriation is all but unavoidable if you want to talk about music. Next up is Springsteen, for God's sake, an artist I love, but who I couldn't possibly doesn't owe a huge debt to the music Butterfield rifled through for this platter.

But an album which gets picked as important because of how wildly successful the thievery involved was - "Where American white kids got the notion they could play the blues", to quote the Rolling Stone article this series is based on - it becomes something different. The theft is no longer just some awkward, unavoidable fact about the "how". It becomes the "why", too. The applause isn't for something that has been stolen. It's for the act of stealing itself.

Are the songs good? Sure. They've taken from the best. Those lads who nicked the Mona Lisa from the Louvre knew what they were doing, too. And one can perhaps admire the competence, even the audacity of how they pulled it off. 

I'm not going to be calling them painters, though, am I?  

Ten creeping tentacles of white supremacy.

Friday Dreadfleet: Additional Squid

At last! The miniature I was born to paint! Four years after I first started her base, the Black Kraken is done.

And her little dog auxiliary, too!

I reckon this pushes me just past the halfway point of painting up the entire set (fourteen years after it was released), so here's a nice moody (read: without proper lighting) picture of everything done so far. Genuinely think this is the best painting I've ever done.

Trek Update: April

A double helping of Trek stuff from me this month. First, my essay on the first episode of Lower Decks is up on the other blog (along with a link to buy my first book in paperback, if you live in the UK).

Second is a podcast I was invited to do with the hosts of Pedagodzilla, an awesome site which uses sci-fi and fantasy stories as a starting point for discussions on pedagogy. I got to chat to them for a while about why the Kobyashi Maru is an absolutely wretched test from a pedagogical standpoint.

Go check all that out!

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.5 - "Take Me Home" (Wilt)

Post-hardcore was a pretty solid idea: answer the "What if we tripled the speed and intensity of punk?" question posed by hardcore itself with the yes-and of "What if we had some actual fucking tunes?". I've probably tipped my hand to the next half of this intro, though, which is that how well this worked out in practice came down into just how post the post-hardcore proved to be.

British post-hardcore had its moment early into the 21st century, happily coinciding with both my awareness that pop-punk was digging itself into something of a rut, and being able to visit my childhood home often enough to check out MTV Rocks for weeks at a time. As a result, I had both the motive and opportunity to watch the battle for dominance of the post-hardcore scene across These Isles unfold in real time.

For me there was only one winner. It wasn't Wilt, actually, who imploded not too after "Take Me Home" was released. There was a sense it might have been, though, had things been different.

"Take Me Home" is a malfunctioning machine of a song. Or maybe not malfunctioning, but certainly not operating in the manner intended. From the submerged opening riff to the jagged slash that heralds the verse resetting along a new vector, there's clearly moving parts generating momentum, but it's not clear that we're going anywhere.

This is an impression subtly alluded to in the video by the band performing inside a circle of what look not just like camera rails, but train tracks. The lyrics contribute here too, returning to diagonally-adjacent themes again and again, like a looped record inside a fever dream. Our narrator is bringing people through the ground, watching them travel through time, and exhorting them to escape, all while himself being trapped in what might well be an asylum, as he plays the role of holy madman.

There's a sense the machine is running out of time, too, not because (or not just because) of its own increasing erraticness, but because of an impending disaster. "Take the last plane if you can" our narrator begs, one of several lines which recall Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (again, this is underlined by the rain of ash that falls upon the band in the latter stages of the video). The machine is glitching, but so is the world; something is coming so powerful it will derail the concept of time itself.

And I guess I could relate, if only a little. It's objectively insane to link the concept of a global pandemic to coming to the end of your undergraduate degree - I didn't need COVID to tell me that. But thematic resonance has a habit of completely ignoring a sense of proportion. Especially sat in the house that I no longer lived in, about to leave the latest in a series of rented rooms I'd inhabited for a maximum of two years in a row each, facing a future in which the only certainty was how much of the past would no longer live on it.

Plus, atop everything else, Twelve Monkeys is an extremely off-kilter love story - a romance as presented by a broken Hollywood machine. Our narrator wants - needs - someone to take him home. But like James Cole is he looking for an escape route, or a place to live, or simply someone to lose himself in for a little while? Whichever it was, grappling with an approaching red line of a future, fighting to find the right pills to keep my head level, and defining myself by my singlehood in a way 45-year-old me feels nauseous recalling, Cormac Battle's anguished yell gave me everything I needed.

Someone. Please. Please.

Take me home.

B-side

Maps Of Legend

Happy March! New month, new blog post. I take some time out from charting the progress of 21st century Trek by looking at maps of a rather different kind.

IDFC 8.1.1

 Forgot to put this up, like some kind of chump. I've started the dispiriting process of picking apart Picard.