LOVELY THINGS: 2

How many times in my life have I heard Wichita Linesman? How many times have I sang along with it when it came on the radio, or when that old clip of Glen Campbell was shown on the television?

Why is it, then, that it was only today, as it was played on 6Music, that I understood what the song is about? Until now, it was a strange thing, half-diary, half-love song.

Today, it’s become the most eloquent, poetic expression of love; about how this man, this ordinary man with his mind on the quotidian demands of his job, a job that can be described in seven ordinary words -

I am a linesman for the county

- suddenly, helplessly, thinks of the woman he loves and describes in equally simple words how much he loves her -

And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time

- then turns back to his job, back to the things he has to do in the coming days. Until she comes back into his mind, bringing with her that haunting phrase again.

That’s what happens. You get on with your day, and when you least expect it you find somebody there with you. Sometimes they’re someone you want, sometimes they’re someone you miss, sometimes they’re someone who’s gone.

Don’t ask me how before now I’d seen it as nothing other than a collection of rhyming words set to a memorable tune, nor how today’s hearing took on such a different meaning. All I know is this:

It was always a good song. Now it’s a perfect song.

S-DCBRs For This Week...

...Well, it seems that the two days off over Easter that caused last week's comics delivery to be delayed enough to derail reviewing just wasn't enough for the distributors, so they've delayed this week's shipment by a day as well.

Same thing next week because of the May Day Bank Holiday.

By the time I'm in the same place as the comics are, sleep will have been had and the books will be a couple of weeks old.

Back to the usual edge-of-sanity ranting soon.

But really. Really. Another delay? For no good reason?

Lazy sods.

A Small Thing, But Mine Own

Possibly the most trivial thing ever, but something that struck me the other night.

Here's a panel from X-Men 13 (or X-Women, or XX-Men if you want to play 'I Know Chromosomes')

Notice anything about it? How about this one:

Still not got it? This one's the giveaway:

Look at the lettering; in particular, look at the letter 'I'. Look specifically at the letter 'I' in the words 'I' and 'IT'S' or 'SIM'.  Do you see it now? What the letterer has done is to differentiate between 'I' used as a pronoun and 'I' as part of a larger wordform by using bilateral serifs in the former. It's very clever,  almost subliminal, guiding the reader towards a closer identification with the character who's speaking and also reinforcing the character by strengthening his or her self-image. In this comic, this is the work of "VC's Joe Caramagna" who I presume is Joe Caramagna working as part of the VC studio.

This bilateral serif / sans serif is also used by other VC staff: here's a panel from All-New Doop 1, lettered by "VC's Clayton Cowles":

The problem is, though, that once you've noticed this, you can't help but to also notice things like this:

See how jarring that serif is on the 'I' in 'IT', especially as there are only three examples of the letter in what is a pretty verbose panel? And again:

This one's even more of a jolt given the frequency of the letter; it subtracts something from the assonance of the dialogue. 

Yes, this is an astonishingly trivial thing to notice in a comic-book. It may be Marvel house style, it may be used only by the VC letterers. I guarantee, however, you'll be looking for the same thing in the next comic you read.

SDCBRs!

Lots going on here at Tottenhamista Towers, so just a few quick observations. More later...


KINGS WATCH 5

Hot pulpy goodness! Dragons getting buggered (not literally)! Heroes making noble sacrifices! That's what you want from a comicbook, at least that's what I want from a comicbook, and that's what you're getting from this baby, baby.


However, given my position as North London's leading pilkunnussija*, I must question the on-off nature of the possessive apostrophe within these pages:

ON!

OFF!

And how about buying The Phantom a Philishave?

Ghosts who walk should always be clean-shaven.
It's only right.

Also: The Phantom's headquarters is in some place called Bangallah. I'd watch out for those fatwas, fellas.

Otherwise: lots of fun, and it leads straight into a Flash Gordon title by the same writer. But not by the same artist. Which is wrong.







*Finnish for 'pedant'. Literal translation: 'comma fucker'.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Of course things aren't looking any better. Sales plummeting, line-wide dullness, underwhelming reader reaction...






(Though I do love me some Giffen)

THE LATE REVIEW: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I’m writing this on the third consecutive Mac laptop I have bought. Just as most other Apple computer users, I wouldn’t care to use a Windows machine if given the choice. Frankly though, when you get down to it, there’s not a great deal of difference. Not anymore.

So: what does this enormous book tell us about Steve Jobs? Nothing we didn’t already know; that he was a deeply unpleasant man, that his ‘reality distortion field’ was nothing more than a heightened form of bullying; that he was very nearly incapable of forming functioning relationships with other people. Most of this we knew already.

All credit to Isaacson for the interviews with those who knew Jobs at different times during his life, and more so for getting to sit down and talk to Jobs himself as that life drew to a close. But even in those supposedly revealing interviews, Jobs is still playing interviewer and reader like a card sharp plays his mark. None of Jobs’ answers have much depth, and instead bringing the conversation around to what seems to be his own question to us. Of course, it’s the question we’d all ask in the same circumstances, the question we’ll all ask at one time; what did you think of me?

Jobs would have liked you to think, and Apple would still like you to think, that he changed the world. He didn’t. He made a very small part of it a little bit easier for a very small number of people. He created, or at least took credit for creating, devices that have changed consumer spending patterns for as long as it takes for the next wave of change to come along.  He introduced a design aesthetic to a work tool and in doing so turned that tool into a lifestyle accessory.

That’s still a huge achievement for any person, whether they did it alone or as part of a larger entity, and I don’t wish to belittle it. Whether it’s as laudable as some see it is debatable; possibly the Mac pushed personal computing forwards by years, possibly the corporation’s (read: Jobs’s) refusal to play with others held the industry back.

Either way, I know that when I heard of his death, I was saddened; Jobs may have been the kind of man you wouldn’t care to know, but he at least was passionate about everything he did, and that in itself is worth saluting. Raise a carrot juice, if you choose. He’d have liked that. 

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Please stand by.

LOVELY THINGS: 1

Tower of Shadows #1, September 1969. Jim Steranko. Every time I look at this story, something new hits me. The car, lost among the rock. The figures enhanced and enlarged by the headlights. The symmetry. The trees, reaching up towards the house and out into the sky.

Lovely.

THE LATE REVIEW: Bleeding Edge

Some disconnected thoughts:

How do we describe Thomas Pynchon?  How do we describe his work?  He fits no genre, we can’t say he’s a crime writer or a humourist or a historical writer even though he’s all three and many more. He’s a recluse who’s been a guest star on The Simpsons. Some of his books are small, slim things of compact beauty while others are massive, life-engulfing monsters that demand months of close attention. He looks – though photographs number no more than nine or ten, and most are from high school yearbooks or his naval days – like someone who’d have trouble with a Hardy Boys adventure, yet he’s written some of the finest books of the twentieth century.

There was a time when I was part of a book group, mainly for the food. Don’t judge me. The only book that nobody could get more than a few pages into – and bear in mind that most choices were of the Guardian persuasion, unreadable but fashionable South American over-cooked metaphor-heaps – was Pynchon’s Vineland. It was the only time I chose a book and I admit to doing so because my primary aim was to give them something to really chew on, without wanting to over-alienate with a Gravity’s Rainbow or a Mason & Dixon.

People, people I trusted, told me to read Pynchon. I finally succumbed and read The Crying of Lot 49 on a transatlantic flight. It was too short; too short for the flight and too short full stop. This was a strange new thing, full of darkness and fireworks, dragging the reader in with its eerie mystery and pushing them away with its impenetrable verbosity. Once the jetlag had dissipated, my hunt for more Pynchon was a parody of the search for V.

So what of Bleeding Edge? Do we turn Tom’s own taste for wordplay against it, rail that it isn’t a book about the frustrations of the lead singer in The Wedding Present, it isn’t Bleedin’ Gedge? Do we complain that the punnery is there for its own sake rather than as a sub-set of Pynchon stylistic tropes? There’s a line near the end of Bleeding Edge, conflating Scooby Doo with a drugs cartel, that you just know had Tom smacking his hands together as he wrote it, telling himself that this was the one that’d make half his readers say ‘No. That’s too much, even for you.’

Or do we say that this time, the plot, in none of his books anything more substantial than a 70s Mystery Movie – and which this time is a 00s Mystery Movie - never anything more than an armature on which to hang the dazzle and the flash and the songs and the layers of astonishment … This time, it’s barely there. It doesn’t happen. Narrative, always a thing the reader has to winnow out from the circus going on around him, is mainly imparted from character’s words; the largest event of the 20^ist century so far – and Bleeding Edge is most certainly Pynchon’s take on the 21^st century so far – happens in a single line. I think that’s a good choice, though; it doesn’t need more.

There’s a feeling one gets as life goes on; a sense that time speeds up and each consecutive year gets that bit shorter. Each book from Pynchon now is seen as a treat, each one may well be the last – he’s 77 - his schedule speeding up from ‘a book whenever he feels like it’ to ‘very nearly a book every couple of years’. Accompanying this, there’s the realisation that his books have been pinging backwards and forwards through time, from Mason & Dixon through Gravity’s Rainbow to Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, settings moving from the 1780s to 2001, and with each passing book the period between each shrinks ever smaller, time speeding up until it catches both author and reader.

The problem with Bleeding Edge is this: the narrative is propelled mainly by dialogue and interaction, but the characters are interchangeable and near-indistinguishable. Everybody seems to be delivering schtick rather than talking, each of them representing a different aspect of culture or technology at the meeting of two centuries, each of them a collection of references rather than a personality.

Talking of references: only in a Pynchon would you get Pokemon and SZ Sakall mentioned within twenty words of each other.

But this is pretty much the point. This is, after all, what a Pynchon book is for. Don’t come to him for crystalline prose or tight plot structure, because his work is, more than anyone else’s I can think of, designed to sprawl, to digress, to go off into unexpected places. Leave your map behind, sit back, enjoy the pyrotechnics. And if you ever see him, try to get a photo.

This Is What They Want

Yesterday's grammar-based post got around six times more hits than anything else ever posted either here or on the original site. 

Just for all the new bods, and because it's too good to abandon to the ephemera of Twitter, here's a picture of a new shop that's opened in Bruce Grove. 

SLEEP-DEPRIVED COMIC-BOOK REVIEWS

Nope, not today.

I'm nicely rested.

There's not much out this week.

None of it was worth my attention.

Here's a picture of Debbie Harry.